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© Davidson Loehr

March 12, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: The Horse in the House

It happened in the summer of 1955, and was both logical and necessary. We lived in Colfax, Iowa, a town of about 1800, twenty miles east of Des Moines. Formerly located on Highway 6, the Interstate bypassed it when it went in in the early 1960s, kind of leaving it where it was.

But where it was – at least in 1955 – was a wonderful place, at least for a 13-year-old boy with a horse. My younger brother also had a horse, named Spooky. Spooky was white, and hot-tempered, at least to me, though my brother seemed to get along with him.

My horse was brown, with a big white line running up the back of his left hind leg, around his rump and back down his right leg. He was laid-back and cool, and his name was Louie.

The horses were our freedom. We could come home from school, throw a saddle on, and just ride, ride, anywhere. A couple times on weekends, we left on horseback to make camp for the weekend. I had a Marlin lever-action .22 caliber rifle and a saddle holster, just like I knew all real cowboys had, and would hunt big game for our vittles. OK, squirrels. Whatever. We”d make camp, cut down some saplings, or cut branches, make a corral that straddled the small creek, so the horses wouldn’t wander off. Then I’d shoot a squirrel or two, which we”d cook on a stick over an open fire, then retire to sleep using our saddles as pillows, just like in the movies. I don’t think cowboys really used saddles as pillows. It’s very uncomfortable.

When my brother Peter and I were 13 and 10, our horses were sometimes our best friends. We fed them, cleaned their stable in the barn, and rode them around the fenced pasture next to the house almost every day. I had a paper route that went from downtown straight out Main Street about two miles out past our house. Every day, summer and winter, I’d get to our house, saddle up Louie, and we”d finish the route together. We were close.

My brother Peter and I used to like to give the horses sugar cubes, which they gobbled out of our hands almost too eagerly. That was until the vet said the sugar cubes would rot their teeth and we shouldn’t do it any more. Bummer. They liked carrots and apples fine, but they also had a sweet tooth. We understood.

We were looking for a loophole in the “no sugar cubes” deal. I think we found it by chance one morning, when my brother didn’t want to finish his grape juice because it was too sweet. The words hit like a revelation straight from the gods – or at least the god Poseidon, who was also fond of horses.

After our mother left for the day, we poured some grape juice in the dog bowls on the rickety back porch. The horses loved it! But there was an unexpected bonus that made it all even better. The grape juice made their noses and tongues purple. Now that was cool! Horses with purple tongues and, in Spooky’s case, a purple nose!

The occasion giving rise to the center of this story came on one of those days when both horses were up on the back porch, drinking grape juice out of the dog bowls. When Pete took Spooky back down, he broke the wooden steps – really, it’s amazing that both horses didn’t fall straight through the porch.

Well, now Louie was stuck up there on the back porch. He wouldn’t jump down, there wasn’t any other way off the porch, and our mother would be coming home in an hour or two. This called for quick thinking, which kids mostly know they’re pretty good at. We had two friends over, who would help with the horses in return for getting to ride them. I shared my plan. Joey could take Louie’s halter, I’d go ahead to clear away the furniture, and we would lead the horse through the house and out the front door, over the new porch with its sturdy cement step. Oh yes, and Jimmy would walk behind Louie, carrying a metal bucket, just in case. Jimmy protested, but he was the littlest, so it was only fitting.

No sooner had I announced this grand and eminently logical plan than my brother jumped on Spooky and rode away as fast and as far as he could.

The plan worked beautifully. I cleared the furniture out of the way, Louie was very well-behaved, and Jimmy whined all the way through the kitchen and dining room about the sorry hand that Life had dealt him.

When we got into the living room, the television was on, and Louie stopped. His ears shot forward, his eyes got big, and I could feel him thinking “Hey – we haven’t got this out in the barn! The Big House is a whole other thing!” I saw the family camera sitting on a hall table – a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye with flash bulb attachment – and quickly took a picture of this scene.

But I wasn’t as quick as Jimmy. When he saw me going for the camera, he walked up by the horse’s shoulders, and set the bucket down.

This was not good timing. It was not good timing because when the flash bulb popped, it startled Louie. And Louie pooped on the rug.

I yelled at Jimmy – his duties had been made very clear. But he snapped back – petulantly, I thought – “I am not going down in history holding a bucket behind a horse’s butt!” It was a good point, well taken.

Still, there was the poop.

We took Louie out the front, got him back into the barn, and both Joey and Jimmy disappeared as quickly as my brother had a few minutes earlier.

I scooped the poop, but it wasn’t going to be that simple. There was a stain. Not dramatic, but noticeable. I went into the kitchen and looked under the sink, where wondrous and mysterious Chemicals are kept. And there was a big bottle of Glamorene Rug Cleaner. It was, I’m quite sure, the only time in my life I ever saw or used that product, but its name was stamped in my mind forevermore.

Luckily, I had a bucket. Of course, if it had been used in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to use it in the second place. I filled the bucket with water, dumped in a lot of Glamorene, got a brush, and scrubbed.

Glamorene Rug Cleaner was truly miraculous! Unfortunately, there was now a large wet spot, a couple feet across, which was even more noticeable than the original stain. My mother had never been accused of being a good housekeeper, though this was the first time I saw that as a good thing. I took a throw rug from the other side of the room and covered the wet spot.

She never noticed. Neither did my father. And Peter knew better than to say one single word. During the day, I’d take the rug off, covering it again before my mother came home. In two or three days, the rug was dry, and looked like its scruffy old self again. When I moved the rug back where it belonged, both parents suddenly noticed it had been moved, though I assured them it had always mostly been there.

In short, I pulled off the caper of the century. I got away with bringing Louie through the house, even though he had had that little accident in the living room. In the days to come, both my brother and I would laugh about it while we were out riding. Certain kinds of kids live for moments like that.

It was – I don’t know, maybe two or three weeks later: a long time later. I came home from some serious playing, and no sooner had the screen door shut than I heard this Mother Voice shouting “Howie! Come in here!” Every kid knows that voice, and knows what it means.

I stood a little paralyzed there by the front door, wondering – not what I’d done, but what anyone could possibly have told her about. Nothing. There was nothing. I’d either been quite good, or left no evidence. I was sure of it. I went into the kitchen, and every kid knows just what comes next. With my most innocent look, I said “Yes, Mother?”

She was not a happy woman. “What do you mean, bringing that horse in the house?”

This took really quick thinking. Could she possibly know about that? It didn’t seem likely. Pete wouldn’t dare tell. And Jimmy and Joey knew if they blabbed, they”d lose their ticket for free horse rides. And Louie didn’t talk. That’s it. She couldn’t know.

So again with the innocent kid look, I said “What horse?”

The next line was the Voice of Damnation and Doom: “I just got the pictures back from Walgreen”s!”

Poop. That horse. Louie, the cool, laid-back horse. Ah, yes.

The next moments were a bit awkward. Denial seemed out of the question. But explaining the logic of it – and especially how responsibly we brought the horse into the house, with moving the furniture and Jimmy and the bucket and all – that was a little trickier. And then there was the matter of the poop. I couldn’t really leave that out. And the Glamorene, and the wet spot – which finally cleared up the mystery of the moving throw rug. It was actually quite a complex story. And telling it did sound a bit odd, even though it was all quite logical from beginning to end.

As I stumbled through the story, I suddenly saw a gift from the gods, a shot of pure Grace: the corner of her mouth twitched. She was on the verge of laughing! Oh, Hallelujah!

Again, every kid would know what move to make next. “What’s the matter, Mom? Are you going to laugh? It’s really pretty funny, isn’t it? Huh?”

Her expression was one of those that should have been filmed. She needed to be serious – it was still Serious Parent time – but she could barely keep it in. Finally, she blurted “I have no idea what to say to you. I would feel ridiculous saying “Don’t bring that horse in the house again”!” I look back on that as about the most ideal way a parent could handle this situation – not that more than like one in a billion parents will ever have to face this situation. As for the back steps; they were rebuilt, but I don’t remember anything about it. Maybe Pete and I had our allowances docked to help pay the carpenter, but I don’t think so. I think the family absorbed Louie’s Big Day as one of those Memories we’re always trying to make – or perhaps as the sad sign of a child too far gone to save.

And that’s the story of how the horse was brought into the house, way back in the summer of 1955 when both I and my world were a lot younger and simpler.

But as logical as it is, I have learned through the years how filled with Basic Disbelief many people are. Like you. You don’t quite believe it – at least not all of it – do you?

Oh, come on. This is better than most history. Even if you don’t believe it, can’t you pretend to?

But no. No. And so, for those too cynical to accept the simple truth of a childhood memory from a half-century ago, a gift for you too. I carried that photo in my billfold for over twenty years. Louie was with me through the Army, in Germany, even through the Vietnam War. Then sometime in the mid-70s, while I was spending a weekend with my brother’s family, he picked my pocket as I slept, stole the picture, and sent it off to have it copied. At Christmas, he gave me a 16×20 print of that old photo, complete with its fading and scratches, which I then had mounted and framed. It still hangs on my office wall today.

PRAYER

There are little sparks of life around that we often miss: a special person, a twinkle in the eye of someone who just seems to very real to us.

Little lights are scattered here and there in our lives: people, places, even things that can awaken our own spirit in ways large and small, but in ways we wish for.

So often when life seems dull or we seem to be in a rut, we’ve lost sight of those sparks, or lost touch with them. Spontaneous things, unplanned fun, or contact with those people who have such a young spirit, no matter how old they are.

There is an old mystical story that says all these sparks are parts of God, and that our task is to find them, draw them to our lives, and use them to transform ourselves and our world back into an image of God.

Drawing the world back into an image of God sounds like a task far beyond anything we can do. But we do recognize those moments, people and places that make us feel more alive, that seem to make life offer more options, that open us up.

Let us start there, attending to the sources of inspiration that make us feel more alive, more thankful, more joyful. Let us claim those sources and the little sparks of life they offer, even if they offer them only to us.

The task of reconstituting the world is too big to imagine. Let us bring it down to a level we can see and feel: reconstituting one spirit at a time, one life at a time, one relationship at a time, to make them show forth more light, love, and joy.

It’s a start. A good start.

Amen

SERMON: Oh, Go ahead: Bring the Horse in the House!

There is a wonderful story from medieval Jewish mysticism about how in the beginning, God existed just as undifferentiated infinite light. But God wanted to behold himself, and so he created the world; the world is the image of God. Then God withdrew, and the world was no longer the image of God, but a fractured, separated place. But spread throughout this world, there are billions and billions of sparks from that divine light that can connect us with all that is sacred.

Our task in life is to cherish those sparks that it is our good fortune to encounter in life, and to raise and spiritualize them, so we can reconstitute the world as an image of God. Each of us, they say, encounters those persons, events and things that contain sparks that we are uniquely suited to redeem.

And our sacred task in life is to find those sparks we are lucky enough to come across, to cherish and embody them, to lift them up and spiritualize them, and by doing this to reconstitute the world so that it can once more take on the image of a God of love, justice, happiness and peace.

There are a lot of ways to describe those sparks, but when you’re around one you usually notice it.

Mostly, we seem to notice those sparks when they’re gone.

I think of the final lines from a poem written 150 years ago by Thomas Hood, called “I Remember, I Remember.” It’s looking back to a childhood when the world seemed to be whole and sacred, but looking from a present where it isn’t. The final lines of the poem say,

I remember, I remember,

The fir trees dark and high;

I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky:

It was a childish ignorance,

But now ’tis little joy

To know I’m farther off from heaven

Than when I was a boy.

He’s talking about heaven as though it were above the sky. But the real “heaven” he’s talking about was that state of spirit in which we were close enough to the soul of life nearly to touch it.

And when we miss that – well, missing it has produced a lot of great tragedy and poetry, including some poignant funny poems. One of my favorite of those is a great favorite of women, at least women who think that one day they might become old. You’ve probably all heard it. It was written in 1961 by an English woman named Jenny Joseph, and her original title for it was simply “Warning”:

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

 with a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

 And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

 and satin candles, and say we’ve no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

 and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

 and run my stick along the public railings

 and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

 and pick the flowers in other people’s gardens

 and learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

 and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

 or only bread and pickles for a week

 and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

 and pay our rent and not swear in the street

 and set a good example for the children.

 We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

 But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

 So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Sometimes, it seems that we lose the ability to see and save these sparks just by growing up. Thomas Hood’s poem longs for his first childhood; Jenny Joseph’s poem seems to be looking forward to her second childhood. That’s a big part of why it’s so much fun seeing the children come up for their story each Sunday: they bring that sense of wonder with them. They seem to do so easily what we grownups sometimes have trouble doing at all.

During my first year in the ministry, in 1986, I witnessed such a scene: one I’ll never forget.

It was after the third sermon I had preached there. I had written a series of children’s stories for those three weeks. They were like a serial, and were a simple story, if not a great one. It was a story about a bush that became unhappy just being a bush because all those darned birds kept taking it for granted and it didn’t have a starring role like the big trees did. The more unhappy it got, and the angrier it got at having to be a bush, the more its roots withdrew from the soil, until at last they pulled out, the wind blew, and it became a tumbleweed.

Now it roamed everywhere, but never had a home, and began feeling lonely. When the wind stopped for awhile, it found itself resting not far from a lovely little river, in a beautiful meadow. It was grateful for the rest, and to be in such a beautiful place. And soon, it put down roots and again became a bush. Now when birds came to sit in its branches, it was thankful for the company. It came to love the place, and all the other creatures in its world. And as that happened, it grew and grew, and finally became a very, very big tree. The End.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened after the service. In the foyer, a church member who was a physics professor came up to me, raging mad. He was actually red in the face, as he accused me of having done a ridiculous and shameful thing. My crime was that I had told the children a story that could not be scientifically true.

I could hardly believe it! It was ridiculous, he yelled, to say that a tumbleweed could again put down roots and become a bush. Though he didn’t know the scientific names of the plants involved, he was quite sure it couldn’t happen. And then, as though that weren’t bad enough, I had gone to absolutely stupid extremes by then telling the children that the bush could become a tree!

“It’s ridiculous!” he said, getting pretty worked up. Then he shook his finger at me and said “Do you actually believe that a bush can become a tree?”

I said Yes. Now he turned nearly purple. He was almost shouting, as he said “Well, I would like to know how in hell a bush can become a tree!”

That’s when the six-year-old boy who had been standing behind me waiting for his turn finally had all he could take. He stepped forward, looked up at the physicist, and said “It’s easy, Mister. It just has to learn how to love!”

You hear something like this, and it can be easy to feel like Peter Pan, like you never want to grow up if it means losing the ability to understand even the simplest of stories. The little boy had been waiting to tell me how much he had liked the three stories, and that he would never forget them. The man was in his fifties, with a Ph.D. in physics, yet actually seemed to think the story had been about a bush! If we must lose the ability to see even the simplest magic when we grow up,

But of course we do grow up. We have to grow up. Eventually, our parents want us to move out and get a job. And to do that – well, we have to grow up. You know, it’s one thing to have your kid bring a horse in the house once. But if every role of film you got developed had a picture of your child with another large heavy animal standing in your living room, you”d be looking for a good therapist.

There’s a famous passage from the Christian scriptures, written by St. Paul, where he says, “When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” (I Cor. 13: 11). When you think about it, it’s an odd thing to say, after Jesus had said that you can’t hope to enter the kingdom of heaven unless you’re like a child! Maybe Paul didn’t get it.

I don’t know quite what happens to us when we grow up, but something does seem to change – that change that Peter Pan was so afraid of. I remember stories on the old hippies of the 60s and 70s who had tuned in, turned on and dropped out, then growing into investment bankers and organization men and women, becoming the new incarnation of the very Establishment they had earlier hated, as they raised their own children and suffered through their teen-aged rebellions, wondering why they didn’t grow up.

Sometimes, it seems that part of growing up is losing touch with that spark, the almost magical and transformative insights of even the simplest fairy tales and stories – about a beauty that remains asleep until wakened by a loving kiss, about frogs turning into princes the same way, or tumbleweeds turning into bushes and then trees, just because they’ve learned how to love.

But without seeing the sparks within these stories, and being open to them, we really are farther off from heaven than when we were young. And the “heaven” in this story isn’t a place, you know, but that kind of life where it feels the sacred dimensions, the sparks, are right there near us, close enough to touch. That’s what we seem to lose.

Of course, growing up doesn’t have to mean just growing old, and we all know some people with both plenty of years and plenty of sparks. In fact, they are probably some of our very favorite people in the whole world. They’re some of the vessels carrying those sparks for us to find, and claim, and embody, in our own sacred task of trying to reconstitute the world so it can once again be the image of God, of all that is holy and life-giving.

When I was a graduate student, in a very arid, intellectual and sometimes impersonal graduate school, there were a few of these living sparks around, and they were absolutely magical for me.

My teacher was one of them. He was a man in his 60s who wore beads, had an earring, wore jeans, sometimes sandals, and open collars that somehow survived from the hippie movement, and shoulder-length hair, except on the top where he didn’t have much hair at all.

He looked like a walking refutation of grown-up seriousness. We became close, I had many dinners with his family, and still remember the feeling that one of the greatest living theologians was also an over-sized elf.

I had another professor who was much more sober and quiet, very grown-up. During the week, if he wasn’t teaching an advanced seminar or discussing the footnotes of footnotes, you would find John in the library, meticulously digging up even more footnotes.

Ah, but on Sunday night, after the sun went down, some of the students would gather in the lounge for an evening of playing Dungeons and Dragons. And there was John, playing the Dungeonmaster, dressed in a wonderful brownish medieval robe with hood and rope belt that his wife had made for him, his eyes twinkling like a six-year-old boy, and more excitedly alive than I ever saw him at any other time. On Sunday nights, he was just full of sparks.

And I suspect that if someone were to have asked John whether he actually believed in that ridiculous Dungeons and Dragons stuff, he might have said he actually believed that letting ourselves expand in imaginary escapades we’ll never be able to encounter in grown-up life can open up whole new and wonderful avenues for our souls to take flight.

In religious studies, you often call figures like this Trickster figures. Those are the figures that don’t follow grown-up rules, that bring spontaneity into life whether you want it or not.

Even the more official and restrained parts of the University sometimes welcomed in these Trickster figures, and there would be a quiet explosion of sparks that could just take your breath away.

The most memorable came one Christmas Eve, in the big formal service in Rockefeller Chapel. Built with the money of John D. Rockefeller, this huge stone building was over a hundred feet high inside, seated two thousand people, and seemed modeled on the magnificent cathedrals of medieval Europe. The Sunday services were so dismal it seldom drew more than fifty.

But on Christmas Eve, it was packed. Organ, huge choir, medium-sized orchestra, priests in formal robes, everybody being very sober and pious.

Then, into the middle of this great pomp, they staged a re-enactment of the old Bible story of Joseph and Mary looking for a place to stay. And slowly, from the end of the long stone aisle all the way to the front, came this year’s Joseph, and Mary – and real live donkey! A donkey! The little donkey didn’t know the story, didn’t care for the music or the costumes or much else besides the carrots Joseph would try to slip him unnoticed.

The donkey had no costume, no pretense at all, couldn’t have cared less about Christmas, and completely stole the show! Finally, when the donkey entered, there was something that was simply real. I don’t remember much else from the program that night, but the donkey, at least, was sacred, and everybody there with eyes to see could see it. There was one of those magnificent sparks, clip-clopping down the aisle: just clip-clopping and looking around.

Bringing the donkey into the temple revealed the temple in the donkey. And if even a little donkey could contain a temple, then surely we could, too. And just knowing that helps to accomplish the sacred task of reconstituting the world.

Sometimes just telling these stories is like bringing a donkey into the temple. That’s the role that stories, fairy tales, movies and some imaginative fantasy games can play for us, and it’s a role we need, if we’re going to find any of those sparks at all.

I don’t know if Mardi Gras or Burning Man or the others offer more escape than transformation. But anywhere that spirit is present, it can offer transformation, because it shows that power of life, that power that represents life unchained, that most powerful force anywhere.

How many of you have thought some version of “When I’m older and no longer afraid of what people might think, I’ll wear purple. I’ll do the harmless but outrageous things I don’t dare do now”?

What would those things be, that would let your soul take flight? Do you think perhaps it might be wise to practice them a little now, so that when you get older and have the nerve to do outrageous things that let your soul soar, people won’t be so surprised?

In the beginning, God, the divine and magical dimension of the universe, existed just as infinite light. But God wanted to behold himself, and so he created the world; the world is the image of God. Then God withdrew, and the world was no longer the image of God, but a fractured, separated place. But spread throughout this world, there are billions and billions of sparks from that divine light that can connect us with all that is sacred. And our sacred task in life is to find those sparks we are lucky enough to come across, to cherish and embody them, to lift them up and spiritualize them, and by doing this to reconstitute the world so that it can once more take on the image of a God of love, justice, joy, and peace.

My story about bringing the horse in the house may not be about much more than dealing with a problem you will never, ever have: what to do with a horse that’s stuck on your back porch before your mother comes home. That’s not a spiritual quest at all. Yet there’s something in it that still has some magic about it, a spark to it, even fifty years later, isn’t there?

Let’s not grow up without bringing with us that child’s ability to feel pure joy, to expect magic everywhere, and to find it. These sparks can come through so many different doors. They can arrive like a little donkey. They can be like a spark, or a lightning flash. Sometimes they come announced by that “still, small voice” that prophets have written about. And sometimes – you can trust me on this one – they even whinny.

Virtually the whole story is captured in this photo. At the far right, you can see the edge of the console-style television set. Louie’s alert eyes and ears speak for themselves. That’s Joey on the sofa, and Jimmy, derelict from duty, peeping over the horse’s shoulders. On the floor, you can still see the top of the metal bucket – which, like Jimmy, is about four feet from where it should have been.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 26, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us seek our fullest humanity. We may be about 1/3 beast, 1/3 human and 1/3 divine, but none of the three parts is whole enough, or wise enough, to guide us.

Let us try to become integrated in every way – all our parts, all our people, are the necessary elements of our fullest humanity, and our most complete strength.

The excellence we seek is a fragile, beautiful thing. We seek the ability to live our passing lives, alive with awareness and compassion, excited by the human-scale joys that come from fully participating in the passing but precious splendor of people who have come alive to the challenges of life and the joy of living them.

As the theologian Howard Thurman has said, “Let us find what makes us come most fully alive, and go do it – because what the world most needs is people who have come alive.”

Amen.

SERMON: Gilgamesh, the Oldest Spiritual Hero

One of the ironies of religion is that we go to our faith traditions to seek what we feel are the most important truths – the truths we should guide our lives by – but what we mostly do is tell stories. Those stories can structure our lives, determine how we live, what we take to be sacred. Yet, at bottom, they’re stories. And if we change our stories, it can change our life. That’s what a conversion experience is about: changing your center to live out of a new story.

In Western religion, we’re trained to explore and interpret stories from the Bible for insights into reality, ethics, etc. In Hindu countries, they don’t use the Bible, but use the many stories in their Mahabharata and Ramayana stories, and some of the philosophical writings like the Upanishads, etc.

Like the Hindus, the ancient Greeks used lots of gods, while the Buddhists used stories without any gods at all.

But for most of us, religion is about forming the right kind of relationship with God, much as subjects form a relationship with their master. Not to care about God is seen as not caring about life, goodness, character or ethics – and, of course, our eternal future for most of those in Western religions. For this God controls eternal damnation or reward, though the terms of it are made by the priests and rulers, since this God, like all gods, isn’t really part of our world except through the stories about him.

But long before the Hebrews, long before the Greeks, over 1500 years before the Hindus, there was an earlier high civilization in Sumer, with a very different kind of story about life, the gods and immortality.

It is the epic of Gilgamesh. It was only unearthed and translated in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I don’t think you can overstate just how deeply different and disturbing it is to all Western religious thought. First, it disturbed Western thinkers because it contains the ancient story of a flood, and a couple who made an ark to survive it, told centuries before the Genesis story and generally accepted as the main source of the story of Noah and his ark.

That was in the 1870s. But by the 1890s, some scholars were making far bolder claims. They said this myth is not only older than the Bible, but also better than the Bible, that it was a mythology to which we could relate more naturally in our modern world.

So this morning, I want to introduce you to this story that’s older than all of the world’s religions, older than all their gods, and explore a little of what it’s saying, and why it may well fit our modern world better.

Ironically, even the Gilgamesh story seems to be claiming that their modern world is no longer served by the ancient world of gods and stories of immortality. Their central concern is with the reality of death, and the stories of immortality, which they finally reject as belonging to ancient times, but not their modern age.

Gilgamesh was a historical figure, from the dawn of our recorded human history. He ruled about 4600 years ago in the city of Uruk in what is now southern Iraq. He was an ancient Sumerian. He knew he was a Sumerian, but he did not know that he was ancient. In fact, he saw himself as very modern. He lived about two centuries after the Sumerians had been the first to invent writing, so they rightly felt that they were far more advanced than any people who had ever lived before them.

In the century after his death, the historical memory of this ruler was transformed into myth. At first, his story was recorded in a series of short poems. 1,000 years later, these stories were woven into an epic, and became known throughout the near East.

Thousands of fragments of this epic have been recovered, and we have about 3,000 lines of this story, which achieved its final form around 1300 BC.

The two main characters in the story are Gilgamesh, who is described as 2/3 divine and 1/3 human, and Enkidu, a kind of mirror image, who seems about 1/3 human and 2/3 animal.

Enkidu was created as a kind of wild anti-hero to Gilgamesh, as his opposite. Gilgamesh sent a woman out into the woods to tame him. Enkidu stays with her for just a week, and is transformed into someone human and urban. I know women who hear this and think doing that in a year, let alone a week, would be a miracle, though I don’t know too many men who think so.

Once he becomes more human, Enkidu challenges and fights with Gilgamesh, and it’s a draw: they’ve met their match, their shadow side, their complement. They become companions, and friends. It was through this bond with his complement that Gilgamesh first learned true friendship – and some of the modern psychological readings of that seem pretty obvious.

Together, they go to kill an evil monster that belongs to the gods, to prove themselves more powerful. And they are: together, they can defeat evil.

The great goddess Ishtar wants Gilgamesh to marry her, and promises him love and peace – she is the goddess of love, fruitfulness and war. But he isn’t interested, says her love leads only to war, and recounts many stories of how she has betrayed her lovers. She is furious, and sends the bull of heaven to kill them both. But Enkidu kills the mighty bull of heaven.

Here are men – or one man who has integrated his animal, human and divine natures – with no fear of the ancient supernatural powers. In fact, they can hold their own against them, and defeat most of them. I don’t know of another religious tradition with such a story.

Enkidu, however, dies from wounds suffered in the fights with the supernatural monsters – at least partly as retribution demanded by the gods for their destruction of the Bull of Heaven – and Gilgamesh discovers loss, grief, and death.

Gilgamesh now roams the earth wondering if it’s possible to avoid death. He finds the old Noah-type figure (Utnapishtim) who, with his wife who survived the great flood, were granted immortality.

Utnapishtim says he was warned by the gods of the flood, so he, his wife and artisans built and survived on the ark. But he says this cannot happen again, and the gods’ granting of immortality was a one-time deal, long ago but not in modern times.

Gilgamesh still wants to gain immortality. As he prepares to leave, the old Noah tells him of the plant growing at the bottom of the sea, called “the old one becomes a child,” and says if Gilgamesh uses it, he won’t grow old. Gilgamesh finds the plant and is going to use it. (This is like taking a pill to solve the problem.) But the plant falls into the water, and a snake steals it, which is why snakes can renew their skin.

You might ask, “Well, what would have happened if Gilgamesh had eaten that plant?” The answer is that then he would have to have discovered, either that the plant didn’t work or that he did something wrong, and lost his only chance at it. Because the story, remember, was written by people who knew that we don’t have immortality, and wrote an imaginative story to say that there are irreversible reasons why we don’t and can’t.

So Gilgamesh knows that he can neither get the cure or the pill, and has accepted that the quest for immortality is in vain.

Now Gilgamesh confronts reality anew. This is his conversion experience, and it changes everything. Here was his spiritual journey:

1. First, he seeks the cure for the fact that we must die – having the gods grant immortality. But that doesn’t happen any more; the gods are useless for this. And even Ushnapishtim, the last human to become immortal, is lonely and grieves for his lost son, so immortality can’t be the answer to human yearning anyway.

2. Then he wants a “pill” – a magic way, not involving the gods, to become immortal, to eat of the plant called “he who is old becomes young again.” But that also only worked once, with the snake, and isn’t available in his modern times.

3. Finally, he understands that neither gods nor natural routes can lead us beyond the fact that we’re born, we live, and we die and become part of the world of the irretrievably dead. Even kings die: even the rich, even the talented, even us.

4. What, then, does the human condition offer? What is a reality-based solution to this longing? Many things. Friendship, sex, relationships, families, children who survive us, the fact that we can memorialize friends, heroes, beloved people – and that we can aspire to become a memorable person. We can achieve things that will live on in the memory of others. We can build things. We are part of cities and states that live on and carry our passions and memories and the tales of our deeds forward.

When we integrate our animal, human and divine aspects, we have great power; we can even destroy evil. And that’s a good thing. Even when gods send the evil against us, we can destroy it. Still, we die.

The Gilgamesh story is saying that the gift of immortality, either from the gods or from a “pill,” belonged to the mythic past, not the reality-based present. Whether it once happened in stories, it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t happen now; it isn’t the reality in which we live.

How is this good news? Because it empowers us in the real world. If we enter the fantasy worlds, we’re subject to those who control the stories, but who have no real information that we don’t have: just stories.

Gods have their own rules. We need a world with human-sized rules and dependable friendship and love, not subject to the whims of gods who wouldn’t care about us. And we don’t need the gods – we can simply refuse to deal with them (Ishtar), or make perfunctory bribes to them (Shamash) without caring about them.

We can live a human-scale life. We lose good friends, we lose those we love, but can memorialize them, tell their stories, write poems, build statues. We can create families, cities, and seek to become a memorable person in the lives of others.

Like one of our own modern authors (Borges) has said, we die twice. The first time is when our body gives out. Then the second and final death comes when there is no one left to tell our story. Gilgamesh accepted the first death, but said the human condition offers us chances to postpone the second death through telling our stories, writing poems, epics, memorializing those who have mattered to us, building families, cities, and participating in the joys of this fragile, transient, precious life.

The goal of human life is not absorption into the moment like other animals, and not an immortality that would breed indifference to transient things, like the gods we have sanctioned. What is available to humans is an excellence located between the beasts and the gods, and available to neither of them. It consists of participation in life, joy, creativity and wisdom.

So the gods prove to be useless, and Gilgamesh must learn to deal with life and the world the way they really are in these modern times of 4600 years ago. This isn’t atheism, it’s growing past the time when it was useful to think in terms of gods; it’s outgrowing the gods by coming into our full humanity.

What, then, is the “divine” part of us? We don’t share the gods’ immortality, or their aloofness to human pains. Perhaps it is our imagination, our ability to gain a kind of fragile wisdom available neither to animals nor gods. Gods don’t need wisdom, animals don’t either: they are living too much in the present to need a perspective that can reach beyond the present.

And what is wisdom? Perhaps it’s dealing with the fact that we live, love and will die, in ways that can lead us to that lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul and a more integrated and authentic existence that magnifies our life force rather than dissipating it. The love of gods who don’t live within our human constraints isn’t helpful, precisely because they don’t empathize with our limitations.

What is essential about human excellence is precisely its fragility. We who live and will die nevertheless love, make friendships, build cities, find joy, create children and invest our love and lives in them. We can watch them grow, as we also grow through the stages of life. Gods can’t do that. But like the gods, our imaginations can range far beyond us: that’s the “divine” part of us. We can create things that were not there, that are tender, beautiful, precious and passing, as we also are. Gilgamesh chooses this fully human and participatory life over gods and immortality.

Nearly two thousand years later, in Homer’s Odyssey Odysseus will also choose his wife Penelope over an immortal existence with the goddess Circe. These choices of the human over the immortal are rare in world literature, and among our most courageous and hopeful stories.

After all, as Gilgamesh might have said, he was a modern man, and nostalgia for the ancient ways no longer serves us. It is time to grow up, time to grow beyond the gods and into our full humanity which is, in its way, even better than the gods.

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© Davidson Loehr

February 19, 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 be willing to listen to our hearts when we are in pain. Not our anger, not our complaints, not our fear or the litany of life’s failings, but the still, small voices of our hearts.

Sometimes, it is the wishes of our hearts that cause our pain, when we expect the world to grant those wishes.

Let us not go through it alone unless we have to. Let us find a safe place, a safe person, and ask them to listen, as we try to listen, to the cries of our hurts and of our hearts.

Whether things around us can be changed, or we’ll have to change our demands and expectations, it often starts with the painful honesty that can say, “This is not what I expected in my life.”

Some times the wisdom we need is just what we don’t want to hear, but what we need to hear – not from others wagging their self-righteous fingers at us, but from ourselves, in our own voice.

Religious miracles aren’t about changing the world around us. Those are social or political endeavors. Religious miracles are about changing our hearts, our expectations, changing what we are willing to accept.

They are among life’s hardest miracles, and they seldom happen alone. When we are in pain, when we need someone just to listen, let us try to find them.

The heart does have reasons that reason does not know. And sometimes, if we will listen carefully, we can hear them. Let us learn to listen.

Amen.

TESTIMONIALS

This service about “listening to the heart” used our own Listening Ministry as an example of church members who have been through nearly six months of training as listeners, and church members who have used these services. For this posting, I’ve removed the last names of our members, but included their comments.

Mike – A Listening Minister:

1. What was the best thing about the listening ministry program?

One of the best things about the Listening Ministry program for me is the training. In the beginning it’s a frustrating and unnatural process, but it gets you thinking. You think about listening, which is unnatural, because most of us listen in order to respond with answers or anecdotes. As a listening minister you learn to respond with questions, to clarify, or by paraphrasing, to comprehend.

The training by itself is good enough. I’d do it again just for that. But, I joined this church for many reasons. One reason is for community, another is for personal salvation. By salvation I mean that I want to live a healthy life in the moment. For me, the two are joined.

A perfect illustration of this for me started in the New UU Covenant group. Everyone in the group gave a talk that summed up their personal spiritual journey. Well, I grew up fairly un-churched. Our family suited-up for Easter or Christmas Eve services at a mild Presbyterian church. I couldn’t tell you anything about it really-other than feeling awkward and stiff in church clothes. So, for this covenant group, I wrote about my life-the emotional ups and downs, the demons, the struggle to forgive myself and others. Before I spilled all of this out in the covenant group, I confessed that I’d written a rather long piece on my spiritual journey. The leader of the group, Nancy G., said quite seriously something to the effect: Take as long as you need, we’re here for you.

We all start coming to church for one reason or the other, but I personally returned to this church for the gentle inclusiveness found in Nancy’s words and in that group’s willingness to listen to my story. This to me embodies one of the listening ministry principles. Bearing witness. Everyone needs a witness to the ups and downs in their lives. At times, friends, family, and co-workers cannot fulfill this role. Sometimes you just need a neutral person to listen respectfully with compassion to your story. You need a witness. I believe that being heard, no matter what you’re suffering, can help with the healing process.

Dana – who used our Listening Ministry:

1. What was the best thing about your listener or the listening ministry program?

Having someone listen without judgment or “helpful” comments. Simply allowing the words from my pain resonate in the room and echo back to my ears. This echo came back to me with acknowledgement, affirmation and confirmation of my feelings. The listening minister likewise, reiterated my feelings, and somehow my feelings were annotated and enlarged, no longer being fuzzy thoughts are hurts… But a solid that could be seen and managed.

2. What would you tell someone who was hesitant to call for a listening minister?

That managing pain alone is a choice, but not the most effective and beneficial. Sharing pain as in sharing joy, a good meal, a good laugh, brings an expanded dimension and allows space for healing….That being heard by someone who can hear, is sensitive and supportive is the very best to bring about resolution.

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

The ease, simplicity, of someone accommodating my time schedule, being available to me, to be with me, and support me in finding positive resolution to my issues.

Caroline – A Listening Minister

I signed up for the LM training soon after joining the church. The training required introspection, openness and sharing among other trainees. This continues throughout one’s participation in the program. Serving as a LM has helped me understand why I respond to situations as I do, what I’m feeling and why, and how to better put it into words – not a forte of mine. So I have learned both from my listenees and my fellow LM”s. Another benefit, I have also come to know quite well a caring, open, diverse group of church members whom I care about greatly. Six of the trainees from my group still get together on a monthly basis. I cherish these get-togethers.

For someone who is hesitant to request a LM, I would say think of it as your time, a time when you give yourself permission to talk about what is on your mind without worrying about whether you are imposing on the listener. The old saying “get it off your chest” works: talking something through in your head is harder. Situations are clarified, emotions may not have the same grip once they are spoken. New perspectives and insights emerge.

The LM is a real win-win situation as far as I’m concerned. I have gained as much from my listenees and the program as they I hope have.

Rebecca – who used our Listening Ministry:

1. What was the best thing about your listener or the listening ministry program?

I liked that my listener had some experience with my specific issue. It made me feel like she would understand my problems from the start.

2. What would you tell someone who was hesitant to call for a listening minister?

I found it to be very effective one on one counseling for a time that was difficult. My listener gave support that I was not able to find in friends or family.

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

How helpful it was. She just listened to me spew out all of my stuff. She never really gave advice or guidance. She just accepted me in the place I was in. It’s a world full of judgments but it’s a very powerful thing to just be accepted.

SERMON:

When I looked for a training program for a listening ministry program after I arrived here in 2000, I chose the one we’re using for two reasons. First, it was the hardest and demanded the most training, and I thought both our members and our volunteers deserve that kind of first-class treatment.

And second, I liked the philosophy of this training, which saw our role not as curing, not as solving, but as listening, in the faith that the wisdom most of us need is the wisdom of our own best selves, and that can happen – sometimes almost magically – just by being able to tell our story. Listening is work, always, and it’s hard work. But when one person can be honest and the other can be attentive, sometimes miracles occur.

I first saw this magic performed twenty-four years ago, and to the end of my days it will remain one of the most miraculous things I have ever witnessed.

I was taking a ten-week chaplaincy training program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, learning how to be a chaplain, which I finally realized meant learning how to listen. I had signed on for the leukemia ward. As soon as I found the ward and told them I was the new chaplain intern, three nurses jumped on me and said “Wonderful! It’s your turn! Go see the woman in room 19!” I asked what this was about, and they said “We have all had all we can take of her. It’s your turn!”

I went in to meet this woman, and a nurse closed the door behind me. The patient was 29, married with two children, dying of leukemia, and furious. I heard her whole story: very loud, punctuated with furious profanity, along with being told that the fact that I dared to be a chaplain was a cheap abomination, because in case I hadn’t heard, there was no God, there was no justice, and there was no love!

I have never been around anyone as deeply furious, or loud, profane and vulgar as this woman, and I had no idea how to help her. I listened to her story. She and her husband had had a stormy beginning to their marriage, with some painful fights and threats of divorce going both ways. Then one day they decided to begin talking through their angers and their differences. They worked hard at it for a year, she said. They were vulnerable, honest, and serious. They were willing to be heard, and willing to listen.

And finally, as they could hear each other’s pain and anger, they began to understand where the resentments were, how the angers had arisen and how they had each nursed them in the dark, where they gained strength until they had nearly destroyed their relationship.

Slowly, painfully, they found each other again, and they found the love they had lost. They fell in love all over again, with each other, with their marriage and their new baby. They recommitted themselves to one another for the rest of their lives, and soon their second child was on the way.

The past three years, she said, had been the happiest either of them had ever imagined. They had worked for it, they had earned it, they deserved it. There was a justice about it – this was a very important phrase for her.

And now, she said, her voice rising again, she was going to die. She was going to die, leaving behind the husband she loved, the two young children they both loved and had so looked forward to spending the rest of their lives raising and loving and watching grow up.

Within seconds, the profanity and vulgarity were back, screamed almost as loud as she could scream from her desperate, hopeless pain. I had absolutely no idea what to do. After she finished, she told me that I was to return at the same time the next day. I asked why. She screamed that I would hear this story every damned day until she died, that’s why, and if I wasn’t there she would have me paged.

I had failed miserably with the very first patient to whom I’d been assigned. I felt awful, and I was in that room at that time for five full days, feeling worse for her and worse for myself every day.

I was depressed all that weekend, and partly because I knew Monday was coming and I’d have to go back into that room again. So Monday morning, in the group when the ten chaplain students met with our supervisor, I confessed. I told the story, said I had completely failed at this, and didn’t know what to do.

Our supervisor was a Lutheran minister named John Serkland – good people deserve to have their names told with their stories. John listened to my miserable story, and said “Do you want me to save you?” I said “Do you honestly think you can?” He said Yes, he thought he probably could. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even know what that could mean. I said “John, this woman is going to die, she’s furious and I don’t blame her. What on earth can you possibly do?” He said that tomorrow he would go with me to visit her.

So that day, Monday, I spent another painful and miserable fifteen minutes in her room, hearing the same story, with more volume, more profanity, more vulgarity, more hopeless fury, and that night I didn’t sleep well.

The next day, John wore his chaplain costume, with the Lutheran backward collar. I thought, Man, she’s going to throw the bedstand at you in that costume! That afternoon, we walked into her room. She took one quick look at us, and sized the situation up immediately. “Oh I see,” she yelled, “the little moron is stumped, so he brings the big fat moron!” Her actual words were far more colorful,

John sat down in the chair by the head of her bed. He said, “My name is John. May I hear your story?” That’s all he said for the next ten minutes. She laid into him. She called him names, told him what an abomination his costume was, then told him her story, the story I had already heard six times. It seemed even more angry, more desperate, more hopeless. When she finished, John said just three words. He looked at her and simply said, “You expected more.”

She was prepared to throw whatever he said right back in his face, and she formed her mouth for a response, but nothing came out. She mustered more energy, more anger, and again tried to say something, but again nothing came out. Then tears ran down both her cheeks; she looked at John and simply said, “Yes.”

“Yes,” he repeated. She reached her hand out, and he clasped it for a few seconds, then said “I would like to come back tomorrow.” She nodded. We left.

The next day, we returned, and the spell had been broken. She apologized for her behavior, her anger, her language, and John said she had nothing to apologize for. “I expected more,” she said, “I expected more than this. But there isn’t more. There’s just this. Just 29 years. Just this. I was just so angry! I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t seem right. There was no justice in it. I wanted more. But there isn’t more. There is just this.” She thanked John, then said “You don’t have to come back.” She nodded toward me and said, “He’ll do.” We laughed, and left.

John and I went to the hospital cafeteria for some coffee and conversation. I said “How did you know what to do?” He said, “I have a confession to make. About ten years ago, I was assigned to a patient much like her, in the same condition, and she was also furious. Each day she would scream at me, call me names, tell me chaplains were a disgrace, and the rest of it. I had no idea what to do. I kept wanting to help her, to solve her problem, and I couldn’t solve her problem because she was right: she was dying, and it wasn’t fair. She died, angry to the end, and I knew I had failed her. I thought about it for years. A couple years ago, after I’d had a lot more experience, I finally realized that I hadn’t needed to fix her, I’d just needed to hear her. I wondered if I would ever get another chance to do it right. This time, it was your turn. And because you failed as I once had, I got the chance to say those three words I wish I had said ten years ago.”

All John did was listen to her heart. It was all she needed. Most of the time, it’s all any of us need. It’s our own wisdom that we need, but we can’t hear it because our fear, our desperation and our fury keep us from hearing ourselves. Sometimes, it just takes someone else. Not someone to fix us, not someone to give us wise answers like dishing out pills. Not someone to listen to our symptoms and diagnose a medication. Just someone to listen to our heart. Just that.

And what a gift it is. That young woman died a few weeks later. During those weeks, she spent every minute she could loving her husband, her children, expressing her appreciation for all that others had been able to do. She had found a peace I didn’t think possible. It was certainly a peace I couldn’t have led her to. But she didn’t need to be led; she just needed to be heard – and to listen to herself.

Of all the thoughts I’ve had about that experience, two stand out.

The first was realizing that virtually all of our frustrations, angers and disappointments in life result from the fact that we expected more. Our friendships or relationships aren’t as satisfying as we want: we expected more. Our parents, our families, frustrate us with their scripts, their expectations, their badgering. We expected more from our family. Our job drives us nuts: we expected more from that! We’re not attractive enough, not successful enough, not happy enough: we expected more.

Sometimes, of course, there can be more. Every social action, every political action effort in history has been the demand that our society be more. The American colonists expected more representation for their taxes, demanded it, fought for it, and got it. A century ago, women expected more of a voice in elections. They fought for it, and got it. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam era anti-war movement, the movement to remove President Nixon from office, and hundreds of other movements came precisely from the fact that we expected more, worked for more, and got more. So this isn’t about urging a spineless passivity. Some things can be changed.

But not everything can be changed. Some things must finally be accepted. Then it’s time to look for spiritual miracles. Those miracles don’t change the world around us; they change the world within us. That’s what religious miracles are about: not walking on water, but learning to walk on the earth for as long as we”ve been given: awake, aware, and grateful.

The second lesson I learned is that it usually won’t happen unless we can listen and hear. Not only chaplains, ministers and listening ministers need to listen and hear, but those telling their stories need to listen and hear, too. I don’t know how many times that woman shouted her story, but she never heard what her heart was saying, and she put others off so much that they didn’t even want to listen. If both she and John had not been willing to listen to her heart, I think she would have died in that same painful fury.

When we can get our hearts and our heads together and listen, sometimes miracles happen. They really happen every day, all around us, in quiet conversations and quiet reflections going on everywhere. Life can have profound disappointments, but it also has its miracles. Indeed, miracles abound. Sometimes all we have to do is listen.

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© Davidson Loehr

18 December 2005

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 learn how to open our gifts. Christmas is coming, wrapped presents are everywhere, and we still struggle to know how to open our gifts, even to recognize them.

The pure gift of just being here – what’s that worth? And being with people we love, and who love us – what’s that selling for on the Dow or the Nasdaq? And our health – whatever degree of health we have, it’s better than having a lot less health. It makes a big difference. What’s that worth?

So many gifts and so many of us who have not learned how to see them. Let us become aware of those simple gifts of being here, loving and being loved, the gifts of our health. Those gifts are the real treasures of this holiday season, and we don’t have to wait until Christmas to open them. In fact, it’s best that we don’t wait. Let us open our gifts of life, love and spirit, and spread them all around our lives, sitting there right in the middle of them. That will help us prepare for Christmas by reminding ourselves that we already have the really important gifts, while on Christmas morning we can open our gaily-wrapped trinkets and toys.

Amen.

SERMON: Love Stories

Some of you may be thinking “All right, this is a church and it’s Christmas time, so tell me a story, take me in, make me believe things that I know aren’t so, just for a week. Do the Christmas thing – if you pretend it could be true, I’ll pretend I believe you, and we’ll fake it through another holiday season. Just tell me a story and take me in.” Even if you wouldn’t say it that way, you recognize the sentiment, and many of you may identify with it.

But others come to church a week before Christmas and think, “All right now, it’s that season when all preachers lie because they think they can get away with it. But don’t lie to me. Don’t insult my mind or my spirit by feeding me hokum. Now more than at any other time of the year, I need the one thing churches almost never offer: I need truth. So don’t you dare lie to me!”

And others are in between, wondering and hoping that there could be truth that’s still magical, and magic that’s true.

Really, this is the range of expectations people bring to religion all the time, everywhere. We know religions always teach using stories, and a lot of people think you only use stories when you don’t have facts, the way Plato defined myths as lies 2400 years ago – though Plato was one of the great mythmakers of Western history.

But you can’t escape stories. You can just hope to tell the difference between stories that serve us and stories that enslave us. Even sciences give their facts a human meaning by embedding them in stories. We might doze off in a talk about Chlorofluorocarbon emissions, but we understand the story of global warming, and the picture of melting ice caps that can raise the sea level and flood some of the world’s major cities.

We can understand that those species of plants and animals that fit the demands of their surroundings would do well, but it’s easier to remember the phrase “survival of the fittest” because it implies all kinds of stories, including a lot of cowboy Westerns.

But even things presented in the media as facts – are usually parts of stories, whether we realize it or not. Right now, for instance, we are told repeatedly that we are at war with Iraq. Well, that one word “war” calls up all kinds of stories of heroic sacrifice made in the name of high and noble ideals, usually against evil enemies.

But the truth is that we aren’t in a war with Iraq. We invaded their country, illegally and against all international law. Our administration lied to our own people to do it, in order to control Iraq’s money, their oil, and occupy their strategic position. What our media call Iraqi “insurgents” aren’t insurgents; they’re fighting and dying to repel a foreign invader that has stolen their money and murdered over 100,000 of their people. That’s a very different story. If the media called it an illegal invasion, called the theft of their money and oil robbery or piracy, and called the deaths of Iraqi citizens murders, then we would have a very different story, and one the country would not support for long. It matters what you call it, because what you call it calls up images and stories that either sanction or condemn what we are doing.

All stories are trying to take us in. But with good stories, we want to be taken in. We love fiction that feeds our spirits, and don’t care a bit whether it’s true. In fact, we prefer stories to facts. This is a religious lesson, but I first learned it from a diaper commercial.

Some years ago, when Pampers came on the market, they were the first good disposable diaper. The advertisers could truthfully say they were the best in the world, because – well, they were the only disposable diaper in the world. So they decided to try an advertising campaign grounded in truth rather than the kinds of images and stories that advertisers prefer. They chose Texas as the test market for this campaign, and just told people the facts, and that Pampers were the best diapers you could buy. Nobody bought them. Apparently that wasn’t what parents were looking for.

So the ad agency decided, Well, we’ll just do it the old way. And they came up with the second ad. This ad said that a Pampers baby is a happy baby. And the rest is history. A happy baby – there’s a whole story tucked in those two words. A happy baby means a happy marriage, a happy family, and young parents who must be doing a good job of parenting. And those are things parents do want to hear: it’s worth the price of a box of diapers any day. And if the diapers are good – well, that’s a bonus.

We prefer stories to facts. We don’t like to admit it, but it’s true.

If you doubt it, just remember the last time you watched “The Nutcracker,” and were perfectly happy seeing dancing mice and a wooden nutcracker who came to life. Not a bit of it actually, historically, happened, you know. But you don’t care a bit, because it’s such a wonderful story.

If you haven’t seen “The Nutcracker,” and still think we prefer truth to fiction, I have one word for you: movies. The documentaries seldom move us. But show us a story that we can imagine ourselves in or connected to, and the tears will flow, our hearts will be touched, and our spirits will be opened and fed.

The best religious stories can do this, too. Some are educational, like the Good Samaritan, or a lot of Buddhist stories. Some are challenging stories, like the stories of the prophets saying God doesn’t care what we believe, only how we behave toward the weakest among us.

And the best of them, those that come from a deep love of life that makes us fall in love with some of the deeper parts of life – those are love stories.

This is the kind of love story that’s the best thing about religions: stories that can make us fall in love with life at deeper levels. They’re everywhere, and I’ve brought you three short ones, from three different religions today.

The first story has a story of its own attending it. A couple years ago, we had an Indian woman who often attended here. She always came late and left early. But one Sunday she came a little early and I saw her, so I went up to her, welcomed her, and asked why she usually came late and left early.

She explained that she had to drive her teen-aged son to Barsana Dahm, the wonderful Hindu temple south of town, then had to drive here, and then had to drive the 30 minutes south again to pick her son up. I said that was two hours of driving, and asked why she didn’t just bring her son here.

“Ah no,” she said, “because you have no good stories!” She said her son needed stories that stirred his mind and his heart, stories he would want to discuss at home during the week. Hinduism, she informed me, had many good stories. “Tell me one,” I asked. “Ah!” she said, “I could tell you a hundred!” “Just one.” “Very well, I’ll tell you the story he learned last week, and which our family has discussed over dinner all this week.”

It was a story about Krishna, probably Hinduism’s favorite picture of God. Krishna was a wonderful god, but as a boy he misbehaved – you could even call him a brat at times. So naturally, kids love him.

Krishna was chewing something in school, and the teacher saw him. He knew he was not supposed to chew gum. “Krishna,” she said, “What are you chewing?” “Nothing,” he replied, still chewing. “Krishna!” she said louder, “that is not true! You are chewing gum, aren’t you?” “No,” he said. She walked over to his desk, told him to stand up, and said “Now open your mouth. I want to look inside!”

So Krishna opened his mouth. The teacher bent down, looked inside his mouth, and saw – a hundred million galaxies. Inside that child were eternity and infinity, just as they are inside all children. That’s a love story! And this woman’s son spent a whole week discussing this story with his parents, and what it might mean to have an infinite and eternal identity inside of him: what it might mean for who he was and how he should live.

A second story isn’t so much a story as it is one sentence that, like Krishna’s mouth, contains a wonderful infinity of possibilities. It comes from Judaism, and is the simple statement where the writer has God say to the Hebrew people “I will be your father, and you will be my people.” God’s people: children of God: everyone! That’s pretty close to containing something infinite and eternal, like the Krishna story, isn’t it? It’s another love story.

And then there is the Christian story, the birth of the baby Jesus. The story is good, both for what it says and for what it does not say. Jesus wasn’t born in a castle, not even in a Holiday Inn, or the story would be saying that only the wealthy have that capacity for bearing the sacred. He wasn’t born to royalty, or it would be saying that only the powerful are really significant. No, in this story, the incarnation of God was born to common people, not rich ones. When God walked among us, he walked as one of us. In fact, it’s the only way he ever walks among us. And we could be incarnations of that spirit rightfully called Holy. For we are children of God and the hope of the world, if only we will be.

Told as history, it isn’t true. It didn’t happen. Told as science, it isn’t true. Humans aren’t conceived without chromosomes from two parents, and that’s done by actual sex, not just an idea. But as a love story, it’s wonderful. If you think about it, it is the Christian version of the story the Hindus tell in that wonderful story of Krishna containing the whole universe in him, or the Jews tell simply by having their God say “I will be your father and you will be my people.” If you’re looking for a story that comes from the depths – not of gods but of humans – then this season has some wonderful love stories for you.

And these love stories aren’t just about giving us a cradle, a manger to make us feel loved, though they can do that. They’re also about nurturing us, empowering us, to grow into our highest selves. They’re stories saying “You, you there: you have within you infinite possibilities. You’re a child of God. You are even, if you will be, an incarnation of God. Now. Go act like it!”

The best love stories give us a love that doesn’t stop until it overflows us, and we reach out to feed a hungry world with the overflow. That’s part of the meaning of reminding ourselves during this season that ” it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Because when we give, we are becoming the incarnation of those forces in the world, in the universe, that are only happy when they are giving unto others: giving life, love, hope, a healing touch, a caring presence. Presence. Spelled with a “c” rather than a “t” – a healing presence, a loving presence. Those are the greatest presents we can give one another, at Christmas or any other time.

It gives a whole new meaning to the words “Christmas presence.” The Christmas story has become mostly a merchants’ story about buying yourself into debt to impress your family and friends with gadgets and toys that will be forgotten in weeks or months. The emphasis is on how many presents you can get, or what they’re worth, or whether they’re cool or impressive enough. And that’s all wrong. There’s nothing there but greed, envy, and a one-upmanship that never ends until you have maxed out your credit cards.

But from the treasuries of the human imagination kept alive for us in the great love stories of religion, another possibility emerges. It is the possibility not of Christmas presents, but of a presence. A presence of love, of awareness, of knowing that within us are infinite possibilities. Within us is the spirit of a son or daughter of God, children of Life’s longing for itself. For we, if only we would realize it, are incarnations of God, needing to claim our sacred heritage, and live it.

These, of course, are stories. Are they true? Yes, these are true, even more true than mere facts. For these are love stories. And it doesn’t get much more true than that!

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

11 December 2005

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 spend so much time looking for magic in the wrong places. We think it must be a hard thing to get, this magic, and we go through the motions of all the incantations, prayers, lucky charms and tricks we can find, trying to trick some magic into entering our souls.

This is the season when we will be charged a lot of money for seeking magic in the wrong places. And no matter how much we spend, toys aren’t likely to deliver the kind of magic for which we really yearn.

It’s the season when we chase after the spirit called Holy, and wish we could be caught by it.

It’s an important chase, but we don’t need to bring our credit cards. For the spirit of life and love and everything really worth the chase – not only is that spirit free, but it is also inside of us, waiting to be awakened, and noticed, so that it might do its work.

This season, let us conspire with the holy spirit to transform our hearts from stone to flesh, to reawaken our gratitude for this miracle of life, and our love for those who help feather our heart’s nest.

There is a glow, and a warmth that comes from looking for magic in the right places, and it can’t be begged, borrowed, stolen or bought. But it can be brought forth, from its home in the manger of our heart, and it can bless us. That blessing, that warmth, that connection, that feeling – that’s the magic that’s really worth seeking.

These holidays, let us seek for the magic of the season, but let us seek it in all the right places.

Amen.

SERMON: Magic

I began thinking about the idea of magic when I was talking with a colleague who is doing an interim ministry at an unhappy church. “I’m getting ready for the Christmas services,” she said, “but I don’t feel the magic.” Christmas is such a magical holiday that without that magic, it isn’t really Christmas.

I’ve been reading a book about magic, a book called Not in Kansas Anymore (Christine Wicker). The author used to be a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News, and brings a lot of skepticism to this subject of magic. But she spent a couple years looking for it among some very colorful people. She spent time with witches, vampires, werewolves and elves, and a host of others in all the costumes you could imagine, and some you couldn’t imagine.

This wasn’t about party tricks, or producing a quarter from behind someone’s ear. It’s what the communities she studied call “High magic.” It’s about transforming yourself. Magic is a search for a power of life by people who are missing it and want it. Magic is the effort to create a feeling that we’re somehow connected to larger powers, and that connection can bring us a feeling of being more alive.

Of the groups she studied, the most fascinating to me were the psychic vampires, because I’ve known a few. They told her they could drain energy from others just by being around them, and she said she sometimes felt drained after they left. These psychic vampires divided the world into two kinds of people: vampires and victims. Those who steal life, and those from whom they steal it.

While all these alternative magic-seekers are usually people for whom traditional religion can’t give them this power or satisfy this need, you don’t need religion to explain where they would get this view of our world as those who take and those who are taken from. They could get it from our economy, which serves the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest. Or they could see it in our imperialism: the notion that since we have the military might, we have the right to invade and rob any country with assets or strategic location we desire. Both our economy and our foreign policy operate a lot like vampires and victims: those with brute power feed on the life energy of those whose powers are more vulnerable, more easily stolen from them.

It’s about trying to take, steal, or buy something from others that can give us a kind of life feeling we don’t have. The whole notion is wrong: that we can steal or buy a worthwhile life. And once you think a quality life can be stolen or bought, we’re at the mercy of the advertising agencies who have made a multi-billion-dollar art of convincing us that their product can give us the magic we need.

So I’ve been thinking about the Christmas season in terms of magic this week. As some of you have heard, it’s the same week in which a bunch of evangelical Christian megachurches announced that they’ll be closed on Sunday the 25th of December. That tiresome crank, Jerry Falwell, has denounced them, as he has denounced the White House for sending “Holiday Greetings” cards, insisting that Christmas is a completely Christian holiday.

But Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday. As even a conservative New York Times op-ed writer reported yesterday (John Tierney, 10 December 2005), it is a winter solstice festival, and has been so for thousands of years. In the ancient calendar, the day we call December 25th was the date of the winter solstice. As such, it was automatically the birth day of all solar deities, including the Roman god Mithras. December 25th wasn’t adopted as Jesus’ birthday until the fourth century, the same time that Sunday was adopted as the Christian holy day. But Sunday is the day of the Sun: the holy day of solar deities. So nothing about this season, or Sunday, has anything to do with the man Jesus.

Christmas isn’t even a religious holiday; it’s a merchants’ holiday, the day they finally close their stores after the Christmas selling orgy that produces about a third of their annual sales. The truth is, Christmas is a secular holiday. If you doubt this, just look at the gifts that are given. Bibles make up an infinitesimally small percentage of Christmas gifts. What we buy has nothing to do with religion. But what we are trying to buy is magic: the magic of the season. And how odd, that we are told that we must buy it!

Here at church, I’ve been getting spammed with e-mails telling me what the hottest toys of this season are, presuming I might want to run out and buy them so I can feel the magic. It’s a confusing array. And somehow, each manufacturer has their own idea of the season’s hottest toy. I’ve read that the season’s hottest toy is the Microsoft X-Box 360, selling for $399. The company says they expect to sell over three million of them. They’re hot.

But there are so many hottest toys of the year! One e-mail says the hottest toy is the Remote control Hovercraft; another says no, it’s the Remote Control UFO that’s the hottest toy of the year. Then there’s the Twinkle Twirl Dance Studio with Twinkle Twirl Pony and Accessories. That’s hot. There’s the Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Play Set, which is more than I want to know about that. Or the Barbie Swan Lake Unicorn, with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken. That doesn’t do a lot for me, but I’ll bet some of you have daughters who hope they get one. There’s even the Room Moodz 6″ Rotating Disco Ball Light for $14.99. I hope disco balls aren’t making a comeback!

The magic of the Christmas season is for sale in stores, through catalogs and online, delivered to your door to transform your Christmas into the magical sort of thing you think you want. These gifts are promising to make your holiday season, to connect it with that larger power that you don’t have. It’s the power of being really cool, excited, keeping up with or staying ahead of your friends. You know, you can’t buy just any Sewer Lair Play Set. It won’t be the right brand. It won’t have the kind of magic that only the Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Play Set has. And you can’t just go down to the Dollar Store and buy some scruffy old unicorn. It won’t have the magic of the Barbie Swan Lake Unicorn, with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken. Just ask your kids. We’re not buying toys; we’re buying holiday magic. And we’ll spend an average of $700 to $1,000 buying it because we aren’t being told that we have the magic within us. This reminds me a lot of those psychic vampires. And think about all these hot toys, and what we do with them. We use them alone. We go off alone, absorbed in our X-Box 360, or the Twinkle Twirl Dance Studio or those sewer turtles. This magic we’re spending so much money for takes us away from contact with almost all the real human beings around us.

But you know this can’t be right. Even saying it out loud sounds silly. We’ve been convinced that holiday magic is something we have to buy, that we don’t have it and can’t call it forth on our own; we have to buy it. And it’s a strange and transient kind of magic, at that. Because the magic of this year’s hottest toys won’t even last a year. Next year these toys won’t have the magic any more. It never ends. Can real magic expire in just a year? Can it be as easy as charging it on a credit card? Is that really what we’re after? I know psychic vampires have to hunt continually for new life to steal, but is that the best we can do?

This is where I want to bring in a different way of looking at the magic we’re looking for. It’s a lens borrowed from Christianity, though one we seldom think about. It’s what the choir sang about this morning. They sang selections from Vivaldi’s Magnificat. Some of you will know where that word “Magnificat” comes from, and some of you won’t. It comes from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 1 verse 46, from the Christian myth of the birth of Jesus. This gospel was written about eight years after the man Jesus was born, half a century after he died, so it’s imaginative religious storytelling, not history. We really don’t know a thing about just where or when the man Jesus was born. Still, it’s a lovely story. Mary’s friend Elizabeth tells her that her baby will be the Messiah. For centuries, Jewish women hoped, at least at some level, that their baby might be the long-awaited Messiah, and Mary has just been told, in this story written more than eighty years after Jesus’ birth, that her baby will be the one. That’s when she said the line that has launched a thousand concerts: “My soul magnifies the Lord.” That’s what the Latin word “magnificat” means: magnifies. My soul magnifies the Lord. Mary was saying “I carry within me magic of the highest order, the magic of God himself, placed in my womb to be born into the world. My soul magnifies the Lord!”

Sure, this is wrapped in that archaic language of a first-century myth; but you have a feeling for what it means. It’s about real magic! Not bought, not something that will wear thin by next season, but a gift of life, a visitation of all that is most holy, growing right there inside of your body. Every mother knows the feeling; every father can relate to it. Today, we get a set of plastic Barbie and Ken dolls, or some sewer turtles. And what does that magnify? The power of advertising to convince us that we want things we don’t really need? Is that what our souls magnify at Christmastime today? The power and the glory of advertisers taking advantage of our gullibility by tapping into our yearning for some high magic?

Mary’s magic was free. And really, in Jewish teachings, all people are the sons and daughters of God, who was their heavenly Father. It was magic, and it was free. Today, we get Barbie and Ken, and we buy them because we’ve been taught that we don’t have the magic in us any more. It’s a lie, but as long as we believe it, it’s true.

Think back this week on your very favorite, your most magical, Christmases, and see what made them so magical. I can remember some from my childhood. And I can’t remember a single present that I got at any of those best Christmases. It was other things: the feeling of our family being together, being happy, the wonderful smells of pine needles, and of cookies and bread baking, the magic of Santa Claus. We put out milk and cookies for Santa every Christmas Eve, and knew for a fact that there was a Santa because every Christmas morning, they were gone. Our father helped us choose the right kind of cookies; he seemed to know just what Santa liked. Then there was that warm glow of the multi-colored tree lights, and the glow in all the windows up and down the street. It was all magic. Nothing Christian about it, but it was magic. And what did our souls magnify? I think it was as simple as the joy of being together, being in a safe place where love lived and we lived, and where we mingled with love and called the place Home. I don’t mean I didn’t often hope for certain presents, but I can’t remember what any of them were.

What about you? When you think back on your best holidays, what did your soul magnify? What spirit were you channeling? What kind of powers or gods were you serving? I’ll bet they were happy ones, warm ones that cherished you and cherished those around you. Your soul magnified the power of love, and gratitude, and that magnification transformed the holidays into something special, something magical. But it was home-grown magic that accomplished the miracle: not store-bought magic.

We pay a fortune for gifts each year, gifts that will be out of fashion within a few months, because we have forgotten that the real magic of the season is all around us. But the center of this season is all about what we are magnifying with our souls. If Mary had said “My soul magnifies the fads of the season,” nobody would have cared. If she had rejoiced in stealing life from God, who was her newest victim, nobody would even have written it down, because you can’t get it more wrong than that.

Our souls are going to magnify something this season. Maybe just Microsoft’s profits and the stock portfolios of those who own a lot of Microsoft stock. Maybe just the fads of the season, new hot toys that start losing their heat within weeks. And in some ways, we spend all the money because, like psychic vampires, we think we’re missing something that can only be taken or bought from others. It never ends, because it’s looking for magic in all the wrong places.

I hope we can magnify more important things this holiday season. Like the warmth of a mutual relationship with another live human being. Like learning that it isn’t the love we buy or steal that saves us; it’s the love we share. This is the season of infinite dreams, when we dream even of finding, and magnifying, things like love, life, tenderness, compassion, the Holy Spirit – the spirit of the God of Love. Let our souls magnify all that is truly holy and life-giving this season. The very best magic is free; it’s still the only enduring miracle of this or any other season.