Podcast: Play in new window | Download

�

Davidson Loehr

23 March 2008

PRAYER:

May our dark places begin to see the light.

May the large and small deaths we have endured release their grip on us, so that we may return to life.

May the apprehension which has stifled us give way to hope and trust.

May all those who have suffered know they have suffered enough, and that it is time to reclaim their dreams, and their courage.

There are two kinds of people: those who are alive and those who are afraid.

But now it is Easter. It is time to come back to life – in our hearts, our lives, and our relationships.

The night has lasted long enough. It is Easter. Let us reclaim our lives.

Amen.

SERMON: Crucifixion and Resurrection in Real-Time (Part III of the Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth)

This is the third in a series of sermons on the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth – a pretty serious subject. But it’s also Easter Sunday in the traditions of Christianity, florists, restaurants, and those who hunt for Easter Eggs, so I want to honor the seriousness of the first subject and the optimism of the second – a feat that might sound like it would have to be a miracle.

The story of Easter is the Christian version of the universal story of our hope that somehow death isn’t the last word, negating the significance of our lives. Hindus had addressed this a few centuries earlier through their metaphor of reincarnation. And you know the even older Egyptian myth of the Phoenix rising from its own ashes. It’s one of our oldest hopes.

Religious liberals usually see these stories, as I do, as metaphors, about psychological sorts of resurrection, or about the hope that life doesn’t have to kill your spirit, the spirit of love or hope, or the spirit of a people. Liberal biblical scholars talk of the resurrection this way, too.

The crucifixion I’ll talk about, however, is all too real. It has involved and continues to involve the real deaths of millions of people, the destruction of economies and societies, and the murder of hope, right here in our real world.

That’s the story of the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth – what author Naomi Klein calls the capitalist fundamentalism of the past 36 years, centered in Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School of Economics, also called the Chicago School, or the Chicago Boys.

It made its dramatic entry on September 11, 1973 when, with the backing of our CIA, the brutal General Pinochet murdered the democratically elected president Salvadore Allende in Chile and unleashed a reign of robbery and terror from which the majority in Chile have never recovered.

By the 1980s, a sophisticated and coordinated plan for repeating all of this had been pretty much perfected:

First, they were aware and ready when a crisis happened or could be helped to happen, that could adequately paralyze a nation so they could apply what Friedman called their economic shock therapy. Since they had all these plans worked out, it was like having an overnight bag you could take with you on the next flight out to the latest crisis.

Chicago-trained economists arrived to show those in the power structure how to immediately rewrite the economic structures and laws, to remove all obstacles to looting by American and multinational corporations. This followed the 500-page plan they had put together after Pinochet’s murder of Chile’s president Allende in 1973.

The plan for kidnapping, torturing, terrorizing and killing citizens who opposed this theft had become standardized, following the procedures set out in our CIA interrogation manual known as Kubark. Put together in 1963, the CIA is still using it as their key interrogation manual. It’s the book that prescribes the early-morning or late-night kidnapping, hooding, beating, sensory deprivation, electroshock, and techniques like waterboarding of which we’re all aware.

Finally, a strong police or military presence and varying degrees of violence have been necessary every time Friedman’s ?Chicago School? economic plans have been put in effect, for obvious reasons: these are plans to loot entire societies, and the majority of people in those societies will not take it if they have the means to resist – especially the workers. The purpose of rewriting the laws, selling off the government assets, destroying workers’ unions, social support networks and bringing in kidnapping, torture, terrorism and murder is to insure that they won’t have the means or the will to resist.

But the violence isn’t the point. The violence enables the robbery. These are extraordinarily violent armed robberies. These methods have used in so many countries: Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Africa, Russia, China, Asia, Iraq and others. Some would also add England under Thatcher and our country since Reagan.

But today, I want to talk about only one of the countries where these practices were put into effect – Russia – in order to save time for the ?resurrection? part, the turning of the tide, the things that people around the world have begun to do to counter this economic plan.

Between 1989 and 1991 the old USSR collapsed. This had been our Cold War enemy. The most hawkish voices in and behind our government now believed that we had no rival for power in the world – and, we believed, no one could stop our greed or our aggression. Just like in a bad movie or video game, we thought we could rule the world. And the real point of ruling the world is money, not just bragging rights.

This occasion brought about the second September 11^th event in this story, on September 11^th, 1991. That’s when President George HW Bush made the speech in which he introduced the phrase ?a New World Order.? The New World Order simply meant a world ruled by American corporate interests, since we believed there was now no one to stop us.

A few words on this date of September 11^th, which figures prominently three times in this story. It seems very odd, but I have no idea how or why it would have been an intentional part of a huge overall plan. So as far as I can tell, it’s just one of those strange coincidences of history.

When Russia’s new president Boris Yeltsin came to the World Bank and IMF for help, they responded with this economic plan designed to destroy the Russian economy and remove all barriers to a feeding frenzy of foreign, mostly American, capitalists looting the entire Russian economy.

On October 28, 1991, Yeltsin announced the lifting of price controls, and the Russian economy was on its way to being decimated (The Shock Doctrine, p. 223). By the end of the day, his military assault on his own people had taken the lives of approximately five hundred people and wounded almost a thousand, the most violence Moscow had seen since the Russian Revolution of 1917 (The Shock Doctrine, p. 229).

The Chicago Boys went on a law-making binge, ramming through huge budget cuts, the price hikes on basic food items, including bread, and even more and faster auctioning off of government assets, at a mere fraction of their worth (The Shock Doctrine, p. 230). They quickly sold off the country’s approximately 225,000 state-owned companies (The Shock Doctrine, p. 223).

The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than in 1991, and a third of the population fell below the poverty line. The middle class was forced to sell personal belongings from card tables on the streets – desperate acts that the Chicago School economists praised as ?entrepreneurial,? proof that a capitalist renaissance was indeed under way, one family heirloom and second-hand blazer at a time (The Shock Doctrine, p. 225). If you had to sell your possessions in order to eat, is ?entrepreneurial? the word you would choose? Can you feel the indifferent and brutal spirit of what Naomi Klein is calling this fundamentalist capitalism? Can you see why so much violence was necessary, to steal so much from so many people, and why one of Friedman’s critics called it economic genocide?

Communism may have collapsed without firing a single shot, but fundamentalist capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns – all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy (The Shock Doctrine, p. 228).

Yeltsin’s assistant in charge of auctioning off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of government assets to corporations became one of the most outspoken champions of Pinochet’s tactics. ?In order to have a democracy in society there must be a dictatorship in power,? he pronounced (The Shock Doctrine, p. 232). This is perfect Orwellian 1984 doublespeak! The phrase ?democracy in society? here means simply the freedom of corporations to loot the entire economy without restraint. And the ?dictatorship of power? and the terrible violence it unleashed was not seen as an enemy of democracy, because no one planning this ever cared about the rights of workers, or anyone else who stood in the way. Human life counted for very little compared to the potential profits at stake.

Just like his mentor Pinochet’s, Yeltsin’s own family grew very rich, his children and several of their spouses appointed to top posts at large firms looted from the government (The Shock Doctrine, p. 233). It was like the old American Depression song, ?The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but ain’t we got fun!? — but without the fun parts.

In the absence of a major famine, plague or battle, never have so many lost so much in so short a time. By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before the Chicago School economic shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By 1997, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that the ?economic reforms? imposed on Russia can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years (The Shock Doctrine, p. 238).

Nor were these catastrophic results unique to Russia; the entire thirty-five year history of the Chicago School experiment has been one of mass corruption and violent collusion between police states and large corporations. The point of the economic shock therapy is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly – and to eliminate all effective resistance by whatever means necessary (The Shock Doctrine, p. 241).

This is the crucifixion that has gone on for the last 40-50 years in countries all over the world – always, it seems, with the backing of our CIA and the involvement of some of our largest corporations and wealthiest individuals.

The parallels to the crucifixion of Jesus are surprisingly apt. Many biblical scholars believe the single event that doomed Jesus was his scene in Jerusalem’s huge temple, turning over the moneychangers’ tables, trying to stop them from making an unnecessary profit from the people. It’s not a coincidence that the most violent torture, suppression and murder in every country from Chile to Russia and others has been against workers, workers’ unions, and the artists and intellectuals who spoke out against the looting.

Popular religion wants to make Jesus a sweet pietistic figure who just preached love. But while that message might get someone ignored by the authorities, it wouldn’t get them killed. In his real life, his crucifixion may have had a lot to do with his activism on behalf of the poor.

And the resurrection as liberal Christian scholars understand it wasn’t about a dead man rising and walking again. It meant that after Jesus had died, some of his followers began to believe that he and his message had represented a perspective far higher and more life-giving than they could grasp simply by saying he was a wise man.

On the first two Sundays in April, I’ll go back to talk about some of the other countries where we have used these methods and the new developments in the tactics for doing so. But I want to spend the rest of our time on the ?resurrection,? the return to life of some of the devastated countries, how they did it, and how it might encourage and empower us.

The three chief financial institutions that have supported the economic looting were the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, the World Trade Organization, or WTO, and the World Bank. All three may now be among the moneychangers being thrown out of some of the world’s temples.

The International Monetary Fund had played a powerful role in helping to destabilize many countries so they could be looted, but eventually people caught on. After 1998, it became increasingly difficult to impose the shock therapy-style makeovers – through the usual IMF bullying or arm-twisting at trade summits. The defiant new mood coming from the South made its global debut when the WTO talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999. You probably remember the news stories about the college-age protesters then, but the real rebellion took place inside the conference center, when developing countries formed a voting bloc and rejected demands for deeper trade concessions as long as Europe and the US continued to subsidize and protect their domestic industries. Within a few years, the US government’s ambitious dream of creating a unified free-trade zone encompassing all of Asia-Pacific was abandoned, as were a global investors’ treaty and plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, stretching from Alaska to Chile (The Shock Doctrine, p. 279).

Remember that the words ?free trade? are code. They refer to a system whereby multinational corporations are allowed free entry into foreign markets, while subsidizing many of their own industries. So we can destroy local industries because the subsidized products we bring in can unfairly undercut them. This is how many feel we may destroy the native corn crops in Mexico with subsidized, artificially cheap American corn.

Ever since the Argentine collapse in 2001, opposition to foreign looting has become the defining issue of the continent, able to make governments and break them; by late 2006, it was practically creating a domino effect. Columbia seems to be the only Latin American country in which we still have some economic control (The Shock Doctrine, p. 451).

Latin America’s mass movements are learning how to build shock absorbers into their organizing models. They are less centralized than in the sixties, making it harder to destroy whole societies by eliminating a few leaders and replacing them with people who are willing to sell out their countries in return for immense personal wealth and power. The progressive networks in Venezuela are highly decentralized, with power dispersed at the grass roots and community level, through thousands of neighborhood councils and co-ops (The Shock Doctrine, p. 453-454).

In Venezuela, Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 cooperatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers (The Shock Doctrine, p. 455).

How effective has this been? In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent – a sea change in only two years. The transformation reaches beyond Latin America. In just three years, the IMF’s worldwide lending portfolio had shrunk from $81 billion to $11.8 billion, with almost all of that going to Turkey. Naomi Klein believes that the IMF, a pariah in so many countries where it has treated crises as profit-making opportunities, is starting to wither away. The World Bank faces an equally grim future. In the midst of the Wolfowitz affair, The Financial Times reported that when World Bank managers dispensed advice in the developing world, ?they were now laughed at.? Add the collapse of the World Trade Organization talks in 2006, and the futures of the three main institutions that had imposed the Chicago School ideology look to be at risk of extinction (The Shock Doctrine, p. 457).

This may signal the end of an era of American piracy that history will look back on in shame – depending, as always, on who gets to write that history. But as an Easter topic, it’s about the difference in the spirits and gods being served, about which ones can bring life. Easter, reincarnation, the Phoenix myth and all other resurrection stories, are always about the victory of life-giving spirits over smaller and more selfish ones.

This looks like it could be the reincarnation of the spirit of life and hope in new bodies and opportunities. And it looks like the rebirth of the sons and daughters of God, again living with power and authority. That’s what all religions worthy of the name teach as our sacred right during our days on this earth.

Let us seek and claim them. To all those in Latin America and other recovering countries, and to all of us seeking to survive the large and small deaths in our lives as well – Happy Easter.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 9 March 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not underestimate the high cost of serving low gods, for we become what we worship.

Let us learn the names of the gods we serve with our lives. The gods have many names, as they’ve always had: fear, greed, insecurity, power, anger, money, compassion, inclusion, exclusion – their names are legion. And each one will shape us in its own image, for better and worse.

Can we pay the economic cost of serving fairness and the cause of an equitable income for all? Can we pay the human cost of greed or indifference? Will we be so indiscriminately inclusive that we welcome toxic people into our lives? Will we be so indiscriminately exclusive that we lose touch with our greater and nobler humanity? Will serving power mean destroying justice, love, even people?

There are many questions because there are many gods, each with their own seductive demands, each able to make us look like them if only we will give them our lives.

May we seek to live in such a way that we can look back on the path we chose with pride, because it helped make us a blessing to ourselves and others. May we serve only gods that can give us life, not merely the illusion of it.

Religious prophets and sages have said forever that only the greater gods of compassion, justice, service and love can give us the life we seek.

Let us consider that they may be right.

Amen.

SERMON: The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part 2

This is the second in a series of three sermons this month and at least two next month, all based on Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I think I have done two sermons based on one book only once before. While I don’t expect you all to rush out and read this long and difficult book, I do want to tell you why I think it’s worth this much of my and our time. A reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle said, “Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time.” I think that’s right. I think she has put together the pieces of the complex story that has been behind most of the political coups and violence in the world for at least the past 35 years – at least the parts in which our country has been involved, overtly or covertly.

Here are some details that resulted from this master narrative in just the past few years, showing only one small part of it:

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law was unveiled that would allow Shell and British Petroleum to claim the country’s vast oil reserves. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly gave out tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of our tax dollars for running the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a powerful tsunami devastates the coasts of Southeast Asia, armed guards prevent residents from returning to their fishing huts on the beach, and the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans’s residents, still scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.

These are all small sophisticated parts of the methods that have been carefully crafted to serve the agenda of the fundamentalist capitalism I talked about last week.

Those goals of fundamentalist capitalism are:

– to undo all the gains of the New Deal that had empowered workers and the middle class.

– to take money from governments and workers, return it to the opulent minority and reduce the masses to disposable people, most of whom are sent permanently below the poverty line.

– to loot the world’s economies, making them serve American corporate interests.

These sound so over-the-top, so dramatic. At the very least, they are very ambitious plans. How could anyone possibly do it?

While the methods are easy to describe now, they didn’t fall out of the sky in a leatherbound book – though there are at least three key books at the heart of this plan.

But the methods evolved, picking up useful ideas as they came along, developing them behind the scenes.

One of the first ideas, which played a central role came from a set of psychological experiments done over fifty years ago.

They were done at McGill University in Montreal which our CIA began funding in 1957. They were run by a psychologist named Ewan Cameron – whom the director of psychology at McGill described as “criminally stupid” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 35). But stupid or not, Dr. Cameron helped change our world more powerfully than all of us here, all of our friends, and all of their friends combined are likely to do. As overstated as that might seem, I think it’s actually a very conservative estimate.

Dr. Cameron believed he could erase a person’s mind, turn it into a blank slate, and rewrite it any way he wanted, by using massive amounts of electroshock treatment, combined with keeping his patients in extreme isolation for weeks, and overloading their systems with drug cocktails of LSD, PCP and many others.

Dr. Cameron was half right. He could almost completely destroy a person’s mind. After these experiments were discovered in the late 1970s through a freedom of information act, a few of the severely damaged patients successfully sued the CIA, which settled for $750,000, the largest settlement ever paid out by the agency.

But at the time, several researchers at the CIA became interested in his methods as a special interrogation technique. They funded research at eighty institutions, including 44 universities and 12 hospitals. Their relationship with Dr. Cameron dates back to June 1, 1951. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 33)

By 1963, our CIA had incorporated Dr. Cameron’s electroshock, sensory deprivation, and drug and sensory overload techniques into a Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook (which they call Kubark), which claims it can take a resistant person and “destroy his capacity for resistance.” In other words, torture. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 39) The Kubark was the first of the three books undergirding what would become the revolution of capitalist fundamentalism.

A historian writing on the evolution of torture since the Inquisition describes the Kubark manual’s shock-inducing formula as “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 41) Here’s some more of how it works:

Prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatemala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the Philippines to Chile, China, Russia and Iraq, the use of electroshock is everywhere. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 41)

In February 2006, the Intelligence Sciences Board, an advisory arm of the CIA, published a report that said that “a careful reading of the Kubark manual is essential for anyone involved in interrogation” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 43). It’s hard to overstate the influence on our world today of this “criminally stupid” man of fifty years ago.

Before long, those in our CIA looking for more effective methods of terrorizing and controlling people realized these same techniques of psychological “shock and awe” could be used to terrorize and control entire populations. This would become an absolutely essential part of the Chicago School’s plan to erase existing laws and freedoms, and remake whole economies to loot trillions of dollars of government assets paid for by taxpayers, while systematically destroying the ability of the middle class to resist, or to recover.

Since 1973, the economic plans have followed Milton Friedman’s theories. He had three rules that must always be applied, which some have called the “free-market trinity.” They’re in code, so I’ll translate them.

1. The first involves wholesale looting. Selling off government assets bought by the citizens for a fraction of their worth to your favored buyers, who may be family, Communist party members, or US or multinational corporations who support you. (The code word for this is “privatization.”)

2. Second, remove all legal constraints, to make the looting fast and easy. (The code word for this is “deregulation.”)

3. Then third, loot all the funds used for social support of the citizens: schools, social security, roads, insurance, medical care, etc. This is a lot of money, and it disempowers those most likely to oppose you. It helps eliminate the middle class and make fear and insecurity systemic – and, hopefully, permanent. (The code words for this are “cuts to social spending.”)

These are the real-world meanings of the words “privatization,” “deregulation” and “cuts to social spending.”

As you can imagine, it will take a lot of power, and almost certainly a lot of violence, to do this, for the simple reason that people will not stand by and be robbed, disempowered and disposed of, if they are able to resist.

So one more important piece of the puzzle was still needed, and we found it in 1965. That was the year our CIA helped Suharto overthrow Sukarto in Indonesia. They had overthrown Mosadegh in Iran in 1953 and replaced him with the brutal Shah, and removed Guatemala’s leaders in 1954 at the direct request of the United Fruit Company. But those were child’s-play compared with the Suharto case. These events were so long ago, many of us may not even know the names, and others may not imagine how they could matter any more.

Sukarto’s sin, as was always the case, was that he would not bend to U.S. corporate interests. He had thrown out the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which he recognized as tools of U.S. corporate ambitions. So we, through our CIA, backed Suharto, who was attracted enough to the great personal wealth and power he’d been offered to sell out his whole country to the desires of U.S. corporate interests – which are usually called “American interests” or “U.S. interests,” in the code language used. Of course he brought the IMF and World Bank back. But he did something else that had not been expected, and which combined nicely with Dr. Cameron’s work to complete the method by which we could and did loot and destroy the economies and societies of a dozen more countries over the next forty years, to this day.

What he did was to unleash such extreme and immediate violence, torture and murder that he effectively destroyed the rebellious workers and middle class. Suharto’s incredible violence got the attention of those in the CIA who were plotting the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. They noted Suharto’s effective brutality, and the role of a group of Berkeley economists in redefining the country’s economy (The Shock Doctrine, p. 68)

The Berkeley Economists passed laws letting foreign companies own 100% of Indonesian resources, handed out “tax holidays,” and within two years, Indonesia’s natural wealth – copper, nickel, hardwood, rubber and oil – was being divided up among the largest mining and energy companies in the world (The Shock Doctrine, p. 69).

Suharto had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock, and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto and his henchmen. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations manager during the years of the coup, said Indonesia was a “model operation”. You can trace back all major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that meant that it would be repeated, again and again” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 69). This is part of the master narrative of our time.

Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School of Economics had been educating economics students from Chile since 1956, hoping that a merely intellectual revolution could change their thinking inside Chile, and had even replaced most of Chile’s top economic advisors with Chicago trained economists. But Chile had found this “third way” of structuring an economy that empowered the government – which nationalized major industries and assets – and the workers, who had powerful unions and healthy middle-class pay, while eliminating the powerful American corporations. They were doing almost as well as American workers under Roosevelt’s New Deal – the structure that Friedman and the Chicago School wanted to destroy wherever they found it, and which the CIA, serving the interests of our corporations, also wanted to destroy.

Suharto’s success gave them the vision of a rich opportunity. If they could find a powerful leader in Chile who would gladly sell out his country in return for great personal wealth and power, coach him in following Suharto’s massive terrorism and brutality, then bring in Chicago School economists while the entire country was paralyzed by shock and awe, they could return Chile to a blank slate, then remake the economy of Chile in the image of Milton Friedman’s utopian vision of a world in which all wealth and power were back in the hands of the opulent minority. It’s not clear whether Friedman saw, or cared about, the immense human cost of his utopian scheme, or whether he actually believed the things he said. But it is clear that when Friedman used the word “freedom,” he meant only the freedom of wealthy corporations to loot the economy without restraint, not the freedom of the masses or the governments to stop them.

Chile offered the golden opportunity for both our CIA and Friedman’s economic theories. This first great coup, this first dramatic step toward what would later be called The New World Order, happened on September 11, 1973, and once again our CIA was behind the coup. Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvadore Allende, was talking about nationalizing the oil fields and removing foreign oil corporations. We were not about to permit that. The CIA backed an extraordinarily violent man named General Augusto Pinochet.

General Pinochet fired rockets into the presidential palace, killing Allende. He quickly instituted torture, mass killings and arrests to throw the rest of Chile into terror and remove his ideological opposition, as Suharto had done in Indonesia. Chile had had 161 years of democratic rule, the past 41 uninterrupted. It all ended almost immediately through the violence and terror – the “shock and awe” – of Pinochet (The Shock Doctrine, p. 76-77).

Very soon a 500-page book detailing the economic restructurings of the entire country appeared. It was the second important book, which because of its size was known as “The Brick.” The proposals in it bore a striking resemblance to those found in the third sacred text – the most sacred text – of fundamentalist capitalism: Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, containing the free-market trinity of those chilling code words: privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 77).

In the coming years, the same policies laid out in “The Brick” would be imposed in dozens of other countries under cover of a wide range of crises. But Chile was the start of it, on September 11, 1973 (The Shock Doctrine, p. 78).

Even three decades later, Chile is still held up by some as proof that Friedmanism works. But the country’s period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties – a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction – because in 1982, Chile’s economy crashed (The Shock Doctrine, p. 85).

The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet never sold off Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile’s export revenues, and kept it afloat (The Shock Doctrine, p. 85).

What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the workers. By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world – out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116th, making it the 8th most unequal country on the list (The Shock Doctrine, p. 86).

Chile under the Chicago School rule was offering a glimpse of the future of the global economy, a pattern that would repeat again and again, from Russia to South Africa to Argentina: – roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; decimation of nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to selected private hands, followed by a huge transfer of private debts to be paid by taxpayers (The Shock Doctrine, p. 87).

Following their great success in Chile, our CIA and Friedman’s Chicago economists repeated their success in Brazil and Uruguay. Friedman traveled to Brazil in 1973, at the height of the regime’s brutality, and declared the economic experiment “a miracle.” Next was Argentina in 1976, when a junta seized power from Isabel Peron. That meant that all four countries that had once been the showcases of the Third Way were now run by US-backed military governments and were living laboratories of Chicago School economics (The Shock Doctrine, p. 87). It was an incredible coup that had been over twenty years in the making. No matter what I think of the gods being served here, I absolutely marvel at the brilliance and forethought of those behind the plans. If the world, like the world of professional wrestling, can be divided into the Smarts and the Marks, these are the Smarts, and I am among the Marks.

By the mid-seventies, “disappearances” of people had become the primary enforcement tool of the Chicago School juntas throughout the Southern Cone. An estimated thirty thousand people had been “disappeared” in Argentina alone (The Shock Doctrine, p. 90). “Disappeared,” you understand, is another code word. It means kidnap, torture and murder.

The torture followed the trademark methods codified in the Kubark manual: early morning arrests, hooding, isolation, drugging, forced nudity, electroshock. And everywhere, the terrible legacy of the McGill experiments in deliberately induced regression (The Shock Doctrine, p. 92).

The exact number of people who went through the Southern Cone’s torture machinery is probably somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000, tens of thousands of them killed (The Shock Doctrine, p. 94).

As Naomi Klein puts it, “Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves (The Shock Doctrine, p. 327).”

And the media have mis-reported these coups for decades, focusing on all the sensational torture, murder, violence, and human rights abuses. At the same time, they have commended the countries in opening their doors to American corporations, and making what they like to call the transition to democracy or free trade. The word “democracy” here does not mean the people have freedom. It means the corporations have freedom and the people don’t. The media and most human rights groups wrote the killings up as regrettable, unnecessary violence, as though they weren’t serving other goals. But they are organic parts of the Chicago School plan, which has never worked without great violence and murder. Naomi Klein put it very clearly, this way:

“In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone of Latin America in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery (The Shock Doctrine, p. 125).” It is the crime which in this country we call homicide in the commission of a felony. In Texas, it’s a capital crime: you can get the death penalty for it.

I think this is one of Klein’s clearest insights into the master narrative of our times: that it was always about money, and the violence always served the greed – from Iran, Guatemala and Indonesia to the Southern Cone, Bolivia, China, Africa, Russia, Asia, England and Iraq. Does anyone really believe it will be stopped at the borders of our own country for long?

Much of this has to sound familiar. You’ve heard parts of it in hundreds of major news stories over the past 35 years. But there are two more stages in the evolution of the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth, which I’ll talk about in two weeks, and in April.

We are talking about what St. Paul called the “powers and principalities” that govern our world, the gods they serve, which are the gods we too have been taught to serve. If you buy the premise that people with immense wealth and power should be allowed to take whatever their superior forces grant them, then the human costs may seem insignificant, as they seemed to Friedman and his economists. But if the human costs of unrestrained greed – what are now many tens of millions of deaths and well over a billion humans thrown into permanent poverty – if those costs are insignificant, what have we become? What gods do we serve, and are they really giving us a life and a nation of which we can be proud?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 2 March 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

It matters so much what we choose to worship. Let us not serve gods that are not worth serving. Let us not kiss the hand that hits us, not forgive those who systematically abuse us, or worship gods who do not love us.

We are surprisingly religious people, whether we know it or not. Our biggest religious problem is often the fact that we serve not wisely but too well. We often do what those around us do. We share their assumptions about life, about what’s worth spending our money on, what’s worth sacrificing for, about what sacrifices will lead us toward that heaven on earth known as The Good Life.

Most of the gods we serve with our lives are second-hand gods, hand-me-downs from other people. We get them from our family and friends, those we envy or admire. And we often serve them almost without question.

We must serve something with our lives. We must serve something that transcends and trumps the day-to-day ordinariness. We will serve gods, whether we recognize them or not.

Let us try to recognize the gods we are serving. Let us ask whether they are really worth serving, whether they give us life, or just drain it away from us.

Let us never worship gods that do not love us. Let us strive to serve only gods that are worth serving. For it matters so much, what we choose to worship.

Amen.

SERMON: The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part 1

It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything that seemed to make so many clear patterns and connections as Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

It is the story of how a fundamentalist and brutal form of capitalism has been seeking since WWII to undo all the advances of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, to transfer immense wealth and power to the largest corporations, the wealthiest people, and the politicians, governments and armies they control.

Mostly, I want to look at this story as a theologian rather than a historian. Religion is always about the gods we’re serving, and honest religion must always ask whether they are worth serving, or whether they are being used again by the few to enslave the many, as gods generally are; throughout history, most of our gods have been for sale to the highest bidder.

For better and worse, our religion is usually just concerned with our personal questions and issues, not what St. Paul called the “powers and principalities” that run our larger world. But those “powers and principalities” in the background always define some of the rules for the lives we live in the foreground. And the gods being served behind the scenes created by the powers and principalities make the difference between our world today and fifty years ago.

After WWII, this was a country in which the laws and economic priorities favored and empowered the middle class – the class that Aristotle said 2400 years ago had to be the empowered class for a democracy to work. Putting it theologically, the gods being served by the New Deal empowered the middle class’s economic possibilities, and controlled the greed of the wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations through taxes, unions, and government regulations.

Most middle-class women didn’t work outside the home then, but the man’s one paycheck was enough. The father of one of my boyhood friends drove a milk truck and delivered bottles of milk to the doorsteps of homes. You wouldn’t think he made much money, and he probably didn’t. But it was enough to buy a new house in a nice middle-class neighborhood, a car, and send two boys through college. It gave his family very good health insurance, gave him lifelong job security, and a retirement that let him and his wife spend their final years living in the style to which they had become accustomed since their early 20s. That’s a fair picture of the America I grew up in, where you could say the “powers and principalities” served the gods of the Old Testament prophets, the ones who cared for the poor and vulnerable.

Today, different gods are being served, and that has changed our world, as it was intended to. Both partners work in most families, but their combined income buys less than the one paycheck did forty to fifty years ago. Today our country has the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, is the only industrialized country that doesn’t provide health insurance, has the lowest standard of living for its old people, and the most obscene discrepancy in income between the richest and the rest – CEO’s average more than four hundred times the pay of their workers, a tenfold increase in just the past thirty years. Public education is underfunded and underwhelming, and tax cuts for the rich are taken as always from public services to the rest. All of this is a result of the gods we are serving.

In my sermon on “Living under Fascism” 3-1/2 years ago, I linked together plutocracy, imperialism and fascism as necessary allies. I hadn’t thought to include violence, torture, illegal invasions and mass murder, but Naomi Klein shows that all these are among the means by which money and power must be taken from the masses, who will not give them up willingly.

Today, I’ll focus not on those means, but on what she calls fundamentalist capitalism. It goes by an amazing list of other names in the media. Here are a few of the synonyms I’ve found for it in the reading I’ve done – you’ve probably heard others, too:

“barbarian capitalism” (p. 452)

“savage capitalism” (French, pp. 448-450)

Reaganomics

Thatcherite

Chicago School Economics

The “Greed is good” school

Frontier capitalism

Gangster capitalism

Crony capitalism

Free-market capitalism

Laissez-faire capitalism

Disaster capitalism

Economic shock therapy (Friedman)

Hollow government, shrunk to a size that can be drowned in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist put it. Shrinking the government means removing all possible services that educate, empower and protect the lower and middle classes.

Plutocracy

Neoliberalism

Neoconservatism

Globalization

An entrepreneur’s utopia that exalts profits over people, owners over workers, and corporations over governments

Economic fascism

What all these have in common is the same guiding economic theory and the same guiding figure: Milton Friedman.

The larger history, though, is very old. For all of history, there has been a battle between power for the few and power for the many. Since money buys a lot more power than poverty does, power mostly serves those with money, rather than those without it.

The battle certainly goes back to the founding of our own country.

Alexander Hamilton declared that the people are “a great beast” that must be tamed (Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People, p. 46).

John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme court, said, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” (Chomsky, 46) The primary responsibility of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” said James Madison, (Chomsky, 47) adding that those “without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights.” 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)

Madison soon learned differently, as the “opulent minority” began living by the motto “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” By 1792, Madison warned that the rising developing capitalist state was “substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty,” leading to “a real domination by the few under [a merely] apparent liberty of the many.” (Chomsky, 52)

Thomas Jefferson also distrusted the emerging class of capitalists: “The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain,” he wrote. (Jim Hightower, If the Gods Had Meant for Us To Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates, p. 283). Sounds surprisingly modern, doesn’t it? Today, we have unleashed that selfish spirit on nearly the whole world, under the name “Globalization,” and all the other more colorful names by which it is known.

But this battle between the rich and the rest has gone on forever. The last great victory for the middle class in our country came with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In a 1932 speech, Roosevelt addressed the problems of the depression by telling the American people that, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

The New Deal Roosevelt had promised began to take shape immediately after his inauguration in March 1933. Based on the assumption that the power of the federal government was needed to get the country out of the depression, the first days of Roosevelt’s administration saw the passage of banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, and agricultural programs. Later, a second New Deal was to evolve; it included union protection programs, the Social Security Act, and programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. What was “new” about the New Deal was that it served the masses rather than the masters – so the masters hated it.

In the short term, New Deal programs helped improve the lives of people suffering from the events of the depression. In the long run, New Deal programs set a precedent for the federal government to play a key role in the economic and social affairs of the nation, to rescue it from the unrestrained greed of America’s Robber Barons and Gilded Age, whose excesses had led the country into the Great Depression.

The reforms of the New Deal enabled my friend’s father to support his family on the pay of a milkman, and enabled a whole generation of the American middle class to become educated, financially stable and empowered as full citizens of our country, for the first time in two or three generations. The powers and principalities were forced to serve new gods and many of them hated it. They said that Roosevelt had betrayed his class by letting the poor come up for air, and they began planning how to get all the money and power back in the hands of that opulent minority, that “better class of men.” Madison had imagined.

In the 1950s, it was very hard to talk openly in polite society about returning to the era of unrestrained greed. But behind the scenes, a lot was going on. And at the time, it didn’t focus so much on our country – which was under the control of that rascal Roosevelt and his New Deal – as on the rest of the world, especially South America. After WWII, our country sought global economic dominance, in what we saw as a life-or-death struggle against Communism. Communism, in economic terms, is known as a liberal or far-left economy, since the government owns the most lucrative assets rather than wealthy corporations or individuals. American capitalism took the second path.

But in the four countries at the tip of South America, known as the Southern Cone, a third way had been found, which worked better and empowered governments and the people, though not wealthy industrialists and bankers. Chile, for example, had been a democracy for about a century and a half, and it began to look like Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and parts of Brazil might have a better economic plan than either the Soviet Union or the United States.

The workers in their factories formed powerful unions that negotiated middle-class salaries, and their children were sent off to study at newly built public universities. The gap between rich and poor began to narrow. By the 1950s, Argentina had the largest middle class on the continent, and Uruguay had a literacy rate of 95% and offered free health care for all citizens (The Shock Doctrine, p. 55).

If other countries followed this model, then this Third Way between the government control of Communism and the unregulated greed of laissez-faire capitalism could become the path of the future. This would disempower the very corporations and bankers who had earlier controlled our own government, and who wanted to regain that control. Worldwide, trillions of dollars were at stake. Solving the problem of those four South American countries was, in some ways, the most important problem in the world, even though most of us weren’t even aware of it.

The capitalists needed a long-range plan to change the economic thinking of people in these South American countries. They needed to make them stop thinking that an economy that empowered the government and the people – but not the corporations or the very wealthy – was good. They needed them to think that a good economy was one that empowered only the wealthy and the corporations, and they were willing to spend a lot of money to do this. Ideally, they would have them trained at the University of Chicago School of Economics, the most right-wing corporatist school of economics in the world. And that’s what they did.

Officially launched in 1956, the project saw one hundred students from Chile pursue advanced degrees at the University of Chicago School of Economics between 1957 and 1970, their tuition and expenses paid for by US taxpayers and US foundations. In 1965, the program was expanded to include students from across Latin America, with particularly heavy participation from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The expansion was funded through a grant from the Ford Foundation and led to the creation of the Center for Latin American Economic Studies at the University of Chicago. Under the program, there were forty to fifty Latin Americans studying graduate-level economics at any given time – roughly one-third of the department’s total student population. In comparable programs at Harvard or MIT, there were just four or five Latin Americans. In just a decade, the ultra-conservative University of Chicago had become the premier destination for Latin Americans wanting to study economics abroad, a fact that would shape the course of the region’s history for decades to come (The Shock Doctrine, p. 61). It was an absolutely brilliant plan.

Think of this activity as that of religious zealots paying missionaries to go to foreign countries and convert the natives, but with trillions of dollars at stake. This religious analogy isn’t far-fetched. Milton Friedman, the High Priest of this fundamentalist capitalism, had described himself as “an old-fashioned preacher delivering a Sunday sermon.” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 6) His evangelical mission, and the mission of the Chicago School of Economics, was about converting the natives of South America, to undo all the gains of the New Deal in our country, and to re-establish an economy that gave money and power back to the corporations and the very wealthy, so that those who owned the world could run it. Today, many believe their victory is nearly complete.

Like all fundamentalism, like all certainty, there was a blindness to this that was stunning.

In the 1990s, for example, Friedman looked back on Pinochet’s entire reign in Chile, which we’ll talk about next week – seventeen years of dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured – and saw it not as a violent unmaking of democracy but its opposite. “The really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society,” Friedman said (The Shock Doctrine, p. 117-118). But no, Pinochet’s brutality closed the free society after a history of 161 years of democracy, the last 41 years continuously. He systematically tortured, murdered or intimidated those who disagreed, and it made Pinochet and his family very wealthy at the expense of the overwhelming majority of Chileans. This was a pattern we would see over and over again.

Even in 1991, Lawrence Summers, the chief economist of the World Bank, was quoted saying “spread the truth – the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 218).

That kind of dogmatic certainty can’t be used until you’ve answered some very basic pre-economic questions, like:

– Who counts more: owners or workers, those who own stocks or those who don’t?

– How do you measure whether an economy is healthy? By the poverty rate, the number of uninsured citizens, literacy rates, infant mortality, the prospects for middle-class advancement and security, whether milk men could support their families – or by the net worth of the top 5%? If a few become very wealthy while the vast majority become destitute and powerless, is that progress or regress? If you go to Sao Paolo, Brazil and see some rich gleaming skyscrapers and hundreds of mansions, surrounded by millions of poor people in drug- and crime-infested ghettos, is the economy a success, or a failure? What if you make the same observation in our own country?

Lawrence Summers could be dogmatic because, like others who bought the Chicago School’s evangelical message, he had answered those questions in favor of the corporations and the very wealthy, and against the interests of 90-95% of the world. But those answers to the questions of who is to be empowered and what makes a healthy economy are more important than everything that follows, because they reveal what gods are being served by the economy.

It’s an amazing blindness, virtually identical to that found in the history of religions.

During the Crusades, the Catholic Church saw only taking land and assets from Muslim powers, not the systematic torture and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of God’s children.

During the Inquisition, the same church was completely oblivious to the brutality of the torture they routinely inflicted on thousands, or the many they murdered in the name of keeping their faith pure by exterminating those who did not share it.

Every major religion has these dark sides to their dogmatic certainty, as fundamentalist capitalism also does. And in the past 35 years, this form of capitalism shaped by Milton Friedman has fundamentally changed our country and our world.

You see how easy it is to become self-righteous, to shake our moral fingers at the Church, or at those with great money and power, identifying them as spawn of the devil from our perch of (mostly impotent) moral purity. I don’t want us to do that.

While we are not in those very high circles of money or power, we can identify with this thinking that our sort of inequality should be favored:

– If we have more education than others, or from more prestigious schools, we think it should make a difference, don’t we?

– We think that superstar athletes and entertainers deserve much more money than the vast majority of others, don’t we?

– If we think we’re good-looking, then we think looks should matter, don’t we? Whereas if we’re smarter than we are beautiful, we may think beauty is only skin-deep, and terribly over-rated when compared to intelligence.

Almost without exception, when the rights and privileges of inequality favor us, we favor them. So it shouldn’t surprise us if those who are good at collecting money and power are doing the same thing – favoring the inequality that favors them, and wanting restrictions on it removed. Wouldn’t most of us do the same? After all, it is very easy to rationalize! A few new cars and a mansion should do the trick.

We serve many different gods, and the gods we serve determine almost everything else about our lives and our world. If we are challenged, we’ll usually insist that our gods are our own business. But are they really? Do we really have no responsibility to others in choosing what gods we will serve? Should a society have no say in the gods, the ideals, served by its powers and principalities? These are not just political or social questions; they are also religious questions, theological questions.

Next week, I’ll continue this by going through the results of this powerful economic theory, what it has done to our world in the past four decades, and the methods necessary to achieve this revolution. The short answer is that nearly all the violence, all the torture, all the coups, all the human rights violations since the early 1970s have been driven by this fundamentalist capitalism, which Naomi Klein argues has never made the world better anywhere, but has caused almost immeasurable harm, as it continues to do to this day. Again, these are religious questions about the gods being served by the powers and principalities that govern our world. They affect us all. You may hear people talk about the difference between living and dead gods, especially when people say the gods of Western religion are dying, judged by the decline in church attendance and so on. Well, these gods of fundamentalist capitalism are living gods, wreaking their havoc in your world and in your life, in your credit card debt, in your diminished purchasing power and retirement hopes, and job security. Do you like them? Do you think they’re worth serving?

How do you fire gods? Here we are left in an awkward picture with our gods dangling.

Think about these things, will you? Think about the gods you’re serving: the gods, the values, running your life and your country. Think about whether they are worth serving, whether they are giving you life or draining it from you. And then think of that other odd question: how do you fire bad gods?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 24 February 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: The Boy Who Loved Hamsters

Once there was a boy who loved hamsters. He badgered and badgered his parents until they finally did two things, one good and one not too smart. They bought him a hamster cage, food, and a hamster. That was good. But they bought him two hamsters. This wasn’t smart, because two hamsters don’t stay just two for very long. Hamsters are very friendly animals. And before long, he no longer had two hamsters, he had twenty.

But this boy loved hamsters, so he saw it as a good thing. He went to his parents protesting that the cage was too small, so they needed to buy him a much bigger cage. They did, and the hamsters kept doing what hamsters do. Before long, he didn’t have twenty hamsters, he had three hundred! They started buying food in ten-pound bags.

Still, the boy loved hamsters, so this was fine. But they had overgrown their cage, were running all over the house, hiding under and in the beds, crawling out from under pillows just as you were falling asleep.

“We need bigger cages, and many more of them,” he pleaded to his parents. “And a special place in the back yard where we can keep all the cages.” The parents yielded, and soon there was a kind of tenement rising in the backyard, with cages organized into blocks with little streets between them. The boy and a couple friends pushed a wheelbarrow down between the cages, throwing food into the rapidly increasing hamster population. There were way too many to play with now. It was all they could do to feed them. They began buying food in hundred-pound bags.

Before long, there weren’t three hundred hamsters, but about fifty thousand of them! They escaped from the cages, from the yard, and were running all over town, getting into everyone’s house, hiding under everyone’s bed and under everyone’s pillows. The town people didn’t like this.

A town meeting was called, but the boy was ready for them. “I really love hamsters,” he said, “but I understand you don’t want them running loose through your town. So the solution is to build a large boat, with several floors, and float it out in the Lake for these lovely, fluffy little hamsters. Then I can take a rowboat out each day to give them food.”

Somehow, he was persuasive, and the town actually built a huge boat. Before long there were millions of hamsters on the big boat. But now nobody could count them. They were breeding so fast they were getting crowded, and the more crowded they got, the meaner they got, so that it was no longer safe to get onto the boat to play with them – not that anybody could really play with millions of hamsters anyway!

Each day, the boy who loved hamsters rowed out to the big ship in his rowboat filled with hamster food, which they were now buying by the ton, and shoveled food over the sides of the ship before rowing back to shore. Still, he loved hamsters, and loved the idea of knowing there were so many of them out there, even if he had no contact with them any more.

While no one could count the hamsters any more, everyone in town could get a sense of their growing numbers just by watching the big boat sink lower and lower into the water every day. There were millions and millions of them onboard now.

Finally, the big boat sank into the Lake, taking all the hamsters with it. The boy who loved hamsters was very sad, and he called another town meeting.

“The problem,” he said, “was that the boat wasn’t big enough. We need to build a bigger boat – and more boats. And we should buy our own company to make hamster food, it will be cheaper. I’ve done some research, and if we fire about five hundred public school teachers and double the class size in public schools, and stop repairing the roads quite so often, we can afford to do it. And we must do it, because I really love hamsters. And after all, hamsters are God’s children, too.”

If you were on the city council, what would you say to the boy who loved hamsters?

PRAYER:

It’s so much harder to love humans than to love pets. Pets are easy: cages, food, a little contact when we’re around, and if they have any internal needs, they seem to take care of them. It’s like love with training wheels.

But to love humans – that can be so much harder! Food and safety are just the start. Then there’s cherishing them, having the emotional and psychological energy to care for their spirits; then education, day-to-day caring, character formation, years of working to help empower them, make them feel cherished, like children of God, the sons and daughters of the universe, Life’s longing for itself. The caring seems to go all the way down to where and how they live, these people we love. We challenge them, and forgive them; empower them to find their own voice, then learn to respect them when their empowered opinions differ from our own.

All of our lives seem like do-it-yourself kits that need the active help of others to be assembled well – others like family, friends, communities and society. The web is woven wide and fine, and we lose our connection with it at our peril.

There is a limit to the number of pets for which we can care well, and an even more important limit to the number of people for whom we can care well. There is the rub. Love doesn’t just magically spill over and grow to cover all the emotional demands placed on us. We must first be nourished and cared for, or we’ll have little to offer to others. It is so much harder than just loving pets. Let us learn to love, and learn to know the limits of our ability to love: to care for ourselves while caring for others. For we are all tied together, and if we cannot hold ourselves up, we cannot hold others up, either.

Jesus once said we should love others as we love ourselves, so being able to love ourselves comes first. Let us not assume that loving others is as simple as just feeling loving feelings about them. Let us try to remember that love begins at home – then, as we become filled, it can grow outward toward others. But first we learn to love ourselves as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. Let us remember that must come first.

SERMON: A Theological Argument for Abortion

I’m going to do something I’ve not really done here before: I’m going to give you a theological argument, supporting both birth control and abortion. I’m doing this because as a theologian, I believe that the issues of birth control and abortion are, at their most fundamental levels, not issues of individual rights, but theological issues, and that support for either side must ultimately be presented in the form of a defensible theological argument.

If the option of pro-choice is to be a religious position, eventually, it will have to be argued that there are times and cases when God demands an abortion. Not simply permits, not closes His or Her eyes to, but demands it.

The fundamental position of both the Roman Catholic church and the pro-life movement in general is that the most important of all considerations is the brute fact of a single individual human life. Every single human life, simply by virtue of being a human life, is considered to be sacred at every stage of development, even at conception. And more sacred than any other consideration. It is the quantity of life that is being defended, and not quality of life. This is consistent, historically, throughout most of the Catholic Church’s positions, and throughout most consistent pro-life arguments, as well.

This is how and why a Pope can stand in any large and desolate metropolitan city, looking in the faces of thousands and millions of women and children who are born to beg, born to sell their bodies and their souls in order to stay alive, born to die of starvation and disease-this is how he can look at those people, and tell them that it is a sin to practice birth control. Because the Bible and God command that we “choose life”, and the word “life” means individual human lives, every single one we can produce.

So birth control is seen as a sin against God, and cannot be permitted.

Likewise with abortion. As the Christian writer Tertullian said eighteen centuries ago in his brilliant and terse formula, “That is a person which will be a person: you have the fruit already in the seed.” And if it is to become a person, then from the start, that individual life is the sole focus of God’s concern, and either to actively stop conception from taking place, as birth control does, or to actively terminate the development of that zygote and fetus into another human being, as abortion does, is seen as a sin, a horrible crime, and must be stopped at all costs. As a theologian might put it, “God demands it.”

This is why those who think of themselves as pro-life have such zeal and such fervor and such a deep commitment to stopping what they see as a murderous crime against not only the individual conceptions, fetuses and children, but against God Himself. But now let’s look more closely at this.

If one human life is good, then two are better, and a million are better yet, and the six billion we have on the earth now are miracles of life to be welcomed and encouraged. But why stop with only six billion? Why not six trillion? The question is not when to stop population growth, but how it can ever be stopped.

How can the Roman Catholic church or pro-life people ever be in favor of birth control or abortion? No matter when it happens, the argument against it will be the same. People committed to the pro-life position will be called on to explain by what authority the new individual human lives are to be denied existence or terminated in their development. If an individual life, in and of itself, is always good, no matter how many children the mother has had by what age, no matter how many are crowded into a single woman’s life, a family’s life, or the squalor of inner-city ghettos, then how could anyone committed to “pro-life” ever argue for birth control or abortion?

Even if there were six trillion people, it would still be terminating the development of an individual human life, still be opposing our own will and our own values to God’s-assuming, of course, that these people have this God-business right in the first place.

Now many people would just say to leave God out of it, that this God is only a projection used by churches and politicians to control people. And it is certainly true that what passes for “God” is often little more than the hand puppet of charismatic preachers and politicians. But the issue of religious responses to life has to include a theological statement in God-language, because that’s how most people think.

This is such a complex topic, there are a lot of dimensions to it I can’t even consider today:

* I can’t talk, for instance, about our government’s support of anti-abortion and anti-birth-control policies that will guarantee that third world countries will never threaten us economically or militarily, and will instead become breeding tanks for desperate, cheap, illiterate labor.

* I can’t talk about the semi-alternative of adoption, and the fact that this becomes a strongly racial issue immediately as, in this country, it may be true that healthy white middle class babies are wanted for adoption, but not many Black babies, and not many babies from mothers addicted to Crack cocaine. Or the fact that pushing powerless women to carry a baby to term, then give it up for adoption is very close to turning poor women into breeding stock for more affluent people – and that’s an immoral proposition.

* And I can’t talk about the patriarchal agendas that lie behind both the conservative pro-lifers and the male-dominated Roman Catholic Church, where women have not, in twenty centuries, been able to become full people in their own right, and where forced breeding laws help keep them suppressed.

* Or the fact that while conservative churches talk as though abortion were murder, no church recognizes either an abortion or a miscarriage as the death of a human being that deserves a funeral or ritual blessings – as many heartbroken Catholic parents have learned in the most painful way. As far as I know, no religion in history has. So no matter what churches may say, the behavior of the churches looks like their abortion stance isn’t pro-life at all, but is primarily intended to keep women in their place as homemakers and breeders, controlled by the kind of men who have turned God into their hand puppet. It’s an offense to all honest religion.

You can think of many other important areas on this subject, any one of which could give rise to a dozen books and a hundred sermons, a bunch of parades and more than a few violent and bloody fights. But I will return to just the theological argument that sometimes God demands both birth control and abortions.

My model for this argument comes from the Roman Catholic Church, from a papal encyclical called Rerum Novarum, written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. It has been updated by the church three times, in 1931, 1961, and 1991, to modernize the language and polish a few of the concepts.

As students of religion, political science, or labor movements will know, I have not picked an obscure papal encyclical. This is perhaps the most important thirty pages in the entire history of Christianity on the subject of religion’s relationship to laws that affect humans. This little document did more to change the social structures of the western world than the entire so-called “Social Gospel Movement” of which Protestant churches are so proud. It enabled changes in attitude that were absolutely fundamental, in getting both churches and governments to change child labor laws and help establish workers’ unions all over the world. And it did it because it was, at bottom, a theological argument of the first order, an argument about what human life is, and what it demands, or what God demands.

For nineteen centuries, the Roman Catholic Church had not cared about the fact that people at the bottom of the economic ladder have always been paid just enough to keep them alive. In fact, over and over again, the same passage from the Bible had been used to justify this state of affairs. It was the passage from Genesis, after Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam “by the sweat of your brow you shall live.” And so, the Church would repeat, life is hard, but that’s the way God planned it.

What Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 was to use the same Bible passage to justify the opposite position, and to lay the foundation for workers’ unions which the Church would support through its offices. Leo did it simply by emphasizing a different word in the sentence. “By the sweat of your brow,” he said, “you shall live!” And what, he asked, does it mean, “to live”? Does it mean merely to exist, to subsist at starvation level? Does it mean to live like lower animals do, or maybe like rats or cockroaches do? Are we promised, by this God of the Bible, only the absolute lowest possible quality of life? Is the mere quantity of life, the mere fact that we breathe all that religion offers? Is it, to keep it in the language of theism, all that God demands, the absolute minimum quality of life? Is it only about how many are alive, rather than how they are living? Is it like the story of the boy who loved hamsters – but without even bothering to feed them or give them a safe place to live?

No, said Pope Leo, it is not life like a lower animal which this God of the Bible demands for us. It is the life of a human being. And not the absolute minimal life of a human being, either. Pope Leo’s God demanded that our labors enable us to live fully, to realize the full potential of human beings. That means time for education, time for leisure, time for relaxation with friends and family, time not only to bear life like a burden, but as well to enjoy it, to live it, like free and empowered human beings.

Leo contrasted humans with lower animals, which he called “brutes.” Now hear this remarkable Pope’s words as he describes the “brute”:

The brute has no power of self-direction, but is governed by two chief instincts”. These instincts are self-preservation and the propagation of the species”. But with [humans] it is different indeed”. It is the mind, or the reason, which is the chief thing in us who are human beings; it is this which makes human beings human, and distinguishes them essentially and completely from the brute. (“Rerum Novarum,” in Seven Great Encyclicals, New York: Paulist Press, 1963, p. 3)

And what is the role of the Church in all of this? “Its desire is that the poor, for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives,” wrote this Pope. (p. 14) And if conditions existed which robbed humans of the possibility of living like humans rather than brutes, if people found themselves in

“conditions that were repugnant to their dignity as human beings” if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age-in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”

And why? Why must the Church and the law do these things? Because God demands it! Demands it, because humans must be given living conditions which allow them to develop fully to the limits of their potential as educated, intelligent, creative, and joyful people. It is for that they were created, and conditions which make that impossible are not merely wrong, they are evil.

Each creature must be allowed to live to the fullest extent possible for that kind of creature, and you can get a dependable idea of what is possible for it by looking at what it has done under ideal conditions. And when you have understood the fullest potential of a species, you have understood what, in theological terms, is God’s will for it. Then, when conditions within our control keep a person from ever growing into their full potential, then the Church, and all people with religious sensitivities, must try to remove those conditions. And why? Because God demands it. I have mixed ordinary language and theological language here, but I will trust that you can understand what I’m saying.

This essay, written 117 years ago, changed the position of the Church, a position which it had held and enforced for nineteen centuries. Even traditions which have existed since the beginning of the religion can be changed, as our understanding of the fullest potential of life is expanded. In other words, the fact that things have always been done a certain way is not necessarily an argument for continuing to do them that way. And now we can bring this full circle.

Times have changed. The population of the world has increased almost exponentially since 1891, even moreso since the era when the Bible was written. The deadly effect of overpopulation and under-education on the possibility of living like human beings has never existed the way it does today. The pressures on single mothers and working families without the support of large extended families or social support has never been this consistently brutal. Neither the religious scriptures of the West nor established theological traditions have yet had to address this changed situation.

But now they do. And both the fact and the threat of more births and of more human beings is now among the chief conditions that make it impossible for many, many people – both mothers and children – ever to have the chance of living like empowered, cherished human beings. They will be driven instead, as Pope Leo said of the “brutes”, by only two instincts: self-preservation, and more breeding.

Would you like to see what it looks like when human beings live only like animals, driven only by self-preservation and propagation of the species? Go to Mexico City. Or Chicago. Or Detroit. Or New York City. Go to the ghettos, the slums, the shantytowns of the world, and you will see the evil conditions, and the results of those evil conditions.

Do you want to see it up close, one-on-one? Look at teen-aged girls pregnant with their second or third child, trapped in a system from which most will never escape. Nor are there are many kinds of employment open to many of these women. With grade-school educations, what are they to do? They can be prostitutes and their boyfriends can be pimps, drug pushers and drug takers, or exploited laborers living at the edge of starvation and kept there by a system which can demand from them what it chooses and give them no more than it must.

The Church’s desire, wrote Pope Leo, “is that the poor – should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives.” And further, if conditions arise “that [are] repugnant to their dignity as human beings” if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age-in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”

By the very reasoning which the Roman Catholic Church itself has used in its most famous and powerful document for social change, the grotesque overpopulation in many parts of the world is an evil which must be opposed because it is anti-life and unholy. It is destroying even the possibility that these people will ever rise above the level of the “brutes” and become human beings.

And this applies first to the people we already have, not those who aren’t yet born. If we can’t cherish and empower the most fragile people we have – and so often that means teen-aged girls and single mothers – then we have no more right than the boy who said he loved hamsters to bring any more lives into a world we have failed or refused to make safe and humane for them.

It is perhaps the first time in history that those who want to defend their position as religious must begin to recognize that both birth control and abortion are not the enemies of religion, but are instead friends. Birth control is not just an economic necessity today, but a religious one, as well. God demands it, because people cannot live like human beings in the squalor of the slums and shantytowns in which they will forever be defined, like brutes, by the basic animal instincts of self-preservation and breeding – and, of course, economic exploitation.

The world doesn’t need more people; it’s already badly overcrowded. We have doubled the population of the world in less than forty years, which is close to breeding like hamsters. But breeding isn’t a high calling. Anything can breed. The higher calling is asking whether we can be proper stewards of the life we would bring forth. If we can’t, it is wrong to let our higher calling be smothered by the fertile productions of the much lower calling of merely breeding. We are meant for more than that, and are urged – commanded – not to settle for less.

That boy did not love hamsters. He only loved the idea of hamsters, and the idea of owning hamsters. He didn’t love real hamsters, because you don’t put creatures you love into miserable, crowded, filthy ghettos that keep them your captives until they die. That’s selfish abuse, not grown-up love. Love demands that we stop bringing forth so much life that we can’t cherish and empower our offspring. This is true both for woman and for societies, and needs to shape our societal laws about sex education, birth control and abortion.

And when sex education doesn’t exist, when birth control fails, and the only hope left for a woman, a family, a ghetto, a city, or a world is an abortion, when an abortion is the only means left of removing a condition which threatens to return this human or these humans to the level of mere brutes, then the church, the state, and all who are really pro-life must, by God, not only condone those abortions, but help the people to get them, safely and easily. God demands it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 10 February 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Here in the midst of the miracle of life, we come to see if there might be a secret to it, a way of living that pays us in a better kind of currency.

Not pay in dollars, but in satisfaction, by helping us find more life, fuller life, more gratifying and grateful life.

Over and over, week after week, we come here to be reminded of the yearnings that hold the key to our hearts and souls.

And we come back because we know it isn’t as simple as just taking someone else’s authoritative answer. We come to hear and feel what might some day become part of our own answer to the perennial questions of who we are, what is worth believing, and how we should live.

The search itself is as sacred as it is frustrating, and it can bless each of us who show up to do the work of self-examination. There is hope there. And, thank goodness, there is also time. There is time for us to learn better how best to live. There is time for us.

Amen.

SERMON: The Parable of the Vineyard Workers

Jesus’ parable of the vineyard workers (Mt 20:1-15, adapted here from the Scholars Version done by the Jesus Seminar) is one of the most intriguing religious stories I know, and one of the hardest to pin down to a single interpretation. So I want to talk about it with you this morning. The Jesus Seminar rated it the third highest among the parables most likely to be authentic – in other words, a story Jesus actually told in something like this form.

I won’t assume you know the story, so will begin by reading it to you:

For the kingdom of God is like a vineyard owner who went out the first thing in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. After agreeing to pay the workers a denarius, he sent them into his vineyard.

And coming out around 9 a.m. he saw others loitering in the marketplace and he said to them, “You go into the vineyard too, and I’ll pay you whatever is fair.” So they went.

Around noon he went out again, and at 3 p.m., and repeated the process. About 5 p.m. he went out and found others loitering about and says to them, “Why did you stand around here idle the whole day?”

They reply, “Because no one hired us.”

He tells them, “You go into the vineyard too.”

When evening came the owner of the vineyard tells his foreman: “Call the workers and pay them their wages starting with those hired last and ending with those hired first.”

Those hired at 5 p.m. came up and received a denarius each. Those hired first approached thinking they would receive more. But they also got a denarius apiece. They took it, but began to grumble against the proprietor, saying, “These men hired last worked only an hour but you paid them the same that you paid those of us who did most of the work during the heat of the day.”

The employer said to one of them, “Did I cheat you? Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Can’t I do whatever I like with my money? Or are you giving me the evil eye because I am generous?”

In other words, the vineyard owner hired people for a twelve-hour workday (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.). Some worked all twelve hours, some worked as little as one hour, but he paid them all a full day’s wage (the denarius was the silver coin that was considered a fair day’s wage for workers). Those who came at the last hour were delighted, but those who had worked a whole day in the hot sun were angry, even though he paid them a full day’s wage, which was what he said he’d pay them.

As you can tell, it’s not easy to know what to make of this. It doesn’t seem at all equitable. Conservative Christians often say that the silver coin represents heaven. Though some of those who wrote the gospels forty to ninety years after Jesus died did have him talking about heaven, Jesus was a Jew who never talked about heaven or hell, just focusing on this life here and now.

When you start reading some of the interpretations that people give this parable, they are absolutely all over the board, which should give you the nerve to give the story your own best interpretation. I want to share some of the ways Christians try to make sense of this odd story, then talk about what Jesus meant by it, and then wonder what we might do with it.

One online skit for two clowns says the point is that we should be happy with what we have – since all the workers agreed to work for a denarius: that silver coin. These clowns say they are hired by churches to come do skits to reinforce the bible lesson.

One of the many large Calvary Churches in the country says that in the Parable, the denarius is Heaven, the glorious payment of God for a whole life’s work of a believer.

God pays with the same coin to those working for 80 years in the church or to the one who repents at the last minute of his life.

But this is fair, they say – for after all, everybody gets to live up above the sky with God in heaven forever. So since the reward is infinite, there is no injustice. That’s at least clever.

An Anabaptist Christian reading doesn’t make it about heaven, but about serving God in this life. This man says: “So, having considered all this, wouldn’t you prefer to be a one-hour worker? Not me! I love the Boss too much! I pity the one-hour worker! He only has an hour to be about his Father’s business.”

He says the point of the parable is Ungratefulness, and ends by saying, “Let’s be so busy serving we don’t have an interest in whining!” This is pretty close to a big Happy Face reading, though I don’t think the original vineyard workers would have bought it.

But what seems worth keeping is that notion that those who spend more of their lives doing God’s work are to be envied because they served high ends rather than shallow or selfish ends. For this interpreter, the silver coin, the denarius, means serving the highest ideals with your life. We all want to do this, and while those who only did it for an hour had a glorious hour, it only lasted an hour instead of a whole life. This man talks about serving life-giving ideals as serving God, and that’s easy to understand whether you’d want to call it serving God or not.

Another commentator says the point of the parable is about answering the call when it comes. For those of us in liberal religion, what that “call” really means is like what the theologian Howard Thurman meant when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Those who use God-talk to talk about these things will call that serving God. But it doesn’t matter what you call that attitude, as long as you can call it forth.

A lot of interpreters get hung up on the money part, and need to spin it to save face for God, because if this is about money, it sounds like God isn’t very fair. One didn’t want to engage this argument, so just said the point of the parable is that there is no room in heaven for people who just want more money or those who are jealous of the few who didn’t have to work very hard for their money.

And this leads to one of my favorite interpretations – favorite in a perverse kind of way – from Paul A. Cleveland, a professor of economics and business administration at Birmingham-Southern College, a man who has converted to the late Milton Friedman’s economic gospel.

He says the point of the parable concerns “The Danger of Presuming the Right to be Treated Graciously.”

“No one has the right to force someone else to deal with them in a merciful and compassionate way,” he says.

What he calls government entitlement programs – like welfare, social security, education and health care – are often called social justice, but he says this parable shows that they are not just, and not what God intends for us.

Furthermore, it’s wrong to have the government provide any social services or welfare, because this “assumes that people have the right to be treated mercifully and that this right is properly established by taking property away from taxpayers.”

In short, “The attempt to establish mercy and charity on earth via the law is not a Christian concept.”

This is the gospel of Milton Friedman. Next month, I’ll devote several sermons to looking at the worldwide effects Friedman’s fundamentalist economic ideas have had on the world since at least 1972, when I spend some time on Naomi Klein’s good but disturbing new book The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. But if you buy an economics of unrestrained greed, it’s no problem to believe that Jesus agrees with you. The truth is, you can interpret these and other stories almost any way you like. How you read them will be determined not by the stories, but by the spirit that possesses and guides you. Your interpretation is usually more about you than about the story. So when we hear these different interpretations, we’re not necessarily learning much about the story, though we’re learning about the interpreters, what they know and what sort of spirit drives them.

The last of these Christian interpretations I wanted to bring you is more in the “can you believe this?” category. It was posted to a chat list, not on this parable, but on the one that follows it. Here’s what the person said:

“I need help for a drama workshop on the Matthew 21 parable of the vineyard where the workers kill the owner’s son. Our church has two workshops per evening, one for younger children and one for older children. Any ideas? I’m burned out.”

Just from these few examples, you should get confidence to try your own reading of this odd parable and all other moral, ethical and religious stories. You couldn’t do worse than some of these, and would probably come up with a reading that you’d have a much better chance of incorporating into your own life.

Now let’s talk about what Jesus meant by the parable. Jesus, we have to remember, was not a Christian, and didn’t talk about heaven or hell. He was a Jew, and talked about living more wisely and fully here and now. So the silver coin wouldn’t represent heaven or any sort of afterlife. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with rewarding Christians, because Christianity wouldn’t be invented until several decades after he died. But the silver coin did represent what Jesus called the kingdom of God.

As I said last week, this was a common phrase used by lots of people at the time – Jews, Romans and later Christians – to mean the ideal world, the best kind of world. Originally, it was all here and now, not elsewhere and later.

And Jesus’ definition of this ideal world was shocking in its simplicity and its radical nature. He said the kingdom of God was one in which we all saw ourselves as children of God, and saw everyone else as children of God as well, no matter what social or economic class they belonged to, and then we all acted on the knowledge that we are all the beloved children of God. So the kingdom of heaven was defined by behaviors, not beliefs. I think this is one of the marks of Jesus’ profundity. Most of history’s great moral, ethical and religious thinkers have said the same: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha and Socrates no less than Jesus. But this is not the way religions usually teach, then or now, as you know. They usually give you an identity defined not by behaviors, but by following prescribed beliefs, sacraments and ritual practices.

And Jesus was clear that this kingdom was not supernatural, wasn’t a thing yet to come through some magic. He said the kingdom wasn’t something that was “coming,” that you couldn’t point to it. It was already here, he said, within and among us, as soon as we see who we are in the kingdom – children of God – and act like it toward others. Like the Buddha, Socrates and other great thinkers he knew nothing about, Jesus put the ball in our court, whereas Christianity – unlike Jesus – gave the ball, the authority, to the Church. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of radical love and compassion between all. And you’re living in it as soon as you act like it. You get paid in full the minute you finally get it. You know people who’ve lived that way for decades, and you must envy them, as I do. And you know others who have finally mellowed, or matured, into that quality recently. It transforms their life, whenever they get it.

If we see it early, we can have most of our life lived in this way. But even if we don’t get it until very late, we get the same quality of life, the same payment, just not as many years of it. So far, Jesus’ meaning is the best of the bunch. It is quite a pretty and poignant vision, but there are some things to question about it.

Jesus was young. He did his short ministry in his early 30s (some of the scholarly estimates now are that Jesus was probably born between about 5-7 BC, and may have been executed around the year 30). Does his vision sound realistic, that the world would dissolve into love? Does this sound like he had an adequate picture of human nature in the real world, or has he left out some terribly important things – like selfishness and power?

Dreams of peace and justice always seem to forget about power, as Jesus also seems to have done. Maybe it’s because those who dream about peace and justice seldom have any real power, so they assign too great an importance to mere ideas. They act as though those with power will just give up as soon as we start being loving. But history doesn’t support that. It shows they tend to see us as patsies, and take even more advantage of us, doesn’t it? Don’t tyrants love most of all those who will forgive them?

Even within a family or a relationship, his radical notion of forgiveness and love can only work where there is mutual love and respect. Practiced unilaterally, it can be very dangerous. As I’ve said before, if you want to see a place filled with people who practice loving their enemies and treating violence with forgiveness, go to a battered women’s shelter.

That kind of love and forgiveness can work within a loving and respectful relationship. Haven’t we all been opened, awakened, by someone in our lives who could forgive us something for which we couldn’t forgive ourselves, and love us anyway? It really can transform you into a more loving person. But if we’re dealing with very selfish, narcissistic or sociopathic people, it just makes us a sucker, and they’ll take merciless advantage of us.

That certainly seems true in politics, economics, history, work relationships and many personal relationships, doesn’t it? Can we say that Jesus’ vision, as beautiful and idealistic as it was, seems terribly naive, and that his dream of an ideal world forgot about the people who aren’t so inclined, and will take their advantages where they can get them?

After all, even in his story, those who worked only one hour had to know it was unfair to be paid for a full day. They just didn’t care. Neither do today’s CEO’s making nearly five hundred times as much as their workers. They’ll take what they can get, gladly. And they’ll always be able to find professors of economics and business who will swear that’s just what Jesus intended. Jesus’ kingdom of God was a utopian vision, and it’s perhaps worth remembering that the word “utopia” (Greek utopos) actually means “no place.”

All that said, however, there are still some things that are right and profound in this parable of Jesus’.

It isn’t about money, it isn’t about beliefs, and it isn’t about heaven. Jesus’ kingdom of God is about behavior, not belief. That’s what makes it a universal vision. It’s about finding a more compassionate, holistic way of seeing ourselves and others, so that we can begin to see ourselves as sacred creatures, put here for only a short time, challenged to find ways to make the time more fulfilling, so we can look back and say by God, I’m glad I lived that way!

That’s the silver coin that we seek. It’s one of the biggest reasons people come to the worship services of different religions. Even though we may not be much into magic or supernaturalism, many people come to sanctuaries like this each week hoping for a miracle: a word, a phrase, an image, an idea, a story or a connection that can open a door for us into a bigger living space.

The questions are always:

1. Who am I, really?

2. What am I serving?

3. Is it worthy of me?

4. If so, am I allowing it a commanding role? Serving it heart mind and soul?

In some ways, this complex parable of Jesus’ presents most of our problem today. We’re looking for the best way to live, individually and together. We believe it can transform the quality of our life if we’re serving the kind of ideals we should be serving. We know we can see the light we’ve been looking for at any time of life – the first hour or the eleventh hour, as this story puts it. And getting it right can make all the difference. We know all this.

But what’s the story that will do it? Jesus said it was a world of radical love and forgiveness. I’ve wondered out loud with you whether this might have been the fairly naive utopian vision of a very young prophet – for he seems to have left out any considerations of power, selfishness and ambition. This left a vacuum that history has filled with centuries of corruption, violence and war sponsored by the churches, and a toxic self-righteousness that has poisoned many families, including some of yours.

Some of life’s problems really do have simple and unambiguous answers that apply to almost everyone: we must work, we must eat, we must either play fair or gradually lose the respect of everyone we know, and so on.

But some questions require personalized answers, and the questions in this story are among them. If the “silver coin” is a life you’re glad you’re living this way, have you found it? How would you describe it? If you haven’t found it, what do you think it would be? Do you agree with Jesus’ prescription? (You don’t have to; arguing with teachers is an honored Jewish custom.) If not, how would you define the “kingdom of God?” What makes you come alive, what makes you feel beloved by God or by Life?

You see, we’re standing here in this marketplace of life, and all these potential employers are coming around, offering us what may be good offers, what may be Faustian bargains. The clowns are here, saying to just put on a happy face and be glad for what you have, no questions asked by golly.

Another says, “Oh, you’re not going to get much now, but if you’re obedient and don’t make waves, then some day you will win big, even if it isn’t until after you’ve died.”

The Friedman economist is here shouting, “Shut up and work! You don’t deserve anything the masters don’t choose to give you!” Some say the work is so satisfying you won’t even mind not getting paid.

Then there’s Jesus, with his idea that if we love one another and love our enemies too and learn to forgive, everything will be fine.

Finally, this preacher comes along who wonders if Jesus was too young and too naive, if just unilateral loving and forgiving doesn’t also make us easy marks for selfish or abusive people who’ll use us like patsies for their own ends.

But like so many good stories, this one is about life. The best stories are always about us, and we are all there in that market place of ideas about how to spend our lives, what kind of silver coin we think is worth our time, our trust, our life.

What about you? What currency could you work for that would make you feel that if this isn’t the kingdom of God, it’ll do until the real thing comes along? How do you find your own path between the whiners and gripers on the one hand, and the abused patsies on the other?

Another day has started. It’s already the fifth hour. What’s worth working for with your heart, with your hands, and with your life?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

February 3, 2008

PRAYER:

Let us have humility in our lives, but let us also not underestimate our own power and authority. For we have far more power and authority in our lives than we imagine.

The Danish poet Piet Hein put this into a short poem some years ago, when he wrote:

�

I am a humble artist, molding my earthly clod,

Adding my labor to Nature?s, simply assisting God.

Not that my effort is needed, yet somehow I understand

My Maker has willed it that I too should have unmolded clay in my hand.

Let us try to keep fear and false humility from making us bow before pretended authorities when we should question them ? in politics, in religion, and in our daily lives.

It is a bold claim, that we too should have unmolded clay in our hands, that we too can co-create our lives and our world. Yet it is one of the most fundamental truths of psychology, politics and religion.

Let us have appropriate humility, and let us have appropriate confidence and power. For there is so much to do, and we must do it together. Amen.

SERMON: The Kingdom of God is Like?.

�

I only realized yesterday afternoon while sitting outside at Central Market working on this sermon where it was really going. I had thought it was about two parables, the two that are probably the most likely to be authentic parables of Jesus: the Good Samaritan story, and his odd comment that the kingdom of God is like leaven.

Then as I put together what I knew of the background and context from the bible and the early first century, I saw they were both spoken to a very specific context that doesn?t really fit us well today, that Jesus? original message not only wasn?t too helpful, but wasn?t very true or wise either.

We look at figures like Jesus, or Mother Teresa, Mohammad, all our religious and cultural heroes, through rose-colored, often romantic and nostalgic glasses, and sometimes just clearing away the haze also clears away the romantic nostalgia.

That?s what doing a scholarly study of any religion often does. We say we don?t want to check our brains at the door, but sometimes that turns into the question of whether we would rather be disillusioned, or illusioned. At the divinity school I attended ? and I suspect this is true of all good divinity schools ? it wasn?t unusual to hear graduate students say by their second or third year that learning about religion had shattered whatever beliefs they had come in with. The romanticism ends as you learn just what human creations all religions and all sacred scriptures really are. The bible was written by hundreds of people, each with their own theological and political agenda, not by God or Jesus. The Koran was too, went through many editions, and borrowed thousands of words from the Jewish and Christian scriptures, among others. And so on. That?s very empowering, freeing you from a more na�ve sense of religion, but it?s also disturbing.

I?ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar since 1991, and that?s where I have learned most of what I know about Jesus. This a group of mostly bible scholars started in 1985 to bridge the gap between what scholars have known about the bible and Jesus for over a century, and what people in the streets and in the pews are told about it. They?ve described that gap as larger than the Grand Canyon. They assembled scholars of the bible and Christian history, and spent eight years having them research every single saying attributed to Jesus, and write papers on whether it should be considered authentic. They assigned every single saying attributed to Jesus ? whether in the gospels or any other early literature ? and having the experts write papers on sayings that came within their field of knowledge. Sometimes, this meant over an hour of listening and arguing about two lines of Greek text. Most people would think this added a whole new dimension to the concept of ?boring.?

They did this by knowing a lot of the history, how the gospels were written ? they weren?t written until forty to ninety years or so after Jesus died ? by comparing them with older sayings from Jewish teachers and secular sayings of the time. When they published their book The Five Gospels: the Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus in December 1993, they reported that they thought only about 18% of the sayings attributed to Jesus were authentic, and only 60% of the scholars were sure that the Good Samaritan story, one of the most famous, was authentic in that form. Only 60%. And that made it the second highest parable they considered to be authentic. The highest-rated parable only got 62% of the scholars voting for it, and that was a very short sentence that doesn?t even sound like a parable, where Jesus said, ?The kingdom of God is like leaven that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.? (Matthew 13:33b).

I remember talking with a very bright Catholic priest attending one of our Seminar meetings, saying the irony was that he was so nourished by what he learned there, but then he?d have to go home and make sure he didn?t tell the people in his church what he had learned, because it would disillusion them. That?s only one of the reasons I?m not a Catholic priest. I think that while no one likes being disillusioned, it?s finally better than being illusioned. It?s liberating, and that word comes from the same root as ?liberal,? which is why I?m one of those, too. I think that being shaken out of our childhood beliefs is the first step toward finding beliefs that can serve us as adults, and it?s a struggle everyone should have a chance at. But that?s one of the reasons I?m a Unitarian rather than some other kind of preacher.

So today, I want to talk about two of Jesus? parables that may or may not be wise ? you?ll decide for yourself. Next week I?ll talk about the third most likely-to-be-authentic parable, which is kind of rude, even ugly, that you?ll almost never hear anyone preach on or agree with, and I?ll suggest that it really is profound and wise, just as I think Jesus meant it.

First, let?s talk about what parables are. They are not nice stories, and they?re not polite. They are the most radical and disturbing kind of story there is, and Jesus did them as well or better than anyone. One good biblical scholar, the Catholic John Dominic Crossan ? the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar ? has said that a parable is a slap in the face to the audience hearing it, and if it isn?t a slap in the face, it isn?t a parable. Its purpose is not to tell them what to do, how to behave. Its purpose is to subvert the worldview of the audience, to deny some of its most basic assumptions. The stories are disturbing, so they?re usually watered down to make them nice.

It?s easy to see all of this by looking at one of the most famous of Jesus? parables: the Good Samaritan story.

It sounds pretty straightforward, but it isn?t. A Jew is mugged walking along a dangerous road, a couple Jews see him there and cross over to the other side rather than stopping to help, then a Samaritan comes by, stops, helps, takes him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to care for him until he?s recovered. The editor of the gospel added the line after the story, ?Go and do likewise,? which would not have been part of the original story. But we need to know some history in order to understand how it?s a parable. The Jews and Samaritans absolutely hated each other at the time. In about the year 6, Samaritans threw human remains into the courtyard of the big temple in Jerusalem, to defile it. The very idea of a good Samaritan was as offensive as the idea of a story about ?the good serial murderer.? Part of the message of the Good Samaritan story was not only that your own kind often won?t help you, but the most radical, the most parabolic, message is that Jesus was telling his Jewish audience that the help they need can only come from the last person on earth they want help from. This would have been a fairly disgusting story to Jesus? fellow Jews ? and remember, Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Christianity hadn?t been invented yet.

We need to hear this parable ? and the one about the leaven ? in the same light as when Jesus said that a prophet isn?t honored by his own people, as Jesus wasn?t. What he?s telling his fellow Jews in the Good Samaritan story is that the help they need won?t come from the people they like, but can only come from the one they hate ? in other words, Jesus. It?s his most autobiographical parable. Scholars believe he was from Galilee, though in one gospel he is also referred to as a Samaritan.

It?s an insulting story in which Jesus is also exalting himself ? like the claim from the gospel of John that has him saying ?I am the Way, no one can come to God except through me.? It?s terribly arrogant, a world away from his humbler saying that no one is good but God alone.

I want you to imagine what this would have sounded and looked like. Jesus was a homeless man. He had no home, no steady job, had no wife or children, he begged for his food, and taught his disciples to beg for their food ? and even told them to eat whatever was offered to them, which would include non-kosher foods like pork and shellfish. The people who knew him didn?t respect him, and one story in the New Testament shows that his own mother thought he was crazy. And this is the man telling them that only he can help them! Today, we would give such a person a diagnosis. I?ll come back to the Good Samaritan, but want to go to the other one for a few minutes.

The highest-ranked parable is that little one-sentence one I mentioned earlier, that ?The kingdom of God is like leaven that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.? 62% of the Fellows in the Jesus Seminar said they were sure it was authentic, and about 90% said it probably was.

Believe it or not, it?s message is a lot like the Good Samaritan parable. At one of our meetings, I asked Dominic Crossan how on earth this was a slap in the face, or even a parable. He reminded me that the audience was Jewish, and that the high holy days of the religion are celebrated with unleavened bread. Jesus was saying, ?The kingdom of God is like what you?ve left out.? That?s what a parable does.

Today we make our bread with yeast that we buy in those little packages. It?s dry, clean, and has that wonderful smell when the bread is baking. But the leaven of the ancient world was pretty vulgar stuff. They made it by leaving a hunk of bread in a dark damp place until it was covered with mold, and stank. And the word for leaven was used as a metaphor. I?ve read that everywhere the word is used in the Hebrew scriptures, it means something corrupt, unclean, unholy.

Why would Jesus say the kingdom of God ? which meant the ideal world, the best kind of world ? was like something unclean and vulgar? Well, remember that Jesus was regarded as unclean and vulgar. He was a homeless man who traveled with the outcasts of society, who begged for their food. In one gospel, he is even described as a glutton and a drunkard. And he was saying the kingdom of God is like him and his followers. The Jews of his day didn?t agree, and not many of us would either.

Few of us travel around with homeless people who beg for their food, and prostitutes, and I suspect few of us would accept the idea that they are the kingdom of God. Just like the people in Jesus? audience, we still like to be around people like us. If homeless people or prostitutes came here on Sunday begging for food, I?d hope we would be courteous, but I don?t think we would cozy up to them during coffee hour. Even someone who wore a pro-life button or a pro-Bush button here would create at least uneasy silences, wouldn?t they? So sticking with our kind of people is as true of us as it was of Jesus? unappreciative audience two thousand years ago.

Are you beginning to feel the kind of slap in the face these parables were? They were powerful, rude stories that could get you killed. Socrates only questioned the things his society taught; Jesus attacked them.

And that little parable about the kingdom of God being like moldy, smelly leaven. What an odd idea, that the ideal world is like unholy corruption! Today, that could make you think the kingdom of God must be a lobbyists? convention in Washington DC. It might look like heaven to lobbyists and the corporations who own them, but it wouldn?t to most of us.

That?s why we sanitize these stories in churches and polite conversation, change them and make them all nice. The rules of sermon-writing seem to including keeping even the most disturbing messages within polite and comfortable boundaries. So some preachers will say that, well, the Samaritan story is really saying we shouldn?t leave people out, or we should help people who need help. But you really didn?t need a religious story to make that point, did you? If you didn?t already know that, something is very wrong, isn?t it?

I?ve heard a good preacher say that the point of the story is a lot like saying that we?re more complete if we can incorporate our shadow sides. He mentioned that the psychologist Carl Jung had made that critique of all of Christianity, which is true. Jung said Christianity had tried to leave out the shadow, leave out the selfish and bad parts of us, tried to define goodness as the absence of all evil. But Jung said no, it isn?t about being good; it?s about being whole, being integrated, and unless we claim and own the rotten parts, we?ll almost certainly project them out onto other people and attack them there. So the secret to the integrated personality ? as Jung and this preacher said ? is hidden in the dirty, uncomfortable things we?ve tried to leave out of it, and if we can add them back where they belong, we have the chance of growing into a fuller person, rising to our full height. This is a nice modern psychological message, and I think it?s true. But is this anything like the message Jesus meant? No. Jesus wasn?t a Jungian, but it?s the way we try to clean up rude stories that are attributed to our religious heroes, because we may go to see R- or X-rated movies, but on Sunday we want the sermons rated G.

When preachers use parables like this in sermons, they almost always clean them up and get away from the truly disturbing message they originally had. They?re not interested in what Jesus meant that was disturbing. They?re more interested in what they can say that?s clever and helpful. So we might say that well, the kingdom of God means a complete world, and that when we leave parts out, it keeps us from a truly integrated, authentic life. That?s nice, and also true. And also about as superficial as it gets, isn?t it?

Or we could preach on it by saying that the ideal world isn?t available from within gated communities surrounded by desperate ghettos, or self-righteous circles of those who think themselves superior to others and whose sense of superiority has cut them off from their common humanity with others. Those are also good sermons, and also true.

These are the kinds of games we play with a lot of religious stories, as you know if you?ve attended many churches. It?s the game of how most sermons are written. You already know the answer is going to be that Jesus was right, so they just have to figure out how to get you there this week. But look how much this distorts the original story, especially when the original story is such a crude and insulting parable. Sometimes, it feels almost like the Nickelodeon version of a Freddy Krueger movie.

This is part of what makes the old religious words and stories such odd candidates for trying to shed light on the world we?re actually living in. There is so much translation involved. We read Shakespeare and struggle with the odd-sounding Shakespearean English, because there is so much wisdom packed in those funny noises. But talking about a kingdom of God, and leaven, or even ancient hatreds between Samaritans and Jews ? which were tribes as closely related as first cousins? Why talk that way? Do we have to learn all this outdated stuff to make our way through life?

No, we don?t. In fact, we need to translate it into plain talk so we can know what we think we?re talking about. And we need to think about whether we agree with what this man is saying. It doesn?t matter who said it, just whether it seems to be wise and useful. So what?s this mean that we need to care about?

Now let me play devil?s advocate and wonder out loud whether the original versions of these two parables are even very wise. Remember, I?m not trying to tell you what to believe, only trying to make you interested in finding out what you believe.

Does the help we need often come from people we hate? No. Mostly, it comes from people we know, or at least people with whom we can identify. Do ?our kind of people? generally ignore and abandon us when we?ve been beaten down? Not in my experience. The most sensitive of them usually ask where it hurts, and whether they can do anything to help. There are certainly painful cases of psychopathic parents or partners that can be quite tragic, but overwhelmingly we can trust those who know us better than those who don?t, can?t we?

And do we need to add corrupt, moldy things to get decent food or a decent life? The image of smelly moldy leaven could have worked two thousand years ago. But it doesn?t work now, when the smell of yeast in baking bread is one of the nicest smells in the world. So is there anything about the parable that is relevant to our world?

Why would we want to invite people we don?t like into our community? It can sound quite idealistic, but would many of us really want to do it ? at least more than just once, for show? Why should we want that kind of stress? The Jews of Jesus? time didn?t. They weren?t persuaded by his story, and probably thought it was a vulgar idea. But then look around today, when some of the loudest conservative Christians don?t like the idea either. They have become notorious for trashing Muslims, trashing gays and lesbians, trashing assertive women, trashing anyone who isn?t like them, consigning them all to the roles of the unclean and impure. The most fanatical Muslims do the same. And our own behavior shows that we strongly prefer being around our kind of people, doesn?t it? Just look around. So whatever Jesus was addressing seems to be part of human nature, then now and probably always.

Let me add one more wrinkle, one more ambiguity, to take away some of the false authority and charisma of our favorite ?wise? sayings. Parables are really just used like proverbs and bromides, like ?A stitch in time saves nine.? And we apply them in a thousand ways that have nothing at all to do with the original meaning, like sewing torn clothing before the rip spreads and you have nine times as much work to mend it. We have used that old saw in a thousand ways that would have mystified the original seamstress who must have coined it about mending clothes. We have a whole mental library of these sayings, many of them contradicting many others, and we pull them out to fit the situation at hand. So we?ll say ?He who hesitates is lost,? then ?Fools rush in?, or ?Look before you leap,? then ?No guts, no glory.? ?Absence makes the heart grow fonder,? and ?Out of sight, out of mind.?

These aren?t really sources of wisdom, as much as they are catchy little sound bytes we can slap on life to feel like we understand it. Slapping a brand-name bromide on life is a way of taming life. We use the sayings we?ve heard ? not because they?re wiser than Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or other sayings, but just because they?re familiar. That?s how most of Jesus? sayings are used, too. We use Jesus? stories in the same way, kind of slapping them on for a needed sound byte ? like ?being a good Samaritan? ? without ever understanding or caring what Jesus actually meant by them in his very different time, context, and agenda.

It?s a measure of how much our traditional religions have become marginalized in our search for understanding today. Saying we want to be a good Samaritan doesn?t have anything to do with Jesus? teachings; it?s just a handy way to say we want to be decent toward those who are in need.

Now, for the question most of you are wondering about: how on earth can this sermon end? I?ll try it this way. The main purpose of education, including learning more about religion, is not to make us more fearful and obedient; it?s to empower us to question even the structure and foundation of the world as we?ve been taught it.

When you make a creative use of an old story to find a way to understand your life, who gets credit? Does it mean the original storyteller was really wise, even if you?ve completely changed his message? Or that you?re really clever? Or that we?re all in this together, may each have a part of the whole, that to leave out any part, however small, may be to diminish us?

Does this give new meaning to Jesus? old stories, or does it show some of them to have been unwise, even self-important and arrogant? Do you want to give credit to Jesus, to the creative opportunities offered by ambiguous old stories, or to yourself for using them to see patterns in the world around you? Does it help you appreciate the role a church can play in keeping us exposed to stories that can help us find our way through life?

Is it, as that Catholic priest said, disillusioning: the sort of thing you should be protected from, by me and all other preachers? Or is it empowering, even if a bit sobering? If sermons are supposed to bring Good News that helps to awaken and empower you, to remind you that you too are a child of God and part of the hope of the world, then was this a sermon?

Welcome to the church where you can find religion almost every Sunday, but where it nearly always comes to you in kit form, with some assembly required.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 January 6, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

We gather here, among other reasons, to try and find life-giving stories. More than anything, we are made more whole, we are saved, through finding stories to live within that open us to better possibilities.

Sometimes we are fed even by small pictures, little parts of stories where we found that spark of light. Good stories aren’t about truth, even if they happen to be true. They are about possibilities. We seek stories that are about possibilities.

Let us open ourselves to the best pictures and stories we can find, and ask ourselves whether we can find in them that whisper of God, that spark of light, that can give us a glimpse of something fine, something noble and whole. And let us have faith that the fine and more whole vision we see may be, or may become, part of our own story.

Let us seek that light, by whatever name we know it. And when we find it, let us be open to it, that it might return the favor and open us.

Amen.

SERMON: Graceful Stories

You know those 500-piece jigsaw puzzles you can buy with a picture of the completed puzzle on the outside. This morning’s sermon is like one of those puzzles, but without the picture of what it’s supposed to look like when it’s assembled. In a way, it’s a response to last week’s sermon, where I talked about how we mistake being certain with being right and are almost incapable of telling the difference between the two.

That could be seen as saying we can never be sure that anything is true, and in some ways that’s right. But not many people live that way, and honest religion is still about trying to find what is most important, and living by its light. This morning, I’ve brought you twelve of those lights: stories that are like puzzle pieces. they’re a particular kind of story I think of as “graceful stories.” I’ll give you an example of one before I try to explain it.

1. A balloon salesman at the circus held a handful of strings tied to helium-filled balloons of every color. Every once in awhile, he’d pull out a string and let a balloon go, so it would rise up in the sky and kids might see it and come find the balloon man to buy one. After he had let go of red, blue and yellow balloons, a little black boy standing near him quietly asked, “Mister if you let the black balloon go, would it rise up too?” The balloon salesman took the string from a black balloon, released it, and of course the balloon rose as fast and as high as all the others. He gave another one to the young boy, and said, “It’s what’s inside that makes them rise.”

Now that story probably never happened literally, just like most religious stories never happened literally, but we don’t care because we know it could happen, and it shows us something that is both true and empowering, which is what we want from our best stories. But the other stories I’ve brought for you today all happen to be true, as well as graceful.

2. The first story of this kind that I remember, one I read over thirty years ago, was about Winston Churchill. There was a formal reception at Buckingham Palace. The Queen was there, as well as Sir Winston and many of the world’s top diplomats. At one point in the evening, Churchill saw something he couldn’t believe. A foreign ambassador actually stole a sterling silver pepper mill from the Queen’s table. While this is not worth publicly embarrassing an ambassador and his country over, it’s also not right to stand by and watch such petty theft. Churchill solved this in a way that almost takes your breath away. He sidled up to the table, took the matching salt shaker from it, and put it inside his coat. Then, when no one else was around to hear them, he went over to the thieving ambassador. He opened his coat, showing him the salt shaker, and said, “we’re going to have to put them back – they’re on to us.” Something creative and magical was added to this scene by Churchill that transformed it from clever to graceful.

When I was in graduate school, I read a lot of Christian thinkers writing about grace, and their writings weren’t very helpful because they were mostly trying to save face for grace by explaining that it all came from God. That didn’t help make any sense of it here in the real world, until finally I came up with a kind of mental equation that let me understand what they were talking about. I began translating “grace” as “grease”: the kind of lubricant that makes life slide by so much more smoothly. Sometimes we add the magical and graceful thing on our own, like Churchill did. Sometimes, it comes when we are awakened by an innocent or unexpected comment from another person. But it transcends us and our species. It is a part of life, and sometimes we can find it in stories of other animals. I shared a lot of these with you last spring in the long sermon series on “Animal Stories.” Here are just two of those graceful stories of other animals doing something extra they didn’t have to do, that added that graceful dimension.

3. One is the story of a bonobo ape named Kuni, who one day caught a starling who had landed on her island in the Twycross Zoo in England. The bird had flown into a plate glass window and fell to the ground stunned but otherwise ok, and the trainers tried to get the ape to hand the bird to them so she wouldn’t hurt it. Instead, Kuni held the starling in her left hand, and climbed up the tallest tree on the island. Then, holding on to the tree with her feet, she carefully took the bird’s wing tips in her hands, spread them out as though the bird were in flight, and tossed the starling high into the air. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 156) (The bird was still too stunned to fly away and fluttered to the ground, where Kuni stood guard over it until it flew away later.)

4. Another came from the newspapers over a decade ago, the extraordinary story of two stray dogs, a dachshund and an Australian cattle dog, who kept alive a mentally disabled boy when he became lost in the woods for three “bone-chilling” days. The boy’s mother called the dogs “angels from heaven” after ten-year-old Josh Carlisle, who has Down syndrome, was rescued from a dry creek in Montana by a searcher on horseback. In temperatures close to zero, the dogs had played with him and cuddled him to keep him warm at night. Josh hadn’t eaten while he was lost, but the dogs must have led him to water, for he was not fully dehydrated. The boy had mild frostbite on all ten toes, having spent his first night with a light snow dusting the ground. When Josh was carried to the ambulance, the dachshund followed and kept jumping up to see in the window. “I’ll never forget that dog’s face,” said one of the rescuers. Both dogs found a new home with the child’s family, and his mother told reporters, “They fell in love with my son during those three days.” Here, the grace crossed over species lines – both ways. (Jeffrey Maisson, Dogs Never Lie, pp. 97-98, from the front page of the St. Louis Post Dispatch in March 1996.)

5. For the fifth story, we can move back to stories of human animals with one from a real estate executive named Robert Ellis. When his son was nine years old, they wanted to get him into soccer, but all the teams were full. Being creative, his wife told those in charge that her husband was a coach. This opened a space for their son. The husband, however, really wasn’t a coach and knew absolutely nothing about soccer. So he dove into this new challenge as though he had been called to coach a professional team of world-class players rather than a group of nine-year-old kids. He read many books on soccer, went to clinics, met Juan Mazia, who had been the great Pele’s coach, and even met Pele, who many regard as the best professional soccer player ever.

Ellis writes, “One day after having practices three days a week, giving lectures to the team that would make [the greatest football coaches or Army generals proud], I asked, “Are there any questions?” One boy raised his hand and said, “My brother got a goldfish for his birthday.” It suddenly hit me that the kids had never been in organized sports before. They weren’t professionals. They wanted to have fun. To get them to a more skillful level, I had to take it slow and easy. I wanted to be the total opposite of the bullying coach who abuses the authority he’s given.

“Practices finally became fun – it wasn’t all soccer talk”. We went on to have five out of eight seasons with undefeated teams.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], pp. 31-32)

6. The actress Mary Steenburgen wrote about her childhood, and her father. He was a freight train conductor for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, but he developed heart problems and so wasn’t able to work for years at a time. During these times, he would do odd jobs – seldom very dignified. Once he was a traveling salesman for a shoe company, and the company gave him a sign to put in the back of his old car that said HANOVER SHOE SALESMAN. Mary writes:

“It was an old secondhand car, and between the sign and the condition of the car, I wasn’t too keen on driving around with my father. I was thirteen and suddenly aware of our lack of money compared to the wealth of the rich kids at school. I mostly walked home from school, but this one day my father came to pick me up. As we were driving away from the school I saw this boy, Charles Harrison, who was president of our class and the most popular guy in our grade. I didn’t want him to see me in our embarrassing car, so I ducked down and pretended to tie my shoes.

“There was silence for a moment and then my father softly said, “Mary, you don’t have to be ashamed of this old car.”

“That’s all he said.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], pp. 27-28)

Years later, she wrote, “I can still hear the sound of his sadness and feel my face burn with shame at my own snobbery. I think that this tiny little moment actually informed a lot about the way I have dealt with the many blessings that have come my way. I am deeply proud to be a trainman’s daughter from Arkansas, and I have been vigilant to remember what does and doesn’t matter in life.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], p. 28)

7. The seventh story is about sports broadcaster Suzyn Waldman, who worked for the New York Yankees twenty years ago, as she still does – one of the first women sportscasters – a fact that made her so nervous that she would seldom say a thing in the locker room after the game if there were any male sportscasters present. “One evening, Yankees outfielder Dave Winfield had a particularly great game,” she wrote. “I mustered up all my courage, and with my tape recorder going, I started to ask my question – and made a mistake with his statistics. Two things ran through my mind. Do I keep going, pretend I didn’t notice, and not be able to use the tape, or do I stop the tape and make it clear to everyone here that I made a mistake? Dave Winfield made the decision for me. He put his hand on the machine’s Stop button, knowing I had reversed the statistics, and said, “I don’t like the way I started to answer that. Can we do it again?” My mistake had led to an incredible act of kindness by a relative stranger.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], p. 36)

8. One of my favorite stories, and one that comes close to the brilliance and gentleness of the Churchill story, comes from a new book I was asked to read in manuscript form and write a cover blurb for. It’s a good book called Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, written by a man (Bruce E. Levine) who has been a psychotherapist for about thirty years. Here’s how he tells the story:

One day a telemarketer began her sales pitch by asking what I did for a living. I paused for a second, and then I told her that I was a telemarketer evangelist. At first she misunderstood, thinking I said a televangelist, and she believed I was being dishonest with her, as clearly many people told her outrageous lies. Then I explained that I was not a televangelist, that I did not evangelize on television, but that I was a telemarketer evangelist and that I ministered to telemarketers who called me. She stopped her pitch and let me continue. I told her that I believed that many telemarketers were in deep pain about what they were doing, and this was made worse by the anger they received from most people they spoke to. In a soft voice, almost sounding like she was going to cry, she agreed with me. I told her that I knew she would not stay on the phone too long, especially since I wasn’t going to buy anything from her, but that I could tell she was a good person and that I had faith she was going to get a more satisfying job. She said, “God bless you.” (Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, pp. 53-54)

9. A ninth graceful story comes from Rachel Naomi Remen, the wise San Francisco physician whose stories I use whenever I can. A 40-year-old very plain librarian came to see her, depressed and aware of her plainness – everyone else in her family was handsome. Life didn’t seem worth it any more. Sitting in Dr. Remen’s waiting room were terminal patients, some bald from chemotherapy, some dying of AIDS. Eventually this woman, Janet, began talking with an AIDS patient, and got to know him. She’d volunteer to help him shop, bring groceries, etc. His name was Will. He was devastatingly handsome, 32, and dying of AIDS. She was devastatingly shy, and deeply convinced that she was too plain to matter. She began to help him, and became closer to him. Several months later, Will died. Rachel called Janet, found she was out of state. Worried about the powerful effect Will’s death would have, she kept calling. Finally Janet came in. She had been with Will’s family in another state, meeting them, attending his funeral. She looked different. She was, for the first time, wearing lipstick. She told the story of Will’s final days. He was very weak, mostly bedridden. On this day he was not doing well, she worried about him all day. Coming home, she ran up the stairs, her arms full of groceries. She opened the door, called his name loudly so he could hear her from his upstairs bedroom.

But Will was not in his bedroom. Fully dressed in a jacket, shirt, and tie, he was sitting in the living room waiting for her. His clothes, still elegant, looked as if they had been bought for a much, much larger man, but his hair was carefully combed and he had shaved. Janet could hardly imagine the effort it had taken for him to do this.

Stunned, she asked him why he had gotten dressed. He had looked at her for a long moment. Then he eased off the couch, and, getting down on one knee, he asked her to marry him. She helped him up, and hugged him for the first time. He died a few days later.

Rachel looked at her in silence. Still blushing (over the lipstick), she met Rachel’s eye. “In my heart I did marry him, you know,” she said. “He will be here with me always.” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 296)

10. The tenth story is one I just read two weeks ago, about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish theologian and wise man who died in 1972. (from Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 by Edward K. Kaplan (Yale).In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport, trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar counter glared at him – his yarmulke and white beard making him look like an ancient Hebrew prophet – and mockingly proclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel they didn’t have any food.

In response, Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the kitchen there might be some water?” Yes, she acknowledged. “Is it possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?” Perhaps, she admitted. “Well, then,” Heschel said, “if you boiled the eggs in the water, “that would be just fine.”

She shot back, “And why should I?”

“Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.”

“What favor did you ever do me?”

“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.” She burst out laughing – and brought him food. (From Connections in the NY Times, 24 December 2007, “A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma that Transcends It,” by Edward Rothstein.) 11. And then, my own favorite Unitarian minister story, written by Robert Walsh, now retired. (“A Baptism” from Noisy Stones by Robert Walsh). It’s a story with which all religious liberals and radicals can probably identify. Here’s how he tells it:

She called to ask if I would baptize her infant son. I said, “What we do is like a baptism, but not exactly. And we normally do it only for people who are part of the congregation. The next one we have scheduled is in May.”

She said, “Could I come to talk to you about it anyway”?

They came to see me, the very young woman and her child and the child’s very young father. She explained that the child had been born with a heart defect. He had to have a risky heart operation soon. She had asked the minister of her own church if he would baptize her son, and he had refused because she was not married to the baby’s father.

I told them that their not being married would not be an impediment to anything we might do, but that our child dedication ceremony still might not be what they were looking for. I explained that our ceremony does not wash away any sin, it does not guarantee the child a place in heaven, it doesn’t even make the child a member of the church. In fact, I said, it doesn’t change the child at all. What we expect is that it will change the rest of us in our relationship with the child, and with all children. She listened patiently.

When I was through she said, “All I want is to know that God blesses my baby.” In my mind I gasped at the sudden clarity in the room. I said, with a catch in my throat, “I think I can do that.”

And I did.

12. The twelfth story is another one from the psychologist who was the telemarketer evangelist, and I’ve added it because it’s the only one that would be easy for every one of us to do. Some of these stories seem to show a kind of brilliance that can make us admire them, but doubt that we’re going to match their quick thinking. This one doesn’t involve any quick creativity or profound wisdom, but it has a magic to offer anyone who tries it, I suspect.

Bruce Levine said he knew a minister who occasionally got completely drained by his profession – but you know this can happen to anyone in any profession, any home, any family. He would be so completely drained of that “grease” that he almost ground to a halt, and had trouble getting through Sunday morning services.

So when he felt completely drained on Saturday night, he would set the alarm for a little earlier on Sunday morning, and go to breakfast at a real dive of a restaurant. He would treat everyone there like royalty, and compliment his server on whatever he could legitimately compliment them on: their hair, how nice they looked in that shirt, the color of their eyes, anything. He would order a big breakfast, then leave a one hundred percent tip. After leaving the restaurant, he felt so completely filled with grace that he could sail joyfully through both his Sunday services.

Twelve graceful stories. These are the puzzle pieces that you can put together to form your own best picture.

According to the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, there is a spark of light – a spark of God – within everything in life. When you hear the symbol “God” used like this, you know it is referring to a potential, not a potentate. It’s a potential within each of us, as well as in stray dogs that keep a boy alive, and a bonobo ape who returned a starling to the sky. These sparks of light are hidden, but they’re there, and our job is to find and release them, so that like God, we too can say “Let there be light!” and help save our world from darkness.

And so on this first Sunday of the new year, let there be light – and let there be grace.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

  December 30, 2007

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON: Don’t Believe Everything You Think

One of our favorite myths is that we are a rational species, for whom reason trumps emotion – at least in grown-ups. It’s hard to understand where such an idea came from – surely not from watching human behavior in politics, economics, religion, gambling or dating.

There are hundreds if not thousands of counterexamples, because what really drives us has very little to do with reason. You can probably all think of five or ten, and I’ll share some this morning. One of the more famous stories comes from the field of medicine from 160 years ago, and is a story every medical student learns.

In 1847, a physician in Vienna named Ignac Semmelweiss saw a pattern others hadn’t seen. He worked in obstetrics, and obstetricians both delivered babies and also did the autopsies on women who died in childbirth – without washing their hands. The mortality rate of women in childbirth was running between 10% and 30%, and he decided the doctors must be carrying something on their hands from the autopsies to the deliveries. So he made all the doctors working under him wash their hands in a chlorine solution, and childbirth deaths dropped dramatically. He tried to get other doctors to wash their hands, and was ridiculed because he seemed to believe in invisible agents, like demons, which was unscientific and didn’t fit the teachings of the modern medicine of the day. Still, women delivering babies were far more likely to come out alive in his hands than anywhere else in Vienna. You’d think that would count as enough empiracle data to at least try washing hands. But his idea didn’t catch on widely for several decades. I don’t know if anyone has tried to estimate the number of women who died needlessly during that time, but he is now known as “the savior of mothers.”

What’s going on here? These doctors were smart, and they were good people. They went into medicine to save lives, and I suspect all of them would have felt horrible if they believed they were actually killing their patients.

What’s going on is that a very different aspect of human nature is showing. It’s happened in science and every other field, probably forever. Thomas Kuhn wrote about some of this in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I’d still propose as the most influential book of the past fifty years. As long as scientists share the same paradigms and assumptions, he said, they can think very logically. But when they can’t agree on basic assumptions, they can barely communicate at all. Like whether there could be invisible agents on the hands of doctors capable of killing mothers, an idea Semmelweiss proposed more than a decade before Louis Pasteur had proposed his “germ theory” of disease.

But you don’t have to go to 19th century medicine. This is so deeply a part of human nature you can find it anywhere. Here’s a story that combines comedy and politics, then adds some neuroscience.

In 1960, the comedian Lenny Bruce watched the very first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He said he would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate and they would be saying, “He’s really slaughtering Nixon.” Then he’d go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, “How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?” And then he realized that each group loved their candidate so much that a guy would have to be this blatant – he would have to look into the camera and say: “I am a thief, a [criminal], do you hear me, I am the worst choice you could ever make for the Presidency!” Yet if he did that, his followers would say, “Now there’s an honest man for you. It takes a big guy to admit that. There’s the kind of guy we need for President!” (Mistakes Were Made, p. 18).

Neuroscientists have recently shown that these biases in thinking are built into the very way the brain processes information. Three years ago, in a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process information about George Bush or John Kerry, researchers found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with information that contradicted their biases, and the emotional circuits of the brain lit up happily when they heard information that supported their biases (Mistakes Were Made, p. 19). In other words, once our minds are made up, it’s hard to confuse us with the facts, because we’re often not even able to see the facts.

Some of these stories are pretty unbelievable. They must shock my own naive hope that we’re rational creatures, because I find that I don’t want to believe them. In the Dinka and Nuer tribes of the Sudan, for instance, there is a shocking practice that has gone on for many generations. They extract several of the permanent front teeth of their children. Apparently, this began during an epidemic of lockjaw; missing front teeth would enable sufferers to get some nourishment. If so, it once made some sense. But very few children ever got lockjaw, and for several generations now, none have. So why continue it? Because it evolved into something else. They’ve forgotten about the medical history, and convinced themselves that pulling teeth has an esthetic value. They turned it into a rite of passage into adulthood. “The toothless look is beautiful,” they say. “People who have all their teeth are ugly: They look like cannibals who would eat a person. A full set of teeth makes a man look like a donkey.” “We like the hissing sound it creates when we speak.” “This ritual is a sign of maturity” (Mistakes Were Made, pp. 23-24). Now I know some parents are thinking about your children and their tattoos and piercings, but forget it. They’re looking at you and wondering why your body didn’t matter enough for you to put some art on it.

Or we can move from body art to the body politic. One researcher took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, then asked Israeli citizens to judge them. The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposals attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposals attributed to the Palestinians. Think about this. If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it really does come from the other side? (Mistakes Were Made, p. 42).

Closer to home, another social psychologist found that Democrats will endorse an extremely restrictive welfare proposal, one usually associated with Republicans, if they think it has been proposed by the Democratic Party, and Republicans will support a generous welfare policy if they think it comes from the Republican Party. Label the same proposal as coming from the other side, and you might as well be asking people if they will favor a policy proposed by a coke-snorting Taliban official. What’s more, none of these people believed they were being influenced by their party’s position. They all claimed that their beliefs followed logically from their own careful study of the policy at hand, guided by their general philosophy of government (Mistakes Were Made, p. 43). Yet their attitude of certainty has trumped reason, truth, and nearly everything else, and this seems to be as deeply a part of human nature as anything we have.

If we’re wrong but certain, and our brain doesn’t even let us see what we don’t want to see, we could do harm, feel no remorse, and not even want to make it right later if we had the chance. And there are plenty of stories from actual court cases like this from our rational species.

Many of you will remember the awful 1989 case of the Central Park jogger, the woman who was assaulted and nearly beaten to death. Five teen-agers were arrested, questioned for up to 30 hours straight, finally confessed and under coaxing, added details of what they did. They were sent to prison for life. Donald Trump bought a full-page ad in the New York Times, urging the court to give them the death penalty. Thirteen years later, a felon named Matias Reyes, already in prison for rapes, robberies and murder, admitted that he alone had done the crime. His DNA matched, and he provided details about the crime that no one else could have known. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, under Robert Morgenthau, investigated for a year and found no connection at all between Reyes and the boys, and in 2002 a motion was granted to vacate the boys’ convictions. But the court decision was angrily denounced by former prosecutors in Morgenthau’s office and by the police officers who had been involved in the original investigation, who refused to believe that the boys were innocent. After all, they had confessed (Mistakes Were Made, pp. 128-9). Never mind the DNA evidence, or the fact that the boys had said after their confessions that after 30 hours of constant interrogations they would have said anything, they just wanted to go to sleep. It isn’t about being right. It’s about being certain. And we are often incapable of telling the difference.

The best known of the efforts to clear innocent people on death row is The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld. They keep a running record on their Web site of the men and women imprisoned for murder or rape who have been cleared, most often by DNA testing but also by other kinds of evidence, such as mistaken eyewitness identifications – and mistaken eyewitness identifications are involved in about 75% of false convictions: people who were dead certain, and dead wrong.

As of December 6, 2007, their site reports that 209 defendants previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing. Almost all of these convictions involved some form of sexual assault and about 25% involved murder (Mistakes Were Made, p. 3). This is good news! Besides setting innocent people free, it also means that now we might find the guilty ones who actually did the crimes. Or so you would think.

Here’s the part that’s hardest for me to accept. Of all the convictions the Innocence Project has succeeded in overturning so far, there is not a single instance in which the police later tried to find the actual perpetrator of the crime. The police and prosecutors just close the books on the case completely, as if to ignore the fact that they made serious mistakes that imprisoned innocent people and have let guilty people go free (Mistakes Were Made, p. 151). It isn’t about catching criminals or following facts. It’s about the almost supernatural power of certainty. They were so sure, they believed they couldn’t be wrong. But how much sense does this make? We are dead certain yet dead wrong a lot of times. Certainty is only an attitude, not a guarantee. The attitude of certainty is about us, not the world outside of our psyches. If I tell you something of which I am absolutely, without reservation, dead certain, you’ve learned something about me. Whether you’ve also learned something about the world we both live in is something you might want to check for yourself. This is why certainty is so dangerous, and national, religious or political ideologies are so deadly. If one person who is dead certain but dead wrong can do harm with a clear conscience, a large group who think alike can change history, sometimes in horrible ways.

Here’s an insight from an unexpected place, the memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s henchman Albert Speer: “In normal circumstances,” he wrote, “people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over” (Mistakes Were Made, p. 65).

That’s a pretty remarkable confession and insight. But doesn’t this describe the self-reinforcing certainty within political parties, scientific communities, religions, nationalisms, discussions of astrology, abortion, homosexuality or discussions among University of Texas alumni about their favorite football team?

There are many more stories like this, but what do we do with this? What does it have to do with us – especially us liberals, who like to think we are rational people and sometimes even imagine we might be the hope of the world?

Years ago, I heard a great scholar (Stephen Toulmin) explain the Atlas myth to an audience which, as I remember it, included graduate students and professors in religion, science and philosophy. “We must understand,” he tried to explain, “that the picture of Atlas holding up the world is not meant to answer the question “What is holding up the world?” Instead, it gives us a mental picture to reassure us on an emotional level that this world on which we live, die, hope, love, lose and try to think big thoughts, this world rests on shoulders that are not only strong, but also friendly to us. That’s what all our stories are trying to do: create pictures that can embrace us within comfortable certainties.” The same is true of our religious certainties, political certainties, nationalistic and racial certainties, and all the rest of them. It isn’t about truth, any more than it was for those obstetricians Dr. Semmelweiss tried to talk into washing their hands 160 years ago, or about the Kennedy, Nixon, Bush or Kerry fans, or the happily toothless tribes of the Sudan, or those who cover themselves with body art and those who are sure it’s a ridiculous idea. It’s about wanting and needing to believe that when we are absolutely, positively dead sure, we couldn’t possibly be wrong – especially if we hang out with others who share our beliefs. Because if we can’t trust that deep feeling of certainty, what on earth can we trust? I think this is a deep human dilemma, not a shallow problem.

My favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said, “Remember that we stand on the world, but the world doesn’t stand on anything else.” Then he added, “Children think it’ll have to fall if it isn’t held up.” I think that’s a far more profound statement than it seems at first sight. Because like that scholar I heard explaining the Atlas myth – a scholar who had been one of Wittgenstein’s students – he wasn’t really talking about our planet. He was talking about the social, emotional and conceptual “worlds” we each live in: worlds that are finally held up not on the shoulders of Atlas, but on the shoulders of our own certainties, reinforced by the certainties of those who think like we do.

It looks like human nature is not built to seek and defend truth. After all, how would evolution have a clue what truth is? We are built to seek and defend an attitude of certainty, and to justify our opinions in the face of nearly everything that should snap us out of it. First we become certain, in a dozen different ways: from swallowing whole some ideology, absorbing second-hand beliefs, annexing our family’s or society’s biases and bigotries, reading some focused collection of authors (rather than others), and many other ways. But first, we become certain. Then we name whatever it is that made us certain, The Truth. Of course, there’s no necessary connection. Certainty is only an attitude, and has nothing at all to do with being right. But try telling that to thousands of years of persecutions in the name of religion, nationalism, race, culture, politics, and preference for particular soccer or football teams. Try telling it to doctors who waited for decades to begin washing their hands before delivering babies, to prosecutors whose behavior says they don’t care who really committed over two hundred rapes and murders if it wasn’t the one they convicted. Try telling it to billions of people who have lived their lives in fear of religious or political damnation.

We live within certainties that have become familiar and habitual. They define and bind our world and often our possibilities, in religion, politics, nationalism and a hundred other ways.

The philosopher of science who explained the Atlas myth once said that the way scientific thinking usually changes isn’t through a rational or scientific process at all. It mostly changes when the deans of top schools and editors of top scientific journals retire and are replaced by people who were educated under different assumptions and paradigms. Then different kinds of scientific articles are published in the leading journals, and different kinds of PhD theses are accepted by the most influential universities, and there has been a kind of scientific revolution. What’s this got to do with us? What all of this has to do with religious liberals, honest religion – and the scientific method, while we’re at it – is absolutely fundamental. That dilemma of identifying with the process that can question everything, versus the need to stand some place solid is the greatest challenge for human beings who want to take either science or honest religion seriously.

This is what is meant by saying that both the soul of liberal religion and the scientific method are a process, but never a position. The liberal spirit is the spirit that challenges an orthodoxy to make room for the truths that give us life. The minute we”ve chosen one and declared it to be true, we have created our orthodoxy, and then try to protect it from the spirit of liberal religion, which would question it, too. So we’re all friends of the spirit of liberal religion or science as long as they help us criticize the beliefs of others. But we’re not as eager to understand that once we”ve found our own orthodoxy, our own position of certainty, those same spirits must question our certainties.

You can tell that this is a subject we could talk about for weeks, and one that can lead into a hundred different directions, many of them very pertinent to the world we’re living in. And I will invest some time doing some sermons on these themes in the spring.

But for now, I have painted us – or at least I’ve painted myself – into a corner filled with questions more profound than answers, so I’ll end with questions:

If you can’t trust your certainty, or even the certainty of a group of people who agree with you, what can you trust? If honest religion can’t ever be grounded in absolute unchanging facts, how do we live with confidence? Are there some absolute unchanging facts? What do you think they are? If you can’t believe everything you think, what can you believe, and why? If you can’t share the certainties of your friends on important topics, do you think they’ll still be your friends? If you now thought they were wrong on fundemantal issues, for how long could they stay your friends if you had to work together on these things? If being certain has no necessary connection to being right, what does?

In some ways, this is like Cassandra’s dilemma in ancient Greek mythology. Apollo, the god women never liked, was after her. So he gave her the gift of prophecy; she could see and say what was going to happen in the future, and she would always be right. When that failed to soften her heart toward him, Apollo got angry. But there was some kind of rule that gods couldn’t take back gifts they”d given, so she still had the gift of prophecy. To get even, he added a curse. She would always see the truth and always be right, but nobody would ever believe her. Which would you rather be – certain, or right? Or are these really the right questions to be asking in an honest church?

Your move.

(NOTE: All page numbers are from Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) Why we Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

-[Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, 2007])