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Brian Ferguson

 December 28, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Reading

Impassioned Clay

by Ralph N. Helverson

Deep in ourselves resides the religious impulse.

Out of the passions of our clay it rises.

We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient,

self-sustaining or self-derived.

We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present,

some self-respect beyond our failures.

We have religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up

at beauty,

when our nerves are edged by some dream in our heart.

We have religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all

that we have received.

We have religion when we look upon people with all their

failings and still find in them good;

when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the purpose in our

our own heart.

We have religion when we have done all that we can,

and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is

larger than ourselves.

Prayer

As we take this time, may we become in touch with the deepest desires of our hearts and memories of our minds. We are creatures with knowledge of our past and hopes for the future.

In recalling our past may we find the humility to learn from both our failures and success. In anticipating our future may we find the strength and courage to challenge ourselves to become more of what we desire to be.

As the adversities of our life remind us of our illusions of control and delusions of independence, may they also remind us of those who can help us and our interdependence with others.

In times of our greatest vulnerability and uncertainty, may we remember the moments of our highest resolve. And in doing so may our life be the embodiment of our highest ideals and an inspiration to all around us.

Amen.

Sermon: Time to Change – again!

As we approach the end of the calendar year, I find myself thinking about that difficult subject of time. The year 2009 is almost upon us and I am one of those people who hasn’t quite got their mind around being in the 21st century and soon we will be in the second decade of it. But when I talk about the difficulty of time I do not just mean the speed with which it goes by or the seeming shortage of time.

I have that constant struggle I have to live in the present. My mind constantly planning ahead to the short term task ahead, like eating lunch, or longer term out to next year, “where am I going to get a job?” When not thinking about the future then I think about my decisions of the past the good ones, a year ago I really didn’t think I’d be living in Texas, or regrets, why did I think this would be a good sermon topic? My mind seems to make only fleeting visits to the present before concerning itself with thoughts for the future and memories of the past.

Midnight on Wednesday as the calendar flips to another year there will be that mixture of poignancy for the past along with hope and perhaps some anxiety for the time ahead. For some of us we will be happy to see the back of 2008 for the hardship and losses we endured. For others we will reflect on a year well-lived and enter the New Year filled with anticipation and optimism. Many of us enter the New Year with externally imposed changes which we had little control over.

As I consider my own situation as intern minister here I am in the middle of my year internship while simultaneously ending it here at First Austin and about to begin a new stage at the Liveoak church. I now understand Jean Luc Godard’s phrase “A story should have a beginning, middle, and an end but not necessarily in that order.” My current situation is simultaneously a beginning, middle and an end. Time is a tricky concept.

The end of a calendar year also imposes on our lives transition points, often artificially, as work contracts and projects end or deadlines imposed by the Christmas season itself. The busyness of the Christmas season can also become such a focus for many of us that it becomes difficult to plan for the time after until we get through Christmas. At this time between Christmas and New Year is when we have the time and energy to take measure of the past and look towards the future.

The month of January is a somewhat arbitrary beginning for a new year since it does not correspond to the beginning of an agricultural season or astronomical cycle. The month of January is named after the Roman God Janus, who had two faces which allowed him to simultaneously look forward to the future and backwards to the past. The tradition of New Year resolutions is also traced to the God Janus and when taken seriously New Year resolutions are about looking at our behaviors of the past and envisioning how we could do better in the future.

As individuals many of us in small ways or perhaps even in significant ways undertake the tradition of New Year resolutions. The most common resolutions are: losing weight, getting fit, eating better, quitting smoking, drinking less alcohol, paying off debt, spending more time with the family, volunteering to help others more, and just being less grumpy. Some of these might be useful goals for many of us. And probably very similar goals to last year, and the year before and the year before that. Or perhaps that is just me. I actually thought that I might take up smoking just so that I could give it up thus fulfilling at least one resolution this year.

Of course the joke of so much of New Year resolutions is how little time it takes to fail in keeping them and how we desire the same changes each year. There is a whole industry around this such as gym membership which sky-rockets in January as the next cycle of resolutions for weight loss and greater fitness begin. While the idea of New Year resolutions can be shrugged off as just another silly example of human nature and the large disconnect between our spoken desires and our actual behavior, I do think the idea touches on a real desire for many of us to live better than we have done and the great difficulty we have in doing so.

Our Unitarian tradition of the 19th and 20th Century has focused on the self-improvement of the person and has been summarized as “Salvation by Character”.

Salvation in our Unitarian tradition was about individuals improving themselves and working towards their own and others moral improvement. We moved the emphasis from a faith in and obedience to a God to an emphasis on improving ourselves to become better, more ethical people, and this improvement was often expressed as becoming more God-like. The 19th Century Unitarian Minister William Ellery Channing said “To honor God, is to approach God as an inexhaustible Fountain of light, power, and purity. It is to feel the quickening and transforming energy of his perfections. It is to thirst for the growth and invigoration of the divine principle within us, and to seek the very spirit of God which proposes as its great end the perfection of the human soul.”

Now I think it is fair to say that most people do not think of their New Year resolutions as the perfecting of the human soul. Yet in their own way, New Year resolutions are about becoming a better person – physically, emotionally or even spiritually – tomorrow than you were yesterday. I wonder if the reason we do not take our resolutions or other desires to change seriously is that we do not aim high enough with our demands on ourselves? The desire for human improvement in our Unitarian tradition led to a great emphasis on the education of people. This belief is still strong in our movement with our strong support and belief in public education for all people.

For example, our split the plate donation today is going towards the American-Nepali Student and Women’s Educational Relief organization. This group, which we will support with half of our offering from today’s service, supports 12-15 years of education for children from the lower castes in Nepal. Our tradition of human improvement and belief in education has taken on a global perspective today, showing a growing focus for our social justice work that is in keeping with our religious tradition. As someone who was the first generation of my family to attend college I know of the transformative effects and opportunities that an education provides.

Religion for many of us is about the transformation of the individual and our society for the better. Transformation for individuals comes generally as a result of an interaction of external circumstances and our internal motivations. Many people come into our religious community desiring change in their lives perhaps by seeking a community where they can pursue spiritual questions, engage in social justice work, or find meaning for the changes their lives. All these can be acts of transformation.

The struggle many of us have in enacting transformations within ourselves is how we go from often vague desires for change into more firm beliefs until we engrain these beliefs as habits. I learned something about this struggle during my chaplaincy training last year where I was working with military veterans who had mental health concerns and addictions. By the time I was working with them many had reached a crisis in their life due to their addiction and were desperate for help.

There was a common pattern where there was a tendency for them to either blame everyone else or blame themselves for all of their problems. Much of the work I did was to explore where the blame should belong then encourage them to take the appropriate responsibility for their actions. Through the 12-step program of alcoholics anonymous there was a strong group support for the patient and the encouraging of humility in admitting the need of help from a higher power.

For many of the people I worked with they had admitted they were powerless to resist alcohol and chose to replace their addiction with a healthier, higher power which often gave them strength to address their addiction.

The major lesson I learned from these veterans was how they struggled with their addiction everyday. As one of them said to me “The difficulty is not to stop drinking but to stay sober every day. Stopping drinking isn’t hard. Not starting again is.” The discipline of choosing everyday not to drink alcohol for them was a huge act of self-control and I believe it to be a spiritual discipline.

In our Liberal Religious tradition much of our religion is to guide us in how we should act and how we should make decisions.

I see a commonality between how our religion guides us to enact changes in our own lives and how those in 12-Step programs were attempting to help people address their addictions. To take a vague desire of how I wish to be different and change it into a belief that I will act on a daily requires a commitment from me and the support of my community which holds me accountable. Enacting these beliefs in my words and actions is a daily spiritual discipline I engage in and often fail at.

As I fail at living up to my beliefs I am fortunate that the consequences are not as severe as those with addictions who I served as a chaplain to. I deal with my disappointment, reflect on why I failed to live to my expectations then begin the cycle again.

By letting go of any attachment towards any need of perfection and just focus on improvement allows me to show compassion to myself and stay engaged in changing my beliefs and habits. This model of action, reflection, and action with consistent emphasis on improvement not perfection is a simple yet significant approach for me to enact change in my life. For many Unitarian Universalists it can be hard for us to settle for simple improvement and not obsess about perfection. It is said that, “The pursuit of excellence is gratifying and healthy. The pursuit of perfection is frustrating, neurotic, and a terrible waste of time.” In this vein I want to share with you a resolution I arrived at that guides much of my life.

There is a lot of talk, at least among seminarians with too much spare time, that we really need to find some guiding principles to help us in daily life. Of course, I undertook up this project with serious intellectual rigor hoping to arrive at some weighty, profound ethical principal. In truth, the outcome for me was on the surface a disappointment. My guiding principle is that I only want to make brand new mistakes.

The satisfaction of making the same mistake as others is a shallow, frustrating consolation and I don’t want to make the same mistakes as others by reinventing another broken wheel. By not wanting to the mistakes of the past then I learn from history and by accepting that I am going to make mistakes, albeit new ones, allows me to move forward into unknown areas and overcome the fear of failure. I have actually found this seemingly superficial guiding principle of only making new mistakes quite liberating.

This thinking may also be beneficial for organizations such as a religious community. Organizations seem to settle into a common behavioral pattern which prevents change and seems to condition any new person to conform to the expected behavior of the organization. Yet if the goal of religion is individual and community growth then we want an organizational structure that encourages change of individuals and renewal of the organization itself not stifle transformations.

A community that learns from the past and takes risks moving forward will make brand new mistakes by pushing boundaries. Hesitancy and resistance to change are understandable but limiting. If we wish to make brand new mistakes then we have to overcome our resistance to change as individuals and as a religious community. What is so bad about a mistake – especially one that no-one has made before?

As adults we become very conscious of what others think of us and we often do not wish to appear less than competent. Ask a group of Kindergarden children if they can sing or can dance then almost all of them would raise their hand enthusiastically and they would be very keen to show you. As we get older, our inhibitions seem to set in and our desire to try new activities or approaches diminishes. We encourage children to make mistakes and to learn. We develop for them compassionate boundaries for them to push against and we support them in their struggles and failures.

As adults we lose the ability to appear vulnerable or fallible. I feel we limit ourselves by not allowing ourselves to make mistakes. As the poem Suzy read earlier said “We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining or self-derived. We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond our failures.”

There is a myth of competency we wish to project. Yet I think most of us have learned more from our mistakes than our successes. Those times we pushed ourselves into unknown areas, further than we intended beyond our comfort zone. By doing so we grow as people as we break down those barriers we have raised for ourselves or others attempted to impose on us.

Mistakes are almost a prerequisite for growth and success. Michael Jordan, the great basketball player, said “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

I would venture to say that perhaps the only real failure is to not attempt something that you really wish to do. When we think about our own life then we rarely regret what we did do, – now I’m only talking about legal activities here – our major regrets are those times where we did not do something when we had opportunity. Even when our efforts do not work out then we generally learn something, even if the lesson was to never to do that again. When we choose not to even attempt something for fear of failure then our learning opportunity is missed.

Of course to accept the possibility of our making a mistake involves us being willing to take a risk. The following words from the poem “To Risk” capture much of our struggles concerning our aversion to risk.

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.

To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.

To reach out for another is to risk exposing our true self.

To place our ideas – our dreams – before the crowd is to risk loss.

To love is to risk not being loved in return.

To hope is to risk despair.

To try is to risk failure.

To live is to risk dying.

I would say that all of these actions – to laugh, weep, reach out, dream, to love, to hope, to try – are acts of coming alive and truly living. They all involve a risk but a risk of what – appearing foolish or sentimental, not being loved, exposing our true feelings. These may be sources of discomfort but are not character flaws. By growing from and beyond our failures and mistakes, we are coming alive to all of life’s possibilities. With knowledge of the past and imagination for the future we can make our whole life be a spiritual practice -breaking down the artificial barriers between the secular and the sacred, between ourselves and others. In doing this we awaken our soul to the excitement and nourishment of the complete spiritual life.

——————-

Cassara, Ernest Biography of Hosea Ballou http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/hoseaballou.html Last accessed on December 27, 2008

Channing, William Ellery, Likeness to God: William Ellery Channing Selected Writing Robinson, David ed., (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) p.156

Hansel, Tim, Eating Problems for Breakfast (Word Publishing, 1988) p.39 quote from Edwin Bliss

Anonymous. To Risk Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993) #658

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Brian Ferguson

 December 21, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Reading –

For So The Children Come

by Sophia Lyon Fahs

For so the children come

And so they have been coming.

Always in the same way they come

born of the seed of man and woman.

No angels herald their beginnings.

No prophets predict their future courses.

No wisemen see a star to show

where to find the babe that will save humankind.

Yet each night a child is born is a holy night

Fathers and mothers–

sitting beside their children’s cribs

feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning.

They ask, ‘Where and how will this new life end?

Or will it ever end?’

Each night a child is born is a holy night–

A time for singing,

A time for wondering,

A time for worshipping.

Prayer

These are the words of Eusebius, the 3rd Century Christian Bishop

May I be no one’s enemy and may I be the friend of that which is eternal and abides.

May I wish for every person’s happiness and envy none.

May I never rejoice in the ill fortune of one who has wronged me.

May I, to the extent of my power, give needful help to all who are in want.

May I never fail a friend.

May I respect myself.

May I always keep tame that which rages within me.

May I accustom myself to be gentle and never be angry with others because of circumstances.

May I know good people and follow in their footsteps.

Amen

Reading

“Christ Climbed Down”

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year

and ran away to where 

there were no rootless Christmas trees

hung with candy canes and breakable stars

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year 

and ran away to where 

there were no gilded Christmas trees

and no tinsel Christmas trees

and no tinfoil Christmas trees

and no pink plastic Christmas trees

and no gold Christmas trees

and no powderblue Christmas trees

hung with electric candles

and encircled by tin electric trains

and clever cornball relatives

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year 

and ran away to where 

no intrepid Bible salesmen

covered the territory 

in two-tone cadillacs

and where no Sears Roebuck crches

complete with plastic babe in manger

arrived by parcel post

the babe by special delivery

and where no televised Wise Men

praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year 

and ran away to where 

no fat handshaking stranger

in a red flannel suit

and a fake white beard

went around passing himself off

as some sort of North Pole saint

crossing the desert to Bethlehem

Pennsylvania 

in a Volkswagen sled

drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer

with German names

and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts

from Saks Fifth Avenue

for everybody’s imagined Christ child

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year 

and ran away to where 

no Bing Crosby carollers

groaned of a tight Christmas

and where no Radio City angels

iceskated wingless

through a winter wonderland

into a jinglebell heaven

daily at 8:30 with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year 

and softly stole away into

some anonymous Mary’s womb again

where in the darkest night

of everybody’s anonymous soul

He awaits again 

an unimaginable 

and impossibly 

Immaculate Reconception 

the very craziest 

of Second Comings

Sermon – Brian Ferguson

Here we are four days before Christmas and we are in the aftermath of a divisive church conflict regarding the dismissal of our minister. Everyone seems to be hurting.

I know I am moving between emotions of sadness, anger, and confusion. It is not a good place to be. The future looks uncertain, many are disillusioned about our church community, and most of us are still trying to make sense of what just happened over the last month. Christmas time is where the dominant religious culture and dominant secular culture are telling us is a time of joy and celebration. I am not feeling much joy and celebration right now.

Christmas is often a time when we Unitarian Universalists turn to our Christian roots. There is a certain irony to this since for most Christians, Easter has a far greater religious significance than Christmas. Easter is about the resurrection of Jesus which demonstrates the divinity of Jesus. Christmas on the hand is very much a story about the humanity of Jesus since it is a celebration of his birth and the hope his birth symbolizes. I am feeling all too human right now and the powerlessness that involves. Hope is something which would be helpful at this time.

The religious message of hope often gets lost amidst the secular aspects of Christmas that the poem I read earlier somewhat cynically described – “the tinsel Christmas trees, the plastic babe in a manger, and the North Pole saint in a red flannel suit with a fake white beard.” Not much sign of hope there. These images of Christmas are so familiar to us from television, shopping malls, and the front yard of our neighbors – or perhaps if we are honest even our own front yards – yes confession time in the UU church. I warned you we would be going back to our Christian roots.

Despite the rampant commercialization of Christmas there is an important religious message to some Christians and it is perhaps the most important aspect of our Christian heritage that we Unitarian Universalists continue to embrace. That is the idea of the incarnation. The divine embodied in flesh is the literal meaning. Incarnation is the idea of the divine being active in the material world in human form. In Christianity this figure was Jesus Christ who came to communicate a message of salvation to people therefore took human form.

Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors embraced the idea of incarnation very seriously and reached some radical conclusions. Incarnation to them meant our highest ideals are embodied into our human form and become an active presence in our world through our own actions. The 19th Century Unitarian William Ellery Channing says “Jesus came, not only to teach with his lips, but to be a living manifestation of his religion – to be, in an important sense, the religion itself. Christianity is a living, embodied religion. It is example and action” This is a call to us to live out our values actively in our lives – to be the incarnation of our values in our world.

Thinking of Jesus in these terms helps me understand the Christian idea of the Church as the Body of Christ. This term can be confusing but I find it helpful in thinking about our religious community being infused and guided by high ideals and moral values. The mission statement of our church reads: “As an inclusive religious and spiritual community, we support each individual’s search for meaning and purpose, and join together to help create a world filled with compassion and love.” Just as some believe that spiritual energy brings alive the material body of a person, our religious community is brought alive by the high spiritual ideas and morals of our mission. Without such ideas we are just a physical building and social group not a church.

In thinking of our church here in Austin as a body it is fair to say our particular body right now is feeling battered, bruised, and broken. It is difficult to find the infusion of high spiritual ideals as we assess where we are as a community. In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, the local congregation has the power to call and dismiss a minister. There is no hierarchical power structure that imposes ministers on congregations as in some religions. The right of a congregation to call any minister of their choosing is a great strength of our movement and has allowed us to be the first religion to call women, gay, and transgender ministers. This is an aspect of our history that we are rightly very proud of. The shadow side of this congregational power is the conflict and divisiveness that can occur within a congregation around the dismissal of a minister. Sadly, this latter case has been so clearly demonstrated to us in the last few weeks.

We are in a time of great pain, uncertainty, and confusion as a religious community. We have voted to dismiss our senior minister, and our future is uncertain. There is pain about the loss of our minister, pain about the process leading up to the vote, and pain about the divisions in our community. I personally have a pain that is beyond the disappointment of losing a colleague and supervisor. I have a pain that is an injury of the soul. My spiritual wound is due to our religious community losing touch with the core elements of our mission such as compassion and love in the turmoil of the last few weeks. I look around our community and see great hurt amongst people on all sides of the vote. I am also pained as valued members of our community leave wounded by the events of recent weeks.

I heard and read statements about the senior minister and members of the board of trustees that I found offensive and disrespectful, and believe such statements should have had no place in any community let alone a religious one. This pained me deeply. We have a right to free speech and to disagreement, in fact they are at the core of our Liberal Religious movement, but we also have a responsibility to exercise those rights respectfully and for the greater good of our community. The value of the inherent worth and dignity of every person is not a value that is turned on at our convenience. Such values are principles we are called to follow and may be most important when we engage with those who we are in disagreement with.

Some people who supported dismissal told me that they feel they now have their church back. Others who wished to retain the minister say they feel they have lost their church and plan to leave our community. I would remind both groups an important yet often unrecognized aspect of our Liberal Religious Tradition – You only lose this church if you choose to leave it. The church as a community is still here and hopefully always will be. We do not exclude people because of how they voted, what they believe, or have creeds you must conform to before you can join.

For those who have come back because they feel they have their church back I caution them that is a different church today than the one they recall from their past. Churches like physical bodies are organic institutions which change over time as new people come in, bringing their energy and vitality forever changing our community. This is a very good thing. For those who feel they have recently lost their church, it is true the church they experienced before the conflict is no longer with us. It is said that forgiveness is the giving up of any hope of a better past. I would suggest that the church of the past for all of us is gone. We cannot unring the bell.

We must attempt to heal our present wounds and begin envisioning what church we want to be in the future. To begin healing we must understand the mistakes we made in the past and why recent events have caused so much hurt in our community. I sympathize with the frustration and sadness that leads people to want to leave a church. We have high expectations of people in our religious community, be they our minister, board members, committee chairs, office staff, other members, or even our ministerial intern. We are all human and often fail to live up to the values as we would wish to.

When wounded in our lives, many of us turn to our religious community for healing. When a part of our religious community is the cause of our wounds then we struggle to believe our church can be a part of our healing. I believe a spiritual injury needs spiritual healing. Perhaps the healing can happen in another religious community but I would suggest the healing might be more whole, more complete if it occurs within the religious community that caused the injury?

The great 16th Century Unitarian Francis David said “We do not need to think alike to love alike.” We hear these words so often in our Unitarian Universalist churches that the profoundness of them can become lost.

These words are so much easier said than acted upon. In the recent turmoil in our church, these words occurred to me often but sadly too often in the violation rather than the observance of the sentiment. We claim that we wish a diversity of opinions and then when we disagree on a major issue we seem to quickly fall out of right relationship with each other. Perhaps the problem is many of us join our movement because “we want to be around people who think like we do.” When a point of disagreement comes up in our community then our relationship with each other can quickly sour and we are at a loss about how to repair it.

As most of us know from our most intimate relationships, a relationship based on love is no guarantee of agreement on all things and avoidance of conflict. Apologies to any new lovers out there! A relationship based on love is a commitment to stay in relationship and work out the difficulties in a mutually beneficial way if possible.

Both our religious connection to our church and our intimate relationships can grow stronger as we work through our differences and conflicts. Being around people who have the same opinions as us is certainly comfortable and supportive but only limited growth can occur. I believe we grow more when we are in community with people who challenge us and are willing to stay in relationship with us as we differ in our thoughts. We can all grow spiritually through this challenge.

One of our duties as members of this religious community is to hold each other accountable for our actions, values and opinions by calling us to embody these values in our actions. I believe Davidson attempted to hold us accountable to these high ideals through his sermons. I believe the board thought they were acting to hold ministerial leadership accountable to our higher values. Many members of our congregation attempted to hold our leadership accountable to values of fairness and openness in recent weeks. These were all good aspects of what happened in the last few weeks.

I believe the failure of our community in the last few weeks is where we fell out of love, respect, and compassion with those we disagree with or were in conflict with. We stopped living our mission by failing to act with compassion and love towards those we disagreed with. Reasonable people can disagree on issues, and disagreeing respectfully is possible. A chasm developed between groups within us where listening stopped as the voices became louder.

There was a dehumanizing of people on all sides of this issue that was heartbreaking for me to witness. I also feel complicit in this since I did too little to stop it. I regret my failure not to do enough to address the dehumanizing words and actions I witnessed on all sides. For example I was talking to a ministerial colleague from another church yesterday who was disgusted by us having many of the documents available through our public website. I too was troubled by this but did not address it Damage was done not only to our church but our movement.

We all probably can think of areas we should have address or things we did differently. Our views became entrenched which limited our imagination to see a greater range of possibilities for the process and how our actions impacted others. I think much of our pain is that we know in our hearts we could have done so much better.

To return to the earlier analogy of the Church as a body: prior to the board’s request for Davidson’s dismissal, a large portion of this community saw our church body as healthy, vibrant, and happy. The request for dismissal and build-up to the congregational meeting showed that much of the body of religious community was injured and in pain. There was a disappointment for many of us that we were unaware of the true feelings of our friends and fellow members of our own religious community. This painful realization that what we thought was a community of health was really a community of brokenness and this was a shock to many.

In looking at how we heal and move forward, I am trying to find sources of hope. One hope I find is that we were not failed by our values but our failure to live up to our values. We often failed to stay in relationship with those we disagree with – to love those that did not think like us.

I have had people on all sides of the issues talk to me trying to find meaning in what happened and seeking to understand their own pain and the pain of others. An honest seeking to understand the pain of others is a sign of hope. The need to be in fellowship with those who share our view is understandable and may be needed in providing emotional support.

The beginning of healing in our community I believe begins with each of us getting together with those having differing opinions and listening to them. Not trying to argue our point or find reasons to dismiss what they are saying, but listening to them to understand why others have the feelings they do. Hopefully if we listen to them they may reciprocate by listening to us. We will hear why people with similar information as us believed, acted, and reached conclusions very different from our own.

Perhaps we may understand most of us were acting in what we believed to be the common good for our religious community. Out of this may grow that seed of respect and though this is not quite the same as loving those who think differently from us, it has the potential to grow there. And at least we will be back in right relationship with others and moving forward. I wish us all well on this difficult journey and hope that we can all be a part of the important work we need to do. As we move towards the Christmas holiday and look forward to our future together may the following words of Howard Thurman hold all of us with love:

When the song of angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

to find the lost,

to heal the broken,

to feed the hungry,

to release the prisoner,

to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among the family,

to make music in the heart.

May we all find the music we need for our hearts at this time and through our actions may we be the incarnation of our highest values of love and compassion in this world. And in doing so let us do the healing, rebuilding, and bringing of peace that our community and our world desperately needs.

———————

Channing, William Ellery, The Imitablness of Christ’s Character: The Works of William Ellery Channing Vol.IV (Boston, MA: American Unitarian Association, 1903) p.135

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© Brian Ferguson

 November 30, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Reading:

excerpt from Sin, Evil, and Economics

by contemporary Christian Theologian Sallie McFague.

Thanks to technologies of communication, transportation, and commerce, the world of the twenty-first century is more deeply interconnected than ever before, and it is increasingly clear that the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism. Not everyone chooses to recognize the primacy of that language, and some speak defiantly in other tongues, but there can be little argument that it has become the global discourse with which all others must contend. It is the defining myth of our time.

While we each have choices to make about the degree to which we will “buy into” the myth, practically no one on earth has the freedom to opt out altogether. It is that pervasive and that powerful. And at the heart of capitalism, I have argued, is the exact dynamic of freedom and bondage as described by the famous Christian theologian Augustine’s theory of evil. Capitalism assumes that we are creatures of desire, and it stokes our desire for lesser goods to the point of addiction, finally rendering us powerless to opt out of its dynamic.

What would it mean, after all, to get “outside” of capitalism in today’s world? Even those who want nothing to do with it, who view it as the pinnacle of Western corruption or imperialism, or whose minds and bodies bear the scars of its excesses and exclusions, are nevertheless pulled into its captivating influence.

Strangely, while market capitalism began with a classic Christian view of humanity based on selfish greed—the basis for the allocation of scarce resources and the eventual “trickle down” of prosperity for all in the twenty-first century—it has eventuated in a näive, optimistic, narrow, and undifferentiated view of sin and evil. Classical economic theory claims that the very core of who we are—individuals motivated by insatiable desire for more and more goods—is the basis from which to build the good life for all. From the selfish desires of billions of human beings turning the earth’s resources into goods for sale, prosperity for all will presumably come eventually.

This vision of the good life, however, neglects two huge facts: the just distribution of the earth’s resources as well as the limits of these resources. We now know that these matters are not mysteriously taken care of by the “invisible hand” of economics; on the contrary, the insatiable greed of billions of human beings causes horrendous injustice to other creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as undermining the sustainability of the planet itself.

But market capitalism does not deal with the tragic dimensions of sin and evil; its view of sin is narrow and viewed only as a sin against God, even though the implication of unregulated greed results in sin against neighbor and nature. By bracketing sin within the limits of the violation of God’s will, it eliminates from view the massive evil that our individual choices have created for others on planet Earth.

Prayer

The following are the words of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.

Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.

Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.

Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living beings.

Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.

With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, nd of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.

Amen

Sermon – Religion and Economics

With the Thanksgiving holiday just past, there is now the seasonal tumble into the Christmas holidays. This past Friday apparently marks the beginning of the Christmas season, a beginning marked by shopping rather than any religious significance or perhaps shopping is religion for some people.

The media attempts to whip up excitement about the beginning of the Christmas shopping season as if it is some sort of race or competition. The mantra seems to be “they who buy the most present wins.” We are told about the must-have goods this season and the so-called bargains to be had. Those of us with children have already been barraged for a few weeks about the gifts our children want. A list that seems ever-changing – or perhaps I missed the point and my daughter’s new requests were additions to her list of desires and not replacements. I might have a very disappointed daughter this Christmas as she receives only one of her many requests.

Looking for someone to blame for these endless requests for presents, I blame at the media. Then I realize that my five year old daughter is too young to read and she doesn’t watch television but she has this remarkably impressive communication network which keeps her supplied with all the information about the latest hip toys. This week I read an article where a group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood had asked the Toy industry to cut back on its marketing to children due to the severe economics hardships which are particularly affecting families.

The Toy industry Association’s response was a firm defense of current marketing practices by asserting that children “are a vital part of the gift selection process.” It appears to me the toy industry association sees children as their most effective and certainly most persistent sales people. So begins the child on their life-long role as consumers. With little regulation of advertising to children then we leave the individual parents battling the massive forces of advertising in a David and Goliath battle where we have taken the sling slot away from David and given it to Goliath.

While the creation of desire for some product by advertising and the resulting peer pressure is most noticeable in children, I think most of us are affected by it. The philosopher and environmentalist, Max Oelschlaeger, says “In so-far as Americans have a collective identity it is as the consumer who lives amid unprecedented material choice and the worker who bends the earth to our virtually unrestrained human purpose.”

Even in difficult economic times as we are experiencing now then consumerism permeates our society in so many ways it creates values and purpose for many people. James Luther Adams, the 20th century Unitarian theologian, maintained that all people have a religion whether they realize it or not. He says “The question concerning faith is not, shall I be a person of faith? The proper question is, rather, which faith is mine? For whether a person craves prestige, wealth, security, or amusement; whether he lives for country, for science, for God or for plunder, he shows that he has faith, he shows that he puts confidence in something. Find out what he gives his deepest loyalty to and you’ve found his religion.” In listening to these words today, it appears to me that money, material possession, and our roles as consumers are defining meaning and value for many in our society therefore fulfills many of the roles of religion.

Our economic system through consumerism and advertising is a powerful perhaps dominant cultural force in our lives today. Yet as we reminded in the reading from Melita earlier, it is based on individual self-interest which unless we control it is just the contemporary reincarnation of the sin of greed. While Economics is often thought of as the study of money and financial systems, it is really a study of human decision-making for the allocation of limited resources. Economics is about how we deal with scarcity and limits with money being an important mechanism to determine the allocation of resources “efficiently”. Sometimes I find it hard to think of money as merely a tool in our lives since so often it seems like a goal in itself. We choose our jobs based on it, plan our retirements around it, and it places very real limitations on the lives of most of us.

Some people say that money makes the world go around. Another view is that money doesn’t make the world go around, but having it makes the journey much more pleasant. Regardless money is important in our society and necessary to meet many of our basic needs. But money can become an obsession for us as we desire more than necessary for their basic needs and distorting what is most important in our lives. All of the major religions caution us to beware of money becoming an idol or a false God, yet religious institutions walk that difficult line of needing money for their own survival but not wanting to be obsessed about it.

In the reading earlier, the author Sallie McFague states that in the 21st Century “the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism” and asks the question of what it would mean to get outside of capitalism in today’s world? We are all so submerged in the world of commerce both as workers and consumers that it is difficult to remember that there are some institutions that do not operate on the typical model of market capitalism. Our non-profit philanthropic institutions are an example which collect donations then distribute goods and services to those in need. There is no attempt to make a profit therefore they can provide goods and services to everyone free or reduced cost.

Another institution that operates on the edge of the market capitalism system is this church. Some might say that our church operates in the hardest aspects of both the non-profit and for-profit world. Our income to support this church is through the donations of members like you – sounds like a National Public radio pledge drive – while much of our spending is in the world of market capitalism. We cannot turn around to the electrical utility company and say donations are down this month so we can’t pay you but we will as soon as donations pick up. I would love to see their faces at the suggestion.

The existence of all elements of this religious community is dependent on the donations of money and time from you the members of the congregation. You are asked to donate what you can financially to sustain and grow our community. There is no market mechanism that determines the price in competition with other churches. Could you imagine charging for people to come for our worship services – $20 to hear the senior minister, $5 for the intern minister and a refund if you don’t like the message?

Perhaps I’ll talk to stewardship about this idea. Not only is the idea crass it misses an important point about why we are here. We have our message, our culture, and our values which we wish to promote to all who are interested. We believe our religious vision has value but we also believe that it is too important, too valuable for people to be prevented hearing our vision due to lack of money. Most religious groups want to transcend the artificial limits placed on access to places and experiences based on limited money.

Those limits are placed by our economic system in an attempt to handle the scarcity of a resource and in a desire to make a profit. Religion is attempting to remove these limits by seeing our message and values as a source of abundance not a cause for scarcity. Most of us are attracted to our religious community because our lives are improved in some way by being here.

Many of us feel affirmed by being part of this community, some of us have had life changing experiences here, and I know people who feel our Liberal religious message has been life-saving to them. How do you put a dollar price on such a place? You can’t. The work is too important but such activities have a cost. Therefore as a religious community we let each of us decide for ourselves about the value of the community we have here and the contribution we wish to make to ease that cost. We are outside much of the market system since we give our service away without charge and those of us who choose, contribute our money and time as we determine is appropriate.

Our economic system is very efficient at delivering a variety of products and services to people for a low price. That is its purpose and we all live with the benefits of that. Our economics system was never developed to be the promoter of values for our society that was what religion is for. Values such as ecological sustainability and greater justice for more people are not promoted in our current economic system unless the consumers force it to. Our consuming habits are perhaps the clearest way that we express our moral choices on a daily basis yet there seems to be a strong separation between our economics and our religion.

The famous industrialist, Andrew Carnegie said that Christianity should not interfere with how money is made and only get involved in how its surplus should be dispersed in the form of charity. It seems that many religious organizations have not moved beyond such thinking therefore often fail to critique our economics system where it may be exploitive of people or abusive to our environment. If injustice in our society is caused by unethical production of goods, unsustainable consumption of resources, or deceitful advertising it not only appropriate to address the issues but I would say our religion calls us to do so.

In the reading we heard earlier, the author Sallie McFague discusses the use of the Christian doctrines of sin and evil in addressing the harm excessive and unregulated greed is harmful to our world. Her critique of market capitalism is that sustainability and justice for all inhabitants are not its central goals of the system. Now we do not talk about sin or evil much in the pulpits of our Unitarian Universalist churches perhaps that is why many of you are here and not at other churches – but I think the ideas behind the doctrines if not the terms themselves can be useful in addressing the excesses and exploitative elements of our economic system.

Now, the Liberal Religious tradition has moved away a long time ago from the doctrine of Original Sin where humanity is inherently depraved but the concept of sin itself is more ambiguous for us. I feel comfortable with McFague’s idea of sin being an excessive concern for ourselves at the expense of the needs of others or sustainability of the planet. Sin is something we are responsible for and can control through the choices we make.

McFague defines evil as the institutions, practices, and attitudes resulting from an exploitive economic system based on excessive individual self-interest, which creates suffering and deprivation in our world. For example, it may seem in my self-interest to buy a product at a low price but if the product was made by forced child labor then I think it is appropriate to call this a sinful act supporting an evil system. Strong but I feel appropriate words. We can replace sin with wrong and evil with bad, it is the meaning not the words that are important.

With these concepts of sin and evil then this sets up a great tension between our economic system and religion. Market capitalism believes that the good life is built by each of us pursuing our own enlightened self-interest. Religion cautions against excessive self-interest and reminds us that through our interdependence we are called to care for one another and our planet.

I think this is a question we deal with daily during satisfying our own needs is when does our enlightened self-interest become excessive self-interest? How do we, as religious people and consumers who desire to lead a good life, deal with this tension in our self-interest as we go about our busy lives and with the child who has just made yet another request for a Christmas present? You really want an easy answer for this one aren’t you – alas there isn’t one. We have to accept that tension between enlightened and excessive self-interest as real and difficult. Our choices as consumers can have a negative impact therefore we should be intentional and thoughtful about our purchasing choices.

The stewardship of our planet and welfare of all people is particularly important in the age of the Global Economy since the environmental impact and exploitation of people may occur far from our purchasing of a product therefore could remain invisible to us unless we are vigilant. The notion of interdependence between ourselves as consumers and the workers who produce the goods, wherever in the world they are, leads us to take responsibility for buying products that were produced without exploitation. Examples of exploitation would be child labor, coerced labor, or paying non-livable wages.

If our individual consumer decisions create an economic system that prevents those in need receiving basic necessities and those producing the goods a reasonable quality of life, then our individual decisions should be able to change this system. I, like many of you, have tried with my consumption habits to move beyond the obvious criteria of price, function, and style to consider the following factors:

Try to distinguish between my true long-term needs and my short-term often misplaced desires.

Can I borrow, barter or get used whatever I am wanting?

Consider factors other than price such as how goods were produced including working conditions, reputation of company involved, and environmental impact.

These criteria do not make shopping easier since they take effort and any desire for perfection will be very frustrating. The goal for me is greater intention and awareness in my consumer habits, which allows me to bring my religious values into my everyday life in a meaningful way. We are both beneficiaries of our market capitalism system and often sufferers in the hardships created by it.

Our economic system is good at delivering products for a low price and handling scarcity. It was not designed to and therefore does not do a good job of determining values or what is valuable.

In our consumer culture today it is too easy to confuse price and value – they are not the same thing. Just consider what is most valuable in your own life – I suspect it has nothing to do with the price you paid for them assuming they even had a price. The love of friends and family, the old photographs we have, a book of special importance to us, that great piece of music that brings us to tears, or that life-changing experience that might even have happened in this church. Those items are dealing in a currency that is far more important than money. They are dealing in the eternal values of finding what makes our life worth living and meaningful. Let the economic system determine price, we are the only ones that define for ourselves what has value and worth in our lives.

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Jones, Serene and Lakeland, Paul. Editors. Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) p.141, 148

Crary, David. Meltdown fallout: some parents rethink toy-buying http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081129/ap-on-bi-ge/toy-worries (accessed 29th November, 2008)

Oelschlaeger, Max Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental crisis. (New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press, 1994) p.96

Parke, David The Epic of Unitarianism (Skinner House, Boston, 1985) p.149

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) p.148

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) p.141

Meeks, M. Douglas God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1989) p.20

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) p.148