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© Davidson Loehr
19 October 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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Prayer
Let us pray without ceasing to the gods worthy of prayer.
Let us pray to the God of love, to guide us in the ways of love, whatever the cost.
To the goddess of compassion, let us ask for enough to grace our relationships with those we know, and those we don’t know who are nevertheless affected by our actions.
To the forces of justice and fair play, let us pledge our allegiance.
Let us, as well, vow to seek understanding rather than prejudice, peace rather than war, and empowerment rather than subjugation – for the many, not just the few.
Where we find ignorance, let us bring understanding.
Where there is despair, let us bring hope;
Where there are walls, let us make doorways;
Where there is loneliness, let us offer familiarity and friendship.
And where the young green shoots of hope, faith and love struggle to survive, let us water them – with out sweat and tears, if necessary.
Let us pray without ceasing to the gods worthy of prayer – the gods of life, love, compassion, hope and courage.
Let us pray to them with all we have in us.
But not only pray. Not only pray.
Amen.
SERMON:
Under the Banner of Heaven
When I read Jon Krakauer’s current best-selling book Under the Banner of Heaven, I decided it wasn’t really about Mormon fundamentalists whose God has told them to kidnap young girls like Elizabeth Smart, to collect women in harems of twenty to fifty or more, and to murder people who got in their way. I decided it was a like a Greek tragedy about America today, and about us.
However, it is also about Mormon fundamentalists, about kidnap, rape, murder, and all the rest of it.
The book begins with the story of two brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who murdered their youngest brother’s wife Brenda and her fifteen-month-old daughter Erica because Brenda seemed to be convincing her husband that his brothers were dangerous people he should stay away from.
Shortly after she stood up to Ron Lafferty, he received a personal revelation from God, informing him that Brenda and her baby daughter needed to be killed. On July 24th 1984, they brutally murdered the 24-year-old woman and her baby girl.
They were arrested soon afterwards, and lied about the murders until the evidence was overwhelming. Then they admitted that yes, they had committed the murders, but they had not committed a crime, because they were following God’s orders.
A jury decided Ron’s revelation came from his own psychopathic mind rather than from God, and convicted both brothers of first-degree murder. Both men are still in prison in Utah, with no possibility of parole.
The book then traces this idea of self-serving revelations back to the founder of the Mormon religion, the 19th century figure Joseph Smith. As a young man, Smith used to put a special magical rock in his hat, look at it, and receive visions telling him where secret caches of money were buried. After six years of charging people for finding money but never finding any, he was convicted of fraud. But Joseph Smith is known today for his other visions, which he said came from God and gave him instructions for a new religion – which he was to lead.
The books he discovered were written in a language called “reformed Egyptian,” of which no one but the angel Moroni has ever heard, but the angel also gave Joseph a pair of magic glasses that let him translate them to his scribe. Later, he used a chocolate-colored, egg-shaped, magical rock to translate the ancient language. He said that he and his people were like the saints of the early days, but these were the saints of the latter days. They were not tainted with original sin, had nothing to atone for, and they were meant to receive the riches of the earth. After they died, they were to continue receiving money and power, and would even become like gods, each couple getting to populate their own planet, like Adam and Eve.
The religion began with fifty people. A year later, it had a thousand. Now, with over eleven million members, it is the fastest-growing religion in the world. At any given time there are about sixty thousand Mormon missionaries at work making converts at high rates. One sociologist believes that within sixty years it will become impossible to govern the United States without Mormon cooperation. Some say the church of the Latter-Day Saints can be considered the first new major religion since the birth of Islam in the 7th century.
At first, Joseph Smith told all his followers to seek their own “direct impressions” from God. But when he incorporated his religion in 1830, he realized all the personal revelations could undermine the authority of his own revelations. Soon, he received a new message from God, making it clear that only Joseph Smith was authorized to receive revelations.
But it was too late, and the teaching that some chosen individuals can receive direct revelations from God continues to this day among fundamentalist Mormons.
Joseph had immense charisma, and several women have written that they found him completely irresistible. Though he was married, he had an almost insatiable lust for other women and young girls. Over the years, he married about forty women, and had many visits to prostitutes. When Emma, his first wife, protested this new kind of philandering, God sent Joseph a revelation telling him that he could have as many women as he wanted. When Emma then said she thought she might receive a similar revelation, Joseph went back to God, who sent a new message telling Emma that only Joseph could have multiple partners, that she had to serve him alone, or she would be destroyed.
The word “destroyed,” as later events showed, meant killed. Jon Krakauer has subtitled his book “A story of violent faith,” because beginning with Joseph Smith, it has been established that those who oppose the will of God as interpreted by the men who receive his revelations might need to be killed. The book tells of dozens of such murders, including nearly twenty by the members of one clan during the past thirty years.
For the past century, the main Mormon church has repudiated polygamy and all notions that revelations can ever sanction murder. But these early ideas continue a vigorous existence among many communities of Mormon fundamentalists, among whom polygamy, child abuse and occasional murders are, according to this book, facts of life. I know someone raised in one of these families, who has told me that the book understates the case, that it was much worse growing up in it.
There are dozens of themes worth pursuing in this book, but I want to pick just the one about people expecting their opinions or private revelations to be respected by others.
This is a great question for liberals, since we are widely assumed to bless every goofy opinion that comes down the road, as though whatever anyone believes is just fine. Liberals, whether political or religious, can be counted on to defend individual rights, individual choices in everything from religion to abortion. We often forget that freedom of belief really means the freedom to believe things that others don’t respect.
Yet I suspect almost everyone here believes that the jury in Ron Lafferty’s case returned the right verdict when they said his private revelations had no authority at all.
The whole murder case played out like a Greek drama, and the jury played the role of the Greek chorus, who condemned the main characters as unworthy and scurrilous.
The truth is, I think Jon Krakauer intended this book to be about America, about us, and about what these times demand of us. And what these times demand of us is a way to challenge and reject some individual beliefs and choices.
The direct revelations from God seem distinctive to the Mormons. Mystics may feel they commune with gods, but they don’t hear the gods telling them to take teen-aged children as their spouses, threaten them with destruction if they refuse, or exhorting them to kill people who have gotten in their way.
There’s a story that comes to mind, a favorite story of mine that I have told before here, that might point to a way through this morass.
It’s a story Joseph Campbell tells of an Australian tribe of aborigines in which the gods spoke to the tribe in the middle of the night when they were displeased. They didn’t use words, they created a horrible low sound unlike anything anyone had heard, created by a secret and sacred object known as a bull-roarer: a long thin board with slits cut in it, attached to a string and swung around in the air to create the eerie noise. Then the next day the tribe’s priest would interpret the sounds, much as Joseph Smith used his magical glasses to interpret the ancient language.
This practice of the priest telling the people what the gods wanted kept order in the tribe, because the gods were angry when the people behaved badly. So the night noises of the gods were the sacred power that maintained order and defined the tribe’s character and culture.
The story gets interesting when young boys reach the age of initiation into manhood. It is a frightening and bloody event. Men wearing masks and painted like monsters kidnap the boy whose time has come, and drag him into the woods at night. There, they tie him to a table, and perform the painful and bloody operation of circumcision and subincision. It must be absolutely terrifying for young boys going through this, not to mention painful.
Then, after the operation is over, one of the masked men dips the end of a bull-roarer in the boy’s blood. He brings it up near the boy’s face. Then he removes the mask so the boy can recognize him as one of the men of the tribe he has known all his life. And that is when the older man reveals the most important secret of life to the boy: “We make the noises.” We make the noises. Not the gods but us, in the woods at night swinging sticks with slits in them. We make the noises.
This is really one of the most important and sacred secrets of all religions, and it is protected by all religions. We make the noises. The revelations always come from us, not to us.
I said earlier that this story was like a Greek tragedy about America, and about us. It is really surprising just how much it is like a Greek tragedy. In those ancient plays, written 24 to 25 centuries ago, the characters were also spoken to by gods; they had their own private revelations. The characters justified their actions as obeying the will of the gods, just as the Lafferty brothers did. Yet at the end of these plays, the Greek chorus declared whether they were innocent or guilty, noble or shameful.
In other words, even 2500 years ago, when everybody was receiving oracles from the gods, people also knew that we make the noises, not the gods. This is such an important point, because we really know it today too, we just sometimes pretend we don’t. But the role of the jury in the trial of the Lafferty brothers was precisely the role of the Greek chorus.
They listened to the brothers tell them that God spoke to them to order these murders. Then they listened to a psychiatrist tell them Ron Lafferty acted out of a narcissistic personality disorder that let him treat other humans as mere things that could be murdered as he wished.
In other words, the psychiatrist said the murders weren’t serving God, but were serving the selfish and evil desires of Ron Lafferty, and that God played no role at all. The jury, like the Greek chorus, weighed the evidence, and decided unanimously that the defendant was a psychopathic murderer, not a prophet, that he made the noises, and that the noises were evil and unforgivable.
They knew that there are standards much higher than individual choice. And we know it, too. We know that we make the noises, we just usually let people get away with it because the noises aren’t harmful to others.
If Mother Teresa felt God wanted her to hug and cleanse lepers, we might still feel those were her values, but we don’t mind if she projects them onto her God because it seems so good-hearted, so compassionate. We say “Well, this is the sort of thing that is worthy of God.”
The word “God” is one of those words we use when we want to claim ultimacy, when we want to claim that we are acting out of the highest and noblest motives we can understand. It’s a word that makes demands on those who use it, that holds them accountable. And something in us knows that such words can not be used lightly. Almost every religion has this notion:
– Zeus & Semele (Sem’-uh-lee), the mortal woman who was mother of Dionysus. Zeus’s wife Hera, always betrayed and always jealous, sought revenge on Semele, so in disguise instructed her to ask Zeus to promise her a favor. Once he had promised, she was to ask him to reveal himself in all his splendor to her. Anyone who has read much world religions knows this is a death sentence, because we can neither hold nor behold the truly sacred. When Zeus complied, the brilliant heat and light of his essence burned Semele to ashes.
– Even if you don’t read Greek mythology, you probably remember Stephen Spielberg’s movie about the Ark of the Covenant, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” When the raiders opened the Ark and looked on it, the bright light melted them right on the spot. It’s the same story.
– A less lethal practice in religions all over the world is the practice of removing your shoes before entering religious places of worship, in Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic religions. And you may remember a similar passage in the Hebrew scriptures, the instructions to remove your shoes because you are on holy ground. These commands don’t come from gods; they come from the human psyche, which knows that the quality of the sacred that we allude to is more than we can behold.
– And in the Mormon religion, only Mormons can enter their sacred Temple. Again, the sacred center is protected from casual interlopers.
Why? Because one of the amazing things about humans is that even though we make the noises, even though all our gods are born from the manger of our own yearnings, we are aware that we can create words and concepts that point beyond us, that allude to transcendence we can’t grasp but can merely allude to. We can put names on things we cannot see, understand or control, but which feel holy. Jews won’t pronounce the name of their god because there is something about naming things that feels like it gives us power over them. And at our best, we know our ultimate concepts, are beyond our control. They can’t take directions from us, or our religion is just a puppet show, where we drag our gods through the mud of our own lusts, envies and angers.
And whose responsibility is it to police the use of our concepts of ultimacy – words like Nation, America, Justice, Equity, Truth, Beauty and God?
In our courts, it is the responsibility of the state, of judges, and of jurors. More broadly, it is the responsibility of all of us, and it is a sacred duty. Every cheapening of religion, every degradation of our highest concepts, lowers the bar by creating dishonest government, greedy economies, imperialistic wars and tawdry counterfeits of religion.
Owning those norms is the sacred task of all of us, and abuses of our languages of ultimacy must always be challenged, or they lose their ability to call forth our best. As Camus put it, it is our task to purify the language of our tribe. We are always on call for jury duty in the Greek choruses that are needed to comment on the most powerful words in our culture. It is a sacred duty. We cannot shirk it.
If you doubt this, I can prove it to you from within your own heart and mind. Imagine how you would have felt if the jury had acquitted Ron Lafferty. The story really isn’t about Ron Lafferty. He is a narcissist, a liar, a psychopath and a murderer, and he is where he belongs.
But all of Jon Krakauer’s books have used their subjects as lenses for viewing larger aspects of life in our times, and so does this one. In important ways, this story is about the sacred role of the Greek chorus in transcending and trumping individual choices, when those choices demean and degrade our highest values.
The murders of an innocent woman and her baby were sad and tragic. But the worse tragedy would have been if the jury had decided that whatever Ron Lafferty believed was fine, and if his God told him to kill others, who were we to judge the quality of his private revelation?
We now live in times when our society’s highest symbols are being demeaned and degraded by those who claim to have personal revelations about them, and most of our people act as though we have no power and no role to play in the local, national and international dramas that continue to unfold.
But if religion is reduced to ignorant and disingenuous censorship of textbooks and if God is reduced to a subordinate local deity whose role is simply to bless America, then religion is being reduced to an instrument of cynical control rather than empowerment, and the chorus must respond.
If the American flag is waved over wars of greed and aggression, our highest national symbol is being dragged through low and mean lusts, and our soldiers are dying not for noble causes, but for low and selfish ones. And again, the chorus must speak out.
If the laws are changed to permit the wholesale robbery of billions of dollars from employees and stockholders by companies like Enron, then the rules of fairness and justice are being dragged down to the selfish horizons of the most rapacious among us, and the chorus must speak out and do its duty as the jury, the guardian of our highest collective values.
To live under the banner of heaven, we must remember what our highest values demand, and speak up for them. If we don’t, those high values – like Ron Lafferty’s sick little God – will be dragged down to low and mean levels: banners used to sanction disreputable motives and actions. And then we will be living not in heaven but in hell.
One important lesson the Greek chorus carries for us is that we are accomplices to all deeds done in the service of values which we have failed to confront.
Heaven or hell? It’s too early to tell whether religion, economics, civil rights, foreign relations and war will fly under the banners of hell or under the banner of heaven. The jury is still out.
