The Difference Between a Church and Disneyworld

September 16, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

(This prayer’s story has much in common with today’s sermon theme. It’s the first prayer I ever wrote, back in 1982. I did my ministerial internship at a UCC/Disciples of Christ church in Hyde Park (Chicago): a very liberal and creative Christian church.

At some point, the minister told me I was to write and deliver the prayer for a coming Sunday.

“I don’t pray to things,” I said.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“Here, we pray.”

“So I’m supposed to pray to something?”

“Oh no, it will be much harder for you. You need to write something that is a prayer and feels like a prayer, but which you can say with complete integrity. This should be interesting.”

And so – please join me in an attitude of prayer:

We pray not to something,

but from something,

to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are, and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness. We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people,

those experiences,

and those transformations that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

AMEN.

SERMON: The Difference Between a Church and Disneyworld

Before talking about Disneyworld, I need to talk about chimpanzees. Last month, I repeated a version of the sermon called “Chimpanzee Politics” that I had done last spring.

What drives chimpanzee politics – and most of ours – usually boils down to selfishness, getting power and privilege for those in power, and the few allies they have in their drive to gain and keep that power.

And that’s why it’s so significant that the key sin, the fundamental human failing noted by all religions I know about is the sin of selfishness. If we’re to evolve beyond our closest relatives the chimps, we have to do it psychologically, politically and culturally, because human cultures move much faster than biological evolution can adapt to.

At their best, religions are about helping us evolve beyond chimpanzee politics. They are about expanding the sense of who we are and what we’re here to serve. This runs throughout human history, going back at least 2500 years. For Confucius, living well meant living for one’s largest sense of self, which meant that we need to see ourselves as small parts of the much larger social world, the whole society. We need to expand our sense of “self” beyond ourselves. Then we should act in ways that serve that larger self.

In Western religions, that larger horizon is called “God.” Most people use the word God as though there were a critter somewhere above the sky, a guy, a big fellow who watched, heard us, could make good or evil things happen to us, much like the god Zeus from ancient Greek religions. But that’s not honest religion, and it’s not useful.

For the best thinkers in all religious traditions, the word “God” is not the name of a critter; it’s a symbol, a symbol of that highest creative horizon we can visualize. And it doesn’t matter what we call that larger horizon – whether we call it God or something else – as long as we can call it forth, and make it present in our lives and our behaviors. That’s what we’re about here: trying to call forth that larger sense of who we are, and lure ourselves into it. That’s what all honest religion is about.

This isn’t just about liberal religion; it’s about honest religion, which is a much larger category. Here, for example, are some words from a preacher I’ve never quoted or heard of, Brother Carl Porter, an Evangelical Holiness minister from Georgia:

“God ain’t no white-bearded old man up in the sky somewhere”. He’s a spirit. He ain’t got no body”. The only body He’s got is us. Amen. Thank God.”

That’s honest religion.

As some of you know – but most of you probably don’t know – this phrase “honest religion” is an especially important phrase this fall. This past Thursday the third ad of a thirteen-week ad campaign appeared in the Austin Chronicle. The ads are about 2″ high and 5″ wide, and are very simple. The first ad had only two lines, and simply said Honest Religion www.AustinUU.org

The ads are all different, but all contain the words “Honest Religion.” Most add a third line. Last week’s was “Honest religion for skeptics,” and this week’s, in sync with the Austin City Limits music festival, is “Honest religion for music lovers.” Other ads will mention families, straights and gays, or just ask “Got honest religion?” You can usually find them in the Calendar or Arts sections. They’re meant to be provocative and witty, like you folks. But They’re also meant to remind us, and me, that honest religion is what we’re about here, in ways that not many churches can claim.

In honest religion, we have to try and say in plain words what we mean. The only way we have to evolve past our deep animal selfishness – our real “original sin” – is through imagining ourselves as small parts of a much bigger reality that empowers and commands us. And that means living to serve the highest ideals we can see and say. Theists might say this is living to serve God; and that means things like truth, beauty, justice, never doing to others what we wouldn’t want done to us.

Almost every crime, every sin in life is a sin of selfishness. The sins, the crimes, that seem to get the strongest emotional responses from us are sins of betrayal: betrayals of trust. A business like Enron that betrays the trust of not only their stockholders, but also their employees, and cheats them. Politicians who sell out the people who elected them in return for money and privileges from the lobbyists who own and train them. Anyone who betrays the trust of the majority by using it to benefit only a small minority. These are the faces that selfishness takes in our lives, the way we still practice chimpanzee politics in our daily lives.

We feel more betrayed when people use our trust to serve themselves than in any other case, I think, because we know that this selfishness is in all of us, and our greatest commandment is the commandment to outgrow it and learn to live for, and serve, others. This is the goal of good character education. It’s also a goal of honest religion.

The difference between a church and Disneyworld.

So now we can talk about the difference between a church and Disneyworld. How many of you have been to Disneyworld? I wonder how many of you know what the four-word mission statement of Disneyworld is?

Disneyworld’s mission is “to make people happy.” To make people happy – not aware, deep, informed, caring, nuanced or responsible. Just happy. And not happy for a lifetime, or even for years. Just for a few days, leaving a happy memory. It worked for me when I spent a week there with my wife and two young stepdaughters aged 9 and 12 years ago.

A church, on the other hand, is not here “to make you happy.” You’ll find some things in a church that you’ll like, by joining groups, meeting new friends and so on. But the church isn’t here to make you happy. To put it in theological terms, a church is here to make God happy. For some of you, that statement will communicate, and will be enough. For others, it will be confusing or irritating or even useless, and you may have this mental image of something like a Cheshire Cat smile up in the sky: just the smile, nothing else: “God is happy”. It’s a pretty silly picture. But the word “God” is not the name of a Critter in the clouds. It is a religious symbol, trying to point us toward feeling a relationship, a kinship, with the creative and sustaining forces of the universe, and the highest and noblest ideals to which we should be aspiring. That’s what any honest religion will say. It isn’t about Disneyworld; it’s about this world, and our place and duty in this world.

A church is here to make God happy. A church is here to articulate, exalt and serve the highest ideals we can see and say. A church must be a kind of sacred space where these highest ideals are called forth, to help us evolve beyond the self-centered level of chimpanzee politics, and most human politics.

That doesn’t mean that everything that goes on here is religious. Most of it is not: we have parties, dinners, book discussion groups, plays, music, all sorts of things that are fun to do, that make us momentarily happy. But restaurants, book stores, theaters and clubs have those things, too. What has to be different here is that, above all the activities and groups, there is this invisible sort of umbrella we call the church, which holds those high ideals up, always. That’s what we’re trying to do in every Sunday service. It’s our mission: calling forth those highest ideals and larger horizons, and making them present to us again. There are very few places in life where you can count on finding that sanctuary for high ideals, but you can count on finding it here.

What high ideals? Maybe your family or friends wonder just what we care about, or if there is anything sacred to us as religious liberals. There is, and it is neither hidden nor fancy. They are the same high ideals that every religion worthy of the name cares about: ideals that make us feel beloved of this place, and move us to pass the love on to those around us. Though religions say this in different words – some in terms of gods, some not – there is not much variation between the high ideals of different human cultures or religions.

That’s what it means to say a church isn’t here to make you happy, but to make God happy. we’re here to call forth a kind of “voice from above”: not a voice from above the sky. That would have to be a very loud voice, yelling from that far away – it would scare the birds. But a voice from above the fray of chimpanzee politics, a voice from above our clamoring for our own needs to be met. It’s a voice saying that the answer to our self-absorbed yearnings is to grow beyond the self-absorption and to get absorbed in the work of a higher calling and broader identity. It’s about the unfinished business of evolving beyond chimpanzees and bonobos – those apes who are our closest relatives on earth – into a truly humane animal that can be a blessing to others and to the earth.

That’s what honest religion is about, regardless of its brand name.

We yearn to have something in our short existence that somehow partakes of the infinite, the eternal – or at least something good and honorable that will outlive us. We find our most satisfying identity not by shining spotlights on ourselves, but by becoming smaller parts of something larger. To put it in god-talk again, a church exists both because we need things and because God needs things. We say “God needs things” in the same way we say “Truth” needs things, or “Justice” or “Honor” need things from us.

We need to feel beloved by life, and by ourselves. We need to feel that though we’re just here a moment, something about our moment is momentous. Something about our being here is momentous. We matter tremendously. Western religion may say we’re all children of God. That’s one poetic way of putting it. Hindus may say your soul is part of the infinite and eternal forces that create, maintain and destroy everything in the universe. Buddhist may say we have a Buddha seed within us, that we suffer from the illusions we create with words, but that we can wake up, that the light of enlightenment can turn on, even in us.

That’s what honest religion is about, and what this church is about: offering a place where personal and spiritual transformation is possible. Tell your friends that, when they ask what we are all about here.

We are religious liberals because we won’t accept slogans, creeds, dogmas, rituals or mandated behaviors that come from priests, churches or traditions unless they feel honest, and they are useful to us and worthy of God – worthy of the highest we can see and say. We reject creeds and dogmas not because we don’t care, but because we care too much to settle for mediocre versions of religion. (The phrase “useful to us and worthy of God” comes from the 3rd century Christian writer Origen, in his book On First Principles, Book IV.)

There’s nothing supernatural about all this. It’s the part of our human nature we’re trying to nourish, whether you want to call it the Buddha-seed, the God-seed, or the depths of our potential to become more fully human and alive.

we’re all aware of needing to serve ideals higher than our own personal wants and needs. These are the insights and yearnings that gave birth to all of our gods.

Here’s a very simple but important example of how high ideals become a commanding presence, taken from right here in this church. This church has gone through some important changes in its culture over the past few years. It’s getting younger. If you have visited many Unitarian churches, you’ll usually find that the average age is near sixty, sometimes higher.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with our new members. About thirty were invited, I think about twenty could make it on the Tuesday night. Not one of them was over forty. The next night, I met with ten visitors at the monthly orientation meeting. Eight of them were made of four married couples, all with young children. The other two were men in their 50’s. We seem to have babies and young children everywhere. A few years ago, we had only three or four children in our middle-school program. This year we have about twenty.

For many members who have been here for ten or thirty years, this is a huge change in the church’s culture. They were used to having their circle of friends also be the effective center of the church. No more. Now they are a group among other groups. Of course this happens every so often, but that doesn’t make it less painful for people seeing a whole lot of strangers – and with over six hundred members, and over nine hundred people in the broader church community, no one here will ever know more than a fraction of the people.

If we were just chimpanzees, those members who have lost their “Alpha” status would be forming alliances and trying to gain power to turn back the hands of time, get rid of all these strangers – that’s most of you folks – and somehow try and make it feel like the church where they first found a home ten, twenty or forty years ago. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, they are finding ways to be noble people acting in noble ways, reframing their role to support a church that’s moving into the future. You may remember the lines from the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran’s great poem on children, where he says: You may give [your children] your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them,But seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

It’s wise and lovely poetry, but it isn’t easy. It hurts to see time pass when it feels like it might be passing you by. So I want you who are new to our church to notice how easy the members of this church make it for you to come in, take part, and take charge. They are the role models that you can look back to in a few years when it’s your turn to pass the torch!

But see how this is an example of how serving ideals that transcend our own personal wants are transformative, both of individuals and institutions?

Now we come to your part in all of this. It’s simple. Your part is to be here, and be present. We’ll promise honest religion for head and heart – that’s another one of the ads coming up in the ad series. I’ll try and focus each Sunday on high ideals that can transform our lives and our world, and to present them in ways that may touch you, move you, and give you something worth taking home with you. I try to make sermons both inspirational and educational. Taken together, a year’s sermons are a kind of spiritual curriculum for both your critical and your compassionate sides.

But you have to be here for it to work. Try to be here every Sunday. We could serve some of the finest spiritual meals in the world, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if you aren’t here. And if you want your children educated, they have to be here, too. It wouldn’t matter how good a religious education curriculum were if kids were absent half the time.

So come in, get active, bring your creative and constructive ideas. Add your voice. Be present. Make it your church. Take this strong healthy church and make it stronger and healthier. Make that the legacy you leave to the future here.

And support this institution financially. Discover where you belong in the range of financial giving here, and settle in. Our average pledge is about $1,400, but we have people pledging from very little to tens of thousands of dollars a year. Think about where your income level fits in here. Is it about average? Lower? Higher? Find your most responsible level of financial support, and settle into it. we’re not going to whine or beg – this is a grown-up church and You’re adults. We do expect that you will be generous and pay your way here. For those are also high ideals that help define and shape our character: supporting the institutions we believe in. So pledge something, and be generous in your pledge. It will absolutely transform the way you feel about this good church, and about yourselves.

That is what a church is finally about, and where it is most different from Disneyworld. Let’s face it: Disneyworld has better rides. But when you get off the rides, You’re about the same as you were before they took you for the ride. Church isn’t about being taken for a ride; it’s about transformation. It is about being in an atmosphere where high ideals are sacred things, and where they will rub off on you, and you may become so glad they rubbed off.