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© Davidson Loehr

8 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is the second service in our new experimental format adding Worship Associates to the preacher, to bring more voices and passions into our worship services. We’ve included both their written remarks here. Sloan’s was essential; it really set the tone and level of the entire service, as well as the sermon. Sheri’s comments were at the beginning of the service. They are included to give you who are reading this online or away from our church a better feel for the atmosphere of the worship service.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sloan McLain

Hello. My name is Sloan McLain, and I’m happy to be a member of the Worship Associates.

A year ago today I lived in Thailand, Southeast Asia. I loved my well-paid, respectable job as head of Wichai Wittaya’s Bilingual Elementary School’s English program. I had a small but comfortable network of Thai and Western friends. I felt like my soul was thriving in Thailand’s community-centered, modest, easy-going culture. Moving to Thailand felt like coming home.

But outside – just outside – of the ideal Thailand I searched for and embraced, was the reality of my life behind closed doors – the reality tied to my abusive Thai husband. The more I blossomed in Thailand, the more my husband tore me apart.

It wasn’t all the time. If anyone has been in an abusive relationship, they know it’s down and up. Some days with my husband Nop were wonderful. We’d take road trips in our new pickup, driving on country roads (sing John Denver) leading us through temperate forests and breathtaking mountain views. We’d stop at noodle shops overlooking rice farms; sit on lonely beaches to watch the sunset, stay in luxury resorts with waterfalls outside our windows. Or perhaps we’d stay in town in Chiang Mai, and browse the Sunday street festival.

But those positive experiences with Nop could not outweigh the insults, the demands, the restraints, the anger, and the manipulation, that threatened my life at home, at work, at the mall, in the movie, at my friend’s house, in the truck, at the cafe, and in our own antique shop.

Last March, I planned a trip home to visit my family in Dallas for one month. But as March approached, I watched the dysfunction of my marriage as though I were an anthropologist living in someone else’s home, taking notes on the bizarre behaviors that kept this husband and wife together or, rather, were pulling them apart. I knew the honeymoon bond that once connected Nop and I had been replaced by pain, distrust, fear, confusion, and plain disgust. I was coping with my husband to try and keep our family together – to give my son his father.

But on March 16, 2003, when I walked through the security gates at Chiang Mai International Airport, without my husband, with my baby in my arms, I felt safe for the first time in months; and I knew I couldn’t go back to Nop, or to Thailand. And I started to process the reality that I was moving to America, not just visiting it.

It was time to get a divorce from the man who locked me in the house so he’d know where I was when he went out for drunken business meetings, who threatened to sleep with other women on a regular basis, who announced to my colleagues at school that I was an unsuitable wife and unfit to be a mother.

And yet this week, on Thursday, February 5, 2004, my husband was finally served the divorce papers in Thailand, and I find my heart weeping for him. I’m scared; I’m furious; I’m disturbed by what I’ve gone through the past few years, but my heart aches for Nop – and all other abusers – to be happy and to feel loved – only that can stop abuse in this world.

Buddhists believe that all things are connected; it is only an illusion that we are separate from one another. Therefore, if we seek a peaceful heart, let alone a peaceful world, we must practice forgiveness and compassion toward all beings, since the peacefulness of our own actions affects the degree of peace in everyone else. By opening our hearts, even toward those who embody beliefs we despise or toward those who have hurt us, we start to experience the interrelatedness of life: we learn how to work with our anger and fear rather than get caught up in it. Instead of separating ourselves from what we don’t agree with, we take the challenge of transforming and dissolving those conflicts instead.

I’ve been practicing some form of Buddhist Christianity for the past seven or eight years, and it is the teachings of interconnectedness and “every moment is a new beginning” that help me reconcile the pain I have experienced.

So often it’s my nature to separate life into good and evil, right and wrong, hero and bad guy, as though I understand the difference and the decision is up to me. But no one is completely right or wrong all the time. I can’t override my husband’s honest actions with his dishonest ones in order to satisfy my image of the “bad guy”. I do think my husband’s actions were wrong, but I don’t think I can judge him solely based on his actions during our marriage. Nop had many experiences before he met me, and those experiences and all those that have occurred since March 2003, make up a man who is more than Sloan’s abusive husband.

I’ve learned that if I punish Nop, I hurt myself as much as I hurt him. But what about revenge, a voice inside of me asks? What does revenge really accomplish but pain, I answer? I know from holding grudges in the past, that I cannot heal pain with pain. I didn’t used to think I needed to make amends with someone who’d hurt me. Why give that person the time of day after what he did? But if I look deeper in my heart, I know the only way to heal my pain is to deal with my pain: “work through the pain, not around it.” In other words, it’s not just for my husband’s sake that I’m trying to deal with him compassionately; it’s for my sake as well. And in order to fill my heart with compassion, I must start with forgiveness – forgiveness for the fact that abuse exists in this world, and then forgiveness for the abuser: Nop Yoosupap. Not until I use compassion to forgive my husband, can I open my heart to others, without the fear I’ll be hurt again.

I’m not there yet – my heart hasn’t reconciled the pain; my mind hasn’t forgiven the memories. But I know in my gut, that’s the direction I need to move toward – the more I confront my anger with compassion, the more I can open my heart and free my mind to love again. And if this is accomplished, I’ll be able to bring a little more peace into the world, rather than hate. And if I can continue this practice of forgiveness and face all beings with compassion, my spirit will thrive, just like it did in Thailand.

PRAYER

We are so often hurt when others sit in judgment on us.

Let us remember that we are, all of us, children of God, gifts of life’s longing for itself, and that we are precious unto the world. Let us bless our best selves.

But don’t stop there. For those close to us are also precious gifts to the world. Let us remember to bless them as well.

And all the people we don’t know, even those we don’t like, even those we may hate – aren’t they also precious gifts, even if we don’t want to admit it. Can we bless them too?

Then where shall the blessing stop? Where can we ever say No, these people do not count, these we can ignore; we’re nothing at all like these people? We know the answer is Never. Nowhere and Never. If one is precious, all are precious. If one is to be blessed, all are to be blessed.

If this is our task in life, let us remember one more thing. Let us remember to forgive ourselves our lapses of compassion, even as we forgive the lapses of others. For compassion begins there, in forgiveness – of ourselves, of others. It begins there. Before we can move toward real blessings, it begins in forgiveness. Let us begin.

Amen.

SERMON: The Strings of Compassion

When we began talking about this topic, it was very airy and abstract. Sloan had written a guided meditation for her affirmation of faith, and I was going to reflect on Buddhist teachings about compassion.

Compassion is a subject the Buddhists probably do better than any other religion. It’s the central aim and attitude of the religion, even its great secret. They have hundreds of things they call “metta” meditations. “Metta” is a word that means “friendship” or “loving-kindness.” They sound simple but they’re not. The metta meditation Sloan and Sheri both liked has just five lines:

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you have ease of well-being.

May you be safe from danger.

May you be free from all suffering.

It sounds like the kind of thing little groups of New Agey people might sit around saying, and grooving on how marvelously compassionate they all felt. But it isn’t a Hallmark card; it’s only easy if you’ve never tried to do it. It’s part of a discipline as high and as difficult as any in world religions.

First, you say a metta meditation for yourself, to heal your own wounds and fears. Then you direct it toward the people close to you, and feel your intimate connection with them. Then you say it for the people you don’t like, are angry at, or even those you hate, to regain an awareness of your intimate connection with them, too. Then for all the people in the world, and all life in the universe.

Somewhere along the line in all this, I was getting confused by all the abstractions, lost in the clouds. So I asked Sloan why she cared about this topic, what it had to do with her real life. That’s when the story came out, the one that became her second version of an affirmation of faith, the one you just heard.

And suddenly, this subject had become very real, and hard to preach about. Hard, because the subject is bigger than I am, and more expansive and inclusive than I know how to be. I would love to think that I set the curve for compassion, but I strongly suspect that it isn’t true.

While reading through that metta meditation, trying to imagine that I had that quality of consciousness and care for people all over the world, I suddenly asked myself how often or how deeply I had thought about the 10,000 to 40,000 Iraqi citizens who have been killed since we invaded their country, or the hundreds of thousands of others who are touched by those deaths. I knew the details, I’d read the stories, but emotionally I had hardly thought of them at all. So I’m not doing very well with loving-kindness toward even some of the most recent and dramatic of the world’s victims.

Closer to home, I asked how often I really thought about all the homeless people begging at every intersection, about the others I drive by downtown, about the estimated five to ten thousand homeless people in Austin, or even the fifty of them who spent the night here during the Freeze Night Friday. Once more, I’ve hardly thought of them at all. Once in awhile, I’ll put the window down and give one of them five bucks, but if I’m honest I’ll admit that it’s usually because it makes me feel better, not because I’m really thinking seriously about their plight, or what a caring citizen or a caring society should try to do about it.

Nor do I really think much about the more than 100 million Americans who have no health insurance. Or the fact that we have the highest infant mortality rate, youth suicide rate and poverty rate for those over 65 of any country in the developed world. If you add all the others who are touched by those tragedies, it must be more than half of our country. If you corner me, I’ll probably try to claim that oh yes, I’m aware of their plight, and I even mention it in sermons. But if I corner me, I have nowhere to hide from the fact that I hardly ever think of it much at all, and I certainly don’t do much of anything about it. And if a tree is known by its fruits, I don’t show much useful compassion at all, and I’m hardly doing anything that might make a positive difference.

The word “compassion” means “to suffer with,” and except for the people whose stories I know on a one-to-one basis, I think the hard truth is that I don’t suffer with many people, really.

If they’re close to me, I can recognize that kind of compassion. My best friend died six years ago, and I suffered with him and with Marsha, his widow. And Marsha, one of the most loving people I’ve ever known, died this past Wednesday of breast cancer that had spread to her brain, and I suffered with her in our recent talks, and with their one son Tyler when we spoke this week. Tyler is 26, and yesterday morning he went to the small cemetery in southern Michigan to see his mother’s casket lowered into a hole. Next to that hole, he saw the gravestone marking his father, who died at age 46. And next to that, he saw the gravestone of his father’s father, who also died at age 46. And I know that for the next twenty years, Tyler will wonder if that’s all the time he is going to have. It’s so very easy to suffer with him.

But compassion at a distance? I don’t have a record that would impress anyone, including me. Maybe you’re way ahead of me here. But maybe you’re not.

I am inspired by Sloan’s attempt to bless her husband. But that’s a terribly high aspiration, isn’t it? It’s not the sort of thing we normally think of doing. And it’s easy to ask, as she asked herself, why on earth we would want to do such a thing. We don’t hear much about really suffering with others, especially those we’re angry with. We hear about defeating them, beating them, but not suffering with them. Instead, we hear slogans like “Don’t get mad, get even.”

I don’t think we have very good models of compassion in Christianity, either. I think of Jesus’ teaching, to turn the other cheek, and I think what a dumb idea! Jews usually criticize that teaching as acquiescence to injustice, and I agree. If you’re in an abusive situation, first you need to get out, then worry about these higher goals. It’s like the instructions you get on airplanes: in case of an emergency, put your own oxygen mask on first, before trying to help others.

And if I don’t like that teaching of Jesus, I think even less of one of Paul’s famous lines, where he actually says “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.” (Romans, 12:20) I’ll admit there’s something sort of nasty about it that is seductive. It’s kind of like a little compassion with a lot of passive-aggressive vengeance thrown in. But I don’t think it’s anything to be proud of.

It helps me to back off and remember why we come to church, what religion is really about. It is about very basic things, you know. Honest religion of any flavor is about trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. It’s about using our time here to try and make a positive difference in our own life, in the lives we touch, and in the larger world. Religion is about reconnecting with an attitude toward life that reminds us that we are meant for very high callings, that nothing less is worthy of us.

But these Buddhist aspirations of loving-kindness toward everyone – they are so high I don’t know how to reach them. I fail daily at them; I imagine many of you do too. It gives me a whole new appreciation of why so many Buddhists believe in reincarnation. If we have to rise to a level of compassion that high, it’s going to take more than one lifetime to do it!

I remembered two years ago at this time, when I was in Thailand. I also flew out of the Chiang Mai International Airport that Sloan mentioned; I can still remember it. I remember one of the Thai guides we had in Bangkok, a very spirited woman. She told us that Americans needed to understand that Buddha was not a god, but a teacher. Then she talked about how they were to live in such a way that they improved a little in this life, so when they came back in their next life they would come back at a higher level.

During one of the breaks, I told her I didn’t know much about this, but thought that the Buddha had said the object was to get beyond reincarnation, so you didn’t have to come back for more rounds of “re-death.” “Oh sure!” she said, ” the Buddha can do that! He’s perfect! But me? I’m coming back!” I’d have to come back too, at least a few times.

Since the Buddhist notion of compassion is so very high, and so very foreign to our American ways of thinking, I decided to try a different way of talking about this with you today. You can think of it as “Compassion for Beginners,” or “Buddhism lite.”

It’s a story from my childhood that most of you know, too: the story of Pinocchio. Though I’ve never heard him presented this way, I have decided that Pinocchio was really a bodhisattva with a message for us. I hadn’t read the story in decades, so had to go buy the book and read it again. Let me refresh your memory of this. (The original story was written in Italian between 1881-1883 by Carlo Collodi, 1821-1890. Walt Disney’s original movie of Pinocchio was made in 1940, with a remake in 2003. The original has some elements Disney omitted.)

The old woodcarver Geppetto carved a puppet from an amazing piece of talking wood. So Pinocchio came into the world as a block of wood, but one with awesome potential.

He didn’t actually have visible strings, even though he was called a puppet. But he had invisible strings that pulled him in two different directions. One set pulled him toward selfish fun that hurt those who loved and trusted him. His guardian angel, the blue fairy, even died of a broken heart when he abandoned her! And soon, as you remember, he grew long ears and a tail, and became a donkey.

Finally, he was able to respond to the tugs of other strings, strings of compassion. He seemed to come to his senses. The blue fairy came back to life – luckily, our guardian angels can be resurrected just by a change of heart. He nursed old Geppetto back to health, and in reward for his compassion the blue fairy turned him into a real boy. The puppet, the book says at the very end, was after all “nothing more than just a piece of wood.”

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but the story tells us – in pretty dramatic terms! – that the choices Pinocchio made determined whether he became a human, or just made an ass of himself. His choices make him a little bodhisattva.

Still, why should we act really big when others around us are acting really small? Remember the five lines of that metta meditation:

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you have ease of well-being.

May you be safe from danger.

May you be free from all suffering.

It’s asking a lot to expect us to feel that way toward the whole world. Wouldn’t it be more fun, when we’re angry with people, to take St. Paul’s spiteful path and act compassionate just to dump hot coals on their heads? It’s so much easier than really being compassionate. That would take an expansion of character, rather than just a clever way of taking revenge. And aren’t you at least a little tempted by the advice “Don’t get mad, get even”? Don’t lie – your nose might grow!

But think of our little wooden bodhisattva again. When Pinocchio finally acted out of compassion rather than self-centeredness, look how many things happened. It was like the “butterfly effect,” where a small change in one place creates huge changes elsewhere. Old Geppetto was saved, Pinocchio’s guardian angel returned to help him; he became a real human rather than a donkey. He got a life worth living and a story worth telling. It’s a profoundly religious story, through and through. We’re all a bit like Pinocchio.

We all come with strings attached. We must choose which set of strings we’ll respond to, but so much depends on what we choose. And our choice has so much creative power to affect the lives of so many others!

1. Even considered only selfishly, compassion makes less suffering for us. Acting out of spite, even St. Paul’s self-righteous spite, lowers us to the level of the kind of people who hurt us in the first place.

2. Compassion also surrounds those we care for with fresher air. Being loving and kind to an ex-spouse we’re furious with is a gift of love and peace to our children – who are always watching, and always learning not from what we say, but from what we do.

3. And compassion puts less poison into our world. It means that we did what we could to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. That’s our job.

In our culture, the notion of having strings attached is seen as a bad thing. But the Buddhists, and that little bodhisattva named Pinocchio, show us that we always have strings attached. If we follow the right ones, it can make us more human, and help us mend our relationships and our world. Otherwise, like the little puppet, we might wind up just making asses of ourselves.

This does not mean you turn the other cheek when someone is hitting you, or become a patsy for aggressive or passive-aggressive people trying to build themselves up by tearing you down. It just means that, as you act to serve what is precious within you, as you get yourself to a safe place, you try as well to serve what is precious in them, and to recognize that even when they act like donkeys, they are more like us than they are unlike us. They react poorly when they are frightened, just as we do. They can be driven to a hurtful anger, just as we can. And when they feel cornered, they sometimes act in ways that no one could be proud of, just like we do.

How far and wide must our strings of compassion reach? That’s our choice. But those choices determine what we are making of ourselves. Those choices determine what we are making of our relationships. They determine what we are making of our world.

In the end, we are all like Pinocchio, trying to lift what is truly human out of what is “nothing more than just a piece of wood.” Like him, if you reduce us to only the cost of our materials, we’re not much. But also like Pinocchio, we come into this world bearing possibilities that are simply awesome, simply awesome!

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© Davidson Loehr

1 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This was the first service constructed under the new “Worship Associates” (WA) program we are trying. Church members may apply to be considered for this program. They are chosen by the ministers, who will have to work with them (in our case, by the minister and the ministerial intern). They are chosen by several criteria, including whether they “play well with others,” whether they might make for good chemistry, with preference given if they are new voices for this aspect of the church’s mission. The UU church in Oakland, CA, which developed the model and wrote the book, now has about thirty applicants a year for thirteen positions. We are hoping for a similar ratio. We began with eleven Worship Associates, who nominated and voted on general themes for the worship services for that quarter. The minister and intern have veto power over themes on which neither of them have strong interest for preaching (only one theme was vetoed this time). The WA who proposed the theme is asked to write a 3-4 minute Affirmation of Faith, about their personal interest in and passion for this topic, as the minister who will be preaching on it decides how to narrow it down to a preachable topic. It’s a new experiment, so we will learn by trying it, just what changes need to be made as we go. As you can read here, this first attempt to blend the passions of a Worship Associate with the prayer and sermon by a minister found a good match and created a good service. The theme chosen was “Women’s Spirituality,” which was narrowed down to the topic of some of the women’s stories that were omitted from the Western religious traditions.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Dennis

Every summer between third and ninth grades, I went to a Girl Scout camp in far southwestern Oklahoma for one to two weeks. The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I began a five-summer-long career as a camp counselor. Between singing songs, building campfires, teaching archery, leading hikes, and pulling cactus spines out of socks and ankles, I also taught many cooperative games. One of these games required the players to stand in a circle shoulder-to-shoulder, then turn so everyone was front-to-back and pretty close together. Please bear in mind that July in southern Oklahoma is just as sticky as July in Austin, and we don’t have air conditioning. Now everybody is in place, and everybody is wondering when we’re going to get to go swimming, and the leader (me) asks the group to sit down. Each player is now wondering two things: Am I strong enough to hold up the girl who’s about to sit on my knees? And: Is the girl behind me going to let me fall? But, the leaders says, “Trust me. It’s going to be okay.” So everybody sits, and everybody learns a vital lesson: The group, working together, can support the weight of everyone in the circle. Ah, the team-building moment we have! The game can be finished at this point, but the lesson is driven home even better if the leader takes a few players out of the circle. Even the removal of just one player works wonders. Without tightening ranks, the group is asked to sit again. Just the space left by one player is enough to make everyone fall over. We’re playing on grass, so nobody’s hurt, and everybody learns an even more important lesson—everybody has to be involved and working together, or else we all fall down.

When Dr. Loehr and I were first discussing women’s spirituality, we were talking about the Greeks, and their goddesses. Dr. Loehr asked what I like about ancient Greek polytheism, what exists there that’s not available in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and I kept talking about the accessibility of the gods, how human they are, and how much they’re something that everyone has to contend with. The Greeks didn’t like women any more than the Hebrews did, but somehow they managed to produce plays such as The Trojan Women or Lysistrata, illustrating women’s reactions to events over which they had no control. Eventually, I started telling Dr. Loehr about my days as a camp counselor, and about how this game could perfectly sum up my thoughts on the need for women’s involvement in spiritual matters. If everybody in the circle doesn’t get to participate, doesn’t get to make his or her own impact, share his or her voice and spirit, then the group will fall down. If our culture were a cooperative game, our team would not be doing well at all. Our history is full of places where many of the people in the game haven’t been allowed to play. Sometimes they’re women, sometimes they’re from a race or ethnic group; sometimes they’re men. For me, a great part of the reason why I’m a UU is the fact that here we know we’ve lost some of the participants in our religious game. We’re trying to get them back now. That’s why we have women in the ministry, gays, minorities. That’s why this is a Welcoming Congregation. I’m here because I want everybody to sit in my religious circle, and I think the rest of the people in this room want that as well.

(By Sally Dennis, member of First UU Church of Austin.)

PRAYER

One of Jesus’ most interesting statements was “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.” He was pointing to a group of children, so perhaps it was only a one-time local saying without any broader meaning.

But he also said that the kingdom of God was spread out across the earth and people wouldn’t see it. What if “the least of these” is part of the kingdom of God, and how we treat them shows us the size of our God, the size of our concept of the sacred?

Then “the least of these” is a changing group, different for each of us. It’s what we hate, what we can’t incorporate or love, and it shows us the limits of our love for the world, society, even our own psyches.

Let us examine who, for us, are “the least of these.” Are they an economic class, a race, a people whose beliefs we hate?

For better and worse, they mark the edges of our world, the limits of creation that we can allow. When we have identified “the least of these,” we have drawn the limits of our compassion.

And inside. What about those parts of ourselves we cannot love, cannot convert to our higher purposes, and so we reject or deny? Our shadows, our smallnesses, those places where fear keeps us too small.

From our souls to our world, the size of all we hold sacred is abridged by what we can not let into our circles of compassion.

Who, for us, are the least of these? What would it take to bring them into our hearts and into our world? Even those weak parts become stronger when they are made parts of a connected circle. Even the least of these.

What would it take and what would it cost to bring safety and strength to all the parts of our lives? All parts of our society or our world?

Let our hearts be tugged by the cries of the least within us, and the least among us.

Amen.

SERMON: Missing Stories

One of the most important and most neglected facts of life are the stories we live in, the stories that assign us our roles and identities, our social and economic status, our worth. And if there’s a single sin we fall into more than any other, it may be the failure to claim a role in writing the stories of our lives, our relationships, our country, and our world. It’s my candidate for our real original sin.

When I first began baking bread years ago, a friend gave me a recipe for a bread she loved. She knew it so well, she just wrote it out on some notepaper for me. The bread was so bad you couldn’t eat it. I invited her over, gave her a piece of it and the recipe she had written out. She took one bite, made an awful face, looked at the recipe, and said “Oh, I left out the salt!” I knew what the recipe said, and I followed it, but I forgot that someone first wrote it down, and may have left something out, without which the whole recipe was ruined.

All our stories have those same three steps. The first step, which we usually forget like I did, is that in the beginning, somebody wrote the recipe, the story. The second step is that we read or hear the story, and think we have learned how things are, what’s true, what’s important, and who we are and what we are to do. The third step is doing it, playing our role, acting out our assigned part in this story that reflects the way things are, the way God or the State or someone else wants them.

Real-life stories are more important than a bread recipe; and whoever writes the stories is sure to give themselves and their kind a better role than they’ll give others. If stories are written by the rich, the poor will fare poorly. If Hispanics write them, they’ll probably have the best parts, just as whites, blacks, yellows, men or women would if they wrote the stories.

We aren’t taught to think of our identities and roles in life as playing parts in stories. We’re taught that it’s who we are and how we are to live. But that’s not quite true, you know? First, somebody wrote a story.

Attending to our stories is a big thing in this church. That’s why we try to open doors for as many people as possible to add their gifts to the mix. We have two people helping with the service this morning rather than the usual one. And you heard each of their voices, and parts of each of their stories. It’s a new experiment we’re trying with worship services, to bring more voices and passions to the pulpit.

And we’re using a new approach to finding people who would like to serve on the church’s governing board. It’s a process open to all members who think they have the skills, experience and passion that can help move this church ahead. We recently learned that we are the fourth fastest-growing church in the UUA, and that’s partly because we are trying very hard to help you find a beloved home here. If you have leadership skills and think you might have something to offer to the church board of governors, you are invited to apply: to send a letter with your experience, your skills, and some words about your passions and your hopes for this church. The Nominating Committee will be publishing the skills and styles they’re looking for, so you can watch for them. It may seem like a little thing, but it is so important to get a lot of voices involved in creating our story, because stories with missing parts misshape us and our world.

And we are surrounded, defined, by stories with missing voices. In politics, we know that elections now are largely bought and paid for by wealthy corporations and individuals. That’s been true for over twenty years; it’s what’s behind all the clamor for campaign finance reform. We know that President Bush has brought more former high executives of large corporations into his cabinet than any president in history.

We know that taxes on corporations and the very wealthy have been cut by over a trillion dollars since 2001. We know that over 40% of Americans have no health insurance: the worst record in the developed world. We know that we have the highest poverty rate among people over 65 in the developed world, and that while the pay of CEOs and the top 1% rises, the pay, benefits, job security and future of the vast majority of America’s workers has fallen steadily and dramatically, as indicated by the fact that in 2003 we had more than 1,660,000 bankruptcies filed, the highest number in our nation’s history.

And we know that all these facts are related. A different set of people gained the power to write America’s story, and they did just what we would have done: they wrote starring roles for themselves, and supporting roles for everyone else.

We are told, again and again in the media, that a healthy economy is to be defined by how well the stock market does, rather than by how well the vast majority of our citizens do. You don’t have to ask who wrote that story, or who it benefits.

If we ask whose job it is to write the stories, it’s easy to see that it is all of our jobs to write them. Anybody who doesn’t help write the story will probably not do very well in it. As citizens, we must all help write the stories that define our nation’s priorities. As world citizens, we have a sacred responsibility to write a script that takes better care of the world.

It is so important that stories have all the voices represented! If you ride in a car with the wheels out of balance, the car will veer off course. The same is true of riding in a society living out a story that’s out of balance: it veers off course, in the direction dictated by those who got to write the script.

Sally Dennis painted a powerful and wonderful picture of this in her story of the cooperative camp game where everyone stood in that circle, front to back, close together. As long as they were all there, they could all sit down and be supported by the person behind them. But remove just a few people from the circle, and everybody falls down. Take half the people out, and it’s a farce. Most of our scripts have voices left out.

But of all the stories leaving people out, the biggest, oldest, most persistent are the religious stories that have left out 50% of the human race for almost all of recorded history in almost all times and places. These are the stories of women and women’s perspectives, omitted from the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Some of this is due to the men who wrote the Bible, most is due to those who have interpreted it. But some is due to the fact that so few people have read the book that we don’t even know there are some better stories there.

For instance, most people don’t know there are two very different creation stories in Genesis. Here’s the one you may not know, though it’s the first one in the Bible:

Gen. 1:26-28: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them.”

This is the first creation story to appear in the bible. No mention of Eve created out of Adam’s rib, no mention of her as a helpmate for him, but equal creation, and “the image of God” is defined as “both male and female.” What a different religious tradition it might have been if that had been the creation story we had used!

But the only creation story most people have ever heard of is the second one:

Gen. 2: 18, 20-23: Then God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” So God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

You might wonder, especially if you’re a man, what the big deal is with some old stories. But we and our worlds are shaped by the stories we tell. And leaving out half the stories, all the women’s voices, has been more destructive to both women and men than we can begin to measure.

You could point to the fact that in the book of Leviticus the worth of women was 3/5 that of a man (Lv 27:2-4). Which creation story did this have to follow? Two hundred years ago in the Constitution of our own country, slaves were also valued at 3/5 of a free man. Where do you think they got that particular fraction for something that is less than a man, if not from these old stories from the Bible? It matters, what we omit from our stories.

Let me share just three more passages from the Bible that rely on this second creation story, and the story of Eve eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. These all come from the Christian scriptures, or the New Testament:

A man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man was not born of the woman; but the woman born of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. This is why it is right for a woman to wear on her head a sign of the authority over her. (I Corinthians 11:3-9)

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. (I Corinthians 14:34-36)

“I do not permit a woman to be a teacher, nor must she domineer over man; she should be quiet. For Adam was created first, and Eve afterwards; and it was not Adam who was deceived; it was the woman who fell into sin.” (I Timothy 2:14, NEB) p. 109

The price women have paid for living within these stories has been horrific, in almost every religion. In the West, it has had dramatic effects. The link between the bible and witchcraft, for example, is a very strong one. And it didn’t come from the lunatic fringe, but from some of the most famous thinkers in Christianity. Martin Luther said that witches were the devil’s whores, and he would burn them all. John Calvin also insisted, on the basis of Exodus 22:18 that all witches must be killed.

In 1768 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said that “Giving up belief in witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible.” William Blackstone, the famed English jurist, wrote that “To deny the . . . existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God.” And we should remember that eight of the original 13 US colonies recognized witchcraft as a capital crime.

Women have been called the lustful, seductive sex for centuries, even though virtually all rapes and sex crimes are committed by men. Why do we listen to such stories without protesting their nonsense?

Eve’s desire for knowledge of good and evil, in any sober discussion, would be regarded as profoundly good, a great gift to the species. How on earth did we ever buy the notion that it was bad? If Adam and Eve were our children, we would compliment and reward Eve for wanting the knowledge of good and evil, and might well tell Adam that he could learn a few things from her. Why did we ever buy such a silly story? I think it’s because we forgot that it began when somebody wrote it to benefit his kind at the expense of her kind, and that no one has the authority to do that without our say-so.

And think of some of the voices that are missing from the Bible:

Eve’s story. Sometime this week, rehearse in your mind what she might have had to say about that business of seeking the knowledge of good and evil, and what she might have to say to both Adam and God, and see how much the story changes.

Abraham’s wife, Sarah. One of the most psychologically and theologically horrid stories in the whole Bible is the story of Abraham hearing voices telling him to murder his son Isaac, and being willing to do it! Where was his wife Sarah’s voice? Where is she in her incredulous fury, asking him what in hell he thinks he is doing to her son? Where is the humanity, the compassion, even the common sense in this story? It belonged to Sarah, and she was omitted.

Miriam, the sister of Moses. We learn that she was also a prophet in her own right, and a woman of considerable power and influence. That’s all we’re told. How would it have changed religious history if we had been given powerful models of women prophets and priests?

Mary Magdalen. Since the book The DaVince Code came out, it has become clear to millions of readers, as it has been clear to biblical scholars for a long time, that Mary Magdalen had one of the most powerful roles and interesting stories in the whole story of Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls brought us gospels that show us that she was called The Apostle of the Apostles, and was Jesus’ favorite, whom he was often seen kissing on the mouth. If that story, if her voice, had not been left out of the story, how might it have changed Christianity and Western history? Perhaps, since she was Jesus’ favorite, and he ranked her above all the other apostles, only women would be able to become Pope!

“In the bible, as in soap operas, woman’s concerns center almost exclusively on childbearing and on her relationships with men.” (Roslyn Lacks, Women and Judaism, Doubleday & Co., 1980, p. 88)

“The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.” (Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 13)

What can we do?

We can speak up and act up to challenge and change stories with missing voices, circles with missing people. Let me share one more quotation with you. It comes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived from 1815 to 1902. In 1892, in a long series of studied commentaries on the Bible, she wrote this:

“Take the snake, the fruit-tree and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, nor frowning Judge, no inferno, no everlasting punishment—hence no need of a Savior. Thus the bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology. Here is the reason why in all the biblical researches and higher criticisms, the scholars never touch the position of women.” This was written 112 years ago, and its theological implications are still right on.

So what can we do? We can speak up, and demand a voice in writing the stories of our lives, so that we are not assigned roles that demean and endanger us. Don’t let people tell these stories without wondering aloud to them whether such a story could possibly be worthy of God. Sometimes it’s just worth saying something as short as “Boy, you know a man wrote that story, don’t you!”

What can we do? We can act up and claim a better role. Last year, my 19-year-old niece, who was in ROTC as a junior at Boston University, heard her sergeant tell them that BU had four slots to send ROTC students to the tough three-week Army Airborne training, and suggested that some of the really macho guys might want to apply. It made her so mad that she applied, and last June I flew to Ft. Benning, GA for a week, to photograph her jumping out of airplanes, and to pin her Airborne wings on her at graduation. In my office, I have a whole wall of photos from that trip, of this small and fierce little warrior, which you can see by looking in the door. They inspire me; maybe they will do the same for you.

The whole human sound goes up only from the full choir. We’re all in the choir: even the least among us. Let us sing songs, tell stories, and act in ways that are worthy of us, worthy of God, worthy of all that is holy, all that is necessary to make our circle complete. Let’s end with an old story:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them” Both of them. Equally.

Amen.