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Davidson Loehr

February 18, 2001

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: “What you need to grow”

There was a boy with an unusual problem. He was only two feet tall, and all of his school classmates made terrible fun of him, calling him all the names you might imagine, and more. One day he heard that there was an old Wise Woman living on a hill outside of town, who had been known to be able to solve problems like this.

So he went outside of town and climbed the hill to find the old woman. She was there, and welcomed him in. “Old Wise Woman,” he said, I have a terrible problem!” “Well,” she replied, “have a seat, and tell me your story.” So he did, pointing out that he was only two feet tall, and nobody else he knew was only two feet tall.

The old woman smiled, studied him for a bit, and then announced, “Well, I know what your problem is, for I have seen it before. Your problem is that you don’t have enough stories in you.”

“What?” said the boy, very surprised by such a silly answer. “I don’t have enough what?”

“Stories,” she repeated. “You don’t have enough good stories in you. Without good stories, you will probably never grow any bigger at all. So go back home, and during the next year start listening to stories, and collecting them. Come back to see me in a year, and we’ll see how you’re doing.”

He hardly knew what to do! He’d never really thought of collecting stories before! The idea! He didn’t even know what to listen to, so he just listened to everything that came easily along. He heard a lot of very bad jokes, and a lot of very nasty gossip about his own friends, always spoken behind their backs.

The next year, he returned to the cabin of the old Wise Woman. “Stand up,” she said, “and we’ll measure you.” She did, and the news was very bad: he had actually shrunk! “Goodness!” she said as though she were surprised, “What kind of stories have you been listening to?” He told her, and she just shook her head. “Well, no wonder you’re shrinking! You can’t grow by taking in bad stories! They can only make you smaller! Now go back home, and this next year I want you to listen to stories of what people love. Just that. Now go!”

Another frustrating year! Though the second year wasn’t as bad as the first, for he heard much nicer stories. He learned that his friend had a gerbil named Max that she loved like crazy. She invited him over to her house, showed him her pet, and even took Max out so the boy could hold and pet him. “Oh, wow!” he said, and he felt like he had just grown an inch.

Another friend loved riding his bicycle, because he rode it, he said, to the most beautiful place in the whole world, a place he loved more than anyplace. So the boy rode out with him one day, to the top of a very high hill, and saw the most beautiful view he had ever seen. “Oh, wow!” he said.

There were other stories he heard that year, about pets places and people that were loved by his family and friends. He had never known these things about them before, and each time he learned what someone else loved, and shared that love with them, his world got a little bigger, and he felt like he was getting bigger too. He could hardly wait to see the Old Wise Woman again!

And, sure enough, he had grown, and grown a lot! “You see?” she said, shaking her finger at him, “You need good stories in order to grow! Now go back home and collect more stories. This time, learn what it is that makes people bigger. Now go!”

Well, this year was more fun. He began learning about all his friends’ religions, the things they believed that made them bigger, and he learned all sorts of things! One friend told him about Jesus. She told him all kinds of stories about Jesus, and about how having Jesus in her life made her feel better and more safe. She even showed him her blue bracelet that said “WWJD?” on it, and explained that it meant “What Would Jesus Do?” and was the question she asked herself whenever she had a hard decision to make.

“Oh, wow!” he said: “Jesus!”

Another friend had just moved to this country with his family from Iran during the last year. He said he was a Muslim, and told the boy about Allah, who was the God of his religion. He spoke of how he kept Allah in mind during the day, how Allah was like an invisible friend and parent, and how he never felt alone because of his faith in Allah.

“Oh, wow!” said the boy: “Allah!”

Still another friend was Buddhist, another religion the boy had never heard of. The friend told him the famous story of how the Buddha had once held up a Lotus blossom in his hand, to teach that the Lotus blossom is like the whole world: it seems so small, so easy to hold, but when it unfolds it contains all kinds of wonderful and unsuspected things.

“Oh, wow!” said the boy: “Buddha!”

These stories were so interesting, he collected them for a long time, and forgot about the Old Wise Woman. Years later, when the boy had grown, he decided to go see her once more. “Let’s measure you!” she said when she saw him, and she stood up to face him. He was now taller than she was! “Yes!” she exclaimed, “This is the day I’ve been waiting for! Come sit here,” she motioned toward her own chair, “there is someone who wants to meet you.”

The boy sat in the chair, the Old Wise Woman seemed to disappear, and suddenly a young girl entered the room. “Old Wise Man,” she said, “I have a terrible problem!”

He looked at the girl, who was only two feet tall. He smiled at her, and said “Please sit, and tell me your story.”

SERMON: “Oh, God!”

 “There is no race so wild and untamed as to be ignorant of the existence of God.” That’s an old quotation. The god he was talking about was Jupiter, for those words were written by the Roman Cicero, 2045 years ago (44 BCE). Well, today perhaps we are that race “wild and untamed,” for few of us spend three thoughts a year on Jupiter or his Greek version, Zeus (though we spend some time on them, as we will see).

If you read in some religions like Buddhism or Taoism, you won’t encounter the word “god” much, because those faiths don’t use god-talk to think about life. But in all Western religions based on the Hebrew scriptures, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you read about God on nearly every page. So since almost all of us were raised in this Western culture, it may sound odd when I say that religion isn’t about God. But it isn’t. Religion isn’t about God. It’s about something else. Still, when you read the great writers of (especially) Western religions, It looks like God is what they are going on about, especially if you read literalistic, rather than liberal, theologians.

It’s an odd fact, but in their own time, almost every famous theologian of history was quite liberal, and most of them took great pains to distance themselves from the literalists of their day, and they seldom did it politely, either! When they used the word “God” they meant something with it that sounds pretty modern, no matter when they lived. I’ve chosen some quotations from some ancient and some modern people talking about the meaning of the word “God.” I’ve picked only a few, because of the well-established scientific fact that if you listen to more than six theologians in a row you are almost certain, right on the spot, to drop dead from boredom.

First was one of my favorites, the 3rd century Christian theologian Origen. It is said that when he died, he left behind over one thousand theological writings. He was born in 185 and died, after imprisonment and extended torture, in 253.

“God must not be thought of as a physical being, or as having any kind of body,” he wrote. “He is pure mind. He moves and acts without needing any corporeal space, or size, or form, or color, or any other property of matter.”

The other ancient theologian is St. Augustine. He lived in North Africa, from 354 to 430, and could be considered the inventor of Roman Catholicism. Augustine had some complex and strange ideas about sex and sin, but when he talked about the meaning of the word “God” he was quite liberal:

“Some people imagine God as a kind of man or as a vast bodily substance endowed with power, who by some new and sudden decision created heaven and earth. When these people hear that God said “Let such and such be made”, and accordingly it was made, they think that once the words had been pronounced, whatever was ordered to come into existence immediately did so. Any other thoughts which occur to them are limited in the same way by their attachment to the familiar material world around them. These people are still like children. But the very simplicity of the language of Scripture sustains them in their weakness as a mother cradles an infant in her lap. But there are others for whom the words of Scripture are no longer a nest but a leafy orchard, where they see the hidden fruit. They fly about it in joy, breaking into song as they gaze at the fruit and feed upon it.” (Confessions, p. 304 in Penguin Classics edition).

I’m not sure that many newspapers would even print quotations from liberal ministers today who described fundamentalists as being “still like children”! You get the idea that God, at least in the hands of the best theologians, is a bit of a mystery. It sounds like a Fellow, but it isn’t a Fellow, isn’t a being, doesn’t live in the sky, doesn’t have a body at all. It’s something else. I hope for us to get a glimpse of what that something else is today.

Let’s jump from the fifth to the nineteenth century, to one of the first Unitarian preachers in the United States. His name was William Ellery Channing. These two sentences come from the 1830s, but see how similar they sound to the two ancient ones, and to things you might say today:

“God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth. The only God whom our thoughts can rest on, our hearts cling to, and our conscience can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls.”

I’ll add two more thinkers from the 20th century, a historian and a novelist. First, the historian:

“I find in the universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law, and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order, and law of the world.” Will Durant, This I Believe, 1954

And the novelist Upton Sinclair wrote “I am sustained by a sense of the worthwhileness of what I am doing: a trust in the good faith of the process which created and sustains me. That process I call God.” (What God Means to Me, 1935)

It looks like Voltaire may have been right when he wrote that “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him”!

Still, the best theologians have been clear that the word “God” isn’t the name of a Being somewhere. It’s a symbol, our most powerful symbol, being used to allude to something that is beyond our ability to express.

The Buddhists have a metaphor for this. They call it the finger pointing at the moon. They say we usually mistake the finger for the moon. We do that with symbols. We mistake them for what they’re point to, and worship the symbol instead of that unnameable thing to which the symbol is pointing. You could almost say that we worship God rather than that to which the symbol of God is pointing.

For many people today, perhaps for many of you, the word “God” is associated with so much hypocrisy and deception you don’t even want to hear it. I don’t have such strong reactions against it, but I’ll admit that for me too, God-language isn’t the most interesting or useful way to talk about life’s most enduring questions and yearnings.

On the other hand, I don’t think illiteracy should be defended, and that includes religious illiteracy. I think God-language is one of the languages we need to understand, especially if we want to communicate with most other people.

So what is it like, this business of using powerful words like God? Here is an analogy that might be useful. I pick up a Stradivarius violin, perhaps the best violin ever made. I put a bow to it, saw back and forth, and make horrible squawking noises that scare the cats. I put it down and say “What an ugly instrument is the violin!” But the fault wasn’t with the violin. I just didn’t know how to play it.

I may not want to play the violin. Most of us don’t. I’d prefer the clarinet, which I can’t play very well either. But our lives can be enriched if we are open to hearing the music that can be created by those who can play the violin well.

The music analogy is helpful for religion, though it isn’t exact. Those who love the violin have never declared war on clarinet players, tried to convert them to violin, or burned them at the stake for persisting in the heretical love of clarinet sounds. A symbol like the word “God” is just far more powerful. If we get it right, it can be sublime. If we get it wrong, it can be vulgar, vicious, deadly. Some of the meanest hatreds I have ever seen were defended as God’s will.

But that’s where god-talk is like a violin again. It measures the character, imagination and heart of those who use it. Or maybe its double-edged quality makes it more like a bow and arrow. If you are an archer, you can use a bow and arrow to get food, to attack an enemy, or — if you’re really good at is, as Cupid was as a vehicle for expressing love.

At its best, God-language is a language of power and glory. We know that’s true, but it’s odd. How would a word have that kind of power? Nationalism has a similar potential for power and glory. It is not a mystery why these two vocabularies of God-talk and patriotism have that deep kind of power and glory, but it’s worth mentioning it.

It goes far deeper than religion. It goes far, far back into our evolutionary past, and is studied in the field of etholgy, or comparative animal behavior. Both the worship of God and the allegiance to a country are behaviors that look a lot like behaviors in a million other species. So let me back off from religion for a minute, to look at it from outside.

We are deeply territorial animals. That means that our sense of who we are is deeply connected to our place, our people, and our way of life. We build fences around our yards, defend our borders, and make battle-cries out of territorial boundaries like “Fifty-four forty or fight!” When we do these things, we are doing with weapons, flags and rationalizing speeches what a million other territorial animals do with teeth, threats and squawks or roars. Remember that a dog barks at strangers from inside your fence for the same reason you built the fence. So “nationalism” and “patriotism” are the words we have invented to describe and call forth our territorial instincts.

Besides being territorial animals, we are also hierarchical animals. We defer to presidents and kings, we fear the boss’s wrath. The ancient Greeks used to talk about how their god Zeus would throw lightning bolts down from above when he was angry. And even today, when somebody speaks out against authority figures, we still talk about “waiting for the lightning to strike.” In short, as students of animal behavior have noticed, God looks a lot like an Alpha Male. Alpha Males are the dominant males that rule the troop or herd. They are the top dog, the silverback gorilla, the male lion who rules the pride of lions. In a million different species, including ours, the acknowledged role of Alpha Males is to set the behavioral boundaries, reward the obedient and threaten or discipline the disobedient. They protect and punish and bomb Bagdhad and those under them fear their wrath and seek their approval. Their job is to draw the boundaries of their tribe’s permissible world. They keep the natives in and the aliens out.

A lot of scholars have said that the god of the ancient Hebrews looks like a super-sized tribal chief. And the God of the Bible was probably first formed as a projection of a tribal chief from somewhere in Canaan, the source of the ancient Hebrews’ religion. But even more anciently, it looks like the Alpha Males of a million other hierarchical species.

So God is an Alpha Male that embodies and claims ultimacy for our sense of place, normative behaviors, our amity toward those who are like us and our enmity toward outsiders. Religious wars show this on a large scale. Creeds, heresy trials and shaming sinners are close-up examples.

There’s something in us that needs to know who we are, whose we are and where our place is in life, the world, everything. And judging by our history, it looks like we need to believe that we’ve heard the answer from On High.

So God, at least in the three religions based on the Bible, is a symbolic vehicle for our highest hopes, our deepest fears, our assurance that the world is safe, we have a meaningful place in it. We make him our father, our father who art in heaven. We crave his love and fear his wrath and seek our peace in an obedient relationship with Him, usually mediated by priests, creeds, rituals and sacraments.

You see that what we’re exploring here is not gods but some of our own deepest levels. Our most powerful symbols measure us as a Stradivarius violin measures us if we try to play it.

Once you frame your quest in god-language, you can go either shallow or deep, the language permits both literalism and liberalism, as theologians have been noting for a couple thousand years or more.

Origen, that 3rd century Christian theologian I quoted earlier, taught that religious scriptures had three levels, which he called the body, soul and spirit. The “body” was the lowest level, the literal level, and he had nothing good to say for it. He thought nothing religious could happen at that level. To understand the “soul” of scripture meant you could raise it a level, and understand the key words, including the word “God” as symbols and metaphors for a deeper kind of awareness and wisdom. And at the highest level, those who understood the “spirit” of religious writings finally see that religion isn’t finally intellectual. It isn’t finally about holy words, but about living a holy life. He wrote that the cardinal rule of understanding religious scriptures is to seek out those things “which are useful to us and worthy of God.” That was the 3rd century, and it’s about as liberal as you can get!

So what is god-talk? It isn’t the name of a Being. It’s a language, an idiom of expression, a certain stylized way of thinking and talking about the human situation understood profoundly.

For me, part of what it means to become human religiously lies in learning how to hear spiritual music played in different keys, on different instruments, in different idioms of expression. It’s being able to hear the violins, the clarinets, the trumpet, drums, the oboe and the rest of it. In religion, it is the learned ability to allow the many different religious languages easy access to our minds and our hearts. The whole human sound, and the full divine sound, goes up only from the full orchestra and chorus.

I work every week, struggling to find words to wrap around who we are, what we seek, and how we might find it and let it find us. Expressing it with power and glory is an art. I seldom achieve it, and always admire it when I hear someone else do it. There are things we know, and things for which we yearn, and I don’t think they have changed much throughout our history.

We know that whatever the forces of life are, they’ve been a part of us forever. These incomprehensible dynamics gave rise to the world and all life on it, including ours. In the span of our planet’s billions of years, we’re hardly here for an eyeblink, then we fly away, and return to the dust from which we came. Our lives are swept away by these infinite forces, as though we didn’t even matter.

Who can begin to measure this power? The sustaining parts of life may feel like love, but the destructive aspects, accident, disease, war, the death of those we love, if we take it personally, and we almost always do, those things can feel like anger, even wrath. If we could get a little humility by seeing ourselves and our vanities against this immense background, we would probably be wiser than we are. In the face of this immensity, we yearn for a sense of peace, a sense that we are, somehow a beloved, a cherished, part of it all. And we wish the things we work for during our lives could somehow become established, and outlive us. Most people can die in peace if they know that the things they have loved, the things they have worked to create, will outlive them. I think, though my language wasn’t very poetic, that everyone who has ever lived has had these feelings and hopes.

Now let me play you the same song I just gave you in the last two paragraphs. But this time, I’ll play it on a borrowed Stradivarius. Listen to those same basic human concerns, as they were expressed by an anonymous poet of perhaps 2500 years ago, in the 90th Psalm of the Hebrew Scriptures, or “Old Testament.” Here is that old tribal god, that ancient Alpha Male, raised to the level of timeless beauty.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.

Thou turnest us back to dust, saying “Turn back, O Children of Adam!” For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.

Thou dost sweep us away; we are like a dream, like grass which is renewed in the morning: in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.

For we are consumed by thy anger; by thy wrath we are overwhelmed. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For all our days pass away under thy wrath, our years come to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of thy anger, and thy wrath according to the fear of thee? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on thy servants! Satisfy us in the morning with thy steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad as many days as thou has afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil.

Let thy work be manifest to thy servants, and thy glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

Oh, God!

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

February 11, 2001

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PUPPET SHOW:

INTRO. (Lisa): Now is the time for children to come down for the Story for All Ages. Children please come sit in front of the curtain and bring your gifts for Caritas so you can put them in the wagon after the puppet show. And now The First UU No Strings Attached Puppet Players present”The Lesson”.

GRUMP: I am so bored, nothing ever happens at this church.

BIG RACCOON: We’re looking for sticks!

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

BIG RACCOON: You can do lots of tricks with sticks. Can you help us?

LITTLE RACCOON: Were in a fix. We need some sticks!

GRUMP: Uh, no. (sarcastically)

WOLF: I need some bricks to go with their sticks ’cause we’ve got a lot of fun things to fix. Would you like to join us and show off your tricks?

GRUMP: You people. I mean puppets, are nuts!

CATERPILLAR: I was wondering whether, you might have a feather? If you join me, we could make things together.

GRUMP: What do I look like, Big Bird?

CATERPILLAR: Could I assume, you don’t have a plume?

GRUMP: No, but you need a padded room.

BIG RACCOON: (appears with sticks) Would you help us with our sticks?

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

WOLF: (with brick) Would you help me lay some bricks?

CATERPILLAR: (appears with feathers) Would you help me glue some feathers?

ALL PUPPETS: We can all have fun together!

GRUMP: No, I will not help you with your sticks! I will not help you lay some bricks! I will not help you glue your feathers! Why don’t you all get lost together!

BIG RACCOON: Okay.

LITTLE RACCOON: Have it your way.

WOLF: You don’t have to huff and puff about it.

CATEPILLAR: What a bird brain!

(Puppets disappear and make all kinds of construction noises.)

(Raccoons and Wolf appear with house)

WOLF: All you do is gripe and grouse.

BIG RACCOON: But look at us.

LITTLE RACCOON: We made a house!

GRUMP: That’s not fair! I don’t have a house!

WOLF: Stop your complaining.

BIG RACCOON: Stop your grousing! You had your chance.

(Turn house to logo)

LITTLE RACCOON: at Paws-on-Housing!

GRUMP: DOH! (Buries head in hands)

BIRD: Look at me up in the sky. With these wings, I can fly!

GRUMP: I want to fly. I want a house. I wish I hadn’t been such a louse. You’re right, you’re right. I’ve learned, I’ve learned. I have no right to what I’ve spurned. I’ve learned my lesson. Okay. Okay. Now what can I help you make today? (Walks over to side of puppets.)

BIG RACCOON: I ‘ve got some string.

LITTLE RACCOON: String!

WOLF: I’ve got some glue!

BIRD: Let’s go figure out what to do!

ALL: Yea!

END

SERMON: Choosing the Feathered Things

As many of you have read in the latest church newsletter, your governing board and I have been busy during the last month, on two very exciting projects. The first was the remarkable offer of 142 acres of land in the Hill Country, complete with four buildings, a new barn and an outdoor pool. Some of you have visited the land; I hope others will make the trip to see it before you vote on whether to recommend that your board accept this gift in the congregational meeting two weeks from today. There are some legal and financial details we are still investigating, and some good sober questions we need to resolve, but it’s an amazing gift, filled with exciting possibilities.

For me, though, the other project was even more exciting. Your board and I developed an ambitious model for serving the church that we have modestly called The Austin Model. While it will evolve and change over time, as a living thing would do, its essence is really very simple. We know that organizations, including churches, exist to make a difference in the world, that they are supposed to be doing something. It is like sailing a boat rather than minding the store, and like standing on the bridge to see where we’re actually going rather than being in the engine room check oil levels. We’re not just trying to stay afloat, we need to ask where are we going, and are we making any progress?

Here’s another way of understanding it. We are taking nearly a half million dollars a year from this community, and the time and talents of over five hundred adults. What are we doing that’s worth that amount of time, energy and money? The money could be used instead to open a bookstore, a little coffee house, maybe a donut shop. In what ways is what we are doing more worthwhile than that? I think we need to be able to answer, both to ourselves and to the community, just what differences we are making that are worth that kind of time and money. And I think you need to be able to give a satisfactory answer to your Baptist or Catholic friends who wonder what in hell (or at least the preparation for hell) you are doing here.

We want to begin consciously planning the actions of myself and the other staff to make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and the community. And as far as possible, we want to take a rough measurement of the differences we are making, and keep you informed of them so that you will feel some of the excitement as we move in this new style.

This may all sound very obvious, you might expect that of course all churches and all organizations would think this way. But they don’t. And to be honest, it is an intimidating prospect, this business of actually taking who we are and what we’re doing with your money and your trust seriously enough to measure our actions by the differences they are making.

It is exciting and frankly, a little scary. It changes, or at least sharpens, my focus in planning sermons.

I wonder what I should do to be more intentional and effective in addressing issues that might make a positive difference in your life, the lives of your children and the community? How do we choose the things in life that might make a positive difference? Or in terms of this morning’s puppet show, how do we choose those things we need to make a home, or those feathered things that can help our spirit take flight? It was Emily Dickinson who said that hope is the thing with feathers, and I’ve always liked her definition. Hope is the thing with feathers, the thing that lifts us up. How do we choose that thing?

There is plenty to gripe about if we’d rather do that, you know. Our lives aren’t as perfect as we fantasize they should be. Not everybody loves us, or even understands us. Our jobs are like most jobs, filled with ups and downs, but not ideal. And as of this week with Motorola’s layoffs, there are over 4,000 fewer jobs in Austin, a number that may soon increase. Besides our jobs, our relationships are seldom perfect. And our kids will almost all grow up to be just regular old adults, not the envy of the civilized world. They’ll probably make about as many dumb mistakes as we did, as will their kids and their kids’ kids. It’s easy to just sit it out, gripe that Nuts, I don’t like this place, or this place, or this place. And we do it too often and too easily, don’t we?

It’s as though we come to believe that the world owes us something. As though we were born with this long list of entitlements. I don’t think we are. I think there is only one gift offered to us, and that is the gift of life itself. I think we’re paid in full the day we’re born. After that, it’s up to us to learn how to negotiate for the other things we wish we had. I don’t think the world owes us love. It doesn’t even owe us fairness or justice. Those are conditions we have to create if we really want them. We were given life, and the chance to make something of it, or just sit and be disappointed. It matters what we believe. It also matters what we choose.

And given the choice, we have to work to discover who we are and make a home for ourselves in life. We need to choose the things with feathers. And I think we must wish the same for others, and try to make our interactions with them positive rather than negative, creative rather than destructive. If our beliefs can’t help us do that, we probably have the wrong beliefs. If they can help us do that, they’re probably working fairly well for us and those in our greater community. That’s a pretty pragmatic approach to religion, but I think it’s the right one.

But the only real miracle is the gift of life. It wasn’t supposed to be perfect, it was only supposed to present itself to us, to let us see what we would and could do with it. If we sit back like couch potatoes waiting for life to please us, it will probably be a very long wait. This is true in churches, too, including this one.

Several years ago I was talking about things like this with two colleagues, and we discovered that the same visitor had been to each of our churches a few times, and then went away. So she had visited a Unitarian church, an American Baptist church, and a liberal Disciples of Christ church.

They were all good churches with good people. In each one, the visitor could have found ways to ask her questions, to meet wonderful friends, to struggle with personal and spiritual issues on several levels. None of the churches was any more perfect than the visitor, but they were all good enough. Maybe she finally found a church where she decided to take root, make friends and become a participant rather than an onlooker. If so, she was the exception.

It’s easy to read this as a failure of the church to integrate visitors, and it’s fair. We could do more to integrate visitors into the body of the church, and we should. But it isn’t only a failure of the churches. It’s also the habit of people to see themselves only as shoppers who keep moving on until something finds a way of keeping them there.

If you are a visitor here, or have just been coming for a few months, here’s something to think about: less than half of you will still be here a year from now. In this or any other church, most who come never join, never make a commitment, and never become a part of the church. Liberal churches, conservative churches, big churches, little churches, it’s the same: most visitors don’t last a year.

I think people visit churches sort of thinking, “Well, I’ll just sit here quietly and see if they swarm around me to make me feel welcome.’ The truth is, it isn’t likely to happen very often. So while I want to welcome all visitors, I want to challenge you. Don’t be passive here. Don’t expect these people to try harder to keep you than you try to stay. We’re not any better at it than you are, and creating a meaningful relationship is a two-way street.

And the way you stay ‘ here or anywhere ‘ is to seek for and choose those things, those relationships, that you can build on and grow from. Seek the things you need to make a home for yourself here, and seek the hopeful things, the bits that nourish you.

This isn’t something I have always known. It is something I learned in a memorable moment. And while I can’t give you the experience I had, I can tell you the story.

It was about twenty years ago, in a preaching class in graduate school. David, our professor was a very gifted preacher who was deeply serious about the ministry, and equally serious about professionalism. In those minutes before class begins, several of the students were whining about the church they all attended, complaining that the preacher was horrible, the service was amateurish, and they didn’t get a single thing out of it. David glared at these future ministers and said ‘How hard did you try?’

That was the first time I really understood that attending a worship service, like attending to living, is meant to be an activity, not a passivity. It changed a lot for me. The church I attended during graduate school also had a very poor preacher, and I could fall into whining about not getting anything out of the worship service as quickly as the next person.

But after that day in class, the question ‘How hard did you try?’ stayed with me. And, while I seldom heard a sermon worth remembering in the next five years, I was always glad I had attended church, but each week I saw it as a personal challenge to find something moving, something memorable in the service. Sometimes, it was the organist, sometimes the sound or feel of a hymn. Sometimes, it was just sitting there as the candles were extinguished, watching the wispy smoke rise up into the dark at the top of the big old church, thinking of the smoke as a spirit set free. But every Sunday, I went to church to try and find something, and it made all the difference.

So if you are a visitor, or have been coming here less than a year, I want to offer you a challenge. Don’t sit passively with us. Come try with us. Or if this church doesn’t suit you and you need to find another, try hard there.

Most churches are pretty good, and this one is pretty good too. We can raise spiritual questions here without any regard for whether they cross over the boundaries of an orthodoxy. You can find some interesting and engaging people here whose spiritual searches are similar to your own, once you get to know one another. We have a strong and active social conscience, we are important parts of our community, and during the coming years we will learn to make even bigger positive differences in the community.

So I challenge you to try hard here, and to come up to me next February and tell me you are still here. We’re not unfriendly. In fact I think many of us are quite friendly. But acceptance and community here require some effort on your part. If you want meaningful relationships and associations here, you have to try. If you want to feel chosen, you have to choose. If you want to live in a friendly community, you need to make friends. I challenge you to come see me and tell me you have done it.

Now some of you are sitting there thinking “Yeah, right!” It’s a lot easier said than done. We sit passively; we hesitate to reach out, to meet new people, partly because most of us just aren’t very good at it, but also because it is very risky. You could fail, feel rebuffed, and be embarrassed. It is so easy to stand back, mind the shop, wait cautiously to see if maybe the world will take the first step, come to you, and make it easy.

It’s like sailing a boat again. Much of life is kind of like sailing a boat. On shore, the boat looks good, and you can have all these great fantasies about how cool it would be to be sailing. But once you actually put the boat in the water, it’s bound to get messier. The wind comes up, the balance shifts, you have to learn what you’re doing, and not all lessons keep you dry.

I like this sailing metaphor even though my experience with sailboats has not been impressive. I was about sixteen the first time I went sailing. My friend Tom took me out in his family’s small sailboat. He steered, I sat on one side feeling the breeze and thinking how cool this was, this sailing business. Within a few minutes, he uttered the strangest sentence I had ever heard in my life. “Prepare to come about,” he said. “Prepare to come about,” I thought: hey, that must be sailing talk. Now I really know I’m a sailor, because we’re talking sailing talk. This is so cool!

Then, with absolutely no warning, I learned what that four-word bit of sailing talk meant. For the land-lubbers here, those words are a kind of shorthand that mean “In about three seconds, the sail is going to swing across the boat, hit you in the chest, knock you overboard, and tip the whole boat over!” Tom explained that to me while we were swimming around in the middle of the lake. And I decided, right there bobbing up and down like fish bait, that I didn’t much like sailing. I still liked the idea of sailing, and the fantasies about it, as long as no boat containing me ever touched the water.

So I understand the fear of failure, and the fact that wishing something were so doesn’t accomplish a single thing, though it’s not as intimidating as putting the boat into the water. I suspect that’s why, in so many areas of life, we are controlled by our fears rather than our hopes, and keep our boats on the shore. We don’t want to fail, we don’t want to be embarrassed, and we don’t want to feel like an idiot.

Sometimes, it helps to hear stories about others who have failed, so we don’t feel so alone when it happens to us. So I have another story for you about someone who was so good at failure he made a career out of it. If you’ve ever felt foolish or inadequate because you made a fool of yourself, this might make you feel better.

It was a while ago; he was a man without any apparent gifts or any apparent luck. I have never personally known such a failure, and I doubt that you have either.

First, he failed as a businessman. Maybe he thought politics would be easier, so the next year he ran for the state legislature, and lost. He went back into business and two years later, he failed in business again.

Besides his habit of failure, life wasn’t very kind to him and he wasn’t very lucky, because the following year his sweetheart died and the next year, not surprisingly, he had a nervous breakdown. Two years later, incredibly, he tried politics for a third time, and for a third time he lost. Then perhaps thinking that his problem was that he had set his sights too low, he ran for Congress. He lost.

About this time in reading his story, I thought this is a guy who just didn’t get it. There are people like that, and he was one of them. Life was giving him all the clues he needed, and he wasn’t listening. If he had any gifts, it seemed pretty clear they didn’t lie in running a business or in winning elections. How many times do you tip the boat over before you decide you weren’t meant to be a sailor?

Still, three years later he ran for Congress again, and was defeated again, and two years later he tried again and again he lost. This man had never won an election. He had run five times and lost five times. When do you get tired of bobbing up and down in the middle of the lake like fish bait? But he wasn’t through. He decided to aim still higher.

So his sixth defeat was for the Senate, his seventh defeat was for the Vice Presidency, and his eighth consecutive defeat, with no victories, was for the Senate again.

Finally, finally! Two years later, he was elected President. Then he won the second and last election of his life when he was re-elected as President in 1864. If you look on your calendars or your daily planners, they’ll tell you that tomorrow is his birthday. We Americans tell a lot of stories about Abraham Lincoln. But we almost never remember that in his whole life, he won only two elections and one war and his victory in that war is still not universally acclaimed in some parts of the South.

But how, after so many successive defeats, was he able to keep choosing the feathered thing? How did he keep putting the boat in the water, when it had turned over on him eight times in a row? I honestly don’t know. I wouldn’t have done it. I would have given up, or found another career, some time before the eighth consecutive failure. I suspect most of you would have, too. That’s just one of the reasons that we won’t have our birthdays written into the next century’s calendars. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time looking for sticks and bricks, looking to stop and make a home. But Abraham Lincoln had an amazing ability to keep looking for and finding hope over, and over, and over again.

If this were a competition, we could feel pretty inadequate next to Lincoln. But this is church. This is the time and the place when we gather together to seek inspiration from higher visions and strivings of more nobility and character. Sometimes we do it by looking to the lives of great religious figures. Today, I used the life of a great American for whom official religion was not a very important category. It is remarkable, I think, how many similarities we find in the lives of great religious figures and great civic figures.

They all show the powerful presence of an invisible kind of force, a kind of dynamism that helped them steer the course of their lives. It isn’t a “force” in the sense of some scientifically demonstrable energy field; it is the force of a powerful and life-affirming kind of attitude. The power of that hopeful, trusting attitude beckons to me through these stories, and I hope it beckons to you as well.

Because life wants to be an active word, not a passive one. And there is a source for that activity that seems to dwell within and around us. Call it the will of God, the inner and outer moving of the Holy Spirit, the Tao, the dynamic presence of the Life Force, or call it something else. As long as you can call it forth, it doesn’t much matter what you

call it. But it has feathers, this indescribable thing. And if we can keep seeking and choosing that feathered thing, it will absolutely make all the difference: all the difference in the world.

Endnotes

The puppet show script was a collaborative effort. I gave the puppeteers a script that gave the general direction and made the points I had incorporated into the sermon. They modified and adapted it, adding their own creative twists. They also turned it into Dr. Seuss-like rhyming. The puppeteers were Lisa Sutton, Eric Kay, David Smith and Melissa Smith.

The Story of a Life

Failed in business – 1831

Lost election for legislature – 1832

Failed again in business – 1834

Sweetheart died – 1835

Nervous breakdown – 1836

Lost second political race – 1838

Defeated for Congress – 1843

Defeated for Congress – 1846

Defeated for Congress – 1848

Defeated for US Senate – 1855

Defeated for Vice President – 1856

Defeated for US Senate – 1858

Elected President – 1860

(Abraham Lincoln)