Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
(Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech words taken from Marianne Williamson)
HOMILY: Is Courage Ever Enough?
This is at least the third time in twenty years that I’ve written a sermon inspired by a famous line from Anais Nin. She said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Something about those nine words is wonderfully appealing, and seems profoundly right. You can think of times when fear made you shrink, and courage expanded you in a hundred ways:
— You were afraid to ask someone you really liked for a date, then finally got the courage to do it and now here you are.
–You were afraid to try something – trying out for a team or a play or a choir. If you never got the courage up to try, you may still wonder what you missed, how your memory of yourself might have been enlarged if you had just mustered up the courage.
— You finally applied for the school or the job you wanted, and you got it. Or even if you didn’t get it, you know you did the most you could do, and there’s comfort there: a comfort that wouldn’t be there if you’d never taken the risk.
You can multiply the list from your own life, but we can all think of times when courage absolutely seemed to expand our life, and fear shrank it.
So it’s easy to say Yes, that colorful French woman was right – life certainly does shrink and expand according to our courage.
And that word “courage” is interesting in its own right. It comes from a French word meaning “heart.” Reacting to something from the heart feels like we’re coming from a strong place, and that can expand life too, for ourselves and those whose lives we touch – because we can feel the difference.
We actually just heard a beautiful example of this a few minutes ago, in Benjamin Britten’s lovely Ceremony of Carols. There is a footnote to those carols that appears in many program notes for their performance. Besides being one of the 20th century’s great composers, Britten was also a political radical, a gay man, and a conscientious pacifist, opposed to all war. It was tougher to be those things seventy years ago. When England declared war on Germany in September 1939, Britten and his partner left England and moved to the United States. He had good success here, but two and a half years later it became a matter of principle for him to return to England. He returned home in March and April 1942, in a five-week North Atlantic crossing right in the middle of the war. Britten couldn’t have known what would happen to him on his return. He would at least be met with great hostility, and he could have been put in prison.
I can’t imagine what Britten must have felt like during the five dangerous weeks crossing the North Atlantic to return home to an England, always in danger of being sunk by German U-boats. And he wasn’t traveling in anything like first class, or any class. He was cooped up near some large machines that put out a constant roar, high temperatures, and very noxious smells. Right there is where and when he composed the Ceremony of Carols we’ve just heard. The music is so lovely and lively it sounds like it couldn’t possibly have come from that setting. But it didn’t come from the bowels of a ship; it came from his heart – his “cour,” his courage – as his decision to return home also did. Britten was finally accepted back into his country, and this composition from his heart certainly expanded his life, and the lives of thousands like us, still to come. It is a tribute to our music director Brent Baldwin’s great perspicacity that he chose that music long before I had any idea what I was going to be talking about today.
Now you can see that it would be easy to do riffs on words like “heart” and “courage” all morning. But I want to leave the surface level of those wonderful nine words and look a little deeper, because there is another level at which something is wrong with just saying that life expands in proportion to our courage. Something is wrong, something is missing, it just isn’t that simple, and I think the whole saying is backwards. Courage isn’t enough, and isn’t what really makes life expand. That’s what I want to look at this morning. In fact, I think Anais Nin missed the most important point, or just assumed a much simpler picture than life really offers.
So I want to retrace the steps that led me down this provocative path and bring you along with me.
I first started thinking about our movie superheroes, and that we really create them as people who are so strong that they don’t have to be afraid of anybody. It’s that strength that lets them always do the right thing, as we wish we could too. So we project our need for courage onto them, then identify with them as they run, fly or rocket around battling the forces of evil. We think that if only we had the strength of Superman, or the agility and the wonderful gadgets of Batman or Ironman, then the courage part would be easy. So we think OK, it’s courage plus strength. Or courage plus strength plus a lot of cool gadgets.
But that’s not right either, because what sets these superheroes apart really isn’t their strength, cleverness or courage. After all, the supervillains are always pretty well matched with them. Lex Luthor, The Joker and Ironman’s many enemies were brilliant, also had clever gadgets, and weren’t afraid of anything not even superheroes. They had all the courage and strength you could hope for. But their courage didn’t make life expand.
Then I thought, Well OK, but everybody knew the supervillains were wrong. They were just obviously evil characters, like Lone Rangers from the Dark Side: aberrations, Bad Seeds.
But when we push it farther, that simple picture doesn’t hold together either. We have read or seen videos on YouTube of the families of young men or women in Iraq or Palestine who gave their lives to their cause by strapping bombs to their chest then killing themselves and as many strangers as they could. Their families, their communities, often even their religious leaders praise them as martyrs and heroes, not villains. You can say Well, they live in this closed little world where their beliefs are like a house of mirrors, repeating back to them only their own biases, and they’ve been taken in. Their courage has been seduced, we say. But you know they’re saying the same thing about us. It’s complex. It’s about more than courage. Life shrinks and expands not just in proportion to our courage, but also in proportion to the size and inclusiveness of our vision and our heart.
It isn’t courage that makes life expand. It’s courage in the service of high and noble ideals that makes life expand; courage in the service of coming alive, seeking truth, and healing the world.
Courage is the ability to take action. But whether that action expands or shrinks life depends on whether the spirits we serve are good or bad: whether we’re serving the angels of our better nature, or the angels of our worst nature. And how are we to know?
There is no foolproof way, but there’s a famous formula from a third-century theologian I’ve always loved as one of the best guides for people of good heart (Origen, c. 185-254). Our course of action, he said, must always meet two criteria. It must both be useful to us, and at the same time worthy of God. Because life also shrinks and expands in proportion to the size of the god we are serving.
(As a kind of scholastic footnote, Origen used this two-part test to determine whether you were interpreting Scripture rightly, though I think using it to determine whether you’re interpreting life rightly is a fair extension of his intent.)
Now you might want to argue that the families of those human bomb people would say the murder of their enemies was worthy of God. But the most revered thinkers in any religion, including Islam, don’t say that. Only the religious hacks praise murder; the more mature and nuanced say that unless our actions are guided by love and compassion, they are not worthy of God, period. When tactics are brutal or dehumanizing, we have already lost the ability to claim that they were good.
Many of you read a perfect example of this in the national news just two days ago, in a closing chapter to the O.J. Simpson saga that has been going on for fourteen years. On Friday, Las Vegas Judge Jackie Glass sentenced Simpson to a minimum of nine years in prison. Simpson tried to argue that he never meant to hurt anybody, he just wanted to recover his personal things, including his slain wife’s wedding ring. In other words, he was saying that what he did was not only useful to him, but also decent and noble, the sort of thing God would like. The judge pointed out that when he took a gun and accomplices, when he kidnapped and threatened people, his actions put the lie to his words. Once he adopted those tactics, he lost all claim to good intent. If we have a conscience at all, we know the difference. It’s one of the things about us that we have to be able to count on for a legal system to work, for juries to work, for anything to work. We know the difference.
It’s never as simple as saying that life expands in proportion to our courage. In every case – from superheroes and supervillains to suicidal bombers or the latest installment in the O.J. Simpson saga, it’s a similar lesson. Life expands in proportion to our courageous service of healthy and life-giving ideals, nothing less. It’s like another metaphor I’ve used here before, about the two wolves. A boy went to his grandfather for advice, saying he was often torn between wanting to do whatever he thought he could get away with, and what he knew was really right. Yes, the grandfather admitted, he had always had those same two voices in him. He thought of them as two wolves, each fighting to define his soul. One urged him to use his strength, courage and cleverness to get away with whatever he could, and the other would accept only fair and caring actions. All his life, the grandfather said, these two wolves have been fighting to own him, to steer his soul. When the boy asked which wolf wins, the old man said, “The one that I feed, my son – the one that I feed.”
Whether we think of these competing spirits as two wolves or as the angels of our better and worse natures, it matters tremendously which one we choose to feed, because only one of them – only one of them — has the power to expand life.
by contemporary Christian Theologian Sallie McFague.
Thanks to technologies of communication, transportation, and commerce, the world of the twenty-first century is more deeply interconnected than ever before, and it is increasingly clear that the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism. Not everyone chooses to recognize the primacy of that language, and some speak defiantly in other tongues, but there can be little argument that it has become the global discourse with which all others must contend. It is the defining myth of our time.
While we each have choices to make about the degree to which we will “buy into” the myth, practically no one on earth has the freedom to opt out altogether. It is that pervasive and that powerful. And at the heart of capitalism, I have argued, is the exact dynamic of freedom and bondage as described by the famous Christian theologian Augustine’s theory of evil. Capitalism assumes that we are creatures of desire, and it stokes our desire for lesser goods to the point of addiction, finally rendering us powerless to opt out of its dynamic.
What would it mean, after all, to get “outside” of capitalism in today’s world? Even those who want nothing to do with it, who view it as the pinnacle of Western corruption or imperialism, or whose minds and bodies bear the scars of its excesses and exclusions, are nevertheless pulled into its captivating influence.
Strangely, while market capitalism began with a classic Christian view of humanity based on selfish greed—the basis for the allocation of scarce resources and the eventual “trickle down” of prosperity for all in the twenty-first century—it has eventuated in a näive, optimistic, narrow, and undifferentiated view of sin and evil. Classical economic theory claims that the very core of who we are—individuals motivated by insatiable desire for more and more goods—is the basis from which to build the good life for all. From the selfish desires of billions of human beings turning the earth’s resources into goods for sale, prosperity for all will presumably come eventually.
This vision of the good life, however, neglects two huge facts: the just distribution of the earth’s resources as well as the limits of these resources. We now know that these matters are not mysteriously taken care of by the “invisible hand” of economics; on the contrary, the insatiable greed of billions of human beings causes horrendous injustice to other creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as undermining the sustainability of the planet itself.
But market capitalism does not deal with the tragic dimensions of sin and evil; its view of sin is narrow and viewed only as a sin against God, even though the implication of unregulated greed results in sin against neighbor and nature. By bracketing sin within the limits of the violation of God’s will, it eliminates from view the massive evil that our individual choices have created for others on planet Earth.
Prayer
The following are the words of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.
Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.
Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.
Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.
With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, nd of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.
Amen
Sermon – Religion and Economics
With the Thanksgiving holiday just past, there is now the seasonal tumble into the Christmas holidays. This past Friday apparently marks the beginning of the Christmas season, a beginning marked by shopping rather than any religious significance or perhaps shopping is religion for some people.
The media attempts to whip up excitement about the beginning of the Christmas shopping season as if it is some sort of race or competition. The mantra seems to be “they who buy the most present wins.” We are told about the must-have goods this season and the so-called bargains to be had. Those of us with children have already been barraged for a few weeks about the gifts our children want. A list that seems ever-changing – or perhaps I missed the point and my daughter’s new requests were additions to her list of desires and not replacements. I might have a very disappointed daughter this Christmas as she receives only one of her many requests.
Looking for someone to blame for these endless requests for presents, I blame at the media. Then I realize that my five year old daughter is too young to read and she doesn’t watch television but she has this remarkably impressive communication network which keeps her supplied with all the information about the latest hip toys. This week I read an article where a group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood had asked the Toy industry to cut back on its marketing to children due to the severe economics hardships which are particularly affecting families.
The Toy industry Association’s response was a firm defense of current marketing practices by asserting that children “are a vital part of the gift selection process.” It appears to me the toy industry association sees children as their most effective and certainly most persistent sales people. So begins the child on their life-long role as consumers. With little regulation of advertising to children then we leave the individual parents battling the massive forces of advertising in a David and Goliath battle where we have taken the sling slot away from David and given it to Goliath.
While the creation of desire for some product by advertising and the resulting peer pressure is most noticeable in children, I think most of us are affected by it. The philosopher and environmentalist, Max Oelschlaeger, says “In so-far as Americans have a collective identity it is as the consumer who lives amid unprecedented material choice and the worker who bends the earth to our virtually unrestrained human purpose.”
Even in difficult economic times as we are experiencing now then consumerism permeates our society in so many ways it creates values and purpose for many people. James Luther Adams, the 20th century Unitarian theologian, maintained that all people have a religion whether they realize it or not. He says “The question concerning faith is not, shall I be a person of faith? The proper question is, rather, which faith is mine? For whether a person craves prestige, wealth, security, or amusement; whether he lives for country, for science, for God or for plunder, he shows that he has faith, he shows that he puts confidence in something. Find out what he gives his deepest loyalty to and you’ve found his religion.” In listening to these words today, it appears to me that money, material possession, and our roles as consumers are defining meaning and value for many in our society therefore fulfills many of the roles of religion.
Our economic system through consumerism and advertising is a powerful perhaps dominant cultural force in our lives today. Yet as we reminded in the reading from Melita earlier, it is based on individual self-interest which unless we control it is just the contemporary reincarnation of the sin of greed. While Economics is often thought of as the study of money and financial systems, it is really a study of human decision-making for the allocation of limited resources. Economics is about how we deal with scarcity and limits with money being an important mechanism to determine the allocation of resources “efficiently”. Sometimes I find it hard to think of money as merely a tool in our lives since so often it seems like a goal in itself. We choose our jobs based on it, plan our retirements around it, and it places very real limitations on the lives of most of us.
Some people say that money makes the world go around. Another view is that money doesn’t make the world go around, but having it makes the journey much more pleasant. Regardless money is important in our society and necessary to meet many of our basic needs. But money can become an obsession for us as we desire more than necessary for their basic needs and distorting what is most important in our lives. All of the major religions caution us to beware of money becoming an idol or a false God, yet religious institutions walk that difficult line of needing money for their own survival but not wanting to be obsessed about it.
In the reading earlier, the author Sallie McFague states that in the 21st Century “the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism” and asks the question of what it would mean to get outside of capitalism in today’s world? We are all so submerged in the world of commerce both as workers and consumers that it is difficult to remember that there are some institutions that do not operate on the typical model of market capitalism. Our non-profit philanthropic institutions are an example which collect donations then distribute goods and services to those in need. There is no attempt to make a profit therefore they can provide goods and services to everyone free or reduced cost.
Another institution that operates on the edge of the market capitalism system is this church. Some might say that our church operates in the hardest aspects of both the non-profit and for-profit world. Our income to support this church is through the donations of members like you – sounds like a National Public radio pledge drive – while much of our spending is in the world of market capitalism. We cannot turn around to the electrical utility company and say donations are down this month so we can’t pay you but we will as soon as donations pick up. I would love to see their faces at the suggestion.
The existence of all elements of this religious community is dependent on the donations of money and time from you the members of the congregation. You are asked to donate what you can financially to sustain and grow our community. There is no market mechanism that determines the price in competition with other churches. Could you imagine charging for people to come for our worship services – $20 to hear the senior minister, $5 for the intern minister and a refund if you don’t like the message?
Perhaps I’ll talk to stewardship about this idea. Not only is the idea crass it misses an important point about why we are here. We have our message, our culture, and our values which we wish to promote to all who are interested. We believe our religious vision has value but we also believe that it is too important, too valuable for people to be prevented hearing our vision due to lack of money. Most religious groups want to transcend the artificial limits placed on access to places and experiences based on limited money.
Those limits are placed by our economic system in an attempt to handle the scarcity of a resource and in a desire to make a profit. Religion is attempting to remove these limits by seeing our message and values as a source of abundance not a cause for scarcity. Most of us are attracted to our religious community because our lives are improved in some way by being here.
Many of us feel affirmed by being part of this community, some of us have had life changing experiences here, and I know people who feel our Liberal religious message has been life-saving to them. How do you put a dollar price on such a place? You can’t. The work is too important but such activities have a cost. Therefore as a religious community we let each of us decide for ourselves about the value of the community we have here and the contribution we wish to make to ease that cost. We are outside much of the market system since we give our service away without charge and those of us who choose, contribute our money and time as we determine is appropriate.
Our economic system is very efficient at delivering a variety of products and services to people for a low price. That is its purpose and we all live with the benefits of that. Our economics system was never developed to be the promoter of values for our society that was what religion is for. Values such as ecological sustainability and greater justice for more people are not promoted in our current economic system unless the consumers force it to. Our consuming habits are perhaps the clearest way that we express our moral choices on a daily basis yet there seems to be a strong separation between our economics and our religion.
The famous industrialist, Andrew Carnegie said that Christianity should not interfere with how money is made and only get involved in how its surplus should be dispersed in the form of charity. It seems that many religious organizations have not moved beyond such thinking therefore often fail to critique our economics system where it may be exploitive of people or abusive to our environment. If injustice in our society is caused by unethical production of goods, unsustainable consumption of resources, or deceitful advertising it not only appropriate to address the issues but I would say our religion calls us to do so.
In the reading we heard earlier, the author Sallie McFague discusses the use of the Christian doctrines of sin and evil in addressing the harm excessive and unregulated greed is harmful to our world. Her critique of market capitalism is that sustainability and justice for all inhabitants are not its central goals of the system. Now we do not talk about sin or evil much in the pulpits of our Unitarian Universalist churches perhaps that is why many of you are here and not at other churches – but I think the ideas behind the doctrines if not the terms themselves can be useful in addressing the excesses and exploitative elements of our economic system.
Now, the Liberal Religious tradition has moved away a long time ago from the doctrine of Original Sin where humanity is inherently depraved but the concept of sin itself is more ambiguous for us. I feel comfortable with McFague’s idea of sin being an excessive concern for ourselves at the expense of the needs of others or sustainability of the planet. Sin is something we are responsible for and can control through the choices we make.
McFague defines evil as the institutions, practices, and attitudes resulting from an exploitive economic system based on excessive individual self-interest, which creates suffering and deprivation in our world. For example, it may seem in my self-interest to buy a product at a low price but if the product was made by forced child labor then I think it is appropriate to call this a sinful act supporting an evil system. Strong but I feel appropriate words. We can replace sin with wrong and evil with bad, it is the meaning not the words that are important.
With these concepts of sin and evil then this sets up a great tension between our economic system and religion. Market capitalism believes that the good life is built by each of us pursuing our own enlightened self-interest. Religion cautions against excessive self-interest and reminds us that through our interdependence we are called to care for one another and our planet.
I think this is a question we deal with daily during satisfying our own needs is when does our enlightened self-interest become excessive self-interest? How do we, as religious people and consumers who desire to lead a good life, deal with this tension in our self-interest as we go about our busy lives and with the child who has just made yet another request for a Christmas present? You really want an easy answer for this one aren’t you – alas there isn’t one. We have to accept that tension between enlightened and excessive self-interest as real and difficult. Our choices as consumers can have a negative impact therefore we should be intentional and thoughtful about our purchasing choices.
The stewardship of our planet and welfare of all people is particularly important in the age of the Global Economy since the environmental impact and exploitation of people may occur far from our purchasing of a product therefore could remain invisible to us unless we are vigilant. The notion of interdependence between ourselves as consumers and the workers who produce the goods, wherever in the world they are, leads us to take responsibility for buying products that were produced without exploitation. Examples of exploitation would be child labor, coerced labor, or paying non-livable wages.
If our individual consumer decisions create an economic system that prevents those in need receiving basic necessities and those producing the goods a reasonable quality of life, then our individual decisions should be able to change this system. I, like many of you, have tried with my consumption habits to move beyond the obvious criteria of price, function, and style to consider the following factors:
Try to distinguish between my true long-term needs and my short-term often misplaced desires.
Can I borrow, barter or get used whatever I am wanting?
Consider factors other than price such as how goods were produced including working conditions, reputation of company involved, and environmental impact.
These criteria do not make shopping easier since they take effort and any desire for perfection will be very frustrating. The goal for me is greater intention and awareness in my consumer habits, which allows me to bring my religious values into my everyday life in a meaningful way. We are both beneficiaries of our market capitalism system and often sufferers in the hardships created by it.
Our economic system is good at delivering products for a low price and handling scarcity. It was not designed to and therefore does not do a good job of determining values or what is valuable.
In our consumer culture today it is too easy to confuse price and value – they are not the same thing. Just consider what is most valuable in your own life – I suspect it has nothing to do with the price you paid for them assuming they even had a price. The love of friends and family, the old photographs we have, a book of special importance to us, that great piece of music that brings us to tears, or that life-changing experience that might even have happened in this church. Those items are dealing in a currency that is far more important than money. They are dealing in the eternal values of finding what makes our life worth living and meaningful. Let the economic system determine price, we are the only ones that define for ourselves what has value and worth in our lives.
——————
Jones, Serene and Lakeland, Paul. Editors. Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) p.141, 148
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin
Fall Congregational Meeting Dec. 14th 2008
Agenda
Lunch 12:30 ? 1:15
Call to Order Sheila Gladstone, President Board of Trustees 1:30 Welcome & Opening Words 1:35 Business Meeting 1:40- 3:30
A. Adoption of Congregational Meeting Rules of Procedure
B. Introduction of Board of Trustees
C. Introduction of Timekeeper
E. Approve Minutes of the May 4th Spring Congregational Meeting
F. Reports:
President Sheila Gladstone
Minister Dr. Davidson Loehr
Executive Director Sean Hale
Office Dotti Sizer
Director of Religious Education Lara Douglass
Director of Music Brent Baldwin
Treasurer Luther Elmore
Stewardship
G. Business:
1. Vote to Approve ?09 Budget
2. Vote to Approve By-law Changes
* Meeting notices can be sent out electronically
* Executive Director added as Ex Oficio
3. Vote to approve what non-profits we work with for our Split-the-plate program
H. Questions and Concerns
I. Closing Words and Adjournment Sheila Gladstone
Requirement for Voting:
According to ARTICLE IV, Section 2 of the Bylaws of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin:
Individuals who have been members of the church for thirty days or more and who have (as an individual or part of a family unit) made a recorded financial contribution during the last eighteen months, have the right to vote at all official church meetings.
Any questions regarding voting status may be directed to the Treasurer, Luther Elmore. He can be contacted by email at: lelmore@austincc.edu
WE NEED YOUR HELP. We have around 400 MP3 audio files of sermons on our web site. Our goal is to post audio files of all our sermons from the present through Aug 2000, but some of our master tapes are missing. Please look through the list below and if you have any of the audio tapes on this list, contact the web team at and we will contact you with further instructions.
MISSING AUDIO SERMONS
Date
Sermon Title
08-01-00
ESSAY: From Surviving to Thriving: Moving Beyond UUism
08-13-00
The Virtues of Heresy
08-27-00
In a Restaurant, Choose a Table Near a Waiter
09-24-00
Talk is Not Cheap
10-08-00
The Dark God of Capitalism
11-19-00
Choose Life
11-26-00
How To Become A Butterfly
02-25-01
Beliefs Part 2: The Religion of Science
03-11-01
Beliefs Part 3: Mysticism
03-18-01
Beliefs Part 4: Feminine Spirituality
04-15-01
New Life for Old
04-29-01
Four Faces of Jesus
05-13-01
Our War on Drugs: A Mother’s Day Sermon
05-20-01
Love Talk
05-27-01
Sacred Stories
06-10-01
Walking on Water
06-17-01
Welcome!
09-09-01
The Courage to Tell the Truth
09-23-01
More Aftermath from September 11
09-30-01
Living in Denial (Part 1 of 5)
10-14-01
Controlling Others Through Anger (Part 2 of 5)
10-21-01
Bargaining : The Deals That We Make To Avoid Change -Part 3
11-11-01
Remembering Those Who Fought For Us
11-18-01
Accepting Life’s Gifts (Part 5 of 5)
12-29-01
Religion is the Music of Believers Seeking Truth Together
09-29-02
Oil, Arrogance, and War
03-30-03
Soliloquies from the Prodigal Son : The Fatted Calf
07-23-03
The Simple Gifts of Liberal Religion – SUUSI
07-21-04
Why “Unitarian Universalism” is Dying
03-13-05
Finding Your Own Voice
04-24-05
Growing Up and Finding Ourselves: Annual youth service
Thanksgiving is part of a harvest cycle, where we plant and then hope we can be thankful for what we reap. In that spirit, I want to share a short and thankful focus from the Buddhist tradition showing us what we hope for every time we plant seeds – whether in the ground, in our lives or in our worship services:
Now we have finished. Everyone stand and we will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because even if we did not have a great enlightenment, we had a small enlightenment. If we did not have a small enlightenment, at least we didn’t get sick. And if we got sick, at least we didn’t die. So let’s thank the Buddha. (Hsuan Hua)
Amen.
HOMILY: Harvesting Thanksgiving
Davidson Loehr
Since I needed my Thanksgiving reflections today to be focused on something significant but fairly distant, I want to use a metaphor to transpose some deeper dimensions of Thanksgiving into history, politics and life. This may sound like the opening to the sermon of a few weeks ago, when I said I wanted to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. But it’s a homily, not a full-length sermon, so it won’t be that ambitious.
Thanksgiving, as we know, is a harvest festival, in the tradition of harvest festivals going back to ancient times. They planted, then they harvested what they had planted. What did they plant?
On the literal level, they planted the usual stuff – beans, squash, other vegetables, they cultivated orchards and the rest. But deeper, it’s different. So let’s start with the first Thanksgiving in this country, which happened in 1621.
You all know much of this story. In December of 1620, 102 Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and landed in Massachusetts.
Mother Nature wasn’t on their side, though Father Time was. They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusettes winter. One hundred and two of them arrived here; by the following summer, only 55 were left alive. Nearly half of them died.
Imagine this! 102 people leave their homes, say farewell to families and friends, say goodbye to a whole way of life, a whole world. They arrive as strangers in a strange land, and the land knows them not. It is cold, indifferent and deadly, and they spend a lonely and fearful winter freezing, starving, and dying. They bury nearly half of their number: one half of these Pilgrims buries the other half, and in the spring they plant crops and they hunt for food.
The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. It was like all of life, compressed into one year. And by late summer, when they could at last celebrate a good crop, half of those with whom they had hoped to celebrate were dead. This was the preparation for the first Thanksgiving, and there was not a yellow Happy Face in the bunch.
The first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and his people. According to one source, the menu for the feast was venison stew cooked over an outdoor fire; spit-roasted wild turkeys stuffed with corn bread; oysters baked in their shells; sweet corn baked in its husks; and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. The food was served on large wooden serving platters, and everyone ate their fill.
But now let’s explore the metaphor. What did the Pilgrims really plant, that let them reap this feast? They certainly didn’t plant venison, wild turkey or oyster seeds.
What the Pilgrims really planted were two crops: hope, and empowerment. They planted hope rather than fear or despair, and empowerment rather than just rolling over and dying.
That’s an easy segue from history to politics because, to put it in a contemporary sound bite, what those Pilgrims were saying to life was “Yes, we can!”
We are just near the beginning of a new planting season in American history. And those seeds of hope and empowerment have been planted on lawns, bumper stickers and windows everywhere.
That’s a huge part of the reason this amazingly unlikely man Barack Obama will be our 44th president: because after the last round of political seeds planted and the harvest we have reaped from that, people were simply starving for hope, the power to make a difference, and the chance to make a difference. We don’t yet know how this new planting will work out, or what kind of harvest we will have.
But we should look over the last crops we’ve planted, because the harvest is damned near killing us.
Think of some of the seeds we have planted during the past three decades or so:
— We planted the seeds of what the French have called “savage capitalism”: an endorsement of high-level greed with only the barest of government restraint. We planted ideas and behaviors intentionally exalting profits over people, stock prices over the livelihoods and lives of human beings. And in the harvest was a crop of American workers forced to compete with the cheapest labor in the world, and unable to do so.
— We sowed the idea that healthcare was a market product deserved only by those who could afford it, rather than a necessary protection of all our citizens, as every other industrialized country in the world does. And we have reaped a harvest of perhaps fifty million citizens who cannot afford to be protected from accidents, disease, or astronomic medical bills that have plunged millions into bankruptcy and desperation. Also in the harvest are an estimated 18,000 deaths a year credited to their lack of adequate health care protection.
— We planted the idea that we could use our armies to invade any country with something we wanted. On one level, we’ve done this for a very long time, as have other strong countries. But in the last seventy years, the invasion, occupation and looting of Iraq was the first invasion of a sovereign nation on that scale since Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. And from this planting of violent militarism, we have harvested the deaths of over 4,200 American soldiers, and many times that number torn apart physically, mentally or both, as well as the deaths of nearly 1.3 million Iraqis, guilty of trying to defend their country from a foreign invasion, or of just being unfortunate enough to live in a country whose oil we lust after.
I could go on down the list of bad seeds we have planted and the bitter harvests we have reaped, but you all know those seeds, those crops, and those harvests of shame.
Choosing the seeds we will plant is not an isolated act. It is interconnected with everything that follows.
The wonderfully wise ancient Greeks coined a famous, short formula for how this kind of sowing and reaping works. Here’s how they put it:
Plant a thought, reap an action;
Plant an action, reap a habit;
Plant a habit, reap a character;
Plant a character, reap a destiny.
We rob ourselves if we treat Thanksgiving like a superficial happy-face festival. The harvest metaphor is too rich for that, and offers too much insight and power to ignore.
We plant, we reap, then we hope we can be thankful for the crop. But whether we can be thankful or not depends on what we planted, and our diligence in nourishing and attending to it.
No planting or crops are ever perfect. History doesn’t show us anybody who was ever that good. Even the wonderfully wise ancient Greeks had slavery, limited rights for women, allowed only about ten percent of the adult population to vote, and seemed to care about only those who excelled above the rest. The United States of America has, at its best, grown up around a very different dream, from very different kinds of seeds.
I wonder if you’ve ever read the full poem by Emma Lazarus that is engraved on a tablet within the pedestal on which our Statue of Liberty stands. She intentionally contrasts our dream with that of the Greeks, because she says we want a different kind of harvest. Her poem is titled “The New Colossus,” named in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Listen to the poem in terms of the harvest metaphor we’ve been using, and see if you don’t hear the American Dream in a new way:
The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Those are some of the most fertile seeds of hope and empowerment ever planted. That message, “Yes, we can!” is the most fundamental expression of the American Dream. Let us plant, in our nation and in our hearts, seeds of hope and empowerment. Let us tend to them, nurture them so they might flourish. Let us hope Mother Nature and Father Time will be on our side. And then let us pray that when the harvest comes, we can give thanks.
HOMILY: Brian Ferguson
Confession is not part of our Liberal religious tradition but I do have a confession to make. The Thanksgiving holiday remains a bit foreign to me. Now being Scottish I didn’t grow up with a Thanksgiving holiday but I don’t think we Scots are an ungrateful bunch. Yet again Scottish weather with its continuous rain and howling wind does not encourage a great sense of gratitude in anyone – except perhaps umbrella makers. The North American Thanksgiving holiday does not conjure family memories or traditions for me as it may for many of you. It also feels for me too close in time to Christmas – a holiday which has always been important to my family. Thanksgiving gets in the way of Christmas for me. Perhaps I’m missing the point but Thanksgiving seems to be predominantly about stressing oneself in preparation for the upcoming Christmas season. We attempt to fly or drive somewhere along with everyone else then express gratitude by eating too much. I’ve been your intern minister for three months now so I thought it was time you saw my curmudgeon side. That was it. The grinch that stole Thanksgiving.
More seriously, while not having a personal tradition of Thanksgiving I feel taking time to give thanks for our spiritual and material possessions to be a healthy practice. Meister Eckhart, the wise 13th century mystic, once said that if the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is thank you that would suffice. The idea of “thank you” as a prayer, as an earnest appreciation of something beyond our selves, resonates with me. Giving thanks when we are healthy, content, and life is going well seems easy and appropriate to do. We are probably too busy having a good time to do it but expressing gratitude would be the right thing to do when life is good. Giving thanks after we have come through hard times and recovering might even give us a heightened appreciation for the simple gifts in our life. What about giving thanks during tough times such as many of us are experiencing now? How do we adopt an attitude of gratitude when many of us are struggling with the various hardships we are experiencing as a nation, as a religious community, and as individuals? I struggle with expressing gratitude at this time. Avoidance or complaining would be so much easier.
There have been many studies conducted saying that during times of economic hardship two things increase – going to movies and alcohol consumption. Such times of uncertainty can lead us to want to escape from our present circumstance. Temporary escapes from a difficult situation can allow us some relief from stress and gain some distance from the issue at hand. Taken to excess such escapism can also lead to an avoidance of reality and an abdication of responsibility. At the other extreme of escapism is the tendency to look to blame someone or something for the difficult circumstances. Blaming others for our own misfortune can really feel good in the short term. We hear of plenty of blame for the global economic conditions – Wall Street, predatory mortgage lenders, greedy Chief Executive Officers, our President, the Republicans, Chinese imports, immigrants to this country – of which I am one. Voting for the Democrats four and eight years ago is not an immunization to our own responsibility or complicity for the current turmoil. Similarly voting for John McCain a few weeks ago is not an abdication of responsibility for what happens in the next four years.
If escapism and blame are unhelpful in tough times then how can expressing gratitude be useful? We usually express gratitude in return for something we receive such as the help of another, a gift received, or simple appreciation of our good fortune. The gifts that life presents us are not always apparent in times of hardship. We are more sensitive, perhaps overly so, to what we have lost or have fear of losing than what we have. We may have less than we had a year ago, financially many of us have a lot less than just two months ago. Do we give thanks for the contents of the half full glass or dwell on the losses of the half empty glass? In hard times the half empty glass seems the much easier option.
Another wise person, who also happened to be my manager in my first job said to me that “it doesn’t have to be a good experience to be an experience.” I have found this observation to be very useful at various times during my life. Life provides learning opportunities whether we want them or not. Perhaps in times of hardship rather than times of plenty we can find what really is most important to us as we are faced with limits, loss, and scarcity. Times of hardship force us to make difficult decisions that we would rather avoid. External events force us to give up things that seem important to us and sometimes we find those things to have been more of a burden than a treasure.
Many of us turn to religion to make sense of the hardships and losses we experience. Sometimes it can feel that religion is just a spoil sport in our life. When things are going well for us religion can be the nagging reminder that tends to dampen our happiness by making us feel guilty for our good fortune and reminding us of the suffering of others. Some religious leaders call this encouraging humility but really we just can’t stand seeing anyone having a good time. Alternatively, when things are going badly for us, then religion becomes the voice of hope or explainer of our fate – have faith then things will turn out alright or there is a reason for our hardship. The famous American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr claimed the function of the preacher was “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” In my less gracious moods this actually sounds like it could be fun. I think that is my curmudgeon side again.
While this view of religion as a counter-balance in people’s lives between comfort and affliction is popular amongst many I find it too simplistic and unhelpful. How can we in good faith separate people into the comfortable and the afflicted? Life is just not that simple. In our own lives most of us have that intertwining of good fortune and suffering simultaneously. Our jobs provide us both a livelihood and high level of stress. Our families can be both a source of support and a burden. Retirement is an opportunity for freedom and a source of insecurity. Even our religious community can provide us with both heartwarmth and heartache as we deal with the uncertainties of life. I think many of us have both doubt and suffering in our lives simultaneously with hope and strength. Religion at its best helps us to be grateful for the good in our life while providing comfort to the distresses of life. Good religion reminds us that we can be both the givers and the recipients of the great eternal values of gratitude, compassion and loving-kindness.
We are not individuals isolated from our surrounding community and our actions matter. Ultimately, this is what I am most thankful for since I do believe what we do and how we do it matters. While not everything we do may seem to be religious, I believe that how we do things can and should be religious. When we treat others with honesty, compassion and respect it is religious. While it can seem our small actions make little difference to the greater events around us, our actions matter greatly to those around us and most directly affected by them. I actually think our actions especially actions of gratitude, kindness and compassion are more significant in times of hardship and uncertainty. At such times people are in more need of help and support while there is less in terms of money and goodwill.
For me, the greatest gift expressing gratitude we have to give, is the gift of service to others and in troubled times it is often harder for us to give. In tough times then this gift is more needed and more appreciated, therefore our gift of service to others returns to us by making us feel more valued. The gift of service to others allows the giver to feel useful and the recipient to feel cared for. A gift that addresses the most basic human needs of being valued and being useful perhaps reflects a variation on our traditional view of Thanksgiving. Or perhaps our gift of service to others is a prayer that says thank you to the miracle that is each of our lives and maybe that is the very essence of Thanksgiving.
Or perhaps my view of Thanksgiving is too foreign for you in which case I’ll remind you of the Buddhist prayer Davidson read earlier: Now we have finished. Everyone stand and will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because if Brian’s message of giving thanks through service to others was not enlightening, then we had Davidson’s message. If Davidson’s message of a harvest of hope and empowerment was not enlightening, then we had the music. And if the music was not comforting, at least we had comfortable seats. So let’s thank the Buddha.
Fall 2008 First Unitarian Universalist Congregational Meeting Invitation
Dear Church Members,
You are invited to attend our Fall Congregational Meeting this coming December the 14th at 1:30pm directly following a lunch that is being served by our FUUCA Teens as a fundraiser from 12:30pm to 1:15pm for a moderate donation. Childcare reservations can be made by contacting childcare@austinuu.com, or calling the church at 452-6168.
You have received this invitation because you are listed as being a voting member of our church:
?According to ARTICLE IV, Section 2 of the Bylaws of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin:
Individuals who have been members of the church for thirty days or more and who have (as an individual or part of a family unit) made a recorded financial contribution during the last eighteen months, have the right to vote at all official church meetings.”
Any questions regarding voting status may be directed to the Treasurer, Luther Elmore. He can be contacted by email at: lelmore@austincc.edu . Any FUUCA member who has not contributed a financial donation is an associate member and is welcome to attend but would be unable to vote.
In accordance with Article VII, Section 6 of the bylaws, notice of the time and place of the meeting is being mailed to members and posted on the church bulletin board at least twenty days prior to the meeting day.
We?d love to hear your ideas, views, questions and concerns at our upcoming congregational meeting.
Enclosed within this mailing are the following documents for review:
1. The Dec. 14th Fall Congregational Meeting Agenda.
2. Proposed changes/updating to the bylaws that will be discussed and voted on at our meeting.
3. Proposed 2009 FUUCA budget that will be discussed and voted on at our meeting.
These documents can also be accessed on-line from our church website www.austinuu.org. The Board Meeting minutes, the Fall All Council Meeting Minutes, and the reports listed on the enclosed agenda will all be able to be accessed after December 2nd from the church website.
If you have any questions about the contents of this mailing, please call me at 683 3431 or email shannonvyff@yahoo.com.
We look forward to seeing you at the Fall Congregational Meeting.
Let us find a spiritual North Star to steer by when we are torn between life’s over-rated pleasures and its under-rated treasures.
We want to feel the difference between being opportunistic and being authentic, and learn how we can better choose the one that gives us more and better life.
Let us find the determination not to do what we should not do, the courage to do what we should do, and that elusive wisdom that lets us tell the difference.
How often we chase after things we don’t need, like dogs chase cars, not knowing what good they’d do us if we caught them. Can we learn to yearn for what we need rather than what we merely want?
And as for our lives – if they can’t be as long as we would like, can they be as rich and rewarding as we wish?
These are just some of the questions we feel along life’s path on this day as on many days. We offer them up, to speak them out loud in the hope that the person who hears them will be us.
Amen
SERMON: The Transient and the Permanent in Religion
There’s something exhilarating about being present when high ideals and aspirations are discussed, even if all we do is listen. We consult experts in diet, exercise, ecology, finances and a few dozen other areas, all important, all with a few really gifted and motivated people available to pass on their inspiring visions to us, and it feels well worth the money we’ve spent. In the meantime, we stay overweight, out of shape, eating poorly, handling our finances poorly, and the rest of it. Still, it’s inspiring.
Hearing about gifted religious visionaries and prophets is like this, too. This is the third in the series of three sermons on the early 19th century thinkers who helped define Unitarianism as a separate religion in America, a religion that was derived from, but distinct from, liberal Christianity. All three men were in their 30s when they delivered the sermons that Unitarian students are still required to read. William Ellery Channing was 38 when he delivered the sermon called “Unitarian Christianity” in 1819. Ralph Waldo Emerson was 35 when he gave his address at the Harvard Divinity School – the last time he was invited to speak there for 30 years. The minister I want to talk about today was Theodore Parker, who was just 31 when he delivered a sermon called “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” in 1841. I have to say that Parker is my favorite of the three, and was from the first time I read their sermons nearly thirty years ago.
Parker was an almost mythic person. Born the eleventh child of a farmer, he grew up very poor. He was mostly self-educated, then wound up graduating from Harvard Divinity School. By the time he entered the ministry, he could read twenty languages. After he died, at the age of 49, it was discovered that his library was the largest personal library in America, with about 50,000 volumes. His biographer (Henry Steele Commager) said that Parker wrote notes in the margins of almost all of them. If he actually read them all, that would be almost three books a day from the day he was born.
At his peak, he preached to around 3,000 people, the largest audience in America – without a microphone. His sermons routinely lasted over an hour, were thoroughly researched and brilliantly written. Besides being the most powerful and combative voice of liberal religion in America – he was far more combative than either William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson – he was ferociously active on behalf of women’s rights, prison reform and especially anti-slavery causes in the 1840s and 1850s, well before that was a cause most Unitarians would touch. That was partly because many wealthy Unitarians made a lot of money from the business of slavery, and partly because it was a rude subject, not suited to high-class cocktail hours. They looked to their ministers for comfort, not challenge.
He was part of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape from the South. One story about him that shows both his courage and his ferocity is about the time that he performed a wedding ceremony for two escaped slaves, holding a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other, to shoot anyone who tried to stop him.
Martin Luther King once said, “We begin to die the day we become silent about the things that matter.” As far as I can tell, Parker never had one of those days in his life. He was uninhibited in his writings against dishonest religion. The things he said in just this one sermon defined the theological debates in America for the next generation, and are still relevant and powerful.
But I want you to hear his words, because he was very good with words. So imagine, if you can, sitting in a Unitarian church on May 19, 1841, when American Christianity – including Unitarianism – was still quite supernatural and often so conservative that it would feel a bit like today’s right-wing Christianity. Imagine hearing some of these words spoken by a brilliant and fiery 31-year-old preacher. (I’ve paraphrased some of these excerpts, to transport them from early 19th to early 21st century ways of speaking.) –
While true religion is always the same thing, in each century and every land, the Christianity of the People, which is the religion that is accepted and lived out; has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands.
Anyone, who traces the history of what is called Christianity, will see that nothing changes more from age to age than the doctrines taught as Christian, and insisted on as essential to Christianity and personal salvation. What is falsehood in one area passes for truth in another. The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next. The stream of Christianity, as men receive it, has caught a stain from every soil it has filtered through, so that now it is not the pure water from the well of Life, which is offered to our lips, but streams troubled and polluted with [a lot of] dirt.
Since our various theologies are so transient, why do we need to accept the teachings of men, as though they were the word of God?
Almost every sect, that has ever been, makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, rather than the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves. It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity should rest on the personal authority of Jesus, any more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid, or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, must rest on the truth of his words.
Wasn’t Jesus our brother; the son of man, as we are; the Son of God, like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety, — sweet and celestial as they were, — are they not what we also may attain? In him, as in a mirror, we may see the image of God. Viewed in this way, how beautiful the life of Jesus is.
God’s word will not change, for that word is Truth. From this Jesus subtracted nothing; to this he added nothing.
Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God.
Real religion gives men new life.
One hundred sixty-seven years later, many of these words would still send most believers into fits of apoplexy.
For Parker, the only sanction that religion requires “is the voice of God in your heart; the perpetual presence of Him, who made us – Christ and the Father abiding within us.” This is the permanent religious core of genuine Christianity, for Parker; the rest is transient and dispensable – including the creeds, orthodoxies, rituals, costumes, and if yo think about it, even the churches and ministers. (Gary Dorrien, The Making of Liberal Theology, 1805-1900, p. p. 86).
As you can hear – though Parker seemed not to hear it – the logical implications of his insights pulverized the intellectual foundations of Christianity, theism, and all religions, reducing them to little more than ways of talking about high morals and ideals – which of course can be done without using any religious language at all.
Even if his ministerial colleagues couldn’t articulate it, they must have felt the force of this earthquake in the foundations of their comfortable faith, because they reacted by cutting him off from the privileges of ministerial fellowship. Nearly all of the Boston area ministers refused to exchange pulpits with him, and some refused to speak to him (Dorrien, p. 88).
The Unitarian ministers told Parker it was his moral duty to resign from the Unitarian Association, but he was both too bright and too shrewd to make it that easy for them. He said they would have to expel him, thereby showing they do have a creed. They backed down – my image is that they had their tails between their legs. And so, as one historian puts it, “The first Unitarian heresy trial was over (Dorrien, p. 90).”
Parker believed the time had come to sweep away all religious authorities except the authority of reason and spiritual intuition (Dorrien, p. 99).
True Christianity, he said, is not about the death or divinity of Christ, but about the death of sin and the life of holy goodness in our heart: “Each man must be his own Christ, or he is no Christian (Dorrien, p. 99).” He defined real Christianity simply as “Being Good and Doing Good” – not needing any miracles or supernaturalism or creeds – or churches or ministers. This drew complete outrage from nearly all clergy, including the Unitarians.
At first, Parker naively hoped that American Unitarianism could become America’s best religious hope, but within a few years, decided that it was so unwilling to see or to think that there was no hope for it.
It’s a little confusing that he continued to insist on calling himself a Unitarian – especially since the leading Unitarian ministers wouldn’t claim him, swap pulpits with him or speak to him, and wanted him to resign.
But Unitarianism was a complex thing in the Boston of his day. It was a religion of the upper class, associated with intelligent, educated and sophisticated people, and Parker wasn’t willing to let go of that identity, which he had worked so hard to earn. He had grown up as a very poor boy, worked hard, married a very wealthy woman. They moved in those social circles – though Parker’s anti-slavery work really ended their welcome there, too. I think that giving up the “Unitarian” label would have felt to him like losing that social and personal identity.
He wanted the rest of the Unitarians to grow into the larger and more honest understanding of religion that he had found. He said the Unitarians were “standing still, and becoming more and more narrow and bigoted from year to year-. There is little scholarship and less philosophical thinking among the Unitarians,” he wrote. “Some of them engage in the great moral movements of the day, such as the anti-slavery movement. But the sect as such is opposed to all [intellectual] reforms (Dorrien, p. 101).”
His opponents used his notorious radical social activities to label and smear him, partly so they wouldn’t have to answer his powerful critiques of their unexamined but comfortable religion.
So Theodore Parker lived the powerful contradiction of preaching to the largest crowd in America while being deeply alienated from the Unitarians, and spurned as unbearable by most respectable high-class socialites (Dorrien, p. 103). No matter how fierce he was in public, he grieved his whole adult life in private over the continual attacks and rejection from the people and the denomination to whom he believed he offered valuable but unwanted help.
In January of 1859, he was told that he was dying of tuberculosis. It did not diminish his spirit, and one of the most inspiring things he ever wrote, he wrote in his Journal after receiving this death sentence: “I am ready to die… nothing to fear. When I see the Inevitable I fall in love with her (John White Chadwick, Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900, p. 352).”
Since his wife had money, they could travel. He left Massachusetts to spend his last year traveling Europe, and settled in Rome. He would die in Italy in 1860. A few months before he died, he wrote another memorable line to a friend: “I have had great powers” he said, “and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).”
All three of the great Unitarian preachers of the early 19th century were absolutely brilliant men who stood head-and-shoulders above almost everyone around them – though whether any of them can really be called Unitarian is a different matter.
William Ellery Channing, who named “Unitarian Christianity,” refused to join the Unitarian Association when it first began in 1825, fearing it would just dumb down religion and lure people to the lowest common denominator where they wouldn’t think for themselves, but would look for some sort of creeds (or principles) to recite. To put it in modern terms, Channing feared that the Unitarian Association would grow into a narcissistic cult, where people were taught to worship the kinds of things that their kind of people believed – that’s a working definition of narcissism. And their churches would tell them when they entered just what those things were that their kind of people needed to believe, and maybe even print them on wallet-sized cards. And that’s one element of a cult.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous of the three, called Unitarianism “corpse-cold,” and was not considered a Unitarian by any of the leading ministers of his day. He thought Unitarianism had become smug, shallow and irrelevant.
And Theodore Parker, the most brilliant of them all, was blacklisted from all the Unitarian pulpits in Boston because of his liberal thinking, was told he should resign from the Unitarian Association, and told that he wasn’t a real Unitarian. One member of the church where he delivered his most famous sermon even said that he’d rather see every Unitarian church burned to the ground than to see Parker’s beliefs preached from a single pulpit.
The important truth is that these three men stood out against the background of Unitarians of their day because the overwhelming majority of Unitarian ministers of their day were not memorable, and their beliefs and actions are hard to look back on with much admiration when we hear these stories. This is true, of course, of all the great visionaries of history: they only stand out because the vast majority of people around them couldn’t see or wouldn’t pursue the vision they saw so clearly.
So these three men were prophets of a higher truth than almost any Unitarians would or could see, though they continue to inspire new Unitarian ministers who are still required to read them. The righteous words of those who opposed them are long, and deservedly, forgotten.
These three weren’t serving Unitarianism, and they were all pretty clear about it. They were serving what Parker finally labeled as the Permanent in religion: True Religion, Absolute Religion, Honest Religion. And throughout history, those voices have always been a tiny minority in all religions – Unitarians are no better or worse than the rest.
We like to think that we listen to serious religious thinkers the way orchestras listen to the concert “A” that is played before all rehearsals and concerts, for them to tune to, though that’s not really true, because we so seldom do tune to their visions in any life-changing way. We really listen to them the same way we listen to all the other experts and motivational speakers in so many other areas: diet, exercise, ecology, finance and the rest of them. We may not be motivated enough or courageous enough to follow them down the demanding path of getting into our best spiritual shape, but we’re at least serious enough to listen, and to carry home some fertile seeds in the form of ideas.
There haven’t been many thinkers in any religion who wanted to move beyond the easy comfort of fitting in with like-minded people. That’s still why we come to church, isn’t it – to enjoy the company of like-minded people? Just think of how strong that gravitational attraction is for you, and how much effort it would take to break free of that gravitational pull. That’s a measure of how unlikely it is that great prophets will ever really effect the changes they see. I think that’s why we’re actually happier with these outspoken types after they’ve died, when we can treat them reverently rather than seriously.
But if these prophets, including Theodore Parker, are right, then getting in spiritual shape is as easy and as hard as actually thinking about who we are and why we are here, about what is most worth believing and doing.
This seems to be what all the prophets have said in their many different ways: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha, the biblical prophets, Jesus, Mohammad, all the way up to relatively minor – but still stirring – people like Channing, Emerson and Parker.
These were people at the Olympic level of spiritual development, no matter how out of shape they may have been in other ways – none of them was in very good financial shape, for instance, and I don’t think any of them lifted weights. They were both empowering and troubling people. They didn’t exist just to tell us that we’re really special just as we are, or that this business of authenticity is easy. They said, as Jesus put it, that the road was narrow and very few ever wanted to take it, even though it was open to all. They said salvation was free, but it wasn’t cheap. It’s about transformation, not blithely following along with a group of like-minded people.
Yet they are mesmerizing, aren’t they? They’re like charismatic self-help gurus, only moreso. I keep thinking of some of the words Theodore Parker wrote near the end of his life: “I have had great powers – and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).”
There, at least, is where Parker was so much like the rest of us: we all have great powers that we have only half used. Isn’t that one reason we come here – to keep being exhorted to develop the other half of our great powers, and to use them to help ourselves and our world come alive? We come seeking wholeness, and so often we don’t want to admit that, if only we will, we can have it.
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.
Video clips at Ustream
PRAYER:
(Ask veterans to stand, thank them.)
We pray for the bodies, minds and spirits of our soldiers on active duty now, that they may return home and may get the care they need.
And we remind ourselves – because we too easily forget – of the gratitude we owe to all veterans, past, present and future, for being willing to play that game of Russian Roulette we call military service. Any of them could have been sent into combat, and any of them could have been maimed or killed. No one else in our country is asked to offer that degree of sacrifice on behalf of political and military ambitions soldiers never fully understand, even as they are being shot at.
We pray, as people have prayed throughout history, for a time when soldiers and wars will not be necessary. But we don’t live in that world. And so we pray for the safety of our soldiers, and offer our heartfelt gratitude to all our veterans for their service.
Amen.
SERMON: The Audacity of Hope
Part A: Excited utterances
Tuesday’s presidential election was both a historic and exciting election. I want to talk about it, to look into this winning message of hope and change that carried Barack Obama to such a stunning victory of more than a two-to-one electoral vote. I want to wonder what it would take to make his hopes real, and whether it’s realistic to believe such change is possible.
But first, I just want to share, even to wallow in, some of the many excited utterances of this week. Here’s one:
“Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is a date that will live in fame (the opposite of infamy) forever. If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.” Those words came from the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a column he wrote for the New York Times two days ago, and they are a measure of the excitement that many people in our country and around the world feel this week.
Just consider the biography of the man we’ve elected President, against the whole history of the United States of America, and ask if it feels like you must be dreaming:
His father was born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father – our new President’s grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.
But as Obama tells the story, “My grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.
“My parents imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.
“I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
This is as perfect a Horatio Alger American Dream story as anyone is ever likely to have: the hard-working and determined person who succeeds despite overwhelming odds simply through what Martin Luther King called the content of his character. This is the American dream: from poor, powerless boy – or girl! – to the White House. He’s right: his story wouldn’t be possible in no other country on Earth.
Here are some more excited utterances, from this morning’s paper:
Maureen Dowd writes:
“I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week. Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel. I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.” (Maureen Dowd, “The Tracks of Our Tears,” 9 November 2008, The New York Times)
And Frank Rich writes with his edge, but also with some good insights:
“On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place – in cities all over America.
“For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid – easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included.
“So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.” (Frank Rich, It Still Felt Good the Morning After, 9 November 2008, The NY Times)
Warm and hopeful messages came from countries all over the world, too many to read here. But I don’t want to leave our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson’s home country out, so here’s another excited utterance from Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond. He sent a message to Mr. Obama, in which he said, “It ushers in a new era of hope for the United States and its role in the world. This was a victory for optimism over pessimism, for hope over fear.” There’s that word, Hope.
Here’s how Obama put it Tuesday night at the start of his speech as the new President-elect of the United States of America:
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
“Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”
My God – how long has it been since we have turned for a poetic and inspiring reading to one of our Presidents? Barack Obama may go down as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history. But it wasn’t just the excitement of election night that lifted him to that kind of eloquence. Here are just a few famous words he wrote about hope four years ago:
“Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”
Those words came from his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention, the speech that made him an instant national political figure – and helped get him a $2 million deal for three books. And that magical phrase, “The audacity of hope,” was the title of his best-selling 2006 book. But he got the message from his minister of twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It was a sentiment that resonated with his whole life experience. It is that audacious hope with which he wants to infect us, all of us.
Part B: the Manger of Hope
I like etymology, the origin of word meanings, so I looked these two words up. An archaic meaning of Hope is “to have trust, confidence”.
And to be audacious means “to dare” – to dare something that others lack the hope, confidence and courage to dare.
But there’s something special about a message of hope. In his first book, Dreams from my Father, he wrote some very telling and very poignant words about it, reflecting on the powerful emotional effect that his first visit to Jeremiah Wright’s church more than twenty years ago had on him. The preacher, choir and congregation had taken up the word “Hope” in chants and shouts, and it had a transformative effect on a young Barack Obama:
“In that single [word] ‘hope’ I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black;…” He also compared them to the hopeful songs that slaves used to sing at night around the fire. Obama’s sentiments of hope have profoundly religious roots.
Voices of hope don’t come from the same place as voices of privilege, power and entitlement. Voices of hope are usually pretty powerless. I think this voice of hope that President-elect Obama has made his centerpiece could only come from someone outside the circles of those accustomed to privilege. Those who already own the country don’t need hope. They just need more power, more protection from those who have been disempowered, a few more politicians in their pockets, to pass a few more laws in their favor – which they don’t seem to have much trouble getting from either political party.
This is not to say that Barack Obama is powerless, without privileges, or even that he’s just an ordinary guy. He’s not. He is very, very bright and focused – remember that he has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, graduated from Harvard Law School as president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I’m not sure we could over-state just how bright, focused and privileged our 44th President is.
But his privilege was earned, not bestowed. It came from his own achievements, not from his family or their entitlements. Our current president also attended elite schools. But he didn’t get into any of them on his own merit, and he did poorly at all of them. George W. Bush was pushed to the top by the financial and political ties of his family, in spite of his unimpressive personal achievements. Barack Obama rose to the top because of his personal achievements, but in spite of the complete lack of wealth or political power of anyone in his family.
As the son of a goat-herder from Kenya and a poor woman from Kansas, both dead now, Obama inherited both the right and the need to hope.
Here’s another kind of metaphor. Think of the different view of food that you can get from a gourmet, and from a man who has been hungry and poor for a long time. The gourmet can tutor you on the nuances of fine sauces and rare wines. She knows more about the subtle flavors of the most exquisite foods than anybody. But in some deeper ways, the hungry man can tell you even more important things about food, because he knows what he needs in order to live, and how much he needs it. That’s like the difference between the voice of power and privilege, and the voice of hope, too.
But Obama is hoping for something very different from Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists of the 1970s. Here’s a line from his justly famous speech on race back on March 18th:
“…we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”
Those are strong words! Obama is not an affirmative action candidate, nor a token played in the disingenuous game of racial reconciliation.
Some have talked about how he stands on the shoulders of people like Jesse Jackson and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and there is certainly something absolutely true about that. But he also represents a profoundly different political ideology than the talk about race or sex thirty years ago. Then, liberals would often favor someone simply because they were black or female. Had Jesse Jackson been elected, we all knew that he would make a point of choosing black people for his key positions, as we expected that Geraldine Ferraro would have chosen women if she had been elected Vice President, using their political power to reward Their Kind with entitlements. But that’s just reverse racism and sexism, and morally it is no better than the original versions that have done so much damage.
Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin continued to play on that reverse sexism this year in their very different campaigns, and many women were willing to vote for them largely because they were women, especially in the case of Hillary. As women, they belonged to a majority containing slightly more than half of the voting population and over half the general population.
But Obama had to be, and was, far more pragmatic. As the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, raised by a white grandmother in Hawaii, rising high into the intellectual and political elite through his own exceptional gifts – he didn’t belong to any majorities. Kenyans aren’t a majority in America, nor people born to parents of two different races, nor Hawaiians. The only majority Obama could appeal to was the majority of Americans. And as he said throughout his speeches over the past four years, he wasn’t appealing to red states or blue states, but to the United States. He wasn’t appealing to black America or white America, or to liberal America or conservative America, but just to the United States of America.
Think of it: a message of hope, spoken to and on behalf of the majority of our citizens, regardless of their political party, race or sex: that is a definition of post-partisan politics, which will be revolutionary if he means it and can pull it off.
If Obama is telling the truth, he is bringing a peaceful, profound, revolution. He says he’s looking for more than just a change of parties in the White House. Obama’s message isn’t about black empowerment. It’s about American empowerment, and human empowerment. This seemed to be the singular voice he brought, a voice that could have come only from outside all the majority groups.
Part C: My Own Audacious Hopes
We don’t know what kind of a president Barack Obama will make. If he plays the race card as Jesse Jackson did, he may become no more than a sensationalist President, notable only because he was black and brilliant, rather than becoming a truly sensational President because he was one of our very best.
I want to share some of my own audacious hopes for the next four years with you. You won’t agree with all of them, but you don’t come here only to have your biases confirmed, but also to hear things that might irritate you enough to make you think about your biases, and be more clear about why you’re going to stick with them, or change them.
I hope this wasn’t just a victory for the Democratic party, because the Democratic Party can not save us. I hope we won’t see four or eight more years of tit for tat, of vengeance on Republicans, and of liberal pork-barrel politics operating at the same low level as the Republican pork-barrel politics of the past eight years.
I hope I don’t like all of Obama’s appointments, and hope neither the Democrats nor the Republicans like them all either.
This has already started, as some prominent liberal voices have spoken out. Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine and a longtime progressive activist, railed against Rahm Emanual as Obama’s choice for Chief of Staff, characterizing him as a right-wing Zionist ideologue. And Ralph Nader wasted no time saying that Obama is already too beholden to giant corporations for us to hope for any significant change. But if Obama is serious about post-partisan politics, then he will appoint a fair number of brilliant Republicans to key posts – people who won’t always agree with him, but who will be open and informed enough in their criticism to keep the possibility of meaningful change alive – and I hope he does that.
I hope he truly puts together a post-partisan cabinet that might help move us all beyond the partisan politics that have proven to be so petty and immature for the past few decades.
I don’t know what that would look like. I don’t even know what it should look like, because in politics as in all other areas, I can’t see very far beyond my own biases, and my biases aren’t good enough. We need to empower meaningful dialogue between many different biases if this is to become – as Obama has also promised – a government of the people, by the people and for the people. I hope he can empower meaningful and influential dialogue between whose biases go beyond mine, no matter how much in love with my own biases I can be.
So I hope we are all surprised and educated in the coming years, to find a president who actually keeps some of his major campaign promises, and moves our country ahead into brave new places it has never been before.
PART D. A Reality Check
Now, does any of this hope for radical change really make any real-world sense? Or is it just that it’s Sunday, so we huddle together in church to be anesthetized with swell-sounding bromides of neither depth nor breadth, to numb us until we can get outside in the actual world again? That sort of thing does happen, as you know. Are we just kidding ourselves, like a herd of little Pollyannas, or can such radical, hopeful, change really happen?
Well, several things suggest that it can. Proposition 8 in California, forbidding the marriage of gay people, won only by a slim margin. That was the one dramatic setback for many people. But let’s back off and see this through a longer lens. In the past eight years, the percentage of people who voted against the rights of gays to marry in California decreased from 61% to 52%. In four more years, it is almost certain to be the minority view. Massachusetts has already extended the right of marriage to all people. New York recognizes those marriages as legal, and soon Connecticut will join them. And on another front, in all three states where regressive abortion propositions were on the ballot, they failed. As I think we’ll see in the coming years, the coming defeat of racial and sexual regression will also be a significant defeat for conservative Christianity – normative Christianity – which has supported them. Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, has an essay from 6 November on the Huffington Post in which she talks about “the Jesus that lost this election,” and it is the angry, bigoted, hateful Jesus who many of us have learned to accept as the normative Jesus over the past couple decades (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/the-victorious-jesus_b_141701.html). Twenty years ago, all of this would have been as unbelievable as a black president, but it’s happening, and the momentum seems both clear and strong.
Two days ago, a man named Benedict Carey reported on the op-ed pages of the New York Times about a study showing that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion and hatred can, and that mutual trust, once developed, travels like what he called a benign virus through an entire peer group. Radical change is possible, and it is happening. The fact that this report – which doesn’t contain much more than common sense to anyone who has made friends in racially mixed places – only came out this week rather than years ago is a sign of the role our media have played in helping to keep us at one another’s throats. Perhaps even the media can return to the days when they were actually the Fourth Estate, and took it as a sacred mission to keep us informed and educated. (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A20 of the New York edition.)
Paul Krugman the economist also wrote on Friday, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”
“And right now,” he says, “happens to be one of those times when the converse is also true, and good morals are good economics. Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.
“So,” Krugman concludes, “a new New Deal isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.” (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A35 of the New York edition.)
I agree with our next President, that if we do this right, we have a righteous wind at our backs and that we stand on the crossroads of history. But the final quote this morning will come from Barack Obama, as he reveals what is at the core of his whole vision, the spirit that he actually says he will serve:
“In the end, then,” he says, “what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” (from the 18 March speech on race).
I don’t always know what to say when politicians talk politics, but I hope many of these audacious dreams come true. I hope we here can find ways to move beyond both partisan and Unitarian biases to become agents of change in the broader kind of coalition that now calls us out.
And finally, I hope that if the new President of the United States asks us if we can grow beyond mere politics and ground our behavior instead in the highest teachings of the world’s great religions – to do unto others only as we would have them do unto us – I hope if he asks us whether we can do that, that as individuals and as a nation, we are able to rise up and shout YES WE CAN!
Through the pale sunlight once more gravely speak,
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
“Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven.”
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited –
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel now new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.
Prayer
At this time of year nature and our mythology remind us of the cycles of life and death. Our environment seems less abundant as trees and plants prepare for winter. Many cultures in our world claim that the veil between the living and dead is thinner at this time of year.
For those of us coping with loss of friends and loved ones, that thinness feels vast – and thin. Vast because our relationship with those who have died has forever changed. Yet thin because our memory of the dead can keep them close and vital to us.
The cherished memories of our loved ones who came before remind us of the love they gave us and our love for them. We are reminded by them that how we live today matters not just to those with us today but the future generations to come.
As those who came before influence us then we will in turn influence those to come. If we influence others is not our choice, how we influence them is. Our time in this life is limited but what we choose to give to others can be abundant.
May our love and concern for others guide us in preserving the memories and values of those who came before – and may we pass on to those who come after the highest values and spirit that enriched our own lives.
Amen
Today’s reading
is a poem entitled Message in Colors
by Spanish Poet Julie Sopetran.
Here, in an impressionistic and sensory fashion, the writer tries to convey to us the kind of nostalgia that is a spiritual celebration on the Day of the Dead in Mexico.
Lit candles. Faces. Memories
and an entrance that’s a rainbow: protection for the place
It is the decomposition of matter, transformed into art.
It is the final curtain awoken from death.
Yes. An eternal dream of uncorrupt flowers and of celebration.
It is death’s lament, fading away
and it is also the respect made as tribute.
Who could have imagined so much beauty on a tomb?
Mole. Glass of water. Incense. Salt. Prayers.
Firecrackers. Fruits. Bread. Music.
Ballads, Poems. Romantic songs.
History praised. Creativity expressed
in its most raw form…
And they are laments in purple, white, blue, and pink.
It is a blow from grace so heightened as artificial fire
that reveals the soul’s presence in the darkness.
Something like the flowering of martyrdom in flames.
An arrangement for the dead
or the posthumous splendor of what one thinks is on the other side;
In that place everything is possible
grief battles with life and life wins,
it is once again for a little while, happiness, playful tradition
which overcomes reality.
It was before these ornate gravesites, when I knew
that in that place, as in my heart,
those that have departed return every year to remind us of their love.
And that only LOVE can save us.
Sermon: What the dead can tell us about coming alive
Today, in the sanctuary we are blessed by these beautiful Altars that were created for our Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebrations here at the church last night. Thank you to all of you who created them. Amidst this explosion of color I am feeling rather drab in my dark suit with only my red tie looking like it belongs up here with all these colors.
This time of year feels really busy. We just had Halloween on Friday and this weekend we also have the Day of the Dead celebrations. The election on Tuesday means that we are only three days away from the beginning of the 2012 Presidential Election campaign. The church year is in full swing with lots of exciting activities happening here most days of the week. The relaxed days of summer seems a distant memory as Thanksgiving plans are starting to coalesce and Christmas is looming just around the corner. Thank goodness for that extra hour we gained with the clocks going back last night, we need all the time we can get. Yet time is a quantity we only have a finite amount of. Our own health concerns or those around us are a constant reminder that we are creatures of finite lives. We are particularly sensitive to these issues at this time of year since in many cultures this is a time where we do honor and celebrate the dead. The Mexican holiday of Day of the Dead is one such tradition.
When I first came to the United States and encountered the Day of the Dead celebration, I naively thought it was just the Mexican version of Halloween. The proliferation of skeletons in various active poses and sugar skulls seemed to suggest a similar emphasis on the fearful and otherworldly aspects of Halloween. My assumption of any similarity with Halloween was mistaken. Day of the Dead focuses on bringing family and friends together to remember and honor those close to us who have died.
In the poem, Ron read earlier we heard about the atmosphere, beauty, and celebratory nature of the Day of the Dead tradition as families gather at gravesites or in homes with altars similar to what we have here. The altars contain mementoes and other objects such as flowers, food, and drink. The intent is to encourage visits from the souls of the dead so they can hear the prayers, music, and stories told in their honor. The commemoration of the dead has warm and pleasant overtones for the participants. In the words from the poem “grief battles with life and life wins, it is once again for a little while, happiness and playful tradition which overcomes reality.” The reality is death but for a brief period through community celebration then grief is transcended. This festive interaction between the living and the dead in a social ritual helps the living to remember how enriched they were by the lives of those no longer alive.
Our Halloween celebration is also based on the idea of the dead being able to visit us at this time of year. The difference is the dead are seen as threatening to the living therefore the tradition of wearing costumes to scare off the dead spirits. What different approaches to the dead, one celebrating them, the other being fearful of them? Halloween has no religious significance for us today but the Day of the Dead has its roots in two religious traditions.
The Day of the Dead celebration – and it is a celebration – has its roots back hundreds of years to the indigenous groups in Mexico. These groups honored their ancestors through gifts and stories. After the Spanish Conquests of Mexico, the Christian missionaries saw these celebrations as sacrilegious and tried to banish the ritual. The Spanish had a fearful attitude towards the dead due to the devastation of the great plagues that killed one third of the population in Europe during the late Middle Ages. After many years of unsuccessfully trying to end the practice, the Spanish Christians then decided to assimilate the celebration. They moved the indigenous celebration from August to coincide with All Soul’s day which is today November 2nd. All Soul’s Day is a Roman Catholic commemoration of the dead so there is a tenuous connection of honoring the dead.
Christianity like other religions has been very effective co-opting indigenous holidays and making them Christian holidays. The birth of Jesus on December 25th is widely recognized to be the co-opting of a Roman Solar holiday not the actual birth of Jesus. The seeming coincidences of Day of the Dead and All Souls Day are not “God working anonymously” as some would claim but the appropriation of a less powerful group’s tradition by a more powerful group. Interestingly, the Day of the Dead celebration as practiced by most people today has little connection to the actual rituals of the Christian tradition and strong connections to the original ideas of the indigenous, pre-Christian tradition.
Sadly, like so many religious practices there has been some co-option of this holiday by that most dominant of all our present religions – consumerism. The commercialization of holidays such as Christmas, Halloween, and Day of the Dead often take the important symbols of a religion and trivialize them as nothing more than products to be sold. This may explain why on my first encounter with Day of the Dead I could not see a distinction from the overt commercialization of Halloween. In the tradition of the Day of the Dead, the significance of the skeletons and sugar skulls are their material symbolism. The skeletons are symbols for the dead family members, not to be feared, but to be loved and invited to join the celebration of their own lives. The specific activity that a skeleton is engaged in is usually the favorite activity of the deceased person being honored.
The desire to have some physical connection to a dead relative or friend is something I suspect many of us can relate to. Many of us have physical keepsakes that remind us of those special to us. The other important aspect of the Day of the Dead celebration is the idea of the gifts the living could give to the dead to bring us closer to their spirit and help bring their spirit more fully into our lives. Of course in Liberal Religion we need to do some translation to bring the idea into our context but I think this is a potentially rich way of thinking for us. What gifts can we give of ourselves today that would honor and bring us closer to departed family and friends? Can we live our lives to honor those who through their love, values, and support made us who we are today? Being a Liberal Religion each of us needs to explore those questions ourselves but perhaps hearing my own struggles with these questions might help you.
I mentioned earlier that this tie may be the only item belonging to me that belongs with these altars. I was referencing the red color in contrast with the dark, austere colors of my suit. Remember we Unitarian Universalists are religiously descended from the Puritans who were not famed for their bold color sense. This tie also belongs on these altars for the symbolism it means to me. I was given this tie twenty-two years ago for my brother’s wedding by my father. It was his tie and he gave it to me as a family gift. My father died unexpectedly in January of this year. Like many of us here who have experienced the loss of someone close to us and perhaps especially a parent whom we’re close to, it is a disorienting experience. A seemingly ever-present pillar of your life is removed. It is painful and destabilizing. This tie for me is an important connection to the memory of my dad.
My dad was an honest, hard working, and plain talking person. He was bright and inquisitive but not college educated and liked people to speak in plain language grounded in what he called the real world. I remind myself to keep my words honest, respectful, and accessible. My dad always loved a good argument and would often disagree with me just for the discussion. Family discussions around the dinner table had always been a huge part of my family culture for as long as I can remember. I believe the constant questioning and discussions in my family home set me on my long and winding path to finding a home in Unitarian Universalism. When I question with honesty, sincerity, respect, and clarity then I believe I am closer to the spirit of my dad while serving important religious values.
Davidson in a sermon a few weeks ago gave a wonderful example of living life as if all the great people of history were watching – living under the gaze of eternity I think he called it. As daunting as that sounds it does seem to be powerful guidance for living a good life. I also think it is in keeping with this spirit of Liberal Religion to consider some of the people who are watching us to be our dead relatives and friends who we most admired and were influential on us. When we invoke the memory of them to guide or motivate us in our lives then we are invoking their spirit and by doing so we are honoring them. I believe this is what May Sarton was saying in the earlier poem:
“Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.”
We are engaging with both the inspiration and the sadness of those important people who are no longer with us physically. At the heart of grief and mourning is the struggle we have dealing with multiple emotions simultaneously: the joy that person brought to us in our lives and the sadness at their absence, the anger at what is seemingly unresolved and fear of how we can live life without them. Our mourning does not end since we are reminded of them as they continue to influence us through their example.
As part of the Day of the Dead celebration many Mexican families tell stories about the dead person each year to keep their memory and influence alive. I think there is great value in this. In our religion the memorial services fill this formal role on a one time basis shortly after their death. We do not have a religious tradition of regularly telling a person’s story. What I wanted to do for my dad became clear to me when I was clearing through photographs when preparing to move here from San Francisco in June.
I was looking at some photographs and I found one of my dad when he was two years old and a photograph of when I was last with him just over a year ago. I looked at him in both photographs and thought what really connects these two completely different people – the fresh-faced two year old boy in 1932 and the haggard face seventy-five years later which showed the years of discomforting illness. What became clear to me is that it is the stories, experiences, and relationships connecting the people in the two photographs. I realized that I knew only a small portion of those stories. The father-son relationship, though intimate and important, is a limited lens through which to view any person.
Being a father myself, I’m acutely aware of the narrow view my five-year old daughter has of me – I’m a mode of transportation and a rather large climbing frame but primarily I’m the authority figure who denies her all things fun. Don’t believe her when she says I denied her any candy on Halloween. I think I allowed her one piece. To broaden my own view of my father I’ve undertaken a project to write his eulogy not from my own perspective or people I know well but from those who I do not know well and had a relationship with my dad very different from me. His friends when he was in the Air Force as a young man, the people who were his apprentices at work, and his brother in Canada who knew him during his early years. This will help me get a fuller perspective beyond just his later life as a father and perhaps gain insights into why he was the person he was.
When a person dies we can often freeze our relationship with them at the time of their death and not remember the changes that occurred in the relationship over the course of their life. I believe that we can continue to change our relationship even with those who are dead by getting a fuller understanding of who they were. As long as they are alive there is often that vain hope that they may still change to become the person we want them to be. Seventy-six years wasn’t enough perhaps the seventy-seventh year of their life will be the one they make the change I desire of them. Ah the eternal hopeful human spirit especially when it is about someone else changing and not ourselves.
When a person dies we give up any hope of them changing but if we choose we can change our own beliefs of that person. Perhaps what we wanted them to change was just not that important and we focus on those more important eternal attributes of the person that are important to us – their love for us despite our imperfections, their confidence in us despite our own doubts, or their friendship despite our sometimes feeling unworthy of it. The death of someone allows us to reframe what we remember about their life – for good and for bad – and perhaps allows us to see the essence of the person beyond the often trivial disagreements that are so much part of our everyday lives.
Despite the inevitability of death for all of us, it is not a subject that is discussed much in our society. There is often avoidance until it is thrust upon on us through our own loss. Many people, religious and non-religious, often turn to religion or religious leaders for guidance at this time. Religion is where we try to find some meaning and comfort about death. Different religions have different ideas about what happens to us when we die. Many propose some form of existence beyond this life, a hope that we will be reunited in some form with those who died before us. I understand the desire for this but to me what happens beyond death is a mystery – and perhaps it is good that it is a mystery. This allows grief-stricken people to find hope in different ways during difficult times. I have seen the solace and strength that friends of mine have gained from believing they would be reunited with a deceased child or young spouse in the future. This is not a denial of death but a belief in something beyond death. I personally struggle to share their beliefs but I cannot be certain what happens after death and at times even feel a little envious of the comfort these beliefs give them.
What I can be certain of is that death is a transformational experience for those close to the deceased. Our lives are changed as we are reminded of our own mortality. We are finite beings with a limited time in this life and it matters what we do with our life. I have heard the Spanish expression Manana described as meaning something might get done tomorrow, or maybe next week, or maybe next month. I heard someone being asked if we had any equivalent of that expression in Scotland and he replied that we had no word to convey that sense of urgency. Urgency is not a good way of determining what is important. Our lives seem to be surrounded by urgency. Urgency of creating Halloween costumes, making Thanksgiving plans, buying Christmas presents and even writing sermons. While death gives us a finite time we should react to this restriction by prioritizing what really is important.
Manana can be thought of as something never being started because of procrastination, alternatively it can mean something will never be completed because it transcends our timeframe. I suspect what is really most important is not what we get done before we die but those projects that we begin that will transcend our deaths. For example the work we do in community to address the social ills such as poverty, violence, hunger, racism, and sexism. This work to heal our world will not be completed in my life time – improved I hope but not completed. By building institutions such as this church with our time and money we hope this work and the promotion of our religious values to others will continue after we are gone. This is legacy work since it transcends our own life span.
I talked earlier about how a focus of Day of the Dead was the gifts whose purpose was to bring the spirit of the dead closer to us. Our legacy is the reverse of this, what will we dedicate ourselves to now that will be a gift to others when we are dead? Our time in this life is finite but our legacy and what we choose it to be is not. How we preserve the memory and values of those who came before us and pass on our values and spirit to others are perhaps the most important questions we will address in our lives. By acknowledging the reality of death and the losses we have in common we may find what is most meaningful in our life and worth passing on to future generations. And when we do that we are honoring the full human experience and celebrating life’s longing for itself.
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Sopetran, Julie, Message in Colors from the book Mexico City, Mixquic & Morelos – Through the Eyes of the Soul, Day of the Dead in Mexico. http://library.thinkquest.org/trio/TTQ03066/poems_english.html#message URL accessed on October 30th, 2008.
Sewell, Marilyn ed. Cries of the Spirit (Boston, Ma: Beacon Press, 1991) p.131
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be significant, formidable, powerful? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
– Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech – words adapted from Marianne Williamson
SERMON: How You Should Vote
So many conservative preachers have been telling their people how to vote for so long that I began to wonder if I was being derelict in my duty. After all, we’re trying to do honest religion here. And surely honest religion also has some light to shed on the upcoming election.
So that’s what I want to do this morning. I want to bring this election – and I mean this presidential election – home to you in a way that might make it more clear just how you should vote on November 4th.
It’s a complex subject, and I first need to sketch a much bigger picture before I can then bring this election – or any- important election – into it.
Many of you know the story about two wolves that comes from our Native American tradition. A young boy who was the strongest and most popular boy in the tribe went to see his grandfather for some wisdom. He was strong and clever enough to take whatever he wanted from others, and one voice within him said he should do it. On the other hand, he felt it wasn’t fair, taking things from others that they needed, just because he could get away with it. His grandfather nodded, and said yes, he had the same two voices within him. He thought of them as two wolves. One always urged him to take what he could get away with, to use his advantages over others to his own advantage, not theirs. The other wolf always wanted him to be decent, compassionate, someone who was a blessing to all around him rather than just to himself.
I want to talk about these two wolves this morning, because they are in all of us. We are not all the strongest, cleverest and most popular, but we have other advantages. Maybe we have more education than the majority of others, or we attended elite schools, and both expect and know that just the fact that we attended an elite school will open doors for us that aren’t opened for others, and we like it. It seems only fair. Or perhaps we’ve made or inherited more money than most others – I’m convinced that the ability to make money is a gift that a few have but most don’t – and righteously cling to the advantages and security that brings. Or we’re more attractive than most, and have learned how to use that to our advantage. But let’s not get so fuzzy that we fail to see the obvious. And what’s obvious is that, while we have lots of individual traits that give us an advantage over others, the differences that really make the most difference in the world have always been differences in power: the ability to get and keep power.
The wolf with power has a different view of power and its privileges than the wolves without power have, and a different plan for How Things Should Work. I’m going to call this Plan A, or Plan Alpha, for it is the scheme of things as designed by the Alpha males and females.
The other wolf favors Plan Beta, or Plan B. It’s about weaker, squishier things, like empathy, compassion, reciprocity, caring almost as much for others as for ourselves, and so on. It is certainly the weaker wolf.
Plan B serves the people who aren’t an alpha. They are, in every species, the overwhelming majority, yet throughout history they have almost always been successfully subdued, disempowered and ruled by the alphas. It may seem amazing that so few can rule over so many for so long – but it looks like Nature’s Way. And in fact, we have millions of years of history showing that is Nature’s Way. Alphas have always written the rules for their groups – in dolphins, dogs, elephants and apes, including human apes.
The strongest take what they want, the weaker submit as they must, or they will be put in their place through violence or threats of violence. You can see it in a hundred nature films, or read about it in the daily news.
In at least two species, the art of politics has developed as a more subtle and effective expression and transmission of power. I’ve brought you some descriptions from a well-known book on politics. They are pretty blunt, but see if you can’t recognize them:
“… politics is all about getting and keeping power, by the few over the many, and by any means necessary. Alpha males form alliances with influential males and females – or subordinate males form coalitions to overpower the alpha male, and then consolidate their power by forming alliances with influential females. Males seldom maintain the alpha rank for more than four years.” Then there’s another round of opportunistic alliances and vicious fighting to crown a new leader – or as we call them, elections.
The two mottoes of politics are “One good turn deserves another,” and “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 202)
And political alliances are not personal, but functional – not with friends, but with those who can, at the moment, be useful. Yesterday’s enemy may be today’s ally, and we may attack today’s friend tomorrow.
Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 43)
As I said, that’s a little blunt, but most of us would say yes, that’s our species, and it is. However, most of these observations came from a book called Chimpanzee Politics, written in 1982 and now a minor classic. The author, who has spent his life studying apes, was describing chimpanzees. And he says humans and chimpanzees are the only two species who do politics this way.
So you can understand why Newt Gingrich put the book Chimpanzee Politics on the recommended reading list for freshmen representatives, back in 1994. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 307)
It’s another way of saying our political style evolved by three million years ago, and perhaps the only major way in which our species has advanced beyond chimpanzees since then is through our invention of money, media and lobbyists. Not everyone would consider that an advance.
Why seek power? In any species, why seek power? It’s not for the sake of power, but for the entitlement that power brings – entitlement to food, mates and pretty much whatever else the top dogs want.
The alpha male chimpanzees, who do about 95% of the breeding in their troops, would think our alpha males have a severe testosterone deficiency, but we know that isn’t always true either. There are stories going all the way back to George Washington, saying he was father of this country in more ways than one – though you only have to turn on the news to see that we do have some modern politicians trying to uphold that ancient tradition.
The observation that Rank Hath Its Privileges didn’t originate with our species. Thousands of species had been playing that out for tens of millions of years before we came along. And maybe if chimpanzees had invented boats or learned to ride horses and make really destructive weapons, they would have invented the idea of empire.
I don’t have to sketch out any more of this. You all know this movie because we’re in it. You can even take a half hour drive and go up the dominance alphabet from omega to alpha here in Austin just by starting out east of I-35 and driving west.
Power and Privilege for the Alphas and Obedience for the masses are the holy trinity of Plan A in thousands of species, always underwritten by violence and threats of violence. The benefits of Plan A are very appealing, at least if you’re up near the top of the alphabet.
In Plan B, the Betas, Gammas, Deltas on down the dominance alphabet are also concerned primarily with their own interests, and the political structure that would serve them best. Of course, they are the vast majority. But they have been subjugated and ruled in almost every species for tens of millions of years. They are the underdogs.
Plan B is certainly the weaker and less likely plan. And not surprisingly, most of those in favor of Plan B are those without much power or wealth.
Yet as powerful as the history and logic of Plan Alpha are, Plan B has also had many profound and enduring champions, including the key prophets and sages of almost every religion and philosophy in human history.
For starters, just think of the words “Do unto others as you would have them to unto you.” It’s called the Golden Rule because you can find a version of it in almost every religion. It is saying that the only Alpha people God recognizes are the moral Alpha people who show more empathy, compassion and courage than most around them – not those with more money or power. Jesus was even clear that those who get their rewards here will not get them in heaven, where things run according to God’s values.
The Plan B sentiments may be terribly unlikely, but they are among the most famous and endearing teachings of almost every religion on earth.
The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu, written five centuries before Jesus lived, is so explicit it sounds like an op-ed piece from yesterday’s news. It says, “When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn – all this is robbery and chaos. It is not in keeping with the Tao.” (#53, Stephen Mitchell translation)
A quick Google search will show you unambiguous quotations supporting Plan B from Bahá’í, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Native American Spirituality, Shinto, Sikhism, Sufism, Taoism, and dozens of others. All the religions seem to agree that the fundamental law that helps us become most fully human is reciprocity: not doing things to others that we wouldn’t want them to do to us. Most people would see this as the polar opposite of Plan Alpha, Nature’s Plan that has dominated biological evolution forever.
These two plans, these two wolves, are the diametrically opposed philosophies of life that have polarized us throughout human history. Even in this country, they go all the way back to our founding fathers.
Alexander Hamilton declared that the people are “a great beast” that must be tamed. Rebellious and independent farmers had to be taught, sometimes by force, that the ideals of the revolutionary pamphlets were not to be taken too seriously. (Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People, p. 46).
Or as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, put it, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” (Chomsky, 46) Others among the founding fathers agreed wholeheartedly. The primary responsibility of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” said James Madison. (Chomsky, 47) Those “without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights,” Madison explained. His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who “come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable set of men.” (Chomsky, 48) That’s Nature’s Way, expressed in a language of our species.
Now let’s bring the picture into a little sharper focus. Here’s where the differences between the Alpha and Beta plans shape and misshape our nation today.
Plan A: For Plan Alpha, if privilege and empowerment rightfully belong only to the winners, to those with a lot of money and power – as Mother Nature seems to say it does – then if you are poor or powerless, it’s probably because you deserve to be. You lack discipline, haven’t worked as hard or as smart as the Alphas. You don’t deserve things like health care or a good education if you can’t afford them, because health care and education are commodities like other commodities, and you’re being not only out of line but also selfish pretending you have a right to things you can’t pay for.
By the same logic, worker unions are against Nature’s Plan – Plan A. It doesn’t matter that there are twenty to forty times more non-Alphas. They don’t have, haven’t earned or bought effective power, and this is about power and its privileges. Asking the powerful to share their money – through higher taxes and fewer privileges – just to keep the weak alive, or even to strengthen them so they might actually become able to threaten the privileged position to which the Alphas feel entitled – well, as you can hear, it’s unnatural and immoral. And if God is the voice of the natural and moral order, then God is also against it.
The free market also has a moral imperative, because it enables those with power to keep it. It isn’t a fair fight, but it’s not supposed to be. The fight’s over. It’s about maintaining privilege. Even chimpanzees know that.
Plan B. Plan B people see these things very differently. They want to measure society by different currencies – by compassion, empathy, empowerment of the many rather than what they see as the unholy trinity of power and privilege for the few and fearful obedience for the rest.
They look at data saying that 18,000 Americans die every year because of inadequate health care, and they see health care as protection, just as police and fire protection, food safety, and adequately tested drugs are protection of our citizens. And this changes it from a mere individual commodity to part of the moral mission of government, part of the compassion we owe one another, even to what God demands of us.
(NOTE: I’m grateful to George Lakoff for the understanding of healthcare as protection rather than commodity. See his book The Political Mind.)
If they’re Christian, they may quote Jesus’ saying “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me,” then connect it not only to the 18,000 of us dying each year, but also to the more than 40 million of us without health care, and they say “Jesus would hate this.”
They can see worker unions in the same way, as necessary protection of the weaker many against the powerful few, who seem so easily tempted to a kind of greed that Plan B folks see as selfish and brutal.
The “free market” looks very different, too. For one thing, it isn’t free. Without government protection, our lawmakers have allowed or encouraged rapacious people to rob us of well over a trillion dollars, while making huge personal profits. Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Weil figures that since the start of fiscal year 2004, the once Mighty Five of Wall Street – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns – lost around $83 billion in stock market value. But they reported employee compensation of around $239 billion. In other words, the engineers who dug this disastrous hole paid themselves almost three dollars for every dollar they lost. To the Betas, this looks like socialism for the rich and a vicious kind of capitalism for the rest of us. (Taken from “For Whom the Bailout Tolls,” Saturday 25 October 2008, by Michael Winship, Truthout/Perspective.)
This latest trillion-dollar bailout will cost every U.S. household close to $9,000. (As calculated by the Internet investigative newsroom ProPublica.org) It has transferred the private debt of a few to all of us by making us pay for it with our taxes.
“The ‘free market’ doesn’t free us from government; it just gives us unaccountable government without a moral mission.” (George Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 63)
You could say this is just a reminder of the real-world power of the Alpha Plan, and that the rest of us need to grow up and accept our natural place. But to the majority of humans, even if they are afraid to speak up, it just sounds greedy and brutal, lacking even the most basic compassion all of our religions have always taught.
This brings me to the coming election. As citizens, we need to practice speaking up. Voting is practice in speaking up. It’s not much, and it’s certainly not enough, but it’s practice.
Here’s one more fact that can be seen in at least a couple ways. Three years ago, the ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers in Washington D.C. was 65:1. I couldn’t find more recent statistics online, though did find one other seeker making the same complaint. While that can sound hopelessly lopsided, there’s another way to see it. It is also saying that elected politicians’ inclinations to serve the majority of people who elected them may be so deep and strong that it can take up to sixty-five times as much energy to persuade them to betray us. Though here in Texas, the ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers is only 8:1, so the lawmakers in Washington can also just look like higher-priced rentals.
I began with a story of the two wolves, but I didn’t finish it. The boy was frustrated by his grandfather’s admission that he too had always had these two wolves fighting to control his soul. “But grandfather,” he finally said, “which wolf wins?” His grandfather looked deep into his eyes – one of those looks that can connect two souls – and said, “The one that I feed, grandson, the one that I feed.”
Voting is throwing food to these wolves. Plan A has been and will probably always be the dominant plan for almost every animal species on earth. And as much as prophets like Jesus, Mohammad, Lao Tzu and the rest preach about Plan B as the highest human path, or as Jesus’ definition of the kingdom of God, I don’t know that Plan B has ever defined a U.S. government, though some have been much closer to it than others.
There has probably never been a presidential candidate who was a pure example of either Plan Alpha or Plan Beta. All are mixtures; there are no unadulterated angels or demons here. But they all lean more toward one than the other, and the direction of their leaning is important.
I started to tell you how you should vote, and I want to finish that. To me as a minister, voting is above all else a spiritual activity, where we can speak up for our deepest and most cherished values and beliefs. When we vote, we are standing before our God, before all that is holy to us.
When you stand before that little touch-screen voting machine, I want you to know that you are not alone. There are two wolves there with you, each singing “Stand by Me”. Don’t try to face them alone. Take with you the image of those whose love has meant the most of you, those for whom you have the deepest respect. Take the spiritual teachings that have most deeply touched your soul. Take the mental image of all the people in your whole life who expected only the very best from you, and who knew you were capable of it. Look at them, and let them look you straight in the eye – that look that connects your souls. Then, in front of that audience, push only the buttons that you can be most proud to have pushed.
Let us trust in the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit within that implores us to seek life, truth and wholeness – let us trust that spirit.
When the voices within or around us say to do something wrong because everybody’s doing it and we can get away with it, let us answer that we can not get away with it, because the angels of our better nature are watching, and because we know better.
When we are in a moral dilemma and are urged to take the path of least resistance, let us remember that in the mor world and the world of character, resistance builds strength.
When tempted to cheat on life, or on those we love, let us remember that you can’t score points by cheating in life and love, because there is a spirit within us that knows better, and it may not give our soul back to us until we make it right.
And all of this is good news – the good news that we are more decent, more loving and more just than we often believe.
The saving truth is that we are being watched by something we can trust, and that something is the person we are meant to become. The person we are meant to become is inviting us into a larger life, a more healing truth, and a better world. That invitation may be our salvation. Let us take it.
Amen.
SERMON: The Holy Heretical Spirit
This morning, I’d like to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Tao te Ching, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. I’ll try to be brief.
I’m doing a series of sermons this fall on the three most significant Unitarian thinkers and preachers of the past 200 years. Almost everyone here will feel a deep kinship with them at that level, I think, whether you care about Unitarians or not.
Mostly today I want to talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson, easily the best known of the people we claim, rightly or wrongly, as Unitarian. He spoke to the general audience of inquiring liberal minds who wanted to know how to think about Jesus, God, the Bible, religion and salvation in the 19th century.
He also has a connection to this church. In 1892, the first incarnation of this church was founded by a student of Emerson’s. And when the church reformed in the 1950s, Rev. Wheelock’s granddaughter Emily Howson was a member, and donated the seed money to let us build our social hall, which is named after her.
We need to see this complex man Emerson against the background of his even more complex times, for they were times that shaped our world today in many ways.
When the seven-member graduating class of Harvard Divinity School invited Emerson to speak in 1838, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of our country’s founding fathers, had been dead for 12 years, both dying on the 4th of July 1826, 50 years after they had signed our Declaration of Independence.
The scientific revolution was under way, and already threatening a view of the world that Christians had held for about 1800 years. Many people still believed the world was only six thousand years old, created by God in six days, and that – as Thomas Jefferson had also believed – no species had ever become extinct. But by 1803 – the year Emerson was born – a brilliant French paleontologist had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct species of animals, and that collection had toured all over Europe, and then through the U.S. with P.T. Barnum’s circuses.
And two geologists had shown that the world was much, much older than six thousand years. Millions and millions of years, they thought, which we now believe to be billions of years. The most influential of these geologists, Charles Lyell, had just published his first volume eight years before Emerson’s address, and among the many who read it and had their worldview forever changed by it was a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Darwin had the second volume shipped to him while he was on his voyage aboard The Beagle, where he made his detailed observations on the Galapagos Islands that led to the publication of his book Origin of the Species, 21 years after Emerson’s address.
This was the broader stage on which Emerson spoke on that hot July day. What were we to make of religion, or of Jesus, God, and all the stories in the Bible? Where were we to stand? Where was the new truth that could set us free and make us come more alive? These were Emerson’s questions, and they’re still our questions today, 170 years later.
The Unitarians of the 1830s – including William Ellery Channing, whom I talked about last month – still believed in a supernatural religion, a supernatural God and the literalness of the biblical miracles. Emerson didn’t. He took all of this psychologically. He saw religion as the development of our innate senses of the good, the true and the beautiful, and said that these senses were like a divine presence within us, or that we were all a part of God.
This is a lot like the Hindu notion that our individual soul, or atman, is part of the universal soul, or Brahman, and within a few years, the Bhagavad Gita would be the favorite religious scripture of both Emerson and his younger friend, Henry David Thoreau.
The way Emerson saw it, salvation would mean getting in touch with these deep sensitivities we have, and living out of them – living lives of truth, justice and compassion. Heaven and hell are here and now for Emerson, not elsewhere and later.
While his attacks were against Christianity, their arguments work against every Western religion. The capacity for a noble, even a holy life is born within us. It’s part of human nature, not something put in from elsewhere. That’s shown by the fact that we know the difference between good and evil, kindness and cruelty, truth and pretense, and we are, at our best, drawn to the better options. This shows the presence within us of what theologians like to call God. Emerson put it this way: “The notion of God is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 61).” “The highest revelation is that God is in every [one of us].” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001]), p. 62)
But if that’s so, then what’s the use of figures like Jesus, Mohammad or Allah, or books like the Bible or the Koran? Well for Emerson, when these people or books can show us some wisdom that helps us come more alive, then they’re useful and probably even true for us for now. But not because Jesus or a holy scripture said them – only because these figures or books happened, in this case, to say something that also seems to be true.
It’s like saying that science books are only correct if what they say happens to be true – but it’s not true just because a science book says so. The books can be wrong. So can the prophets, so can all holy scriptures. And the way we check it out is in the real world, with our own mind and in our own heart.
In intellectual terms, what Emerson did was to convert theology into a kind of depth psychology. Religion is about our becoming all that we can be. All religions are about being all that we can be – it’s such a timeless religious truth, it’s really a pity that some advertising agency stole it for the Army. People like Jesus are examples of what all of us can become: they’re examples of our deepest human nature, not exceptions to it. Emerson said that Jesus was true to what is in you and me, and that if we are compassionate and just, then to that extent we are God. The gods are our best traits, writ large. We are the projector, they are the screen.
These were the sorts of things he said in that commencement address to the students, faculty and guest ministers at Harvard Divinity School when he was just 35 years old. He was attacked viciously for his remarks – especially by the Unitarians. The Unitarian paper called The Christian Examiner said that Emerson’s Divinity School address contained “neither good divinity nor good sense (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).” And a man named Andrews Norton, who was regarded as the most liberal Unitarian scholar alive at the time, said Emerson’s beliefs threatened civilization itself (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).
His address made him an outsider to the Unitarians. They denounced him, and closed ranks against him (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 74). It also set off a firestorm that lasted for decades. It was almost thirty years before he was invited to speak at Harvard again.
He was ordained and served as a Unitarian minister for about three years, but it didn’t agree with him, and he resigned from it. After that, he liked to say things like “Unitarianism is corpse-cold.”
He was a scathing critic of all the religion of his time. He said, “I think no [one] can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on [people] is gone, or going.”
He puzzled over people who went to church, and said “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church.'” (In fact, that person was him. It was something he wrote to his wife.)
Emerson’s vision carried him far beyond the boundaries not only of Christianity, but of theism and all religions. He had faith that we had a divine impulse within us that we could trust. He saw all gods and religions as projections of our own sense of being part of something larger than ourselves. Not all teachings of religions or about gods are good, of course. Some are foolish, or evil. But he trusted that we could generally tell the difference.
You can think of the Bible’s command, for example, that disobedient teen-agers or women who were not virgins when they married should be stoned to death.
You may have seen the YouTube videos of women being stoned to death by Muslim clerics, or read about fundamentalist cults in our country today where disobedient children were beaten to death. Jon Krakauer, the author of the book and movie Into the Wild, also wrote a powerful expose of fundamentalist Mormons called Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (on which I preached here a few years ago), in which he recounted the story of a Mormon father murdering his daughter because she was disobedient. That father later died in a Mexican prison for other violent crimes he believed God commanded him to commit. I happen to know one of that man’s daughters, a sister of the girl who was murdered. She lives in Austin. These things aren’t just happening “elsewhere” – they’re right here among us, too.
All of these punitive teachings, Emerson believed, are evil. And I agree with him. There is nothing about any real God in any of them. And we can all see this. When we’re being honest with ourselves, we can and should trust our own heads and hearts more than we trust theologians, preachers, churches or scriptures.
All of this means that the role of churches and preachers is to offer us insights, stories and teachings that can help us become more alive and whole. And the churches and preachers are to be judged by how well they do that. If they don’t, we need to keep looking for a church and minister who meet our own deepest needs, which may not be quite the same as those of the person in the next row.
You have to take the best urgings of your head and heart seriously – what Abraham Lincoln called the angels of our better nature. Then you have to find people, places and experiences that also take you seriously – where you don’t have to check your head or your heart at the door. But don’t think the real authority lies with a church or a bible or a god. All those, including the gods, are human creations. The best of them are good, in the same way the best philosophies, psychologies or literature are. But the fundamental revelation for Emerson was that we already have the spirit – a spirit that even transcends God – within us, and need to live out of that.
The Unitarians and others of the day called all this The Transcendentalist Revolt. Do you see how radical it is? Whether or not Emerson can be seen as a Unitarian – and the leading Unitarians of his time denied that he could be – he was definitely a religious liberal, and a courageous preacher of honest religion.
But honest religion is a style, not a position. When it becomes a position, a belief, a creed or orthodoxy, we need to hold lightly to it. Yesterday’s beliefs and other people’s creeds may not do it. Second-hand religion isn’t likely to give us a first-hand life. The spirit that honestly seeks truth can’t be fenced in. “Time makes ancient good uncouth,” as the poet says (James Russell Lowell) – not just out of date, but uncouth.
The movement Emerson started was called Transcendentalism. And for the Transcendentalists, time made the ancient teachings about Jesus, God and the Bible uncouth. Uncouth, because they no longer led reasonable and informed minds to truth that helped them come alive, no longer led to truth that could heal them or their world and help make them more authentic and whole.
When we look back to people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, it’s not too important to focus on their beliefs, because those may be out of date by now. But it is important to look back to that spirit that drove them beyond the comfort zone of those around them. St. Paul once said that “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (II Cor. 3:6), and this is what I think he was getting at. The spirit always moves on beyond all creeds and orthodoxies, beyond the beliefs of any person or any time and place.
This life-giving spirit is called many things. One name for it is the spirit of life; another is the spirit of heresy. People engaging in honest religion were, are and always will be heretics. Now don’t get queasy; that’s a good thing. The word heretic comes from a Greek verb meaning “to choose.” Heretics are those who choose when some small orthodoxy declares the choices closed because they – only they – have found the truth. So yet another name for the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of heresy, is the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that may never be fenced in, the Holy Spirit that is larger than all creeds, all gods, and all religions. Emerson believed it is within us all, and I think he was right.
It’s that sense of being really alive that we’ve all felt. It drives us to seek more life, and to shun things that don’t give us life. And as Emerson saw and said, it is bigger than all our religions.
You can see this spirit at every level of life. It is what makes plants turn toward the sun. It is what makes kittens, puppies and children run toward things that welcome them and run away from things that frighten them. I once saw an amoeba through a microscope, and even it was moving into the open places, moving toward food, and moving away from impurities or negative things in its environment. That’s the same spirit of life we call the Holy Spirit, operating even in puppies, plants, and amoeba.
There is a famous passage from the ancient Chinese classic the Tao te Ching that says it this way:
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.
And the reason it’s older than God is because it’s part of life, and part of us. It’s the energy that helps us come more alive. We want to be a part of that Tao, that way, to let it help us get around impurities and obstacles in our own lives. In our Western religions where time has indeed made much of their ancient good uncouth, many of the obstacles today are the very creeds and orthodoxies which theologians, priests and churches have frozen into little outdated idols. And the Holy Spirit hates those little linguistic idols, so it keeps bringing us these heretics, these prophets of honest religion, who will let the questions more profound than answers challenge and shatter those answers when they can no longer help us come alive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the servants of those questions more profound than answers, a servant of that spirit of life. I used the Army’s slogan earlier about being all that you can be. So I want to use the slogan from another branch of the service to close, so they won’t feel slighted. And that’s to say that this ancient and holy spirit, like a Marine Corps recruiter, is looking for a few good men and women – or a lot of them. It’s looking for us. And this is a kind of hide-and-seek where the best part of the game is definitely being found.
This is a service borrowing from and centered in some of the Jewish tradition and thought about these topics of repentance and atonement that are the center of Judaism’s highest holy days. Rabbi LeBurkien is now a member of this church, and was gracious enough to provide many materials – and some basic education for me – on these two holidays. He also brought his shofar and played it at the beginning and end of the service. Most of the ritual words here were taken or adapted from Jewish materials, while the sermon was my attempt to incorporate some of the wisdom from these stories and traditions into our own tradition of doing honest religion in ordinary language. Since it’s an unusual service, I’ve included almost all spoken parts of the service, to give a more rounded feel for it.
– Davidson Loehr
BLOWING OF THE SHOFAR
Give heed to the sound of the shofar,
The sharp, piercing blasts of the shofar,
Splitting the air with its message,
Renouncing unworthy goals and selfish behaviors.
Instill in your hearts a new spirit.
Heed the sound of the shofar,
Sounding its message of warning,
Its cry of alarm and awakening –
Urging us to work with our brothers and sisters
To combat the ills that beset us all.
Accept the challenge to triumph
Over the forces of anger and destruction.
And all their poisonous fruit.
Heed the sound of the shofar,
Bringing bright hope to a people
Long scattered and stricken with sorrow.
Heed the sound of the shofar,
The blast that is blown within our spaces like the voice of God, O my people.
SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR
According to some Jewish writers, the sound of the shofar is like a prayer, or even like the voice of God in our midst. We welcome both. Please join me in the responsive invocation written in your order of service.
RESPONSIVE INVOCATION
LEADER: We gather to seek, to find and to share the promise of honest religion:
PEOPLE: TO COME ALIVE, TO SEEK TRUTH, AND TO HEAL OUR WORLD.
LEADER: And so it is a sacred time, this, and a sacred place, this.
PEOPLE: A PLACE FOR QUESTIONS MORE PROFOUND THAN ANSWERS
LEADER: Vulnerability more powerful than strength
PEOPLE: AND A PEACE THAT CAN PASS UNDERSTANDING.
LEADER: It is a sacred time, this. Let us begin it together in song.
READING: THE STORY OF JOSEPH
The sons of Jacob were twelve in number, Now Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, so he made a coat of many colors for him. When his brothers saw the coat they believed that their father loved Joseph more than any of them, and began to hate their brother.
Joseph had a series of dreams which he told his brothers about. The first was of binding up of sheaves in the field., and Joseph’s sheaf rising and standing up, and the brothers’ sheaves gathered round and bowed to Joseph’s. This dream stirred the brothers’ hatred again. Joseph came to them again with another dream in which the sun, moon and 11 stars bowed down to him. His father scolded him “am I and your mother and brothers to bow down to you”? The father pondered his son’s dreams and wondered what these meant. And again his brothers increased their hatred of their brother Joseph who was unaware of their feelings against him. After his brothers left to pasture their father’s flocks at Shechem, Jacob spoke with Joseph about following them and bringing back word of their work with his flocks.
And so Joseph set off but his brothers saw him at a distance and began plotting the murder of their brother because of their hatred and jealousy. They wanted to kill Joseph and throw him into a pit but the oldest brother, Rueben, wanted Joseph to be saved from being murdered and said “do not shed any blood; throw him in the pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay hands on him.” When Joseph reached his brothers they took his coat of many colors and after stripping him of it they threw him into the pit. After these deeds, the brothers sat down to eat a meal and as they ate, they watched a caravan of Ishmaelites from and in doing so saved my life, Gilead coming with their spices, balm and laudanum bound for Egypt. Brother Judah went in another direction and said to his brothers “Instead of slaying Joseph and leaving him in the pit for wild animals, let us sell him to this caravan of Ishmaelites and not lay hands on him. After all he is our brother.” His brothers agreed and sold Joseph for 20 shekels of silver, and the Ismaelites took him to Egypt. They returned the bloody coat to their father and Joseph was believed to have died from animal attack.
Joseph did well in the land of Egypt. He worked very hard and bought himself out of slavery, and rose in importance to become close to the king or Pharaoh. Eventually drought and famine came to Canaan where Joseph’s family lived and his brothers had to come to Egypt to buy food. He had his brothers brought before him and contemplated taking revenge against them but could not. His brothers did not recognize him as a man but were fearful of his power and when they were again brought to the palace he began weeping and all heard him say, “I am your brother Joseph whom you sold into Egypt. Be not grieved nor angry but hurry back to my father and speak to him from his son Joseph: You will live near me, you, your sons, your grandsons, your flocks and herds and all that belongs to you and I will provide for you through the years of famine to come. You must tell my father who I am in Egypt, and all you have seen and bring him back here to me.” All the brothers, the 12 sons of Jacob, wept upon each other’s shoulders.
PRAYER: A RESPONSIVE LITANY OF ATONEMENT
Leader: For remaining silent when a single voice would have made a difference.
LEFT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
RIGHT SIDE: FOR EACH TIME THAT OUR FEARS HAVE MADE US RIGID AND INACCESSIBLE
Leader: We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
LEFT SIDE: FOR EACH TIME THAT WE HAVE STRUCK OUT IN ANGER WITHOUT JUST CAUSE
RIGHT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
Leader: For each time that our greed has blinded us to the needs of others
LEFT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
RIGHT SIDE: FOR THE SELFISHNESS WHICH SETS US APART AND ALONE
Leader: We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
LEFT SIDE: FOR FORGETTING THAT WE ARE ALL PART OF ONE FAMILY
RIGHT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
Leader: For those and for so many things big and small that make it seem we are separate.
ALL: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
SERMON: Atonement
We are reflecting on two of Judaism’s high holy days this morning, Rosh Hashanah, which was September 30-1 October, is their spiritual New Year. And Yom Kippur, which ended the ten days of repentance and atonement this past Thursday.
Rosh Hashanah is a time of repenting for bad actions toward other people, a time for looking inside, asking what kind of people our actions have shown us to be in the past year. Before forgiveness can happen, we have to confess to the people we believe we have wronged.
Yom Kippur, the end of this ten days, is called the Day of Atonement. “Atonement” is a wonderful theological term, and its spelling is its meaning: at-one-ment. Being at one with yourself and your highest and most life-giving values – or in theological language, with your God. To do this, you first have to be at one with your neighbors, so it’s really a complete kind of at-one-ment. We’d all be happier if we had it.
Most of Judaism is for Jews, just as most of Christianity is for Christians. But there are parts of all religions that are ours for the taking, and we want to learn from them if we can. Those parts are the insights into the human condition, and the wisdom for living more wisely and well. That’s part of what theologians call the Wisdom Tradition, and wisdom is always free, offered to all who are willing to hear it and take it to heart.
As we sometimes do on New Year’s Eve, Jews also make resolutions for the new year. And like the rest of us, they usually fail to keep many of them. The world seldom cooperates with all of our resolutions, and then what do we do? They’re harder than we hoped they would be when we made them. Life can put us in a hole or back us into a corner or frighten us, and we lower our expectations and our standards.
This is part of the religious lesson of that story of Joseph that Rabbi LeBurkien told you earlier. It’s a wonderful story, and I want to visit it from a different angle this morning. Joseph’s brothers were horrible to him. If you looked in the Hall of Fame for Dysfunctional Families, their group photo would be there. Some wanted to kill him, others to throw him into a deep hole so the wild animals would eat him, and the kindest of them decided simply to sell him into slavery. If you got to choose your brothers, nobody would choose them.
Years later, Joseph has risen to power through the strength of his own character and the luck of life. His brothers – due to bad luck, which in this story is also meant as a judgment on their character – are brought before him. Joseph can take all the vengeance he wants now. He can get even with them in spades for everything they did to him and everything they thought about doing to him.
But what would he gain? Sure, it would give him a wonderful cheap thrill, getting even. And you know how good that feels, don’t you? But then he would have stooped to their level. He would be showing that he was their brother in the worst way rather than in the best way. It wouldn’t be anything you could be proud of if you thought God was watching – and in these stories, God is usually watching.
What Joseph did in this ancient myth by acting out of love, out of his highest and proudest ideals, is more than most of us might do. That’s why the story has remained so powerful all these centuries. It calls us to a higher plane of being, to live out of only our proudest ideals. That’s important because life can still frighten us away from those high ideals if we let it.
Unless we can forgive a past that cannot be changed, we will carry anger, resentment and the hope for vengeance or anger or a paralyzing fear into the future. Then we won’t be starting a new year after all, but repeating some of the poisonous parts of the one we just had – like the movie “Groundhog Day,” reliving the same sorry situation again and again. So instead, we forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love.
Joseph forgave his brothers, redefined them as brothers rather than enemies, they embraced and went into the future together, and into our common mythology as one of the most challenging and inspiring stories we’ve ever told. This isn’t just about forgiving some awful brothers. It’s really about forgiving life for not pleasing us. This makes it easy to see that this old story isn’t really about Joseph. It’s really about us, and about life. What do we do when we’re scared, angry or resentful? Because the world really isn’t made in the image of our desires. And every once in awhile, it rises up to remind us of that, and to say, “Now what will you do?”
Think of the current economic mess our country and growing parts of the world are in. It isn’t fair. You’ve read the same stories I have. The whole situation is more complex than I understand, and maybe there’s a lot more to it than we’re being told right now, I don’t know. But stocks have fallen, some people have lost thousands from their retirement funds, and other countries are panicked as well.
Nonprofits and churches are also worried because right now, in this panic, charitable giving is slowing down. People are afraid want to put their money under their pillow, or under a rock. And under the heading of Really Interesting Timing, we’re in the middle of our own annual pledge drive just as this whole subject of money has become one people don’t want to talk about. We don’t have anywhere near enough people on our stewardship committee to share the tasks without burning out. It’s hard to talk about money because people are afraid and don’t want to hear about it or think about it. A lot of people are afraid that the light at the end of the tunnel might be an oncoming train. This shows us once again that Denial isn’t a river in Egypt – the river runs right through us.
We are Joseph, thrown into a hole. Not by this or that Republican or Democrat or Congress, but by Life. Sometimes, it favors us, sometimes it doesn’t, because life isn’t created in the image of our own wishes or needs.
We are Joseph. Do we allow ourselves to be ruled by fear and anger? People could understand if we did, because it’s what many of them are doing. So many strong winds blowing us in so many directions right now. Which winds do we let blow us around?
Should we give up on the pledge drive, cancel the wonderful building campaign we have planned for our children, our programs, our future, cancel all two dozen of our split-the-plate recipients and sell the church for spare parts?
Now when we start thinking this way, we know we’re wrong, because this is a church where we are here because we want to learn how to serve high and brave and life-giving ideals, not fears that make us shrink back from life. We will not be frightened away from life.
We need to back off a little to ask whether it’s realistic to stay in a hole of doom and gloom, whether the sky is really falling as Chicken Little always, always believes, or whether there are life-giving and healing insights that are also true. They can come from folk wisdom and stories, but also from straight facts, so let’s start with some of those.
I read an article from a company called Resource Services Inc. this week that our new executive director Sean Hale passed around, and then went online to learn more about this company. It was founded in 1972 by two evangelical classmates from Baylor University, to help churches plan successful capital campaigns, and at one point, of the 25 largest successful church capital campaigns in history, all but one of them was planned by this company. So they have learned a lot about the vicissitudes of economics and economic history.
Here are just a few facts from a paper they published six years ago, during the panic after 9-11 (“Christian Giving in Uncertain Times” from the NACBA Seminar, a Presentation of Bill Wilson of RWI, July 9, 2002):
o The total amount of giving in the U.S. has increased every year but one for the past 40 years, including through wars, recessions and other crises. Each year we have given more than the previous year.
— These crises do tend to paralyze us for a short time, but in the calendar year following crises, the giving grew at a greater rate than it did during the crisis year.
— The larger a church is, the more likely their members are to support it. About 70% supported churches under 100 members, while about 87% supported churches of 500 or more.
— People in the South and West give more per capita than those in the Midwest and Northeast.
— “People with the strongest convictions are the most likely to support their worldview financially….” (from George Barna)
— Commitments to capital campaigns aren’t usually affected much by economic crises, partly because they’re received over a three-year period.
They suggest thinking about it this way: everything we give, Life gave to us first. It isn’t so much a giving as it is a giving-back.
The economy always recovers. Even if this is going to be compared to the great scares like the 1987 stock market crash, or the one way back in 1929, the economy is now far more global. As we’re seeing, economies all over the world are affected and working on it. Too much is at stake for too many people to let everything slide off a cliff.
In other words, it is safe to act as though our highest values are still our best guides to living now. We don’t cancel our split-the-plate practice, because we want to heal our world, not withdraw from it. We want to be people, and a church, that are conspicuous because we choose to serve life, to come alive, not to stay in the hole we’ve been thrown into.
As the preacher Robert Schuler once put it, “Tough times never last; tough people do.” We don’t get to choose our crises, but we do get to choose how we will act in them.
The next year or two may well be tough. Tough times are a part of living. They are the times that show us what we’re made of when we’re in that hole.
I can tell you that I’d rather be representing a church right now than any other kind of business. Because we’re not defined by productivity or the bottom line, and we don’t outsource your souls to another country. We’re defined by the power of the ideals we serve, and their ability to steer us through even – and especially – these wonderfully challenging times.
This past Wednesday I attended the Kol Nidre service at Congregation Agudis Achim, a local conservative congregation, and heard a new version of an old story. I want to share it with you.
An older man was out walking on the beach one day when he noticed, far ahead of him, a young woman who would bend down, pick something up, throw it into the ocean, then walk on until she stopped and did it again. Curious, he walked toward her, and as he got closer he saw she was picking up starfish, one at a time, and throwing them back into the ocean.
He walked up to her and said, “Why are you doing that?” “I’m saving starfish,” she answered. “The ocean washes them up onto the beach where they’ll die. I throw them back to their home.”
He laughed. “Why are you wasting your time? The ocean has been doing this for millions of years. Millions of starfish have died on the beach, and always will. Do you honestly think you can make any difference?”
She walked over to another starfish, picked it up, and threw it back into the ocean. She turned to the man and said, “It made a difference to that one.”
The man hadn’t expected this, because as you know, negativity and cynicism can usually silence most arguments, even when it’s wrong. But it forced him to think, and to act. As she walked on, he joined her, and before long he bent over, picked up a starfish, threw it back to the sea, and a big smile broke out on his face.
Some other people on the beach who had been watching this interchange began getting up and walking toward the ocean, picking up starfish and tossing them into the sea. Soon nearly everyone was doing it, and kept doing it until they had covered the whole beach. When the last starfish had been thrown back to its home in the ocean, the people all cheered and hugged one another.
Like the story of Joseph, that beach is a metaphor for life. Bad stuff is part of life, and sometimes we actually come to believe that we’re powerless – what difference could we possibly make? But the real truth about us is just how powerful we really are if we will act on our highest values, no matter what life brings us. Because people are watching. We are watching. We’re watching each other, and the courage of a few people can have an amazing effect in giving others the courage of their own convictions. Then before you know it, we’ve cleaned up the beach, kept this exciting and life-giving liberal church on its healthy path, and built a lovely new building for our children, our programs and our future. Then comes the laughing and cheering. Cheering ourselves, for having the courage of our deepest convictions, the courage to come alive, embrace our most life-giving truths, and begin healing ourselves and our world.
If you have hesitated to come into our pledge drive, or have entered it hesitantly and would be prouder to invest more of your money, time and spirit here, I advise you to come in boldly. Come join us on this wonderful and challenging beach of life. Help us clean the fearful and paralyzing debris off of it. Help us return everything to life.
Make the kind of strong and confident pledge you’d really like to for next year. If it takes us all a little longer than we think to restore health to our economy and you need to adjust your pledge next spring or summer, of course you can do that. But for now, be hopeful and bold because that gives life both to us and to you.
This isn’t an economic matter; it’s a religious mission. It is a mission of at-one-ment, coming to be at one with our proudest ideals and highest values. So come join us on this beach, and help us maintain it and ourselves as beacons of light, life and hope. The work together is inspiring and fun. And afterwards, there will be this party and this cheering that you don’t want to miss. Join us!
BLOWING OF THE SHOFAR
Now once more, hear the sound of the shofar,
Splitting the air, reminding us to let go of unworthy goals and selfish behaviors, and instill in our hearts a new spirit.
Heed the sound of the shofar,
Sounding its cry of awakening –
Urging us to accept the challenge to triumph
Over the forces of anger and fear.
And all of their many poisonous fruits.
Let us heed the sound of the shofar, O my people.
SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR
Together we have celebrated the creation of the universe, the creations of nature, and the power of creation which is within each one of us. We are the creators and co-creators of our lives, our world, and our future. We have, each of us, a small power of creation like unto that of God. Let us go forth from here reclaiming our ability to know good from evil. We go forth as creative and powerful people, called again to serve only our highest callings, to come alive, to seek truth and to heal our world. Please join me in our responsive benediction.
RESPONSIVE BENEDICTION:
PREACHER: We leave this sacred time and place,
PEOPLE: But we carry its promise with us.
PREACHER: The world needs the spirit that we can carry forth.
PEOPLE: Let us become the life, the truth and the healing that we seek.
The author of the reading is Robert Bellah, the sociologist and author of Habits of the Heart. The reading is an excerpt from the speech he gave at the 1998 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly.
So, it is no accident, as they say, that the United States, with its high evaluation of the individual person, is nonetheless alone among North Atlantic societies in the percentage of our population who live in poverty and that we are dismantling what was already the weakest welfare state of any North Atlantic nation. Just when we are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. And this is in no small part due to the fact that our religious individualism is linked to an economic individualism which, though it makes no distinctions between persons except monetary ones, ultimately knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. If the only standard is money, then all other distinctions are undermined.
What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore, is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves aren’t going to make it all alone. That is a tradition singularly weak in our country, though Catholics and some high church Protestants have tried to provide it. Nor do we have a tradition of democratic socialism such as is common in Europe-again, I would argue, linked to an established church culture-a tradition that believes the state has some responsibility for the well-being of its citizens.
So, alas, perhaps Mark Lilla is right: the 1960’s cultural revolution and the 1980’s Reagan revolution are two sides of the same coin. Radical religio-cultural individualism opens the door to radical economic individualism. The former provides inadequate resources to moderate the latter. Here I return to the paradox from which I started, the contradiction between Unitarian Universalist’s social witness and your religious tradition: in your social witness we are dissenters; in your religious beliefs you are mainstream in a culture whose majority is dissenters. How can you possibly gain the religious and cultural leverage to overcome this contradiction?
Prayer:
When the uncertainty of life threatens to overwhelm us, may we find comfort.
When the grief for loss of loved ones feels too much, may we find strength.
When isolation in our lives seems impenetrable, may we find connection.
When our brokenness seems irreparable, may we find healing.
When we find happiness and hope, may we spread them to others.
May we find the meaning, inspiration and wholeness in our life.
May others join us in our work with toward the common good.
When we stumble may they support us, when we doubt may they reassure us, and when we stray may they guide us.
Life is too large and too precious to journey alone, may we find the solidarity of others when needed and may we be the strength needed by others.
Amen.
Sermon:
We seem to have been hearing for many years now that we live in a time of uncertainty. Recent events seem to be only increasing that uncertainty. The financial meltdown is the latest in a series of unpredictable events that we hear about not knowing the outcome or how they will affect us. The roller coaster of the Presidential election creates an uncertainty about our political futures, worries about our jobs or retirement creates uncertainty about our economic futures, the threat of unexpected illness and violence creates uncertainty about the lives of our friends and loved ones. Climate change raises questions about our very existence. We most certainly do live in a time of uncertainty. Yet I suspect people have always felt that way.
A common response for many people is to turn to religion at such times. Sometimes looking for answers, other times an explanation, and often just for comfort. The old saying goes that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. While a religious response on the subject of taxes sounds really interesting, I’ll leave that for another sermon – perhaps around April 15th. Religion has had a lot to say about death and in Christianity particularity life after death. While life on this earth was uncertain, life after death was about certainty. You were going to hell if you were bad and heaven if you were good. The threat of hell was the motivation to live a good life. Our Liberal religious tradition has moved away from such thinking. We are not concerned much with what happens beyond death and more interested in the responsible search for truth and meaning in this life. To ensure a responsible search for truth and meaning then it is best that we do this search in a community. At least that is the theory.
Many of us today feel lonely or isolated as our sense of community subsides and we have less contact with our families or friends. Work absorbs much of our time and energy such that our community ties become frayed. In the reading we heard earlier, Robert Bellah was discussing the decline of community in the United States due to the emphasis on the individual. He says “our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing?” He blames economic individualism in partnership with religious individualism as the culprit for destroying much of our sense of community. He said these words at the 1998 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. He knew his audience. Our Unitarian ancestors in the 19th century put great emphasis on the individual religious experience and the individual’s use of reason to interpret those experiences. This emphasis on the individual continues to strongly influence our movement.
Many people come into our congregations because they feel our communities support their own individual values. I know I did. Yet the choosing of a community to support my values still has a focus on the individual. Having a community support my values is comforting but are we challenged to grow as people? Does having our values supported help us find greater truth and meaning? This focus on the individual within our Unitarian tradition is similar to many other mainstream Christian religions in the U.S. This is why Robert Bellah places the Unitarian Universalist movement as part of the religious mainstream. This conclusion may be surprising to many of us, it certainly was for me. He acknowledges that our social justice work is in the dissenting tradition often against the dominant thoughts of the time.
While I really value Bellah’s critique regarding religious individualism in relation to our movement I think he is only dealing with half of our tradition, the Unitarians. Like many he seems to have forgotten about the Universalist side of the movement. You know that part of our name where people’s eyes start to glaze over when you tell them what religion you are – “I’m a Unitarian Universa-whatever.” I noticed that it is around the second or third syllable of Universalist where people stop pretending to be interested. I believe Universalism is an important part of our tradition because, while the thinking is still liberal, the center is not grounded in religious individualism. This can help provide a balance to the individual emphasis of Unitarian thinking. Opinions regarding the importance of our Universalist belief varies widely. Some leaders in our movement would dismiss it as irrelevant and answering a question no-one has been asking for over a hundred years. This does not sound very promising. Other leaders in our movement see Universalism as a vibrant path forward for our movement in the 21st century. At the risk of appearing completely spineless on the matter, I agree with both perspectives. Let me try to explain.
Regarding why Universalism is answering a question that no-one has been asking for 100 years we actually have to go back 200 years. In the late 18th/early 19th century the dominant Christian view was that due to sin then all people were destined to hell in the afterlife and only because of the death of Jesus would a small elect few be saved and go to heaven. This is a difficult perspective for many of us to accept today but this thinking was the dominant religious view in the U.S. at the time. Universalism disagreed with this view and asserted that all people would be saved and no-one would suffer endless punishment in hell.
This idea is known as Universal Salvation. Hosea Ballou was one of the most profound thinkers and leaders of Universalism in the 19th century and is quite a character. He was from a farming background, had little formal education and is described as “rustic” in both dress and diction. I suspect “rustic” was not a compliment. In his early days Ballou was a circuit riding preacher who had no church of his own but rode around preaching in small towns and often debating other preachers. Ballou’s character, thinking and evangelism really defined the Universalist movement of the 19th century.
There is a story that shows the type of character Ballou was and his – shall we call them – persuasive tactics. He was riding the circuit when he stopped for the night at a New England farmhouse. The farmer was upset and confided to Ballou that his son was a terror who got drunk in the village every night causing lots of trouble. The farmer was afraid the son would go to hell. “All right,” said Ballou with a serious face. “We’ll find a place on the path where your son will be coming home drunk, and we’ll build a big fire, and when he comes home, we’ll grab him and throw him into it.” Remember this is one of the most influential thinkers in our history. The farmer was shocked: “That’s my son and I love him!” Ballou said, “If you, a human and imperfect father, love your son so much that you wouldn’t throw him in the fire, then how can you possibly believe that God, the perfect father, would do so!” I think Ballou would be a fun person to have over for dinner. Just don’t get close to the fire.
Ballou’s basic premise for Universal Salvation was that our human failings were finite therefore it is unjust for an infinite, all-powerful God to condemn us to eternal punishment. He actually holds God to a moral standard. He no longer views God as a punisher of human failings and believes people are trying to be in relationship with a loving God. For Ballou, God was about love not punishment. This salvation of all people was a radical idea because it destroyed the idea of only a few people being saved from God’s punishment and has a profoundly egalitarian emphasis. This gave all humanity a common destiny as opposed to the separation of a small elect to heaven and a majority damned to misery in hell. We all had equal worth in the eyes of God, not divided into the damned and the saved but one group: “The Beloved of God.”
To religious liberals like ourselves the notions of heaven and hell seem like obscure remnants from the past and have no significance for us today. Who cares about heaven and hell when we have the uncertainty and problems of this world to deal with? A reasonable question hence the earlier opinion that Universalism is answering a question that no one has been asking for 100 years. Certainly most religious liberals stopped asking that question over 100 years ago. Ballou’s insistence on a supernatural, otherworldly salvation is not the important part of Universalism for me but the consequences of his answer seem important and revolutionary.
For our religious ancestors notions of heaven and hell were part of their framework for making meaning in their lives and deaths. Through this framework the Universalists found a common human destiny therefore a belief in equality for all people. This message had great appeal especially to the less wealthy and less powerful. In the strict hierarchy of 19th century society, I would imagine that the religious elect were often seen as the elite in society. The Universalist message had a strong appeal to the non-elite, who flocked to the Universalist movement making it the six largest denomination in the country by 1840 with about 700,000 members. For comparison, today Unitarian Universalism has about 200,000 members.
The message of radical equality of all people gave the Universalist movement a strong religious motivation for social justice work in the 19th century. Universalists were at the forefront of movements to abolish slavery, promote equality of women, establishing public education, and working to change prisons from places of punishment to places for reforming criminals. Humanitarian concerns were foremost amongst Universalists such as Clara Barton who was the founder of the American Red Cross. Universalist members were primarily in rural communities and relatively poor financially. They rarely saw a conflict of interest between their religious principles of caring for others and their economic self-interest. This is in contrast to the Unitarians, who were primarily wealthy and amongst the elite of society. Some Unitarians took a strong abolitionist stance against slavery but many Unitarians accepted slavery because much of their money was made as a result of it. Their economic self-interests conflicted with their religious principles and guess which lost? While the 19th century Universalist movement was still Christian their uniqueness was the love for all humanity at the center of their beliefs. This was not an individualistic religion which put humanity at the center of religion, they put love of humanity at the center. An important difference.
While Ballou’s religious ideas had a profound impact on Universalism in the 19th century his personality also left an indelible mark on the character of the Universalist movement. While he often disagreed with others, he also tolerated a range of opinions. There is a wonderful example of this when Ballou was preaching at a church of another prominent Universalist leader. The wife of the church’s regular minister so strongly disagreed with Ballou’s sermon that she sent a message to the choir master expressing her displeasure. Ballou finished his sermon and was about to announce the hymn, the choir master arose and announced to the congregation: “I wish to give notice that the doctrine which has been preached here this afternoon is not the doctrine that is usually preached in this house.” Ballou listened attentively to the announcement and then said simply, “The audience will please to take notice of what our brother has said.” He then proceeded to the hymn.
So if any of you are unhappy with this sermon then please just let Brent our musical director know and he’ll announce it when I’m finished. I do not guarantee such a dignified response as Ballou’s. I feel this story is very telling about Ballou’s character. He was opinionated but he created a tolerance for differing opinions that influences our movement to this day. He exemplifies the phrase “We do not need to think alike to love alike.” Religion was about high ideals and not his own ego. He engaged in his own responsible search for truth in his Universalist community and I believe our movement is the better for it.
Universalism had a strong sense of human solidarity – people sharing a common purpose and responsibility. Solidarity is not a word you hear in religion very much but it is a good word. There seems to be a greater intimacy about being in solidarity with another rather than just supporting them. Solidarity has a sense of working together for the common good. Support has a sense that you are doing something as an individual that others agree with but are not engaged with themselves. For example, when you are in jail – for some non-violent protest of course – and someone comes to visit you, that is support. Solidarity is when the person is in jail with you. Perhaps this is not the best example of a common destiny.
A relationship of solidarity means a passionate and intimate concern for the welfare of another. Think in our own lives – which relationships do you have with others would you describe as relationships of solidarity? Which are relationships of support? Where do we as a religious community take a stand of solidarity with others? Our work on marriage equality? Our anti-racist work that is done in many of our congregations? These are important questions to consider.
The deep-rooted concern for others in Universalism comes from the sense of a universal love of others. I believe Universalism with its concern for others is a powerful corrective to the religious individualism of which we are often accused. Some people within the Unitarian Universalist movement say that Universalism leads with the heart and Unitarianism leads with the mind. I see this tension between the passion of our hearts and the reasoning of our minds as healthy. The passion of the heart can help us reach beyond our own self-interest and emotional detachment to engage passionately for the welfare of others. Reason can prevent our passion from being misplaced, naive, or ineffective. We should not see the choice of our Universalist or Unitarian heritages, as an either-or choice. We can and do engage both traditions – our hearts and our minds.
What brought the Unitarian and Universalist movements together were the causes we cared about, not shared religious doctrines. On many social justice issues the Unitarians and the Universalists found ourselves working together, on issues such as civil rights, public education, and women’s suffrage. It was our actions not our beliefs that brought us together. Robert Bellah acknowledges that it is in our social justice work where we have been dissenting from mainstream religion. As I look today the only area I see us showing religious leadership on social issues is on marriage equality for gays and lesbians. We do not seem be showing leadership in other areas such as environmental concerns, health care, economic justice, and immigrant rights. We are doing work in these areas but I do not believe we have a leadership role in them. I am not sure we even work in partnership with other religious denominations which are showing leadership in these areas. We are a small religion therefore working with others even those we disagree with on some issues, makes sense on many issues. Do we as a religious movement, play well with others? I wonder if our individualism has been institutionalized even in our social justice work. I am reminded of Denise Levertov’s earlier words “We have only begun to know, the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.”
The common thrust of both the Unitarian and Universalist movements was in the changes they wished to see in society. For the Universalists, this work was driven by a radical view of human equality and the faith in a loving presence for all people in the universe which they call God. The idea that a loving presence cares for us, all of us, helps many to get through times of uncertainty. Sometimes that loving presence is family, other times a friend, often it is a religious community, and sometimes a presence that one can’t explain. Universalism placed that loving presence and love of humanity at the center of their theology. That was an act of faith and hope. It is also a challenge to us.
Can we rise up to that challenge by loving others, not just those who are easy to love, but also those where it is difficult? Loving those who disagree with us and loving those who show us no love in return. That is the Universalist notion of love so challenging. Perhaps to guide us we need to remember Francis David’s famous statement “We need not think alike, to love alike.” If we believe that and embrace its meaning then we might be able to care for each other a little better today than we did yesterday – and care for each other a little better tomorrow than we did today. This might be transformational for us, our religion, and even our world.
Bellah, Robert N. Unitarian Universalism in Societal Perspective Lecture given at the UUA General Assembly on June 27, 1998 http://www.robertbellah.com/lectures_7.htm (accessed September 30th, 2008)
