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© Davidson Loehr

13 November 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Ask all veterans to stand, thank them for serving

Prayer

We who send soldiers to die, let us remember what they are like alive. For they do not begin as young dead soldiers. They begin vibrant and alive, with their whole lives ahead of them. They are full of hope and full of future. Their marriages, children and families are still ahead of them. All the challenges life brings, the successes and failures, life’s unpredictable array of comedies and tragedies – all are still ahead of them. The whole hope and promise of life beckon them.

When we send them into war, we are promising them that this cause will be worth it – worth cutting off their lives for, worth dying for.

Yet looking back just over our own lifetimes, how few wars there have been that rose to the height of actually being preferable to all those young dead and wounded soldiers?

Just the pull of a trigger can end so many young lives. But the most powerful trigger isn’t on a gun. It’s the trigger we pull when we send them into the meat-grinder of wars that are not worthy of them, not worthy of our own or America’s highest and most honest ideals.

We too pull the triggers that send the young to die.

Let us remember the look and feel of alive young soldiers. And let us not be trigger-happy.

Amen.

SERMON: T.T.T.

The odd title comes from a poem and drawing by Piet Hein. The picture was of what looked like a section of Stonehenge: three large upright blocks, with three large horizontal blocks across their tops, looking like three capital “T’s” in a row. The poem, titled “T.T.T.” read:

Put up in a place where it’s easy to see,

The cryptic admonishment: T.T.T.

When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb,

It’s well to remember: Things Take Time.

This fits many occasions, and certainly fits the mood many have after the resounding defeat of Proposition 2 in the election this past Tuesday. (Proposition 2 was an amendment to the Texas constitution defining “marriage” as existing only “between one man and one woman,” and prohibiting the state from setting up any comparable set of rights and entitlements for non-heterosexual couples. While only a little over 15% of Texas voters turned out, the amendment passed by over 76% to 24%, making Texas the 19th state to pass such an amendment.)

But the amendment, which passed with 76% of the vote, makes it clear that voters are not likely to endorse such a request framed in this way. Rather than focusing on that amendment, I want to back off and talk about the idea of reframing liberal issues in terms that can fit the atmosphere of American fascism within which we’re now living.

It has been just over a year since I sat here and delivered the sermon titled “Living under Fascism” (7 November 2004). As that sermon took on a life of its own on the Internet, it spread to what are now thousands of sites. It also brought a book contract, a lot of radio interviews, the recent interview in the online version of the UU World (http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/2222.shtml), and the recent award from the Austin Chronicle (“Best Minister/Spiritual Leader” in the 2005 Best of Austin awards). And I just learned yesterday that the sermon was quoted at length by a political writer in the Sydney, Australia Morning Herald – not writing about America, but using the sermon to diagnose what the writer saw as Australia’s slide into fascism.

Looking back a year later, I think that sermon’s diagnosis was on the mark, and that we are increasingly living under an American style of fascism. That American fascism involves plutocracy, imperialism and fundamentalism, and it has changed some of the most important rules of life, both here and abroad. Those new rules must be taken into account when planning any new social or political endeavor.

While these comments are political, they’re not partisan; our slide into the American style of fascism grew continuously through the past four presidential administrations, both Republican and Democrat. President Clinton’s selling of both American and world workers through defending and passing both the WTO and NAFTA played key roles in bringing about the New World Order that has now wreaked such havoc at home and abroad. And while we are justly concerned about the more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths we have caused since invading their country, the embargoes Bill Clinton applied to Iraq caused the deaths of five to ten times as many. Neither political party seems to have any clear or good answers.

So today, a year after offering critiques in the sermon on fascism, I want to begin offering some suggestions for operating in this Brave New World Order that looks more and more like 1984. If we are living under an American fascism, then our tactics have to work under the conditions of this new world order.

The primary rule of fascism is that it is the state that matters, not the individual. We may not like the rules, but they have won the day, control both political parties, a majority of Congress, the Senate, high courts, more and more laws, and the media.

This means that continuing to frame arguments in terms of individual rights is suicide, even when it is individual rights that are under attack, as they will be more and more often in coming months and perhaps years.

Arguments for gay rights that can be presented in ways that suggest sex will fail overwhelmingly, which is what happened to the gay marriage issue.

Arguments for individual rights that can be framed as selfish and indifferent to or destructive of the soul of America will fail.

Arguments that can be framed as a plea for a weaker America will fail.

Arguments against our rapacious capitalism will fail as long as that capitalism can be successfully framed as a synonym for what is best about America.

Arguments now need to be framed in terms of what is best for the state, for the good of the majority of Americans of all religious and political persuasions. We need to be people who want to serve the interests of our country, and who try to persuade a majority of our fellow citizens to join us. I don’t think we can convince either political party or the media. I think we have to focus on persuading the huge majority of Americans who have been disenfranchised.

Now the truth is that not many people here are really interested, or going to become active in, politics. I doubt that more than 5-10% of our church members really plan to invest much time in this. And I’m one of that majority who don’t see political action as very compelling.

But each of us has something positive to offer, even if it is as undramatic as simply living a healthy, vibrant and loving life of integrity.

There must be a new plan of action; and its center must be moral and ethical, concerned with what is best for the country, for the common good of the vast majority of our citizens..

The religious right is correct when they say we need to operate out of deep moral and ethical values. They call these values “religious,” though the literalistic style of religion they sell is too narrow and disingenuous to serve us.

Furthermore – media hype notwithstanding – we’re not a Christian nation. We’re the most pluralistic nation on earth. The largest Hindu temple in North America is just south of Austin, and Los Angeles has the world’s largest array of Buddhisms. And the best studies of church attendance say that only about 21% of Americans of all faiths attend any religious services regularly. Nearly four out of five Americans don’t think religion is interesting enough to get out of bed for on the weekends very often.

So this morning, while there are a hundred topics that need to be addressed, I want to talk and think with you about just three: the economy, politics – and the solution to our problems, which I would define as saving our souls, reclaiming a noble soul for America, and helping to reconstitute the world. Let’s begin.

1. The Economy. Since President Reagan, we have moved resolutely into an economy of greed, designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, disempower worker unions, remove the social welfare net and increase the gap between the rich and the rest. None of this is news. But the question would be how we might make the case than an economy of greed is bad for human life, America and the world.

The assumption since 1980, now simply taken as true, is that it is a dog-eat-dog world, and the government should help the biggest dogs. With a few exceptions – like the first president Bush’s raising taxes – these rules have governed Reagan, the Clintons, and both Bushes. It’s bi-partisan, established in the assumptions of both parties, and it’s wrong.

Why is it wrong? Not because of its logic, but because of its fundamental misunderstanding of what an economy is supposed to do. We think it’s about numbers and profits, especially profits for stockholders. But that’s not what the word “economy” means. The Greek word “nomos” means laws, rules for doing something. And the root, those letters “Eco,” mean “home.” Economics means “home-making,” how we can make a society a home for its people. Defining it as merely being concerned with making profits for owners and stockholders is as wrong as defining democracy as being concerned only with the whims of the rulers. And the problems we’ve created follow absolutely logically from that bad definition of what an economy is supposed to do. Bad assumptions plus good logic equals logical but bad conclusions.

When profits count more than people, we will turn people into things to serve profits rather than seeing profits as serving the lives of all our people.

Then it is perfectly logical to cut worker’s pay and benefits, logical to ship jobs overseas to the cheapest markets, logical to coerce poor areas of the world to get their people to make our goods for pennies an hour, in inhumane working conditions that can not buy them enough food. And it’s logical to support tyrannical regimes who can control their people as we milk them for cheap labor, if profits for the few are more important than high standards of living for the many. Because they have ceased to be people, and have become merely things, whose only use is making profits for others, and who can and should be discarded when something or someone else can do it cheaper.

It’s perfectly logical to say that people don’t deserve anything they can’t afford to pay for – as large corporations have been claiming, and selling even water to poor people in South America. And it’s logical to say that those who own the country should run it – as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, said over two centuries ago. The idea may be wrong, but it is not new; it has a long history in our society.

And, since the masses won’t like this new and degraded, subhuman role, it’s also logical to use public relations, advertising and the media – and the police when necessary – to manipulate them, to lead them in the direction needed to keep using them as things.

Noam Chomsky has a book out about “manufacturing consent”; but that phrase was actually coined more than half a century ago by the American psychologist Edward Bernays. Bernays played a key role in the development of internal American propaganda during the 1940s, and he described the science of manufacturing consent as a good thing, as the way the masses need to be manipulated in a large country, so they will follow the agenda of those who rule them. By now, the manipulation of us masses to manufacture our consent has grown into a high and fine art and science, having been perfected by advertisers, politicians and the media.

It’s why both political parties have agreed, with the eager cooperation of the media, to avoid dealing with significant issues at all during presidential and many other elections, and just to distract the masses with attack ads, personalities, scandals and sensationalism. These things draw crowds, draw audiences to TV programs, and the companies that pay for the news shows want the biggest crowds they can get to hawk their products to.

And as those who control the money control the laws, presidents and judges on major courts, it’s logical to say democracy is working, no matter what a real majority of the people think or feel, no matter that we have the highest percentage of our people – about 40% – without health care. They don’t deserve health care if they can’t afford it, according to the logic of an “economics” that sees its role as rewarding the rich while disempowering the rest. And the estimated 18,000 Americans who die each year due to inadequate health care deserve it because they can’t afford – well, the price of life.

All of this is logical. I think it’s evil, but it’s logical.

The task is to persuade – not the owners, not the politicians, not the media, but the majority of citizens – that this is a bad definition of people, a bad understanding of the proper relationship of people and money, and a mortal enemy of democracy and the greater good for the greater number.

Our media keep telling us that what’s driving our economy is the concern that we have an increasingly better standard of living. But that’s not true. Since 1980, with few exceptions, the vast majority of us have had increasingly worse standards of living. We have no savings, credit card debts of over $10,000, fewer benefits, less job security, less health care, and less of a voice in the laws that are passed. And I read yesterday that this president has now borrowed more money, has put the United States into deeper debt, than all previous 42 presidents combined. No matter how you try to spin it, that is not an economy that is working, let alone making a safe and comfortable home for our citizens.

These things are not the inevitable result of Progress. They came from valuing profits for the few over life for the many. That was both an unwise and greedy decision, and an evil one if human life has something intrinsic that must be honored and valued.

So, since economics is supposed to be – not the art of profit-taking, but the art of home-making, we can argue that for the sake of the vast majority of our brothers and sisters in this great country, we have been subjected to a terrible definition of economics: an economics of greed. And those terribl assumptions have harmed, even killed, people of all religious and political persuasions. For the greatest good of the greatest number of Americans, we need to redefine economic priorities to make profits serve and empower the many rather than the few.

No, politicians and the media will not support this. I don’t think either major political party can be converted from their allegiance to those with the most money – at least not any time soon. And the Christian Coalition will probably keep saying that the rich shouldn’t be taxed, and that social programs and health care should be taken away from all who can’t pay for them.

But the voices that might change these rules will have to convince the vast majority of our fellow citizens that the role of money is to serve them, not the other way around. That would be a revolution of the highest order.

2. Politics

I want to use one recent experience I had here in Austin as a way to frame the whole huge subject of politics. It was a rally on November 2nd, when I was asked to speak from the Capital steps for a group working nationally for the impeachment of our president. I agreed to speak, though I don’t like political rallies, because I think our president is guilty – ironically – of the same two charges used to impeach President Clinton: lying and obstruction of justice.

Several people from this church were there. I don’t know how all of you experienced it, but for me it was a very distasteful experience. The biggest signs I saw people carrying were simply vulgar and childish, and I left feeling dirty, and wanting to get away from those people. The woman who organized that rally and invited me to speak at it came to see me on Thursday, so we could talk about these things. I asked her if she really thought such vulgarity would persuade others to want to be associated with their cause, or wouldn’t it instead make it easy for people to say that, if this is the kind of behavior associated with people who dislike President Bush, then they would be glad they were for him.

She said that they couldn’t censor anyone, and didn’t want to exclude anyone, and besides, she knew their cause was right, so the rightness of it would, she hoped, attract many more people than the 200 or so who showed up at the little rally and march. I could not convince her that vulgar behavior automatically excludes all those who are repulsed by it, and don’t want to associate with people who define themselves through it.

So, without trying to pretend that one rally of about two hundred people really represents all grand political activities, I do think it points up some key errors the political left is still making, that the political right is no longer making.

One of the errors is thinking this is about being right. It isn’t. It’s about being persuasive to those who do not agree with you.

We need to go back and study some of the films of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. It stopped me short at the time, and is still inspiring to me today, to see the sight of so many black people in the South, marching in the summer heat and wearing white shirts and ties.

They didn’t stoop to the low and often vulgar levels of those who were calling them names, denying them rights, and sometimes beating or murdering them. They saw their mission as raising the level of civility and behavior, of presenting a better picture than the other side did.

They were presenting a picture of a more civil and decent America, and I think it was that picture, rather than their logical arguments, that won over the majority of Americans that passed the Voters’ Rights Act and won the unlikely victories for their just and noble cause. They didn’t win because they were right – though they were right. They won because they were persuasive. And they were persuasive because they presented an image, and acted in ways, that were morally superior to the image and the actions of those who opposed them with vulgar alternatives and vulgar language. (After I delivered this sermon, a member of our church came through the line to tell me the sermon had brought some tears to her eyes because she had marched in those civil rights demonstrations. And she said she well remembered how often they were told that “We had to be better than those who hated us; we had to be better.” They were, and they won the hearts and minds of enough other Americans that they could change the laws that had been stacked against them. But it was their behavior and their higher level of civility, I am convinced, that let them win their battle.)

If the civil rights marches had carried angry, vulgar, self-righteous signs and the people had dressed like slobs, that civil rights movement would have failed. That’s a lesson we need to reclaim today. People who watch marches and demonstrations look to the character of the demonstrators more than they look at their signs. They’re looking at the image, and deciding whether these are the sorts of people who their society should look like. It isn’t about being right. It’s about being persuasive. And the character we play plays a bigger role than our rhetoric.

3. The solution: winning our souls, the soul of America and reconstituting the world.

It’s clear to me that the tactics that can win under the rules of American fascism must behave in ways that those who disagree with us can respect. I’m also clear that arguments grounded in the “rights talk” of the 1970s will not work in this atmosphere. Fascism is about the primacy of the state, not the individual.

The battles are for the image of America and of the best kind of American that a majority want to identify with. The arguments are made more by image and behavior and role modeling than by rhetoric and logic.

And this becomes a religious issue, because the question is, “How then, shall we live and act toward those with whom we disagree?” Shall we call them idiots, carry vulgar signs about them? Is that noble? Is that the image of ourselves or our country that we could be proud of, and think would be persuasive to those who already think we’re wrong? How do we act in ways that can serve the highest notions of God rather than low ones? Or: what is the essence of being most fully human? How would we act if the noblest people of history and religion were watching? These are the questions that helped the civil rights movement of forty and fifty years ago to be persuasive. We need to remember and reclaim them.

So. In rallies or politics, under the current rules, if we want to win, we must realize it’s not about being right; it’s about being persuasive. And persuasion comes more through our image and behavior than through our logic or speeches. No majority wants to identify with angry or vulgar people. Nor will they want to identify with people who are perceived as hating America.

This was a mistake the Left made during the Vietnam War, from which they have never recovered. They burned American flags, rather than waving them and demanding that the country live up to the noble values symbolized by that great flag. To reclaim the soul of America, we must love our country – love the highest and noblest and most just and compassionate kind of nation that it could be. The whole enterprise needs to be grounded in love rather than anger or hatred. We must be better than those who dislike us and have disempowered the vast majority of our brothers and sisters.

How, then, shall we live and act? The best answers to this are still found in the greatest prophets and sages of history:

We must be people of high character. No matter how those around us behave, we must behave nobly. We must not do to others what we wouldn’t want them to do to us. This includes calling them names, treating them like moral inferiors or morons, or flinging vulgarities at them. We must act in ways we could be proud of if the noblest people of history and all of our own personal heroes were watching – as if God were watching.

It isn’t about being right; it’s about being persuasive. It isn’t about being self-righteous; it’s about acting like a person others want to be near and hear. It isn’t about hating what America has become under the misguidance of bad values; it’s about loving what America has been, and can again become, for the empowerment of the vast majority of her citizens.

And these are not just lessons for winning political battles. They are lessons to live by. They are lessons for living more wisely and well, for becoming the kind of person we can be most proud of, for blessing our little part of the world as we pass through it.

Is this guaranteed to win dirty and dishonest political battles? No. But it’s guaranteed to help you become a person you can be proud of, and guide you toward behavior that is a credit to people of good character and good will. You may lose the battle, but you will gain your soul. This thought comes to me from the saying attributed to Jesus, when he asked what a man gained if he gained the whole world but lost his soul. “Soul” here doesn’t mean a little metaphysical bag of air; it means the core of what makes you admirable. If you lose that, you don’t have a lot left. And without this, winning the battle can lose your soul, by lowering you to the level of the shadow side of those who disgust you.

Life isn’t about being right. Everyone thinks they’re right! It’s about being decent, noble, civil, respectful, compassionate, and persuasive. No matter how low others may drag the standards of behavior, we must not follow them there. First, we save our souls. Then we save the soul of the ideals, the picture of America that we care about. Then we reach out to those who disagree with us to offer them both understanding and arguments, always being more civil and more respectful than they might be. We model what we want America to become.

This is the Buddhist teaching that if we want a peaceful world, we must become peaceful. If we want a compassionate and just world where everyone is heard, we must become compassionate and just and strive more to understand than to be understood. These are moral and ethical teachings, and among the highest religious teachings. They trump political tactics. They can let us wade through vile fights without becoming vile, through angry and dishonest fights without becoming angry or dishonest; through hateful fights without becoming hateful. This has always been the teaching of the best prophets and sages. And it has always been the high moral path, the only path worth taking.

Our society, and the world we are abusing, invading and robbing, is in need of deep reform. This reform transcends political parties, because it runs counter to the basic behaviors of both political parties of the past twenty five years.

You don’t have to be political activists, which is good news because the vast majority of you don’t want to be. You are improving the world if you can love one another, love your children, play fair, treat those you love with compassion and those you meet with civility, and always act in such a way that you have improved the level of both civility and humanity, understanding and compassion, that you find around you. It can save your soul. It can save the soul of our society and perhaps of our world. It may be the only thing that can.

This won’t be quick: things take time. But during that time, whether we are fighters, talkers, thinkers or lovers, we face the same challenge that decent and noble people have always faced. That is the challenge of becoming people of character and compassion who seek more to understand than to be understood, where there is hatred, we must seek to spread love; where there is vulgarity of speech and action, we must spread a higher civility, and invite others to join us at that more compassionate place.

Things take time. They also require intelligent, aware and loving people of good character, living in ways that bring blessings to them and the world around them. It’s our world. Let us reclaim it with diligence and dignity.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

30 October 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 not be scared too easily. Not all who come in costumes are monsters. Sometimes the new forces that appear in our lives are forces of healing and of life, that we just need to learn how to recognize.

The voices most familiar to us aren’t always good voices. And new, unfamiliar voices may be those of friends we really need to make.

This Halloween when so many wear masks, let us be reminded that we all wear masks. So let us try not to be impressed by the masks, including our own.

Let us look behind the masks, including our own, and ask Who goes there? Who goes there in our dreams, our relationships, our families, our country. Who goes there, that we may know their heart rather than their mask.

The masks are parts of children’s games we play. Behind them are people who need to connect with others in authentic ways, at levels of both mind and heart. Let us look forward to and be ready for, the great unmasking when we shall see and be seen, face to face, in both truth and love.

Amen.

SERMON: Happy Halloween

Like nearly all Christian holidays, including Easter and Christmas, Halloween – a shortened form of the Eve of All Hallows, or All Saints Day – is a “cover” of a much older pagan festival. Some scholars say that November 1st was the beginning of the new year in ancient Celtic reckoning, and that the evening before it – called “Summer’s End,” or “Samhain” – was the most important holiday of their year.

Samhain marks one of the two great doorways of the Celtic year, for the Celts divided the year into two seasons: the light and the dark, at Beltane on May 1st and Samhain on November 1st. Some believe that Samhain was the more important festival, marking the beginning of a whole new cycle, just as the Celtic day began at night. For it was understood that in dark silence comes whisperings of new beginnings.

With the rise of Christianity, Samhain was changed to Hallowmas, or All Saints’ Day, to commemorate the souls of the blessed dead who had been canonized that year, so the night before became popularly known asAll Hallows Eve(ning), or Halloween.

A night of glowing jack-o-lanterns, bobbing for apples, tricks or treats, and dressing in costume. A night of ghost stories and seances, tarot card readings and trying to see the future. A night of power, when the veil that separates our world from the Otherworld is at its thinnest. It was a ‘spirit night.’

The most interesting belief was their belief that on this night, the spirits of the unseen world – usually the dark spirits, the spirits of the dead – came through to our world. A Jungian psychologist might rephrase this by saying that we are invited to confront our shadow sides, the unexpressed part of the world that is less obvious than the part that we’re living. Usually, that means that we live in positive images, suppress or deny the fearful things – that’s how we make it through the day, you might say. But on this one night, the veil between layers of consciousness is lifted, and we are given a kind of ritual permission to let our unconscious become conscious.

You may be sitting here thinking “Well, that could be scary!” And then you’ll have a much deeper appreciation for the kinds of costumes people wear on Halloween. They are mostly the costumes of our fears, let loose for one night of the year – though by now, they’re so dressed up as cartoons they hardly scare anybody.

This is why Halloween is so spooky: because it is trying to reach through the cartoons to let us confront our own shadow sides. And that’s spooky.

Preachers often love a chance like this to get all morbid, to delve into all the deep suppressed things we carry around, drag them out and whack you with them. You may have experienced that in church before. It’s part of the sadism of this religion business. We say “Have a spooky Halloween!” – then we snicker.

This year, I’ve decided to do it differently – even to risk being too optimistic. Because this year the times are “out of joint,” as Shakespeare put it. There are signs that this may be a different kind of Halloween – not a spooky Halloween, but a Happy Halloween. So I want to use Halloween as a lens for looking at our world today. And I decided to use what might seem like a very unrelated and unlikely symbol as a kind of teaching aid: the Yin-Yang symbol of ancient China:

Most of you probably didn’t even know that the ancient Celts knew about ancient Chinese philosophy. Well, they didn’t. But all the best religions and philosophies are trying to give form and substance to some of our enduring questions, the things that just always seem to be part of the human condition. And sometimes it’s useful to mix the teachings of different cultures, to let them illuminate each other – and, hopefully, us.

This symbol (Yin-Yang) represents the ancient Chinese understanding of how things work. The outer circle represents “everything”, while the black and white shapes within the circle represent the interaction of two energies, called “yin” (black) and “yang” (white), which cause everything to happen. They are not completely black or white, just as things in life are not completely black or white, and they cannot exist without each other. Each carries within it, at its strongest, the seeds of its own undoing, so the dance goes on forever.

While “yin” is dark, passive, downward, cold, contracting, and weak, “yang” is bright, active, upward, hot, expanding, and strong. The shape of the yin and yang sections of the symbol, actually gives you a sense of the continual movement of these two energies, yin to yang and yang to yin, a kind of nonstop dance, an undulation, causing everything to happen. The yin/yang symbol isn’t meant as a snapshot, but as a dynamic image of the forces whose movement define nearly all reality.

If you think about it, the weakest position you can be in is to be at your strongest and fullest position, for it means that you will soon be giving way to the kinds of forces you have suppressed. And the strongest position to be in is the weakest, the force just beginning to come up, because it just gets better during your turn to lead in the next round of this dance.

Yang (white) is the strong force, and Yin is the weak force. Is the strong force always good? No, just strong. Back in history when both Halloween and the yin/yang symbol were born, I suspect the strong forces were seen as good, because they were identified with the planting and growing season, where the dark forces were identified with winter, when the seeds lay fallow in the ground.

But today, they’re psychological and social and political symbols and forces. And the strong forces aren’t always good. Just strong.

You can find some of our most timeless sayings reflected in the dynamics of this yin/yang circle. At the top, when the strong forces are at their peak, you can think of saying “pride goes before a fall.” And at the bottom, when the darker forces have become out of balance, you remember the saying that it is always darkest just before the new dawn.

You experience this rhythm in your own life, with its ups and downs. You experience it in your relationships, with give and take, strong and weak moments or periods. It’s what Hindus and Buddhists have called karma, the cosmic law of cause and effect.

All actions have consequences. You can see this in nature, especially now. We have allowed a very high level of destructive omissions from vehicles and factories for years, to increase the profits of the owners and stockholders. Those emissions led to global warming, which has led to the melting of the ice caps. Many scientists are saying these changes in the balance of the atmosphere were the root causes of the record number of destructive hurricanes we have been having. Not only is it not nice to fool with Mother Nature, you can’t get away with it for long. All actions carry within them the seeds of their own undoing. It is about as cosmic a law as we have.

These risings and fallings of strong and weak forces are the dynamics of all life. If you are in a relationship and you fail to address important issues for too long, forces will rise from the depths of one or both of you that will become more dissatisfied until something erupts.

Want a faster and worse eruption? Try betraying the trust of your partner. Lies, betrayals, brutality, violence – all these things carry the seeds of their own demise, as the forces of yin and yang do. And the opposing forces represented in the “seeds” – those small circles – will arise in time to reverse the direction of relationships, even nations.

And it works the other way, too. Plant seeds of trust and compassion, and see how they change the people around you, and the atmosphere of your life. Take advantage of people, you plant seeds of uprising and vengeance. Empower and educate them, and you can raise citizens and neighbors with strong bonds.

I grew up in such an empowering time. The GI Bill after WWII let more Americans go to college than ever in our history. The Marshall Plan invested huge sums of money to help the people we had just defeated in the war get back on their feet and rebuild. Those were the actions that earned America the respect of most of the world, as a moral leader.

Now, the tide has turned, as it does, and our nation’s spirit is greedier, harsher. How can we be the only developed country that doesn’t provide health care for all its citizens? How can that have happened in America? How can we possibly be arguing, as the Vice President did this week, for the right to torture prisoners without restraint? How could leaders lead us into a war by manufacturing claims about weapons of mass destruction and a tie between Iraq and the attacks of 9-11 that they knew never existed? All these actions are strong, but they carry the seeds of their own undoing. How can leaders ask our young soldiers to die in a war of imperialism and greed, and then vote to cut veterans’ benefits by $25 billion? Such deceit and betrayal carry their own undoing in them, just as Hindus observed in their law of karma thirty centuries ago.

Well, you can extend this list of questions as well as I can. In the yin/yang picture, these are pictures of yang at its fullest and most arrogant size.

These are very strong forces, but they are not forces of life. Every new news story carries more facts about the deceit at all levels.

But the other voices are rising. This week, the first indictment came, for the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United States. And Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, also had a meeting with President Bush’s criminal defense lawyer, the content of which was not revealed.

The media are starting – though weakly – to write more critically of the President, and to show him in more awkward poses rather than the staged photo-ops. This is a shift in emphasis. It’s rounding the top of the circle, moving from one kind of force to its opposite.

Cindy Sheehan’s witness has had a big effect. I was visited this week by a local woman who won a Best of Austin award for her idea of putting up billboards of conscience along I-35. She came to talk about billboards and posters outside many church entrances that might simply say “Thou Shalt Not Torture.” That is a very different kind of voice. You can feel the difference. 70% now disapprove of the war. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.

And the rise of fundamentalism isn’t as strong or enduring a force as the media and others are trying to make it. It is tempered, for instance, by the seldom-publicized fact that new studies are showing that only about 21% of Americans attend church regularly. We are a far more secular society than we are being led to believe. (Studies done by Kirk Hadaway, who has written a dozen books in the field.)

I’m speaking this Wednesday from the capital steps for a group that is part of a national effort to move for the impeachment of President Bush. Does it have a realistic chance? I don’t know, but it’s important that these voices be heard, and it feels right to be a part of them.

Europe is rejecting the US control of the Internet. That’s a huge move. China holds so much of our debt it could bankrupt us in a heartbeat if it thought it could find other adequate markets – or calculated that it was worth making that power play. Citizen groups and lawyers around the country are rising to take on corporations, to try and get corporate money out of elections – the things that our elected officials haven’t had the gumption to do.

I think all of these new voices are voices of truth, of life, of justice and compassion. Proposition 2 will probably pass by a large margin: its counterpart passed in Michigan earlier by a vote of more than 60%, as it has done in a couple dozen other states. At least we’re just following the parade it bigoted Bubbadom, rather than leading it. But the bigotry and hatred that produced these bills carry the seeds of their undoing, too. I think the rise of this new bigotry is a sunset, not a sunrise.

Why does this matter? For several reasons. First, these are the forces that make up the atmosphere of our society and the stresses in all of our lives. And to feel that we’re passing over the top of this yin/yang circle, is to feel a surge of life coming.

All these voices of life and compassion are holy voices, and should be encouraged. You’ll hear those voices of life and compassion in this church in as many ways as we can manage. You heard these voices singing out through the piece the choir sang this morning, that wonderful piece by “Sweet Honey in the Rock.”

So I am optimistic this Halloween. I think we see the signs of turning toward a more honest, healthy and empowering direction that we’ve needed for a long time.

It is almost impossible to kill the human spirit. Life is profoundly good, and that goodness may start to define us in the near future. People are still falling in love, parents are still having children and excited by their coming and their being. And while it’s easy to blame “the government,” we have many people in this room who work for the government. And most people who work for the government are good people who want to make a positive difference. After all, Patrick Fitzgerald works for the government, too.

The beauty of the universe isn’t playing to a passive audience. It’s an interactive game. We’re all a part of it, each in our own small but important way.

Halloween is about bringing the shadow sides up to the surface, to restore balance. Usually, those forces are a little scary, and Halloween is spooky. But the point isn’t to scare us; it’s to help integrate us and help us become more authentic and power-filled. Because an authentic person rejuvenates the world.

And so I hate to risk upsetting you with this big bunch of optimism, but I’m optimistic. Happy Halloween!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

23 October 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

NOTE: This is the third of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia.

Prayer

So often the stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone of the building we really need.

Let us ask whether it has happened in our own lives. Have we rejected insights and unpleasant truths we should instead be building our lives around?

Have we adopted tough, rigid values that have damaged the compassionate and vulnerable connections with the people around us?

Have we rejected tender mercies as too soft, too weak, and traded them for too much tough love?

Have we made such a habit of associating only with our own kind of people, that the richness of the larger human community is slipping through our fingers and our lives?

So much in building depends upon the cornerstone. Are we building our lives and relationships in solid, honest and loving ways? Or is there a large stone missing, a cornerstone that we finally need to bring into our lives and into our relationships?

So often the stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone of the building we really need.

Let us attend to the building of our selves, our souls, our relationships and our world.

Amen.

SERMON: Liberal Religion, Part Three

The Religion of Jesus vs. the Religion About Jesus

You probably aren’t aware of what a significant day this is. For today, October 23, 2005, is the 6009th birthday of the universe! Yes, according to Archbishop Ussher’s seventeenth-century calculation, made by adding up all the days he found in the Bible, he concluded that the world was created on October 23, 4004 B.C. Pretty exciting. Also pretty absurd.

Yet that absurdity is part of one of the main styles of religion that exist within Christianity, so it’s worth understanding those styles, and the implications of that absurdity.

Within the tradition of Christianity, there are two distinct and diametrically opposed religions. They have almost nothing to do with each other, and both began in the first century, about thirty to forty years apart.

The first is the religion of Jesus, which can be found in his most profound teachings. The second is the religion about Jesus, which is called Christianity. The differences between them are sometimes almost total, and they had two very different origins. So I want to talk about these two religions this morning, because those two styles of religion – the liberal and the literal, the religions of trust and of fear, of love and of hate, seem to be eternal parts of the human imagination, wearing the costumes of the culture and era in which they appear in each of their new forms.

Let’s start with the religion of Jesus. We know almost nothing about the man. We think he was born around 6 or 7 BC, but we don’t know. The tradition says his father was a carpenter, and that he may have been one too. We don’t know. He seems to have been born and raised in Galilee, a country north of Israel, in very complex and contentious times.

There was no unifying identity in Galilee, and many little religious and ethnic groups lived together without sharing a lot of values or traditions. The conquests of Alexander the Great’s Greek army and then the Roman army had destroyed all the temples that had served as the unifying centers of the several different religious and ethnic groups in the area. The different religious and ethnic groups living together didn’t share enough social or ritual identity to provide a cultural center. Jews wouldn’t eat pork or shellfish. Greeks, who were often their neighbors, loved both.

It was a time of great religious experimentation. Religious entrepreneurs abounded. A dozen religions and mystery cults flourished. The cult of Isis and Osirus was popular, as were Dionysian festivals and meetings of the new religion of Mithraism, from which Christianity took much of its structure.

And there were great animosities between some groups in particular. The Samaritans hated the Jews and the Jews hated the Samaritans. Each considered the others to be half-breeds. And Greeks, Jews, Samaritans and others were all under the rule of the Roman Empire, whose gods were more like social binding agents than the markers of deep personal beliefs.

Each little group had its own stories, and each of their stories tended to make them the center of the universe. As small stories always do, they were too small to include or care for those not in their club. In this respect, their world was a lot like our own.

Jesus had been a disciple of John the Baptist, a very charismatic teacher who said the world was ending and the kingdom of God would be coming with judgment and wrath. After John’s murder, Jesus emerged as a new charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him.

But Jesus’ message was radically different. His was not a supernatural message. He didn’t think the kingdom of God was coming at all. He thought it was, at least potentially, already here. That phrase “the kingdom of God” was a popular phrase in the first century, and a lot of groups used it. It meant the best kind of world, the world where compassion and justice ruled rather than the values that almost always rule us.

John the Baptist’s supernatural religion had said there was nothing we could do, that it was all in God’s hands. We had to wait for God to act. Jesus reversed it. He said only we could bring about the kingdom of God, and that it would be here when we treated one another like brothers, sisters and children of God. No short-cuts and no magic: God was waiting for us to act.

He attacked the Jewish identity that exalted Jews over Samaritans and others. But if he had been a Samaritan, he would have attacked their small, exclusive and judgmental rules. What was distinctive about Jesus was that he had that kind of grand vision that we associate with history’s greatest sages and prophets. He thought he saw how to make the world whole, and he put the ball squarely in our court.

He had no creeds, nothing people were required to believe. He didn’t seem to care what they believed. He never spoke of heaven or hell, though those who wrote the gospels a half century after he died put words about heaven in the mouth of their Jesus. But Jesus wasn’t concerned with rewards, punishments, or an afterlife. He was concerned with how people treated one another. He said they shouldn’t judge others, and that the quality of their faith was determined by how they treated “the least among them,” the poorest and most vulnerable people. This group “the least among you” is a moveable group, different for each of us, and sometimes changing several times a week or day. It is whatever person or group of people we are currently treating as things, as means to our ends, as less precious than we are. For some today, it’s gays or lesbians. For others, it’s independent women, or the poor, or liberals, or atheists, or fundamentalists.

Jesus didn’t think rich people could get to heaven, didn’t trust or respect the priests, and wasn’t interested in quoting the Bible as an authority. This was not a man you’d want at a polite cocktail party or a political gathering.

He spoke, they said, under his own authority. And this always irritates priests, who have decided they speak for God, since God couldn’t possibly believe any differently than they do. The teachings of the priests were seldom about behavior. Just do the rituals, recite the prescribed beliefs, love who they love and hate who they hate, and you’re saved – at least in the imaginations of the priests and the others in your particular club.

More accurately, Jesus spoke from within a vision of life that was so big it transcended the beliefs of any religion and the teachings, creeds and absurdities of the priests. He would have been bored or angry if someone tried to tell him on what day the universe was created. He didn’t care. He cared about how we were to treat one another while we are here, and those are much harder teachings because there is no place to hide from them, no simple creed to recite and shut off your responsibility toward others.

Few people seemed to understand Jesus, including his own followers. This isn’t covered over in the New Testament. It’s right out in the open. At one point, the author of the gospel of Mark has Jesus saying to his disciples, “You still aren’t using your heads, are you? You still haven’t got the point, have you? Are you just dense? Though you have eyes, you still don’t see, and though you have ears, you still don’t hear!” (Mark 8:17-18, Scholars’ translation from The Five Gospels, by the Jesus Seminar)

At one point, he even called his disciple Peter Satan, in the famous line “Get thee behind me, Satan!” He said this because Peter didn’t understand him or his mission. Peter kept wanting to exalt him as a superhero, and Jesus kept saying not to call anyone good but God.

The spirit of the religion of Jesus was profoundly liberal. He excluded no one, even made a Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous parables. It’s hard for us to imagine how disgusting it would have been for his fellow Jews to hear a story about the Good Samaritan. In the year 6, Samaritans had thrown human remains over the wall into the courtyard of the huge temple in Jerusalem. They did this to define the space, but also to make a particularly vulgar insult. The Jews hated them. Nobody could imagine linking the idea of a Samaritan with the idea of a good person – and Jesus made the Samaritan a better model than the priest and the Levite. Today, to get such an effect, you might have to tell the story of “The Good Terrorist.”

He saw God as a God of love, not judgment or exclusion, and told people not to judge, not to puff themselves up, not to wave their good deeds about for others to see, because it was phony, and you can’t do honest religion with that kind of phoniness.

The truth is, that while the religion of Jesus was profound and timeless, it would never be very popular, either then or now. It’s too hard.

After he died, maybe in the year 30, maybe a little later, there were groups of people who collected his sayings, and wrote some others in his style, to augment them. They saw his sayings as offering wisdom for living wisely and well here and now, and they passed them around, talked about them, and saved them.

But there is something remarkable about this group of people, who you could call Jesus People, but not Christians, for they had never heard of Christ. They didn’t consider him a savior, a son of God, or a miracle-worker. They didn’t even tell a story about his arrest, trial or crucifixion. In fact, they seem never even to have heard of these stories. They just knew and loved his teachings, as some of them could remember hearing them from Jesus. (This fascinating story can be read in the now-classic book by New Testament scholar Burton Mack called The Missing Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins.)

What this means is that the biography of Jesus had not been written yet. He had died, but nobody had invented his life yet. He was just a teacher who even the gospels described as a glutton and a drunkard, who hung around with the outcasts and prostitutes, and taught really disturbing things. But for many groups of people in the 30s, 40, 50s and 60s, Jesus wasn’t any kind of a savior, miracle worker or son of God. This is remarkable. Because – think about this with me – if they had believed this man was born of a virgin, or a son of God, or a miracle-worker or a savior, or rose from the dead or walked on water, they could not have left that out! Can you imagine people saying “Well, this guy was a son of God and all that stuff, but forget it. We just want to talk about his teachings.” It’s not possible! If the story had existed, if they had ever heard it, that supernatural story would have trumped a mere collection of teachings. But the religion of Jesus didn’t have a Christ, just a Jesus. In the 30s, Christ had not yet been invented.

The religion about Jesus seems to have originated with Peter, the one Jesus called Satan because he couldn’t understand either Jesus’ teachings or his sense of mission. Peter was also the one who denied Jesus three times when he was arrested, claiming he never knew the man.

And in a favorite line of mine, Roman Catholic scholar Thomas Sheehan has written “And Peter continued his denial of Jesus by inventing Christianity.” Roman Catholicism considers Peter to be the first Pope.

The Christ myth was constructed two or three decades after Jesus died. And to turn him into a savior and a god-man, the early Christians patterned him after most of the other god-men and saviors well known in the culture at the time.

So like many Greek and Roman gods, he was born of God and a young woman. He was given a virgin birth, but virgin births were a dime a dozen in the first century. Even Caesar Augustus, who had died in August of the year 14, was awarded a virgin birth by the Roman Senate a month later.

The category of savior figures was a genre in the first century. There were things that would-be saviors needed to be able to do. So the life of Jesus as the Christ was patterned after the well-known savior figures already known to most people of the time. Like the Greek Aesculapius, Jesus raised men from the dead and gave sight to the blind; like Attis and Adonis, Jesus is mourned and rejoiced over by women. His resurrection took place, like that of Mithra, from a rock tomb. And like Dionysus, Jesus turned water into wine, and his body and blood were symbolically eaten by worshipers.

In Christianity, everything Jesus cared for has been thrown aside. Now Jesus has been turned into a god-man and a supernatural savior. And once again, there isn’t much we need to do except believe the stories being taught by the new priests. Once again, there is our in-group, and everyone else is the out-group, a fit target for scorn or hatred. This was the situation Jesus spent his whole life fighting against! All religious wars have been designed to kill or eliminate those who wouldn’t get in line behind the story of the priests of the day. Jumping ahead more than a thousand years, remember that the Crusades were undertaken to kill all the Muslims. And the Christian soldiers were promised a trip to heaven if they died in this holy war, just as the Islamic Jihadists are promised by Muslim fundamentalists today.

In a sentence, Christianity – the religion about Jesus – has been the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus, ever since Jesus called Peter Satan.

It was those who followed the story put together by Peter and Paul who put together the gospels, forty to eighty years after the man Jesus had died. And the victors write the history, as well as the gospels. No, the gospels were not written by disciples or by eye-witnesses. Mark and Matthew were given their names in the second century by a Catholic bishop named Papias, who thought it would sound better if the gospels were written by disciples.

But the difference between the two religions is fundamental, profound, and often deadly. Jesus hit people between the eyes with his demand that they treat all humans as equally children of God. The religion about Jesus demanded obedience to their teachings, not his, and to their ever-changing and usually strange creeds. Catholics teach that there is no salvation outside of the church. Jesus never talked about salvation at all. Baptists say Presbyterians, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists and just about everyone else is going to hell. Jesus never talked about heaven or hell at all – though the community that wrote the Gospel of John put words in his mouth sixty years after he died, that made it seem otherwise.

If you look back through the history of Christianity for its absurdities, as many like to do, you will find virtually all of the absurdities in the religion about Jesus, but almost never in the religion of Jesus. Like people saying Jesus was both God and man, when there has never been a theologian who could make coherent sense of such an absurd statement except as poetry. Churches exhorting believers to go into holy wars and kill other people, as they are now exhorting American Christian Soldiers to kill people in Iraq who look a whole lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. It’s absurd. They’re also saying the universe is just 6,000 years old, and may well agree with the 17th century Archbishop Ussher that today is the universe’s birthday. It’s a dangerous kind of absurdity.

Voltaire once said that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities. That’s why absurdities like thinking this is the universe’s 6009th birthday are potentially so dangerous. Because those conditioned to believe that are also conditioned to believe that teaching about “Intelligent Design” is intelligent, or that God hates homosexuals, or wants America to rule the world, or invade Iraq, take its money and oil, and kill anyone who gets in the way.

I know many people who call themselves Christians who reject this kind of Christianity. What they are saying is that they prefer the religion of Jesus, the teachings of a holy spirit rather than a bigoted and deadly spirit.

When you compare the teachings of Jesus with the religion about him created by far lesser people, it is easy for Christians and non-Christians alike to hate the religion that has so often served as the enemy of the teachings of Jesus, the enemy of love, the enemy of the kingdom of God. But of all the people who might hate Christianity, none would hate it more than Jesus.

And Voltaire’s saying keeps haunting us, that notion that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities.

Today, we hear the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and a host of other morally and theologically reprehensible preachers say that Christianity demands that the rich not be taxed, that uppity women and all gays and lesbians be excluded and suppressed, and that you don’t have to act as Jesus wanted, you only have to do as today’s priests and politicians say. It’s hard to imagine a teaching designed as more of an insult to the man Jesus. It is the new crucifixion of Jesus. And today, Jesus is being crucified by Christians.

And when you think of the times that Christianity has been combined with state power, as is happening now in our country, it is always the religion of the priests, the religion about Jesus, but almost never the religion of Jesus.

Proposition Two is coming up for passage on November 8th, to add an amendment to the Texas constitution forbidding any area of Texas to give gay couples status or rights similar to marriage. This is an excellent example of this religion Jesus would have hated. I suspect it will pass by an embarrassing margin, and the Christian churches will be able to take major credit for passing it. That’s what I mean by saying the religion about Jesus is, as it has often been, the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus.

Now what does any of this have to do with you?

For one thing, since we are hearing a low form of Christianity being increasingly mixed in with our government and our war, it is important to be able to point out that this is a religion, filled with bigotries and hatreds, that is a complete betrayal of the teachings of Jesus. We don’t have to be against religion to be against the religious right; we only have to be against dishonest and ungodly religion. We can attack the religion about Jesus in the name of the religion of Jesus – which is what Jesus would have done.

For another, it’s important for us to understand that virtually all liberal Christians in the country would agree with us in this. I have now set up the Round Robin series of guest preachers for January, when we’ll have a Muslim preacher and three Christian preachers. All three of those Christian ministers are trying to stand up for the religion of Jesus against their churches who have nearly beat it to death with the religion about him. We’re all on the same side, and it will strengthen us all to know that.

But there is another reason, and ironically it is profoundly Christian, from some of the best thought in that religion about Jesus. When you study the philosophy of religion, you learn that, theologically, what the invention of the Christ figure represents is the realization that the only God we’re likely to find, now or ever, is the one that has taken human form and acted in loving and godly ways right here on earth. It seems that’s what Jesus taught in the Gospel of Thomas, too. That’s where he said that those who understood him became him: that we are all potentially incarnations of the divine. That’s really why Jesus is so beloved by so many Christians and non-Christians alike: because he was the embodiment of love for the least among us, the kind of love we have always thought of as God’s main job on earth.

That notion that we can become incarnations, embodiments, of a spirit of compassion and love that might rightly be called holy – that is a sacred notion, and a profound one.

Maybe, if Voltaire is right that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities, then maybe it’s also true that when we are led to profundities, we may also be led toward acts of compassion and courage, with the power to reconstitute, to save, both ourselves and our world.

We can only hope – but not only only hope.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

16 October 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

NOTE: This is the second of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia.

Prayer

We give thanks on this beautiful day for the beauty that is all around us and within us.

For the beauty of the earth, we give thanks, and we accept its stewardship.

For the love of family and friends – love we did not earn – we give thanks, and we vow to be worthy of it.

For the love that lives in our own hearts we give thanks. We hope and pray that we can nourish that love until we are filled to overflowing, and the world around us is fed with the overflow.

We are stewards of love and life that come through us more than they come from us. And only by sharing these gifts can they – or we – grow to full size.

We give thanks for the many gifts of life. Now it is also our turn. Let us share the gifts of life – with ourselves, with others, and with the often hungry and lonely world around us. Let us share our gifts.

Amen.

SERMON: Liberal Religion, Part Two

Three weeks ago, I began talking about liberal religion, and have decided to make it a short series of sermons, on the worldwide phenomenon of liberal religion that dates back to at least 2500 years ago.

This is a much broader sense of liberal religion than you’re probably used to, so let me take a couple paragraphs to explain.

Between about 2200 and 2800 years ago, in what one scholar named the Axial Age, religious thought all over the world turned on its axis. Before that, religions had been religions of fear, centered on offering bribes to the gods for our safety, trying to see the whole world as somehow revolving around our wishes, if only we could find the right sacrifice, the right ritual formula, the right appeasement. It was a million fearful people in search of a persuasive magician.

Ancient religions both East and West had human sacrifice, meant to be the most precious gift they could offer, to bribe the gods and gain favor. It was the picture of powerless and frightened humans trying to bribe a sort of cosmic Alpha Male or tribal chief for safety and favors. And echoes of all this can still be seen in the world’s major religions today.

But in this Axial Age, for reasons we don’t know, cultures that had no contact, no relation to one another, all began to see religion as looking for ways to live more wisely and well here and now, in spite of whatever slings and arrows Fortune might bring. This was the birth of seeing religion as a quest for wisdom rather than ways to bribe or fool the gods. It was the birth of the spirit of liberal religion, which has always been about the search for wisdom to help us live more wisely and well.

And while some religions, like Hinduism, kept their supernatural stories about some sort of afterlife, the focus in the emerging liberal styles of religion was on the here and now, on our souls, our own capacity for understanding and meaningful action.

There are many ways to sketch this history, both in long and short versions. I want to do it this time in just three or four sermons, so I’ll take what might feel like a simple approach.

Last time, I talked about how the messages of the emerging liberal religions can be found with and without supernatural stories, with or without gods. Hinduism taught reincarnation as a central belief. But in one of the Upanishads, you read “there is no consciousness after death.” (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad) You’re recycled. Your parts become the parts of other things. Nothing is destroyed, but your consciousness and memories and identity die with you. That’s a bold message in the history of religion. It’s a message that prophets proclaim and priests suppress.

Buddhism also teaches about reincarnation, which they inherited from their Hindu origins. Yet the more advanced Buddhist teachings don’t mention the supernatural stories, as much as they mention living in the here and now, and outgrowing our need for illusions. This is the spirit of liberal religion in Buddhism.

And Taoism and Confucianism are all about how to live, with almost no supernatural stories to sugarcoat their teachings.

The best teachings of religion can be done with or without supernatural stories. The Hindus had both the teachings and the stories, as Buddhism also did. And you know that Judaism, Christianity and Islam also come with both the teachings and the stories.

But it’s important to know that the stories are optional. And nobody taught us this better than the ancient Greeks. I want to talk about the Greeks today, because they introduced some very new ideas into Western religious thinking. Their concern, going all the way back to Homer, was with how we should live. They thought breeding mattered, but they focused more on how we can create noble humans out of the raw material we’re born with.

If you think about this with me, you’ll see how deeply logical they were about this. And you’ll learn a new word, which you might think at, first is completely foreign to anything in our world, but you’ll then see that it is absolutely fundamental.

The Greeks had both teachings and stories. But their gods were intended from the start as symbols of, projections of, the natural forces around and within us. Gods like Zeus and Poseidon were responsible for thunderstorms or storms at sea, as Demeter controlled the growing of the crops and Hestia gave us the subtle ability to add human feeling to worship and home. It was the presence of Hestia’s spirit that made a religious service feel like a worship service, and that made a house feel like a home.

Other gods and goddesses were personifications of some of the psychological styles that have always been part of human nature. The war-making, angry spirit familiar to many men came from Ares, the god of war. Our cleverness, as well as our ability to understanding subtle and sacred meanings in things came from Hermes. Women whose lives revolved around the care of their children were the daughters of Demeter, as those with a fierce and focused ambition claimed Artemis. Several years ago, I read a book on the gods of Greece by Arianna Huffington. She grew up in Greek culture, and said her life has been a series of trade-offs between the demands of Demeter – since she is a single mother of two daughters – and Artemis, since she is also extremely bright and very focused and driven.

So these gods and goddesses weren’t really about supernatural creatures, but about the dimensions of our world and of ourselves that always set the stage for our lives, and that seem to drive us through them. The Greek gods and goddesses – originally they had six male and six female deities – were aspects of the human experience writ large, rather than distant and unrelated powers we must appease. When Muslims say that Allah is closer to them than their own jugular vein, they are showing the kind of awareness from within which the Greek gods were created and clothed.

The Greeks did make sacrifices to them, especially Apollo and Athena. But it was more like trying to bring those facets of life into sharper focus, to feel their presence more fully – though they still hoped for favors.

But the other development of the Greeks is what concerns me more today. And this is where the famous Greek logic is especially logical. They believed that we create noble people out of the raw material we’re born with, and that we do it by shaping them in the form of the highest and noblest ideals we know. There are no gods in this picture, only humans, ideals, values and education.

Now if this is true, then the most sacred treasure of any society is precisely that collection of their highest and noblest ideals. Every citizen would be responsible for holding, serving, and passing them on. And that’s how the Greeks saw it.

Here’s your new word for the day. They had a collective noun that referred to all their highest ideals, the most sacred treasure of their civilization. That word was paideia. It was found in the roots of their words for both child (paidos) and education, just as we still find our Anglicized versions of it in our words pediatrics and pedagogy.

Every citizen, in every action, was responsible for upholding these highest ideals. A favorite story makes the point.

It involves Aristophanes, the great comic playwright. He’s the only comic playwright whose works survive, so for us he’s the best by default. But the Greeks thought he was great, too. And while the humor in his plays sounds like 14-year-old bathroom humor, his plays made points that were serious. Some historians think one of his plays (“The Clouds”) was the reason that Socrates was brought to trial and condemned to death for corrupting the youth by questioning the values of the paideia.

The story is about a scene witnessed between Aristophanes and a younger comic playwright, whose play had just won a gold medal in competition. (When the Greeks put on their Olympic games, and the Pythian games and others, they gave medals for athletics, and also for playwriting. They thought the whole person needed to be formed: mind, body and spirit.)

You might think old Aristophanes was congratulating the young writer, but he was reaming him. What he said, in essence, was “You simply went for laughs. You never presented or transmitted the paideia anywhere! You failed in the only sacred mission you had, and compared with that failure, all the gold medals in the world are worthless!”

It’s almost impossible to imagine such a scene today, isn’t it? We’re used to seeing writers rewarded for going only for the laughs. Then again, this young man in ancient Greece had also just won a gold medal.

But the soul of the Golden Age of Greece – the real gold – was a seriousness about preserving, presenting and transmitting the highest ideals they could articulate, knowing that without them, they were unlikely ever to mold the noblest sort of human beings, including themselves. That was a high point in human history, and you could argue that it produced the greatest outpouring of literary and artistic genius of any culture in history. This was secularism raised to its highest level. The word “secular” means to be concerned for this world. So it can overlap with the aims of liberal religion, but only when it’s raised to such a high level.

That old story with its commandment to serve only the highest ideals has been an inspiration to me in my own work ever since I read it over twenty years ago. But even with this story, you have probably still never heard of paideia. At least not in Greek. But you know it in Latin.

For a few centuries later, the Roman philosopher Cicero became acquainted with the ideals of the Greek culture, and with the word paideia. He realized that they had neither a word nor a concept in Latin like this. He also believed that this was one of the most important ideas in any civilization: the notion that we create noble people by molding them in the image of noble values. It’s how we become most fully human.

So Cicero continued to serve the aims of liberal religion through non-supernatural secular means, by coining a word to translate this into Latin. The word he coined was humanitas, which means roughly the essence of what it means to be most fully human. That word, and that concept, became the soul of the “humanities” and the liberal arts in Western educational curricula from his day to our own. These are the courses designed to make us more fully human: an aim we inherited from the Golden Age of Greece. It’s also the root of our word “humanism” which, at its best, still preserves the ancient Greek ideal of preserving and passing on the most sacred of ideals, without using any stories of gods at all.

Indeed, the Greeks were the first Mediterranean people to pass down their highest ideals without wrapping them in religious or priestly authority. Here was the essence of liberal religion, expressed in ordinary language, and expressed in some of the finest dramatic plays, poetry, philosophy, and athletic games our species has ever produced.

You might think that Greek philosophy doesn’t really have anything to do with religion, especially Christianity. You’d be wrong. It had almost everything to do with it. “Philosophy” means, “love of wisdom,” and the Greeks loved wisdom, or “Sophia.” But the Sophia they loved was not a collection of facts or abstractions. The kind of wisdom they loved was the wisdom to live by. After Socrates, it didn’t so much matter what you said, or how smart or wise it was. What mattered was who you were, and whether you had a right to speak such words, whether you had striven to embody them in your own life.

Beginning at least with Plato, philosophy was no longer about acquiring mere knowledge, but about questioning ourselves, because we have the feeling that we are not what we ought to be. (Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? p. 29) This started with Socrates, whose effect on some people was so much like a religious experience; it’s hard to know how it’s different at all.

For example, Plato records the words of Alcibiades, one of the prominent men whose life was changed by Socrates. “I was in such a state that it did not seem possible to live while behaving as I was behaving. He forces me to admit to myself that I do not take care for myself.” (Ibid. p. 31)

If this doesn’t sound profoundly religious, it should, because it is. No gods, no supernaturalism, no afterlife, no stories. Wisdom, stripped down to its most naked and arresting, with the power to bring people like Alcibiades forth in a kind of ancient altar call.

This is really what Greek philosophy was about: how to live. They weren’t trying to inform students as much as they were trying to form them, into the noblest sort of people, aware of themselves, their world, and inspired – even driven – to live according to only the highest of personal and moral values. Philosophy was a way of living, not a way of thinking.

They all agreed on this, even though the philosophers disagreed on other things.

The Stoics, who mixed ethics, astronomy, astrology and fate together, believed that everything was a result of the fates, everything that happened was part of a plan. If this sounds very Christian, it’s because the Christians took this attitude, and the structure for most Christian ethics, from the Stoics. So for the Stoics, it wasn’t important whether we were happy, but whether we lived right, served the Good, and always intended to do good.

The Epicureans didn’t think there was a plan. They thought life was essentially a crapshoot, that we were the playthings of Chance. And in this world, they said we need to be able to enjoy whatever our lot is. If it’s steaks, enjoy the steaks. But if it’s only bread and cheese, you should be able to enjoy that just as thoroughly. And what mattered most, they said, was friends: being part of a warm and loving community of friends. This is a teaching I don’t think Christianity ever picked up, unfortunately.

For Plato, it was living in harmony with the abstract Ideals: the notions of pure Beauty, pure Goodness, pure Justice, pure Truth, and striving to emulate them, to serve and become one with them. It was quite mystical, and Platonism is the style of thinking from which Christian mysticism was later derived.

And then there is that other Greek word which, like paideia, provided both the foundation and the transition from secular Greek philosophy to Christian theology: the word logos. It’s a hard word to translate. It referred to the logic of, structure of, essence and understanding of something, as well as the words we use to express all this. We find it in our words “psychology” (the structure and understanding of the psyche, or soul), anthropology (the understanding of humans), and the word “logic.”

For Heraclitus, it was all about the logos, the essence of what is most real and enduring, sort of the hidden Center of all reality. In the second and third centuries, when early Christian thinkers were trying to define just what this new religion was, they were exposed to, and accepted, the Greek notion that philosophy is a way of life, the way we should live here. And they accepted the notion that there was a logos, an invisible sort of structure and understanding, kind of the secret of life, that could be communicated to us, and which became the center of any worthwhile philosophy of living.

Not many Christians know this, but Christianity was first defended to Greek thinkers as a philosophy, a way of life. That’s also how Saint Augustine understood it. He agreed with Plato’s notion that philosophy meant living in the best way, being the best sort of person. Nietzsche once described Christianity as “Platonism for the masses,” and he could have had Saint Augustine in mind, for Augustine could have agreed with him.

Where the Christians thought they had the edge on Greek philosophy was in that idea of logos. For the Christians said they had the ultimate, the final, logos, in the person of Jesus Christ. The opening words of the Gospel of John are almost always translated as “In the beginning was the Word.” But the Greek word there is logos. Let me read it to you with the correct translation, and you can see in just a few sentences the modulation from Greek philosophy to Christianity as the ultimate philosophy:

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” (John, 1:1-4).

Now there. In just a few sentences, we moved from secular philosophy without gods or myths, right into Christianity with its God and its very different myths. Snuck in through that one hard-to-translate Greek word logos. And in the history of Western religious thought, it also happened almost that smoothly.

What’s this like? It’s like a holy spirit moving through time, granting life to those it touches, but wearing a hundred different costumes, each suited to the imagination of the ages in which it appears. It appeared first in the Upanishads, wrapped in their innumerable gods, their wonderful webs of myth and story, and cradled in the concept of reincarnation, which promised that we would have all the time we need to get it right.

Then in Buddhism it shed its gods and most of its supernaturalism. In Greek philosophy, it shed them completely, and brought at least the idea of a perfect human down to earth in plain talk.

And the Christians, writing further variations on this timeless theme, said they went one better. They said they had brought God himself, the Logos, down to earth, in human form, in the person of Jesus Christ, to teach us how to live.

Next time I’ll talk about the liberal religious spirit in Christianity. But you don’t get off easy, you know. We’re in dangerous territory here. We’re talking about how we should live, who we should be, and it isn’t just a sterile list of objective facts. It is the living spirit of liberal religion and of life, and it looks at you. It looks at you, and asks “What about you? Are you living as you should? Are you taking proper care for yourself? These aren’t just mind games, you know. There are lives at stake, and one of them is yours. So you: What about you?”

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© Davidson Loehr

Sally Miculek

9 October 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Miculek

My husband and I don’t have Cable. We don’t have satellite. We just have an antenna for our television, and sometimes find ourselves watching a little extra fuzz. A couple years ago, when we moved in together in anticipation of our coming nuptials, both of us looked forward to getting Cable hooked up. But then it just didn’t happen. We set up DSL. We signed up for Netflix. Finally, we talked it over and decided that maybe we don’t need all those extra channels after all. We get enough TV shows from Network Television, and the Netflix keeps us in a steady supply of movies, so my cinephile mate doesn’t think longingly about what he could be watching if we had HBO or the Independent Film Channel. Anything that comes on Cable that ends up good enough for us to want to watch it will come to DVD soon enough, and this way we get to skip the commercials!

Inevitably, one night as I was happily watching Antiques Roadshow or The American Experience, or some other vaguely wholesome PBS offering, the doorbell rang. I opened the door, encountering the ubiquitous Time Warner guy. He launched into his schpiel about the current offer from Time Warner, and how much money we’d save if we hooked up now, and what kind of introductory package we’d get, blah blah blah. I was in the process of turning him down when he looked around behind me, saw the television, and then stared blankly at me, incredulous. “You don’t want Cable?” “Nope.” “But you’re watching Public Television. Don’t you want better TV than that?”

Now, I realize that the poor Time Warner guy is programmed to tell people that Cable is way better than PBS, but come on! How on earth could the folks who brought us the Golf Channel possibly claim that what they’ve got to offer is somehow of higher quality than the Keno brothers? Are the Sopranos really much more interesting than a documentary on Appalachia? Needless to say, the poor guy didn’t get his commission that evening, and the Miculek household soldiers on in its Cable-free state, much to the shock of many friends and extend family members.

I’ll be the first to tell you I’m a media junkie. My VCR is programmed to record The O.C. And I admit it. I’m sure a lot of you are junkies, too, even though you may not watch shows about beautiful people in California. Maybe you don’t watch television at all. Maybe you’re addicted to your computer. Or books. I’m a junkie for media in most of its forms. My morning isn’t complete without Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep. I check multiple email addresses many, many times each day. I paid for New York Times Select so I can still read all the online articles I want. I choose purses and bags based on whether or not they’re likely to hold a copy of my trusty New Yorker and/or whatever book I may be reading at the moment. In short, I’ve got a lot of means at my disposal to tune out the world around me, and I’m a fervent user of them all.

But how do I keep from letting a small amount of media-induced isolation mushroom and truly cut me off from the things I love to do and the people I like to spend time with? I work on tilting the balance away from rampant media consumption and towards activities that encourage actively participating in my life. I record and watch two television shows on a regular basis. That number’s down from about four last year and about eight the year before. I still watch other TV, but I try not to let it become a priority. I try to make sure the books I read are good ones. I talk to people about what I’m reading, whether they’re going to read the same things or no. I jog. I use my husband’s new banjo habit and the endless practice sessions to help pass the time while I take on what would normally be tedious household tasks. I am definitely addicted, but at least I’m aware of the problem and am trying to do something about it. Maybe some of the folks in the congregation are on the same path. And perhaps someday we can all go toss our televisions and computers (figuratively, at least) off Mount Bonnell. Until then, though, a few minutes reading Maureen Dowd, or a little time spent dwelling on the trials and tribulations of the Cohen family isn’t going to kill us. And, no matter what, I’m keeping my books.

SERMON: Media Addiction

My name is Davidson and I’m a recovering television addict. That may sound silly, but it’s true. When I bought my house two years ago, I decided not to have cable connected. So for the past two years, I have not watched any television at home.

I made the decision to go cold turkey when I realized that I’d been watching an average of over four hours of television a night for several years, and couldn’t remember ever seeing anything I really needed to know, and very little that I could even remember.

Now I read more books, and go out to my shop and turn wooden bowls, and sometimes have dinner with friends – things I didn’t have time to do when my television addiction was in full swing.

Four hours a day may sound extreme, but it isn’t. An online Indian magazine just reported that in the twelve months from 20 September 2004 to 18 September 2005, the average American watched four hours and thirty-two minutes of television a day, and the television set was on for an average of eight hours and eleven minutes a day – the highest figure in the history of television. (http://www.Indiantelevision.com/, 29 September 2005)

Children spend more time watching television than they spend in school now, by over a hundred hours. They see an average of 30,000 commercials a year. At that rate, by age 65, they will have seen over two million television commercials. And the people who write commercials are much better storytellers and much better at appealing to their deep fears and wants than public school teachers are. After all, toy manufacturers spend 92% of their advertising budget on television ads.

In some important ways, television is the real teacher of our children. It’s where they learn the most powerful stories, see the most powerful images, where they learn how to look, what to wear, what to eat, and to a large degree who to be.

Still, is this really a spiritual or religious issue, or just the kind of rant you’d expect from a recovering addict?

It’s a spiritual matter, and I want to think about it with you in two different ways, one theological and one more down-to-earth.

Most of us grew up in the atmosphere of Western religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And all three religions make a big deal out of idolatry, the difference between worshiping gods and idols.

Here’s an easy lesson in Religion 101, on the difference between gods and idols. If you think in these terms, then it matters a lot what we worship, and whether it’s a god or an idol. To put that in ordinary language, it matters what values and ideals we put at the center of our life. We want to serve things with our life that serve us too, that make our life richer and more satisfying. Some theologians call these gods.

We all have them, whether we call them gods or just call them ideals and values. And we all make the same deal with them. See if this isn’t true for you. We make a kind of contract, a covenant.

We say “I’ll live my life in your terms. I’ll make you the center of my life and my energies and activities. I’ll serve you heart and soul. And in return, you must give me a life that will have been worth living.”

One person gives their life to working for justice as they define it. They’ll break dates to work at this, and gladly do this work rather than take a vacation or read a book about something completely unrelated to the kind of justice they want to see. And they do it gladly, because they believe that there is nothing that is more worthy of them and their time. They expect, when they look back in years to come, that they will be able to say, “I served this, I made it the center of my life, I made it my god, and it gave me a life I am proud to have lived.” If we can say that, we don’t ask much more.

But not everything we chase after can give us life. Some things we chase after were never really interested in us at all. They just use us for their own ends, and take life away from us, leaving us drained and empty and depressed. It’s such a shock when it happens. They were so seductive! We were so sure! It seemed so good!

This is what Buddhists or Hindus call the difference between living in illusions or maya, and living in reality. In Western religion, we call it the difference between serving gods and serving idols. And chasing after idols, like chasing after mirages or living in illusions, usually ends up by draining life from us rather than giving us more and deeper life. Because idols use their seductive powers to take us in, use us up, and throw us out.

This word “seduction” is the right word for what’s going on. It’s always surprising to learn that “seduction” comes from the same root as the word “education.” And the difference between the two words is precisely the difference between idols and gods, illusion and reality.

The root of both words is the “-duc,” which means “to lead.” So a conductor leads the musicians through the music, or leads his bus or train through the countryside. Induction leads you into something – the Army, or the Hall of Fame, perhaps. Education means to lead you outward, out of your smaller self into a larger and more adequate self. That’s what education is about. It’s why we go to school: to learn to become bigger, deeper, more aware and nuanced. We want to be led into a bigger sense of identity and a bigger life; we want to be educated.

And seduce? It means to lead astray: to lead off the path. To lead somewhere that doesn’t make you bigger or deeper or better. It means to lead you in ways that serve not you, but your seducer. Your seducer takes you in. You follow gladly, willingly, because you’ve been seduced but think you’re going to be educated. They you’re used to fill the seducer’s needs, used up, and tossed aside.

A seducer is an idol, a powerful but illusory presence that you want to follow but shouldn’t follow.

The oldest and most vivid story of seduction I know of comes from around three thousand years ago, in The Odyssey from ancient Greece. If you know the story, you’ll remember the scene where Odysseus’ ship must sail past the Sirens, those supernatural but deadly women who would seduce him and his crew with their Sirens’ Song. No one could resist that song, he was told. But he was curious. So he had his men tie him to the mast so he couldn’t escape, then had them fill their ears with wax so they couldn’t hear the seductive song, and they sailed by the island of the Sirens.

The Sirens called out, and even mighty Odysseus screamed for his men to turn to shore, to follow their seductive song. But they couldn’t hear him, so they kept sailing. If you looked closely on the shores of their island, you saw the many piles of bones bleached white by the sun and surf. That was all that was left of those who had followed the Sirens’ Song.

The seducers, like the Sirens, are only doing what comes naturally to them. They’re simply a lot better at it than you are, so they take you in. It’s so easy for them to take you in, and then to use you as they will. But anybody that easy to take in is hard to care very much about, and they don’t. You can see why so many people want to say that whatever else you could say about God, God is Love. Because love wouldn’t do that to you. Seduction would, but not God, not Education, not anything that cared about you.

What does this have to do with television? Seduction means leading astray, leading away from wholeness, truth, health, into a direction that serves the seducer at the expense of the seduced – in any field. Television distracts us from life in order to draw us into crowds to hawk their wares to.

You might ask, “What about news? We need the news!” I would ask you to think about how much news we get, how complete it is, how reliable it is, and whether news programs, just like other entertainment programs, aren’t really trying to draw a crowd for their sponsors, rather than educate them. If “news” is the information that keeps people free, I don’t think there has been much news on television for decades.

And look how the time is actually spent on news programs. About 30% of the total time is taken with commercials. Nearly 54% of the time is spent on war, crime and terror, and one of the slogans of nearly all news programs is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Is this education, or seduction? Do they want to serve you, or use you?

“Well,” you might think, “if the world is really that full of war, crime and terror, then don’t we need to know about it?” Well, we need to know why there is war, who is making money from it, what deceptions were used to trick others into losing their lives there. It would help to know the economic background of most of our crime, why people feel driven to crime in order to get by. But we don’t hear these things.

And the focus on crime and terror aren’t to educate us. They are the evening news version of “If it bleeds, it leads.” It’s car-crash journalism, meant to draw a crowd of passing sailors to its shores, like the Sirens.

For example, during one five-year period (1990-95), television coverage of homicides went up by 336% — nearly three and a half times. Yet during that same period, the actual homicides in the real world went down by 13%. That’s not news. That’s a Siren Song, a seduction, an idol.

And it’s not a secret. Four out of five Hollywood executives believe there is a link between TV violence and real-life violence. Over nine out of ten children say they feel upset or scared by violence on television.

The longest we go on television without a commercial break is eight minutes. Violence, terror, murder, sex and brutality are featured on the news for the same reason they are featured on so many regular television shows: because they draw a crowd that can be used by the superb seduction of the advertising industry to reward their sponsors. Is this education or seduction? Is it serving us or duping us?

Spending an average of four and a half hours a day watching television means that we are spending one quarter of our waking time, and nearly all our leisure time, sitting in front of the tube.

When I was watching an average of four hours of TV a night, I watched mostly the Law & Order-type shows, or CSI, or Monday Night Football. I found that I was more paranoid, more aware of danger, less aware of grace or kindness, more suspicious of others, and when I dreamed, the dreams often had violent themes. Since I stopped watching TV, I seldom dream, and almost never have violent themes in my dreams or my waking imagination. It is simply easier to see and believe in the loving and kind parts of people, and to see violence and deceit as sins against humanity, rather than the way things are in a dog-eat-dog world.

Even when I watched good dramas – and I thought a lot of the Law & Order shows were good dramas, well-acted – the aftertaste was violent. I never felt better after watching them, never felt uplifted, never had my faith in myself or in humanity strengthened, only weakened.

And so, like many addicts, I don’t have much good to say for the drug that seduces me so easily.

But I don’t hate television because:

1. of car-crash journalism that draws crowds to sell them things rather than to educate and enlarge them

2. or because it seduces Americans into living vicariously within the stories it spins to attract them, while its commercials help them run up their credit card debt to an average of about $10,000 at over 22% interest.

3. I don’t hate television because it tries to seduce us into wanting material wealth when what we need is spiritual wealth.

4. Or the reality TV that both reflects and programs the selfish and deceptive behavior used to get ahead while downplaying or ignoring our humanity, our decency and our compassion.

5. And I don’t hate news shows that titillate rather than educate, and turn serious debates into the shallow sensationalist joust of the day.

6. Or the fact that after a few years of watching over four hours of TV a day, I still can’t remember anything I learned that I needed to know.

7. And I don’t hate television because I resent the fact that commercials work, and I, like millions of others, keep buying things I don’t need.

Well … yes I do. Yes I do hate television for this, for all these reasons. But I hate it the way an alcoholic hates alcohol, because if it’s on I’m drawn to it like a moth to a flame or a sailor to bone-covered shores. I watch it like an idiot. When I’m on the road, I sit in front of the TV in my motel room for four hours every night. The next morning, I can’t remember what I watched or why, and am glad to return home to a TV set that only plays movies and videos on how to turn bowls.

You may not be addicted. Your self-control may be much better than mine – unless you’re also watching four and a half hours a night. But television is not an innocuous presence in our homes. I think it’s a dangerous one.

Because we are shaped by the most powerful stories we learn, molded by the ideals and values that we absorb. All of education and all of religion know and rely on this fact. So do advertisers. But education at its best is about leading us out of ourselves into a bigger identity and more satisfying life. Religion at its best is about inducting us into a Sangha, a community of faith where life is valued and only the best in us is encouraged. And the media, I think, neither educate nor induct, but seduce. They lead astray. They are the Siren Songs of today, and few of us seem very good at resisting them.

Think about it this way: Would you invite a storyteller into your home every night to tell you stories of blood, greed, murder and violence, leaving you more fearful and paranoid, robbing you of the time you might have spent doing things together? And then the next day, would you rush out to buy things you don’t need, so that the sponsors would send this same toxic storyteller back into your home again the next night? No, of course, you wouldn’t do that. Or do you?

A few years ago, the Surgeon General of the United States sponsored Turn off the TV weeks. When the Surgeon General sponsored a Turn off the TV week a few years ago, he said, “We are raising the most overweight generation of youngsters in American history … This week is about saving lives.” The surgeon general says television is bad for physical health. But most of it is just as bad for emotional, psychological and spiritual health.

A second grader named Drew Henderson of Donora, PA said “I really didn’t like TV-Turnoff Week except that I did notice that my grades went up and I was in a good mood all week.”

So I wonder. What if we could kick the TV habit, stop spending most of our leisure time ingesting stories that make us more afraid, more suspicious of our fellow humans, and more insensitive to real-world violence? And what if, instead, we had more time to spend with those we love – learning how to turn that love into memories worth having – and our real-world performance went up and we were in a good mood. If we could do that, would that be a bad thing?

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© Davidson Loehr

25 September 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

NOTE: This is the first of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Evangelizing Liberal Religion,

David Borden

Good morning. My Name is David Borden and I am here to share my thoughts on Evangelizing Liberal Religion. As you know, the numbers of Unitarian Universalists have stayed stagnant for some time. Meanwhile, evangelical Christian groups have seen an increase in numbers. Why is that?

I believe there are two reasons and we should learn from them:

1) Religions that grow pursue their faith with vigor.

2) Religions that grow have members that can articulate their main beliefs to potential members.

I did a bit of comparison shopping on the web. I found thousands of evangelical Christian sites. The first one I looked at was called evangelize.com. At the bottom of the home page there was a little box with a counter furiously running up numbers. It professed to be the number of people who had died since I had opened the page. Unfortunately, it stated, “the vast majority of them are going to hell.”

Another part of the site had a menu of 27 lessons to read and then act upon. Among the ones that caught my attention were:

-Your Legal Rights and witnessing in public

-100 responses to hard questions

 -Use Halloween to win souls

And my personal favorite:

-Throw an evangelistic Super Bowl Party!

Now the idea of winning converts during the Janet Jackson half-time show may be ridiculous, but it perfectly illustrates to what lengths the Christian Right will go in order to get their message out.

I also searched “evangelical liberal religion” and “evangelical Unitarian Universalism.” I got very few hits. Perhaps because these are oxymorons. I tried to read some of these pages, but my mind kept wandering. I wanted to get back to evangelize.com and watch the tally of the damned. I wanted to read about that Superbowl Party. What was wrong with this picture? Why were these UU articles about the need for evangelizing so boring?

I was telling my wife, Tamara, about this experience. She got right to the point and asked, “Why do you even care?”

Good question, I thought. And it is the question we all need to ask ourselves before we hit the street corners with soapboxes and bullhorns..

I care because I don’t wish to live in a world in which irrationality is a virtue, thinking is a crime, and religion is used to shackle people instead of setting them free.

So, what is the alternative? Why, Liberal Religion, of course. But what is Liberal Religion? It is when the Buddha said that salvation is to be found in the realization of truth. It is in Islam when it is said that giving alms is good, but giving anonymously is divine. It is the Tao Te Ching when it is said that only difficult things are worth pursuing.

But my favorite example of Liberal Religion is Jesus when he said to turn the other cheek. Many people take this as a call to pacifism. But I don’t think so. It is a call to subversion of the established social order. My wife and I lived in Morocco for 5 years. In Islamic countries you learn to do everything with your right hand because your left is reserved for less glamorous duties, and, thus, unclean. Imagine for a moment that you are a filthy commoner in need of a good slapping by a high-class gentleman. He is going to hit you with his left hand. You have no recourse because he is powerful. Striking back would only get you flogged mercilessly or killed. Both of these outcomes are counterproductive to your cause. Your only recourse is your wit. Turn your other cheek. Make him slap you next time with his right hand, his clean hand. Look the powerful dead in the eye and make him defile himself or yield.

That is what it means to be a practitioner of Liberal Religion.

Our call is one of sedition. It is not maintaining the status quo. It is about changing the world. Nothing worth doing is easy. If your religion is not worth fighting for, or proclaiming from the tree tops, you need to find a new one. Liberal Religion should not only be about guest speakers and green sanctuaries. It should be about your very soul and how you wish to live your life and in what world you wish to live it.

Your call today is to go out there and get slapped.

SERMON: Liberal Religion, Part I

Between about 2200 and 2800 years ago, in locations all over the world, liberal religion was born. It was and remains the hardest, most honest, and most liberating religious path the world has ever known, though it is not for the frightened.

Liberal religion isn’t small like a denomination or even a religious tradition. It is at the heart of all honest religion in all times and places. It is as universal, as honest and as infinite as anything on earth that involves humans.

Even though it wasn’t born until a few thousand years ago, it is really older than God, older than all the gods, this liberal religion tradition. It has been served under many names in most of the world’s great religions both Eastern and Western. Yet the various kinds of liberal religion have more in common with each other than any of them have with the literal religions in their own tradition. So liberal religion offers ready-made bridges of understanding and friendship to all the world’s people.

When a liberal style of religion is being served with honesty and courage – both are required – you don’t have to check your brain at the door; you don’t have to check your heart at the door, either. You can bring all of you inside, including your doubts and your flaws. Since it is honest, it need not fear questions. And in no liberal religion on earth are you expected to be perfect. They aren’t about saving you from sin; they’re about recognizing your innate blessings, and helping you to become more whole, to live a life of greater integrity and authenticity, by showing you the fairly narrow and hard path of integrity and authenticity.

The insights of liberal religion can, if you are open to them, replace our tendency to judge others with our capacity to love them. And it contains the truth that can set you free. But these truths of liberal religion are dangerous to discuss in their naked form, and almost never are. Usually, they are clothed in the many languages of myth, or mystery and miracle, because the message feels so much more welcoming when it comes in friendly costume. But sometimes, it comes naked.

We often say we want the straight truth, not stories, and we often say that’s what liberal religion is about. I’d say no, that’s what logical positivism or sterile mechanics are about. The truth that can set us free, I think, is usually a bit different. And while liberal religion may have the best handle on that truth, it often has the worst selection of vehicles for that truth, since we are often not very good at learning the important languages of symbol, metaphor and myth. So let’s begin.

Hinduism

Twenty-five centuries or more ago, the Upanishads appeared in ancient Hinduism, and they signaled the birth of the liberal spirit in that tradition. They said “Do you sense the vast creative power of the universe? The power that creates all things, sustains all things, and claims them all in the end? Well, you don’t have to bow down or feel insignificant, because you are part of that power. You are part of the infinite and the eternal, just as you are. If you deny God, they say, you deny yourself. If you affirm God, you affirm yourself. Today, we sometimes like to say we are made of stardust; it’s a kind of rational, semi-scientific attempt at a spiritual perspective. But the ancient Hindus were way ahead of us. Oh, they would say, but you have so completely understated the facts. We are not merely made of the dust and atoms of stars which exploded long ago; we are made of the unimaginable powers that created the stars, and which destroyed them.

And so they write, “Seek to know him from whom all beings have come, by whom they all live, and unto whom they all return. He is Brahman.” (Taittiriya Upanishad, p. 110)

And what is this Brahman thing about? What is it made of? It sounds like another costume for the Western God: some kind of Fellow giving orders. But it isn’t, not at all. Here’s what they wrote, more than twenty-five centuries ago: “Brahman is joy: for from joy all beings have come, by joy they all live, and unto joy they all return.” (“Taittiriya Upanishad,” p. 111)

Can you feel how much more healthy and whole and life-affirming this is than most that we hear from Western religions?

But Hinduism offers more than just this. It also offers you a roadmap of how to navigate this life here and now – the one where you do have consciousness. It’s about karma. The rules are very simple.

As you act in your life, so you become. If you do good, you become good; if you do evil, you become evil. By pure actions you becomes pure; by evil actions you becomes evil. (p. 140)

So the power you need is within you, an essential part of you. It includes both the power to create and destroy. And then, when Hinduism adds reincarnation, you have all the time you need to work through your karma. It sounds, and has been heard as, very comfortably wrapped in mythology, very friendly. Like the Western script, it looks like you never really have to die; you just live forever in one way or another.

But once in awhile, they would say it straight out and tell the naked truth. In the Upanishad considered the most authoritative of all, after talking about this atman-Brahman stuff and the reincarnations, the author slips in this amazing line. Just for the record, he’s saying, “there is no consciousness after death.” The other character this author created is stunned, amazed that after all these stories about reincarnation, eternity and the rest, he’s saying No, you’re done after one. Your memories, experiences, loves, disappear from all consciousness when you die. This is it. (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, p. 132)

That’s about as naked as the truth gets, but throughout the ages most have not found much comfort in it. It may be true, but it isn’t a very interesting story, and mostly we’d rather have good stories to live within.

Buddhism

Buddhism was born out of Hinduism about 2500 years ago, and it has a thousand stories, myths, images – something for everyone. You can see today’s Buddhists lining up in temples throughout Thailand paying the monks to make lucky charm bracelets for them, like the Rosary beads many Catholics use, or the St. Christopher statues they used to have on the dashboards of their car as supernatural lucky charms. They have the costumes, the saffron robes, the shaved heads, begging bowls, and a hundred other props that give Buddhism its rich tapestry of colors and customs. And for most Buddhists, reincarnation still means, as it does for most Hindus, another life – with consciousness.

But under the wonderful myths and images, Buddhism tells the naked truth more bluntly than any religion in the world. Our suffering in life, the Buddha said, comes from the fact that we live in illusions. And waking up – Buddhism is about waking up – means outgrowing our need for illusions, including our comforting ones.

And on what can you lean? What do the Buddhists give you at their most blunt level? A famous story tells it.

A student came to a Buddhist monastery to live and study. He was very anxious about finding the center of life, that on which he could lean, when he saw the Teacher of the order. “Tell me, Master,” he pleaded, “What is the Buddha?” The master studied him for a second, and said “The Buddha is the mind.”

For ten years, the young man studied everything about the mind that he could. He gained a lot of knowledge, certain that somehow this knowledge would add up to a foundation of rock on which he could stand securely forevermore. His anxiety went away. And ten years later, he returned for a second meeting with the Master. “Master,” he said, “ten years ago you told me the Buddha was the Mind, and I have learned much pursuing this great insight. Can you now give me a more advanced lesson?”

“Yes,” said the Master: “There is no Mind, and there is no Buddha.”

“But then why did you tell me there was?”

“I told you that because your baby was crying. I said it to help stop your frightened baby from crying. Now you are older, and are ready for the truth: there is no Buddha, there is no Mind.”

In other words, there is nothing to seek that will make a foundation, because no foundation is needed. You are here, you are now, this is it. Accept it as a gift. Accept yourself as a gift. Stop looking for something special, something hidden. This is it, and like it or not, it is enough. No illusions are needed. There is no consciousness after death; the quality of our life is determined most of all by how we live, and it is enough.

It’s a stark message, but then like the Master in this story, Buddhism offers enough myths and stories to keep your “baby” from crying, so that everyone can find a path that fits them. You like the naked truth? Fine. You prefer the story with the Buddha and the Mind? Also fine.

Taoism

About the same time the Buddha lived, the great Chinese sage Lao Tzu was writing his Tao te Ching. Here too is the voice of liberal religion, done pretty starkly, though with more comfort than just hearing that there’s nothing and it’s ok.

“When you realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu said, “the whole world belongs to you.” (The Tao te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell [Harper Perenniel, 1988], #44) This is like the Hindu saying that there’s nothing after death but the impersonal recycling of atoms.

But our comfort in life is realizing that there is a simple Way that things run, and that our life will be happiest if we are in harmony with this Way, or Tao.

“The great Way is easy, yet people prefer the side paths,” Lao Tzu writes. “Be aware when things are out of balance. Stay centered within the Tao. When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn – all this is robbery and chaos. It is not in keeping with the Tao.” (#53) No, that’s not from yesterday’s editorial page; it’s from 2500 years ago, from a completely different culture, but arising from exactly the same kind of human nature and timeless human condition.

“Let the Tao be present in your life and you will become genuine. Let it be present in your family and your family will flourish. Let it be present in your country and your country will be an example to all countries in the world. Let it be present in the universe and the universe will sing. How do I know this is true? By looking inside myself.” (#54) There’s that message again: inside, outside, all connected, and it is enough, right here and now.

“All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.” (#66) Jesus would have recognized this wisdom immediately.

And finally, one of the finest teachings in any of the world’s religions:

“What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.” (#27)

All of this is the spirit of liberal religion in all times and places, because it is about how to live wisely and well in the only human life we will have.

Confucius

K’ung-fu-tzu lived about 551-479 BC. Like all these paths, Confucianism deserves – and has been given – hundreds of volumes rather than a few paragraphs. Some feel it is not really a religion because there are no deities or prescribed rituals. But it does belong in the tradition of liberal religion, which is concerned with living wisely and well.

One of the old Master’s many sayings that springs from his recognition of the power of authenticity is, “A man should practice what he preaches, but a man should also preach what he practices.” We know the first half – but to do the second half requires that we’re actually living within the authenticity we preach.

Some years ago after speaking about some of these topics of existential religion – liberal religion – a man came up to me excitedly and said “You need to read my book!” He gave me his card; he was an emeritus professor of Chinese studies at Columbia named William deBary. His book was on a subject I would never have picked off the shelf: 13th Century Neo-Confucianism.

Yet he was right. For the central concept in this era’s Confucianism was what they called “living for one’s self” – where the correct “self” was the larger one consisting in ourselves, our society, and the art of interrelationships that can make our social life smooth and harmonious. One more path and dimension to living more wisely and well here and now.

And I’m reminded of another Confucian story I read long ago from a source I’ve completely forgotten. It was about some sophisticated students who had paid good money to study with an internationally renowned Master. They expected the story without “tigers,” especially from such a man as this. Yet in his first talk with them, he repeatedly mentioned a kind of “magic” on which he said everything depended.

This was outrageous, and very un-Confucian, they thought! With some edge to his voice, one student dared to challenge the Master, explaining that they were not children, nor were they superstitious peasants, and that if he was going to use a word as old-fashioned as “magic,” they would greatly appreciate it if he might explain what he meant, in a way they could understand and respect.

“Ah,” said the teacher, perhaps not expecting this challenge. “Well then, we can do that. But it is not a quick matter, and my throat is dry.” Then, turning to a student sitting near him, he said “I wonder if you would get me a glass of water?”

When the student returned, the Master took a long drink of water, set the glass down, and said “That was magic.” He did my bidding, without being coerced, without feeling demeaned or ordered about. He did it without threats, because he wanted to, and both he and I – and I suspect most of you – felt good about that asking for and getting a glass of water. No force, no trickery, just an honest and respectful request, and it was done quickly and happily. That is magic. And without learning that kind of magic, our lives together will be strained, even dismal.”

But the “magic” wasn’t supernatural or otherworldly. It was the mastery of the kind of respectful authenticity that make all social interactions fluid and gratifying. It is in complete harmony with the kind of “Way” that Taoism is about. It is liberal religion without the tigers but with the magic.

The Greeks

Plato brought this spirit into Western civilization with all of his teachings on how to live wisely and well – and again, he did it without using any gods. We were as complete as we needed, and just needed to learn how to pursue what is good rather than lesser things. You can hear the lessons of Karma here, or seeking the Tao, the Way.

We could go on through all of Western history from Plato to the present, and find many more thinkers, both religious and secular, who carried this same spirit. And I’ll do some of that other times. But for now, I want to comment on something I’ve been hinting at, and make it explicit.

Like all religions, the liberal style comes with a choice of languages. You can either hear the straight truth, stripped of all its poetry, imaginative stories and myths, or you can take it wrapped in myths, which give a warmer, more friendly form to it. Though to do that, we must learn to be mythically musical, to learn these most fertile and imaginative vehicles for expressing truths that pass understanding. And we’re often not good at that, so we sound unimaginative and sterile to those from richer traditions.

I’m reminded of Bruno Bettleheim’s classic book The Uses of Enchantment, in which he explains that the role fairy tales play in a child’s development is to give them pre-rational or sub-rational structures for integrating powerful emotions, years before they are mature enough to integrate them rationally. So a “wicked stepmother” offers an acceptable channel for a thought unthinkable to a five-year-old: that they sometimes hate their mother and think she’s an evil witch. This is the role that imagination plays throughout our lives. It is one of the most essential tools for growing into liberal religions of any era.

I read a book a few years ago that made this point about magic in a wonderful way. It was the 2001 book Life of Pi, by Canadian author Yann Martel. It is the story of a 16-year-old Indian boy adrift for 227 days in a large lifeboat, accompanied – according to the story – by a 450-lb. Bengal tiger.

Now that’s unbelievable, and turns out to be untrue. But it’s a better story than the truth, which was naked and brutal. The truth was that the boy and his family were moving from India to Canada, when their ship sank. His father was drowned. He, his mother, a cook and a passenger with a broken leg wound up in a large lifeboat. As food ran out, the cook killed the wounded passenger to eat. Pi’s mother was appalled, and shouted at the cook about his barbarism, so he murdered her too, even cut off her head and threw it overboard. Pi then murdered the cook with his own butcher knife, and after disposing of the bodies, including the headless body of his mother, he was alone in the lifeboat for nearly eight months.

Here is a boy who has lost both parents, watched his mother being murdered, then in turn kills her killer, and is left alone – to face losing his family, the brutal murder, and his own capacity to kill. You could say that something deep within him was awakened. Something ancient, powerful and wild, a dark side that he had to learn to master or it could destroy him. Speaking in merely factual or psychological terms doesn’t do justice to the power or the terror of this thing that has awakened within him, and that saved his life. And so instead, this naked story of brutality, murder, more murder and survival became the story of a boy alone in a lifeboat with a 450-lb. Bengal Tiger that he must learn to master, lest it destroy him.

The truth, you could say, is that he had everything in him needed to survive, including the capacity, when necessary, to kill. The truth was that he was now alone in the world, with bloody memories almost impossible to incorporate without nightmares. But the truth made an awful story, and not one with much room to live in.

When he finally made it to the shores of South America, the tiger disappeared, and he was met by two men from the company that owned the ship that had sunk. They wanted to know what happened, and how he survived. He told them the story with the tiger, and they didn’t believe him. So he told them the brutal story, and they realized the awful truth. Then he said Look, I have told you two stories, one with a tiger and one without a tiger. Neither story explains why your ship went down. So now: which story do you want? The one with the tiger, or the one without the tiger? The men said they would write it up as a story about a boy and a tiger.

Yet you can’t accuse Pi of living in fantasy or illusion. He knew the truth. But he wanted a more imaginative story to carry it in, and a less naked and brutal one.

Do you want the truth? Here’s one way to tell it. The truth is that there is no consciousness after death. There is no mind and no Buddha, no heaven or hell. It’s here, or it’s nowhere. You’re fully awake only when you can give up even your comforting illusions, and the only magic is the magic we can create together. We also have everything we need. We are adequate to the tasks of life. That’s one way to say it. It’s pretty ho-hum.

Or you could say that we are all parts of God, parts of the infinite and eternal powers of the universe, created from joy, bathed in joy, and wrapped in joy until the very end of time. And all, all, is blessed. All is holy, and we are essential parts of all that is holy.

Both these stories carry the truths of that spirit of liberal religion that was first born in the human soul close to three thousand years ago.

That’s the good news. It’s the news of liberal religion in all ages. It can set you free. You don’t have to check your brain at the door. You don’t have to check your heart at the door. And, for the record, you don’t have to check your imagination at the door, either.

The liberal religious message will work told straight and naked for some few people. It will work just as well – and for more people – enshrined in a myth to live by, a story with a comforting and challenging role for us. As long as you remember that the story isn’t really about the tigers or the myths, you can choose. In liberal religion, you don’t have to check your brain at the door, or your heart. You don’t have to check your imagination at the door either, or your childlike ability to enter into useful fictions. And so think about it this week: do you want the truth that can set you free with or without tigers?

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

18 September 2005

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:

Jack Harris-Bonham, Ministerial Intern

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, we present ourselves to you in this moment. We acknowledge that life is a lot bigger than any of us. We remember connections; we see familiar faces, smiles and hugs all around, some coffee, some cake. This feeling of being together, this feeling of community reminds us of something.

Some of us come from a hectic week in which being in touch with the presence of the moment escaped us. Some of us feel fine about the week, but we still wait for the other shoe to drop. That nagging feeling that any moment it, whatever we’re attached to, whatever we so desperately want will all go up in smoke.

We let go now of all that has followed us throughout the week. We give it up! Our burdens, helium filled, drift off our shoulders. We watch them as they float toward the clouds, smaller, smaller, and then suddenly … they are gone. We take a deep breath and let it all out. Another breath … another exhalation. We are nearing home. We see it just ahead. It’s that place we know so well. It’s safe there, comfortable. We’re at home and from home all life’s difficulties are simply the scenery of our lives, nothing more.

We know the place. We recognize it when we’re there.

For it is from this place that compassion arises. We can’t be truly home, until we realize that everyone – so-called enemies, those we secretly dislike – they have all come home with us.

Out of this realization, help us unnamed Mystery, to walk the way fully awake. And don’t let us look away, for as surely as we are witness and audience, so too, the world is witness and audience to us.

The Mystery is within us, just as we are within the Mystery. Help us then, unnamed Mystery, to find our home, and to find ourselves.

Amen.

SERMON: Who is Your Audience?

All the world’s a stage,

 And all the men and women merely players:

 They have their exits and their entrances;

 And one man in his time plays many parts…

(Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” Act II, scene 7)

A lot of us learned that bit of Shakespeare somewhere in school, but the language is so lovely it’s easy to forget that it’s also true. I doubt that any of us is aware of all the different parts we play in our lives, or all the different kinds of audiences we play to.

The Greeks had a custom that could make it easier for us to keep track of who we’re being at any given moment, and even though it’s pretty impractical, it’s also pretty vivid.

In ancient Greece, plays were performed in amphitheaters for t housands of people at a time, many of them fairly far from the stage – I’ve heard from tourists who visited one amphitheater that seated 13,000. So the actors sometimes carried large faces of their characters on a stick in front of them, so the audience could see which role they were playing. That’s quite an image, carrying your mask, your persona, around in front of you, super-sized. Can you visualize what your office would look like if everyone had to hold up the mask they were pretending to be at the moment? Or your home? Or your relationship? Or you? It doesn’t take long for this to get a little uncomfortable, does it?

The audiences cheered for the characters, not the actors: they cheered for actors who could play roles well, who could change into the persona shown on their masks. We still do that. One part of playing a role is playing to an audience, and you could even say that each kind of role we play is played to a different audience. Let’s look at a few of the masks we wear:

1. A teen-aged girl, in great physical shape, gorgeous, wearing the coolest clothes (and the right brand names), just the right jewelry, embodying, playing, the right image of a cool, attractive young woman. She’s playing not just to an audience of her peers, but an audience of her peers who know the rules of that role, which clothes matter, the connoisseurs of the young cool look. It’s a performance, and when she wows her audience, she knows it.

2. The older man in a $1,000 Armani suit and Rolls Royce, wearing the right kind of suave look is also playing a role, showing he has won at the game of financial success, he has made it. He’s not playing to the same audience as the girl, but to an audience of his peers, those who know that the car cost a bundle, that the mask he’s holding up in front of him is the mask of a hugely successful man, the hero of that sort of play: the kind Business Week might feature.

3. The hostess welcoming guests into her home, a home just dripping with Feng Shui, caressing you with subtle colors and textures, carefully and tastefully chosen furniture and just the right sort of paintings and sculptures, making the whole house a kind of mask held up to show a complete mastery of a certain kind of style and class. She’s not playing to the teenaged girl’s audience, and while the man could get out of his Rolls Royce and be comfortable in her house, she’s really playing to her peers, too, who know enough about the subtle arts of home décor to realize just how superbly she has done it. And she warms to their appreciation, given not in applause but in awed looks and compliments.

4. Or the child trying to be good, to please her parents, showing off good schoolwork, good art work, wanting her parents to see her soccer game or her middle school band concert. Probably without thinking of it, she’s hoping she plays her role as daughter well enough to – well, sometimes to earn their love, sometimes to earn their respect, sometimes just to do a good job playing this assigned role.

5. Our roles aren’t all positive. Teen-ages gang members, even in violent gang activities, are playing to an audience of other gang members. They wear the prescribed costumes, jewelry, maybe tattoos that mark them as members of this gang rather than others. Soldiers have many similarities. And high school kids who shout that they are radical individuals often wear the right costume, the costume of radical individuals approved by their peers, as they play for their audience’s approval. Those who have been in combat situations know that soldiers aren’t fighting for truth, freedom or the American Way. They’re fighting in front of the audience of their buddies, not wanting to disgrace themselves in the performance of this role.

6. Or a preacher, trying to invoke and evoke the presence of an attitude of seriousness, depth, trying to convince people he’s got a handle on what’s sacred and what isn’t – he’s also playing to an audience, and hopefully it’s one larger than the one in front of him. It’s the audience, probably in his mind, of those who know that worship services are meant to be a combination of reverence and relevance, challenge and comfort, done with the right kind of voice, body language and attitude.

I included my own role in the list because I want you to know that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with playing many roles to many audiences. They provide the background and the context for how we play our lives. Most young girls want to feel pretty, attractive and sexy, want to know that they can grow from the girl role to the woman role without feeling geeky. Those roles, in the right clothes and hairstyle, can ease them into some of the roles they’ll play as women.

The successful businessman might not know how to act like a successful businessman without the sense of a role, and might not know how to communicate his status to those who don’t know him. He worked hard for it; you can’t blame him for wanting to flaunt it a bit.

And if you’ve been in homes decorated by gifted hostesses, you know it feels great, and you’ve probably been among those in their audience who applauded the setting they created. I think such homes are almost magical, and a wonderful environment to be in.

The child – well, all children play these roles, just as we did. I had my “Little Man” role to play around my father, a different flavored role when I wanted to impress my mother, and still different roles with my brother, and my friends. It’s how we build our repertoire of moves in life, how we learn to steer our way through social circles as though we know what we’re doing. We couldn’t do much in many areas without having mastered a lot of those parts Shakespeare talked about.

With gang members, warriors, it can take on a dark and dangerous aspect, as they also want the approval of the audience that knows just how tough guys are supposed to look, talk and act. This often includes a toughness, even an indifference, to the suffering the cause others.

And I think you’re glad that I mostly act like a preacher when I’m up here, rather than fumbling around, slurring my words, looking down at the manuscript all the time and so on. All these roles are important. They’re part of how we try to please our several audiences.

And we know, or should know, that we’re playing roles, that we are an actor playing an appropriate role for the occasion. And once you get the feel for the many parts we all play, you can spot them just as though we were all carrying those big faces on sticks, like the Greek actors did.

If we don’t know the difference between the actor and the role, then we may not know the difference between what we do and who we are. I know that the movie “Batman Begins” says that “It’s not who you are deep down; it’s what you do that defines you.” But when you’re doing what you should do to be defined as a decent and honorable person, you are playing to a different audience than when you’re just fighting bad guys. And then it isn’t the character that matters, but the actor: who you are deep down.

There’s an old Jewish story this, told many ways. Rabbi Schwartz was taking a ribbing from his friend Smith, who was a great surgeon, Roberts, a distinguished scholar, and Rubenstein, a great musician. “Don’t you think you should have done more with your life?” they would ask. “You could have been a surgeon, or scholar, or musician instead of just a rabbi. Doesn’t it feel inadequate to you? Rabbi Schwartz said that no, it didn’t feel inadequate to him – though it felt inadequate in front of this audience. But he said that when he stands before his Maker, he will not be asked why he wasn’t a great surgeon or scholar or musician. He will be asked whether he was the best Rabbi Schwartz he could have been. And that, he said, is the audience he’s really trying to please.

There’s the distinction between the actor and the roles, and the distinction between the “B” level audience and the “A” level audience. In Western religion, most people think of this ultimate audience as standing before God, as they think of living as God would want them to live. The Greeks didn’t put it in God-terms in their Golden Age, but in terms of owing obedience to the highest ideals of the culture, which they relied on to help create the noblest kinds of people. The Romans didn’t put it in God-talk either by the end centuries of the Roman Empire. They said you should live “under the gaze of eternity”: as though all the greatest, noblest people who had ever lived or would ever live were watching you. Then, they said, do only what you would do in front of that kind of an audience.

There’s another story about this, a parable collected by a man named Anthony de Mello, one of the great collectors of spiritual stories from all over the world.

A woman in a coma was dying. She suddenly had a feeling that she was taken up to heaven and stood before the Judgment Seat.

“Who are you?” a Voice said to her.

“I’m the wife of the mayor,” she replied.

“I did not ask whose wife you are but who you are.”

“I’m the mother of four children.”

“I did not ask whose mother you are, but who you are.”

“I’m a schoolteacher.”

“I did not ask what your profession is but who you are.”

And so it went. No matter what she replied, she did not seem to give a satisfactory answer to the question, “Who are you?”

“I’m a Christian.”

“I did not ask what your religion is but who you are.”

“I’m the one who went to church every day and always helped the poor and needy.”

“I did not ask what you did but who you are.”

She evidently failed the examination, for she was sent back to life. When she recovered from her illness, she was determined to find out who she was. And that made all the difference.

– Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight, p. 140

She answered questions about who she was with answers about the roles she played, the collection of masks she owned. But here, she was playing to a higher kind of audience, asking about the actor, not the roles wanting a higher kind of authenticity than just that of her being a wife, mother, teacher, Christian or the rest of it – even though those can all be good and important roles.

Friday night, about seventy-five of us watched a wonderful movie called “The Movie Hero,” about a cast of characters who hadn’t found the right audience to play to, and the lead character who had found his audience, but couldn’t find the right role to play before this audience who wanted him to be the hero of his story. After the movie, the discussion lasted for about forty-five minutes, because everyone there could recognize some dimensions of their life and the lives of those closest to them in this cast of characters.

(“The Movie Hero” is among the films our church owns through our subscription to the Spiritual Cinema Circle – http://www.spiritualcinemacircle.com/. We show spiritual movies on the third Friday of each month, and have an “Uppity Movie Night” on the first Fridays, where we feature films about society, the economy, the war and so on.)

This isn’t about blaming ourselves for not being perfectly noble people. It isn’t about holding up one more yardstick that will find us wanting. It’s about reminding ourselves that the actor is more important than the roles we play, and if we forget that for too long, the roles may take over the actor, which can give our story a very sad ending.

Rachel Naomi Remen, a gifted physician in the San Francisco area, has written two books filled with stories about what matters most in life, and I want to share one of her stories with you – a true story from her own experience.

She attended the retirement dinner for a medical school faculty member while she was in medical school. He was internationally known for his contributions to medical science. “Later in the evening,” she writes, “a group of medical students went to speak to him and offer him our congratulations and admiration. He was gracious. One of our number asked him if he had any words for us now at the beginning of our careers, anything he thought we should know. He hesitated. But then he told us that despite his professional success and recognition he felt he knew nothing more about life now than he had at the beginning. That he was no wiser. His face became withdrawn, even sad. “It has slipped through my fingers,” he said.

“None of us understood what he meant. Talking about it afterwards, I attributed it to modesty. Some of the others wondered if he had at last become senile. Now, almost thirty-five years later, my heart goes out to him.”

(Kitchen Table Wisdom, pp. 205-206)

Wearing his doctor mask, he had played to appreciative audiences his whole career. Only when he looked back on it, he realized it had been the role that had been developed, not the actor, and life had slipped through his fingers.

And sometimes, when people feel like personal failures, like it has slipped through their fingers, they get bitter, and try to poison the hopes and dreams of others. We have all known people like this, and they can be quite destructive. The people who delight in bursting others’ balloons, mocking their hopes because they are so empty inside and the emptiness hurts because they never found their audience, never found the right audience, never grew into the kind of person who knew who they were and were proud of it.

We all know cynics who tear down everything hopeful and good anyone puts forth, and use that destructive little role as an identity. But it’s the screaming lack of an adequate identity, not a real one. It’s the painful cry masquerading as a self. It’s the painful and dangerous cry from the forces playing to an audience drawn from the Dark Side, from the minions of Lord Sauron, from Voldemort, and those who are held in thrall by them.

How and where do you find an audience that cares whether you’re true to your best self rather than giving in to the trolls and demons that haunt you? What will lead you to a life you’ll be glad to have lived? What if you develop talent, succeed, and identify with your success rather than with your character, your soul?

We are born into a world that always tilts toward life and hope, and our deepest challenge is to adopt that tilt toward life and hope, to become eager servants of the best kind of life, the life that serves and heals the life within and around us, so that we won’t look back after many years and say “It slipped through my fingers.”

Where to find the kind of audience that expects the best from us? If we serve the gods of our culture, we will live to succeed, gain wealth, power, and seek the endorsement of our society as a sign that we’ve won in the rat race. Most of us do that, at least in part, and it mostly works, at least in part.

But as that great American philosopher Lily Tomlin said, “Even if you win in the rat race, you’re still a rat!” Even if you win at the game, is it enough? If you please an audience of rats or functionaries or repressed people, is it enough?

When you stand before the mirror at those times of your life when honesty invades and makes the rules and you must take account of yourself, it will not matter a great deal whether you played this or that role well. It will matter whether you were the best you possible, not what you imitated. It will matter whether you played yourself well. And the only audience finally worth playing to is the audience that believes there is something precious and singular in you that needs to be offered to the world.

Because there is. You are the only person in the world with the unique combination of quirks, gifts and style that you have: the only one. What a loss it would be to the world if you never put the mask down long enough to find the actor inside and bring him or her to light and to fruition. What a shame it would be if we focused so hard on the roles we must play that when we reach the end we realize that life slipped through our fingers. The audience that matters most dearly hopes you will do it, because they want you to be the hero of your unique story.

Don’t waste your “A” game on “B” audiences. At its best, this church is one of those better audiences that will prefer the actor to the characters. I try to preach from and to those places that listen for the better angels of our nature, that help us find the Buddha-seed, the God-seed that’s within us.

Because I don’t want, and you don’t want, life to slip through your fingers. You want life to be all over your fingers, all over your body, soaked deep into your mind, warming the very depths of your heart.

You want this, so that when the person whose opinion means the most asks “Were you true to your best self? Were you animated by love rather than envy or hate, by compassion rather than condescension, by understanding rather than prejudice” – and the other questions that will come up on that sort of existential exam – you want to be able to raise your head and say “Yes. Yes. I was not perfect, but I tried as well as I knew how to be a person of integrity and character, and a small blessing to the people whose lives I touched as I passed through life. I tried to make, and to be, a positive difference. And it was enough. It was enough.”

The applause won’t come from outside. It will come from the opinion that is finally the most important in your world. It will come from inside, because it’s your own most honest opinion that matters so deeply. It will be a silent kind of applause; but the noise from that silent applause can be deafening.

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Davidson Loehr

11 September 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 pray with our words, our hearts, and our resources. We’ll share our resources later in the service, but let’s begin by opening our hearts.

We hear of the continuing loss of life in Iraq, and wonder what to tell our soldiers if they return. Can we honestly tell them that the deaths and disfiguring injuries they received were justified by an illegal war sold to us through outright lies? That our lust for oil and military location was worth their sacrifices? And the more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens we asked our troops to kill – what was served by their deaths that was worth their lives?

At home, resources were diverted from strengthening levees in New Orleans known to be a danger for the past six years. The money was sent to Iraq. A hurricane came that everyone knew was coming. Many news personnel were evacuated several days before the public was warned to leave.

Yet still, we came with no food, no water and no apparent concern. The president’s mother, characteristically, laughed off the suffering of those stranded in Houston, saying they were poor anyway, so this isn’t so bad for them. And her son, the president, seems to show that the apple does not fall far from the tree.

These tragedies cry out for attention, even outrage. So many ways to spread the blame or remain in denial. Yet when the dust clears from the war and the flood waters recede from the Gulf Coast, there remain thousands and thousands of our brothers and sisters lying dead, and ten times that number suffering the loss of those they loved, those who loved them.

Religious voices are saying “We can only hope and pray, it’s in God’s hands.” We can hope and pray, and that might make us feel better. But we also have hands, and much of what must come is in our hands. And so let us hope and pray that these tragedies will end as well as they can. We never want to lose hope, so let us hope.

But not only hope. Not only hope.

Amen.

SERMON: Size Matters!

“By size I mean the stature of one’s soul, the range and depth of one’s love, one’s capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature. To me, this is the fundamental category, this is the essential principle.” This is the size that matters.

This paragraph was written over thirty years ago by a liberal theologian named Bernard Loomer. He was the Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School for a decade, then finished his career teaching religion in California, where he also began attending, and joined, a Unitarian church. Some may think he was one of us because he once joined a Unitarian church. I don’t care what his official religion was; I think he was one of us because he understood just how – and what kind of – size matters.

Today is the beginning of our annual pledge drive, and I want to talk to you about what religion is, what a healthy church is about, and why you should support generously whatever church you attend regularly. And I’ve decided to do all this by talking with you about this notion of size. So first I’m going to do the pitch, and then I’ll spend the rest of our time together explaining why these things matter so much, and why they should matter to you.

I read a story this week about a boy who wanted to help survivors of the Hurricane Katrina, so he sent some supplies, and also sent his $2 allowance to help with the disaster relief efforts. Just two dollars. The story was treated as cute. I also read this week that Sam Walton donated $23 million to the disaster relief efforts, and was praised by President Bush as a great philanthropist. But Sam Walton’s net worth is about $90 billion. If the average American family donated the same percentage of their net worth, it would be less than $8.00. Sam Walton’s gift sounds big. But it’s like most of us giving $8.00, which doesn’t sound very generous at all. So for this boy to donate $2, his whole allowance, is hundreds of times more generous than the Walton family was.

When we hear this story, we hear the boy as part of something big, not a boy-sized thing. If the boy had just said “Ah yes, I feel your pain,” I’m not sure we’d care much. But he got possessed by a very big spirit of compassion, and it made him a bigger person, opened him up, and he became a bigger person, far beyond his years, and far more generous than the richest man in the world.

And all his caring, all his praying, wouldn’t have helped a single family. That takes money.

Last week, closer to home, our own 4th and 5th grade boys baked cookies and sold them to help with the disaster relief. They raised $200.

Conservatives laugh at liberals when we talk about money, saying we’re all talk and no action because we don’t support our churches at a very high rate. They say, as many have told me over the years, that this just proves that liberals don’t believe in anything really worth supporting. We ask for 5% of your pre-tax income as a pledge – half a tithe. But we’re really averaging less than 2%. The First Baptist Church downtown has around 800 members and a budget triple ours. They’re a pretty liberal Baptist church – they withdrew from the SBC a few years back, and their minister’s wife has been here several times to attend some of the liberal social causes that meet here. Their members come from the same socio-economic slice of Austin that you all do. Yet they can do things we can barely dream of.

It’s not right. Our rightful place in this community is as a leader church and we’re not likely to do it without a healthy and responsible level of financial giving.

We count only about six hundred members here, meaning they have signed the membership book and made a financial contribution during the past year. But if you count everyone who has signed the membership book, we have over 900 members. Several hundred people attend here fairly regularly, and don’t contribute money to help pay the bills, and help the church realize its potential.

Don’t do that! Don’t do it to this church, and don’t do it to yourselves. I want you to join with us fully: not as a spectator, but as a full member and participant. Don’t stand back. Join fully with us. Invest your energy here. Invest your money here. Invest your spirit here. Choose really to be a part of this community of seekers. Join us fully. Come all the way in to this church.

The grown-ups, the adults, need to support it financially. It’s walking the talk, putting our money where our mouth and our values are. It’s consecrating our money and our energy to the search for size and for light that makes this church so special.

Now let’s talk about why all of this matters so much.

At its best, every religion is about this kind of size

Some religions make God big and you absorb some bigness second hand by worshiping God, like the moon is bright only by reflecting light that came from the sun. This is like identifying with your college on game day, or your country in war, feeling bigger as part of a bigger identity. All UT fans feel a little bigger today, after the UT football team, ranked #2 in the country, beat Ohio State, ranked #4, in the first meeting ever between these teams. As a University of Michigan alumnus, I’m glad Texas won, too – in spite of what Texas did to Michigan in the Rose Bowl! That’s a certain kind of bigness, but it’s limited: we don’t care a bit how they may feel in Columbus, Ohio today. So it’s a pretty local, and constrained, kind of size.

It’s like this in religion, too. You cozy up only to your own little club rather than the bigger purpose they’re supposed to be serving. Then everyone in other clubs is condemned because they’re not in your club – and then you’ve missed the whole point of religion. Baptists condemn others to their hell; Catholics say there is no salvation outside the church. And people who support them with their time and money are sometimes paying not to seek truth or authenticity, but merely certainty, safety. And those are so much smaller things.

Here, we say – though it is true everywhere, whether people say it or not – that you are not damned, ever. You have faults. You have done things you shouldn’t have done, and hurt people you shouldn’t have hurt. We all have. We don’t want to be that way, and we work toward offering more light than heat. But we are never condemned by our faults. That’s a different approach to life, and to religion. It’s valuable to have this kind of option, isn’t it?

And when we support causes and ideals like this, they raise us up and make us bigger, too. They can consecrate us, as we consecrate our money to supporting them.

“Consecrate” is a wonderful old word we don’t use much any more. The dictionary says it means to make holy, to set aside as holy. A Catholic Encyclopedia says only a priest can consecrate things, but this is not true. In the early church, members used to bring even their household items to church to be consecrated: their hammers, pots and pans, regular household tools. What that meant was that these things were dedicated to the service of God, wherever they were being used. Then they took them home again. But now when they were building or baking, they weren’t just doing it for themselves. They were doing it for the glory of God. That’s consecration. It increased the size of the imaginative world within which they lived almost infinitely.

And there’s a great story about this from a later time. In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a tourist once went into one of these huge buildings. Over at one side were carpenters, and he said to them “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? We’re carpenters. We’re building pews!” Then he went to the glass cutters who were painstakingly piecing together one of the monstrous stained-glass windows. Again he asked “What are you doing?” And again, they laughed and said they were assembling a window.

Then over on the other side was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters and glass workers. Of her too, he asked “What are you doing?” The woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!” Her job was bigger than the jobs of the carpenters and glaziers. Not “bigger” in the sense that it was more important to the cathedral, but in the sense that it was more important to her. She lived in a world where her simple act of sweeping was part of a magnificent service to God. And activities of that size absolutely bless us.

The great mythologist Joseph Campbell used a more modern metaphor to talk about small and great spiritual size, by comparing light bulbs with Light. You look up above, and you’ll see a lot of light bulbs that are on. But sitting here, you’re not aware of them. What you’re aware of is the light that comes from all of them. If one went out, if one or two more came on, you probably wouldn’t notice. And I suspect nobody here cares a bit about what brand those light bulbs are. We’re not here to look at the bulbs; we need light.

Religions are like this too, Campbell said. Each religion is like one light bulb that offers light to the world. But nobody else really cares about the brand name of the religions, any more than we care about the brand names of the bulbs above us. Their purpose is to provide light, not draw attention to themselves.

Now looking out at you, I don’t see light bulbs, but heads. But here too, you could say, Well, it’s a couple hundred heads, each doing their own thing. Or you could say No, here are a couple hundred heads all tuned into the words they’re hearing, hoping those words from this preacher in front might do for them what the light bulbs above are doing: giving them light they can use. And the preacher’s job is to serve the greater glory of light and enlightenment, not call attention to him- or herself. Here are two or three hundred people seeking light, opening themselves to its possibility. If you put it that way, we’re all involved in something much bigger. Then it isn’t about me or what I believe or say. It’s about whether and to what extent you can participate in the shedding of light, and can find some to catch in your imagination and take home with you, to tend to, to nurture, to ponder, to see what might be brought into your own life to make you grow in size.

Too often, religions don’t understand what they are supposed to be doing. They stay small rather than trying to become big. They think it’s about the light bulbs.

I experienced this in a ceremony at City Hall downtown a few months ago, and know some of you were there, too. Your reactions to it may have been different from mine. But to me, it was a very weird and disappointing ceremony. They brought together representatives of many different religious traditions, to offer our several blessings to the city and the City Council in their new building. I think they were asking for light, and bringing the individual lights in to offer it – maybe wondering if we had any light to offer.

But what happened was very disappointing to me. A Christian woman stood and read a confessional statement from her faith. Then, while she was speaking, a Buddhist began reciting something in another language. Then a Jewish cantor sang, very loudly, something in Hebrew. Then another and another and another. Here, a woman who defined herself as a wiccan came in costume and went through dramatic gestures with her arms. There, another, also in costume, chanting a chant no one else could understand. I wanted to shout that this isn’t about you! We’re not here to look at you! We’re here to see if you have anything to offer to people outside your club besides a chance to see you perform.

The idea was to be that here we have this wide variety of religions in Austin. But then all of them took this moment to shine their light not on the city, not on the City Council, not on those in attendance, but merely on themselves. It was as though they were all, one after another, shouting, “Now look at me! Now look at me!” They acted as though religions really are merely little clubs where club members dress and talk in idiosyncratic ways that those outside the club can’t understand, rather than little lights whose sacred mission is to help light both our individual and communal paths. It felt like a pep rally for a bunch of teams I wasn’t interested in rooting for because they were too self-absorbed.

You can’t light a path for others if each person shines their flashlight only on themselves. It gives religion a bad name, and makes us smaller.

Yes, they probably each have some light for the members of their club, expressed in ways that only those in their club can really understand, judging from the City Hall ceremony. But as the Buddhists have taught us, each religion is like a finger pointing at the moon, at the Light. And once you realize that, you realize that there isn’t anything special about any religion except its ability to point to a light that shines not just on its own club members, but on everyone. And that’s rare. How many times have you heard a church define itself and its religion that way?

(After this service, a couple people asked me, understandably, what I had said at the City Hall occasion. I’ve attached those remarks at the end of this sermon.)

We’re going to have an exercise in trying to offer something to the world outside our walls right after the sermon, when we take our offering. The entire offering this morning will be given to help people hit by Hurricane Katrina. Half of the collection will go to a UUA fund set up to help the thirteen UU churches damaged or destroyed, and some of their members who are now without a home. The other half will go into a restricted fund that we will use to help some of the families that have been relocated to Austin. At last count, we had over 4,000 survivors of Hurricane Katrina in Austin, and they will be here for several or many months. It’s the kind of challenge that asks whether we are here to shine our light only on ourselves, or to help enlighten the world beyond our walls.

You know we could sit here and pray for them and hold them in our hearts, and it wouldn’t help them one bit. Helping them takes money for food, rent, clothes and all the rest. The same is true of helping and supporting a church.

Our society has seldom needed strong liberal institutions as it needs them now, and the work of any good church can not be done on loose change and one-dollar bills, or even five-dollar bills.

I want to read you that paragraph on size that we began with. This is what religion is about here, what we are after, what we are trying to do with ourselves and with you. It’s a remarkable statement, let’s listen to it again:

“By size I mean the stature of one’s soul, the range and depth of one’s love, one’s capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature. To me, this is the fundamental category, this is the essential principle.”

How many churches have you ever attended that would describe what is sacred to them in a way this broad, this inclusive, with this kind of spiritual size? How rare are institutions like this? How important is it to support them, to consecrate some of your time and money to them?

This is the kind of size that makes us useful rather than merely decorative. And both we and our nation need this greater and more humane kind of size more than they have needed them in decades.

You can think of this as just a church, and you can think of supporting it as just paying money or putting in time. But you’d be wrong. We’re doing something here of much greater size. We are building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of life, love, truth, hope, God, and all the gods worthy of the name.

I invite you to become a part of it: a full, participating, supporting part.

—————–

Following are the remarks I made at that City Council affair mentioned in the sermon. While I had not heard of Bernard Loomer’s notion of “size” then, and hadn’t articulated my beliefs the way I did for this sermon, these beliefs – that we are here to share light with others rather than calling attention to ourselves – run so deep they color and shape most of what I try to do.

– Davidson

To our City Council:

Blessings, and a Challenge from Austin Area Clergy

January 2005

Rev. Davidson Loehr,

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

www.AustinUU.org

512-452-6168

davidson@AustinUU.org

When we all speak at once in our different languages, the messages of religions aren’t much more than cacophony: just noise. But beneath the noise, all the world’s great religions are in profound agreement about how we should treat one another, and who needs the greatest care and protection. And we hope and believe that the areas in which we speak with one voice can offer both blessing and challenge for you, and for all of us.

We have been invited to offer blessings to the City Council in your lovely new building, and we are pleased to do so. The blessings come in the currency of religion rather than politics, and it is a currency both rich and challenging.

So often, politics is the art of compromise between the different values, or currencies, by which people are to be measured and rewarded.

But religion and politics don’t always deal in the same currency, as you know. And many people would have you give power to currencies that disempower the majority of our worshipers and your citizens. There, our blessings are accompanied by the challenge to honor only the most humane, compassionate and just of values.

Citizens with more money want money to buy not only goods but also favorable laws and rulings, which favor them at the expense of those without money or power. And there, all the religions of the world rise as one to protest. For it is always the weak, poor and powerless who are the chief concern of religions being true to their best teachings. “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me” was a saying from Jesus, but fits as well with the teachings of Muhammad, the Buddha, the great Hindu teachers, Taoism, Sikhism, Judaism, humanism and so many others.

Employers may want the rights of employers to trump those of workers, in the interest of greater profits. Yet here too, we would ask you with one voice to serve the higher calling that honors the weak rather than the strong, and to defend them.

There is a dangerous mood in our nation now that sanctions the suppression of individual rights and individual voices, and counsels an unquestioning obedience to those who have gained power. Here too, the religions of the world speak as one to remind you that when push comes to shove, we must not push our sometimes cantankerous freedoms out of reach, or shove higher values aside for political agendas designed to serve much lower aims.

You requested blessings, not a sermon. But we would remind you of the higher ideals honored by all religions in defense of a currency that defines us by our simple and fragile common humanity. We hope to join you in protecting and serving those better angels of our nature here in our beloved city of Austin.

And so – blessings to you for this noble and challenging endeavor, in the name of all that is most sacred, through all the names by which it is called forth!

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Davidson Loehr

4 September 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This service followed the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, in which thousands are feared dead. At the same time, gasoline prices in Austin rose above $3.00 a gallon.

PRAYER:

We gather in this safe little room, in a world with so much death. It overwhelms us, all the death.

In the foreground are the thousands of deaths from the hurricane in New Orleans, and the survivors who are beginning to arrive in Austin for an indefinite stay. We read that the levees failed partly because over 40% of the funds requested for them were diverted to the war in Iraq.

The ironies abound. An illegal invasion of Iraq to liberate them from their oil, while a hurricane wipes out 20-25% of our own capacity for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has offered to send inexpensive oil to help with our oil shortage, shortly after one of America’s official Christian ministers urged our government to murder him – and the State Department is balking at accepting Chavez’s offer, for fear they may lose face.

So the games continue: the games of politics, one-up-manship, command and control, the illegal war. And the games and political intrigue can almost blind us to all the death.

But we are not blind, and our hearts hurt when we try to wrap them around so many dead brothers and sisters, in Louisiana or Iraq, so many crying, angry and grieving families, in New Orleans or Baghdad. At the moment of grief, the cause of death pales beside the awful reality of death, and of lives of survivors changing in unknown ways as they struggle on. And as we struggle on. My mind called on the words of an earlier preacher, John Donne:

No man is an island, entire of itself;

It tolls for thee.

We are surrounded by death this morning, near and far, from causes we can not easily control. This morning, we do not need to solve these problems. We only need to be aware of them, to feel them, to let our hearts and minds reach out to feel that we are all connected, and the loss of so many of our connections diminishes our own souls, our dearest world. We need each other.

Let us be gentle with one another as we begin to grieve our way through the death, all the death. Amen.

SERMON: WWJD?

You’ve never paid so much for gasoline in your whole life, and the prices promise to keep rising, as we’ve lost 20-25% of our ability to produce oil because of the hurricane damage in New Orleans and at its many offshore drilling rigs – and now Saudi Arabia is admitting that it can’t increase its oil production. So some of the rants of people claiming that the world is running out of enough oil no longer seem like rants.

We’ve suffered the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, with a death toll in the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands before it is through. And one factor in the levees that failed in New Orleans was the fact that tens of millions of dollars had been diverted to fund the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the war we now know to be based on contrived lies manufactured to serve the imperialistic agenda of the neo-conservatives who have taken over America.

The religious and political right are wrong about almost everything they say: on religion, the economy, sanctioning torture, killing over 100,000 of our brothers and sisters in Iraq – everything. And the religious and political left seem either too blind or too gutless to say or do anything that matters, as they have endorsed the war, the transfer of America’s wealth to the greediest of our individuals and corporations. Right now, it seems the platform of the Democratic party can only be “Wouldn’t you rather be robbed by Democrats?” And I’m not sure people would.

Asking what Jesus would do seems ridiculous and redundant!

Instead, I’m reminded of words from the great American philosopher Lily Tomlin, when she said “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up!”

Many Christians, including all the Christian ministers in town that I know – several of whom have preached here during our January Round Robin – are troubled and embarrassed by the way their religion has been hijacked, both by politicians and preachers.

And the voices from the religious right are never asking WWJD. They are so busy telling you who God hates or wants dead, that you realize this god of theirs really is a god of hate rather than love. And the reason they can’t ask WWJD is because you just can’t turn Jesus into a bigot, or a prophet of hate, or an ally of the rich against the poor.

In fact, when you hear people today asking WWJD, or putting WWJD bumper stickers on their cars, it’s almost always to criticize the direction in which our country is being led: “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” “Who Would Jesus Hate?” They’re rhetorical questions. Jesus wouldn’t bomb anybody. And the people he would be most likely to hate today are the Christians who have created such an ignorant, bigoted and hateful religion in his name.

Ironically, they are a persuasive argument for Unintelligent Design. For no intelligent designer would have designed people so willfully ignorant of science, sexuality or simple human decency. And no Christian deity would have permitted the most vocal Christians of today to drag Christianity into such foul gutters, in the name of Jesus.

This subject of Jesus is a little more poignant for me today because my friend Robert Funk, the biblical scholar and founder of the Jesus Seminar 20 years ago, is at home under hospice care this weekend, dying. (I learned Sunday night that Bob had died around 1 a.m. Sunday.) I’ve been a Fellow in the Seminar since 1991, have given a keynote address to the group at Bob’s request, and taught an adult Jesus Seminar program nearly twenty times in seven or eight states.

The Jesus Seminar is the only real group of scholars I know of that has cared to ask what Jesus really said or did, and what he might say about how we are living in America today.

Most in the religious and political left don’t seem to know enough about Jesus to ask what he said or would do. And those in the religious right don’t dare ask, because they know they and their ministers aren’t serving the teachings of Jesus at all, and he would hate what they’ve done in his name. So they just talk about their God, and who he would bomb, hate or want killed.

But Jesus was not a Christian, and he didn’t quote the Bible. He didn’t even think it was particularly authoritative. Jesus was a liberal Jew. He has become the most famous religious liberal of the first century.

But even though conservatives are people who worship dead liberals, you don’t hear them asking WWJD because Jesus was a liberal, and Jesus would hate the religion they’ve constructed around his name but not around his teachings.

The religion of Jesus has always been the enemy of the religions about Jesus: the supernatural religion of the baby and the cross; the religion of the gagged and crucified savior who is not allowed to speak. But when he was alive, Jesus the liberal Jew did speak. Here are some of the things he said:

Start with the list of beatitudes we read together earlier (Reading 640). These read like a translation by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar:

Blessed are you poor. The realm of God is yours.

Blessed are you who hunger today. You shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep today. You shall laugh.

Blessed are the humble. They will inherit the earth.

Blessed are the merciful. They will find mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be ranked as children of God.

Think of the direction America has been taking for the past quarter century. Think of our illegal invasion of Iraq, where we have killed over 100,000 people who look a lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. Think of the fact that we have a higher percentage of our citizens without health care than any other developed nation besides Africa. Or that about 18,000 Americans die each year because of inadequate health care, or of a dozen other things from the news of the past years, and ask whose side you think Jesus would be on.

Jesus said a tree is known by its fruits. What kind of a tree do you think he would say America has become?

He said “What good does it do if you love those who love you? Even the worst of people do that. No, you should love even your enemies.” Is this Jesus on the side of the religious right, or the religious and secular left?

He told a rich lawyer to sell all he had and give it to the poor. What do you think Jesus would say about the economic priorities of the Christian right, when men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson preach that there should be no taxation of the rich, no welfare, no social security, no medicare, and no public education? And that’s not even counting Falwell’s proclamation that we should “hunt down terrorists and blow them away in the name of the Lord,” or Robertson’s that we should send assassins into Venezuala to murder their president Hugo Chavez because Chavez, unlike American preachers or politicians, has had the courage to stand up the bullying imperialism of the US.

And when a group of self-righteous people asked him how the quality of their faith was to be judged, he said it would be judged by what they had done to “the least of these” among the people around them.

We live in a time when official Christianity has become the mortal enemy of everything Jesus held to be sacred. We live in a time, and in a state, where the governor can go to the Cavalry Christian Academy in Ft. Worth to sign a bill prohibiting the marriage of homosexuals who love each other: a time when he and the leaders of that Christian academy can wrap these bigoted and hateful actions in the mantle of popular politics and religion. It is a time when those who make their living by pandering to the worst among us have hijacked the name of the man Jesus who lived and died serving the least among us.

Unlike the Christian moralists of today, Jesus ate and drank, was called a glutton and a drunkard. He associated with prostitutes and tax collectors – whom those who wrote the gospels seemed to feel belonged lumped together. He constantly disagreed with the priests of his time, as he would disagree with the priests of all times.

For these are the things that prophets do, and Jesus was a prophet. The religion of the prophets is as far above the religion of the priests as the religion of Jesus is above the religion about him.

No, he wasn’t in our camp either. He was not a feminist, though some liberals have tried to make him into one. He would have given women fewer rights to divorce than they already had, and would certainly have considered abortion to be murder. And even though feminists often make much of the fact that Martha and Mary – or at least Mary – were his students, they sat at his feet, not up with him as his male followers did. Jesus would not vote a Democratic ticket today – or a Republican ticket. He was a prophet, and they are a scary bunch.

What’s that mean? A prophet is someone trying to speak to the issues of their times from what you could call a God’s-eye view.

What’s that mean? It means from the highest moral and ethical perspective we know how to see and say, nothing less. It means speaking on behalf of ultimate values, to confront those who would enslave us in the name of greedy, bigoted, imperialistic or hateful values.

As the scholars of the Jesus Seminar and many Jewish scholars have said, Jesus belongs in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. He sounds like them. He feels like them. Centuries earlier, the Hebrew prophet Amos, a shepherd, came into town to rail at the politicians for selling the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes, and to rail against the priests for sanctioning it. Sound political? Prophets are political.

Jesus was political. He turned over the tables of the money-changers in the big temple in Jerusalem. These were the people converting the foreign currencies of those who came from out of the area, so they could buy animals for the sacrifices done in the temple. The temple made a lot of money from the poor in this way, and the priests profited, as did the politicians. That isn’t what God is about, Jesus said. It isn’t what God wants. Jesus was attacking the habits of exalting profits over people, and the superstitious religion used to keep people frightened and obedient.

In the first century Jerusalem, Jesus was the most famous liberal alive. Today’s religious conservatives, and the political conservatives they serve, are not being true to either the letter or the spirit of the teachings of Jesus. Not by a mile.

Now if you have a feel for the kind of message the man Jesus spent his short ministry preaching and teaching, where do you find that voice, and those allegiances, today?

United States of Shame

by Maureen Dowd

Published: September 3, 2005

1. “When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

“When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans – most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line [Friday] while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first – they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.”

(Maureen Dowd, “United States of Shame,” NY Times September 3, 2005.)

2. “I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it’s in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich.”

— Congressman Charles B. Rangel – 09/02/05

3. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed–those who are cold and not clothed.”

(President Dwight W. Eisenhower)

4. And speaking of the tragedy in New Orleans, another voice said, “…it is the POOR, the MOST VULNERABLE, who are the first to suffer. The wealthy built their homes on higher ground, had better information, more insurance, and more avenues of escape. So whether it is in facing the rising waters in Bangladesh or Malaysia or Lousiana and Missippi, it’s going to be “the least among us” who will suffer most immediately.

– Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Magazine.

Most of these voices are liberal; that’s the state of social criticism today. But not all of them are. Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of World War II, a five-star general, and a two-term Republican president. It isn’t about liberal or conservative. It’s about decent or indecent, moral or immoral, honest or dishonest, compassionate or brutal.

And it really isn’t about Jesus, either. It is about wisdom, about being most fully humane and most fully human. And every religious prophet and sage worthy of the name has been trying to teach us how to do this since human history began.

You can find that quality of wisdom in many of those who came before Jesus: like Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the Buddha.

Lao Tzu wrote about the Tao, the Way:

When the Way is forgotten, duty and justice appear;

Then knowledge and wisdom are born, along with hypocrisy.

When a nation falls to chaos, then loyalty and patriotism are born.

Weapons of war are instruments of fear, and are abhorred by those who follow the Tao. The leader who follows the natural way does not abide them.

To rejoice in victory is to delight in killing; to delight in killing is to have no decent self.

Confucius had many sayings, including the saying that “To see what is right, and not to do it, is a lack of courage or of principle.” This is like Martin Luther King Jr.’s saying that we begin to die on the day when we fail to do what is right.

And the Buddha told a story about violence and war that is as good as any ever told.

One day a bandit came up to the Buddha, waving his sword. “I am the most powerful warrior in all the world,” he announced, “and I am going to prove it by killing you.”

“Ah well,” said the Buddha, “if you are so powerful, then you can grant me two final wishes.”

“Be quick about it,” snarled the bandit. “I’ve got places to go and people to kill!”

The Buddha pointed to a small sapling tree nearby, and said, “Cut off the smallest branch on that tree.”

“Hah!” yelled the bandit, and with one quick swipe of his sword it was done. “And what is your final wish, you old fool?”

The Buddha picked up the small branch, handed it to the bandit, and said, “Now put it back.”

It is said that the bandit achieved enlightenment then and there.

It isn’t just about what Jesus would do. It’s about what we should do. And we should try to follow the wisest and most morally demanding teachings we can find. They are our best hope for becoming most fully human, even though they demand a lot of us.

There is no evidence that Jesus ever heard of Lao Tzu, Confucius or the Buddha, who all lived about five hundred years earlier. But if he heard teachings and stories like these, I know what Jesus would do. He would say, “I’m with those guys!”

Then he would look at us – at you and at me – and he would say, “And you – who are you with?”