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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 11, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our principles talk of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. How do we seek the truth? Can we be like wise magi, bringing our gifts to the newborn Light?

Call to Worship
by Denise Levertov

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise, iron ball, egg, dark horse, shadow, cloud of breath on the air,

Dwell in our crowded hearts, our steaming bathrooms, kitchens full of things to be done, the ordinary streets.

Thrust close your smile that we know you, terrible joy.

Reading
by Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro

Bless Adonai
who spins day into dusk

With wisdom watch the dawn gates open;
With understanding let
time and seasons
come and go;

With awe perceive
the stars in lawful orbit.

Morning dawns,
evening darkens;

Darkness and light yielding
one to the other,

Yet each distinguished
and unique.

Marvel at Life!
Strive to know its ways!

Seek Wisdom and Truth,
the gateways
to Life’s mysteries!

Wondrous indeed
is the evening twilight.

Sermon

Here we are at the season of holy days, when most religions originating in the northern hemisphere celebrate the return of the light. Hanukkah is the Jewish celebration of the light that burned in the temple longer than it could naturally have burned, a miracle of light in the darkness. Hinduism celebrates Diwali, the Pagans celebrate the Winter Solstice and Christianity celebrates the birth of the son at the same time that its Roman rulers were celebrating the birth of the sun. No one knows the historical truth of these stories, but we feel in our hearts that they have a different kind of truth, an inner truth that can teach us about ourselves, about how to live well, how to get along with the way the Universe seems to work, a truth of the spirit. We usually call these faith stories, and we contrast faith stories with historical truth. There is sometimes overlap, but that overlap is unimportant to the faithful.

I quake to speak about the truth today. I have been casual in my thinking. I assumed that the truth is something that agrees with facts, something most people agree on together and that people feel it’s important in news and conversation. I have spoken confidently about the thing called “the ring of truth,” saying that most of us can recognize it when we hear it. We say we affirm a free search for truth and meaning. You can’t have meaning without truth. A pile of lies can have no meaning other than someone feels contempt enough for the world that they blatherate a pile of lies and leave it there in the road for the rest of us to step in. To be asked to find meaning in a pile of lies is cynical and abusive.

We can have a free search for truth, but we have seen a shift. It used to be that we expected some spin in advertising, but there were truth in advertising rules that were enforced. It used to be that we expected some spin from politicians, even outright lying, but we remember when Paul Ryan shaved over an hour off his marathon time and the media chewed on that lie for weeks. It used to be that people hung their heads when they were caught lying. There was some sense of shame. We have had experience with people of no shame before. Rumsfeld, Cheney. We have had loads of experience with lying politicians, but there is a shift now to a politician who lies and acts as if you are stupid for expecting him to have told the truth. Now a PPP poll shows that 60% of Trump voters believe “millions of people voted illegally,” with no evidence and strong denials from Republican election officials. 67% of them believe that unemployment is up, even though the fact is that it has gone from 7.8 in 2009 to 4.6. 40% of Trump voters believe that he won the popular vote.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” You can say ” Facts show that millions of people did not vote illegally.” Those citizens say the so-called facts are being reported by biased sources. They don’t believe the New York Times or the Washington Post. They say Snopes.com is only accurate 50% of the time, even though Factcheck.org says it’s accurate most of the time. Factcheck is a program of the Annenburg Foundation. These citizens would say they don’t respect the Annenburg Foundation’s facts. They are compartmentalizing their faith from their intellect. Many of their preachers have trained them in not applying their minds to their strongly held faith. The stories they believe are faith stories, not historical facts, and they’re ok with that.

They have faith in Donald Trump. We’ve all seen the interview with one woman, who, shown that Trump had lied, said “I believe what he said because he said it. If he says it, it’s true.” I do not think Trump voters are stupid. I think they are treating their belief in him as they would a religious belief.

Epistemology is the study of how we know things. When you ask yourself “How can I know what is true?” You are asking about epistemology. You can dig one level deeper and ask “how do we know anything?” You discuss that different colors of light have different wavelengths, which are measurable. Data. But we interpret that data inside our minds, so we don’t know that the way I see that wavelength is the way you see it. I say “trees are green,” and you nod and agree, but there isn’t a way to know whether we are both seeing the same color. Science has its way of seeking truth which has to do with whether a certain result is able to be reproduced, whether a certain way of getting to your results is respectable. Peer review is a way of getting to truth. Can you get consensus? Do a certain number of scientists agree on this thing, which we might now call a “fact.” Philosophy has its way of talking about truth. Some philosophers say you can’t say anything is Truth with a capital T, but there are certain assertions we all believe, which we agree to act upon. We agree to act as if certain things are true. Some even assert that there is no way to know that you even exist. What if you are a puppy in Peru, dreaming that you are a human sitting in this sanctuary? Descartes says “I think, therefore I am,” but another philosopher is only willing to say “there is a thought.”

I don’t have the patience, these days, though, for relaxed discussions about the nature of truth. When you say “millions of people voted illegally,” that is either true or it is not. If it’s not true, it’s a mistake or a lie. (or you are “isolated in your own reality,” which is a way of talking about some forms of mental illness. This is not a fact about which the data sets can be interpreted many ways. It’s true or it’s not. The sense of alarm many of us feel is that we meet so many people who are isolated from reality. As a group. I imagine many of them feel that same alarm about liberals who believe the New York Times and Factcheck.org.

Our principle says we search, (in freedom and responsibility) for truth. We are at a strange point where it’s the preacher has to talk about defending, not a divine truth, but defending facts. I think those are things we can all agree happen in the actual world. Perceptions differ, true. Interpretations of data differ. But there are things we all agree to act upon as true. When millions of people agree to operate as though wholly different things are true from the ones we are acting on, a kind of vertigo results. It becomes difficult to find common ground.

I would have said, in more innocent times, that we all mostly agree that the New York Times aims to be truthful. When they are not, they apologize. They feel shame. We all would mostly agree that the Washington Post publishes the truth. If they find they are inaccurate, they apologize, they feel shame. I think they are still trying to live in that reality.

Now from the President-elect, the lies come fast and loud, and there is absolutely no shame in being found out. People in Macedonia make up fake news stories, and no one knows how to tell the difference. Some of us are learning to
1. Check the source. Is it a satire site? A fantasy news site? Is there a button you can push to make them show the actual news story highlighted in yellow?
2. What is the date on the story? Is it from yesterday or from 2011?
3. Does it sound too strange to be true? Does it fit with the facts as you know them?
4. Why would people do what the story says they did? Does it make sense?

We are in a morass of lies, and as of now it’s up to us to discern what’s true. In Europe there are laws about social media content, so the fake news is damped down a bit. Here, we are just starting to see that. Don’t be part of thoughtlessly repeating things that are deliciously shocking but possibly less than true.

What is truth? Is an ancient question. When Rabbi Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate for judgment, Pilate asked You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me. “What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

The Christian scriptures which talk about Rabbi Jesus as if he were a special part of the Divine call him the Word. The Greek in the New Testament translated this way is the Greek word logos. Logos is a concept whose many layers of meaning include not only “word,” but more on the order of “reason,” “structure,” “organizing principle.” Scholars think the author of this part of the scripture was educated in the Greek manner but was born a Jew. In the Jewish scriptures, the word is a creative force, especially the word of God. It’s how they described the creation of the skies, the oceans and the earth. In this religion, the creation wasn’t a birth from a great mother or a star, it was done by words. So when the gospel writer says “in the beginning was the word,” and implies that Rabbi Jesus and that word are the same, he is trying to communicate that he wants people to worship the reason of God, the Creative power of God, the underlying principles by which everything in the Universe is laid out. In this same gospel, the spirit of God is called the “Spirit of Truth.”

In my opinion, when we talk about truth, “capital T Truth,” we are talking about something that has this kind of generative power. We find truth and it changes things. It’s not just something to which we assent by nodding our heads sagely or clapping our hands and rejoicing that we have another bit of knowledge to add to our cocktail party conversation or our discussions with friends. In the view of these scriptures, love, light, reason, and the truth of things are ways of describing the divine.

Truth changes things. It’s moving or funny or challenging. When two people are talking authentically to one another, when they are connecting in truth and in love, they are having a nourishing, transformative experience. When someone lies, especially when they don’t care to pretend they’re not lying, the ground beneath our feet shifts, and we lose our balance. Something inside struggles to refute, struggles to understand, to derive meaning. The person who lies claims they are speaking impressionistically, speaking in “euphanism,” and that you are stupid for not realizing that. You quote them to themselves and they say “I never said that.” When you show them the video, they say “you were taking it out of context.” Unless you surrender to their worldview, your choices are to be stupid, to be confused, to be wrong, to be mocked, or to be an enemy.

This is how abusers set things up in a relationship. Their reality is the only one that has any worth. If you don’t share it, you are silly or dangerous, or misguided, or crazy. You can’t ever find your balance because the rules constantly change. Reality changes, and the only one who knows where it’s going isn’t telling you. You stop trusting your own perception of reality. Is the only way to respect the leader to surrender to them completely? Is disagreement disloyalty? If you stay in the abusive situation, your reality gets overwritten so many times you begin to doubt yourself.

This season we celebrate the birth of the Spirit of Truth. Let us bring the truth our gifts of attention, responsible evaluation of what we are told, let us acknowledge its importance in keeping the ground solid under our feet. Follow the star of truth, and it will get us through these days. The star is big enough to follow. It’s there in the day time, but it’s when the darkness falls, when you can’t see your way, that the star shines the brightest to guide us on.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 4, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The fourth element in the Buddhist Eightfold Path is “Right Action.” What did the Buddha suggest we think about as we consider our actions? What are we doing? Why are we doing it?

Many among us have been experiencing grief and depression about the results of the election. It’s not that the candidate we voted for lost the Electoral College, it’s that we must wake up to the fact that our friends and neighbors, our family members, can shrug off coarse, bullying, mean, ignorant and racist behavior. That they believed the other candidate when he said he knew how to do the job and handed him the reins of government, that the white nationalists are in the White House now and someone who’s behavior disgusts us is representing us on the world stage. He’s blundering around, and we fear that the delicate balances among nations will shake and give way. We’re sad and worried, and it’s hard to know what to do.

In times like these, as I’ve said, we go back to basics. The 7 Principles, the 8-fold path, the Golden Rule, the precepts we follow, our core values. First of all, it’s okay not to know what to do. It’s okay to be sad.

Buddhist teachers say, as I often remind myself, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” We tell ourselves stories about what is happening, and we suffer from our stories. Then what happens is something we didn’t even think to worry about! One of the opportunities to do something is happening in the snow in ND. So many of us are going to Standing Rock. It seems like the next right thing to do. Take your body there. Be a protector if you are a vet. Be a chaplain if you are a minister. Be a healer if you are in one of the healing professions. Attend the Women’s March on January 21, either in DC or here in Austin in the local version of the protest. Find out how to go with us to the detention centers to visit with the women and their children being held there. We are galvanized, ready to be called into action. The Second Saturday volunteering group starts next Saturday – just show up at the church with or without the kids, and choose which service opportunity will do the most good.

Don’t waste your outrage, focus it. Pick two things to be working on, worried about. There are so many that if we try to spend passion and energy on them all, we burn out and grind to a halt. Find out what’s real and what’s made up. I was outraged about the list of liberal academics being put together. Look a little deeper, and it’s a college kid asking other college kids which professors are too liberal for them, a rate-your-professor kind of thing. It could grow, it could be used by those in authority, but that’s not what it is, yet.

How do we find the balance of being alert but not fearful. “Fear is the mind-killer,” those of us who are Frank Herbert fans will remember. Fear makes us want to howl, to hide under our beds, to obsess about how to make it stop. Alert, aware that there is a struggle to come, but it has been there for many already. Awake, understanding that, for half the country, racism is not any kind of a deal breaker. Alert, awake, and active. James Luther Adams, a Unitarian theologian, wrote extensively about his concern about American Facism. One of the most effective ways to stand against it is to be active in voluntary organizations, to band together with people of like values (the way we are doing this morning) and to be active in grass-roots lobbying (which we are doing on Feb 15?) knocking on doors, helping good candidates run for local offices.

How do we have the strength to move away from our fear? Spiritual practice. Building a sturdy spirit. We are talking today about the 8- fold path of Buddhism. It teaches how to be a person who does the right thing.

Right action is the name of this element, one of the three that talks about ethical behavior. Last month we talked about right speech, this month is right action, and next month will be right livelihood.

The reason to act rightly is not to avoid some hell in the afterlife, but to have a good happy life while you’re here.

Buddhist teacher Eric Kolvig says “Basically, we do our spiritual practice (meditation and ethical behavior) in all of its aspects to achieve two things: to achieve a clear mind-that is, to achieve wisdom; and to achieve an open heart-that is, to achieve love and compassion.”

The Buddha gave five precepts with which to experiment. If you live according to the five precepts of right action, you will be giving a gift to yourself and to the world, as you add good to the world. These are not commandments; they are trainings for setting the heart free from suffering and pain. Buddhists say “please don’t believe what I say. Try it for yourself and see what happens.”

We do the right thing in order to be joyful and free. We do it as a gift to the world, and so that we will be safe for people to be around. So many people in this world will steal, lie, rape, hit, babble, yell, hurt. If we are non-harming in our lives, we create a space of safety. If each one of us in this room held open a space of safety, think how much better this world would be. We all can be non-harming when we are well rested, well fed, with gas in the tank and money in the bank. It’s when life takes a spin that we get mean. Practice, spiritual practice, is to strengthen us so that no matter what happens we can find joy and peace.

So we take the right action. If we don’t know what that is in the large sense, we do the next right thing.

How do you know what the right thing to do is? You listen to the wisdom inside you. What does that little voice say? You ask how would you feel if someone did it to you. You ask is it fair, is it harmful to me or to others? How will you feel about yourself and about the world later if you do it?

We soulful Unitarian Universalists pay attention to our actions, asking two simple questions: “What am I doing?” “Why am I doing it?” If you give away some things or some money, I hope it sets you free and makes you happy, if you make amends to someone you have hurt, or let resentments go toward someone who has hurt you, I hope that sets you free and makes you happy. May you be blessed. May you be forgiven, may you be joyful. May it be so.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 13, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our third UU principle says we will affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. Are there some ways to encourage one another that don’t sound like judgment or advice?

Sermon

There was a big election upset. “Upset” is how many of us feel. Sad, sick, shaken. Angry. Blaming people who didn’t vote, regretting not working harder, for believing pollsters and pundits. Many of us broke up with the news for a while, broke up with social media, cynical about anyone’s explanations of why and how this happened. They didn’t know squat before the election. Why listen to them now. Upset.

And here come the holidays, family time. Some stay with chosen family during those times (we’re having Thanksgiving dinner here at 2:30 on the day, but others go to the family they were born or adopted into. For most of us, there are people we will see who would say they love us, but who voted for someone whose policies and promises threaten us and our beloveds.

Do we beg off this season? Do we say we just have too much going on or do we tell the truth, that we have not yet figured out how to sit at a table and eat with people who actively participated in bringing about a situation in which we or our beloveds are suddenly endangered, vulnerable? Did they just want change so badly that they were willing to shrug off our fears as unfounded? Would they shrug off stories of bullying’s escalation, of hate crimes increasing? Would they shake their heads and say “not all Trump supporters?” They would never beat up someone. If they saw a person of color thrown to the ground by a white man, would they interfere? If it were a police officer would they start filming? If they went into their kids’ school and saw a kid with brown skin crying because someone just told her to go back to Mexico, or because her best uncle just got deported, would they shrug and say well, you don’t have a country if you don’t have borders? They have shrugged off a cascade of racist statements and stances, the discovery of a confession of sexual assault (yes, grabbing a woman’s private places is a sexual assault,) they have shrugged off or explained away mysterious finances, possible ties to an enemy power, made it clear that we queer folks, brown and black folks, women and children don’t deserve protection as much as they deserve— what? Survival is how some Trump voters see it. They need jobs and they feel forgotten (because they have been) and they feel endangered. In most rural parts of the country, there is no liberal news channel. Maybe they’ll get CNN, but mostly they get Fox. Fox facts are the only facts they hear. They want to feel safer, and they made a choice to dismiss and shrug away the dangers staring the rest of us in the face. That’s hard to understand and forgive. Also, I could be wrong. They may not want to feel safer. They may also not want to change their picture of what an American looks like. Or they may just want someone in charge who is a Big Daddy, and will tell them he’s got this, don’t worry any more.

Some white folks are claiming to be so surprised, shocked at the glimpse of the America they’ve just seen. They had NO IDEA it was this bad. No person of color is shocked or stunned. It was part of a sleepy and thoughtless privilege to remain unaware of the racism and the deep-rooted sexism in our culture. Now they’ll say “Oh, it’s not that bad.” And it won’t be bad for a lot of us. It will continue to be bad and worse for women, who are already hearing coarse men “joking” about grabbing their private places. What we have learned is that people who say they love us are willing to shrug, to excuse, to blame it on God or their preacher, to minimize our fear and wave away our concerns. The Mike Pence headshake with downcast eyes and dismissive chuckle is going to become the gesture of art in conversation.

How do we talk to those we love, those who claim to love us, when they have chosen to vote for “change,” (the kindest word I can find for this conflagration of American Constitutional values)

What we know is that it’s going to be really difficult. Awkward at its very best. I’ll tell you what I know today, and that’s the best I can do.

We go BACK TO BASICS when things get bad. That’s what we do. Our UU basics are our principles. The third one, the one I was scheduled to talk about today, turns out to be perfect for this problem. We covenant together to affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. You all know that I like to say “in our homes and congregations,” so here we go.

Acceptance of one another means acceptance of the people who have different ideas from ours. Acceptance of the people does not mean or even imply acceptance of all of their ideas, because some ideas are destructive, and lead to injustice. We accept the people, though. I accept that you are who you are, and I trust that you will be you. I may need to protect myself or others from you. I may need to limit what I talk to you about, but I accept that you are who you are. That’s being a Unitarian Universalist. What is this “encouragement to spiritual growth” part, though? Well, spiritual growth is where you get clear about your values, and you live those values, so your spirit’s water runs clear and doesn’t hurt anyone downstream. Do we encourage spiritual growth through argument? I imagine there are some people who have grown through being harangued or shamed, but not many. People grow spiritually when we feel a dissonance between our values and our actions, and when we can deal with that dissonance in an atmosphere of curiosity and respect. Not safety, necessarily. Change is hard. No comfort, but curiosity and respect.

1. Figure out what you want for you, what you want for them, and what you want for the relationship. That’s what the Crucial Conversations people suggest. 2. Listen deeply. Listen with focus, suffused with curiosity, until you can almost see how they got there. That’s what the FBI hostage negotiators suggest when you’re trying to get someone rigid with certainty and grievance to put down their weapon and come out peacefully.

3. Give your own internal “weather report.” No one can argue with you saying “I feel afraid for my people who are black, brown, undocumented, queer, differently abled. I am sick and sad, and watchful for signs of autocracy. I love this country whether it’s right or wrong, and that means that sometimes it’s wrong. I believe it’s wrong now. And I love you, even though I’m hurt by your actions right now.”

4. Don’t despair. This may sound harsh, but that is a privileged response. Folks in marginalized communities and populations have been struggling forever. There is life and joy in the midst of struggle. Just because there is a struggle doesn’t mean you did something wrong. Not everything can be fixed. Life is struggle, and we can’t afford to give up.

5. Resist at every turn. The time to be nice and silent is not now. We don’t argue and shame individuals, but public policies, actions of the government, contempt for the press or the judiciary? We lobby. We write letters, we make noise. Those of us who are disruptors disrupt, and those who want the power of respectability, use that power for good.

6. One thing people are doing to indicate that they are protectors, safe spaces, is to wear safety pins on their clothing. We have boxes of them in the Gallery at the Social Action table. BUT. Here’s what it means when you put it on. You are willing to get next to a brown or black or Muslim person at a bus stop if you see them being harassed. It means you have looked online to see how to deescalate a potentially violent situation. We don’t want to make things worse. It means you will take the time to find out how to get that person to safety. If you have your kids with you you may want to take it off, if you don’t want them involved in such a situation. If you are feeling rushed and committed or weak and weird that day, you can take it off. People are wearing them, not to signify that they are a perfect ally, but to signify that they want to get there, and that they are actively seeking out training in order to be a good ally. We don’t wear them because all the cool kids are doing it, or because we feel guilty about the racist comments we didn’t challenge in order to keep things sweet on the surface.

7. Challenge. A good long stare is sometimes enough. A full minute of silence, count it off in your head. You haven’t said anything, you can’t be kicked out of the family or friend group, but the Dowager Countess face with a full minute of silence will go far. Let’s practice that now.

8. Engage by asking questions. Questions are powerful. Most of your ministers have preached sermons about asking good questions. “Help me understand this.” “How did you come to this view?” “What is your favorite thing about this?” “Do you have any concerns about this?” I wrote a whole sermon about asking questions that should be on our podcast somewhere. Watch Van Jones’ The Messy Truth videos. He is a Black man, a commentator on CNN, he spoke at General Assembly a few years ago. He gets in a room with a politically and racially mixed group and engages with such strength and kindness until he gets to the common values people can agree on. So we can build on strengths instead of clawing at differences.

9. We cannot afford to be squeamish here. We cannot be separatists. If you don’t have the spiritual strength to get in there and find common ground with people, that’s how it is, but if you do, you can build on people’s strengths, on their values. Van Jones as filmed some conversations of himself doing this in mixed political groups. He searches underneath the facts and talking points for someone’s vision of how things should be. Maybe we can ask people about the world they think should be. Maybe we can say “what is your vision of a fair country?”

There are loud and scary people in this country with varying points of view. Some of the loudest, scariest people who used to be dismissed as being fringe elements have just won the right to occupy the White House. If we talk to our friends and relatives who were Trump voters, if we find shared values with those regular people, we strengthen them and ourselves for times of trouble. Most of them don’t want to see hate crimes. They don’t want to see school children bullied. If we can all agree on that, that’s something. Most of us, after eighteen months of the most astonishingly vulgar and shocking campaign rhetoric, feel battered, wounded. Many of us are triggered and traumatized by having a loud verbally and sexually aggressive insecure narcissist in our peripheral vision for a long time, representing the loud aggressive bullying man in our past experience. Many among us do not have the strength yet to do anything like have a curious conversation with Trump supporters. Those among us who do, though, need to strengthen alliances. Things will go badly for the asylum seekers first, and those are our people. Then they will go badly for the undocumented men and women, boys and girls. People of color, poor people, women, gay women, gay men, then men who disagree with those in power. I hope none of that happens, but we are watching. We are watching for how the press is being treated, and it’s not starting in any kind of a reassuring way. This is not up to anyone else, my people. We must train ourselves to be the safe ones. You can wear safety pins to designate yourself as a safe person for Muslims, people of color and the undocumented. If you wear them, though, be sure to know that it means you have some knowledge of what to do in a situation where you’re needed. Whom to call, where to drive someone to, which agencies can be of help. We don’t wear safety pins because we would like to be competent allies, but because we are becoming competent allies. May that be so, more and more.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 6, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In the third strand of the Noble Eight-Fold Path, the Buddha recommends that we abstain from lying, divisive speech, abusive speech, and idle chatter. How might we do this?

We gather this morning on the Sunday before a Presidential campaign which has broken all recent records for vulgarity and nastiness. Well, there was the election of 1828, where Adams’ camp called Andrew Jackson a slave-trading, brawling murderer. This was ugly, but no one could much quibble, as it was all true. Jackson’s people said Adams was visiting with his wife before she was divorced, and that, as ambassador to Russia he had procured an American working girl for Alexander 1. The one that takes the prize for me was when, in 1800, the Federalists let it be known far and wide that the Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson, was dead. That was a rank exaggeration. It’s been bad lately. I don’t mean to make light of it. The fabric of our culture is showing the wear. The Buddha said Right Speech entails “Abstaining from lying, abstaining from divisive speech, abstaining from abusive speech, abstaining from idle chatter.” Buddhist teachers as you to wonder whether something you are about to say is true, and whether it is useful.

When we lie, we damage the bond between people. If you lie people don’t know who you are. Our interactions with one another are founded on steady ground between us. It’s strongest when I know you are telling me truth as far as you can, and I’m telling you truth. Lying makes us all sick, the one who lies, and the one who is lied to. We live in a culture of speech. All around us is talking. We read emails and ads and we watch TV and we talk to one another. Almost all ads are lies; almost all TV is lies of one sort or another. To say you will do something and then not follow through is a lie. I’m guilty of that one. Doing what you say you will do makes more happiness and less suffering. To find someone who speaks the truth to us is a treasure. To be a person who speaks the truth will make you a treasure.

Let me say something here. Buddhist teacher Eric Kolvig points out that the Buddha didn’t say “if you lie, you’re a bad person.” Buddhism is not a path of morality, of good and bad. It is a path of noticing, becoming aware. Instead of “good” and “bad,” there is “harmful, increasing the suffering in the world,” and “not harmful,” increasing peace in the world.” Everyone wants to be happy. Almost everyone. The eight-fold path: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration, is the way to freedom from suffering, to peace of mind and happiness. If you notice yourself lying, don’t beat yourself up, don’t wallow in the delicious drama of being a bad person, just notice and gently wonder “What would this situation be like if I were to speak more truthfully?” One of my teachers, Wendy Palmer, writes that Wondering is so much more effective than trying.

Abstaining from “divisive speech” is the next element of right speech. What is that? It’s anything that drives a wedge between us. If I gossip about her (over there) to you (over there) even if it’s true, then you know something about her that she doesn’t know you know, and you have to not let her know that you know it. If the connection between the two of you is like a road, it becomes difficult to travel a road with that big a boulder sitting in the middle of it. In one of the books I read this week, Rabbi Stephen Wylen says we shouldn’t say things that lower another in the estimation of one with whom you are speaking, unless you are giving a factual warning about someone to prevent harm or loss, and you do that with doubt, like “I don’t know if this person has changed, but he was abusive to his last wife, so you may want to keep your guard up for a while if you go out with him.” In our congregational behavioral covenant, we agree to “limit disagreements to the individuals or groups directly involved.” This prevents divisive talking as folks gather support in the wider community for their side of a conflict. We have seen so much divisive speech in this cycle, categorizing groups of people and painting them as criminal, lazy, stupid, weak. We look at each other and are almost repulsed “HOW could they be so…?” Anything that turns it into “us” and “them” is divisive. We wil hardly ever succeed in including everyone when we say “us,” but we can wonder what the world would be if we did that.

It could be that just talking about someone who isn’t there can be divisive. The Buddhist teachers I read all talked about becoming mindful of talking about an absent third party. Not that it’s always harmful, but it often is, so it’s an interesting exercise to become aware of doing it.

Other teachers say talking about one another builds community. We drop interesting tidbits about other people that help others see how amazing they are.

The third element in the Buddha’s teaching about right speech is that we refrain from abusive speech. It makes us sick to heap abuse on other people, and it’s likely that we talk to ourselves that same way. That makes us sick for sure. So many hear abusive speech as children, and it sticks in your heart and begins to shout at you in your own voice. When people speak to you abusively, it tells you much more about them than it does about you. They are hurting, they are poisoned, and they can’t even see you clearly, much less speak to you in a way that is about you.

Sometimes we are tempted to tell the truth in a way that is abusive — just to let someone have it. Even when what we’re saying is true, if we using the truth as a weapon against someone, it can do harm. Hard truths should be said in love. Gently. With respect. With the willingness for the hard truths about yourself to be told as well.

The last element of Right Speech, according to the Buddha’s teaching is abstaining from “”Idle chatter.” Well, like they say, “Now you’ve quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin.” I read a story about a man who decided he wouldn’t speak if it weren’t necessary, and he was silent for the next thirteen years. That made me mad. How do you decide what’s necessary? Telling your partner you love them every day at least once is necessary, in my opinion. It’s not a situation where you can say “Honey, I told you I love you when we got together and I’ll let you know if anything changes.” Asking someone how their day was is relationship strengthening. Is it necessary? Maybe that silent man wasn’t in any relationship. Maybe he didn’t even have a dog, or a friend. How do you decide what’s “idle chatter?” Humph. Well, I know it when I hear it.

The Talmud says God spoke to the tongue and said “all the other parts of the body I have made standing up, but you I have made lying down, and I have built walls around you.” The word is powerful. It can create and it can destroy. Choose to create. Your inner wisdom will guide you. Silence

The wise man in the teaching story said he had decided never again to utter an unnecessary word. He was silent for the next twelve years. The story didn’t say what persuaded the wise man to break his silence. I think that would have been important information. When the story was done, I felt mad. Yes, mad. I do understand the beauty and the power of silence. In conversations with clients, with my children, with parishioners, I stay silent sometimes as a way to give them space to figure things out on their own, and oftentimes they do. In my office I have a carved wooden mask of a woman’s face, and she is holding one finger up to her lips. She reminds me to say less. Sometimes that works.

Why did the teaching story make me so mad? I guess because it was teaching that you shouldn’t say unnecessary words. What makes a word necessary? I have done couples counseling for nearly twenty years now, and silence does as much damage to a relationship as hard words. Sweet words strengthen the bond between people. We need to hear that we are loved, that we look good, that we did a great job, that we are appreciated. Those are necessary words. I have known people who starved to death emotionally in relationships where their partners didn’t believe in saying unnecessary words. Some folks think the only thing talking is good for is to exchange information or to give advice. You say, “talk to me about your day,” and they say “It’s nothing you haven’t heard before. No new information.” You say “Tell me how you feel.” and they answer, “It wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t fix the situation.”

Stories that families tell carry history and identity. Stories friends tell to one another, on one another, create bonds and memories that can support a life when it’s sagging. I was on the phone with my sister last night. Our beloved friend Pat Jobe visited them last month in Texas; he and his seven year old son spent the day. Now, Pat’s a talker, and so is his boy, and so is my brother in law. My sisters children are now telling Pat stories, imitating his voice as they remember lines from his stories. Their family was fed by the lack of silence. They have enough to go on now for months, just from that one day. They tell his stories back to me. One day at a party he was telling a woman that he was jealous of Charles Burgin because “Charles is better looking than me, richer than me, he’s more successful than me and he’s funnier than me.” The woman said “Oh, Pat, he’s not funnier than you.” Last night on the phone my sister had to give the receiver to her eight year old daughter so she could deliver the punch line to me. Her little girl voice said, in a dead-on Forest City NC accent. “OH Pat, he’s not FUNNIER than you!”

I want to say to that silent wise man: “Mr. wise man, I hope you are not in a relationship, and I hope you don’t have any children, and I hope you don’t have any friends, because, if you are, shame on you for not thinking it necessary every day to say “I love you,” or “How are you?” or “Tell me your day.” I hope you live in a hermitage far away from folks who need you or love you, maybe with one very understanding cat and I hope you pat her.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 30, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As we approach Halloween, All Saints and All Souls days, we might think about which ancestors we would choose to honor, and what actions we could take to honor them.

During the time of meditation we called out the names of those we have lost. The Celtic tradition says that the veil between the worlds of the dead and the living are thin at this time. In the Mexican/Aztec tradition, these are the days to celebrate the death of innocent babies and little children, then the next day, adults who have died. The Roman Catholic church delineates All Saints Day on Nov 1, and then All Souls Day on the 2nd.

This is a good time of year to honor those who have gone before us. Do we want to be just like them? No, we are each a unique self, and not to be the best of who we are dishonors the creative force. Do we search our ancestors to find something of ourselves? Of course.

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.”
– Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

Some people use Ancestry.com, others do the mitochondrial DNA testing where you swab your cheek and send it off in the mail. Everyone has ancestors, whether they were the ones who raised you or not. They are part of you.

I’ve told you some family stories, mostly about the Southerners on my mother’s side. I want to start by telling you about my dad’s aunt Neoskaleeta this morning. She was the oldest of three children, born in Huntingdon, PA to Rev. and Mrs. Tiffany. We don’t know why, but there in the 1890’s, they named their daughters, Mary Neolskaleeta and one Ruth Winureeta Tiffany. Local Native names. Ruth Tiffany was my grandmother, and Aunt Neosk found “Mary” to be dull and always went by Neoskaleeta, or Neosk. She had an illness as a child, maybe scarlet fever, and her hair fell out. When it grew back in, it was flaming red. She was argumentative, in contrast to her sweet sister, rebellious, and willful. In high school, when she declared she wanted to be a doctor, the principal told her that was out of range for a girl, but she could become a nurse. She went away to college, then medical school, got her diploma, rode back into Huntingdon on a motorcycle, went to the high school, and smacked the diploma down on the Principal’s desk.

She moved to Bahrain to be a doctor and married a man who worked for Standard Oil. A family story says that one day, men on horseback brandishing swords came and demanded she go with them. A sheik’s favorite wife was having trouble in childbirth. He wouldn’t have a male doctor look at her, and he’d heard there was a woman doctor in that town and went to fetch her. After hours long travel, she met with the sheik. If you save my wife, and if she has a daughter, I will pay you this much. If you save her and she has a son, it will be this much more. If she dies, you can find your way home across the desert alone. She saved the woman, who had a son, and the sheik gave her a back of gold and jewels. She gave those jewels to her children and grandchildren one at a time over the years. That’s what I hear. My grandmother, Ruth, married the preacher. He was a towering figure in the US during the twenties, thirties, and forties and fifties. They still sell his books in Christian book stores, I’m glad they are all part of me, but it’s Neoskaleeta I’m going to invite to sit down at the table with my inner committee. Do you have an inner committee? Who is on it? Any ancestors?.

This morning I want to tell you about some of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors.

Who will we want to emulate? A Universalist preacher named Hosea Ballou? 1796-1852 The “family” stories about him: “Hosea Ballou, another Universalist once found himself sharing a carriage with a minister from another denomination, someone who believed very much in hell and damnation. Midway through their ride, the fellow asked him: “Could it be that you are Hosea Ballou, the infamous Universalist preacher?” Hosea admitted with pride to being who he was, and this other minister began to question him about his beliefs.

“So you do not believe in the existence of hell?”
“No.”
“Not even for the punishment of truly heinous crimes?”
“No.”
“Not even when you imagine that you yourself could be the victim of such a crime? Can you not conceive of a space in hell for someone who harmed you personally?”
“I cannot conceive of any place in hell, friend, for it does not exist.” Finally, exasperated and upset, the man asked Hosea, “Am I to understand then that if I were a Universalist, there would be nothing to stop me from killing you and the driver and making off into the night with this carriage?” And Hosea replied, “No, sir. If you were a Universalist, the thought of doing so would not have occurred to you.”

Another time a father came to him, concerned for the eternal soul of his son, who was always in the bars, partying and making bad choices. Please talk to him, pastor! He begged.
YES, let’s go build a fire outside the bar, and we’ll drag him out of the bar and throw him in it!
The father was horrified. “Why would I do that to my son?”
Ballou nodded. Why indeed, and are you a better parent than God?

There is Theodore Parker, a Transcendentalist Unitarian minister who founded a Vigilance Committee to get in the way of the slave catchers who came to Boston to kidnap men and women who had escaped slavery and drag them back South. He was a fiery abolitionist, and had an integrated congregation. He was constant about reminding people about the Black activists and soldiers who helped with the Revolutionary War. He wrote a letter to President Millard Filmore, another Unitarian forbear, which said There hangs in my study . . . the gun my grandfather fought with at the battle of Lexington… and also the musket he captured from a British soldier on that day,” Parker wrote in his letter to President Fillmore. “If I would not peril my property, my liberty, nay my life to keep my parishioners out of slavery, then I should throw away these trophies, and should think I was the son of some coward and not a brave man’s child.” Millard Filmore thought he was doing the best thing for the Union, signing the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave-catchers to come north and snatch people. The new law also required all private free citizens to assist in the capture of those who had escaped. The members of the Vigilance Committee followed the slave catchers, harassed them, got in their way in many ways. They saved the lives of the men and women on the slave catchers’ list.

Margaret Fuller is one of the most dramatic female forbears. Her life is like an opera. She was born to a Unitarian family, educated in Latin, math, writing. She was a frequent visitor to the Emerson’s home, and a conversational adversary to him. Rumor has it that he had a great crush on her, but we don’t know if there was anything between them. She became a foreign correspondent for Horace Greely’s paper, the NY Tribune, He sent her to London to cover the literary world, but she became passionate about the Italian revolution, and went to Italy to cover the revolution there. Before this, war news was written by soldiers, and involved stories of battles and strategy. She wrote about the French bombardment of Italian citizens, and her stories held the human interest that war stories hadn’t included before that. She met an Italian Count, and they had a baby. Maybe tney weren’t married. She was advised not to come back to New England with a love child and an Italian Count, but they set sail. Caught in a storm, the ship was battered by waves and began to fall apart within plain sight of shore. A sailor said “I think I can make it, hand me the baby!” He strapped the baby to himself and dived in. They both drowned immediately. She stood on the deck as people on the shore watched in horror, her white night gown and her dark hair whipping in the wind, as the ship broke apart, its wooden hull battered from within by a giant marble bust of John C Calhoun being delivered to from Italy.

We are going to be ancestors ourselves. Whose story guides us? What family traditions do we carry on, consciously or unconsciously? What stories do we want told about us by our children’s children’s children? Do we sometimes do the wrong thing for reasons which seem sensible to us, as Millard Filmore did? Did we strain our relationships for the sake of justice or authenticity? Did we flout convention or do we live within the mores of a community to build trusting relationships or did they find a way to do both?

We can get guidance from the lives of those who have gone before us. No one is without flaws. No one is superhuman. Sometimes I color part of my hair red to honor Neoskaleeta, her intelligence and courage. I preach because that’s who I am, and I hope it honors all the preachers I come from. We are grateful to be here. We are grateful to be here together.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 23, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

When making a decision, the 10-10-10 rule is used to think about where you’ll be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years after the choice. Similarly, the second strand of the Buddhist Eightfold Path is sometimes translated as right intention.

Call to Worship
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

Sermon

The meditation reading was from Emerson, and he said what you believe about life shapes what you think about. What you think about shapes your actions. Your actions shape your work, your relationships, your whole life.

Buddhist teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi says The Buddha talked about two kinds of thoughts: those that lead to happiness and those that lead to pain. The ones leading to pain are thoughts of desire and greed, thoughts of ill will, and thoughts that lead to harmful actions. Those that lead to happiness are thoughts of contentment, thoughts of good will, and kind thoughts that lead to non-harming. Happiness will follow that person like a shadow, always there. For the person who thinks greedy, hateful, vengeful thoughts, pain follows like a cart follows the ox who is pulling it. Does happiness shadow you wherever you go, or do messed up situations lumber behind you like a cart on wobbly wheels? The first strand of the path was “right understanding, “or “right view.” Your right view of existence affects the things you care about, it affects where you put your focus, your habits of attention. The right view, or right understanding we talked about last month is the realization that life is full of suffering. Suffering is caused by desire. If you could let go of desire you lose your suffering. Not your pain, because pain comes with life in a body, but your suffering over your pain, the stories you tell yourself about your pain. The eightfold path of wise thought and action is the way to move yourself toward happiness. The teaching assumes that we want to be happy. It’s not wrong to want happiness, to aim for freedom from suffering.

Buddhism invites you to make three intentions, which I’ll tell you in a few minutes. First let’s try to look at the intentions currently guiding us. Emerson says you already have intentions that permeate your life. Do you want to be loved above all else? Do you want to be beautiful? The smartest? Powerful? Secure? Admired? Helpful? Do you want to leave the world a better place than you found it?

What are the stars you steer by? If you were to make a circle and pretend it was a compass, what one word would be at each compass point?

Martha Beck writes, in her book Steering By Starlight, that to find your real desires, you should ask yourself “what then?” questions about them. Say you want your business to succeed. Why? You would be respected. What then? Your dad will finally give you his blessing. What then? You can stop feeling like a failure. Odds are there is another way to stop feeling like a failure, because that feeling is inside you, not somewhere external. You want your business to succeed so you can have money. What then? You would feel secure. What then? You could stop feeling afraid. Is there another way to stop fear? Say you want a baby. What then? You would feel loved. Is that the way to get there? Maybe yes and maybe no, but it’s a hard job for a kid to be born to fill a hole in an adult. Is joy on your compass anywhere? Contentment? Think all the way out into the future, and imagine the feeling you want to have about your life.

Susy Welch, a business writer with a demanding job, a marriage and school aged children, talks about thinking out into the future in this way. She came up with a way to make decisions in her overwhelmed, information drenched, demand-crunched life. Should I say yes to the Saturday meeting the boss wants me to lead, which will be a huge plus in my column when it comes to promotion time, or should I say no to the meeting and go to my son’s black belt test? She asked herself this question: what would each course of action bring into my life in 10 minutes, 10 months or 10 years? I0 minutes from now her boss would be happy and her son would be crushed. 10 months from now her job would still be full of opportunities and her son would have a tangible memory of her love and support. In 10 years he would be looking for a relationship with someone who was not an out of control work-a-holic, and he would be confident that he was number one with her. That’s the decision she made. OR, and this is my contrariness, in 10 minutes her son would be happy and her boss would be disappointed, in 10 months she could be looking at someone else in the job she had coveted, and her kids would have had plenty of chances to feel her love, and if she had given up the meeting her son wouldn’t have grasped the sacrifice she’d made, and in 10 years he’d be looking for someone whose world revolved around him and he’d have unreasonable expectations.

I think the 10 10 10 works for decisions like “do I really want to go to the gym today?” In 10 minutes you’ll feel virtuous, but maybe whiny about missing a nap. In 10 months you’ll be stronger and maybe grow addicted to the gym. In 10 years it’ll be so much a part of your life that you don’t even look at it as a decision any more.

I think the 10 10 10 is a fun way of considering choices, and that the most useful part of it is the 10 year thinking. In order to think that far out you have to know what you’re aiming for. You need to have hold of your core values, you want to be squinting into your spyglass at the star on the horizon by which to steer.

Remember the three intentions the Buddha recommends? Here they are. First, you understand that greed, craving, and desire cause fear and suffering, so you make an intention to renounce desire. Second, you intend to have good will toward all beings. Third, you make an intention to do no harm. These intentions cure fear and suffering. They move you toward freedom and joy. Intend to have good will towards all beings. Intend to do no harm. You still might get fired, get sick, go broke, lose a child to illness, violence or accident. Life holds both beauties and horrors. Your intention is like a rope you’ve fixed along the way to your goal, and you can grab hold of that rope when conditions get rough. An intention forms your thoughts and gives rise to your actions. It’s not a feeling, or a hope, it’s a plan of action. Scarlett O’Hara set her intention on her knees in a field with the sunset behind her “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” That intention shaped her decisions, for good or ill, for the rest of her life – uh – for the rest of the movie. Some of us set intentions very early in life that shape the person we become: “I will find security.” “I will not be around anger.” “I won’t try – it just sets me up for failure.” “I will never be hurt again, so I just won’t get attached to anyone or hope for anything.”

Marilyn Monroe said “I just want to be wonderful.” There is an intention that can shape a life.

To be content, as the Buddha said, and Suzy Welch came up with later, is that you look a couple of steps ahead of your desires. If you want to drink yourself to sleep every night, you think about what comes after that: sick feelings and a sense of having done yourself damage. If you think ahead to the feelings that will come after you act on that desire, the Buddha says, you don’t have to repress the desire. Everyone has always known that repressing desires doesn’t work very well at all. Thinking it through sometimes can. When you think it all the way through, the craving just falls away like autumn leaves from a tree. If you want to have an affair, you think two or three steps ahead to the chaos and insanity that will likely come into your life because of that. If you want to change relationships, you certainly can. Just don’t sit in one thing and hope for another thing. Clarity works to diminish the desire. Be content with where you are, or think what needs to change and change it.

If we have the intention to be content, we practice being content. We are grateful for what we have. We take care of where we are, the things we have, the people we have in our lives.

If we intend to have good will, we practice letting go of resentments. That’s hard, and fortunately there is magic to help you. That magic is called the resentment prayer, where you pray for a person to have everything in their life that you want in yours. So you would pray for your mother in law to have peace of mind, financial security, good health, etc. In Buddhism it’s called the metta, or loving kindness prayer, and you don’t have to believe in it or even mean it at first, you just try it.

If we intend harmlessness, for some of us that means we give up doing wrong to people. For others, it might mean giving up violent thoughts, for others it might lead them to eat in a vegan way, the way of most compassion and the least harm. What does it mean for you? Take the steps that feel natural, that feel like a call, that feel like a move toward freedom and joy. So it’s little by little. Contentment and peace rather than agitation and anger. It takes practice, practice, practice.

Notice what intention has been guiding your life. It works like a mission statement. Wonder to yourself how it has shaped your experiences and wonder ( so much better than making a resolution) what your life would be like if you intended to be content, do no harm, to have good will toward all beings.

“Be a lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.” –Rumi

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 9, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer, “We Must be Saved,” he talks about what makes us whole as we try to do right in the context of history. Rev. Meg explores the beautiful complexity of this poem.

Prayer

We Must be Saved 
by Reinhold Niebuhr

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
Therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous,
can be accomplished alone;
Therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous
from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love
which is forgiveness.

Sermon

These are the Days of Awe, celebrated by those among us with Jewish roots. Rosh Hashanna was October 3 and 4, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. Yom Kippur starts Tuesday evening and ends Wednesday evening. Observance of this holiday includes fasting from sundown Tuesday until nightfall Wednesday. Repentance from wrongs you have done, asking for forgiveness from those you have wronged, and gratitude for being pardoned are at the heart of this holy day.

Last Sunday you heard Susan speak about Rosh Hashannah, about new beginnings. Today I would like to continue by talking about the story that is traditionally read right at the beginning of these “Days of Awe.” It is the story of Abram (later given the name Abraham)Sarai (later given the name Sarah) and Hagar. The story in the Bible, written and later edited by the Jews, has a different perspective and emphasis that the story in the Quran. You know that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (named in order of their appearance) are called the Abrahamic Religions, as they share the same stories of their history.

In the Bible, which contains the Jewish version of the story, Abram has had a vision where he was promised that his children would be as many as the stars in the night sky. Time passes and his wife Sarai does not conceive, so she arranges for her handmaiden, Hagar, to lie with her husband, and she will bear a child by him. As soon as Hagar knows she is pregnant, she begins to look upon Sarai with contempt. Sarai is hurt and angry, and begins to treat Hagar cruelly. Hagar runs away, and an angel finds her by a spring and tells her to go back and submit to her mistress, and her son will be the father of great nations. He will be a wild donkey of a man, the angel says (the Jews say the angel says, about the forbear of the Arab nations, and his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand will be against him, and he will live in opposition to all his kinfolk. She goes back. The angel comes back to Abram and Sarai, and says they will have a child by the next year. He changes their names to Abraham and Sarah. After their child Isaac is born, Sarah is jealous of Ishmael, and makes Abraham send them out into the desert again. He sends them with a little skin of water, but it’s not enough, and they are near dying of thirst. They are both crying, and God hears them and shows her a well where she gets water. Ishmael grows up in the desert and becomes and expert archer.

In the Muslim version, Hagar is the daughter of an Egyptian king who has been given to Ibrahim as a second wife. She bears her son, Ismael, and Sarai is jealous. She makes Ibrahim take his second wife and child to a desert valley and leave them there, telling them God will care for them. They almost die of thirst, and Hagar runs back and forth between two hills looking for water. Finally God causes a spring to flow from the ground, and they are saved. Ruth Behar, and anthropologist and Jewish scholar, guesses that this terrible story was chosen to open the days of repentance and reconciliation because everyone in the story is at fault. Sarai was cruel and jealous, Hagar was unwise to treat her mistress, or the first wife with contempt, and Ibrahim was the miserable dad caught between two feuding family members. It is fitting that we see that each of us contributes in a way to whatever misery in which we find ourselves. There is almost always a way we could have done better, and it is good to see that before you ask for forgiveness.

You can see how different points of view spin a story in different ways. In the Muslim world, Hagar is an Egyptian princess, a godly woman of faith whose son was the father of the Adnan Arabs. Ibrahim was a faithful father who traveled between his two households, loving both sons and both wives. In the Jewish story she was an arrogant and unwise brat who trash-talked her mistress and gave birth to a wild donkey of a son. What can you expect from our distant cousins, these Arabs, who descend from a wild donkey of a man? His hand is always raised against others and the hand of others is always raised against him. How many of you have family members, at the level of first cousin or closer, who don’t speak because of a conflict? Do you think the stories each side tells about what happened are different?

What if Sarah had apologized for her cruelty? What if Hagar had apologized for her contempt? What if they could have done what was best for the family, for Isaac and Ismael? What might the rippling after-effects of such apologies have been? What would forgiveness in that family done for the world? Repentance and forgiveness are what this season is about for Judaism, which is one of the sources of our UU faith.

We have seen a Presidential candidate apologize recently. Once a couple of months ago, the kind of apology that is not an apology, where you say “If I did something that hurt some people, I’m sorry

An apology with “I’m sorry if….” in it is thin gruel, and will not nourish any relationship. The one Saturday morning was better. “I said it. I was wrong, and I apologize.” That’s more like it. You acknowledge what you did. You acknowledge that it was wrong. You apologize.” That’s a C- apology. It’s the one we most often give and get. “I was tired. I wasn’t myself. I was worried about some other thing and it came out sideways…” The non-interactive apology. There is no asking for forgiveness. There is no validation of the hurt that was caused. There is no deep understanding of the other’s point of view. A truly great apology involvesan understanding snf sn acknowledgment of of what happened. Not only in you but in the other person. It’s not too quick. A premature apology, where you say you’re sorry and that means the other person isn’t allowed to talk any more about their feelings about what happened, is unfair and controlling. A great apology leaves room for the hurt person to talk about what it was like for them to be hurt. It validates the hurt. There is deep listening. Patience. Vulnerability. It’s as simple as saying “I can really see how that hurt you.” Then it might be good to say more about that. See if you really do see, if you do understand. A great apology has a lot of listening in it. Then there is an ask – for forgiveness. Forgiveness also takes listening. Listening until you understand another person, how they could have done what they did. Deciding whether you still want to be in relationship, and under what conditions.

Listening is one of the most healing actions in the world. It is also, as I’ve said to you before, astonishingly rare. Deep listening, I’m convinced, can not only make a great apology, it can lead to forgiveness because it leads to understanding. Deep listening can transform lives, nourish souls, and bring justice. So many people suffer from not being seen or heard. Your family, your church, is a place where you can practice the healing art of listening and forgiveness.

You could practice nourishing souls and transforming lives this very afternoon if you wanted to make a listening appointment. Some people worry that, once they start listening, they will be sucked in to a three-hour commitment. Make a container. Set a timer. Get a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend, and say “Ok, you talk for 30 min and then I’ll talk for 30 min.” When the other person is talking, you get still (this is a complicated/simple spiritual practice) open your heart (also a practice) and be present to them in the moment (also….. you get it). You don’t think about what amazing question you are going to ask them. You don’t plan your self-defense, as you are feeling criminally misunderstood. You try to receive what is the heart of this matter. What is the feeling? Mad, sad, glad? There are lists of feelings online you can print out if you would like assistance in this. You listen with love. Ask yourself how this situation would be changed if you were held in the arms of love while you listened?

Sweethearts, when you can quiet the mad buzzing of the voices in your core, the energy attached to being right, the panic at being misunderstood, the urge to tell the story of when a similar thing happened to you, when you can sink the advice that bubbles up and needs to, has to come out, then you can get still enough to really listen. This is why listening is such a rare gift. To get to this place takes practice. A good way to live our mission is to listen. This is what can change people’s minds in politics. This is what can make a hostage-taker put down his guns and give himself up. Listening is what can bring the realization of common ground between protectors of the water and people in the oil business trying to deliver the energy that modern life in our culture demands. Our Chalice Circles, which you can begin to sign up for today, are a crucible in which you can learn to listen and be listened to. If you feel you need a trained listener, please let me know and I will connect you to one of the trained listeners in the congregation. Listening can heal the world.

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Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.