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© Davidson Loehr

16 February 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

A. Powell Davies

May the life of our minds and breath of our being bring us once more to full remembrance of our greater calling. Strangely do we walk through the days of our years, unseeing, unhearing, inattentive, and the glory of life is all about us and we do not know that it is there. We wrap ourselves up in the petty and the trivial, and sometimes even in the mean and sordid, shutting out life’s promise. We are afraid of life – afraid of its truth and goodness and its mighty claim upon us – and we wall ourselves in, thinking to be safe: and so we scarcely live at all.

Oh, may the walls be broken down! Let winds that have swept the far horizons blow now upon the barriers that we have built to keep us paltry! Let them all be swept away! That the light of the heavens may light our lives, the vision of good enlarge our minds, and the love of all that is noble and true find room in our hearts.

How vain are all our hopes, how empty all our prayers, until we ourselves are ready to fulfill them.

SERMON: Reconsidering the Concept of God

The hymn we just sang was in 7/4 time. It’s an odd meter, you almost never hear or sing it, and it feels like you’re in strange territory, doing something you shouldn’t be. This sermon may strike you that way, too. How often have you even thought of reconsidering the concept of God?

God is discussed in our culture like a cartoon character, like a Critter. Almost the only “theological” question anyone thinks to ask is “Do you believe in God?” That’s a question that only makes sense if God is a kind of Critter. Then it’s like a simple true-false quiz: “God is a big Critter living up there somewhere: Yes or No?” And that’s really dumb.

So let’s get straight from the beginning. God is not and has never been a Critter, or a “being” of any kind that would have weight or occupy space. That’s Disneyworld, not religion. God is an idea, a concept. And theological questions are about the content and style of the concept, and it relevance to life.

Still, it may feel like we’re trying to dance in 7/4 time. So let’s start with a story.

One of my favorite stories from any religious scripture is the ancient story in the Bible of Jacob wrestling with God. Technically, it wasn’t God he was wrestling with, just a local deity guarding the river he wanted to cross. That’s how we know what an ancient story this is. People used to believe that all boundaries were guarded by spirits, that to cross over, to grow beyond a boundary, you had to wrestle with the god that guarded that boundary.

Modern psychologists also know this is true. To grow beyond a boundary that’s kept us too small, too ignorant, too enslaved, we must be willing to wrestle with the gods that guard that boundary.

That’s kind of what we’re about this morning: wrestling with concepts of God that are unhealthy and small, that enslave rather than empower.

Still, it’s a risky thing to do. In the Jacob story, he held on all night, finally receiving the blessing of the god and the ability to cross over the river, and even getting a new name: Israel, the father of the Twelve Tribes. But he was wounded in the struggle, and came out with a limp. He had that limp for the rest of his life. So it’s risky. But we’re brave. Besides, we’re just pretending. Maybe.

I’m trying to do something hard as well as odd: I want to persuade you of something you need to know about gods by convincing you that it’s something you already know. And that is that all gods are more like hand puppets than they are like puppeteers. Everyone who tells you what God is like or what God wants or says is using the concept like a hand puppet, either creating or choosing which words their God can and can’t say. So whether it’s a decent God usually depends on whose hands he’s in.

I want to persuade you that you know the difference between healthy concepts and bogus ones, and that only you can decide whether a god is good or bad, is worth serving with your life or not. I want to show you that the power is in you, not in the gods, and want to convince you that you have known this, at some level, all along.

Here’s what you already know: we already and automatically wrestle with almost every authority claiming power over us. For instance:

1. Automakers routinely tell us their machines are perfectly safe. But both governmental and private firms are always testing them, always doubting that they’re really telling us the truth, and are routinely exposing the design flaws the manufacturers were covering up. Why did they cover them up? Because it benefited them, even though it didn’t benefit us. But we check it out, because lives are at stake.

2. Or think about food. Governmental and private agencies are routinely inspecting the meat supplies and waste disposal processes at our largest food processing plants. The owners always tell us the meat and food are perfectly safe. But we know they have millions of dollars at stake, and we know they can and do lie to benefit themselves. So we expose a hundred tons of hamburger with e-coli, or Mad Cow Disease or other dangerous or deadly problems. The fact that an authoritative voice wearing a suit or a white lab coat tells us it’s safe doesn’t fool us until we have checked it out through our own agencies. Lives are at stake.

3. Or pharmaceuticals. To pick just one, I remember when the manufacturers of Fen-Phen were on trial, how they insisted that the drugs were just effective weight-reducing aids with no serious side effects, that they had done extensive testing, that everyone was safe. But the FDA wouldn’t take their word for it. They did independent tests and found that Fen-Phen damaged heart valves and could be fatal. A member of this church died here a year ago from heart damage from Fen-Phen. Authoritative people lie. Even if they really believe what they’re saying, we know they could be wrong. So we check it. Because lives are at stake.

The Three-Step

All of these claims and investigations have three parts. In every case I know of, all the truths, beliefs and gods we create have the same three steps. Just knowing them can give you a kind of User’s Guide to Hokum. Here is the three-step process by which truths and beliefs and gods are created. I won’t go through the steps in order, because the first step is invisible. It has to be invisible for the game to work.

The second step is that a company spokesman or other authoritative-looking person tells us something is true.

The third step is that they then say that, because it is true, we should go along with it, and everything will be all right.

But what all our investigations show is that there is a first step that they kept invisible. And the first step is that there is a set of facts or a state of affairs that would empower or enrich them, if it were really true. They have a stake in it; it’s how they see the world.

So the whole three-step process goes like this:

1. First, I want you to believe something because if you do it will empower or enrich me, or will confirm my view of the world.

2. Second, I convince myself, then tell you, that this is true and good and safe.

3. And third, since it is true and good and safe, you should follow it.

But when we want to know whether it’s really true or good or safe, we check it out. You don’t ask true believers to investigate their own truth-claims. You don’t ask Ford executives whether the gas tanks on its Pintos are really safe. You don’t ask the manufacturers of SUV’s whether they have a high likelihood of tipping over and injuring or killing the passengers. You don’t ask the manager of a Jack in the Box whether it’s safe to eat his hamburgers. You ask a nonbeliever. An outsider. You ask someone who has left the Garden of Eden, who can tell the difference between fact and fiction, good and evil, and let them investigate.

And that’s how we find out what we feel most safe believing is really true. This process looks a lot like the scientific method. Someone proposes a theory and says it’s true. So immediately other scientists who don’t believe the theory run the same experiments to see if the results are the same for nonbelievers. If not, the theory is false. If so, it may be true, at least for now.

And we do these tests, every day, because there are lives at stake. Now you already knew all of this. No news here. But this is how virtually every truth and every religious belief works, through the same three steps, with the same need for checking by unbelievers to see if it’s true or just familiar and convenient to the true believers.

We seem hardwired to respond to authoritative people and voices, so we are easy to fool. Advertising agencies, political advisors and slick preachers all count on it. I’ll tell you one more story that makes this point in a particularly enlightening way. You’ll be able to spot all three steps, with the invisible first step last, in an exceptionally clear and dramatic form:

The story is one Joseph Campbell told, about a tribe in Australia whose social order was maintained with the aid of “bullroarers.” These are long flat boards with a couple slits cut in them, which have a rope tied to the other end, and are swung around over one’s head, producing an eerie low kind of humming sound that seems quite otherworldly. When the gods were angry with the tribe, the gods would sound the bullroarers in the woods at night. No one, of course, ever saw them do this. The next day, the males of the tribe would explain what that gods were angry about, and what behaviors had to change.

This was far more than just a game. Campbell reports the time that a chief’s daughter found his bullroarer under his sleeping pad, brought it out and asked what it was: the chief killed her for violating this sacred object.

But the revelation comes at a key moment during the initiation of young men into manhood in the tribe. It’s all very dramatic, and very ritualized. In the evening, some of the tribe’s men, wearing masks, come to kidnap the young boy. The women pretend to defend him, though they know the routine, and eventually the men overpower them and drag the boy into the woods.

Once there, the boy is tied to a table, and a frightening and bloody initiation rite takes place. Technically, it’s called subincision, which means that, using a flint knife, a slit is made the length of the underside of the boy’s penis. (Men who have been through this have said that this makes them complete, with the genital marks of both a male and a female.)

But the revelation comes at the end. One of the men dips the end of the bullroarer in the boy’s blood, brings it up near his face, then removes his mask – so the boy will recognize him as a man he’s known all his life – and says the magical words: “We make the noises!” We make the noises we attribute to the gods. It’s equally true everywhere, it’s just seldom acknowledged as openly.

That’s what our independent investigations of defective cars, infected hamburger and deadly pharmaceuticals reveals, too. The authorities with the most to gain are the ones who make the noises saying we should believe them. And we have learned not to believe them until we have checked it out for ourselves. This is how concepts of gods are created.

There are thousands of examples from religion. To keep it manageable, I’ll only take three, and just take them from the Hebrew Scriptures that are common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three of these come from the book of Deuteronomy, chapters 20 to 22. You can find dozens more like these in that book:

1. If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die. (Deuteronomy 22:22)

2. If upon marriage it is discovered that a woman isn’t a virgin, the men of the city shall stone her to death. (Deut. 22: 20-21)

3.If a son is stubborn and won’t obey his parents, then his parents will bring him to the elders at the city gate and the men of the city will stone him to death. (Deut. 21:18-21, all RSV)

When you hear such things, you know that’s a horrible concept of God that no decent or healthy person would admit into their lives. Even those bible-shaking preachers who insist that every word of the Bible is literally true never seem to quote these lines. They don’t believe them, either, and would regard anyone who acted on them as psychopathic or worse.

And we know it too, intuitively. You hear this ancient speaker claiming that these things are the word of God and so you should obey them. But instinctively, you know better. Every parent of rebellious teen-agers can understand the frustration in that last one. But every parent knows that anyone who actually did that, who actually had their own child murdered, was a repugnant person following a repugnant god, not a god of life or truth or wholeness. You sense that these awful sayings must have originated in a particular time and place maybe 2500 years ago, where whoever made them up was having trouble with authority or social control, so put those bloody words in the mouth of his god, trying to give authority to them.

Last week, I talked about escaping from the fool’s paradise pictured as the Garden of Eden. For the first four centuries of Christianity, eating the apple was celebrated as the human freedom that let us learn about good and evil. Seen this way, it’s a profound myth, saying that the price of growing up and learning to make necessary distinctions expels us from a child’s kind of paradise.

This is the same kind of story. Only by doubting the authorities – in food production, car production, drug production or god production – and trying to find out for ourselves what is good and what is evil, only by doing that can we ever escape from the fool’s paradise of believing that all advertising companies, politicians and preachers are trying to empower us rather than themselves.

So far, this sounds like a simple story of courage, of challenging authorities, defeating them, and exulting in triumph – like a bad martial-arts movie. But that’s not all there is to it. Because every time we find another manufacturer’s claims proven false, every time another group of politicians is caught lying to us, every time religious claims are shown to have been false and self-serving, we lose some of our naivete and our trust.

That’s the price of leaving paradise, the price of leaving Eden. Wrestling with gods usually leaves us with a limp. It’s never a cheap victory. Remember when you stopped believing there was this one Santa Claus guy who came down every chimney bringing presents to every child every Christmas – even though you didn’t have a chimney? Remember what you lost? Some people mark that as the end of their naive childhood.

And what happens when you reconsider the concept of God? You look at whose hands God has been in, and suddenly God looks more like a hand puppet than a puppeteer. You investigate and you realize God was never making the noises. People were making the noises: parents, preachers, politicians, people with their own agenda for you. They made the noises they had been taught to make. Maybe they even believed them. But what happens when you realize they were not true?

This three-step model isn’t one I made up. It’s taught in the best divinity schools and sociology departments, and has been for a quarter century or more. And when you understand how it works, you realize that it creates a dilemma for us, especially in the field of religion.

On the one hand, if you forget about the invisible first step, and simply internalize and obey the “truths” you are taught, eventually they will not fit the times, the situations, or you. Then they become kind of demonic – as they would if anyone really took the instructions in those examples from the book of Deuteronomy seriously.

On the other hand, if you take the liberal route, if you challenge and debunk those claims for truth or God, then in some ways the price is even steeper, and the limp is even greater. For if even the idea of God you’ve taught can be wrong, that what can’t be wrong? How and where could you ever again find absolutely unshakable certainty? And where, then, would you find your moral bearing?

You can lose faith in God. Do you also lose faith in even the idea of God? Many do. You don’t think that’s a limp? It’s a limp. Do you lose faith even in the idea of truth, or goodness, justice or beauty? That’s worse than a limp. Don’t do that.

You can always try to return to the fool’s paradise where you stay ignorant and don’t learn the difference. But the God in the Eden story was also created by priests and tribal chiefs who were served by that compliant ignorance. Why would you want to exalt them, or their self-serving idea of God? You might as well wrestle with God yourself, and cross over.

But crossing over, wrestling with God, isn’t cheap. For God is like Santa Claus in that way. You lost the child’s magical Santa when your eyes were opened. And you lose the child’s magical god in the same way – by having your eyes opened and realizing that we make the noises.

To wrestle with our gods is often to wind up disillusioned. I’ve had ministers tell me that’s why they don’t encourage their people to question the concept of God too deeply: they’re afraid they’ll become disillusioned. That sounds bad. But think about it: Is being disillusioned really worse than being “illusioned”? I’d think, if you’re illusioned, you’d want to get disillusioned! Or you can get cynical or desperate, thinking that nothing, after all, is sacred but the integrity of your own mind. But that isn’t true either.

To wrestle with the concept of God and win, I think we need to be armed with some of the things we’ve been examining in the last two sermons:

that we are made of stardust, we are deeply at home in the universe, intimately tied to everything, that the dynamic power of the universe is also in us, and that part of our destiny lies in reclaiming our noble origins.

that all life on earth is linked, too. We are not alone here, we are connected as members of a family, all the way down. All people are our brothers and sisters. Here, in Iraq, in Nicaragua, everywhere.

And we need to remember that authoritative claims that would take away our power and dignity and transfer them to others are always lies, lies and blasphemies against life and truth and everything that is whole and holy.

Wrestling with the concept of God grants us both honor, and a task. Since we make the noises, it is now up to us to see that those noises are sacred noises: noises of truth that empower, not that enslave, truth that sets us free, not that puts us or others in heavier chains.

Part of growing up religiously is escaping from a child’s Garden of Eden, understanding who makes the noises, and understanding that most of our truths and most of our gods are the hand puppets of the politicians, preachers and churches who benefit from using their voice to control people. Those are false gods and need to be unmasked. But there is still wonder and miracle and mystery, and the magic of transformation in the world. We lose an excuse not to act. We lose an excuse for not getting involved. That’s our human calling: to escape from the fool’s paradise and search for truth and wholeness East of Eden.

And what is left of the concept of God? Perhaps the Buddhists can help here. They tell the story of the finger pointing at the moon, and the poor people who spent all their time looking at the finger, never seeing the moon. Perhaps we will gain a fresh view of the moon. And once we can see the light, that pointing finger is just a distraction, isn’t it?

Good magicians don’t reveal their tricks at the end of the show. But I’m not a magician, I’m a preacher, so I’ll reveal mine here.

I hope you see that what I’ve tried to do today follows the same three steps I’ve been taking about. I start with what, to me, is the most true and useful way to understand how we make our gods. Then I’ve tried to persuade you that it’s true, so you will adapt it for your own life.

Am I right? Is this the best kind of truth for you here? It’s all I can offer you. From here, it’s up to you. This is where I came out when I wrestled with the idea of God. Eventually, you’ll need to wrestle, too. I recommend it. Even if the ordeal leaves you with a limp, it will bless you, and might give you a new kind of name. After all, lives are at stake. And one of them may be yours.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 9, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Original Sins and Blessings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 2, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER:

Once in awhile – not often, but once in awhile – a very painful moment gets our attention. It breaks through all the mind-numbing manipulations of our best advertising and political geniuses, and wakes us up, often rudely. It hurts. And, if we will let it, it may bring us some wisdom.

I love that paradox of wisdom coming through unwanted pain. The best statement of it I’ve ever read was written by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, some 2500 years ago:

Pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop

upon the heart

until in our despair

there comes wisdom

through the awful

grace of God.

Yesterday another of those awful moments got to us. Our space shuttle Columbia exploded and disintegrated over Texas around 8:00 yesterday morning, less than 15 minutes before it was to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Here was a crew of seven people, an international crew: a black man, an Israeli, two women – one from India – a couple American Top Gun Air Force pilots, some doctors and scientists. Different sexes, races, nationalities, and religions.

Yet we all knew immediately that all these lives were equal, not ranked according to their ethnicity or ideology. If we hadn’t realized it, there would have been something dangerously missing from us, I think. Perhaps that realization is some of the wisdom that comes through what Aeschylus called “the awful grace of God.”

Yet the timing of this tragedy will bring a revelation, if we will let it. For our elected leaders are preparing to invade a sovereign nation and slaughter an estimated tens of thousands of innocent civilians. They and we try to ignore this human sacrifice by calling it “collateral damage.”

But no one yesterday dismissed those seven deaths as collateral damage from our space program. It would have been vulgar to do so. We showed each of their faces. We told their stories. We cried for the families they left behind.

Yesterday we remembered that all the lives lost were equally precious, regardless of sex, race, religion or nationality. Can we really now forget it again so quickly, and resume our talk of unprovoked war, of using our weapons of mass destruction to destroy huge masses of our brothers and sisters in Iraq?

If we are to squeeze a lesson from yesterday’s tragedy, let it be to remember that all lives are equally sacred, and that war – even if it were an honest war – is the ultimate failure of our imagination, our leadership, and our humanity.

Let us pray that those seven deaths do not go by without letting them remind us that no other people are enough different from us that we have license to kill them in an unprovoked war.

SERMON: In the Beginning…

Those of you who heard the Rev. Donald Wheat preach here on December 29th will remember he said one reason liberal religion loses out to the many more literalistic varieties is because we don’t have a good story. He meant a story of creation, of human nature, of the human condition, and of prescriptions for the yearnings and fears that always seem to arise for those of us in the human condition.

Last summer, my 16-year-old niece had an even more pointed accusation. She’s a Christian fundamentalist, and she and my brother visited me in Quebec while thousands of UUs were mobbing the city for their General Assembly. She studied this odd tribe as though she were doing fieldwork in a foreign, and weird, island. She engaged some of them in conversation – just gathering data, I suspect.

On about the third day, she announced “Uncle Davidson, I know why your religion is such a miserable failure.” “Well,” I said, “that would be interesting to know.” “It’s simple,” she said: “You don’t have a Book.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I said, lamely, that we had lots of books, but that wouldn’t wash: “Nope, you can’t just tell people to go browse around the library and see if they find any wisdom. You’ve got to have a Book so you can say “Hey: go read the Book.” But you can’t say that ’cause you don’t have a Book. That’s why your religion is so miserable.” I think (or at least hope) I thanked her for her insights, but didn’t have an answer for them.

I suppose my answer to the “Book” issue would be that one book isn’t enough, that the range of life’s questions surpasses the scope of any one book or any one religion. No, I don’t think she would have bought it.

So I’ll return to the easier challenge of Rev. Don Wheat. This month I want to offer four sermons to address his critiques. I think we do have a coherent story, and a true one; but I don’t know that it has ever been put into the form of a good myth. And when it comes to showdowns between facts and stories, good stories will win almost every time. Even the sciences rely on stories to make their points: like the story of the Big Bang and the story of evolution.

The kind of stories people really seem to yearn for have to help us find answers to a lot of very basic questions: like who we are, where we came from, how we should live, how we should live together, and what, if anything, will remain after we are gone, to testify to the fact that once, we lived, loved, and gave our lives to things we thought enduringly important?

These are the questions we have been asking for, probably, hundreds of thousands of years. Only a fool would try to address them in four sermons. Let’s begin.

Most religions start with a creation story: “In the beginning….” Non-theistic religions like Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism don’t use creation stories. But all our Western religions begin with essentially the same creation story.

Creation stories are very powerful. They tell us where we come from, what we’re made of, where the real power in life lies, and how to get it. If you know someone’s creation story, you can understand their salvation story, for the two are almost always linked, the one being a mirror image of the other.

That point alone is worth a half dozen sermons. You might think of asking about your own story: what you think you’re made of, what gives you your worth, what you need to do to become more whole.

But for now, let’s think about our creation story, about how everything came to be: us, life, the universe, everything. Forget about religious myths for now. Just think about how we really believe it all began. The myths will come in later.

Most of us answer these questions with our sciences. That’s where we go for our most convincing stories. About fifteen billion years ago, we’re told by our scientific storytellers, it began with a Bang. It all exploded and expanded faster than we can imagine, but everything in the universe was once all together in a little sort of ball.

This means that everything in the universe, including us, is made of stardust. Our birthplace was literally in the stars. And it means that everything everywhere, the whole shebang, is made of the same stuff.

This seems to be true. We have discovered 109 different elements so far, and all the information we’ve gathered through our space probes and spectrographic analysis of images from the Hubbell Space Telescope hasn’t found any others. We’re made of the same stuff that everything else is.

Here on earth, life evolved in ways we’re still just beginning to understand. But again, it’s the case that a very few materials make up the warp and the weft of all life on earth. All DNA, from ours down to the DNA of bacteria, is made from just four different building blocks:

A = Adenine

G = Guanine

C = Cytosine

T = Thymine

When you consider RNA as well, you add one more chemical: Uracil replaces Thymine.

And when they combine, each one is always and only attracted to just one other: the adenine always links with the thymine (or uracil), the guanine always connects to the cytosine. Very simple building blocks, simple rules. They have formed millions of shapes, millions of kinds of living things, but once again, the whole shebang is made up of the same stuff. Animals, plants, all intimately related, made of combinations of the same five building blocks. All life on earth is part of the same family.

And it’s a cycle. We live by killing and eating other plant and animal life. Then when we die, our bodies are broken down and become the bodies of plants, then the plants become the bodies of other animals, from the beginning of time till the end of time. It’s nature’s great plan, reducing life to its basics, then recycling it over and over again.

I’m not trying to sell you on reincarnation. But I am trying to sell you our most honest story of creation, which is that we are deeply linked with all life on earth, all the way down. That is our deepest identity, and carries powerful suggestions for how we should think about each other and treat one another.

The great poets and sages of the world’s religions seemed to intuit this thousands of years ago. And they built it into their myths, myths that survive today. Native Americans had rituals like the Buffalo Dance, done to repay the buffaloes they ate by helping them regenerate. I’ve read other Indian rituals of talking to trees before cutting them down for a canoe or for tipi poles, treating the tree as a brother and explaining why it was necessary to cut it down. They felt, and expressed, a familiar connection that sciences show us is really, deeply, there.

Even the most ancient Neanderthal burial sites discovered in China, dating to more than 100,000 years ago, show a sense of our being a part of the whole world. Those Neanderthals buried their dead in womb-shaped graves, curled into a fetal position, facing east, the direction of the rising sun. While they didn’t explain it in words, it looks like they are entrusting their beloved dead to mother earth, returning them to her womb curled up like babies, ready to be reborn as the rising sun is reborn. And similar burial practices have been found among the ancient Peruvian people, and the Dogon people on Mali.

The true creation story tells us that we’re not strangers here. This is our home. We are one with everything here, intimately connected with all life and all matter.

The ancient Greek myth of creation expresses this by saying that in the beginning Father Heaven mated with Mother Earth, and everything here was born from that mating. We’re the children of heaven and earth, the children of the gods. Every particle of us is sacred, just as every atom is stardust.

It’s poetry, but it’s good poetry, poetry that tells the truth. Remember, one of the most famous of all religious prayers is that it become “on earth, as it is in heaven.” We may be made of earth, but the earth is made of stardust, and we want to regain a sense of our regal beginnings and our true home.

This is the real story of creation, and of the creation of life on earth. It’s all made of stardust, and is all intimately interconnected. Here is the plea for universal peace and brotherhood that sings like a leitmotif through every great religion in the world. The power that created the universe is within us; it is our own power. If we would remember our real creation story, if we would claim that power and if we would act in ways that are consistent with our interrelation with everyone and everything else, how different our local, national and international worlds would look!

That’s the good news: there really is a true creation story, which can be verified not only by our most advanced sciences but also by some of the greatest myths in the world’s most ancient religions.

But there’s a problem, and it is an absolutely gigantic problem. It’s one of the most important things to learn about religion, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and how they become demonic. And that’s that the true story has usually been changed by priests (or politicians) into a story that takes the power and the dignity away from people and transfers it to priests, tribal leaders, religions and rulers.

Archaeologists and biblical scholars are now fairly sure that the ancient Hebrews developed from the more ancient tribe of Canaanites. Modern scholars are beginning to say with some force that there was never an Egyptian chapter in ancient Jewish history, and that Moses was not a historical character in their actual history. They came from the Canaanites, and developed their religion in large part to contradict the older Canaanite religion.

We know the Canaanite religion was a powerful nature religion, with an Earth Mother who gave birth to all. This is the same basic story the Chinese Neanderthals acted out 100,000 years earlier: the earth is our mother and our natural home. It was a religion that might have empowered its people through rituals to put them in touch with the power of the earth and their own power, though we don’t know that.

But the Hebrews created a new religion, in direct opposition to the Canaanite religion. You can see it in their creation story, which was obviously adapted from the creation story of a Mother Earth. Why? Because when you read a story about a deity creating everything by itself, you know it is a woman’s story, not a man’s. Mother earth can do it, but not Father Sky.

Scholars have argued that the god invented by the ancient Hebrews was a simple projection of their tribal chiefs, with the same powers and duties as their tribal chiefs. The chiefs set the rules, laid out rewards and punishments, and defined the way of life for the tribe, just as old Jahweh did.

And other scholars have shown that the covenant made between God and humans in the bible was modeled after ancient Hittite treaties between tribal rulers and their people. The people were expected to have no other ruler above the tribal chief. They were punished if they disobeyed, but were rewarded and protected as long as they were obedient. This is the basic structure of the covenant between the ancient Hebrews and the God they created.

And so their male god, they wrote, created the whole world and all the life on it, all by himself. In their new creation story, we were made out of dirt, and were nothing but dirt until this male tribal-chief-god breathed his breath of life into us. By ourselves, we were nothing. We had nothing sacred in or about us. It was all loaned to us by this new God. In return, we had to obey him. Or, more accurately, we had to obey those who claimed to speak for him: the priests and rulers.

Even if you were never Muslim, Christian or Jewish, you were soaked in this creation story just because you grew up in this society. And we’ve not been trained to back off from the story, look at it critically, and ask bold questions like whether or not it is a true account of creation, or even if it is a good myth. But that’s what I’m asking you to do: to back off far enough to see that the dominant creation story, and the dominant style of religion in Western civilization, may in fact be bad religion based on a false creation story.

And this is important because creation stories are so closely related to salvation stories. They can either empower or enslave us, and it’s our job to try and find out which kind we’ve given our hearts and minds to. The true creation story empowers us. It says we are carriers of the dynamic power of the universe, related to all of creation, and the power is ours to claim and act on, to make it “on earth as it is in heaven” by acting like all other life forms are related to us, in our family. The power and the responsibility are ours. What would such a world look like? Jesus called it the Kingdom of God: the world in which we simply treat all others as our sisters and brothers. Buddhists could call it living in Nirvana, connected with true life by being freed from our misleading illusions about it. Honest religion needs an honest creation story, or it isn’t likely to have a healthy salvation story.

But in the ancient Hebrew revision of that story, everything is different. Now there is nothing sacred about us at all. We are dirt, God is God, and the most we can hope for is to establish an obedient relationship with this God – through the priests and the rulers who claim to represent him.

The first creation story says our salvation comes through realizing our identity with the sacred forces of the universe. The second says all we can hope for is a relationship with those forces – now identified not with the universe, but with this God – a relationship defined by our being obedient to the priests and rulers who speak for this God created so long ago.

The first salvation story is found in advanced Hinduism, when the teacher points the student outward toward the whole world, the whole universe, and says “That art thou!” That is a religion of empowerment, grounded in the true story of our creation and birth. It is found in all mysticisms, which also teach our fundamental and unmediated identity with all that is sacred.

The second is taught by religions that teach obedience rather than empowerment, and threaten all who disobey their church’s rules with damnation. It’s a dishonest religion, founded in a dishonest creation story, and we need to say it loud and clear.

Religious liberals and millions of secular people who reject the biblical creation story and its authoritarian God are routinely attacked as heretics, as though they weren’t really seeking the truth. But the facts show otherwise. It was the ancient Hebrews who falsified the real creation story. It seems to have arisen from their boundary disputes with their closest religious kin, the Canaanites. But they created a creation story that was untrue, and a God who disempowered people and transferred both their dignity and their power to the priests who claimed to speak for that God. And that habit has continued all the way down to the present, as we know.

Power belongs to those who control the story. If we don’t know the true story, we’re not likely to have much power or dignity at all. And the churches aren’t likely to have any honest authority, either, no matter how many costumes they wear.

This last point was made clear to me in an unexpected way last week. While I was in Berkeley, I spent a little time with John Dominic Crossan, an acquaintance of mine who was the cofounder of the Jesus Seminar. Dominic spent nineteen years as a Catholic priest, then left the priesthood, married, and raised a family. But he is still a Catholic who fights much of what his church is doing, and fights it on the basis of his forty years of work as a biblical scholar. Dominic spoke of the arrogance of the bishops, cardinals, and the pope today on the terrible cases of sexual abuse – where they want to be regarded as authoritative even though they are wrong. He said “We Catholics are yearning for the days when the worst thing the Church did was sell indulgences.” (The sale of indulgences was the church practice that led to the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago.)

What Catholics and non-Catholics alike have come to see is that religions that aren’t grounded in the real truth have no necessary moral or ethical authority. The good news in religion is that you really can’t fake it.

The other good news is that if you know the truth, the truth can set you free. It may not make you popular with members of your tribe, but it can set you free. It may be the only thing that can set you free.

This morning, I began our four-part sermon series by telling you the true story of creation. There’s much more to consider in the coming weeks: the nature of human nature, good and evil, and the prescription for what ails the human condition. But this was a beginning. Think about the story this week, and about the difference between religious stories that empower you and stories that enslave you. If you find yourself feeling a little more free, it’s a good sign that you may be a religious liberal. And that, for the record, is also good news!