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© Davidson Loehr

January 21, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We want to reweave the lost connections in our world. Those feelings of warmth and kinship we did have or might have – we want to reweave them.

The gentle feelings that we can feel at times even for strangers, that knowledge beyond all argument that we are one, that we are indeed all in this together, flesh of one flesh and blood of one blood – where do they come from, those gentle feelings, and how can we get them back?

Sometimes we feel a more immediate and warmer compassion for a stray animal we”ve never seen before than we can muster for the other human beings with whom we live. Why is that? Can it really be that familiarity breeds only contempt? It seems so sour a view of closeness, we vote No.

Yet something, over time, seems to breed at least indifference, and the indifference can kill the spirit of life itself, left to fester. Something can seem to die, even in the very relationships we most cherish. How did it happen? And can what seems wounded be brought back to full health?

These questions run through our relationships, our jobs, our families, our nation and our world. Everywhere, so much has come undone. We want to reweave the lost connections in our world. Those feelings of warmth and kinship we did have or might have – we want to reweave them. We will need all the help we can get . Let us seek that help, within and among our selves and our precious relationships with others. Amen.

SERMON

When the foundations of our Western religion were laid, when Yahweh, the main God of the ancient Hebrews, was created a few thousand years ago, he was created specifically to oppose the nature deities of the Canaanite culture in which the ancient Hebrews originated.

The Canaanites saw us as absolutely embedded in nature, because they were farmers. The Hebrews were sheep-herders, and created a religion that pretended we had no deep connection with nature at all, only with their God, who was created as a kind of tribal chief.

Yet we are profoundly children of nature. And that means that some of the biases in our religions have profoundly misidentified us and misled us. The real ground of our being is in our deep relationships with all other life on earth, and with the earth itself, not with authoritative voices from on high, or wishful and distracting poetry.

That’s why I think it’s worth trying to take a more serious look at who we are and where we came from, because Life knows a lot. There are a lot of deep and clear patterns that can help show us who we are, what we need, what we love, and how we can live more fulfilled lives.

So I want to look at some of the things life seems to know, by looking at some animal stories – today, stories from monkeys and the two apes who are our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos, plus a few stories about dogs, elephants, bulls and pigs.

One of the most important things these stories show us is how much other animals can think like us, find the same kind of solution to their problems that we might seek.

Modern study of animals” inventive problem-solving began in 1953, when a Japanese observer studying a troop of Japanese macaque monkeys, noticed that a young female she had named Imo, had suddenly solved a problem the rest of her troop hadn’t been able to solve.

Researchers were giving the monkeys sweet potatoes, which the monkeys liked a lot. But the potatoes were covered in sand and dirt, and you can imagine the feeling of chewing a potato covered in sand and dirt, what would you do? I can tell you what the monkeys did. The one named Imo, just a year and a half old, took her potato into the ocean, and scrubbed the dirt off in the ocean water. Three years later, Imo came up with a second brilliant idea, when she figured out how to separate all the sand from rice they found on the beach. What would you do? Imo solved it by tossing handfuls of the rice and sand mixture into the water, letting the sand sink, and eating the rice that stayed on the surface, now lightly salted by the ocean water.

Before too long, the other monkeys in her community had learned to wash their potatoes and their rice, and now more than a half century later, long after Imo has died, the whole culture of monkeys still does these things, and teaches their children how to do them. Imo’s ideas have become a part of monkey culture.

Chimpanzees have done even more impressive things.

In Africa, they have devised a hammer and anvil technique to break open very hard Coula and Panda nuts. They will carry these nuts to a special tree root or rock with an indentation in it, put the nut in the indentation, then with a heavy stick or rock, crush it enough to get the nut out of the inside. They can get about 3800 calories a day this way, and many have become very good at it. It’s a skill that can take a decade to learn well. Children learn the skill from their elders, and it has been part of their chimpanzee culture for a long time now. (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi, p. 29)

The human natives living in the area also eat those nuts, and have their own hammer and anvil stations in their villages that look like those the chimps have hidden deep in the jungle. So it looks like the chimps and the humans thought alike, and figured out the same solution to the same problem, and we’re always impressed with an animal’s intelligence if they think like we do.

We used chimpanzees in the early years of our space program, in ways many Americans may not know today. In the late 50s, our US Air Force bought about 65 chimps from Africa and began training them to operate the controls inside space capsules. Some of you will remember – from history books if not from newspapers – that the first living things we fired into space were chimpanzees.

They trained the young chimps through a reward and punishment system, giving them banana pellets for correct moves and electric shocks to their feet for wrong moves, because they assumed that chimps could only care about rewards and punishments.

But the second chimp we sent into space showed us something different. His name was Enos, and after his Atlas rocket blasted off in November 1961, the machinery malfunctioned once he got into orbit. A fuel line stuck open, wasting fuel and sending the capsule into a dangerous wobble. He had to correct the wobble, and help bring the thing back to earth. Now remember, this was a five-year-old chimpanzee. It was like sending a 3- or 4-year-old boy into space, and expecting him to help correct the flight of an errant spaceship. Even worse, the reward and punishment system went haywire, and began giving banana pellets for wrong responses, and giving electric shocks for correct moves.

The rocket scientists assumed Enos would begin making wrong moves in order to get his banana pellets. Instead, he did the moves he knew were right, even though he got an electric shock for every right response. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, pp. 40-41) We talk of the joy of doing a job well, and the Germans have the term funktionslust, meaning the love of what we can do well. It plays a big role in self-fulfillment for many people. But also for many other animals. Those who work with seeing-eye dogs or rescue dogs talk of the dogs” delight, the dogs” satisfaction, in being good at what they do. It’s the healthy kind of pride, not to be confused with the kind that goes before a fall.

In post-flight tests the scientists could barely match the chimp’s in-flight performance, and none of them were receiving shocks. Thanks to the space exploits of our Astrochimps, NASA made 250 safety and comfort modifications to improve Friendship 7, the spacecraft that would carry John Glenn around the earth three times in February 1962. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 42)

But impressive as all this is, there are much more interesting things that other animals have to teach us about life. They’re more about animals showing us what living things need: things that we need too, and which may be some of the fundamental needs of all life, or at least most animals. Today I’ll talk about what life seems to know that it needs – what we can learn from the “mind of Life,” to put it poetically. Next week I’ll focus more on the heart of life: some of the emotional dimensions of life that are clearly recognizable to us even in species separated from us by tens or hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

Today, I want to share some animal stories that show us things we know about ourselves, but may not know are deep parts of what almost all animals need. The stories tell us that life needs

Health or wholeness (one meaning of “salvation”)

Freedom and dignity

A safe place

Fairness, or justice

These are needs that we have encased in our religions and our laws, but they are far older than gods, religions or laws.

1. Life seeks health, wholeness (“salvation”)

Seeking health and wholeness is very close to what is meant by the word “salvation” in Western theology. The word comes from a Latin word for “to save,” but it is also the root of our word “salve.” Salvation is a healthy kind of wholeness, and the desire for it predates the gods by millions of years. And we know, to a small or large extent, what we need to feel healthy and whole.

We all know that dogs and cats will lick their wounds, to clean and heal themselves. And cats will eat grass to help with their digestive system. But you may not have known about the evidence that chimpanzees in the jungle self-medicate. Some self-medication is widespread in all sort of animals, such as the eating of clay, which contains absorbent components resembling Kaopectate, or cats eating grass to aid their digestive system. But apes are also known to chew the bitter pith of certain plants, which cures worm infestations and dysentery. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 254)

Another discovery is that apes do what is called leaf-swallowing. Chimpanzees tend to swallow them in the morning, before foraging for food. They don’t chew them, they carefully fold them over so they can be swallowed whole. The leaves move through their system like brooms, expelling parasites from their intestines. Leaf swallowing has been identified in a lot of chimpanzee populations across Africa, involving over thirty different plant species. (The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 255)

Some of the human tribes living in those areas use many of the same plants for the same purposes, and Western doctors are now studying the chimpanzee knowledge of natural plant remedies. We seem to think a lot alike.

2. Life needs freedom and dignity

A second need we animals have is the need for freedom and dignity. Nobody likes to be “dissed,” and feeling disrespected has led to many fights and wars. But a lot of animals won’t put up with it.

If you’ve owned a dog, you know that they do not like to be laughed at. They will often look at you and give you that “Rowr-rown-rowr-rowr!” noise, if you tease them. And you know just what they mean: “Stop it! Stop teasing me!” And maybe even, “I’ve got teeth, you know!”

A 19th century writer told a story about his terrier, who loved to snap at flies on the windowpane. When the owner noticed one day that the dog wasn’t actually catching any flies, he began making fun of him, laughing and pointing to the flies. The dog promptly snapped at thin air, pretended to have caught a fly, and chewed the imaginary fly up really good. And then I suspect he snorted and walked away with his head held high. (story from George Romanes in Animal Intelligence, 1886, from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs, p. 105)

Nobody liked to be “dissed.” When I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta last November, I talked with a scientist named Sarah Brosnan who said she could only do behavioral experiments with the chimpanzees when they were in the mood. She said chimps are very smart. They can easily figure out what you are trying to test in your experiments, and if you don’t respect their moods and strong wishes, they will simply sabotage you! She had run many experiments in “match-to-object” tests with an adolescent female chimp named Rita, and Rita always scored about 90% recognition. Then Rita came into estrus, and didn’t want to be taken away from the boys. Sarah persisted, and managed to remove Rita anyway, and take her to the testing room. Suddenly, Rita couldn’t do better than 10% recognition. A few weeks later, when she was through with the boys, she immediately returned to her 90% recognition rate. How much like teen-agers does that sound?

Let’s take a much heavier and more tragic story.

The state of New Hampshire’s motto is “Live free or die,” (the full quote from General Stark in 1809 was “Live free or die! Death is not the worst of evils.”) And we all know Patrick Henry’s famous battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” We may think this shows a life-or-death devotion to abstract ideals like freedom and dignity that only we humans are capable of, because we never hear animals talking about concepts like freedom or dignity. But here too, we only put words to a feeling shared by thousands of animals for millions of years before we came along.

Just this week, one of the scientists with whom I’ve been in e-mail contact (Marc Bekoff, an ethologist from the University of Colorado in Boulder) sent me a story from a newspaper in Thailand, about the training program for the elephants they use to perform for tourists, and take people for elephant rides. The training is more brutal than I had wanted to know. It is called “crushing,” meaning crushing the elephant’s spirit, and about half the elephants die during the training, as They’re chained in small pens and abused.

But some of the elephants, they say, are committing suicide by standing on their own trunks and suffocating themselves, rather than suffer through the abuse. (from a Thai newspaper, reprinted as “Small is Huge” by David Neff in “Christianity Today,” February 2006)

I rode one of those elephants for about three hours, and watched others perform when I was in Thailand several years ago, and learning this has forever changed the feel of that experience.

Living things must have their dignity, their spirit. Techniques that seek to crush it – including a lot of the “breaking” of horses or the Calvinistic child-rearing programs designed to break the child’s spirit, may be deep crimes against the very spirit of life.

3. Living things need a safe space

A third thing all animals seem to need is a safe space. There is a Spanish word, querencia (kuh-den-see-uh), that I first learned in the context of bullfighting. The querencia is that place in the ring where the bull feels most safe. It is a different place for each bull. Online, you can find that the word is also used as the name for all kinds of upscale resorts, offering patrons a safe, comfortable place. Whatever we call it, all life needs this kind of place, this querencia.

Some species, including ours, make their own querencias. Both chimpanzees and bonobos build nests. Bonobos build nests in the trees for the night, but also for resting, grooming, or play in the daytime. These nests represent a private area that cannot be infringed upon, not even by the nest maker’s closest companions. For example, youngsters do not enter their mother’s nest uninvited, but wait at the edge, requesting access by means of facial expressions and distress calls. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 158)

Females use the sanctity of their nests to help wean their young, by not giving them permission to enter. Other apes will make quick nests from a couple branches, then sit inside to eat special foods without being disturbed. And sometimes adult males will escape the threatening charge of another male by climbing up a tree and building a nest. In response, the charging males have been observed stopping at the base of the tree and moving away. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 158) In our species, we say our home is our castle, and breaking and entering someone’s home is a crime. But the concept and the need are as old as most life.

4. Many animals expect fairness and justice

Sarah Brosnan at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center who I mentioned earlier, conducted a fairly famous experiment with capuchin monkeys which seems to show that they have a very strong sense of fairness, and won’t play a game that isn’t fair to them. Capuchins like cucumbers, but they really like grapes a lot better. Sarah put two capuchins in adjoining cages, led the first one through a task, and gave it a slice of cucumber when it completed the task correctly, while the second capuchin watched. Then she gave the second monkey the same task, and the same reward, a slice of cucumber. All went well until on a new task, she rewarded the first monkey with a grape, but when the second monkey did the same task, she just gave it a cucumber. In test after test, the monkey threw the cucumber down on the floor refused to eat it, and threw a tantrum. It wasn’t fair. (Sarah did point out that each capuchin only seems to be concerned about whether it’s fair to them. None seem upset if they get the grape and the other monkey gets the cucumber.)

There’s another story about a Norwegian farmer who learned an important lesson from his big sow. Extremely fond of people, the pig liked to lie with her head on top of the metal railing around her pen when there were people in the barn. Those passing her would speak kindly to her and pat her head. One day the farmer had to repair a rotten board on the floor of her stall. The pig was curious and kept nudging and poking him as he worked. He got annoyed, and smacked her with his hammer. “I should not have done that,” he said later, “for immediately she took my thigh into her big mouth and locked it completely between her jaws, though she did not bite. She probably only wanted to warn me not to do such a thing to her ever again. She found it intolerable that I would do something unkind to her.” This story shows a sophisticated sensitivity on the part of the pig. She had a sense of justice and of the consequences of breaking certain rules of behavior, but also of making allowance for a slow but otherwise decent human who could not be expected to have mastered all the fine points of fairness. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, pp. 29-30)

I’ll close with one more story about how deeply embedded in us is the knowledge that life needs health, respect, and freedom – and that playing fair with others sometimes asks that we figure out how to help them.

It’s 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 seemed stunned but otherwise ok, and the trainers tried to get the ape to give them the bird 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)

This is a much bigger, broader, deeper and more compassionate picture of the human condition than that presented by most religions, especially the three Western religions.

Our minds look at and structure much of life in ways very similar to animals separated from us by millions or tens of millions of years in evolutionary time. Yet here are all the parables we could need of noble, caring, gentle and decent behavior. Something bigger than God is calling to us, and not with a harsh voice. It is the voice of life, speaking through the mind of life, reminding us of who we are, what we’re like, how many living relatives we really have, and what a rich world it can be, if only we’ll remember our true heritage, our breeding.

Some of these stories are as profound as any religious parables I know. Think of how much about dignity, freedom, respect and justice the pig and the bonobos seemed to know intuitively. Then think about us. Do we really want to admit that we will settle for less?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

January 14, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We pray from within our human condition, wanting some help in getting it together. We have done things we should not have done, as we have left undone things we should have done. We are capable of more compassion and courage than we often show.

We come to be opened by visions that can enlist us in larger causes and more caring actions. We come to hear stories that might take us into a deeper kind of integrity and reconnect us with the better angels of our nature.

They are simple dreams, yet they seem forever beyond us, for we do this week after week, and still we are not there.

And so once more, we pray that we may listen for – and perhaps even hear – words, stories and images of the kind of wholeness and authenticity we seek. For the fact that we know to seek it tells us we are capable of becoming that which we seek, of being who we want and need to be, and of treating others in ways that make us a blessing to our world, each in our own way.

It would seem so little that we seek. Yet it is so very much. And so we seek this warmer fullness with all our heart, mind and soul. Amen.

SERMON

we’re living in a time when popular religion has become too degraded to trust. Don’t take my word for it. Ask people like Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, or Bill Moyers, or others who have always been friendly to religion but now have almost nothing good to say about it. They ask why sermons are so trivial, why the pulpits are so silent about our slide into fascism, the removal of laws like the Writ of Habeas Corpus or the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act, the “signing statements” that let a president simply ignore any laws he doesn’t like, the illegal invasion of Iraq about which the media still mislead us by calling it a war, and a dozen other things that healthy religion should protest loudly and without ceasing. But the healthy fire is gone from the religions, it seems. They have too easily and eagerly sold out to power, or silenced themselves so as not to disturb anyone.

A whole host of critics are saying that the “God” of our Western religions has too often become little more than a mute hand puppet of the worst religious, political and military leaders among us. This includes not only Christian evangelical support of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the predicted coming nuclear attacks on Iran. It also includes Israel’s murderous actions toward Palestinians and Muslims, and fundamentalist Islam’s sanctioning the murders of innocent people. There isn’t a God in any of these pictures worth worshiping. Too often today, religions call us to our lowest selves rather than helping us reach our higher possibilities.

While any religion, at its best, can be a positive personal and social force, many people feel that we’ve passed a point of no return with the popular Western religions. Christianity is virtually dead throughout Europe because once people saw how easily the churches sold out to the fascisms of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, they never again trusted those who controlled the religious symbols. I think that will happen here. I also think the current vulgar rise of the religious right is a sunset that some have mistaken for a sunrise.

Books by Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Bishop Richard Holloway (Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics) are unanimous in their condemnation of the worst of religious delusions and hypocrisies, and these are always important critiques. Harris and Dawkins seem to think a shallow rationalism or scientism will meet the needs of humans, and it’s hard for me to understand their naivete. Bishop Holloway just argues that ethics should be a secular issue, and religion should be kept out of it because religious posturings spread heat but not light.

But it’s easier to criticize than it is to suggest a legitimate heir to these religions and their dangerous little gods.

We have been taught for centuries that religion offers the only adequate foundation for ethics, morality, and our sense of who we are and how we should live. How could we invent a new foundation to take their place? How could we invent a way to understand who we are and how we are to live that is more honest, more broad and deep, more empowering and more apt to point us in noble directions than the parodies of religion parading around today?

We seem to think, Well, here we are, and we need to know how to live, how to treat ourselves and others. So we look to philosophy, theology, psychology, law or great literature because they are, we think, our best sources of wisdom. I don’t think they are.

During November I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, and visited with Frans de Waal, the primatologist who heads the center. I had read all of his books, and wanted to talk with him about animal behavior, morality and religion. During our talks, he said It isn’t possible that religion, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and the rest of our intellectual disciplines could tell us much that’s very deep or profound about who we are. They’re simply too new! (Frans de Waal) we’re not used to thinking of traditions that are two to four thousand years old as being “new,” but they are.

Think of it this way. If the time since the Big Bang is condensed into one year, then Cro Magnon – the first recognized human – has been here about one minute. One minute out of the 525,960 minutes in a year (365.25 days). And the 4,000 years of our recorded history, including the birth of all our existing religions and the invention of their gods, go back just one one-millionth of the way to the origins of life four billion years ago. Why would we think that stories invented in the last one-millionth of the year of Life could know or tell us much about who we are, how we came to be this way and how we should live? Four thousand years is only about two hundred generations. Yet “A hundred thousand generations ago our ancestors were still recognizably human, and ages of geological time stretch back before them.” (Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1992, p. 5) There is obviously a lot that was written in nature before we appeared.

We are all descended from that first life form, four billion years ago. We are all related. And we know the fact that we are all related has implications, has shaped much of who we are and how we think and desire and behave, because we can see them all around us. Some of these animal stories may sound pretty trivial, like knowing that thumb-sucking is a universal primate behavior around weaning time (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 155). Or that some apes (bonobos), like humans, are overwhelmingly right-handed. Or think about territoriality by realizing that the dog that barks at you from behind its owners” fence is barking for the same reason the owners built the fence. OK, some of these are sort of Oprah-style stories.

But other animal stories seem to call us by name:

Snakes, for instance, are separated from us by about150 million years of evolution. Yet even among snakes there is a core of basic behavior – including dominance, territoriality, and sexual jealousy – that we have no trouble recognizing. (Carl Sagan & Anne Druyan Shadows for Forgotten Ancestors,1992, p. 204)

We recognize courtship rituals, male posturing, defense of territory, aggression and maternal instincts in thousands of species because we share them. Unless all these behaviors evolved independently and coincidentally a million times, we are all related, and our similar behaviors come through the same process as the fact that the wings of a bat, flippers of a whale and human hands have similar bone structures.

We all know instinctively to play much more gently with young children, but so do our family pets. But so do rats. People who study rats playing – there are a lot of jobs out there you never really thought of, aren’t there? – have said that when larger rats play-wrestle with smaller rats, they let the small rats win about half the time. And we’re not surprised to learn that among dogs, wolves, chimpanzees, monkeys and many other species, the adults have a different and gentler set of rules for playing with their young than they do when playing or fighting with older animals. We all seem to know the difference between “play time” and “real time.”

Some of our tenderest behaviors can be found in other animals that have been here practically forever. Crocodiles evolved during the age of the dinosaurs, about 200 million years ago, before monkeys or apes existed, even before mammals existed. A crocodile’s jaw muscles are very strong, its snout is long, and it can make a lunch of us in a minute. Yet we read about a crocodile mother taking all the newly-hatched little crocodiles into her mouth and carrying them to protect them – her babies looking out at the world through the spaces between her long teeth, and we know what she is doing and why she is doing it. She is caring for the life for which she feels a responsibility, just as we do. That reverence for life, that gentleness with the vulnerable ones for whom we feel responsible – these things are all older than the gods, older than mammals, older than we have time to count. And we are part of that grand panorama of life. We aren’t so much “children of God” – that’s awfully new and young – but we’re children of this world, of Life, with behaviors, wants, feelings, fears and yearnings that connect us with almost all other life on earth. That’s a pretty strong foundation.

This isn’t to say it’s all like Disneyworld. Nature, including human nature, isn’t all sweetness and light. Biologists have observed forcible rape not only in our species, but also in orangutans, dolphins, seals, bighorn sheep, wild horses, and some birds (ducks). (When Elephants Weep, p. 140)

And like boys throwing rocks at ducks in a pond, apes sometimes inflict pain for fun. In one game, juvenile laboratory chimpanzees enticed chickens behind a fence with bread crumbs. Each time the gullible chickens approached, the chimps hit them with a stick or poked them with a sharp piece of wire. The chimps invented this game to fight boredom. They refined it to the point that one ape would be the enticer, another the hit man. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 5)

But it’s worth noting that they did this out of sight of the adult chimps, who would have stopped it. Even the juveniles knew this was wrong, according to the moral boundaries of their troop. It was something they would not do in front of the adults.

So it isn’t all Disneyworld. But the dark sides of animal behavior can also show us important things about our own dark sides. For example, can we learn something from knowing that the only two species which routinely expand their territory by killing the males in their target territories are chimpanzees and humans? And what happens when we combine this with the fact that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing more than 98% of our DNA? We pretend we kill for freedom, democracy or the American Way, but the chimps do the same things, without pretending to such high ideals. It looks more like we use language to help us rationalize doing the same selfish and vicious behaviors which we would think brutish and beneath us if we saw chimpanzees doing them.

All of this is part of the picture of who and what we are: the emotional structure and behavioral habits that show our profound kinship with more animal species than we can name.

In this extended series of sermons on Animal Stories, I want to sketch that bigger story of who we are and how we came to be this way. That story is grounded in hundreds of millions of years of evolution still shaping us, and it can offer some insights not from religion but from life, in response to our deepest and most enduring questions about our meaning and purpose.

The primatologist Frans de Waal is clearly right: morality, or an adequate understanding of who we are and how we should live, is not likely to come from religion – it’s just too new. Religions and gods arose as vehicles for carrying our hopes and fears forward in our culture. And when we study the origins of gods, they didn’t have very elegant births. Yahweh, the main deity in the Hebrew Scriptures (aka the “Old Testament”) was modeled on a tribal chief, and given the tasks of a tribal chief: prescribing behaviors, demanding obedience, rewarding those who served him and punishing or killing those who didn’t. That kind of a god isn’t likely to lead us toward very high places, then or now. Today, the question is whether religions are very good vehicles for leading us to our highest possibilities. Often, They’re not. Often, they teach irrelevant trivialities grounded in fear, while all around us, there are stories that can move us more deeply and show us more clearly who we are and how we should and shouldn’t live.

For a simple example, scientists have learned that rats are reluctant to press a lever to get food if doing so will also deliver an electric shock to a companion. They will invariably press the lever that will not deliver the shock, and some will even forgo food rather than hurt their friends. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs never Lie, p. 95). Similar experiments with rhesus monkeys had even more dramatic results. One monkey stopped pulling the lever for five days, and another one for twelve days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another. (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 29, from Masserman et al. 1964) They felt an identity with that other life, and automatically volunteered for discomfort or danger to protect it.

Think of the similarities here to the story in the news last week about Wesley Autrey, the man who dove between the tracks of a New York subway, risking his life to save the life of a stranger. Doesn’t it share the same feeling for life similar to ours, the same instinctive drive to protect it? Mr. Autrey was treated like a hero, but what he said was, “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.” (NY Times, 3 January 2007)

And how different is this from the story some of you will remember from 1996, when a gorilla in Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo saved a 3-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure? That gorilla made the cover of Time magazine that year as one of Time’s “People of the Year.” It was ironic. On the one hand, we celebrated this gorilla mother because we identified her compassion with the highest of human behaviors, the kind to which we aspire. On the other hand, her behavior seemed to set her apart from the 250 million Americans who didn’t make the cover of Time for our behaviors. And as one gorilla expert said, her behavior could only surprise people who didn’t know a thing about gorillas. (Swiss gorilla expert Jurg Hess, quoted by Frans de Waal in The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 79)

It wasn’t high human behavior; it wasn’t religious behavior; it was compassionate animal behavior. And compare the gorilla’s behavior with some of our own society’s behavior that year. In 1996, our sanctions against Iraq caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, our economic policies made beggars and prostitutes of children in third-world countries, and the hateful voices of religious charlatans again called for the persecution of gays, lesbians, infidels, and pretty much every other group not in their clubs. Who would you want your children influenced by: a million religious bigots, politicians, economists and corporations turning the world’s children into beggars, prostitutes and corpses, or a gorilla who, with her own baby on her back, saved the baby of parents from another species because, I suspect, she simply felt it was the right thing to do? No wonder she made the cover of Time.

In some ways, this may seem an unusual sermon series. I”m not interested in leading you to God here – or any of the gods. I”m interested in leading us back to a much older, deeper and nobler place: the place within us that has created all the gods of history, to put us in touch with that spirit of life that can trump every little god, every self-serving religious or political ideology, that we have created. I want us to see far older and more empowering connections to all of life, the life coursing through us and the life sometimes carrying us and sometimes battering us and the kind of life we could have – not with more money or power, but with more integrity and authenticity, more caring and courage.

It is about opening us to an emotional awareness of life: ours and others. We’ll see, in these animal stories, the whole range of human behaviors shared by thousands of animals. We’ll find many stories of empathy, some of which will take your breath away. We’ll identify with chimpanzees, whose social expectations are constantly undermining the tyranny that the alpha males and their helpers are always trying to inflict. In some important ways, our species, like the chimpanzees, has a deeply subversive streak – the streak in which you find most of our liberals. We’ll see that creativity extends far beyond our species, to chimpanzees, dolphins and others. We’ll hear of pigeons who can identify Impressionistic or Cubist painters better than most of us can. We’ll see that chimpanzee politics is so identical to human politics that we won’t be surprised to learn that when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Newt Gingrich assigned a book on Chimpanzee Politics to all new congressional representatives, so they could understand the nature of politics. And always the lessons will be religious, in search of better answers to the questions of what kind of a moral order we are part of, and how we should behave. Those lessons can come from many places, including thousands of animal stories. Here’s a final story.

During his final years in exile, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote about how, at the end of the Italian campaign, a dog sat beside the body of his fallen master, licking his hand. Napoleon could never get this out of his mind, and at the end of his days wrote this:

Perhaps it was the spirit of the time and the place that affected me. But I assure you no occurrence of any of my other battlefields impressed me so keenly. I halted on my tour to gaze on the spectacle, and to reflect on its meaning.

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog”. I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs never Lie, pp. 165-166, from Lemish’s War Dogs, p. 4)

I”m appealing to those parts of us that reacted immediately and emotionally to this story and others like it. That part of us that can get choked up and inspired by Napoleon’s tears, gorillas saving humans or humans saving humans. That compassionate potential has been in us for tens of millions of years, and we share it with ten thousand other species.

The Romans used to say that noble humans lived as though they were living “under the gaze of eternity,” by which they meant that we should live as though all the noblest and most sensitive people who ever lived were watching us, then do only what we would do in front of that audience. I want to expand the circle to include many, many animals whose stories you’ll be hearing. Those animals are also part of that gaze of eternity. We should act in ways that are worthy of them, too – especially if we’re going to have the conceit of calling them “lower” animals!

Just listen to these words from Napoleon’s story again, as he stood looking at the fallen soldier:

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog”. I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog.

Those tears over the grief of one dog put Napoleon in closer touch with his noblest traits than causing the deaths of thousands. The empathy and compassion that can reconnect all of us with our larger selves are far older than God. Many of them are as old as life itself. And they call to us, they call us back to our best selves and back to life. Let us pray that we can learn to hear their calls.

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© Davidson Loehr

December 24, 2006

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 prepare a manger in our hearts, where we can welcome the birth of the sacred this Christmas.

Let us not worry about building a place to hold all the presents we anticipate tomorrow. Holidays become holy days when we become aware of the gifts we already have; we’re not always sure how that’s supposed to happen. So let us make a space where we are open to life’s miracles, the ones happening within and among us.

They’re free, the best gifts: like the ability to accept ourselves as a cherished part of our world, or the fact that just being loved by people whose love we didn’t earn is a gift beyond measure. And the gift of life itself, the fact that we so often complain about not having enough and so seldom give thanks for the fact that we are here at all . These are the gifts that transform holidays into holy days. There is no room for them at the Inn. They can only be born in simple and honest places that make room for them. These gifts need a manger.

And so let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born, and it needs our help. Let us prepare a manger in our hearts.

Amen.

SERMON

This is the morning of the Night Before Christmas. Tonight, at our two Christmas Eve services, we will tell the traditional Christmas story, with some comments to relate it to our lives here and now, and lots of singing of traditional Christmas songs.

This morning, I want to put that old story in historical and human context by showing it as a variation on a much older story, one probably going back into our pre-history. For the story we tell about Jesus is a variation on a theme we have told countless times, in almost every human society in all times and places.

Some of these stories had been told for thousands of years before Jesus even came along. They were famous stories, and a lot of them were stories about special babies born on December 25th , because in the ancient calendar, the day we call December 25th was four days earlier, the date of the winter solstice, when the sun is “reborn,” days start getting longer, and the light in the sky starts coming back.

But we need to learn how to read religious stories, because they’re not meant to be read in a straightforward way. So I want to borrow an insight from a very odd place. Over twenty years ago, I read a what I thought was a profound essay in Esquire magazine by William Broyles called “Why Men Love War” (Esquire, November 1984) Broyles had been a soldier in Vietnam as I also had been, and in this essay he made the astonishing statement that no true war stories had ever been written. It wasn’t, he said, that those who write about war mean to lie. It’s that they are trying to write something that is true not to the mere facts of their war, but to the deep and powerful associations it generated within them. And mere words, mere facts, can’t do this without being shaped into an almost mythic story. That’s still one of the most important and enlightening things I’ve ever read about either war or religion.

All of our most important stories, our favorite stories, are in some sense not true, are in some sense mythic. This includes all of our favorite novels, popular television shows, movies, video games or fairy tales. They’re all imaginative stories made up to express and evoke some very deep needs and hopes within us. That’s what gives them their power. In this sense, the animated television show “South Park” is no more unreal than “All in the Family,” “Rambo,” “The Matrix,” “Star Wars,” or all the world’s most fantastic-sounding religious stories.

They’re trying to serve something more important than mere facts; they’re myths. What’s a myth? It’s a story in whose images and terms we want to live for a while – sometimes minutes, sometimes years. It’s why action movies, love stories or fantasies like “Lord of the Rings’ and the Harry Potter stories attract a million times more people to them than documentaries and The History Channel do. We live in stories. Without a good story to live in, we hardly know who we are.

We live in stories a lot like hermit crabs live in their borrowed homes. These are animals without their own protective covering, who will find abandoned shells of other animals, or even tin cans on the floor of the sea, and live in them for protection. The little animals are really quite vulnerable, no matter how secure they may look in someone else’s shell or soup can.

And without a good myth to live in, we feel vulnerable, too. The stories we choose are almost always on themes that have been with us for as long as we”ve been humans. They give us a role, a picture of the world, always at least partly imaginative, and we need that. That’s what a myth is: a story that never happened but always feels true to some parts of our human condition. So it’s almost impossible to create a brand-new story that isn’t just a variation on some much, much older story.

Prometheus was the story of someone who gave “fire” – often interpreted metaphorically as creativity, an imagination letting us transcend mechanical fate. How many variations on this story can you think of? Atlas was the god with the life-consuming, boring job of holding up the sky for others. How many people still spend their lives doing this?

And to take just two more, Artemis and Demeter remind me of a book by Arianna Huffington on The Gods of Greece . She was raised in France, but her culture was Greek, and she learned the ancient Olympic gods as symbols and projections of dynamics and allegiances that are, as the Greeks recognized, timeless parts of the human condition. As a brilliant and ambitious woman with two daughters, she wrote that her adult life has often seemed like her balancing act between the conflicting demands of Demeter – the archetypal Mother – and Artemis, that defiant, bold spirit of an assertive woman. (Artemis was the patron goddess of the “Women’s Movement” of the 1970s, embodied by, among others, Gloria Steinem.)

Those who have read much by Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Thomas Moore, James Hillman or a host of other mythologists and depth psychologists will recognize this sort of thinking. It is saying that all the great religious myths, including all the myths about Jesus, are absolutely ancient, far older than Jesus, Christianity or Judaism, and that if we understand them well, they are actually stories about the human condition, about us, about our anxieties and yearnings.

We don’t have to put this in stories; we just like stories. But some of this can be put into pretty straightforward philosophical language for those who aren’t as fond of stories. Listen to these words the philosopher Aristotle wrote about us, more than 2300 years ago:

“There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity; [we] will live it not by virtue of [our] humanity, but by virtue of something in [us] that is divine, – [will] live according to the highest thing that is in [us], for small though it be, in power and worth it is above [all] the rest.” (Ethics, X, 7, 7)

We want to believe this, but questions arise: like, how did this divine thing get inside us? Where did it come from? Most of our poets and mythmakers have said these things must come from gods. We don’t see gods in the world we live in, but sometimes, those rare people who we see as heroes or saviors – so many ancient writers described them as somehow coming from that place where gods come from. In ancient Greece, this is what a hero was: someone with a human as one parent and a god for the other. Human, but also a child of God. That’s how storytellers say what Aristotle said about that something in us that is divine.

And there are thousands of these stories about the birth of someone sacred, about heroes or saviors with one parent from earth, the other from above the sky in the heavens. Stories of “sons of God” are in almost every culture. You can find them in Native American stories from long before they had any contact with Europeans. They are in all cultures, people living within very similar stories, like hermit crabs that look for similar shells or tin cans.

So in ancient Greece, Zeus, Father of the gods, visited the young woman Semele in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to the great savior Dionysus.

Zeus, again, visited the young woman Danae in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, one of Greece’s greatest mythic heroes.

In Hinduism, the god Krishna, the favorite god of most Hindus, was born of Devaki, the human woman, and the great god Vishnu.

The Egyptians had their stories of Isis and Osiris, and the miraculous conception of their son Horus, and the many drawings and statues of Isis holding baby Horus on her lap were the models for the later drawings and statues of Mary holding the baby Jesus. Most people knew these stories weren’t true in a historical or factual sense, but were meant in that deeper sense that is so hard to put into words.

So when ancient people from all over the world tell stories about their favorite heroes and saviors, something deep inside of them seems to want to tell the story as the birth of a special human whose father was a god. They’re not lying, any more than those who write moving stories about the experience of war are lying. They’re trying to tell a truth that seems beyond the reach of mere facts, that seems to live only in that place within our imaginations where miracles can still happen.

Many of you have seen “The Nutcracker,” and you know it was written in the same way. People who see it know it isn’t really about dancing mice in the middle of the night. It’s about dancing spirits in the middle of the winter. When we read some of the world’s great myths, we could wonder whether there really were all these special births all over the world. Were they reported in the media of the day? Did historians mention them? Did anybody interview them? Did they leave writings, maybe memoirs? But we know better. These things never happened in historical time, public time. Instead, we wonder why it seems so natural to tell stories like this, and why they seem to make such comforting homes, such welcoming myths, for us to live in.

Dionysus, Krishna, Horus, Hercules and most others were mythic inventions, not real people. But we can even find stories of historical people who were said to be born in this miraculous way with God as their father, and there are a lot of those stories, not just the one about the man Jesus. The most interesting thing about these stories is that the special births weren’t awarded to these people until after they had died! It was a kind of posthumous recognition that here, something spectacular had dwelled in the heart of a person.

There was even a famous example of this that happened during Jesus’ life. In August of the year 14, the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus died – considered by many to have been the greatest of the Caesars – the month of August was named for him. And one month later, in September, the Roman Senate conferred on Caesar Augustus a virgin birth. This may give geneticists trouble, but not mythologists. For how can you tell whether this really was one of those people who lived by something in them that was divine, until you”ve seen how they lived?

The best pagan writers during the early centuries of Christianity were not at all surprised or upset by the Christian myth of Jesus’ “virgin birth” – they had lots of those, and understand the imaginative, literary genre. What they objected to was that Jesus was awarded a virgin birth. He didn’t achieve anything notable in history – certainly compared with rulers like Caesar Augustus; he didn’t deserve to be awarded a virgin birth! And of course during his life (if he lived), nobody said things like, “Well, there’s that Jesus. You know his mother was a virgin and his father was old Yahweh from up above the sky?” Virgin births, like resurrections, aren’t historical events. They’re imaginative, mythological events, trying to make a qualitative comment on the style of living and being we think this person exhibited – the degree to which that “highest thing in us,” that “divine thing” shaped and defined their behaviors.

Almost every other part of the story of Jesus was also used hundreds of years earlier in the stories of other heroes, saviors and gods. Three wise men are said to have visited the births of these miraculous babies hundreds of years earlier. There are hieroglyphs depicting the birth of a son of God with three wise men bringing gifts from ancient Egypt, over 1600 years before the Jesus stories were written.

Some scholars have said all this is from astronomy and astrology, and the three wise men or three kings represent the three stars in the belt of the constellation Orion in the sky, just as Jesus’ twelve disciples or Mithras’s twelve companions or the twelve labors of Hercules or the twelve tribes of Israel represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Twelve was a symbolic and mythic number in the ancient world; a way of saying this story isn’t just a local thing, that it refers to the whole universe.

Also in the Jesus story is the awful story about how Herod had hundreds or thousands of innocent babies slaughtered when he heard that Jesus would be born. No historians from the time record this, because it didn’t happen in real time. It happened in mythic time, and had happened many times before. It was in the myths of Sargon, Nimrod, Moses, Jason, and Krishna as well as Jesus. Innocents are also slain in the stories of Oedipus, Perseus, Romulus and Remus, and Zeus.

What this seems to be about is that someone has predicted that the birth of a certain child or mythic character will be destructive of the current corrupt regime, so all possible contenders are slaughtered. It’s another way of saying that the presence of that divine thing Aristotle talked about is a threat to everything on earth that is brutal or dishonest.

These are very old stories, and they don’t come from history, but from some of own deepest anxieties, fears, and hopes.

We are a funny species. We are these strange animals who know we’re here and know we’ll die and feel that somehow it matters who we are and how we should live. We don’t worry much about this with dogs, squirrels, whales or even with chimpanzees, with whom we share almost 99% of our DNA. We think it’s just about us. A good religion scholar (Peter Berger) once defined religion as the effort to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant. That’s an incredible statement, but it seems to be true.

The stories we write show our anxieties and yearnings. It’s as if we are saying, “Please God, don’t let us be like everything else on earth. Our life must have meaning, even cosmic meaning. The universe must somehow be humanly significant. Can’t we have a special star, a special god who cares most of all for us, and a special savior who lets us feel chosen? Can’t we?”

And these dreams seem to surface at this time of year more than at any other time. We have woven stories around the winter solstice for perhaps ten thousand years, have woven our webs of hope, wanting to make the return of the light into a metaphor for our the return of light in own lives. We must have hope return; we will have hope return, and some of our best-loved stories are on this theme. It is the great human yearning of the last 10,000 years or more, wearing a thousand faces.

There have been well over a hundred deities born on the day we call December 25th , probably over a thousand. It is, by definition, the “birthday” of all solar deities. It’s the time the sun returns, the light returns, days start getting longer, and something deep within us hopes and believes that somehow it might be “on earth as it is in the heavens,” that that light, that divine spark, might be born again in us, as well.

Jesus didn’t start out as a solar deity. In the first three centuries, he had no recognized birthday, and early Church Fathers used to write with pride about having no “holy day” in their religion, like those pagans who named days after their gods. But in the fourth century, as part of the accommodation to Constantine – who seems to have been a Mithraist rather than a Christian, all the way up to his deathbed – Christianity, while gaining the protection of the state, adopted Mithras’ birthday (December 25th ) and the holy day of Mithraism – the same holy day any solar cult would have: Sunday. The halos drawn around Jesus’ head by later painters preserve this ancient symbol of solar deities.

The purpose of writing so many stories about the winter solstice, the rebirth of the “sun of God” or “son of God,” isn’t to tell the astronomical truth about the sun and the earth. It’s about trying to tell stories that feel true at that deeper level where we yearn for more light, both in our world and in ourselves. And at this level, the literalism of Christianity – that unfortunate notion that all these mythic stories were only about a historical person, one man, rather than archetypal stories about the possibilities inherent in all of us – has been a profound enemy of honest or useful religion for two thousand years.

Stories about “virgin births,” birth of the sun/son of God, rising above lower temptations, and being “resurrected” in the sense of being “reborn” into a life serving that divine thing Aristotle noted, are all and always symbolic and mythic, not historical. They are about that divine spark, the power of that kind of light. We can see this is the Jewish story of Hanukah, too. A flame burns eight nights without fuel: impossible! Can that spark of the divine be kept alive in our world, in us, even when the nights are longest and darkest? Can our faith keep it alive?

It’s funny, and telling, that in all these stories we seem to keep a distance from them, as though we were handling fragile, sacred things and didn’t want to get too close. So we don’t tell it as though it were something in us being reborn, as though it were us in whom this divine presence entered the world. No, we say “I have this friend, this savior, in whom something truly divine lives, in whom lives a light that could bring a little light into the whole world. It’s a miraculous story, a birth of the sacred right in the middle of ordinary old life. I’m sure it’s not about me. I’m not that special. Still, I have this friend, this savior: Dionysus, Apollo, Mithras, Jesus, or a hundred others. And this friend of mine, this savior of mine, is a son of God, and just telling the stories about him makes me feel more special, more safe, even more sacred. It’s how I find that divine light that’s supposed to be in me.”

There was a wonderful op-ed piece in the New York Times yesterday (12-23-06), written by a woman here in Austin named Jacqueline Woolley, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. She talked about how both children and adults decide what to believe, in large part by how seriously it is presented to us.

So she and her group invented imaginary things they called “surnits,” and presented them to children as parts of different kinds of stories:

To some of the children, we put surnits in a fantastical context: “Ghosts try to catch surnits when they fly around at night.” To others, we characterized them in scientific terms: “Doctors use surnits to help them in the hospital.”

The 4- to 6-year-olds who heard the medical description were much more likely to think surnits were real than children who were told they had something to do with ghosts. The children demonstrated that they do not indiscriminately believe everything they’re told, but use some pretty high-level tools to distinguish between fantasy and reality. (Jacqueline Woolley, “So you believe in Surnits?” in NY Times 23 December 2006 op-ed page.)

So why do children believe in Santa Claus? She suggests it’s because “The adults they count on to provide reliable information about the world introduce them to Santa. Then his existence is affirmed by friends, books, TV and movies.” And of course you can see him in every shopping mall.

And this is why we believe in religious myths and stories: they are presented in a serious attitude; people we trust take them seriously, and ministers are hired to treat them as sober facts. So they feel like safe stories to take seriously, to move into, in our hermit-crab mode.

But also like hermit crabs, as we grow bigger intellectually and spiritually, we need bigger stories in which to live, in which to let our imaginations soar and our souls grow. Many of you find yourselves in this church precisely because you need more room to grow, need fewer constraints on your mind and your spirit. So you come, often, to ask and to hear pesky questions, and you”ve heard a few pesky things this morning.

But we also need some answers. We’re also looking for new stories to live in, or new ways to live in old stories. And among those old stories, the ones associated with Christmas, our winter solstice stories, are still good stories if we can find our way into them, even if for just a few hours or weeks.

Because good Christmas stories are more than a hermit crab’s seashells or tin cans. They are like mangers , in which the tenderest of dreams and yearnings can be born. Let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born. It is the rebirth of hope, light, love, and the reminder that all the sacred stories we hear are trying to remind us that:

“There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity; [we] will live it not by virtue of our humanity, but by virtue of something in us that is divine, – [will] live according to the highest thing that is in [us], for small though it be, in power and worth it is above [all] the rest.”

It is the time of winter solstice, the return of the light in the heavens and the light – we pray – in our hearts and lives as well. And so let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born, and it needs our help. Merry Christmas, good people.

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© Davidson Loehr

December 17, 2006

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 is almost Christmas, the season that can remind us of gifts and wrapping paper. We think about gifts we want to give, gifts we want to receive. And the wrapping paper, to make them look really appealing. Sometimes, we know the wrapping paper is really better than the gift, so we hope we don’t give or receive too many like that.

And sometimes we get gifts from a child or a friend or relative who is dramatically gift-wrap-challenged, and it almost looks like the present kind of rolled down a hill of wrapping paper, collecting some as it went, then winding up under the tree, looking kind of like a sparkly tumbleweed among the really well-wrapped gifts.

Sometimes, our very favorite presents were also the best-wrapped. That’s rare but memorable. Sometimes the very best gifts come in the sloppiest wrapping paper. You just never know until you unwrap them. Then you discover what your real gifts are.

That’s what life is like too, we know. Most of the great gifts come in the plain wrapping paper of our regular old lives. Most of the great gifts don’t have to be bought. They’re free. It’s hard to believe we might really have something to give just from inside us, without spending much money or struggling with the wrapping paper. For this is the season when we, friends, family and merchants often seem like co-conspirators saying, “No, there really isn’t something just in you, just free, that’s worth giving. You need to go buy it.”

But really, we know better.

It is the gift-giving season, when we pretend and sometimes act like only money can buy the real gifts we long for from one another, and so we’ll spend our money again because it feels like there must be at least some truth to that.

And it is the season when the real longings of our hearts are for simple and quiet things K-Mart doesn’t have – love, understanding, forgiveness, acceptance, peace, a reassuring touch, feeling like we’re really home.

How much are those presents worth? And how much more often should we give them? It is the gift-giving season: time again to open ourselves to these questions, and to welcome their answers as gifts of the season, from the very heart of us. Let us prepare ourselves to give and receive real gifts – even if they have to cost money.

Amen.

SERMON

For this Christmas season, today and next Sunday, I want to talk about three very different approaches to the figure of Jesus. There are good scholars who don’t think there ever was a historical Jesus, and perhaps they’re right. But if this Jewish man we call Jesus did live, I believe he was one of that handful of truly gifted prophets and sages of history.

We’re in what is called “the Christmas Season.” You could also call it “the merchants’ season,” since major chain stores make a third to half of their annual profits in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s why almost every Christmas decoration you see was paid for by merchants, whether they have a religion or not.

And it’s fair to remind ourselves that Christianity only began identifying the date we call December 25th as Jesus’ birthday in the middle of the fourth century – we have no idea when he was born, though some scholars believe it was in about 6 BC. Only Jesus could do that. But for many centuries before that, the date had been celebrated as winter solstice, the birthday of all solar deities.

I’ve never been a Christian, so in some ways it’s easier for me to see this as the season of shopping and solstice. But no matter what our personal religion is, the fact is that Christianity is the dominant religion in our society, many Christians see the season as having everything to do with Jesus, and whether you’re a Christian or not, it is one of the rich, deep and profound religions in the world, and understanding it better has something to offer everyone. In fact, as one of the minorities in a nominally Christian nation, we need to understand the religion better than most Christians.

So today, I want to look at two of these paths within Christianity. The first is the path of Christianity: the religion about Jesus. This is the belief that Christ was the savior of all who accept the story taught about him by the various churches. The second is the very different kind of path opened most recently by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar, which is concerned not with the religion about Jesus, but with the religion of Jesus. I’ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar for fifteen years, and think they have indeed shown a profound way of understanding Jesus that can offer challenge and wisdom to everyone, regardless of their religion. That’s the Christmas present I want to unwrap today.

Next Sunday, the day before Christmas, we’ll warm it up more, by looking at some of the powerful mythic and psychological dimensions of the story of Jesus, looking at them as timeless myths rather than one-time history.

All three of these paths deal in one way or another with some aspect of Jesus. They don’t agree. They each have different pictures of who we are and how we should live. The first path can be good, though throughout history it has also often been downright evil: the cause of bigotry, hatred, persecution and war. The second path, if it’s done well, will almost always be good. The third path, which we’ll visit next week, is a very different way of understanding what it means to be human: who we most deeply are and how precious and holy that is.

And yet I think you’ll find that not one of these paths that talk about Jesus is really about Jesus, but that each lead to a different place.

The First Path: the Religion about Jesus

The first path, the one that has always attracted and led the majority of those who consider themselves Christians, is the religion about Jesus, the religion of Christianity.

You all know this story. Jesus was the son of God. In orthodoxy, this is meant pretty literally, though nobody wants to go into a lot of detail about the genetics involved. Jesus was, for orthodox Christians, the only son of God. The next part of the story is that he gave up his life, was killed, to save us. Somehow, God was pleased when his son was killed – there are several parts of this story that don’t hold up well under much scrutiny. He is our savior, the only real savior we can have. This salvation isn’t open to everyone, only those who say they believe this story. Those who don’t buy the story may be called heretics, heathen, pagans, or just by the more inclusive and poetic phrase, “The Damned.”

This is the story of Christ as a sacrifice made to god – the highest sort of sacrifice there could be, the sacrifice of a god-man, a son of God, in return for which God gives us something we want. Put more crudely but accurately, this is the very ancient practice of bribing God, and its roots go back into prehistory.

Mary Renault wrote a wonderful historical novel about this back in 1958, still in print, called The King Must Die. The king must die as a sacrifice to the gods because as king, he’s the highest sacrifice the tribe can think to offer. The practice of sacrificing kings continued in some societies well into the 19 th century, but its roots are in pre-history.

The reason you sacrifice someone so important is because you want to ask a lot from the gods, and think you need to trade something of apparent high value. At some time in our pre-history, some kings got smart and decided they could sacrifice their son instead, and it could still be considered a sacrifice from the “A” list.

This practice went on in the ancient Hebrew tribes from which Judaism evolved, and it is reflected in the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. You may remember that in this story, God told Abraham to take his son up to the mountain, put him on the sacrificial altar, and kill him, and Abraham was willing to do it. (Never mind what deep psychological problems Isaac may have had for the rest of his life.) Once he was ready to sacrifice his son, this God told him that no, he would now accept the sacrifice of a ram rather than his son. This story marks the transition in ancient Hebrew history from human sacrifices to animal sacrifices. This must have made kings, queens and their sons a lot happier, though not the animals.

But the purpose of the sacrifice was still the same: to curry favor with Yahweh, to bribe God. And in return, this God was expected to grant some of our wishes – food, victory, mates, the usual list.

I can understand the logic behind this, but it is a Wizard-of-Oz kind of religion. It is saying that whatever it is that we really need, isn’t within our power to get. It’s outside of us, along a path defined by priests, and we must do as they say because we, after all, aren’t really holy, aren’t really sacred. We were made from dirt, after all. And dirt isn’t holy. It needs the help of gods, who wouldn’t care to help us out without a bribe. It sounds like primitive thought, and it very primitive psychology: also very powerful.

I have never liked Wizard of Oz religions, because I don’t buy their premise. They empower priests and rulers, and define believers as obedient, through a supernatural religion promising to save us through a human or animal sacrifice. I think it’s a bad concept of humans, and a worse concept of God.

And in Christianity, the person who would have hated this religion most was the man Jesus. Because if all religions of sacrifice and priest craft are playing the role of the Wizard of Oz, all great religious prophets and sages are Toto, pulling back the curtain to reveal the illusion, and to tell us that we don’t need the illusion, because we already have what we need, if only we will have the courage to claim it.

The Second Path: the Religion of Jesus

So let’s talk about Jesus, and the path of the religion of Jesus. This is the second path, the one that is not concerned with making Jesus a human sacrifice, or claiming that his death was good news for us. It is the path concerned with trying to know what that great teacher actually taught , the path that believes it was not his death, but his life that that was the gift to us.

Those who have been here for a few years know that in the past, I’ve invited several very good liberal Christian ministers to preach here. Every one of them is far more interested in the religion of Jesus than they are in the religion about Jesus. And there have always been Christian ministers like them, thank goodness.

While such voices have come up throughout history, in the last twenty-two years I think the best single guide to what Jesus thought and taught has been the Jesus Seminar. It has come as a breath of fresh air to millions of Christians and non-Christians alike, because it resurrects not Christ, but the man Jesus.

The Jesus Seminar switched the focus from understanding Christ as a human sacrifice, to understanding Jesus as a man, through his teachings. This makes his teachings available and challenging to everyone, and makes him easier to take as a sage, and teacher, rather than some kind of a supernatural character.

During Jesus’ life, the Wizard of Oz religion of sacrifice had become big business, with the huge Temple in Jerusalem selling all sorts of animals to be used in the animal sacrifices conducted by the priests. That’s how you got God to listen to you, how you bought a ticket in the lottery, hoping that God might grant your wishes.

But all great religious teachers are like that little dog Toto, who pulled back the curtain showing the Wizard’s illusions to be illusions made to empower the Wizard, not the people. Jesus, like all the Hebrew prophets, said God doesn’t care about sacrifices, but about how we’re treating one another. And there’s no short cut there, no way to duck that.

You can see this just by looking at the most mistranslated line in the whole set of Christian scriptures. It is the line from the Lord’s Prayer, which you have probably heard translated as, “and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” In that form, you wouldn’t have to think much about it. It sounds like it could say “Forgive our sins, and we may forgive the sins of others if we get around to it.” But that’s a horrible translation of the key word in the whole sentence.

Translated more accurately, it should say, “and forgive us our sins, to the extent that we forgive those who have sinned against us.” Unless we forgive the sins of others, in other words, we have absolutely no hope of having our own sins forgiven. That’s the religion of Jesus.

The kingdom of God is the state of affairs that exists when we treat all others like brothers, sisters and children of God. We have everything we need, and God is waiting for us to act, to bring it about, for the kingdom of God is not within the useless killing of people or animals; it is within and among us. Either we act in ways that honor high ideals or we have no claim to be following God.

Jesus attacked the Wizard-of-Oz religion of his time like an angry young man. He didn’t come like the Sweet Jesus of bad Hallmark cards, but like an ethical and moral explosion. He said those who mislead children would be better off thrown in the lake with a rock around their neck. He said he didn’t come to bring peace, but came to bring a sword, to divide members of families from each other.

A lawyer came to tell him he had kept the commandments, and asked if there was anything else he should do. You can feel that he expected to be told No, no of course not: just follow the commandments, buy your chickens and lambs for the temple sacrifices, and everything is just dandy.

Instead Jesus said he should sell all he had and give the money to the poor. A young man was drawn in by Jesus’ charisma and Jesus asked the young man to come follow him. The man said yes, but my father just died, so I need to bury him first. Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead!” This is not Sweet Jesus! You wouldn’t want to be sending a whole lot of Christmas cards with some of his most famous sayings on them.

He wasn’t a saint, and didn’t try to be one. The first miracle the gospels record automatically disqualified him from ever being a Baptist, when he turned water into wine! And he didn’t just do tricks with wine. He drank it. In fact, in the gospel of Luke, Jesus is described as a glutton and a drunkard!

Jesus would usually have been a bad role model, not one parents would want their children to emulate. He ran around with prostitutes. He had no job, no home, no mate, no family, and could always be counted on to insult the high priests. He was surrounded by people who didn’t understand him, and described himself merely as homeless. How many parents really hope their kids turn out like that?

But this Jesus, the man who lived, isn’t a role model or a savior or any sort of a supernatural figure at all. Forty to eighty years after he died, when the gospels were written, he was turned into a magical figure, a supernatural figure, a savior, and he would have hated it. He came to put the ball back in our court, to say that we have what we need, and God is waiting for us to act. And the priests, as they almost always do, turned it back into a magical Wizard-of-Oz religion that empowered them, and once more assigned their people the simple roles of believing and obeying – not Jesus, but them. Not much has changed, has it?

What I’ve enjoyed about my years as a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar was the exposure to this greater Jesus, this idealistic young Jew with such bold, disturbing and life-giving things to say. But while this is much better than the first path, the religion about Jesus, this one doesn’t really lead to Jesus either; it leads past him.

One of the Jesus Seminar’s most popular authors, Marcus Borg, even wrote a book called Jesus and Buddha: the Parallel Sayings , showing some of their sayings on facing pages, arguing that many of their teachings could be made to sound very similar – though of course the Buddha didn’t care about gods at all. And I have heard Marcus say that if he had been born into a Buddhist culture, he could have been perfectly content with Buddhism, and saw Jesus and Buddha as being on the same level, neither being higher than the other.

This is really where the Jesus Seminar leads, I think – not to Jesus, but to the desire for healthy and wise insights into the human condition and how we should treat ourselves and others – insights from any source.

There is a wonderful passage in the Gospel of Thomas that may not sound like orthodox Christianity, but Elaine Pagels described it as her favorite passage in that gospel. I think it is one of the most profound psychological insights in the history of religion:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

(Another translation of this same passage, much harsher, puts it this way:

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.” [Jesus Seminar translation])

Understanding the teachings of the first-century Jewish sage may lead through Jesus, but it is not about leading us to Jesus. It is about leading us to ourselves: to our own best selves. It is about pulling back the curtain hiding all the wizard wanna-be’s who would keep us tied to bad creeds anchored to horrible notions of God. Bypassing the religions about Jesus to listen to some of the teachings of this great spiritual visionary can lead anyone – Christian or non-Christian – to life more abundant, love more generous, and an appreciation of ourselves as being, like the man Jesus, the sons and daughters of God, precious beyond measure, and the hope of the world.

And it’s free. It isn’t cheap, for it can cost us our comfortable smallnesses. But it’s a free gift, once you remove the bad wrapping paper.

Merry Christmas, all you daughters and sons of God. Merry Christmas.