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© Davidson Loehr

30 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Instead of a prayer this morning, a kind of guided meditation, best heard in an attitude of prayer:

Imagine a great circle, a great dance. It is the circle of Humanity: countless people, holding hands, moving and dancing through life. They often don’t seem to be aware of one another, yet they dance on in that great circle, as they have been doing since before time counted.

Occasionally, parts of the circle pass over a deep chasm, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, tornado or lightning would strike, and some dancers are lost. But immediately, the loose hands seek each other out, the circle is closed, and the dance goes on. After each loss, the dancers recite their special stories to explain why they were spared. “It was God,” said some, “looking out for us.” For others, it is a kind of cosmic energy that safeguards them. Others have their own explanations: guardian angels, Fate, and more exotic plots. There are disagreements over just what it is that keeps the dancers safe – they seldom speak of those who are lost from time to time. There is no pattern to the periodic losses and accidents: they usually just happen. And each time the circle is broken it seems to heal itself, and the dance goes on. Yet the question hovers: with so many different stories, what should dancers believe? In what, if anything, should they put their faith? Is it their stories, or the dance?

SERMON: “How to Become Big and Strong”

One way that the difference between conservative and liberal religions has been put is to say that conservative religions offer life-preservers while liberal religions offer swimming lessons. I have conservative friends who say they become big and strong by knowing that they and the whole universe rest in the hands of a God who is big and strong. Liberals, for all our cocky talk about swimming lessons, have to admit that we don’t have answers as solid and certain as that.

We are, all of us, a lot like Sheherezade, the woman who invented stories for 1001 nights to save her life. We’re all under the spell of Sheherezade; we all tell stories in order to live.

Still, I’ve always thought that all efforts to make it seem like we have life wrapped up in a sufficient story are just whistling in the dark. I want to take you to some of those dark places this morning, against the background of that question of how we really become big and strong.

Last month, I gave a sermon derived from Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book Under the Banner of Heaven, about some of the dark stories contained in Mormon teachings, and the violent form they have taken among some Mormon fundamentalists (19 Oct 2003).

This morning, I want to use another of his books, called Into the Wild. It is a book showing the self-deception of one of our favorite stories, which Joseph Campbell called The Hero’s Quest. It’s the plot of most adventure stories. An ordinary person finds themselves plucked from the safety of life and plunged into dangerous adventures, whether physical or psychological. If they succeed in slaying their dragons and winning their adventures, they develop a heroic character, and return to life bigger and stronger than most around them. The great gift of heroes is that they earn an authenticity that helps rejuvenate the world.

It’s hard to think of a great adventure story that doesn’t have this plot, from The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, to Frodo and the Lord of the Rings. It’s the small and weak characters whose moral courage and strength of character make them victorious over the forces of evil and elevate them into heroic stature.

This is the story that Jon Krakauer took on in his 1997 book Into the Wild, about a young man named Chris McCandless, who was an honor graduate from Emory University, and could have become a success at about anything he chose to do. But inside of him were these ancient voices that used to torment the classic heroes. They were dangerous voices, calling him to emerge from the conventional limits of his world, to bring to life the powerful will to live inside of him that had to be fought to be freed – it’s a plot any mythmaker would recognize.

McCandless’s extreme character needed the most extreme ordeals. He gave away the $15,000 trust fund set aside for his graduate school, and simply disappeared. He wanted to test himself against all of Nature, and spent two years learning how to survive in cities and in deserts with nothing but his wits. These first two years were his self-training like training for the knighthood, as he learned about how to survive in the wild.

Finally, he was ready to run the ultimate gamut, to win his heroic soul, to earn his sacred name, and he went to Alaska, to survive the Alaskan wilderness.

He went prepared, and in fact he did defeat the elements of the Alaskan wilderness. He survived, with only a knife and a .22 rifle, for about five months in an Alaskan winter wilderness that would have killed nearly anyone else. He hunted and trapped and fished, he gathered plants. He had studied plants for two years, knew which were edible and which were not. He even had a copy of the most authoritative book on plants from that area, and had marked in it to identify the plants he found around the abandoned school bus where he lived.

After about four months, the transformation inside McCandless seemed to be complete. He had finished his hero’s journey, and prepared to return home. The wild urges and demons that had driven him to the edge of life and death had been mastered and, in the most ancient style of heroes, had won his soul. And so he left the wild to return to the world.

This is the point in hero stories that carries so much excitement, so much promise. This is Buddha emerging from under the Bo Tree, Jesus returning from his wild scene of resisting the devil’s temptations. This is every hero who has finally gained enough mastery over their own inner powers to defeat the lesser voices, to rise above the ordinary fears of us ordinary people, and begin the return to the world. When they return, they bring back the gift of life with them. They bring a hard-won authenticity with them, an immense power of integrity and character, capable of rejuvenating their world.

The seasonal thaw had flooded the nearby river, and McCandless couldn’t cross, so returned to the bus to wait for the waters to subside. He was hungry: the life of a hunter-gatherer is always just a few days from desperation and starvation, and he was dangerously thin. He consulted his book, and raided the surrounding plants for the few things left, some potato seeds his book identified as edible and safe. But the book was wrong. The most authoritative book on plants was wrong. The potato seeds were poisonous. Before long, Chris McCandless realized it, and wrote out some notes identifying them as the deadly culprits, a few days later, he died.

That’s not the way the Hero’s quest is supposed to end. There’s supposed to be a cosmic kind of reward at the end. McCandless played the extreme game by its extreme rules; he became big and strong like a classic Greek hero, and he won. He did everything he was supposed to do. He learned, he did his homework, he went through two years of methodical and rigorous training. He confronted and defeated the inner and outer demons that had to be defeated. He won. Then he died. It isn’t fair.

If it had been a Greek story, the gods would have admired his character, and come to his aid – at least Athena would have, as she did for Osysseus and so many other male heroes. But there were no gods in this story, and no salvation. He risked all, he won, then he died.

When I read the book six years ago, Chris McCandless’ hero’s quest reminded me a lot of what my best friend was going through. Todd wasn’t bizarre or extreme like McCandless, he was more like most of the rest of us. But he had that heroic kind of courage and daring, in his intellectual way.

Todd Driskill had been a minister for a dozen years. He’d switched from the Methodists to the Disciples of Christ, and the switch was part of a much deeper struggle going on inside of him. He struggled against all the theology taught by the churches, because he thought most of it was demeaning nonsense.

He had no superstition left in his Christianity. He didn’t believe there was a Fellow living above the sky, and he didn’t believe that after he died he would show up somewhere else to go on living forever. These were myths, and he knew it. But beneath the myths, he saw some deeper, down-to-earth truths, and those deeper truths called him to serve them.

I saw Todd struggling with these inner voices during our weekly lunches together. He was trying to give birth to a larger religious vision, a larger truth, a larger self, and the struggles really took him to the mat.

Finally, in 1991, five years after I met him, Todd took a bold step and resigned from the ministry. He told me he could no longer preach the things he believed, no longer believed the things his church members were pressuring him to preach, and said he would lose his soul if he stayed.

So with his son in Jr. High School, Todd quit his job and the family moved to New Jersey, where he began Ph.D. studies at Drew University. His wife found a nursing position nearby. In our phone conversations, letters, and finally e-mails, Todd wrestled with the huge chasm between the wisdom he found in the Bible and the drivel he said the churches teach.

Through his intelligent reading of the Bible, Todd found wisdom and insight into the depths of living a more authentic life, and that was the “good news” he wished people would hear, rather than the supernatural nonsense they got instead. He would say, “If only Christians would learn how to read this book like grown-ups, Christianity could transform their lives and the world!”

I thought it was too bad he was never going to return to the ministry, and he certainly wasn’t likely to earn a living by teaching people how to read the Bible intelligently.

Then, as he was finishing his Ph.D. dissertation, he got a call. The voice at the other end wondered if he would be interested in interviewing to become the Director of the Society for Biblical Literacy for the Disciples of Christ churches worldwide. The job would involve traveling around the country and around the world, teaching both ministers and lay people how to read the Bible intelligently. The former director had died, they had already interviewed several candidates, but a minister who knew Todd had called them to say he thought the job was made for Todd Driskill. Todd flew to Atlanta, and they offered him the job at the end of the first interview.

As Todd said, this was a script written in Heaven by God and the angels, too good even to make a believable movie.

So six years ago at just this time of year, Todd was loading a truck for the move to Atlanta, more excited and more alive than any of us who knew him had ever seen him. He loaded all those boxes of books. Then he lifted an air-conditioner into the back of the truck, slumped forward and died of a heart attack at the age of 46.

We have hundreds of stories about heroic quests. We hardly ever talk about stories of heroic failures. But they are all around us. The year I read Krakauer’s book and preached the eulogy at Todd’s funeral, the movie “Titanic” came out. It was presented partly as a story of the arrogance of rich industrialists who thought they could build an unsinkable ship, and sped through a huge field of icebergs.

But there are other stories there, too. There are the stories of 1500 people, mostly 3rd class passengers, who died in the North Atlantic 92 years ago. Many or most of these people were poor working people from all over Europe. They were leaving everything and everyone they had known, risking everything they owned for the chance of a better life in America. Wasn’t this a hero’s quest? Hadn’t they done everything they were supposed to do? And weren’t they coming to the New World filled with the zeal and determination we try to teach through our hero stories?

And what of the millions of students, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other successful Cambodians who were hunted down and killed by Pol Pot’s armies during the time of Cambodia’s “killing fields” twenty years ago? What of the intellectuals, the patriotic and devoted Jews, homosexuals and others whose efforts were rewarded in the Nazi death camps nearly sixty years ago? What of all the innocent deaths of history, where the undeniable message is that life isn’t fair? What does it all do to our stories of justice, fairness, the rewards for hard work and sacrifice, the great and abiding gift brought by a good character?

There is something frightening about admitting the role that Chance plays in life. The Greeks saw that even the gods were the playthings of the fates, as we also are.

It can be put more bluntly: once Chance is acknowledged, all the gods lose all pretense to being in charge of anything at all. The only existence left for them is as ideas, concepts within our minds, limited to the kind of power ideas can have.

The best of religious writings have always known that even our most profound and necessary stories are fictions. That’s what the book of Job is about in the Hebrew Bible: that there is no cosmic justice, no God in charge of making sure everything will work out well. We don’t reflect enough on the fact that in the Jewish ordering of their bible, the book of Job is their last word on the subject of God. Buddhists teach that no one is really spiritually mature until they no longer need to be lied to – something my friend Todd despaired of ever being able to teach as a minister. Like Sheherezade, we tell our stories in order to live. And the greatest paradox of religion and of life is that, like Sheherezade, our lives are sustained in part by stories that we really know are not true.

It’s like a picture of all humanity, in a big circle holding hands. We dance, we sing, we work and play, live and die, always in that huge circle of humanity, and as we go through life, we tell each other our stories. We tell our stories about God and his Providence, how his eye is on the sparrow and on us as too, about how all things happen as part of his divine plan, and the plan is good. We tell our stories about truth and goodness and doing the right thing. We say in a hundred ways that there is a kind of cosmic justice underlying everything.

These are the stories we tell, as we hold hands in the big dance of life. And once in awhile we pass over a chasm, and someone falls through and is lost. Chris McCandless, Todd Driskill, hundreds of hopeful people aboard the Titanic, millions of innocents in the Nazi death camps, the Cambodian killing fields, thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, millions of Africans dying of AIDS. They fall through, they’re lost, and we rush to close the holes, to grasp the nearest hand and complete the circle again, so life’s dance can go on.

We pretend that our stories explain all about life: how we’re safe because God is watching, or because there is a cosmic justice on the lookout or because what goes around comes around or because death isn’t real and we’ll all come back in some other form, some other time. But they’re just the stories we tell ourselves while we’re still safe. They’re the necessary fictions we tell while holding hands and spinning in the dance of life, above an Abyss we seldom mention.

Then, on those few occasions in life when the circle breaks and we lose someone we shouldn’t have lost, the inadequacy of our stories is momentarily exposed. But just for a moment. For then we feel that tug, and we respond to it. It is the tug of the hands holding our hands, the hands of the others in that huge circle of humanity reaching out instinctively to pull us to them, to cradle us while we cry and heal and gain the faith to go on again.

So how, really, do we become big and strong in life? Is it by adopting a religious story that has all the answers and assures us that everything will be all right? Or is it, instead, by learning how to reach out and feel the touch of the hands next to ours, of the whole circle of humanity, how to respond to them, how to trust, and how to dance?

This is one of those sermons that preachers aren’t supposed to give. They’re too much like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where the little dog Toto pulls the curtain away, showing the illusions for what they were.

But we began by talking about some of the differences between religious conservatives and liberals, so I will leave the question with you: When you know that, like Sheherezade, we live by telling brave and hopeful stories that we know aren’t always true – when you know this, does the knowledge make you feel smaller and more afraid, or does it make you, as I hope it will, bigger and stronger?

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© Davidson Loehr

16 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

STORY: The Prince Who Was a Chicken

Once there was a kingdom where almost everything was perfect. The king was perfect, the queen was perfect, and the prince – who was only four years old – was being trained to be perfect. He had to become perfect, because one day he would become king.

Each day, the young prince would be brought into the great hall and dressed in a small crown, a junior-sized king’s robe, and seated in a very small but kingly throne. And for thirty minutes every day, he had to stand in front of a full-length mirror, looking at himself dressed up like a little king, and say over and over again “I am the king, I am the king, I am the king.”

It was a pretty silly thing to make a four-year-old prince do. And it didn’t get any less silly when he was five, six, seven, or ten. Every time he grew a little, they would increase the size of his crown, his kingly robes, and his throne. And every day, for more days than he could or wanted to count, he stood in front of that mirror, dressed up in his crown and robe, saying “I am the king, I am the king, I am the king.”

It went on for so many years! Then one day, when the prince was about sixteen, he did a very odd thing. Coming into the great hall, he didn’t walk over to the tailors waiting to fit him with today’s kingly crown and robe. Instead, he went over to the great banquet table, took off all of his clothes, and crawled under the table.

The king and queen were shocked and disturbed, to say the least! “What are you doing?” the king shouted at him. “You’re a prince, you’re going to be a king. What are you doing? Put your clothes on and sit at the table for dinner!”

The prince looked at his father with kingly confidence, and said, “I am a chicken. Chickens don’t need clothes. And chickens don’t eat from plates.”

Never in the history of the kingdom had such a ridiculous thing been heard. “You are not a chicken!” the king yelled. “You’re a prince and a future king!”

“No,” said the prince from under the table, “I am a chicken. And I am hungry. I want food brought and thrown on the floor so I can eat.”

Well, as ridiculous as this was, the servants couldn’t let the young prince starve. So they brought his food and put it on the floor, and he began pecking at it, much like a chicken might.

The king and queen were nearly crazy with this idea that their son was going to be a chicken. They sent for experts in “strange and terrible diseases infecting the minds of young princes,” and several showed up. But they got nowhere. To every assertion to the contrary, the young prince would calmly reply “I am a chicken.” And he would peck at his food on the floor, and that would be the end of it.

One day an old farmwoman came to the king, and told him she could cure his son. The king laughed: “You’re not an expert! You’re just an old farmwoman. Do you know anything about the mental demons that have invaded his mind?” She allowed as how she did not know of any such things. “Then why do you think you can help him?”

“Because,” the old farm woman said calmly, “I understand chickens.” Well, the queen said, they hardly had anything left to lose, so she might as well try.

She entered the great hall, took off all her clothes, crept under the table, and sat down next to the prince. The prince said nothing. In a while, a servant entered and scattered a few handfuls of food, and when the prince began to eat, the old woman also pecked at the food. Even though the prince had been practicing this new way of eating for weeks, she was immediately better at it than he was. She really did understand chickens. They sat together in silence for some time longer. Finally the prince said to the old woman, “Who are you?”

“And you?” she replied. “Who are you?”

“I am a chicken,” said the prince.

“Ah,” said the old woman. “I am a chicken, too.”

The prince thought about this for several days. Gradually he began to talk to the old woman about the things that are important to chickens, things that are different from the things important to kings and queens. She understood as only another chicken could understand. They spoke not about the world as it is but about the world as it could be. They became friends.

After several weeks, the old woman called to one of the serving girls and told her to bring some clothes. When the clothes arrived, she dressed herself. The prince was horrified. “You have betrayed me!” he shouted. “You told me you were a chicken! You’re no chicken!”

“But I am a chicken,” she said. “I can wear clothes and still be a chicken.” The prince thought about this for some time. Then he turned to the pile of clothing and dressed himself also. They continued their conversations as before and ate their food from the floor together as before. (This eating food from the floor wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The floors in the great hall were so clean you could … well, you know.)

After a few days more, the old woman called to one of the serving girls and told her to bring a fine meal and set it on the table. When the meal arrived she crawled out from under the table and, sitting in a chair, began to eat. The prince was appalled. “You have lied to me!” he shouted. “You told me you were a chicken!” “But I am a chicken,” said the old woman. “I can sit at a table and eat from a plate and still be a chicken.” The prince thought about this for some time. Then he, too, crawled out from under the table and joined the old woman. They ate in silence for some time. Then the prince began to laugh.

The prince went on to become a wonderful king. Under his rule, freedom grew in the kingdom much the way that peaches and potatoes had grown in the past. Each person became free to be the person that they were meant to be, and the people who had once been productive and happy became wise.

And all over the kingdom, wherever he went, the people said to him “You are the best king ever!” And so he seemed to be.

But you know, there were stories…. Some people said – though not where anyone from the castle could hear them, of course – that sometimes, on bright moonlit nights, they swore they saw someone who looked a lot like their king, running naked through the fields and shouting “But really … I am a chicken!”

(Adapted from a story told by Rachel Naomi Remen in My Grandfather’s Blessings, pp. 285-287.)

PRAYER

We gather here as faithful people seeking truth that can make us free, love that can bind us together, and spiritual nourishment to sustain us during our journey.

We lose our way so easily.

We stumble over the difference between the transient and the permanent, the illusory and the real.

We accept roles, which enslave us rather than empowering us.

We need truth, yet are too often seduced by habit and convention.

We seek warmth, acceptance, and love – how many times we settle for so much less!

Life is so short, so precious, those we love and those who love us seem to pass so quickly.

We would clarify our thinking, educate our wanting, and harmonize the yearnings of our mind with the longings of our soul. This is the miracle we seek.

We confess our imperfections, our failings, our sins of commission and of omission, and seek the saving truth: the truth that in spite of our human failings, we are children of God, children of the universe, and the world is more blessed because we are in it. If we can live out of that simple but abiding truth, other saving graces will be revealed to us as well. This we believe; this we know.

Amen.

SERMON: How to be a Chicken

This begins, as so much begins, with a story. Years ago, I was a combat photographer and Press Officer with the Army in Vietnam. Besides covering the war, I usually spent a couple days a week in Saigon, making the rounds of war correspondents: the Associated Press, UPI, LIFE Magazine and so on, trying to get them interested in doing some feature stories on my unit. As a result, I knew Saigon fairly well, including some of its fine French and Chinese restaurants, and whenever I came in from the field, I usually visited one.

You could tell what the restaurant owners thought of Americans just by looking at their menu. If they weren’t interested in attracting Americans, they wouldn’t print the menu in English. On this particular trip into Saigon, I visited a new French restaurant called Le Cave. It was pretty ritzy, but the menu was printed only in French, which was like posting a sign saying, “Chinese and Americans stay out!”

I went anyway. Since I couldn’t read French, the menu was a challenge. The food was supposed to be good – it was very pricey – but I had no idea what the food actually was. I recognized a couple famous words, like Chateaubriand and Pomme Fritz, but not enough to make a meal. Finally, I decided to order one item from each section of the menu, thinking they’d probably fit together into some kind of a gourmet meal. As I picked a salad, soup, an entree, a side dish and a dessert, I looked for famous words, thinking if I recognized the word – even if I didn’t know what it meant – the food would probably be great.

This made the whole dinner kind of an adventure. The waiter brought out the salad I had ordered. I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it.

Then they brought the soup. I ate one spoonful, and couldn’t believe it! I waved for the waiter, and pointed to the bowl: “The soup’s cold.”

The expression on his face was a combination of shock and revulsion. “Monsieur,” he tried to explain in a polite but revolted way, “It is Vichyssoise!”

“It’s cold,” I said. “Please take it back and heat it up.”

He looked at me like I was the one who had done something weird! “But Monsieur” – it was a desperate, pathetic pleading voice now – “It is Vichyssoise!”

Now, I’d tried to be polite and all, but we’d been over this already, and I was hungry. “Look,” I said: “I understand you: it’s Vichyssoise! But it’s cold Vichyssoise! Now take it back and cook it!”

The waiter disappeared into the kitchen with my bowl of cold soup. When he returned, the soup was steaming. It was very good. Once it was properly heated up, I realized that heck, Vichyssoise is just potato-leek soup! The waiter was very quiet and polite for the rest of the meal. I figured he was probably pretty embarrassed over having served cold potato soup, so I left him a big tip to show there were no hard feelings.

Back in the field a couple weeks later, I was in the Officers’ Club having some drinks with our Colonel and his staff. We had just finished a major combat operation, and the Colonel was talking about going into Saigon for some high-level meetings – and to sneak in a couple days’ relaxation. I was telling him about the good hotels, bars and steam baths, when he took a slip of paper out of his pocket. Somebody had recommended a new French restaurant named “The Cave” to him. He had lived in France, spoke the language fluently, and wanted to know if I’d heard of this place.

What a coincidence! I told him I’d been there just two weeks ago, that I had had a great salad, French-Fries, an excellent Chateaubriand and my first Crepes Suzettes. In fact, the only complaint I’d had was that my waiter tried to serve me cold Vichyssoise. They were all very attentive, so I told them the story.

Suddenly the Officers’ Club got very quiet. My Colonel had an expression just like that waiter had had. He looked very sad. He told me he didn’t think I should be allowed to leave the base camp any more. The other Colonel asked me if I’d ever read the book The Ugly American. Then they told me that Vichyssoise is always served cold, that the French actually think it’s supposed to be eaten that way! Amazing!

I’ll admit that after my Colonel tried to give me that lesson in culture, I thought of my experience in the French restaurant somewhat differently. And I never went back to that restaurant. But I’ve never looked at that story the way my Colonel did, or that waiter.

Instead, the word “Vichyssoise” became a metaphor for me. And the story has always reminded me of how easily we get confused by the difference between matters of fact and matters of taste.

We human beings always operate out of at least two different kinds of identity, which we seem to have trouble keeping straight. We have our individual identity, that’s marked by our innovations, our differences from others. Those are the things that make us “chickens,” like the prince in the story. And we have our group identities, our regional, national, or religious character. And these group identities are defined not by our innovation but by our imitation, by how faithfully we adopt the customs and tastes of others, whether they make sense to us or not.

It’s not that group tastes and identities are senseless. It’s just that they are arbitrary. They’re matters of taste, not matters of truth. They’re matters of fashion, not matters of fact. And that’s a distinction we have always had a hard time making.

Whether you like your potato-leek soup hot or cold is an issue of food preferences, not right and wrong. It’s your soup; you can eat it any way you like. If you want it cold, go to a French Restaurant. If you want it hot, order it that way. The French aren’t being more correct by serving their potato soup cold; they’re just being more French.

Once you start looking at things like this – like a chicken – everything looks different.

For instance, Protestants aren’t more correct by rejecting Catholic sacraments and authority – that just makes them Protestants. Catholics aren’t more “true” by rejecting Protestantism, Buddhism and other religions; that’s just what defines them as Catholics. The same is true of Democrats, Republicans, and all other religious, political and social identities. Their list of certainties and prohibitions identify the terms of membership in their club, their group identity. That’s all. This isn’t about Truth; it’s about convention. And one of the most important tasks of religion is to help us tell the difference between Truth and Vichyssoise.

I want to try and persuade you to think of this word Vichyssoise as a metaphor for matters of personal taste that pretend to be matters of truth. It’s a good word, it has a funny sound, and I want to make that funny sound memorable for you this morning.

So to help expand the meaning of this word, I have brought you a couple Vichyssoise stories that don’t involve food.

My favorite example of Vichyssoise in religion comes from a tract in the form of an election ballot printed by the Moody Bible Institute in the 1920s. At the top of the ballot is the question “Will You Be Saved?” Then it says “God has voted YES; Satan has voted NO – A Tie! Your vote must decide the issue.” And below there is a place for you to make your X with God or the Devil. Now this may sound a little silly, and the ballot looked even sillier, but it’s the basic recipe for Vichyssoise, because the “Yes” meant you had to affirm their particular way of cooking religion. (Data taken from George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 100.)

A second bowl of Vichyssoise is a musical example. Some of you may know of Wanda Landowska, who was a brilliant and very opinionated harpsichordist whose favorite composer was Bach. Once another musician quarreled with her interpretation of Bach and argued that there were, after all, many possible interpretations of the master. Wanda’s response could have come from a Moody Bible Institute tract: “You play the music your way,” she snapped, “and I’ll play it Bach’s way!”

That’s Vichyssoise!

Since there are dozens of different recordings of the master, Bach-lovers can usually find someone who plays it their way, and so Wanda Landowska’s fundamentalism just added some sparkle to her character, without doing much harm. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes the authoritative suppression of divergent views has important and far-reaching consequences. Rules, laws, religions are to enhance life, not enslave it. When we forget that, we’re serving Vichyssoise.

Nearly every major religious figure in history has made their name by saying that what their listeners had been taught as God’s word was not necessarily sacred after all. They were chickens, and the greatest of them helped turn others into chickens, too. Jesus ate and worked on the Sabbath, the holy day of his people. We weren’t made to serve the Sabbath, he said; the Sabbath is made for us to use. And all the teachings to the contrary — which they held sacred — were just arbitrary teachings without authority. He would say “You’ve been taught such-and-such, but I say unto you…” and then dismiss their teachings as Vichyssoise.

You could say that Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation in 1517 by saying that the Catholic Church was serving its own recipes, which no Christian really had to swallow. When the Unitarians began a couple decades later, they rejected two-thirds of the Trinity as bad food.

I would say that religion is about learning to tell the difference between Vichyssoise and Truth, between customs and wisdom.

Betty Skwarek, our Director of Religious Education, and I recently finished an eight-week adult education course on religion. As part of it, we talked about the fact that some sociologists of religion have studied the way in which we fool ourselves into thinking that opinions are facts. It’s part of the way that we “create reality.” (One of the classic books here is named The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.) It’s the recipe for making Vichyssoise, and it’s pretty simple. It has just three steps, but the whole scheme depends on your forgetting the first step:

1. Somebody comes up with an idea: God, women’s roles, acceptable sexual orientations, the requirements of patriotism, the right way to believe, cold potato soup, and so on. Somebody has an idea; that’s where it starts. “The word of God” doesn’t begin when some chap sits down with a regal, glowing fellow named God and takes notes. It begins when a poet, a prophet, or a demagogue has an idea that something feels so important that it is, they’re sure, just the sort of thing God would say if God could talk. So they write the words “Thus saith the Lord,” and it begins with their idea.

2. The second step is that this idea gets projected out onto a really powerful word or symbol, like God, Nature, America, Justice or Love. Then we forget the human origin of the idea, and we are told that God said this, or it’s a law of Nature, or part of being a True American, or that Justice or Love demand this – or because potato soup is always served cold, as though the idea really had an authority from some other realm.

3. Then, since the idea comes from God, Nature or Tradition, we feel that we and others must obey it, so that it will be “on earth as it is in heaven.”

That means that all such absolute rules present us with a dilemma. If we forget the first step and pretend that the rule really came from God, Nature, etc., we lose our creative role in the process, and the rule begins to enslave us rather than enrich us. Then we’re conformed not confirmed. Our soul and our mind are relinquished, not replenished, because somebody has served us Vichyssoise and passed it off as Truth. On the other hand, if we acknowledge that this rule, like all rules, had its origin in someone’s idea, someone’s personal opinion, then the whole idea of a “transcendent authority” vanishes. The idea of “God” vanishes, because Toto has pulled the curtain back, showing that God was, after all, a projection of the dreams, ideas, beliefs and fears of ordinary people. (This three-part process of “creating truths” comes from Peter Berger’s classic little book The Sacred Canopy. It was an elaboration of the theme that Berger and Thomas Luckmann had developed earlier in the even more classic The Social Construction of Reality. I think both books are necessary parts of any adequate education in religion, politics or science.)

Do you see how tricky, this is? And we’re not just the victims in this very human game. We’ve all served up our own kind of cold soup to others. It isn’t evil. It isn’t something deranged or malevolent. We do it with the very best of intentions. We learn our lessons of life, we collect what we take to be wisdom, and naturally we want to help others learn it. If our life became centered only after we had found Christ, we’ll tend to think that everybody’s life would be more centered if they could discover Christ as we have. If we finally found our sense of integrity only after dumping all kinds of mythic religion and putting our faith in science and rationality, we will probably be pretty sure that everybody else will be better off jettisoning their religion and becoming rational as we have.

It is such a hard lesson! We mean so well, we want so much for others to have a better life, to believe the kinds of things we know to be best. It’s so hard really to believe that life grows beyond even our grasp, that possibilities exist that we are unable even to imagine, that even those people we hate are worthy of love, that even those who disagree with us may well be right. It’s so easy to lose patience with those who can’t find our path, who can’t see what we see so clearly.

And so we stifle them. And so they stifle us.

How many times have you wanted someone just to let you be, to love or accept you even when you had to grow away from them? How often have we all felt alone and distraught because someone stood in judgment over us, and rejected us; because someone was sure there must be a command of God, a law of nature or an official recipe to prevent us from doing and being what we knew we must do and must be? How many times have we played God, and how many times have we had it played against us? And what an awful game it is, playing God! We believe it, so it must be true. And since it’s true, others must need to believe it too. That’s the recipe for Vichyssoise. And when you’re being served Vichyssoise that’s being passed off as truth, it’s time to think about becoming a chicken.

This isn’t to suggest that nothing is true, or that religion is just a matter of personal taste. Some things are, I believe, abidingly true, and necessary to live with hope, with integrity and authenticity. You recognize them when you hear them. Here are just a few things I would argue are really Truth, not convention:

We are all precious and sacred people, with a special gift we need to discover, cultivate, and offer to the world. And what is true of us is equally true of all others, too: including those we don’t like.

There is a peace that passes all understanding, even ours, and we need to leave room for it to enter our lives.

We are not perfect, and need to attend to our imperfections. But we are not condemned by our imperfections. They are part of being human. We are not called to be perfect. We’re called to be alive, awake, aware, and whole.

We should live in ways that open us to the mystery and miracle of life, that let us recognize all others as our brothers and sisters, and that try to make a positive difference in our world, each in our own way.

I think all these things are true. They are true whether we believe them or not. Our lives and our world are enhanced when we incorporate this wisdom in our lives. And the quality of our lives and our world is diminished to the extent that we can not live in obedience to the kind of wisdom embodied in such simple insights as these.

But not everything passed on to us in an authoritative voice is bread for the soul, truth for the mind, or health for the spirit.

When someone says you must accept Christ or God or Allah or you are damned, that is not true.

When you hear that certain types of people are second-class citizens, not qualified to be priests – or bishops – you have not heard the truth.

When you hear any message that judges and sorts people on the basis of their sex, race, sexual orientation, their beliefs, political affiliations, education, or wealth, when you hear anyone from anywhere restricting life to those who look, act or believe just the way they do, you have not been served a truth that can sustain life or cherish its precious mystery and variety.

That’s not truth. That’s Vichyssoise. Vichyssoise!

It’s a good word. Say it with me: Vichyssoise!

Let’s say it again: Vichyssoise!

And one more time, with great feeling: Vichyssoise!

Hallelujah – and Amen!

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© Davidson Loehr

2 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

For this Veterans’ Day, let us remember the sacred covenant we have with our soldiers.

As they promise to risk everything, to risk even their lives, we must promise that the cause for which we send them forth is worth the sacrifice of their lives.

We are humbled by the sacrifice they offer us. But our covenant binds both ways; we must meet their courage with our own.

Let us fight for those who fight for us.

Surely, there are causes worth the ultimate sacrifice. But just as surely, they are few and far between.

We must be able to say that the motives behind their war are worth the cost of their lives and the lives of the thousands of those we tell them to kill.

And if we do not believe that, then let us haved the courage to speak, to act, to make it right before it can never be made right again.

Times that call for soldiers call, as well, for our courage. Let us never forget our part in the sacred covenant with our soldiers. Let us have the courage and the will to fight for those who fight for us. That much courage, that much will, nothing less.

Amen.

SERMON: Veterans’ Day 2003

Veterans’ Day is always hard for me to translate into a sermon. I believe the covenant between a society and its soldiers is one of the most sacred covenants in the world. Soldiers do their part by being willing to serve, to fight, perhaps to die. Our part is to assure them that the reasons for going to war are worth the sacrifice of their lives, are worth robbing these young soldiers of the chance to marry, raise children, and grow old, illuminated by the glowing embers of a full life, well lived.

As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I know that soldiers carry more than just their weapons into combat. They also carry the political baggage of their war. If you can be in a Good War – and WWII is the only one we’ve had that is still considered a Good War – then soldiers carry the respect of their country and the approval of history. But if your turn comes up in a bad war, or a war fought for selfish or stupid reasons, then you carry that on your back, forever. Sometimes, the load seems to get heavier every day, as those who served in Vietnam during the early 1970s learned.

So, 36 years after my war, I can’t look at today’s soldiers without wondering what they are carrying on their backs as they go into their war. And you don’t have to be psychic to know that our soldiers in Iraq have a load on their backs. We’re already starting to see headlines like those that came mostly at the end of the Vietnam War. Here are just a few of the headlines from stories I’ve seen this week:

A Fiction Shattered by America’s Aggression

Assassinations Surge in Iraq

Rebel War Spirals Out of Control As U.S. Intelligence Loses the Plot

As Casualties Mount, Doubts Grow

18 Americans Dead, 21 Wounded, a Deadly Day in Iraq

How Many Body Bags?

When Will Bush Address Mounting Casualties?

Judge is Shot Dead as Iraqis’ Hatred of Occupiers Grows

Rage Erupts over Iraq War Profiteering

A High Price for a Hollow Victory

White House Ignored Iraqi Bid to Avert War

And yesterday (8 Nov 03), while I was attending a district meeting in San Antonio, military Families from across the state held a press conference in San Antonio demanding an end to the US Occupation of Iraq and the immediate return of all troops to their home duty stations. These families represented soldiers from all four of the military bases in Texas. And again, it’s very early in the war for this level of outrage and accusation to be surfacing.

You wonder how we got into this mess, and I think of the old story about how to cook a frog. If you drop a frog into hot water, it will devote all its effort to jumping out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and gradually raise the heat, the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late and it’s cooked. Mind you, I haven’t actually tried this with a live frog, I just trust the old story. And if you have tried this with a frog, I don’t want to know about it!

Oh, I can hear conservatives saying “There go those liberals again, always criticizing, never trusting their leaders. They’re not good Americans. Good Americans follow their leader and support the troops and the war.”

Here’s a quote I just read this week that seems to endorse this view, a quote from a fairly surprising source:

“The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets.” –

Those words are from Lawrence Grossman – longtime head of PBS and NBC News. When the head of NBC News believes the job of the press is to follow the leader rather than informing those who are being led, it’s easy to feel that these darned liberals are just out of touch.

But then I remember another quotation, which you have probably heard at least part of. It’s much older,

“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” — John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790. (Speeches. Dublin, 1808.) as quoted in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations

These two quotations seem to represent the options we find offered to us: conservatives preaching obedience, liberals preaching vigilance and critical inquiries into the motives of those who are now leading our country. These options are framed as though they were merely partisan political choices, where there are no truths beyond our individual opinions. Republicans are supposed to embrace obedience while Democrats try and awaken a country falling asleep in hot water.

But it isn’t that simple, now or ever. The families who protested in San Antonio yesterday came from both political parties, from conservative and liberal religions or no religions. They are among the voices saying that this is not about partisan politics. This is about the fate of America, and the dangers that are beginning to surround us.

I am one of those who believe we are being dangerously and unwisely misled, but I will no longer accept it as a partisan statement. It is a patriotic statement, the kind that must be made by all who realize that liberty is always given to us on the condition of eternal vigilance, that failing to be vigilant is failing to be patriotic, and that we have a sacred covenant with our soldiers.

I want to borrow some comments from two news articles and mix them with my own, to try and show you why some people fear that we are violating our sacred covenant with our soldiers, and with ourselves as Americans.

First, I want to provide a kind of historical background by sharing parts of an essay written by Thomas Hartman on March 23, 2003, on “When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History.” These are the kind of historical parallels that some feel are unwarranted and rude. I feel they are honest, and timely – part of the eternal vigilance we owe ourselves and our great country. Reflecting on economic crises, terrorists and wars, Hartman says:

“It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings. The media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed.

“But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language – reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state – and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

“When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he … called a press conference.

“He used the occasion – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

“Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation’s now-popular leader had pushed through legislation – in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it – that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people’s homes without warrants if they thought the case might involve terrorism.

“Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. Instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as “The Homeland.”

“His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a “New Christianity.” Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared “Gott Mit Uns” – God Is With Us – and most of them fervently believed it was true.

“Soon, he proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland…

“To consolidate his power, he reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation’s largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the terrorists, and to prepare for wars overseas. … He built powerful alliances with industry…

“He then began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe – at first – denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar’s Rome or Alexander’s Greece.

The story, of course, is about Hitler and the rise of Nazi power seventy years ago. It looks to this writer, to me, and to many others like we are resolutely following the course that Hitler’s Third Reich followed in our ambition to establish an American empire – the German word for empire is “Reich.”

None of this is new information. The seeds were planted in essays going back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, when some neoconservatives argued that it was time for America to gain immediate military and economic domination of the world: the Fourth Reich, if you like. Nor were they mincing their words. One 1989 essay by Charles Krauthammer was titled “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World” (National Interest 18 (Winter 1989), 48-49; Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70 (1991), 23.)

In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then-under secretary of defense for policy, supervised the drafting of the Defense Policy Guidance document, in which he outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil” and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.

He called for preemptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when “collective action cannot be orchestrated.” The primary goal of U.S. policy should be to prevent the rise of any nation that could challenge the United States. When the document was leaked to the New York Times, it proved so extreme that it had to be rewritten. The first President Bush rejected these extreme ideas of Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense in 1992. These concepts are now part of the new U.S. National Security Strategy.

That strategy follows the ideas in an earlier paper from September 2000 published by a group of called “Project for the New American Century.” The paper, called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” was the product of twenty-seven neoconservatives including Wolfowitz and Cheney. The report was called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” and was a product of the Project for the New American Century. Six of the key authors of that report now hold high positions in the Bush administration. Others, like Donald Kagen and Richard Perle, hold influential positions as unofficial advisors.

The 2000 paper on “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” directly acknowledges its debt to the 1992 document written by Wolfowitz.

If you believe these plans for an American empire of military domination of the world are the primary mission of the Bush administration, as many people do, then everything going on makes a new kind of sense where all the pieces seem to fit together.

(The following ideas taken from article by Jay Bookman for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9-29-02, titled “The president’s real goal in Iraq”.)

It means “this war [in Iraq] marks the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire…. Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

“Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

“And why did the administration dismiss the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. … The plan dismisses deterrence as a Cold War relic and instead talks of “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.”

Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy — he served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project — describes the new world order in cowboy-movie metaphors: “You saw the movie ‘High Noon’?” he asks. “We’re Gary Cooper.”

Kagan also acknowledges that we will most likely establish permanent military bases in Iraq. “We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time. … When we have economic problems, it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.”

Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview a few months ago that the reason we cared about Iraq but not North Korea was because Iraq was “swimming in oil.” But even in his 1992 paper he had identified Iraqi oil as a major reason for ousting Saddam Hussein and taking effective control of the country. So if people actually claim it’s wrong to accuse the administration of murdering for oil, they either have not done their homework, or are being disingenuous.

To see who the new American empire would serve, you only have to look at the changes in economy and taxes since Bush was elected. It is to be an empire rewarding the corporations and the very wealthy and, as far as possible, eliminating the middle class to create the kind of two-tiered economy that has enriched the few and impoverished the many in Mexico.

Putting Americans out of work to be replaced by cheap foreign labor isn’t only happening at Wal-Mart; it’s happening in the high-tech industries too, as many of you know first-hand.

Corporations such as Cigna, General Electric and Merrill Lynch are already using a loophole called the L-1 Visa to import low-wage technology workers from India to replace their American employees, and have already brought some 325,000 computer ingineers, programmers, and other high-tech employees from abroad, mostly from India. (Jim Hightower, “A Loophole for Busting High-tech Wages,” September 23, 2003)

This is a full-scale drive toward the military domination of the world and the subjugation of anyone and everyone who could protest. That’s why civil rights are being curtailed as part of the “security for the Homeland.” It is also why it is likely that repressive forms of religion will gain both power and influence.

Here’s one more quotation from another important neoconservative named Richard Perle, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, and is in another influential role with this administration, in case it seems like I’m overstating things:

“This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it… If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” (Go here for one source of this quote.)

These are the battles our soldiers are being used to fight. They are battles for a concept of empire so similar to the vision of Hitler’s Nazi party of sixty years ago that it’s hard to consider the similarities accidental. This is the ideology our soldiers are carrying into battle with them as they fight, kill and die not for freedom or the American way, but for greed, arrogance, and a murderous lust for power that seems terrifyingly insane.

As the water heats up, it is worth considering again some lessons of history from the 1930s and 1940s. Both America and Germany were deep into economic depression.

“Germany’s response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society’s richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.” (Thomas Hartman)

America’s leaders and America’s soldiers fought for democracy, which means a powerful middle class and rigorous controls on the natural greed of wealthy corporations and individuals. We’re still proud of those soldiers .

Germany’s leaders and soldiers fought for an economic and military tyranny that is the mortal enemy of democracy. They looted the working class and transferred money, power and privilege to their wealthiest individuals and corporations, while restricting the rights of ordinary people to protest. No one is proud of them today.

It is time to celebrate Veterans’ Day 2003, so it is time to ask about the sacred covenant we have with our soldiers. Can we honestly tell them that the mad dreams of a few dangerous leaders are worth their sacrifices, worth their lives, let alone the lives of more than 15,000 Iraqis estimated killed?

If our motives are indeed the motives of dominating the world, then these deaths, on both sides, are not casualties of war, but murders. And the actions of our current administration are, by the definitions we used at Nuremburg, war crimes.

Our soldiers carry into battle not only their weapons and supplies, but also the weight of the cause for which we are asking them to fight and die. Can we honestly look them in the face and tell them that we have honored our part of this sacred covenant with them?

This isn’t a question for our leaders, who seem beyond caring about such matters. It’s a question for those who understand that the price of liberty is always eternal vigilance. It is a question for us, and we must pursue the question wherever it leads. Our soldiers are counting on us.