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Ron Phares

April 12, 2009

Mark 16

1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ”

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Gilgamesh; a verse narrative

Friendship is vowing toward immortality and does not know the passing away of beauty… You have known, oh Gilgamesh, what interests me, to drink from the well of immortality. Which means to make the dead rise from their graves and the prisoners from their cells and the sinners from their sins. I think love’s kiss kills the heart of flesh. It is the only way to eternal life.

Song of Myself

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.

Prayer

We come here today in the midst of a loss, a loss of trust, and of community and of direction within our congregation. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We are here in the midst of global ecological and political turmoil. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. As our spiritual disenchantment festers, our financial philanthropy dwindles. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We are here in the midst of a global economic crisis. Which touches not only our friends and neighbors, but also those we may not have met; our global brothers and sisters. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light.

But as the winter becomes the spring, so shall the troubled past become the promising future.

We come here to understand that the investment of our energies into our community lead to a greater personal and communal spiritual growth. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here to understand that a commitment to political and ecological non-violence will help us to change the world. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here and recognize that good life is giving life and that is accomplished through compassion, respect and interest in eachother. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here and recognize that in supporting all of the earth’s creatures we support ourselves. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light.

Amen.

Sermon

Isn’t it delightful that there’s the whiff of iconoclasm in reading the Bible in a UU church? I’m going to actually take it step further and make a confession. This will be a sermon of sentiment. It is sentimental. And I’ll own that and confess that as long as you all understand that a confession is not an apology. Because I feel today drawn between two ordeals. I feel it in myself. I feel it in our community. I feel it in the nation. I feel it in the land. I feel today drawn between beauty and ruin. The feeling took root two mornings past. It just so happened to be Good Friday. You’ll remember because it was probably the same for you, I walked out into the crisp, bright morning and inhaled… the scent of burning. And as I drove to Mayfield park that day, I could see the smoke, come down from the fires far, far north of us, fuzzing out the horizon of hills. So there was that tension, of beauty and ruin, right there in the day. You could see it. You could smell it.

It did occur to me that the day was significant. Perhaps not as much for our community, but for our greater heritage and the culture at large and certainly for many of my classmates at seminary, Good Friday is a momentous notch in the year. It is the day Jesus is put on the cross. And so, it was the day a hero died and a god was born. Beauty and ruin.

Now, this was a couple of days after Passover, which celebrates the freedom of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Pharo granted this beloved freedom after the breath of the Hebrew God killed the first born of every non-Jewish house. Beauty and ruin.

And this morning we have seen a fine piece of theatre about Brother Capek, who, like Jesus, spread his gospel of life while in the belly of a system of death, meeting a similar fate and producing a resonant faith. This is not to mention the performance of the play itself, which appropriately had its own share of beauty and ruin. It’s meta-theatre here at the UU church. Very avante garde. And here we have our flowers, which represent our own flowering and our willingness to give ourselves to others and to receive and recognize the loveliness of our fellows. These flowers are gorgeous. But these flowers are dead. Or dying. Beauty and ruin.

Meanwhile, pulling the lens back to wide angle once again, our economy continues to molt. One has the sense that the system wants to die or is, for all purposes already dead, except for one last mission; for there is a persistent will to not die to nothing, but instead to create another vessel for life, a similar but changed system for the energy of the dieing system to inhabit and invigorate. So that seems ruinous. But there is beauty there too. It’s quite a time to be alive.

So this tension felt, feels, very personal. But maybe you feel it too. Because the personal was just one plane upon which the tension arose. It was in the land, in the economy. It was on the calendar, in the significance of this time of year to our culture, to our practice of Unitarian Universalism, to Christians, to Jews, and, given that not for nothing does this all occur around the vernal equinox, it is significant as well to our pagan forbearers and contemporaries. It’s loaded. It is, and here I get to use the ten-cent word of the sermon title, a palimpsest.

That’s a mighty fine word. As a word, you’d think it might be good for ten dollars, not just cents. But while the economy is cracking, inflation has remained stable, so it’s still ten cents. And worthless in Europe. At any rate, a palimpsest is, first definition, “a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible,” and, second definition, “an object, place, or area that reflects its history.”

And so here, with this beauty and ruin in this calendrical space, we a have a sacred palimpsest. Humans throughout time have responded to this period of year, with the deepest method at their disposal: the art of mythmaking. Particularly in the west there is a sense of pairing, not of opposites necessarily, but of a pairing of beauty and ruin, which are perhaps only a prettier gloss for the clearly oppositional words: life and death. But I don’t want to make this binary. It is more subtle than a play of opposites. And so I will use, rather than life and death, beauty and ruin. I think it more accurately captures the nuance and desperation that culture after culture have felt, crafted stories around, and then placed and recalled for good reason at this time of year.

This palimpsest reminds me of a story in a book I read for class, though now I can’t recall which book or even which class. At any rate, an astrologist or physicist or some such was lecturing about the earth’s place in the solar system, it’s orbit and the implications thereof. At the end of his lecture there was a question and answer period. An elderly woman stood and reprimanded the lecturer. She told him that his words were wrong, that everyone knew that the earth was flat and that it was held up by the back of a turtle. The clever scientist saw quickly how to outflank the woman. Sure that the logic of a simple question would startle her out of her superstition, he asked her, “Well, what’s the turtle standing on?” But she was entirely unphased and replied conclusively, “It’s turtles! All the way down.”

I’m not agreeing with her science, but taken as a testimony to something like a sociology of spirituality, it rings true. What I mean is that, given the sacred palimpsest of this day, right now, and maybe always, maybe everyday, its beauty and ruin – all the way up, all the way down. I don’t think the theme is limited to this time of year necessarily, but its prominence is heightened by the earth’s current alignment, the cyclical flowering of life out of death and back, no doubt.

So here is this stack of turtle-backs of beauty and ruin, running through culture and time, through me, through us, through economy and ecology, from the concept of God through to the concept of Nature. And since these last two seem to meet, we may have a circle rather than an ascending line. So its stacked turtle backs, all the way around. Beauty and ruin, all the way around. It is not likely that we are left out of this great change taking place in our ecosystem, and by that I simply mean spring. We are of the ecosystem, after all. And so maybe this theme is biological, at its root. And if that’s the case, and I tend to think it is at least that, then we as individuals and as culture are, by our very hope and discomfort, expressions of something, articulations of something that is deep within ecological and, by extension, cosmic processes.

So what’s the message? Why is God, the universe, ecology, the pagans, the Jews, the Christians, and Norbert Capeck (in conjunction with whoever moved the flower communion from early summer to the equinox… I think I’ve just gone deterministically from God to a committee, which is true.) At any rate, what are they trying to tell me with this undercurrent of beauty and ruin? What am I trying to tell myself? And quite to the point, what in the name of beauty and ruin am I trying to tell you? What are we supposed to learn or be reminded of? How do we apply it?

For me, the answer has something to do with the notion that creation is a product of tension. Tension is what occurs between a writer and an empty page, between sculptor and clay, between lovers, between the promise of life and an empty tomb.

Recall the readings. The women find the tomb of Jesus empty. This is from the book of Mark, which is incidentally, the first gospel to be written. In Mark’s tale of the resurrection, we don’t ever see Jesus. We see this odd little dude in white, which may very likely be a later edition to the text, but we don’t see Jesus. We just know that his corpse is gone. We are told by this avatar narrator in white that he is risen. But the main thing to understand is that the tomb is empty. This is how Jesus becomes the Christ. His particular, locational absence makes possible his ubiquitous presence. The fact that he is not there, means he can be everywhere, incarnate now in us. The emptiness of the tomb begs questions, calls to our religious imaginations, leads us into that emptiness, so that we too might be everywhere in our reckoning and Christ-like in our compassion. The ruin of the tomb is the beauty of resurrection. It is a new life in the mold of the hero Jesus and therein a kind immortality.

This was also the quest of Gilgamesh and the meditation of its authors. The ancients who carved this tale into stone understood that immortality was not found in the conquest of time but in the timeless act of love. For though friends pass out of our lives, it is acts of true friendship, they tell us, where life is unbound.

So what of beauty and ruin? What of that tension? What are we to do with that sensation? Well, for one, take heart. Celebrate. Savor. The tension between beauty and ruin, gives us hope amidst the rubble of our lives. And when we are feeling high and fine and light, it reminds us to revel in every drop of light, every sweet breath because it is fleeting and will pass. But its passing makes it’s apprehension all the more exquisite. Beauty and ruin, but… beauty and ruin. It plants hope in horror, seeds forgiveness in evil, and from dry boredom, despair and lonliness, coaxes life and worth and laughter. It will come again. And more than that it is here now. Beauty is not permanent, but neither is it permanently suppressible. It is erupting and dying all about us all the time, even in our sorrow, even in our sin, even in our suffering and struggle. It is there. We find it. We nurture it. We savor its every sensation because we know beauty will pass and in that we are sustained. We are nurtured ourselves. We are found. We are given the great gift of unsustainable satisfaction. Beauty and ruin.

So here I am tempted, in response to our congregational episodes of beauty and ruin, to cajole you all into recommitting to this church and to each other, to finding that immortal sensation in friendship, to find life in the empty tomb of this building. But, alas, I see that I am too late. You guys are way ahead of me. I look around and I see the vibrancy of the children’s religious education program. I see book groups and philosophical discussion forums. I see the dedication of our church staff. I see covenant groups and adult education programs. I see, and usually smell, the men’s group breakfast (I smell the breakfast. I see the group.) I hear the talented voices of our congregation lifted and crafted in song and sermon. I see hours and effort put in by caring people in countless committees and positions of leadership and volunteerism. I see an updated web page listing these and many other ways to get involved. I see the senior luncheon and the Voyagers and the FuucYaa’s, a brave few of which are set to do a little evangelizing as they participate in the Hill Country ride for aids very soon. I see an active social action committee inviting our engagement. I see hands on housing and freeze night. I see you. I see you here today holding your flowers and sharing this moment with each other. We are here to refine our best nature. And I gotta say, on the whole, you guys are great. You’re doing it. You’re doing it.

I mean, we’re a little bit all over the map. We make mistakes. And where our mission ought to be, where our purpose ought to be, there is instead a big empty tomb. And that is alarming. But don’t run away. Run in. That’s where we will find life, that’s where we will find each other, if only our attitude is of life, or rather of beauty. Because beauty implies ruin, and that will make compassion the rule, and the key to unlocking immortality in each other. The Navajo have a benediction, or a parting wish classically given; “Walk in beauty.” But I say walk in beauty and ruin and be thereby compelled into a resurrection, into life. Not just life but life unbound. Original energy. And here, because I am a sentimental fool and willingly blind when I know I can get away with it, I have brought a little resurrection of my own. The flower communion is a meaningful event that affirms our principles, our compassion and interconnection. It is beautiful. But, as we noted before, it’s beauty in-folds ruin, as we have sacrificed some life by exchanging it. So I have brought something magical with which we can rejuvenate life. I have brought seeds. We’ll have them for you in the lobby as you leave. What you do is find a little spot of ruin, throw a few bits of good intention into it. Cover it so that it is protected from birds. Give it water and light, watch it grow. Invite your soul. Plant it. Nurture it. Savor it.

Consider the flowers in your hand the seeds of our community. Plant their image and significance in your mind. See it’s beauty and ruin in the hearts of your fellow seekers. Attend to that, protect it and watch it grow. Plant it. Nuture it. Savor it. It is all around you. It is you, every atom.

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Ron Phares

March 8, 2009

Reading from Ecclesiastes of the Hebrew Bible.

Illusion of illusions, says the Teacher, illusion of illusions! All is illusion. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.

This also is illusion and a chasing after breath.

Prayer

Let’s pray: We come here today humbled by the uncertainty of our times We return here today, to a touchstone of our lives We arrive here today audacious enough to hope that By our participation in these moments, our fears of uncertainty Might be transformed into a celebration of uncertainty. We come here to connect with our most profound understandings And to give our most generous attention to our ideals, our truth and each other. We are here, hat in hand but fist held high, humble and hopeful. And so we give thanks For this company, for this time and for this place And ask that it train and sustain us For mercy and grace.

Amen

Sermon

Today is a good day. These are uncertain times, but this hour is a good hour. This light. This breath is a good breath. They are good precisely because we are here to recognize them as good, to praise them and be grateful. And the way you’re sitting and thinking are also good, as are these words good words, framed as we are by this day and this hour.

But in the midst of this goodness, there is anxiety. In the midst of our gratitude, there is resentment. In the midst of our praise, there is judgment. We are conflicted, as bodies and as a body. And this is no surprise. In fact, it may be a constant. We’re complex. We’re messy. On a metaphysical level, we’re somehow complete and incomplete at the same time. That there is anxiety and judgment and resentment need not mar the goodness of this hour and may in fact highlight it.

After all, there are reasons we are here this morning. Admirable reasons. There are causes that account for our choosing to show up in this place. We want to be here. So give thanks. Despite our troubled hearts, and maybe because of them, we each made a conscious decision to come worship together. Or did we? Was it ever really a choice? We’re we going to come here this morning regardless of our experience of deciding to do so? Perhaps it was pre-ordained, written in the stars or in the book of life. Could it be that, your being here today was a predestined result due to nigh on infinite causes and consequences dating back to the big bang? A series of causes and consequences that you have no say in whatsoever?

I know that’s not what it feels like. It feels like you chose to be here this morning. But the paradigm in which we live maintains that while there are forks in the path, there was never really any question about which path is taken. Thus, choice is a figment. Free will is an illusion.

So here’s a story. Tell me if you’ve heard this before – a man came face to face with the truth in the form of an apple. A curious fellow, he was fascinated by the natural scene around him and the apple tree near which he sat. And then came the fall. And everything changed. To be clear, it was the apple that fell, not the man. You see, our protagonist’s name was Isaac Newton. And what changed everything, was his assertion that an unseen, but distinct, measurable and predictable force was causing the apple to fall to the ground. No longer did God keep the seas at bay. No longer did reality have a purpose.

Be careful of apples, people. They keep the doctor away, sure, but as Adam and Isaac Newton can attest, they have a conspicuous and dramatic potential to destroy worldviews and realign identity. For no less than that is what gravity did.

At any rate, the discovery of gravity was an assault, the final and definitive assault, on the preceding paradigm. Like most assaults, this one had collateral damage. Much like Galileo and Darwin, Newton did not set out to kill god. And yet there lies the occidental diety, amongst the rubble of antiquity. And next to him lay the corpse of free will. It might come as a shock that God and free will were in a relationship of such intimacy that they would both be felled by the same apple. It’s certainly not without irony. To many here, an omnipotent, omniscient God might be synonymous with predestination and the suppression of free will. And yet the in the end, the paradigm that Newton and his kind ushered in, eliminated the possibility of either.

Here’s the forensics; the way Newton described gravity set us on a trajectory of cause and effect, where every event has material causes, identifiable, measurable causes and every effect can be predicted by taking these causes into account. This view is maintained in physics, biology and psychology. It is a notion of reality where our predictive accuracy is limited only by the amount and accuracy of the information we posses. The metaphor is billiard balls. The metaphor is a machine. And it is a powerful worldview. Cause and effect took humanity to the moon. However, our personalities, our decision making methods are reduced or, perhaps, elevated to a definite (if difficult to figure) mixture of DNA, biological secretions and socialization that is purely mechanistic. This knowledge is inherent, however threatening it sounds. After all, we debate about whether a cause was nature verses nurture, not whether there was a cause. Play that out, folks, and it leaves no room for free will.

But let me shift the perspective a little bit. I first started thinking about this when I was considering the Buddhist concept of Prat_tyasamutp_da. This is the doctrine of dependent origination or mutual causation. Essentially, this observes that every being is contingent on every other being, that reality arises in an infinite and interdependent web of causation, that nothing in the universe exists without everything else in the universe. That made sense to me. I could kind of reverse engineer my present to that conclusion slash origin. So, I was thinking, “huh, if everything causes everything, that doesn’t leave much room for free will. But, I’ve grown up to really value free will.” It was a riddle.

And then it occurred to me that, “hey, this inderdependent web thing sounds kind of familiar.” It’s right there in our principles. To be fair, the committees at General Assembly didn’t come up with the interdependent web out of thin air. It is attested to in several ontologies, from Buddhism to the environmental movement and deep ecology to physics and western philosophy. It’s the butterfly effect, where the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Botswana has some consequence, eventually in Siberia. But think; a thousand butterflies. A million butterflies. Think every butterfly that ever lived.

Let’s just imagine this for a moment. Think of a spider web. You are a node or maybe a strand between two nodes on the web. I’m assuming that a spider web as we imagine it is more or less one-dimensional. Existence is not. So at every node imagine several other strands connecting at every conceivable angle. Each of these strands connects to a node in yet another web. And each node in another web has strands attached to it at every conceivable angle to other webs. And this tightly compacted weave and interconnected web is as big as EXISTENCE. If I move one node here, everything moves. If every event is mutually dependent, if it’s all cause and effect and every effect is another cause, what then of free will? Under pressure from all of existence, is there room for it? So Newton and gravity and the billiard ball cause and effect present a significant challenge to free will. Buddhism and our own UU principles severely limit any notion of free agency. It’s beginning to feel like piling on, but contemporary science kicks it to the curb.

Benjamin Libet conducted the touchstone experiment for this in the 1970’s. He was able to determine that people were acting before they decided to act even though they thought they were deciding to act before they acted. He found that the brain had initiated movement before any conscious decision to move had been made. According to Libet, free will, insofar as it is conscious, is more like story telling than decision making. It is purely after the act. In a more recent study, Yale psychology professor John Bargh (Barge) sent one of his grad assistants into town, arms full of papers, a briefcase, pens, all sorts of stuff, including a cup of coffee. The grad assistant would then administer a survey to random passers by. The survey described a person named Joe and included his photograph and asked something like, do you like Joe? Sometime near the beginning of this encounter, the grad assistant would shift his too many things he was carrying and ask the survey participant to hold the cup of coffee. This would be for a mere second. Very casually done. The trick is that some people were given hot coffee. Some people were given ice coffee. Consistently, the clear majority of people who held the hot coffee, for ONE second, liked Joe. And those that held the cold coffee, did not like Joe. You think the cold coffee people think they made a decision of their own free will to not like Joe? In a recent interview, Malcolm Gladwell, author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point, drives home the argument. Specifically naming the research of Daniel Wegner at Harvard, Gladwell states that, “If you go through all of this research that’s been done in psychology recently, you end up with the position that the conscious will is an illusion.”

We can do a little experiment here this morning. The experiment goes as follows : Decide you are going to close your eyes, relax, pay attention only to your breathing and have no thoughts, i.e. do a form of meditation. OK, if you were running this show this should be no problem, decide to have no thoughts, have no thoughts! It would be very surprising if most of you didn’t find it exceptionally difficult to banish thoughts. The brain, is generating them in spite of your conscious best intentions. That is what the brain is designed to do, regardless of whether “you” want it to or not. It has been said that we are, each us, fundamentally a hundred trillion cellular robots who are not self conscious and who do not know who “you” are.

So by now, I’m hoping that I’ve put some serious questions into your brain about the possibility of free will (as if you could choose to believe in free will or not). This might be the grown up version of being told there’s no such thing as Santa Clause. It’s a bummer. I mean, is it so much to ask? I’m not asking to control the stars, or even a starship, or even someone else. I just want the dignity of self-control. Now inherent dignity is collateral damage too.

And what does this say about morality? Did we just obliterate any notion of benevolence? Did the distinction between good and evil just evaporate? If we’re all part of an unplanned plan with no triumph of progress or humanly understandable goal of any kind, is there any meaning to be had at all?

These are serious questions. For what its worth, they are being hashed out by our champions of philosophy and science even now. In fact, you can watch parts of the conversation on you tube. I watched far too much of it preparing this sermon, so I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to disregard them. Sometimes you can’t fix a problem from the same vantage point and with the same tools with which you created the problem. It’s harder to find your way out of a maze when you are in it than when you are above it. So we need to shift our perspective. It’s like a couple Sundays ago, one of the youth First Austin and I were trying to teach the precocious little Spencer some really big words. Spencer, by the way, is our Director of Religious Education’s little boy. He’s like four or eight or some small number of years old. He’s a little guy. He’s locally famous for being the one in the kids choir that usually looks like he’s about to fall over from enthusiastic singing. Great kid. So we tried to teach him the word synesthesia so he could blow his teacher’s mind come Monday. We didn’t have a lot of luck. So I asked Spencer what was the biggest word he knew. He thought about it for a bit and then replied, “The Sky.”

The Sky. Right. Thank you Spencer for teaching me a truly big word. So, a shift in perspective. Let’s have a fresh look at how this argy bargy began. Go back to the interconnected web of existence and understand this: Every event in the world that has happened, every breath, every confession, every joy, every misspelling, every shift of sand on the ocean’s floor, every leaf dying in autumn, every inching of every worm, every event is plugged into you, is shaping you and propelling you just as you propel it all likewise. Can you feel it? Well…. Can you feel some of it? Maybe. Can you imagine it? Yes. In some way. Yes. And that is the trick.

The quantum physicist John Wheeler puts it this way, “There is no out there out there.” All we know is how we correlate with the world. We do not really know what the world is really like, without us. When we seem to experience an external world that is out there, independent of us, it is evidently something we dream up.

Modern neurobiology has reached the exact same conclusion as quantum physics. The visual world, what we see, is an illusion. The science writer Tor Norretranders, author of The Generous Man writes, “The merging of the epistemological lesson from quantum mechanics with the epistemological lesson from neurobiology attest to a very simple fact: What we perceive as being outside of us is indeed a fancy and elegant projection of what we have inside. We do make this projection as a result of interacting with something not inside, but everything we experience is inside.

So, there are causes, but we’re imagining our experiences of them. In some way, we’re projecting the events that determine our actions. Well, that’s not necessarily free will. But it is a radical kind of agency for which I don’t think we even have a word. I mean, the sky? The sky inside. This is radical agency. This is the agency with which we reappropriate our inherent dignity. So the next time you go outside and look up, I want you to see that great big word; dignity.

On top of that, all this radical agency is correlated. It’s all interrelated. It is entirely relational and co-arising. It is Prat_tyasamutp_da. Which, by the way, is a seriously big word.

So, if this is the adult version of the unmasking of Santa Clause, we can, as we did as children, take solace in the fact that we still get presents! It’s not Santa, it’s better. It’s our relatives, our relationships! We still get presents. We still get life. We still get love and hope and fear and breath and fresh bread. Now, I can say without exactly lying and for similar reasons, that, yes, Virginia, there is free will.

So today is a good day. This breath is a good breath. They are good precisely because we recognize them as good. We praise them and are grateful. And the way you’re sitting and thinking are also good, correlated as we are with this day and this moment.

And that there is anxiety and judgment and resentment need not mar the goodness of this hour and may in fact highlight it. For on a metaphysical level, we’re somehow complete and incomplete at the same time.

“Illusion of illusions, says the Teacher, illusion of illusions! All is illusion.” And so, I have been chasing my breath for the past while. But is there some inherent good in this futility? Is there some purpose to the mistaken attribution of purpose?

Free will, experientially, existentially, is akin to an emotion. To deny it would be like denying the reality of love or hate or hope. And as it turns out, emotions are among the primary building blocks of our reality. They have kept us alive and evolving since they emerged in our being. They are the connective tissue in our sense of reality. They are the connective tissue between each other. This is radical agency, but it is also relational agency. We need the world. And we need each other.

Look around. When you see your neighbor’s faults, then you will see your own also. When you see your neighbor’s dignity, then you will have secured your own. Let us embody it with ritual. When we have completed this ritual, please stand, stretch out, shake hands and say hello and thanks to the folks in your vicinity. It’ll be a nice way to close it. You can then remain standing and we’ll move into the song from there.

For now, if you would, hold out both of your hands, palm up. This is a gesture of openness, of asking and receiving. If this next gesture makes you uncomfortable, it’s okay. Honest religion often takes us out of our comfort zone. Keep your left hand open. But with your right hand, place two or more fingers on the wrist of the neighbor to your right, over here on the side a little and under the thumb. If you’re unable to find a pulse, it is enough to know that it is there. If you are on an aisle or sitting by yourself, hold your hand open and feel the qualities of the air.

You may close your eyes or not. However you are comfortable. Breathe in and exhale slowly, as if you were meditating. And keeping that breath intentional, consider how touch affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person and compassion in human relations, how touch embodies acceptance of one another and is a first step towards the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice.

Consider that through your fingerprints, you can feel the pulse of your neighbor. Through your singularity, you touch the life force. Finally, see if you can syncopate your breathing with the rhythm of your neighbor’s heart beat and let that syncopation expand in your imagination to include the rhythms of everyone here as nodes on the interdependent web of all existence and facets of the sum that is greater than all these parts. Listen now to breath and blood and life. At one time, be grounded, be here, transcend.

Amen.

Take a minute and say thanks to the folks around you. We’ll move to the next hymn from here.

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© Ron Phares

January 18, 2009

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Reading 1

I Have a Dream (excerpt)

Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Reading 2

Untitled Poem

Carl Wenell Himes, Jr.

Now that he is safely dead

Let us praise him

Build monuments to his glory

Sing hosannas to his name.

Dead men make

Such convenient heroes: They cannot rise

To challenge the images

We would fashion from their lives.

And besides,

It is easier to build monuments

Than to make a better world.

So, now that he is safely dead

We with eased consciences

Will teach our children

That he was a great man … knowing

That the cause for which he lived

Is still a cause

And the dream for which he died is still a dream,

A dead man’s dream.

Reading 3

Creation Spell

Ed Bullins

Into your palm I place the ashes

Into your palm are the ashes of your brothers

burnt in the Alabama night

Into your palm that holds your babies

into your palm that feeds your children

into your palm that holds the work tools

place the ashes of your father

here are the ashes of your husbands

Take the ashes of your nation

and create the cement to build again

Create the spirits to move again

Take this soul dust and begin again

Reading 4

Barak Obama

From a speech following the New Hampshire Primary

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check; we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we’ve been told we’re not ready, or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

Homily & Sermon:

Disembodied Dreams

First Movement

Let me take you back to Thursday, April 4, 1968 on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The late Dr. King’s body has been taken away. But for his close colleagues returning from the hospital, there is a grim reminder of his having been here: a pool of blood on the balcony floor. Jesse Jackson approaches and sinks to his knees before the puddle. He places both of his hands, palms downward, into the blood of his friend. He then stands and wipes the front of his turtleneck shirt with his hands, taking the blood of Martin onto himself.

Dr. King was murdered as he was about to join the efforts of striking garbage workers in Memphis. It was a somewhat unplanned initial step on what was to be the most ambitious endeavor of King’s career; the Poor People’s Campaign. This effort was envisioned to culminate in a multiracial army of the poor descending on Washington D.C. until Congress enacted a Poor People’s Bill of Rights, which would include a massive government jobs program.

Having learned a little bit about the levers of power in our nation while he fought for desegregation and equal rights, and then while he spoke out against the war in Viet Nam, Dr. King was determined to hit at the root of exploitation in the Poor People’s Campaign. This carried him well beyond the field of race politics and into the much more dangerous field of economics. In Selma and Washington D.C., King was trying to change the way people in and out of power thought about race. What he was about to do was change the way people in and out of power thought about power.

His inner circle thought this too diffuse and a departure from the work they had all been doing up until then. They began to fracture and he was loosing patience with them. And when the invitation came for him to go to Memphis, King was counseled that it was too paltry an affair in addition to being part of a venture his associates weren’t entirely on board with. But it was neither insignificant to King, nor was it anything less than exactly the kind of systematic sin he was hoping to root out of America. And so he went.

The day before his assassination he assured an audience that has subsequently grown to include the whole world that he had been to the mountaintop, that he had seen the promised land. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!î

I think King was wrong. If there is a place to get to, I think he will get there with us. He was murdered. But he was not ended. His action lives on in his disciples and in the trajectory upon which he set this nation. And what are we if not our action?

There is no end there. Just more means to further means, action birthing action, character in mitosis.

You see, when Reverend Jackson knelt down and dipped his palms in King’s blood, he was physically enacting a kind of resurrection. After all, the great work hadn’t got done. So Jackson was, in a sense, taking onto himself the properties of his friend. But he wasn’t just taking them onto himself alone. Because we see it ñ we’ve seen pictures in the past or we see it in our mind’s eye today ñ because we see it and understand it’s history and significance, we know that the properties of Martin, in transferring to Jesse, have also been transferred to us. For while Jackson remained focused primarily on racial questions, there were other people and organizations that took up the post-racial agenda that King had begun. Nonetheless, on that night in Memphis, it was Jackson who embodied a transference that unwittingly would take root in many of us and pave the winding way to this Tuesday’s inauguration.

It turns out, evidentally, that blood is both medically and poetically a rampant vehicle for the transference of properties from one person to another. And because were using the poetic sense here, properties means the character of or the meaning of that blood. What Jesse did was only what mankind has been doing for millennia. It’s either hard wired into our DNA or the vestige of humanity’s hero myths, but there seems to be a repeated practice among our species of taking on some properties of a beloved martyr through the martyr’s blood. An obvious example of this is the Christian Eucharist, wherein the blood of Christ is swallowed.

While we understand the Eucharistic blood of Christ is symbolic, in Jesse’s case, the blood was both symbolic and all too physical. When he dipped his hands into that blood, he took part in an impromptu ritual that ratcheted him, and ourselves as well, to the continuing action of Dr. King. So, Jesse still has blood on his hands. Barak Obama has blood on his hands. And the blood is still on our hands. It reminds us of the guilt in which our history implicates us. But that historical indictment is only worthwhile if it also reminds us that we continue ñ all of us, regardless of our heritage, skin color or economic status – to participate, to varying degrees, in a vast system of repression and exploitation that pollutes our character by a lack of awareness and a lack of intentionality. The good news is there are things we can do about that. Yes we can.

So, on one hand the purpose of the blood is to remind us of our transgressions. And on the other hand, is the transferred properties, a reminder of hope, and heroism, of faith in humankind, a reminder of fallibility, forgiveness and true power, and the life and work of Martin Luthor King Jr. That blood has become ours. It is our heritage. If we don’t want it, that blood becomes only an indictment.

And yet, if we accept it, if we take it in, if you let it seep into our imagination and into our heart, that blood becomes, not only an indictment but it also becomes a force in our own veins, a meaning in our own life. For that is the blood in which the murdered prophet still lives. And we are worthy of it. And we are guilty of it. As worthy and as guilty as the prophet himself. So, if we accept it, if we accept that blood, if we accept this story, then we can hold up our own bloody hands and see death (hold up left hand) and life (hold up right hand), guilt and hope, and change these disparities from a posture of the convicted, to a posture of conviction (clasp hands in prayer).

Let us pray.

We come hear today to be nurtured by one another,

with hopes of hearing a healing word, of singing a song that helps us, of celebrating, of walking back into beauty.

Our lives are fraught with trouble, and actions that miss the mark and cause damage to ourselves or to others.

But our being here confesses our awareness of our imperfection and hopes that such an awareness must necessarily understand and thus forgive the failings of others as well as of ourselves.

Just as our joy is a beacon, so to can our sorrow be a guide.

Let this awareness be the seed of empathy then, and this fellowship be the soil to nurture that empathy, so that its fruit can feed many.

Amen.

Disembodied Dreams

Second Movement

I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It displayed an image of Obama in red, white and blue, above the words, “Yes, we did.î Now, I know this person was just slapping a celebratory flag on their car. I know they were just feeling proud, feeling good. And they should. Yet, I confess that I was somewhat troubled by that bumper sticker. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the layers of significance that an Obama presidency promises. I most certainly do. I have high hopes and deep gratitude.

It’s just that, “Yes, we did,î suggests that the work is over when, really, the work is just beginning. The phraseÖ is, “Yes we can,î not “Yes, we did.î And therein is a message of both political and spiritual consequence. The work is not yesterday. The work, the joy, the pain is always and ever arising. If I can hearken back to King for a moment the view from the mountaintop of equal rights is of the mountain of unscrupulous warfare. The view from the mountaintop of unscrupulous warfare is of the mountain of economic exploitation. The mountains get bigger. The work is never over.

The difficulty is that once you start down the path of justice, it is easy to be overwhelmed by where that path leads you. You start in a soup kitchen and you wind up waving a defiant ladle at the World Bank. It seems like an impossible task. But then we also know, as our soon-to-be President has reminded us, that, “nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.î And what do you know? It works. At least its working to shift the face of the power structure in Washington. But the real work, as we know all too well ñ as we witness Palestine unraveling, as Pakistan and Mexico stand on the brink of collapse, as our own economy teeters on the precipice of national terror and a crisis of character ñ the real work has only just begun.

So, not, “Yes we did.î “Yes we can.î And maybe that implies, “Yes we are,î right now, right here. If the work the joy and pain is ever arising, then it is arising now, right here, as you sit.

After all, being here is an action. And what are we if not our action? Being here has an effect; on you, on the people next to you, on the world you encounter away from here. Being here is an action. But the question we must ask ourselves, as participants in this corporate body ñ sitting here, are we active enough? What does being here do? More to the point, what are we doing here?

So, when I go to church I know that most of the time I’m there I’m sitting and listening. Right? You’re listening, aren’t you? Okay. That’s a start. I know that my listening is reinforced by my standing to sing and by my singing (apologies to those within earshot). So, that’s also a step. I watch candles be kindled and light some of my own. That’s good. But in a religion that has no central text, in a religion whose cosmology, ontology, theology is intentionally vague, in a religion that is essentially new ñ despite the braided histories we claim ñ and lacks a rich tradition – is listening enough? Are these actions enough to embody our purpose? Or do they leave us entirely without “a tradition, an ontology and a rich understanding of the human condition, its malaise and its cure,î as has been suggested.

The way I see it, the problem is not that we do not have an ontology and a rich understanding of the human condition, its malaise and its cure. The problem is that our understanding comes from such a broad spectrum of sources that it is all too easy to miss the forest of consensus for the trees of our variety. Maybe because of that, our understanding has not been taken into our bodies in any kind of communal, central ritual. And so it is that our religion has been damned to a mere haunting, all too often remaining in the realm of ideas, a dream without a body to be in.

In short, we’re a religion without any religious experience because we are a religion of disembodied dreams. T.S. Eliot comes to mind.

“We are the hollow men.

Our dried voices,

when We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass”

“Shape without form,

shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

I don’t think Eliot was talking about us, but he sure could have been. Emerson, however, was definitely talking about us when he called Unitarianism “corpse cold.î But we can change that. We can live into the dream of our forebears and we can and must do this together. Oh, yes we can. In fact, we will.

Some of you may know, I am currently studying for the ministry at Austin Seminary. This past semester, a small group of my colleagues began meeting once a week to create some sacred space in our lives. We would gather, splash our hands and faces with water (a practice borrowed from Islam), do some physical action which we often drew from yoga. We would then sing ñ to clear away the ego. And finally, we would relax in silence for a half an hour, ala a Quaker meeting. This was followed by the sharing of snacks and some discussion. I can assure you, our theologies all varied radically from one another. And yet we could create that space together. It was a deeply enriching experience each and every week.

Now I could have, and have, done something like this on my own, alone. But the fellowship was important. The fellowship elevated the experience. Fellowship taps into love and that’s why we’re here this morning, right?

So ritual embodiment creates space. It also articulates faith. After all, what is Islam without Mecca-facing prayers in prostration? What is Christianity without the Eucharist? What is Buddhism without meditation? What is Unitarian Universalism without… umÖ We claim these traditions as sources. There is wisdom in the fact that they ALL ritualize their bodies in order to reinforce and articulate interpretations of the world.

The Buddhist author Jack Kornfield writes, “Spiritual transformation Ö doesn’t happen by accident. We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing.î In other words, we have to practice cosmology. We have to practice ontology and theology. We will neither grow, nor be effective, nor, in my opinion, even survive as a religion without also thriving as a religious practice.

Now, I’m not just going to whine at you. I want to try and find a solution. So what kind of ritual embodies our values and beliefs and theological liberality? How shall we practice? The Buddhist teacher Achaan Chah described the commitment to practice as “taking the one seat.” He said, “Just go into a room and put one chair in the centerÖ open the doors and the windows, sit in the chair, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.”

So we will take our cue here, with a few minor changes. I’m actually going to ask you to move a bit. Indulge me. Let’s see how this goes. So, as you are able, shift in your pews toward the center aisles, so that you are seated close to each other, right next to each other. Thank you.

SoÖ we are going to do a ritual, a ritual that embodies our theological and ontological openness, our social vision, our scientific grounding and our spiritual aspirations.

Now if you would, hold out both of your hands, palm up. This is a gesture of openness, of asking and receiving. If this next gesture makes you uncomfortable, it’s okay. Ritual, principles and honest religion often, in integrity, take us out of our comfort zone. So, see if you can come in to this next step. If you would, keep your left hand open. But with your right hand, place two or more fingers on the wrist of the neighbor to your right. Try to find a pulse, over here on the side a little and under the thumb. If you’re unable to find a pulse, it is enough to know that it is there. If you are on an aisle or sitting by yourself, place your free fingers on your own neck.

You may close your eyes or not. However you are comfortable. Now I’ll ask you to breath in and exhale slowly, as if you were meditating. And keeping that breath intentional, consider how this gesture recalls our principles, how touch affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person and compassion in human relations.

Consider how touch embodies acceptance of one another and is a first step towards the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

Consider that through your fingerprints, you can feel the pulse of your neighbor, through your singularity, you touch the life force.

Consider how this reveals our fragility, just as it reveals the miracle of the human machine.

Finally, take a few breath cycles on your own, increasing your sensitivity to your neighbors life force. See if you can syncopate your breathing with the rhythm of their heart and let that syncopation expand in your imagination to include the rhythms of everyone here and then onward so that your thoughts turn at last to the interdependent web of all existence and the sum that is greater than all these parts. Listen now to breath and blood and life. At one time, be grounded, be here, transcend.

Amen.

I hope that gave you an idea of what I am talking about. Actually doing it hopefully made the idea more clear than if we had just left it at talk. And that is precisely the point. I hope it is an idea we can build on. It doesn’t need to be the ritual we performed today, but I would encourage some kind of exercise that embodies our faith to become a regular part of our service, our related board and committee functions and your personal practice. I’ll submit it to the worship committee for some deliberation. Consider today the first line of a conversation. But it must not only be a conversation.

Allowing our thoughts only to be in our mind and allowing our minds to be only in our brains does each component, as well as their sum ñnamely our lives and the gods in which we live them ñ a great penalty. Meanwhile, using our bodies to express our consciousness in ritual will lead to using our bodies to express our consciousness to each other and to the larger world. This can help in troubled times. And as a church and as a nation, these are troubled times. We can start healing without a word. We can take that wisdom and apply it to ourselves and our world. We can live this dream of Unitarian Universalism. We can heal this nation. We can repair this world. Yes we can.

Amen.