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© Davidson Loehr 2005

13 February 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

In many ways, we know so little. Yet we guide our lives, and our actions toward others, based on the little that we know. And sometimes we do harm, because we hadn’t understood, because we hadn’t cared, because we didn’t know the right little things.

Let us try to take an honest inventory of the little things we know, and test them with both head and heart:

When we judge and condemn others, have we understood that they, no less than we, are children of God?

If we are alienated by those who love differently than we do, have we remembered that it is often a gift to the world when we can love at all?

When we see that another’s values would not feed our souls, can we also see that means that our values might not feed theirs?

If the god of understanding were watching the way we treat those with whom we disagree, would that god say that we have really understood them?

If the goddess of love were watching, would she say that we had added to the amount of love in the world, or detracted from it?

And if all the people we most admire, those with the clearest understanding or biggest hearts – if they were watching us, would we feel ashamed, or proud?

We know so little, yet must guide our lives by the little we know. We seek ways of being and living that can make us better people, partners, parents and citizens.

Let us pray that our actions may make us agents of a deeper understanding and a broader love. For the world needs those gifts, far more than it needs our little certainties.

When we can’t respect others enough, when we can’t love them enough to bless their best intentions, let us pray for the character to treat them as we might if only we could understand them better or love them more.

We offer this prayer with honest minds, open hearts, and a grateful reverence for this amazing gift of life.

Amen.

Sermon

This starts and ends with stories.

One day the devil and one of his little helpers were sitting on a cloud looking down at the humans below, when they saw a man walking down a road who stopped, picked up something from the road, put it in his pocket and walked on.

“What did he find?” asked the devil’s helper. “A piece of the truth,” chuckled the devil.

“A piece of the truth? Don’t you want to stop him?”

“Stop him? Oh no,” said the devil. “It’s only a tiny piece of truth. Before long, he’ll turn it into an orthodoxy. And then he’ll be doing my work!”

There are ways in which that story sums up the history of almost all religions. It’s like the ancient Hindu story of the blind people and the elephant, but with a vengeance. In the Hindu story, different blind people came upon different parts of an elephant. The one who had grabbed the ear said “Why, an elephant is like a big leathery leaf!” The one who had hold of the trunk said “You fool! It’s nothing at all like a leaf. It’s like a long, thick snake!” The one who had bumped into a leg said “You’re both crazy! I have a firm hold on this elephant, and it is like a strong, rough, tree trunk!” And from behind, the one who had grabbed the tail called out “You’re all idiots. Either you’ve never experienced an elephant at all, or you’re lying. It is not a large thing at all; it is like a small, stiff rope!” And so on.

Both of these stories are immediately recognizable because they’re both about the human condition and human nature, and that hasn’t hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

One of the original sins of our species is that we will never have more than a few pieces of the truth, but we always want to pretend that we have the whole truth. It gets us into most of our problems with each other, doesn’t it?

I spent several years studying theology back in graduate school. At its best, theology is the study of those deep and abiding truths that can set us free. But mostly, it is the study of how each religious thinker managed to find one tiny piece of truth, then turn it into an idol that became the enemy of honest religion, and too often the enemy of both truth and humanity.

So the question of religious toleration is a tricky one, because there is a lot that should not be tolerated, and part of the art is learning which is which. When I went on the Internet and Googled “religious toleration,” I was drawn to two fairly dramatic sites. The first was the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia. They pointed out that we only tolerate things we think are wrong but don’t want to speak out against. So we tolerate evil. No one will say: “We must show toleration towards courage or love”, for these are both traits that we don’t tolerate, but encourage.

Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church is against “freedom of belief”, which asserts the right of each person to believe what he pleases. And they quote Pope Leo XIII’s writing on this, from 1885, where he wrote: “The gravest obligation requires the acceptance and practice, not of the religion which one may choose, but of that which God prescribes and which is known by certain and indubitable marks to be the only true one.” “In the domain of science and of faith alike,” the Encyclopedia article continues, “truth is the standard, the aim, and the guide of all investigation; but love of truth and truthfulness forbid every honorable investigator to [tolerate] error or falsehood.”

In other words, for the Catholic Encyclopedia, freedom of belief is only freedom to choose the truth, and the only religious truth is, coincidentally, owned by the Catholic Church. Well, there’s that guy picking up the tiny piece of truth, and the devil watching with delight.

Then I also came on a website called biblebelievers.org. The headline read,

“The Cult of Liberty is the Recipe of Moral Breakdown”. Beneath the headline, they said the only thing conservatives can hope for is a moral reawakening of the United States.

They were encouraged by the fact that the conservatives in power are going to “dismantle the welfare state.”

“Bravo,” they wrote. Then they asked, “But what about dismantling abortion? Gay rights? Birth control pills and devices? Sex education? Dirty movies and TV? Women’s liberation? Secular humanism in the schools? These are the true plagues of American society,” they wrote, “not high taxes or welfare, and these diseases are the effect of the general breakdown of the morals of the people. And the problem is that these infections cannot be eradicated legally and logically except by some ‘principle, a principle which restricts human freedom only to those objects which are good’.” (http://www.biblebelievers.org/)

Both these websites are variations on the stories of people grabbing tiny pieces of truth, and the myth of the blind people and the elephant. And they show why the United States of America has had freedom of belief for nearly all of its history. Each of these religious groups has picked up a tiny piece of truth, smothered it in a ton of arrogance, and each has confused truth with their own small biases.

The Catholics would be embarrassed by the hateful bigotries of biblebelievers.org, even though they share many of them. And when biblebelievers.org speaks of goodness or truth, they do not mean the kind the Catholic Church has. Back when we had British colonies here, before the Revolutionary War that gave us the right to make our own laws, almost all the colonies were examples of what can happen when these tiny pieces of truth are given the power of law.

For example, the colony of Maryland published something called An Act Concerning Religion, on 21 April 1649. In that act, they said that anyone who denied that Jesus Christ was the son of God, or denied the trinity, or said anything bad about them, was to be put to death, and their properties would all be seized by the colony.

That’s what it means to say that when people find a tiny piece of truth and turn it into an orthodoxy, they are doing the devil’s work. In fact, I would say that orthodoxies are the devil’s work, because they are always that guy picking up the tiny piece of truth wrapped in reams of arrogance, then turning it all into dogma.

The truth that can set you free

Still, I’m with the biblebelievers.org and the Catholic Church when they say that we should encourage truth but not tolerate untruths masquerading as truth. And I’m with them when they say that liberals have far too often been willing to bless anything, including things that shouldn’t be blessed. Sometimes we liberals have had such open minds that some of our brains have fallen out.

But what is this truth business – especially something like the kind of truth that can set you free?

The short answer is that that’s what all great religious teachings have always been about. The best religious and philosophical thinkers have tried to help us understand what this greater truth is like, the kind that can set you free, the only kind that should really be encouraged. But few read them.

Aristotle, as the Catholic Encyclopedia noted, taught that wisdom consisted in choosing the middle road between extremes, because extremes can be either too permissive or too narrow and brutal. The best religious teachers and prophets have always known this.

In the Qu’ran of the religion of Islam, there were no obligatory doctrines about God: indeed, the Koran is highly suspicious of theological speculation, dismissing it as self-indulgent guesswork about things that nobody can possibly know or prove. (Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p. 143) The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition says there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinitude. Thus the Koran repeatedly points out that it is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims must emphasize their kinship with the older religions. (Armstrong, p.152)

And behind Christianity was the figure of the man Jesus, who would have hated Christianity. Jesus said don’t judge. He said to treat others the way you’d want to be treated. He even said to let the wheat and the weeds grow together – which sounds far more permissive than even the cult of liberty.

The Buddha taught that when we have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the compassionate thing, we should always choose the compassionate thing. Why? Because what we think of as the right thing will almost always happen to coincide with our own biases, the little bits of truth we picked up.

Taoism has an even more subtle kind of teaching. They say everything is always in movement, either coming to be or passing away, either moving from weakness to strength or from strength to weakness. So certainty is a very weak place to be, because your next move has to be down.

And Jews have such a way of taking some lesson that sounds rigid, then soaking it in such human warmth and wit that it melts into understanding and compassion.

One of their many stories about this concerned a small village, which prided itself on enforcing the strictest kind of obedience to the Law – like that 1649 Act of Religion by the Maryland colony. The village was losing so many people it was on the verge of collapse. They couldn’t understand how they could be dying when they were so right.

So one of their elders traveled to a large town nearby, to see a rabbi who was known far and wide for his wisdom. He told the rabbi their strange plight: that they were dead right but nearly dead as a village. The rabbi nodded, and said “Your sin is the sin of ignorance. You see, the Messiah is among you, and you are ignorant of this fact.” The man returned home, hardly willing to believe this. He knew everyone in the village – after all, there were fewer and fewer of them every day – and there wasn’t anybody there who could possibly be pure enough to be the Messiah. When he told the other villagers, they didn’t believe it either.

Still, the old rabbi was famous for his wisdom, and nobody wanted to say he was a fool. So they began wondering if maybe he could be right – if old Goldberg over there could possible be the Messiah, or Mrs. Robbins. Impossible! Still, just in case, they began treating everyone as though they might be the Messiah, which means they began treating them a lot better than they had been.

You can see the end of the story coming: the village flourished, because they had let go of their tiny little truthlet and found the more difficult and more full truth, and it had set them free of their certainty, and free of their smallness.

The truth worth serving, the truth that can set us free, must first set us free from our own narrowest certainties, those certainties that would shrink the world to the size of our biases and habits. That’s the irony of places like biblebelievers.org or those passages in the Catholic Encyclopedia: while willing to fight or even kill for the truth, they don’t realize that they are among its greatest enemies – and that they make the devil laugh with glee at his newest disciples.

I don’t think any church or any religion can be trusted to know the truth when they see it, because that story of the man who picked up a tiny piece of truth and made an orthodoxy out of it – that seems to be a story of human nature.

That’s why the insights of the founding thinkers of great religions are almost always the enemies of the religions founded on them. The religion about Jesus has almost nothing in common with the religion of Jesus. Of all the people who might hate Islamic fundamentalism, none would hate it more than Mohammad. The Buddha would be at least saddened to see the rank superstition that 98% of Buddhists mistake for Buddhism, and on down the line.

You don’t let Budweiser choose the drinks, or all you’ll have is beer. You don’t let Christians define truth or no one else is safe. And when the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It simply takes more and better tools to serve either truth or life.

Yet behind it all, there is still this thing called truth that is still worth pursuing, and can still set us free. But today, it seems that it must first set us free from the religions that identify truth with their beliefs, from the nationalisms that identify it with their borders, and with every other example of people doing the devil’s work by beating others to death with their tiny little truthlets. Their name is legion.

One part of the truth is that none of us will ever have it all. We are all that person who picked up a tiny piece of truth. You could say both the gods and the devils are watching to see what we’ll do with it, whether we will use it to serve the demons of our lower nature or the angels of our better nature.

So another way of looking at which kinds of truth we should encourage, which kinds we should tolerate, and which kinds we should actively oppose is by asking whether the ideals we are following make us a curse or a blessing, whether our presence here has increased or decreased the amount of understanding and compassion in the world.

There is a wonderful story about this, which comes from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Unitarians want to claim him, though he didn’t think much of them, and once called them “corpse-cold.” But I don’t care what club he belonged to; I only care whether the tiny bit of truth he picked up seems worthy of the best we can be. Here is the story he wrote:

“The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travelers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you?” — “Look at our pictures, and books, they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.” Then came in the men, and they said, “What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want gifts?” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?'” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

Here is someone who worshiped something very different from the biblebelievers.org or those who wrote the Catholic Encyclopedia. The wise old rabbi would have smiled, though the devil would not. We become what we worship. If all we will ever have are tiny pieces of the truth, let us choose very carefully what we make of them.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

6 February 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 gather up our souls.

1. From personal interactions, let us gather up our souls:

— from relationships where we have accepted duplicity rather than integrity, let us gather them.

— from those places where we have promised to be true, but have not delivered on our promise, let us reclaim our integrity.

2. From our roles at work and in business dealing, let us gather up our souls:

— from those days when we return home grateful that we can have higher standards in our personal lives than we do at work, let us reclaim what must be ours.

— rather than playing mute and compliant roles in businesses we know to be cutting ethical corners, let us speak up, however we can, to wonder whether we can’t all do our work with more integrity, so we don’t all have to check our souls at the door.

3. And from our nation’s actions at home and abroad, let us gather up our souls, rendering to Caesar only what is Caesar’s, and keeping for our own souls what is most holy and inviolate.

— When we find high words being used to achieve low ends, let us look into our hearts and find a way to speak out.

In all that we are and do, we need to come from a place of integrity and authenticity that is only available to people who have taken care to own their own souls. It is that center from which we need to live, and which we seek.

So let us gather up our souls from all the places where they have become misplaced or dissipated, like strangers to us. Let us gather up our souls.

Amen.

SERMON: God

Let’s start simplistically, almost at cartoon level: The body politic doesn’t have elbows or kneecaps. And Lady Justice doesn’t have breasts, even though our former U.S. Attorney General spent several thousand dollars to cover them. Cupid is a myth, too. There isn’t any little baby flying around shooting people with arrows making them fall in love, even though falling in love sometimes feels almost that capricious.

You can learn a lot about the kind of creatures we are by the way we put together our myths and stories. We make everything seem human, even when it isn’t. We do it because we relate to it better if we think of it as human-like.

Look at our cartoons. We have all these cartoons with mice, cats, dogs, and an occasional goblin, and they all seem to think and talk just like we do. So they aren’t mice, cats, dogs or goblins at all.

They are projections of parts of ourselves, playing out plots familiar to us. We project those life situations out like movie projectors project images on screens in front of us. Then we study them as though they came from somewhere other than us, and we can be caught sending e-mails to people quoting a line from a cartoon character that seemed really wise. Isn’t this funny?

It’s not that we think all cartoons are wise. Most are just funny or goofy. Only a few seem wise, and we know the difference. When we cut out a cartoon and put it on our wall or refrigerator, most people can figure out why we would put it up. They see what it’s about. We are the ones who judge whether it’s useful or not. Cartoons that aren’t useful we finally just stop reading.

But most of our projections are useful. They let us back off to get a better perspective on ourselves. We do it in movies, too. And music. If you want to hear what’s on the minds of people between about 15 and 40, listen to the lyrics of popular music.

I don’t know why we do it this way. I’m reminded of a famous definition of religion by a sociologist of religion about thirty years ago, when he said religion is “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant.” (Peter Berger) It’s audacious, but it’s just what we do in our religions, isn’t it? No matter how they do it, all our religions manage to propose some scheme for reality, and find us a special place in it.

Hindus say we are parts of the infinite and eternal powers of creation, maintenance and destruction. They made that up, but it’s a good story.

Buddhists say no, we’re not, but we can rise above the whole indifferent mess of the world and find a perspective that transcends even the gods. Taoism has its story about the coming and going of everything, the eternal flux where everything is either coming to be or passing away, and they say we can find a kind of comfort in imagining ourselves as parts of that story.

When we make stories for fun, we might call them cartoons and expect people to laugh. But when we’re really serious, when we think the stories we have made are really about the way things are, then we don’t create cartoon characters. We create gods. Those are our most serious stories, the trump suit of stories. That’s where we project our grandest ideas. Sometimes, our worst sides get projected onto our gods as well – like the times we have our gods sanction smallness, violence or hatred.

We seem to be walking projectors, casting on the wall both our insights and our shadows.

Plato once said life for most of us is like people sitting in a cave watching the shadows cast on the wall ahead of them by people and animals walking by outside. Something about that seems right, doesn’t it?

Still, we confuse ourselves with all these projections, because we can’t seem to remember that all our stories, all our religions, all our gods, came from the imaginations of some of our ancestors. Then the gods get passed down to us without that story about how they really began.

But think of Lady Justice. Well, no; let’s take a closer example. Think of Lady Liberty. You can see her standing on top of the capital building in downtown Austin. And she looks like a large woman. But we know we couldn’t take Lady Liberty out for some coffee – free-trade coffee, of course – and ask her what this “liberty” business is about. She doesn’t exist except as a projection and personification of our own dreams of justice, and our certainty that justice, at its best, is one of the ideals that all decent people must try to serve. Sometimes we need to gain independence from our projections, to gather up the ideas and ideals they are supposed to serve, and reclaim them.

I was rereading Karen Armstrong’s classic book called A History of God this week, and had forgotten how candid she is in talking about this. For those of you who don’t know who Karen Armstrong is, she is an English woman who used to be a nun, then left the order and became a religion scholar. She has said that she still lives within the discipline, but now her discipline is spending eight to twelve hours a day in London’s libraries, doing her research. She has written books on God, the Buddha, and Mohammad, among others I want to read you a few paragraphs from this book she wrote in 1993 which has become a kind of classic in religious studies. She begins by talking about growing away from the Church:

“Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so…. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown. (xviii-xix)

“Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines…. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years. (xix)

It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality “out there”…. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that “he” was the most important reality in the world. (xx)

Karen is really telling the whole story here, but it sounds like I’m revealing secrets, telling you that the best religion scholars are quite candid about saying that of course God doesn’t exist, or course it’s a projection the way we project other stories. But they also want to say that “he” is the most important thing in our world.

The reason that “he” is in quotation marks is because what is so important isn’t God, but the high ideals we have projected onto him for safekeeping.

And what it means when someone like a Karen Armstrong grows away from God as one of the “childish things” she has put away, is that she doesn’t think the symbol God or the stories our ancestors created about him do justice to our high ideals, and she can honor them better without the projected pictures and stories of God flickering on the screen.

I want to talk with you about God, but the two most important things you need to know about God, about all the gods, are that, first, they were invented many centuries ago as vehicles to carry and guard our highest ideals. That’s why scholars say it’s the most important reality in the world. But the second thing you need to know is that the reality is not God, not any of the gods; the reality is the importance of our highest ideals.

And they don’t have to have the symbol of gods to carry them, as Karen Armstrong found, and as I suspect many of you have also found.

In the Golden Age of Greece – those centuries that produced their great playwrights, that produced poets and philosophers like Pindar, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – they did what Karen Armstrong has done. They reclaimed their highest ideals from the myths of the Olympian gods. Neither Socrates, Plato nor Aristotle cared much about the gods, and Plato tried to write myths that would replace the Homeric myths of Zeus, Apollo and the rest of them. Plato and others believed the stories about the gods had become like cartoons. People weren’t served by worshiping them any more, and needed to reclaim the treasures the gods had been created to guard. The priests controlled the stories about the gods, and used those stories to empower themselves more than the people.

But they were not about to give up their highest ideals. Instead, they rescued them from the gods, and made them the sacred center of society during Greece’s golden age. They called them the paideia – the word just means the highest ideals of the culture. They said they were the most sacred property of their society, and that all people had a sacred duty to live, teach, and honor these high ideals, just as former ages had honored them indirectly in the form of the gods the more ancient Greeks had imagined and projected.

And the biblical prophets made the same kind of move that the Greeks were making about the same time. They began attacking the low meanings the priests were loading onto this concept of God. They rejected the distant God who demanded only sacrifice and obedience, and insisted that the test of authenticity was that religious experience be integrated successfully with daily life. (Armstrong, p. 44) They were gathering up their souls.

The prophet Amos said that the people had misunderstood the nature of their covenant with this God. The priests were saying it made them the special people, the chosen people. Amos said No, being associated with this God meant responsibility, not privilege. (Armstrong, p. 46)

What Amos was doing was what all the prophets were doing, including Jesus. They were reclaiming the high ideals as things which must be written in our hearts and lived out in our lives, not hidden in a temple to be bowed down to as we listened to bad priests misrepresenting them.

I want you to understand what this means. It means that they all saw – even if they didn’t put it this way – that God is a part of us. God is the vehicle our ancestors imagined, on which they projected our highest ideals. And the gods are only useful as long as the represent the highest ideals. When they are kidnapped for low and mean purposes, we need to reclaim our ideals from them.

Still, there’s something audacious about thinking we have the right or the authority to reclaim our highest ideals. We project them out onto Lady Justice or Lady Liberty, onto idealistic visions of America, onto God, and then it feels that they are out of our hands, entirely above us, things we could never aspire to reclaim.

Yesterday I read a story of just this sort of thing happening that is worth sharing with you. Last night in California there was a special ceremony with a lot of very old Japanese Americans, to pay tribute to some even older white Americans. The story goes back sixty years, and most Americans don’t know about it.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, a kind of racist frenzy seemed to spread through our country, and over 110,000 American citizens with Japanese ancestry were arrested and imprisoned in detainment camps until the war ended in 1945. The part few know is that several hundred white American teachers volunteered to follow them to the camps, to continue teaching their children.

Their little-known stories took center stage last night when the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo honored more than 200 of the camp educators. Among them, museum staff tracked down 53; more than half were expected to attend the dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

Glenn Kumekawa, a retired professor who was sent to a detainment camp in Utah at the age of 14 was one of them. Speaking of the teachers, he said, “They gave to us the link to the America we knew: the sense that not all Americans were racist, not all of them saw us as a threat but saw the potential we had as individuals.”

“Inside the camp, when every public indication was that we had no future, you had these teachers saying, ‘Yes, you do matter. They were the best of America,” Professor Kumekawa said. “They gave us assurance and hope by believing in us.”

When it came time to teach about U.S. democracy, teachers like Margaret Crosby Gunderson told her students at the Tule Lake camp not to give up on the Constitution; that the nation’s flawed political leadership was to blame for their unjust internment, [but that most Americans still honored the high ideals their leaders were betraying].

Another former teacher being honored was Mary Smelzer, who is now 89 years old. She is short and round with a cap of silver hair framing her face, and her memory remains sharp. As a member of the anti-war Church of the Brethren, she and her now-deceased husband, Ralph, opposed the internment. She taught math at the camps, her husband taught science.

The couple’s real goal, however, was to help people leave the camps. After six months of teaching, they set up a hostel in Chicago and later in New York through their church networks. They figure they helped resettle 1,000 Japanese Americans inland, away from the West Coast military zones.

Later in life, Mary Smeltzer went on to distribute relief aid in Vienna, join the Peace Corps in Africa, run a friendship center in Hiroshima and broker race relations in Illinois. Today she does volunteer reading with juvenile delinquents. Asked why she reached out to the internees, she replied with a laugh: “It’s just part of me. It’s just part of being a Christian, being a peace person, part of doing what I think is right.” (By Teresa Watanabe, LA Times Staff Writer, 5 February 2005)

These teachers reclaimed the high ideals they had projected onto America when America no longer honored them. That’s what Plato did with the ideals formerly projected onto the Olympian deities. It’s also what the biblical prophets did when their own ideals were higher than those their priests were giving to God, and what Karen Armstrong did with God. They gathered up their souls and owned them in a way we can’t do without that courage.

You can’t tell the story of God without telling the story of us. For the truth is that in the beginning, we created our gods in our image, or at least in the image of our highest and most life-giving ideals, like the compassion those teachers showed in the Japanese detention camps sixty years ago. And unless we remember that our highest ideals are only on loan to God as long as those who speak most loudly for him continue to serve them – unless we remember that, then we will see God’s corpse turned into a hand puppet by our worst preachers and politicians: a hand puppet to serve their agenda at the expense of our souls, and the soul of America.

It’s easy to think of other examples where we reclaim and reframe our high ideals from institutions that can not be trusted to serve them. Lawyers challenge the idea of Justice in the practice of sending mostly poor people to death row – the poor who can’t afford clever lawyers like Ken Lay and other higher-level criminals. We challenge the idea of “God’s will” and “Love” when we set up shelters for battered women. Their battering husbands often come to the shelters, accompanied by their ministers, demanding that this beaten and bloody woman be returned to the man who “loves” them because it’s “God’s will.” We know better. And we reclaim the concepts of love, respect, responsibility, and justice when we convict a Catholic priest of child abuse that has been covered up by the Church – sometimes for decades.

The history of religion, like the history of politics, is punctuated by those times when people rescued their high ideals from religions, politicians and nations that were no longer interested in serving them. When we look back, it is those people whose courageous actions we admire – just as I suspect you did when you heard the story of those teachers in the internment camps.

The story of God, like the story of America or the story of Justice, Compassion, Love and the rest of our high ideals, is a story about us. It is about whether we recognize those times when the most precious treasures we have, our highest ideals, need to be rescued from those who are violating them, no matter what kind of costumes they wear or political and judicial offices they hold. We do this so we can gather up our souls and be more whole – as people, partners, parents and citizens.

I said these things to remind myself, and hoped you might like to listen in.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

30 January 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 find gods worth serving. There are so many powerful voices calling out to us, trying to become our gods for a day, a year, or a lifetime. And so few are worthy. Let us find gods worth serving.

Let us ask, “Does this god cherish me, or manipulate me to benefit others? Does it offer understanding and compassion, or only judgment and condemnation?

We pray from a place that includes all the gods, and seeks to transcend them. For all that is human is in us, and we pray to harmonize it, and tune it in the key of decency, compassion, a quest for truth that stretches us, and a commitment to the courage demanded by this quest for truth.

We yearn to become better people, better partners, better parents and citizens. We want dearly to be a blessing to the world as we pass through it. And we want to feel blessed, to feel cherished.

These are prayers worthy of those better angels of our nature, in whose company we want to feel at home.

May we grow to become the answer to our prayers. May we grow that true, that courageous, that loving. These things we pray with honest minds, open hearts, and a grateful reverence for the gift of life.

Amen.

Sermon

Each time I revisit the ancient Greek myths, I’m more struck by how modern they are. The Greeks saw their Olympian gods as personifications of the natural and psychological forces within and around us. So you didn’t have to “believe in” them the way Western religions have always taught. Instead, you could just look within and around you, and find the powers, the voices, the passions and urges from which the gods were made. They’re still a good way of getting a different kind of understanding of who we are and why we often seem so confused about what to serve with our lives, even from day to day.

I want to talk about four Greek gods, and will start with the one you’re least likely to know about: Hephaestus, the crippled craftsman, whom the Romans called Vulcan, and whose Roman name was taken to describe the kind of person Dr. Spock was on the original Star Trek series.

Hephaestus was rejected by everyone: his father and mother rejected him and his father threw him off Mt. Olympus. He loved Athena and she rejected him. He married Aphrodite, she was never faithful to him and bore him no children, though she bore children to her other lovers.

Hephaestus threw himself into his work, lost himself in his work, and invested all of his passion in his work. He was the only god who worked, and he created many beautiful and useful things for others. But he had no passion left for his wife, no warmth left for people, no tenderness or mercy. Here too was passion that was intense without being integrated, even though it produced things of value for others.

Here is the modern man who throws himself into his work at the expense of his family and friends. Here is the surgeon – and I lived with an uncle who was one of these when I was 20 – who spends twelve to eighteen hours a day at the hospital healing others but never attends to himself or those who love him. It is a passion for work that becomes short-circuited that has lost any unifying vision of the whole person, the whole life. Here is the intense, introverted person who can not express feelings directly, and can become an emotional cripple unless he finds a way to blend his passions into the rest of his life, instead of simply turning them into work and giving them away to strangers.

There is something admirable, noble, even godly, about being able to convert personal sorrow into productive work. It’s a dramatic example of that old saw about making lemonade when life gives you lemons. So I don’t want to ridicule it. But it isn’t the highest goal we’re seeking, is it?

Part of Hephaestus’s myth has it that he made some golden maidservants – robots – to do his housework. What an insight! Hephaestus husbands and fathers can mold both wives and children into golden servants too, dehumanizing them by turning them into machines to do housework and wait on men, ignoring their own needs for love and the companionship of a human being instead of just a provider.

And for all his hard work, life can be frustrating for a Hephaestus man, because in our culture the Olympian heights of success are not filled by those who work with their hands, but by the owners, the dealmakers and investors, by those who work above ground with their wits and clear thinking to control those who earn a living through work. Hephaestus is no match for Apollo, and is still out of place in a Zeus world, as he has been for thirty or forty centuries.

Hephaestus is worth a whole series of sermons on his own, but I want to move on to another god.

Ares

Ares, whom the Romans called Mars, was the god of war, and a son whom Zeus rejected, though you might think he would prize him. But Ares, unlike Zeus, was a creature of immediate passion: he, like Poseidon, was a shadow side of Zeus. He fought spontaneously, without a clear view of the over-all war to be won, and so he was of no use to Zeus, for whom passions must be brought into the service of a clear long-range goal.

What is wrong with Ares is that it is a style of intense power but not integrated power. It is aggression cut loose from any decent or civil purpose. Ares will fight viciously for a cause without the ability to back off and judge whether or not the cause is worth it, or whether in stooping to brutal methods, he has become like the enemy he hates – the Abu Ghraib prison abuses come quickly to mind here, don’t they?

It is this lack of integration that makes Ares dangerous. A 20th Century example of Zeus rejecting Ares occurred during WWII when Eisenhower – who was even called “the Supreme Commander – relieved General Patton of command because his unpredictable verbal and physical attacks crippled the over-all war effort.

Dionysus

But if we’re going to talk about passion, we need to talk about the most passionate of all the gods: Dionysus.

Dionysus is pure passion, liberated from any need for integration. A passion so powerful it acted like a magnet in the ancient world, drawing people into Dionysian festivals of eating, drinking, and fairly uncontrolled behaviors. One Greek myth tells of a mother who, under the influence of this god, in the frenzy of a festival, killed her own son.

We have never been able to integrate this god, then or now. Instead, the overt expression of powerful passions is usually done during what you could call “time-out” periods of life, like the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the German Oktoberfest, or some of the festivities every weekend, right in downtown Austin on Sixth Street. Thousands of people leave the more calm, rational, Apollonian lives of Monday through Friday for some mostly mild Dionysian festivals, then on Monday return to work.

This is so similar to the way the Greeks handled Dionysus it is almost eerie. The two gods who were most different were Apollo, the cool and classical one, and Dionysus, the wild and frenzied one. Even in music and the arts, we still speak of the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian styles. In music, Classical music is sometimes called Apollonian, while Romantic music is called Dionysian.

Yet though Dionysus was pretty pure and powerful passion, he was also a favored son of Zeus’s. And in the temple of Apollo, the most famous of the Greek temples, Apollo was worshipped only nine months out of the year. The other three months were reserved for the worship of Dionysus.

Even the American religious movement known as the Shakers, who were completely Apollonian, even celibate, had periodic ceremonies where they would dance, whirl and shake to the point of exhaustion or unconsciousness. And it was these wild dances, rather than all of their other activities that gave these mostly quiet and Apollo-like people their name as “Shakers.” Dionysus is a powerful spirit, no matter how little time you spend under his spell.

Hermes

Now on to one of the most popular and powerful gods in both ancient Greece and modern America: the god called Hermes, whom the Romans called Mercury. Hermes is the messenger god. He is even the symbol of the Greek Post Offices.

Last time, I talked about Apollo, the high-level functionary who serves the wishes of the Father or Boss, and who sees people not as people but as parts of whatever scheme he needs to manipulate to reach the boss’s goals.

In pursuit of these goals, almost any means seem to be acceptable, including clever persuasion and its darker side, outright deception. In the terms of Greek mythology, these are the realms of Hermes, the messenger god. He could travel between all the realms, was the god of clear and persuasive speech, and often had trouble telling the difference between honest persuasion and dishonest persuasion, as long as it got him what he wanted.

In literature and religion, the field of hermeneutics is named after Hermes. Here too, the idea is that if we interpret great literature or religion properly, we will be finding the kind of wisdom that’s associated with the gods.

The gifts associated with Hermes are behind the brilliant orator, teacher, and preacher, but also behind crooked lawyers, deceptive advertising, and hypocritical preachers. He is clever and persuasive, but he is a trickster, and will do what he needs to get what he wants. This too is something Americans admire: Tom Sawyer, Brer Rabbit, Robin Hood and Peter Pan are modern incarnations of Hermes, but so are rascally politicians who say anything they need to say in order to get elected.

Hermes is the power of persuasion, linking high, godly ideals with action. But persuasion is the goal, not the quality of the ideals, so neither gods nor humans can trust Hermes – or any other trickster figure.

Apollo and Hermes make an effective, if dangerous, pair. Apollo doesn’t see people as people, but only parts in a scheme to serve “the father,” the boss, or “God.” He links with Hermes, who knows how to trick them by using high words to serve low aims.

And the manipulation of us masses has been a constant part of American politics for a very long time. Until recently, it was talked about quite openly, going all the way back to the 1920s. The name from that time, one of the most important Hermes figure in the art of bamboozling the masses, was Edward Bernays. Bernays had worked in Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the first U.S. state propaganda agency. Bernays wrote “It was the astounding success of propaganda during the (First World) war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.” (Noam Chomsky, p. 54 – I think it’s from his book on Manufacturing Consent, but have lost the notes and book.)

Here are more words from this most influential American who was such an influential incarnation of Hermes in the mid-20th century: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” To carry out this essential task, “the intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically,” because they alone “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and can “pull the wires which control the public mind.” This process of “engineering consent” – a phrase Bernays coined – is the very “essence of the democratic process,” he wrote shortly before he was honored for his contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1949. (Chomsky, 53) It is also the essence of the power of Hermes. And now, like then, his people are tricksters whom nobody can really trust. Their thrill and fulfillment lie in the power of persuading people – not in the quality of the things they’re persuading them of.

Another member of Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda committee, and another avatar or incarnation of Hermes, was Walter Lippman, perhaps the most influential and respected journalist in America for about fifty years. The intelligent minority, Lippman explained in essays on democracy, are a “specialized class” who are responsible for setting policy and for “the formation of a sound public opinion.” They must be free from interference by the general public, who are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” The public must “be put in its place;” their function is to be “spectators of action,” not participants, apart from periodic electoral exercises when they choose among the specialized class. (Chomsky, 54) Again, Hermes would be so proud!

Hannah Arendt once described totalitarianism as the triumph of politics over truth. She was intimately familiar with both the Russian revolution of 1917, and the rise of Nazi power in Germany. She would recognize many of the patterns of contemporary America immediately.

This visit to the Greek gods can give us a new way of understanding both ourselves – especially men – and the world that men are running: namely, our world. One thing this means to me is that all the griping among political liberals about G.W. Bush is a little misdirected. As the Greeks would see, he isn’t unique; he’s just the puppet, the instrument, of the rise to power of the gods Apollo and Hermes, with Ares operating our Army and soon, perhaps, our domestic police. They are in the service of the voice they have taken to be the voice of their Zeus: the voice of the privileged class who feel entitled to money and power taken from the “ignorant and meddlesome” masses.

Our four gods now are Apollo, Hermes, Ares and an ersatz Zeus. Zeus is played by the large corporations, directing both our domestic and foreign economic policies. Nothing godly there except their power and arrogance. Apollo is all the functionaries serving these demands, including (at least) our past four presidents. Hermes is Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, the speechwriters and advertising companies who wrap the agenda in deceptive language and images, to sell it to those of us who have been put in our place as spectators of action.

And Ares invades Iraq for its oil and strategic military location, soon to be followed by Iran in the imperialistic scheme of the corporations and wealthy individuals who form the collective incarnation of our weird modern version of Zeus. But when the public is told our motives are to find “weapons of mass destruction” or the “liberation” of Iraq, while published papers by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney from 1992 say we need to invade Iraq to control their oil and military location, and when Wolfowitz gives an interview last year candidly acknowledging that the reason we invaded Iraq but not Korea was because Iraq was “swimming in oil” – then the agents of Hermes are at work, lying to America’s ignorant masses to serve the low and greedy agendas of the corporate interests that comprise their make-believe Zeus. These are the gods behind the action, not something nobler.

No one could argue that the gods America is serving in its treatment of our poor, or the citizens of other countries, have anything to do with either Jesus or the God of the Old Testament, whose prophets routinely attacked the rich and powerful on behalf of the poor.

What the Greek gods can help us understand about the biblical God whose stories are more familiar to us is that each god is only partial. Our task is coordination and integration in search of what Joseph Campbell called the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul. It’s never done completely, for the gods represent passions and allegiances that are always shifting, always beckoning to us, and sometimes persuading us.

The art of coordinating the voices of the gods is the art of coming to our full humanity, of growing up and growing whole.

I’ll continue this theme in two weeks when we think about religious tolerance. If there are so many gods, are they all to be encouraged, or even tolerated? The Greeks didn’t think so, and neither do I. But if not, where do we find our center? What is the authority for choosing among the gods?

Those questions are more profound than answers. But live with them for a couple weeks, will you?

I said that as though we really have a choice!

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

16 January 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

We pray that we can find a way to fit all our parts together into a coordinated whole.

We are such complex creatures. We have so many voices inside telling us what we should do or be.

One says, “Work harder; earn more; provide for your family.” Another counters, “Spend more time with your family, your partner, your friends.” One voice says “Obey authorities, serve your nation.” Another says, “Question your leaders to insure that they are serving your nation.” One voice wants us to get to know ourselves better, to go deeper into who we are and what we should do. But another voice urges us to be sociable, to look outward rather than inward, to become working parts of a larger world than just ourselves.

Socrates once said “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and we still try to examine, to know ourselves, to know our souls. But the unlived life is not worth examining! And so we are pulled outward again, to spend time and energy experiencing rather than just contemplating.

And there are many more voices than these. We each have our own personal pantheon of gods, giving us orders, as we struggle to pull them all together into a whole. Our quest is for nothing less than the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.

It is the quest that makes us most fully human, most nuanced. We pray for the insight, the vision, and the will to listen to the best voices, and learn to blend them all together.

It is a noble goal. Let us persist. And let us be patient with ourselves.

Amen.

SERMON:

“Myths to Live By,” Part Four: The Gods of Men and Societies

This is the third sermon I’ve done on the Greek gods and goddesses, and it’s such a rich field that each time I’ve been led to places I hadn’t expected. This morning is the first of two sermons on the Greek gods – the second one will be in two weeks, on January 30th.

This business of gods is more complex than you might think. For instance, when we talked about the Greek goddesses, I was just using them to see different archetypes of behaviors that are still familiar to most women in our culture. But we could have used them to understand the values of many families or public schools or good nursing, since these are areas often defined by women. So you find more feminine values in these areas, concerned with relationships, nurturing, treating everyone with respect regardless of their status, and so on.

When we study the male gods, we have to talk about how they define the areas of the world that men control, because it’s most areas of the world.

But first, if we’re going to talk about Greek gods, we need to take some time to understand what gods are. Different cultures have produced very different kinds of gods. The main Hindu god, Brahman, is the biggest and most abstract of all gods, I think. Brahman is a symbol for all the creative, sustaining and destructive forces in the universe. Then all the different gods the Hindus have created give form to one or more parts of these universal forces.

Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew scriptures, the bible, was created in the image of ancient Hebrew tribal chiefs, and was given the powers of tribal chiefs. So Yahweh sets the rules for behavior, promises rewards to the good and punishments for the disobedient, just like a powerful tribal chief. Biblical scholars have found that the covenant between that God and his chosen people was modeled on ancient Hittite treaties between a sovereign and his subjects, for instance. Yahweh told us what we could and couldn’t do, and those who spoke for him were always writing commandments they insisted that this God meant for us to follow – as they still are. Yahweh also had a lot of sexual hang-ups compared with the gods of the Hindus or the Greeks, and those hang-ups have tainted almost all of Western civilization – you think gods aren’t powerful?

But where Yahweh was an autocratic rule-giver who didn’t much like sex or independent women, the Greek gods could hardly forbid many behaviors, because they did about everything themselves. They were certainly much more comfortable with sex than old Yahweh was. The Greek gods were made as imaginative images of the psychological dynamics they saw within human nature. So, while the ancient Greek gods and goddesses aren’t worshiped any more, they are still worth studying because they are about us, about human nature, and that nature hasn’t changed much in the past ten thousand or hundred thousand years.

You could spend years of study just on the four gods I’m talking about this morning. These are about men, but since men control the power of states, armies and most organized religions, they also show us a picture of our world, the world of Western civilization that has half its roots deep into the soil of the ancient Greeks. It also shows us the kind of balance – or lack of it – that we have, both individually and as a society.

One more word about gods, since it’s hard for most of us to understand what gods are. The study of gods is not like a manhunt or the search for a missing person. There are no fellows, no critters, no Big Guys hiding somewhere behind a cloud or up a mountain that we’re planning to find, then sit down and talk with. That’s not what gods are. The study of gods is a discovery of the human soul in some of its most powerful and imaginative projections. We create our gods to preserve and teach our vision of who we are or aspire to be, and the powers or mysteries we see as most significant in life.

There’s a Theology 101 course in just one paragraph.

So. We’ll take two weeks for the Greek male gods. We’ll talk about four of them today, and four more in two weeks.

While most of the gods are psychological archetypes of styles we men can still find in ourselves, the three most powerful Greek gods were quite profound psychology about styles of being that apply to both men and women. I want to begin with those three gods, who were brothers. I’ll back into it.

Think of our world as having three different levels, three different realms, and three different styles of living. The first level emphasizes clear thinking, cool and impersonal rationality; it takes the long view, sets goals, and works to achieve them. You could think of bright sunlight on a clear day for this level. The job of the god at this level is to harness all of our different gods into an integrated and productive whole.

The second level is as deep as the ocean, and as turbulent. Here it is not clear thinking, but powerful emotions that rule. There is no long view, no overall plan, though both desire and rage may last a long time, and a grudge can be carried forever. There are deep feelings here that would frighten most people, but to those who live in this realm, the deep and powerful feelings are home. They are seldom, however, a comfortable home: their turbulence short-circuits nearly all efforts to put a life into order, and you are tossed about on the waves of an overwhelming sea of powerful feelings.

The third realm is in the underworld. Cool, dark, dispassionate, removed from the worlds of both the first two levels, this is the realm of the suppressed and the unconscious, of convoluted ambiguities and dark doubts. This is the underside of the bright and clear world, its other half. It is always beneath us, this underworld, though few can live in it, or would want to.

You could call this third level the realm of Hades, for that is what the ancient Greeks called it – or you could call it Hell, after the Norse goddess of the underworld. The Greek mythology is very telling here, for Hades was almost never seen, though he was always there. He had a cap of invisibility, making him an unseen presence, just as modern psychologists have shown us that the realm of the unconscious and of the shadow sides of our psyches is an unseen presence within our lives and our world. Hades people can often be found leading lives of quiet desperation, aware of the shadow sides, but unable to integrate them into a well-rounded life.

And that second level, the style of living where deep and turbulent emotions rule, you could think of as the realm of Poseidon. Like Hades, his was the realm of inner realities rather than outer ones, but here they have a terrible force. They carry grudges, they seek vengeance, and like the sea they often have a calm surface hiding a terrible power raging underneath. To take the most violent examples, think of the number of times that mass murderers have been described as calm and quiet people. And those of you who have spent time studying the Greek classics will know of the awful power, rage, and grudges carried by Poseidon. The whole book of the Odyssey was driven by Poseidon’s rage at Odysseus for killing his son Polyphemos. He pursued Odysseus for ten years, until Athena – always the protector of the great male heroes – intervened to let him go home.

Neither Hades nor Poseidon ever accomplished much that was constructive. Poseidon was as much a victim of his fury as everyone else was, because he could not escape its pull on him. So Poseidon remained mostly trapped within the depths of his feelings, as Hades remained mostly in the dark depths of his shadows and abstractions.

Both ancient myths and modern experience say that few people would want to have to live in those depths, and those who do are not people you would want to invite to a party. Both in Greek mythology and in our western cultures, which have been so heavily shaped by that mythology, we choose to live above the ground, in a world of clarity and light. That realm reigns supreme now as then. And that first level, the realm of clarity and light, was the realm of Zeus, the number one god of the Olympians. Zeus’s job was to coordinate our passions into a working and integrated whole. He was so different from Yahweh, who tried to deny or suppress our passions. Zeus embraced them – they were also gods, after all, meaning they are enduring parts of human nature and the human condition. But he wanted a clear rationality to rule the whole.

I was struck several times while working on this sermon just how much our world really does echo the old mythic realm of Mt. Olympus. The world that they and we recognize as normative, healthy and sane is the realm of Zeus’s clear-thinking, of rational behavior and a life where dark doubts and powerful emotions are kept in line through the training and education of unclouded, well-ordered minds. As individuals and as a society, we are not comfortable with introspection or deep doubts. And, since we insist that everything lies on the surface, knowing what to do is just a matter of gathering the necessary facts and then taking decisive action. This is the style of life that the Greeks exalted in their myths, and that western culture has exalted for more than 3,000 years.

Zeus was the god of lightning; his symbol was the thunderbolt. And to this day, when we dare to go against an authoritative prohibition handed down from above, we speak of “waiting for the lightning to strike.”

These first three gods – Zeus, Poseidon and Hades – show us the major parts of our psyches, all of our psyches. Women can recognize them as well as men. But I want to go back to the Alpha Male, the Main Man, the top God, Zeus, and his Number One Son.

Zeus was like the CEO of the Olympic deities, or at least tried to be. And in our own culture, CEO types operate much like Zeus. They give the orders, they have the vision, and their anger can make heads roll. But they need lesser people to get the work done. Not these highest-level gods, but slightly more subordinate ones. CEO’s don’t hire people who will go after their job. They hire people who will follow orders: brilliant functionaries. So around them, these Zeus people will assemble a string of second-in-command people. Not the ambitious kind who will be fighting them for control, but the auxiliary kind, who work toward the goals the leader has set, with the same kind of clear-thinking and dispassionate genius that the leader displays. I think of generals’ aides or presidential press secretaries here: public spokesmen whose job and whose talent is to diffuse or redirect all criticism of the boss, to dismiss doubts, to look only on the optimistic side of things, to be can-do men who act like the favorite sons of their leader. These are people acting as functionaries. They are people in the mold of the god Apollo, who was the second most important god of ancient Greece, after Zeus.

Others say of these people that they are emotionally distant, and have little real personal passion. Their ex-spouses say they are lousy lovers, technical and impersonal; that they can’t express feelings and don’t care to get into the murky depths where doubts live, or into the shadow sides of their bright optimism. Others may say that their focus and their clear vision are achieved at the cost of being stunted in other areas, and while they attract admiration, respect, or envy, these people seldom inspire love or passion. They are clear-sighted and far seeing like eagles flying high above it all, and will often sacrifice their children, their friends, and their personal lives to get power, consolidate it, and keep it.

But while people may admire or fear Apollo types, they seldom love them. The Greeks noticed this, too, and you can see it in the stories they told about Apollo. Women didn’t like him. You might think if you’re a god, that’s like even cooler than being a rap singer or a pro athlete, but it isn’t true if you’re Apollo.

One of the most famous stories about Apollo shows just how much women didn’t like him. It is the story of Cassandra, one of my favorite characters.

Apollo was trying to seduce Cassandra, who wasn’t interested in him, even though she was a mortal and he was a god. So he tried to bribe her by giving her an amazing gift. She would be able to see clearly into the future. She alone could know in advance what was going to happen. After he gave her this great gift, he tried again with her, but she wasn’t interested. She liked the gift, but not the giver. Apollo couldn’t take back the gift – this must have been some rule of godly etiquette – so he added a strange curse to it, which gave Cassandra her unique character. She would be able to see what was coming, and to tell people about it in advance – but nobody would ever believe her! Something essential is lacking in Apollo people, and women sense it immediately. I’ve had several discussions with women in this church who say that when they’re in a bar and see a guy who looks to good to be true, it gives them the willies. Apollo was the handsomest of the gods, and in his mythic days he gave women the willies, too.

We train these Apollo people in our schools, where clear-thinking and dispassionate rationality are prized, where knowledge is quantified and those who best learn the rules and have the self-control needed to play the game are the ones who get the best grades, earn the respect of their classmates, are elected class presidents, win scholarships, and go on to college, where they continue to shine. In fact, the most common image of the Good Life held out for children by their parents may be this image of an efficient, orderly and successful life where both doubts and passions are controlled or suppressed so they can not sabotage our long-range plans.

It is no surprise that Zeus’s symbolic creature was the eagle, for that far-sighted and dispassionate view is still the ideal in our world. It is still what our education trains us for, still the path that leads to success in business and politics. It is also reflected in Freud’s psychology, where sanity and health are achieved when the rational ego can control and organize the passionate and potentially destructive forces of our Id, like a well-trained rider controlling the more powerful but more primitive horse that he rides.

What we consider both reality and sanity are models of this kind of rational control, of “delayed gratification,” of working together, following the legitimate authority passed down from above. It is the world of modern commerce and competitive markets, where only the most efficient and far seeing will survive, and the others will be dictated to by those at the top. Our dominant American myths are inextricably bound up with this picture of being number one, being on top, controlling the weapons, controlling industry, and having the most clout. Apollo reminds us of America.

But there’s a human dimension that’s absolutely lacking, isn’t there? Where is warmth, compassion? We could perhaps admire or fear the kind of impersonal and objective power that our American leaders are modeling, but could anyone really love it? Something is missing. And what’s missing is essential, if we are to try and become more complete human beings.

And, since these old gods also show us what we are worshiping as a society, there is something terribly essential missing in our society now, and it feels a lot like what’s missing from Apollo. It’s all very efficient, quite powerful, but without relationship, without compassion, without warmth. You can admire or fear it, but you can’t love it. And this is what so many writers in the foreign press have been saying about America for several years now.

The goal, both in the ancient world and in our own, wasn’t to be the most powerful, angry or intimidating. The goal was learning to become a whole person and a healthy society, able to integrate all the varied voices of the many gods that are always a part of us.

When people are out of balance, it’s usually because the wrong gods are running the show. The wrong gods are running the show when a society is out of balance, too.

Joseph Campbell was the one who said that the task of modern people is the quest for the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul. It is also the quest for the lost Atlantis of the coordinated and humane society.

Suddenly, these old Greek gods seem very modern, don’t they?

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Davidson Loehr

Carolyn Gremminger

January 2, 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:

Carolyn Gremminger

My name is Carolyn Gremminger and I am a member of the Worship Associates. I was raised a Roman Catholic in a Rural North Texas town. As a small child, I found much comfort in the rituals of the church and I was very devoted, taking it all very seriously and literally. The strong sure patriarchal God provided reassurance and a feeling of love and kinship in my small community.

As I grew older and was preparing to leave home for college, I became very afraid about venturing to the “Big City” of Austin. I made the choice at that time to leave the Catholic Church, as I felt they were not “serious enough” about God. I believed at that time that there really was one right way out there to follow God and I began looking for someone to tell me how to do it. It them became my mission to save myself and all others I came into contact with.

I eventually found a very rigid church. As I became more and more devout in that fundamentalist religion, I grew more and more joyless and unhappy. I did not question this. I just thought that is how one lived if one was serious about religion.

After about four years of this experience, my attachment to this form of religion deteriorated. That religion did not honor the fact that in my essence, I am an independent woman who does not only define her selfhood in relation to being a wife and a mother. The religion did not facilitate the authentic processing of difficult emotions. The final straw was when my brother came out of the closet and the only view I was offered was one of judgment and condemnation. I love my brother very much and this was not an acceptable course of action for me. To harken back to Davidson’s prior sermon, I needed to lay down this “raft.” This religion no longer supported my life. It no longer offered acceptable choices and possibilities of relating with a complex world with myriad moral dilemmas and ways of being.

So at that point, when I was about 25, I made the decision to leave “church” all together. I came to consider church to be a place where certain questions could not be asked and certain people would not be honored. I eventually got married. Looking back at that time, the “raft” that I constructed was a lifestyle of acquisition, consumption and comfort seeking.

Then, in the span of less than a year, my husband decided to leave what I thought was our happy marriage, my mother died and my beloved brother was diagnosed with cancer. My current raft was ripped apart and I felt like I was sinking. I needed a new raft to help me through this transition. I was very afraid and knew I needed community, but knew better than to go back to what I had experienced before. However, it seemed like some sort of religion, something that would facilitate a deeper relationship with life, was called for.

So here I am at First UU. I have been attending for about three years. My intention now is to be on a path of developing a more conscious and meaningful way of life. I am once again constructing a raft.

The community I have found at First UU has become a safe place for me to evolve into a new person, to grow and to heal from the hurts I mentioned earlier, and ultimately to become more than I ever could have been without this experience. I want to be able to look back on my life and be proud of the choices I have made, the work I have accomplished and the community I have helped to construct and be a part of.

The method of building the raft is emerging by becoming involved in voyagers and specifically in a covenant group, from the inspiration in the worship services and through daily spiritual practices. I am purposefully changing my worldview from the childhood belief in the story of Adam and Eve to the story of our innate Buddha nature. From the view that we have a fallen nature that we continually have to repent of to the view that we all are inherently good, and that spiritual awakening consists of realizing our essential goodness, natural wisdom and compassion.

To me, authentic religion comforts me and challenges me. It heals me and increases my capacity for love, generosity, wisdom and courage. It builds up my sense of self, while at the same time helping me to guard against self-righteousness.

I aspire to be the best friend, social worker, and community member possible. I think being a part of an authentic religious community and taking part in daily spiritual practices will empower me to become this person.

Prayer

We are nearly paralyzed by the awful scale of the earthquake and the walls of water that have killed more than 150,000 of our fellow humans. They are half a world away, but so poignantly present in our minds and hearts.

Children, families, natives and tourists washed together off the beach. Whole islands destroyed. Old and young, rich and poor, the frightened and the smug, all taken together by a disaster that neither knows nor cares, but only explodes, spreads, destroys and sinks back into the sea.

Centuries ago, an unknown poet wrote a psalm in which he identified these forces as coming from God. And of this God, he said,

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away with a flood; they are as a sleep; in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled. (Psalm 90)

Whether we assign them to God or nature, we live at the mercy of forces indifferent to us, indifferent to everything, just indifferent.

It is in this indifferent world where we make the difference that matters, by weaving those fragile webs of compassion that let us live not only amidst the indifferent forces of nature, but the compassionate forces of millions and billions of people who see, feel, care, and reach out to one another with aid, with money, with the thousand simple acts of humanity which have the power to turn hell into heaven.

As we mourn the losses in this latest tragedy, let us remember that our grief unites us with all people in all times and places who have similarly grieved. And as we move out of grief, let us work to recreate a world grounded in compassion rather than indifference. Until then, we grieve, we weep, and slowly we begin to heal.

Amen.

SERMON:

Someone sent me an essay from the British paper The Guardian on Christmas Eve, written by an Anglican priest, the Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser of Oxford. He is making a distinction between the religion of Jesus and the religions about Jesus, and he does it so well I want to share some of it with you.

Empires Prefer a Baby and the Cross to the Adult Jesus

From Constantine to Bush, power has needed to stifle a revolutionary message.

By Giles Fraser, The Guardian U.K., Friday 24 December 2004. The Rev Dr. Giles Fraser is vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford.

Every Sunday in church, Christians recite the Nicene Creed. “Who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven. And was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary and was made man; was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried; and the third day rose again according to the Scriptures.” It’s the official summary of the Christian faith but, astonishingly, it jumps straight from birth to death, apparently indifferent to what happened in between.

Nicene Christianity is the religion of Christmas and Easter, the celebration of a Jesus who is either too young or too much in agony to shock us with his revolutionary rhetoric. The adult Christ who calls his followers to renounce wealth, power and violence is passed over in favour of the gurgling baby and the screaming victim. As such, Nicene Christianity is easily conscripted into a religion of convenience, with believers worshipping a gagged and glorified savior who has nothing to say about how we use our money or whether or not we go to war.

Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312, after which the church began to backpedal on the more radical demands of the adult Christ. From Constantine onwards, the radical Christ worshipped by the early church would be pushed to the margins of Christian history to be replaced with the infinitely more accommodating religion of the baby and the cross.

The adult Jesus described his mission as being to “preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and to set at liberty those who are oppressed”. He insisted that the social outcast be loved and cared for, and that the rich have less chance of getting into heaven than a camel has of getting through the eye of a needle. Jesus set out to destroy the imprisoning obligations of debt, speaking instead of forgiveness and the redistribution of wealth. He was accused of blasphemy for attacking the religious authorities as self-serving and hypocritical.

In contrast, the Nicene religion of the baby and the cross gives us Christianity without the politics. The nativity scene is the perfect tableau into which to place this Nicene baby, for like the much-lauded celebrity, this Christ is there to be gazed upon and adored – but not to be heard or heeded. In a similar vein, modern evangelical choruses offer wave upon wave of praise to the name of Jesus, but offer little political or economic content to trouble his adoring fans.

Like Constantine, George Bush has borrowed the language of Christianity to support and justify his military ambition. And just like that of Constantine, the Christianity of this new Rome offers another carefully edited version of the Bible. Once again, the religion that speaks of forgiving enemies and turning the other cheek is pressed into military service.

The story of Christmas, properly understood, asserts that God is not best imagined as an all-powerful despot but as a vulnerable and pathetic child. It’s a statement about the nature of divine power. But in the hands of conservative theologians, the Nicene religion of the baby and the cross is a way of distracting attention away from the teachings of Christ. It’s a form of religion that concentrates on things like belief in the virgin birth while ignoring the fact that the gospels are much more concerned about the treatment of the poor and the forgiveness of enemies.

Bush may have claimed that “Jesus Christ changed my life”, but Jesus doesn’t seem to have changed his politics. (The Guardian, 24 December 2004)

This piece is saying that normative Christianity not only has nothing to do with the message of Jesus, but that it exists to stifle that message, as its mortal enemy. And yet, he isn’t giving that evangelical religion which has nothing to do with Jesus the credit it deserves. Not theological credit; there, he is dead on in noting that it is a stark betrayal of the man Jesus. But political credit; for that religion put into the service of military power and economic greed now has more power – at least in America – than it ever has before.

It reminds me of a story from a very different field, the field of music, which I want to use as lens through which to view the rise of literalistic Christianity in America.

When he was a young man, the composer Claude Debussy earned money as a music critic.

Once, he was reviewing a new opera by Wagner, who was The Man in the 1880s, the acknowledged master of virtually every facet of music, drama and staging. Most saw him as the dawn of a new era of music. But Debussy saw something else. “Wagner,” he wrote, “is the sunset which some have mistaken for a sunrise.” Even with all the attention Wagner was getting, Debussy saw him as the end of an era; and history proved Debussy right.

This sermon is kind of a continuation of one I gave at the end of November (28 November 2004, “The Legitimate Heir to God”). It has been observed for decades that in some respects the God of Western religions has died. But that word “God,” which at its best is a symbol of our highest ideals and aspirations, has now been dragged down to the very lowest depths, used to sanction greed, economic inequity, imperialism, war and the slaughter of innocents to such a great degree that nearly the whole civilized world is ashamed of and disgusted with America, as you can read by scanning the world press stories.

I can see three logical paths from here, though I think only two are viable, and only one can work in the longer run. The path that won’t work is to abandon religion and everything it stands for, and go to war over merely political ideologies, which is a bit of what this last election looked like to me. But at its best, religion is about preserving and claiming ultimacy for the highest ideals we can articulate. And abandoning that search seems insane to me.

The second path is the one that Anglican priest wants: to try and force normative Christianity back into a path that follows the demanding and revolutionary teachings of Jesus rather than the supernatural myths created around the baby and the cross, so the religion can be used to sanction precisely the kinds of greed, unjust distribution of wealth, arrogance and war that Jesus spent his career preaching against.

This is the path that virtually all Christian scholars and moderate-to-liberal preachers wish they could take. I wish them luck, but I don’t think they can do it this time. It has simply become too painfully clear that, as that Anglican priest said, the religion of Christianity has become far easier to misuse than to use wisely and well.

But this is true of all three Western religions. I think the God of all three Western religions has become the hand puppet of the worst kind of people – and has found its most likely home among them.

Israel acts in violent and murderous ways against Palestinians, ways that the great prophets of the Bible would condemn in a heartbeat. Their God is used for little but a land grant, and a sanction for revenge and violence.

And the fundamentalists of Islam have dragged the names of Mohammad and Allah through more mud than anyone knows how to remove. They torment and kill women who show the faces God gave them. Saudi Arabia forbids women to vote. They champion a primitive and vicious patriarchy that cannot be defended as being worthy of Allah. They brag about murder and suicide bombers, and speak in terms of blood, violence and death. Mohammed would be disgusted with them. Yet it is almost impossible to find many voices of moderate or liberal Muslims to counter them, even in Austin. Once again, the God of the Bible has been turned into a barbaric and murderous hand puppet by our worst people, and no one within any of the three religions seems able to stop them.

That’s where this reminds me of that music review that Debussy wrote about a Wagner opera. These brutal, ungodly versions of Western religion are clearly holding the reins of power and the guns and bombs of violence and murder. They are all kings of their respective hills, and their arrogant spokesmen brag that this is the dawning of a new and bloody age, to be played by their rules.

But I don’t think so. I think these may be closer to sunsets than sunrises. I think these mean, selfish and arrogant perversions of the God of Western religions show instead that that symbol, that God, no longer has the power to attract enough decent and brave people to rescue it from the gutters.

In the sermon at the end of November, I mentioned that this happened after Franco finally died and his dictatorship of Spain ended. He had brought the Church into power with him, and after he died, people began removing power from the Church as well. It had proven too easy and eager an ally of low and mean motives to be trusted with our tender mercies.

And I think that is what may happen to Christianity in America. I don’t know enough about the state of religious affairs in Israel or the Muslim world to talk about them. But I’ve seen enough bad preachers and politicians here enlist Jesus and God in their greedy, imperialistic and murderous schemes to believe that the symbol of God may well lose its right to be trusted with our highest ideals.

So the third path, the one I think is most interesting ahead of us, is the chance to reclaim our highest ideals from institutional religion, and begin expressing them in ordinary language that can belong to all the people. This would reverse the authority of churches and believers, which is exactly what Jesus and the ancient Hebrew prophets also did. It would mean that we would judge the churches by how well they served our high ideals, rather than pretending that they have the moral right to judge us in the name of a God they have turned into a mercenary who fights for the interests of the wealthiest and most greedy and brutal.

This sounds like such a big task, it seems unrealistic to pretend it can be done. But it can be done. In fact, it is being done all the time. Caroline Gremminger’s Affirmation of Faith was one example of it. She left the religion of her childhood when she found that its God served low needs rather than high ones. Once she saw that, she left it because she valued higher ideals than her church did, and she knew the difference.

So do you. Every one of you who has left a former religion to find a new path has left, I’m guessing, because you too decided to hold to your high ideals rather than follow churches or priests who either couldn’t see those ideals or didn’t have the courage to follow them.

In other words, as some of the best theologians have said for centuries, the gods are symbols that we create as vehicles to carry and preserve our highest ideals. We wrap them in rituals and creeds, embed them in worship services, and trust the gods to guard the better angels of our nature. But the ideals belong to us, not the gods.

164 years ago, a great German theologian wrote that all the attributes of the gods are the things that we happen to admire, and we project them onto the gods we have created in the same way that we project noble ideals onto our race or our country. (Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 1841, translated by George Eliot. The “essence” of Christianity was the projection of our own highest ideals onto the gods we created.)

And 206 years ago another theologian who was this man’s teacher wrote that religion is a purely human invention, designed to help us become most fully human. It was, he added, our most important of human inventions, when it worked. (Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 1799)

Every “reformation” in the history of religion, every instance of higher thinkers correcting the theological errors of lower thinkers, is an example of we who are the true owners of our highest ideals reclaiming them from misuse by those who speak for the churches.

This means that we have some serious work to do.

It means that we as a society need to do what we as individuals do when we leave an inadequate religion. We need to reclaim our high ideals, and look for more adequate ways to express them in ordinary language, rather than the jargon claimed as the private reserve of churches and preachers. That is the most important religious task I think America now faces: reclaiming our high ideals from religions that have proven unworthy to handle them, and have proven to be too cowardly to speak up for them in any effective way.

Perhaps you think this is beyond you, that you don’t know these things, that it’s presumptuous to think you might know what’s moral and right better than churches with two thousand years of tradition behind them? It’s not true.

We have had at least two things in this morning’s service that might show you otherwise. The first, which many of you have told me is your favorite part of the service, is those candles in the windows to your left. A hundred and fifty votive candles there, which you can light to mark memories, hopes, yearnings and prayers you bring here with you. The reasons you light them are your own private reasons. But I am pretty sure those candle lights stand for some of the deep, noble, and loving sentiments that come in here as parts of you. You bring the values, the concerns, the ideals, the personal and spiritual seriousness, and you mark them with those lovely flames. We provide the space and the candles; you provide the yearning, and the meaning.

The second part of today’s service that will show the quality of your religious depth and caring is the offering we will take right after the sermon: an offering which we will give entirely to help the relief efforts of the more than 150,000 victims of the tsunami waves on the other side of the world.

All of our hearts opened for those people we don’t even know as soon as we heard the tragic story start to unfold a few days ago. You don’t have to be told they are your brothers and sisters or children of God; you know it intuitively and deeply. It’s in your genes. The tender mercies that well up in us toward the suffering of all those people we don’t know – they are our tender mercies. Not God’s, not Jesus’s, not Allah’s, but ours. And the better angels of our nature that Abraham Lincoln spoke of so poetically – they are indeed the better angels of our nature. Not God’s, not Jesus’s, not Allah’s. Ours.

Claiming those noble callings is laying claim to our fullest humanity. And all the gods, all the saviors, all the angels we create are not holy in their own right. Their holiness is only on loan from us, as long as they embody our highest aspirations, our own most tender mercies toward ourselves and one another.

I want us to grow beyond thinking that religion is about bowing before an external source of authority or goodness. I want us to grow beyond thinking it is the job of priests to proclaim and believers to obey. I want us to grow into the realization that if there is ever to be an incarnation of truth, justice and compassion – an incarnation of God – that incarnation must take our shape, not the shape of gods, prophets and saviors who have been dead so long they can be turned into hand puppets by our worst preachers and politicians. Some first-rate religious thinkers have said for a long time that this is the deepest significance of the Christian myth of Jesus as an incarnation of God. They see early Christianity – unlike the religions which preceded it – as saying that the form which God’s presence must take to be effective among us can only be human form: our form. No, that’s not how literalist religions have taught it. They have taught it as a supernaturalism, which lets them use these powerful symbols to subdue the masses rather than to empower them. Literalistic religion is, as it has always been, profoundly dishonest.

The soul of honest religion is the human soul seeking its own finest form. The soul of all legitimate religion is the human spirit, aspiring to become an agent of the highest ideals: those angels of our better nature.

I first read this in the Bible. It isn’t an obscure piece; it’s the ending of the 90th Psalm, one of the best known of all Psalms – the one I quoted in the prayer. After praising God for a few verses, the psalm ends with this plea. It may strike you almost as anti-religious, but it is not. It is the most profoundly religious plea we can make. This is the plea:

” and establish the work of our hands upon us.

Yea, the work of our hands; establish thou it.”

That doesn’t mean any work of our hands. It doesn’t mean the dirty work of our hands. It means the work of the hands of those angels of our better nature, the vehicles of our highest and most sacred yearnings. We address those angels, those highest of ideals, and we ask them for the courage of our deepest convictions, saying, ” and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yea, the work of our hands, establish thou it.”

It’s a good place to start, now and always.

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© Davidson Loehr

26 December 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

May we be granted a saving vision, a vision of wholeness, of justice and compassion, a vision of peace. May we be granted that saving vision.

We struggle each day in this land of partial visions, where whole armies and unholy laws serve those whose half-truths have achieved fearful power.

When it is too much, too unrealistic, to hope for the victory of more adequate visions, let us keep the faith that we may have those visions of a healthier kind of wholeness. And let us be sustained and carried forward by those greater visions.

In our lives, in our families, in our relationships, in our nation and in our world, we usually stumble not because we are bad, but because we can’t see clearly enough to discern the higher path. We slip back into our frustrating ruts because we cannot see a better path.

It is said that the longest trip still begins with the first step. But even before the first step, it begins with the vision of where we need to step, where our road needs to lead us.

May we be granted a saving vision, a vision of wholeness, of justice and compassion, a vision of peace. May we be granted that saving vision for our lives, our families, our relationships, our nation and our world.

Amen.

READING:

The reading for this morning is from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Scriptures.

And Yahweh said to Moses, “Ascend this mountain, Mt. Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, opposite Jericho; and view the land of Canaan, which I give to the people of Israel for a possession; and die on the mountain which you ascend, and be gathered to your people. For you shall see the land before you; but you shall not go there, into the land which I give to the people of Israel.” (32:48-52)

And Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mt. Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And Yahweh showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan, all Naph’tali, the land of E’phriam and Manas’seh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain, that is, the valley of Jericho the city of palm trees, as far as Zo’ar. And Yahweh said to Moses, “This is the land which I promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there.” (34: 1-4)

So Moses died there in the land of Moab, never entering the Promised Land.

SERMON: “The View from Mt. Nebo”

Now there are these people in this wilderness, this land that doesn’t feel much like a home, and their leader is taken up to the top of a mountain and given a wonderful vision of a land where all the different peoples have become one in a land of milk and honey.

This is not your run-of-the-mill view, this view from Mt. Nebo. It is not one seen from down below. The people of Gilead don’t see it, nor the people of Judah, nor Moses’s own people.

Their visions are so much more limited. They are just trying to survive down there, and all those other people are in their way. They each have their own small territories, their own cities of darkness, and they cluster together there in their tight little knots, to protect their flanks.

But this one man is given a view almost beyond belief. Some day, he is told, this land will be a place where enemies have learned to be friends, war has given way to peace, and the people are at last one.

Then he is told: oh, by the way – you’ll never live to see this. Long before the fractious nature of the world ends, you will end. Now go back and tell your people about this vision of the Promised Land you’ll never live to see. Make them believe it, help them to seek it. Maybe they will live to see what is beyond the reach of your own lifetime.

Then, the story says, Moses died and his people finally entered the Promised Land. And after defeating all the other inhabitants of the place through a series of wars, they claimed the land as their own, which they are doing again now in our own time. Now there, we have left religion, and come back into tribalism. There they missed the wonderful point the story had just made, and retreated into the very territorialism that the view from Mt. Nebo had pointed beyond.

Now I wonder: is that right, or is it that there the story ended and reality returned? That after this mythic image, we people come back in, and we don’t do well with all these grand visions, and so proceed to mess it all up again?

I am not sure how a story could be more timeless or true to the human condition than the story we used for this morning’s reading. We are as lost in the wilderness today as that little tribe was 3,000 years ago.

More than any other single thing today, we lack a shared vision with enough depth to bring us together. We are disjointed. We are people, but not a people; we are like a landscape filled with potted plants, but no garden.

Lacking a shared vision, we define ourselves by partial visions. And this sets person against person and group against group. The very differences in race, sex, belief or political bias which separate and make us different from others-those are the traits we use to define ourselves and partition our little area off from the rest. No one has a view of the whole. There is a proverb that says, “Without a vision, the people perish.” And we are without a vision.

We are born straight or gay; male or female; white or black. We decide to define ourselves as liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats, and all the rest. We define ourselves by our differences, and then fight for our individual rights. But every victory for a partial vision is really a victory for the wilderness, for a world in which the most fundamental problem is still that we do not share a deep and binding vision.

What would today’s version of the view from Mt. Nebo be? for it would not show us the tribal areas of Gilead, Judah, and the rest. Today’s version of the view from Mt. Nebo, I think, is captured in that remarkable photograph of the earth taken from the surface of the moon that you have all seen. An earth without national, racial, or religious divisions. A living planet where everything on it swirls together into a small but glorious green island in space. So today’s version of Mt. Nebo is that view from the moon. As we grow more and are able to look back upon ourselves from farther out, new and more inclusive visions will take the place of this view from the moon. But the important message in all these progressive views of the whole is that partial visions and little victories for partial visions are the problem, not the solution. The drives and allegiances which once served us now serve to defeat us.

Nationalism served us once. It bonded the people of a country together and made them one. But now the territory we must care for is not a nation but the whole planet, and so the same spirit of nationalism which once brought local people together is driving global peoples apart.

Nor can the great world religions bond the peoples of the planet together. Once they brought people together within the religious framework of their particular faith. But from here on the situation is one of peoples with very different faiths, few of whom will ever convert. And so like nationalism, religions have become associated with the factions, as instruments of propaganda and self-importance. General propaganda for one or another of the local solutions has become a menace.

Let me be clear about this Promised Land business, for we can get into trouble if we confuse poetry and reality. I do not for one minute really believe that the world will ever be united into one happy group of warless people with a single shared common vision, a world where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them,” as Isaiah put it (Isaiah 11:6, RSV). That is mythic language, not historical language, and the fact that this hope has been given poetic form for most of recorded history must help us realize that this is not a problem to be solved by enlightened social programs, but a timeless picture of the human condition itself.

Nevertheless, the view from Mt. Nebo is a vision we are called to live by, if we are to live this life deeply and caringly, if we are to aspire to become most fully human or most nearly divine, whichever way you prefer to put it. And it is fundamentally different from the visions which really do rule the world as humans know it and seem always to have known it. It is a vision calling us to see each other not in terms of our differences, but in terms of those human or divine things which we hold in common, those yearnings that lie deep within us all.

It is a vision of the earth like that photograph taken from the moon, and we are called to live as if it were true. The Promised Land would be what the world would be like if everyone lived as if it were true. That is what I believe we are called to do: you and I and everyone who wants to try and become part of the solution rather than part of the continuing problem. That is the fundamental religious task before the world today: the task of finding, articulating, and living a vision of wholeness that can begin to bring us together.

I’ll give you two examples of more recent people who preached and tried to live by this vision. One you will know, the other you may not. I was told recently, though I have not read this myself, that the native Americans, or American Indians, had a wonderful policy that could teach us this greater vision. When they had to make a major decision for the tribe, and the grand council was called together, they were commanded to make the decision based upon the effects of that decision on the next seven generations of people. That’s about 150 to 200 years. Can you imagine what our world today would be like if all major decisions concerning the environment, social programs, and war were made taking into account the needs and benefits of the next seven generations? Or how grateful we would be if that had been the law of the land for the past five or six generations? There is a modern view from Mt. Nebo.

The second example is one that most of you will know. It comes from thirty six years ago: April 3rd, 1968, to be exact. It was in a speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., just a few days before he was murdered. You have probably heard these words, but unless you knew your Bible very well, you probably didn’t know just what they were referring to before. Here is what King wrote:

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain top. I won’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.

And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.

So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

This story about Mt. Nebo is not as ancient or forgotten as we may have thought. And one of its messages is that we will be judged, you and I-both by ourselves and by others-according to the bigness of the vision we served with our lives. Long after Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson have been forgotten, Martin Luther King Jr. will still be remembered and quoted and missed, because he had a view from that mountain. And he proclaimed that promise, and lived that promise, even though he suspected that he, like Moses, would not live to see it fulfilled.

Neither will you or I. But we will be remembered according to the vision we served. And it is far nobler to struggle with a great vision than to champion a mediocre one. Think of the people you most cherish from your own lives and see if this isn’t true. They aren’t the clever or arrogant people, but those who reached out to the world around them as if they belonged to it, who acted as if we really were all together in this. You know those people from your own life, and you know-whether you would use these words or not-that in those special people the most sacred dimension of life was touched, and was brought to life.

We gather at this church and at many other churches today to ponder things like this, to think about them, but I want to say there is more to it than that. It is not just a mind-game, this religion business. There are things at the depth of life which call us, which make demands on us, which say to us “look, if you are to be serious about this life, you must care about it. You must care about the people who need you, and about the planet, which is your home. Whether you like it or not, whether it is intellectually interesting or not, there are things you are simply called to do, and you must answer that call!”

The view from Mt. Nebo is not the view looking back toward our own small group, trying to see the whole world in terms of only our own beliefs. It is looking ahead, to a place we have never been, to a vision of foreigners become friends, strangers become brothers and sisters, a place where the deep awareness of our commonalities is so strong that it can absorb our differences, the way it is done within healthy families and loving friendships.

We will not live to reach the Promised Land. That is not our goal. Our goal is to live to reach the vision, and to begin to live that vision out in our lives. We need each other. This community of Austin and its environs needs us. This country needs us. This desperate world needs us, every single one of us. We don’t need any more ways to be apart, we need ways to be together, and our world calls us to that task.

Partial visions in our community and our world must be replaced by more complete ones. Who will do it, if not us?

New moral perspectives are needed on so many issues of the day: the questions and problems raised by the AIDS epidemic, all of the issues surrounding abortion, programs for human services and the prioritizing of our local and national commitments, which must be guided by a more humane and moral vision. Who will do this, if not us?

There are hungry and desperate people in our town, in our country, and in our world. Who will care for them, if not us? And who will try to change the structures of the community, the country, and the world to help make them productive people with their own earned dignity-if not us?

Who will wipe their tears, who will reach out and touch them, if not you and I and the rest of us?

The view from Mt. Nebo is a view of the Promised Land. It is a metaphor. It uses geographical symbols and describes this Land as if it were out there. But you don’t get there in a car. For this is the language of religion, not geography, and like all religious metaphors, it points within and among us, not across some fields or oceans.

The view from Mt. Nebo is the vision of a coordinated soul, reunited with its own depths, and reaching out for completion, reaching out to clasp to its breast all of its long-lost brothers and sisters, reaching out in recognition and compassion to bring the human family together again, and to make of this place a home.

The journey begins here. It begins in our own hearts and souls. It can begin simply with a recognition, a feeling, a tear, and a touch. It seems a simple, even an ineffectual, beginning.

And what a grand vision: a world made whole, where a vulnerable and simple truth is honored more than powerful lies, where naked humanity trumps an ensconced hierarchy. It is a vision of what has been call a world of truth, justice and love, the kingdom of God, the Promised Land.

We won’t live to see the whole thing, ever. Neither did Moses, or Martin Luther King, Jr. But to be inspired by the vision, by the view from today’s version of Mt. Nebo, and actually to begin taking steps toward it – that view, and those steps, can transform all the lives they can touch. Even ours, even here, even now.

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© Davidson Loehr

12 December 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us prepare a manger in our hearts for the birth of the sacred. When we are offered a choice between certain but sterile doubts and fragile but fertile faith, let us choose a faith that feeds our souls. For something sacred needs to be born: born from the mating of what is, and what might be.

Living in a tragic world, let us remind ourselves it is also a hopeful world, with a future yet to be constructed, a future wanting to enlist builders of a better tomorrow. Let us enlist in that army who will build a better future.

And let us be comforted by the fact that it is never foolish to believe in a better tomorrow. It is never faithless to believe that the tender mercies of love, truth and justice are on the side of the angels. Indeed, they are the only aspirations that are on the side of the angels.

Those angels are messengers from the gods, from that unconquerable realm of hope, faith and love. And this is the season when those angels tell us that something sacred wants to be born. It needs a manger. Let us prepare a manger in our hearts for the birth of the sacred.

Amen.

SERMON: Advent

Advent is about preparing ourselves for the birth of something sacred. Advent isn’t the holiday; it’s getting ready for the holiday. It’s the personal homework we have to do to enter into the spirit of holidays. This week, in trying to get myself into an Advent kind of mood, I Googled the word “Advent” on the Internet. Two of the first things I saw were ads. One said:

“Advent Blowout – incredible prices on electronics at Amazon.com. Free shipping.” The other told me that I could buy a LEGO Advent calendar at Target for only $14.99. This wasn’t helpful.

But while I was doing this, an e-mail arrived from a colleague, containing some quotations he was forwarding for general usage. One that struck me was from the medieval Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich: “This is the cause why we are not at rest in heart and soul: that here we seek our rest in things that are so little there is no rest in them.”

Her quote seems so much more appropriate for this season than frenzied ads for Advent Blowout sales or LEGO calendars. Especially since the ads are such good examples of just what any holy days are supposed to be lifting us beyond.

But for its whole history, Advent has been an attempt to lure Christians away from the low and trivial concerns that are too little in which to find rest for our souls. If we do it right, this whole season is about trying to find things big enough to rest in. Christmas is the season of that spirit.

This search for a spirit big enough to rest in is one of the deepest yearnings we have, and you don’t have to look far to find us pursuing it.

The special choral piece today is an example. Brent chooses these larger works, and the choir learns them, because they find something large there, something coming from a large spirit, and they want to share it with both themselves and with you, as a place worth resting in.

The new twist on the food collection we’ll be starting next week is also one of these. We’re aspiring to a bigger generosity, both because others need it, and because we are enlarged by acting out of a bigger generosity.

And the new members we welcomed today are part of this spirit. People join a church hoping to find that bigger spirit, hoping to become a part of it as it becomes a part of them.

There are a lot of things this season that celebrate this larger spirit. We are right in the middle of Hanukkah, which began Wednesday. It’s the Jewish festival of lights, but it is to remember a time in ancient Judaism when some brave people during the Maccabees’ revolt of twenty-two centuries ago were so filled with that bigger spirit that they transformed Jewish history.

But you can find the calls of this larger spirit everywhere. Friday (December 10th) was the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. I read that story, which said it was “the first occasion on which the organized international community of nations has made a Declaration on Human Rights and fundamental freedoms…. It is to this document that millions of men and women in countries far distant from Paris or New York will turn for hope and guidance and inspiration.” (NY Times, December 10, 1948) Well, this is a good season for the anniversary of that hopeful declaration, because it celebrated the same large spirit that we’re trying to get ourselves attuned to during Advent.

And nearly five centuries ago, on December 10, 1520, at the start of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther publicly burned the papal edict demanding that he recant or face excommunication. He did that because he was serving a bigger spirit than that being served by what was at the time a very corrupt Catholic Church. He rested in that bigger spirit for the rest of his life, as many millions of Protestants also have.

Tacky ads for Advent Blowout sales are parasites on the spirit of this season in the same way that orchestrated flag-waving as a conditioned reflex is a caricature of true patriotism, and Valentine’s Day cards are hobos riding the rails of real love. They are all too small to rest in. But behind all these little things that are too small to find rest in, there is that bigger spirit.

Still, it can be risky blowing the horn for these holidays. Because so often, voices urging us to serve a bigger spirit come soaked in guilt, and just represent more work to do, as though we weren’t already doing enough. As though the choir just hasn’t done enough big works demanding extra rehearsals, so they needed to squeeze one in before Christmas. Or we should feel guilty about having enough to eat, so bringing food to share is a kind of penance to make us feel bad. Or you haven’t done enough spiritually, so it’s about time you sinners joined a church! Or you better tell the Hanukah story to remind yourself that once there were people who really suffered, really knew how to make sacrifices! And while you’re at it, go buy more Christmas presents! Oh sure, the workers in China and other poor countries are paid slave wages to produce them, and suffer the kind of human rights violations we resolved to end back in 1948. But companies like Wal-Mart make 1/3 to 1/2 of their annual profits during this season and their stockholders would like your money, so go make their stock prices rise by running up that 20+% interest on your credit card debts, like a good American should!

You see how easily this could become an absolutely miserable Christmas season? Realism can slide into cynicism seamlessly. Lego Advent calendars, Advent Blowouts – and of course, guilt: the gift that keeps on giving? One bit of advice I have for us this year is that if you are offered that kind of a holiday, just say No! And remember those poetic words from Julian of Norwich:

“This is the cause why we are not at rest in heart and soul: that here we seek our rest in things that are so little there is no rest in them.”

You don’t have to be Christian, or Jewish, or Lutheran to enter into this season. Christmas has been a cultural holiday for over a century: virtually all the public decorations are paid for and put up by merchants, because some of them really do make 1/3 to 1/2 of their annual profits during this super-hyped season. Many bemoan this, but I like the fact that our winter solstice celebration has returned to being a cultural holiday, open to all. No religion owns it. You just have to be alive and awake to the fact that when we can find a bigger spirit to serve, we can find a kind of rest for our souls, and that rest is worth seeking.

A bigger identity is calling to us, every season but particularly this season. It sang to us through Benjamin Britten’s wonderful music, it glows for us in the Advent and Hanukkah candles. It welcomes us as the church welcomes new spiritual seekers and spiritual finders into our membership. And sharing our food with some of Austin’s hungrier people reminds us that even in simple ways we can make a big difference in the lives of our brothers and sisters here and elsewhere.

There is an old Jewish story about this, because there is an old Jewish story about everything.

A small synagogue was struggling to stay alive. There was no generous spirit there, nothing to rest in, and the people had taken to bickering. Finally, one of them set out to visit this great wise rabbi in the next town, to ask his advice. He told the rabbi their sad story.

“Well,” the old man said, “your problem is that you are suffering from the sin of ignorance. The Messiah is among you, and you are ignorant of this fact.” When the man returned to his small synagogue and related these words, nobody could believe them. “How could it be one of us?” they would ask. Then, to prove that it couldn’t be true, they would go down the list of each one of them, outlining all the reasons it certainly couldn’t be that person, or that person, or any of them.

Still, the old rabbi was known for a surprising kind of wisdom. So they thought “My God, what if it is that person? Or that person? And just in case it might be, they started treating one another much more generously. As you can imagine, this changed the spirit of the place completely. They had found a bigger spirit in which to reside, and as they resided in it and it in them, both they and their synagogue grew into a very great blessing in the world.

That’s a kind of Hanukkah story, a kind of Christmas story, a kind of holy music sung by a choir of angels. The music is set to the words of that wise old rabbi and the words of Julian of Norwich. It contains the secret of this season, and the secret of finding that bigger place in which to rest.

Our sin is a sin of ignorance. The Messiah is among us, and we are ignorant of this fact. What is the Messiah that can save us? It is the spirit of life carried in good music performed with love. It is the generous spirit that feeds the hungry, right here in Austin. It is the yearning to join a church, to join together in a community of spiritual seekers and finders. These are some of the Messiahs among us, some of the spirits big enough to rest in.

But there’s more, too. The Messiah, the light of the world and hope of the future, is also within us – within each of us – and we are often ignorant of that fact, too.

Now I’ve shared the great secret with you, for you to share with others. The Messiah is both among us and within us. Let us learn to become the midwives for the birth of the sacred. For something sacred wants to be born among and within us, and it needs our help.

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© Davidson Loehr

28 November 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

In thinking about this service, which deals with learning how to express our beliefs in ordinary language rather than the language owned by religions, I thought back to the first time I had to do this.

It was over 20 years ago, during my ministerial internship at a vibrant and exciting Christian church in south Chicago. My first turn to preach was coming up (the church had three interns, so we each got to preach only twice a year). The minister said I was responsible for writing not only a sermon, but also a prayer.

I’d never written a prayer, and tried to get out of it. “No,” he said, “and this will be tougher for you than for the others, since you’re a Unitarian. You have to offer a prayer on behalf of this Christian congregation, to connect them with their own spiritual depths, and the source of life – by whatever name you call it. And it must have the integrity of coming from an honest place within you, as well.”

It was a tough assignment, and the first prayer I ever wrote. This sermon topic reminded me of it, so now I offer it to you, twenty-odd years after it was first written:

Prayer

We pray not to something, but from something, to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are,

and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people, those experiences, and those transformations

that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes

with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

AMEN.

SERMON: The Legitimate Heir to Christianity

The Buddhists tell a wonderful story which they say goes all the way back to the Buddha. It sounds simple, even funny, like a child’s tale. But it’s one of the most revolutionary stories ever told. You’ve probably heard it before:

A man was on a small island when a flash flood came up, surrounding him with a deadly rushing river on all sides. He might have drowned or starved, but was lucky enough to find a raft left there by someone else. He found a long pole, and rode the raft to safety on the other side. He was so grateful to the raft for saving him that he put it on his back and carried it there for the rest of his life. The Buddha asked whether that is the right way to use a raft, and said No.

The raft worked once, now put it down and go on your way. Because your next passage may not need a raft at all, but a vehicle of a very different kind. And we must be prepared to change vehicles – including our beliefs about ourselves, about relationships, about work, about our nation, or about God – if we are going to use beliefs wisely rather than foolishly. For beliefs are only useful if they help us through the transitions we are facing, not if we are carrying them on our backs, or sticking with them because they were prescribed by someone authoritative.

This is really one of the most radical and empowering stories ever written. It encourages heresy; it sanctions experimentation, and it endorses change. It trusts us more than our religions, trusts us to know what kind of a vehicle we might need at any point, trusts us to change vehicles – and grants us the authority to do so.

When you apply this to religion, it could get you burned at the stake in most times and places. But it’s profound and wise. Sometimes even our religions become like rafts that must be put down as we search for their legitimate heir. A legitimate heir is one that can carry us through tough transitions with integrity and hope.

For instance, the more our current administration claims it’s being guided by God, the more warlike, greedy and imperialistic it becomes. If you take them at their word, they are Christians – or at least people who believe in God, since they mention God a lot more than they mention Jesus. And if that is how the word “God” is being defined and used in our society, then we need a different way of talking about what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We need a legitimate heir to it, and fast!

This topic came up from a couple directions. The first is just looking around at the way the very worst kind of religion has now gained a potentially dangerous degree of political power. Also, I am trying to write a new nine-hour program on this question to teach at SUUSI, the large Unitarian summer camp in Blacksburg, Virginia next July. So I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and this sermon is the first result – there will be more as the year goes on.

Still: why would anyone suggest such a thing as the legitimate heir to Christianity or God? On the surface, it just sounds rude. While America was never founded as a Christian nation, Christianity has still been the dominant religion here since we began. So whether we are Christians or not, our whole society is shot through with the symbols and myths of that religion, for both good and bad.

The words to the song “Blowin’ in the Wind” that we sang this morning were a protest song, and part of the message was that whatever was carrying our notions of decency, civility, and peaceful behavior – whatever the vehicles of our nobler aspirations were, they were failing. We needed a legitimate heir to the culture that said yes to an immoral war and no to decent treatment of even our own people. That’s really the message this morning as well.

Cultures look to their religions, when they are healthy, to carry deep and healthy assessments of the human condition. Religions, at their best, have produced some of our species’ finest outcries against the injustices of the powerful against the powerless, those who control money over those who earn it and the rest. When people like MLK Jr. refer to their religion as an aid in unjust times, those are the passages they refer to, not the other, inhumane, even murderous and embarrassing passages.

History shows us that all gods die, though the great ones die more slowly, and can linger in a moribund state for centuries. They can die in several ways. They can die when the cosmology supporting them collapses. They can die when they no longer inspire passion or affection in people’s hearts. — And they can die when their stories and symbols are more easily hijacked by preachers and politicians of low and mean purpose than by those of high and noble purpose.

And all these things have happened during the past couple centuries to the primary God of our American culture.

But back to my question: Why does the God of Western religions need an heir, and what does it mean to be a “legitimate” heir?

One measure is political: the degree to which only the very lowest forms of Christianity have attracted and been attracted to the political and military power in our time. Pat Robertson has said that a democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians – the kind that will not tax the rich, will not support social services, welfare or public education, and so on. And the Rev. Jerry Falwell said during a television interview a couple weeks ago that we should hunt down terrorists and blow them away in the name of the Lord.

Jesus would detest these men. Don’t be shocked, that’s not a bit overstated. Heck, Jesus called Peter Satan, and that was just because Peter didn’t understand him! Peter wasn’t even offering to blow people away in the name of God. Jesus would detest these men, and the low and hateful religion they sell.

The God of people like Robertson and Falwell – and a growing number of other bad preachers – is not a God worth serving, and has nothing to do with the far higher teachings of a Jesus who instructed people to love one another and not to judge one another, and who said that whatever we did to the least among us we did to him. The God Jerry Falwell worships is little more than his own bigotries, writ large and nasty. And ironically, the fact that he can proudly chant such hateful and murderous advice while holding a bible shows that he doesn’t really believe in the God of Jesus for one second, and knows that nothing will happen to him for insulting the very idea of God with his smallness. That’s the measure of a religion whose God has died. And when gods die, their corpses almost always become hand puppets for the worst kind of charlatans and demagogues. Conversely, and importantly, when a God can become the hand puppet of low-level charlatans and demagogues like these men, it is a sign that that God is dying.

This has happened before. When Franco (Francisco Franco Bahamonde, 1892-1975) established his fascist dictatorship in Spain, he brought the Catholic Church into power with him – but, again, just the low and mean parts that oppressed women, the poor and the different. But when Franco’s reign finally ended, so did the power of the Church. People had seen that it became the willing toady of the worst kind of people all too eagerly, and they didn’t trust it with their hearts or minds. In some ways, Spain now has a more liberal set of abortion laws than our own country does. When a court grants permission for a third trimester abortion, for instance, the country pays for it. That’s a sign of the Church losing authority in people’s minds and hearts, and it happened because the religion seemed like far too natural a bedmate for fascism.

Now in our own country, the phrase “Christo-fascism” is beginning to appear in more and more places — Google it, and you’ll find an increasing number of hits, over 300 now. Some feel it is happening here. I’m one of them. And once again, the religion seems more available as a tool for the rich, greedy, powerful and mean than for the poor, for whom Jesus spoke. Jesus didn’t think rich people could even get in to heaven. Now they own it, and the tickets so expensive the poor can’t afford them. You can hardly betray Jesus more fundamentally than that!

A second reason the raft won’t float is scientific. It’s that the symbols and myths of Christianity lost their footing in the real world more than two centuries ago, as the best Christian thinkers have pointed out for at least that long.

Western religions were grounded on the idea of a male God who was a being. He walked, talked, saw and heard, planned, rewarded and punished. To do these things, he had to live somewhere, and eventually they assigned him to heaven, which they believed was right above the sky.

But during the past couple centuries; we have realized there is nothing above the sky but endless space. God lost a place to live. And that means – though few people want to take it this far – that we lost the kind of God who could do human-type things like seeing, hearing, or loving. We haven’t seen through this revolution yet, but it is a profound one.

If somebody tells you that God wants you to do something, you should be asking how you could check that out for yourself, independently. If there is not a way – and it’s not clear how there could be a way – then the command doesn’t come from God. It’s the command of those who have turned the corpse of this God into their hand puppet to serve their agenda – often at your expense.

Now, we could go on listing all the logical or scientific or common-sense reasons that the myths and symbols of Christianity are anachronistic, but it wouldn’t achieve much. Because religions aren’t primarily vehicles of truth about the world. Primarily, they are like the rafts in that Buddhist story. Rafts to carry us across certain kinds of human dilemmas, with honest insights into the human condition and wisdom to help us live wisely and well.

It’s true that once we’ve been helped by a religion we tend to carry that raft around on our backs from then on, whether it’s the right vehicle for us or not. But it’s more true that we need some kind of a vehicle for our hopes, dreams, yearnings and tender mercies. And the very best stories and teachings of Christianity honor those, even if its loudest and most powerful preachers and adherents do not.

So it isn’t enough to set the raft down. A legitimate heir to God would have to carry our yearnings and help us to live more wisely and well.

Religions, like their gods, lose their roots in the hearts and minds of people when they are no longer seen as having the power to resist being dragged down by the lowest kind of preachers, politicians and media. But neither morality nor ethics rely on religion as their vehicles – and that’s good news. Across Europe, for instance, religion has lost its power of persuasion. Only about one or two percent of the English and French attend church, and it’s only a few points higher in Germany. And as a nation, Japan is officially secular. Even closer to home, so is Canada, whose ties with Catholicism are little more than ornamental. Yet these cultures have moral standards at least as high as ours, both as individuals and as society.

To take just a couple examples, they all have lower infant mortality rates and higher educational standards than we do. They all have far fewer citizens without basic health insurance than we do, and they all have higher standards of living for their citizens over age 65 than we do. And in Germany and the Netherlands, all citizens who want it are given a free college education, because the government believes that informed citizens able to think are preferable to ignorant citizens who just obey.

Don’t think of these as merely “political” values. These are profoundly religious values. They show the souls of these nations. They show how these nations regard others, how they treat their own weakest members, whether their “pro-life” stance is dishonest rhetoric or healthy governmental programs to serve the life of their people throughout their lives. These are religious values, nothing less. If the tree is known by its fruits, as Jesus said, than America is the least religious and compassionate country in the developed world!

So. We look outward to a world of countries that are more moral and ethical than we are, though far less religious. Some say this means that religion is bad. I don’t agree, but I say it means that bad religion should be dropped like a hot raft.

I want us, both individually and collectively, to develop a more adequate religion, and a more adequate sense of compassion and responsibility toward others that our national policies show us to have. It can happen within Christianity or any other religion if that religion can be raised to its higher levels of aspiration rather than sinking to its lower ones. It can also be done without any organized religion. Well, that’s a good thing, because nobody has a more disorganized religion than Unitarians.

But however it is done and wherever it is done, it needs to inspire us, and needs to inspire our nation to change its direction from a greedy, selfish, imperialistic nation that is now disliked or detested by most other countries in the world.

Here are seven things the legitimate heir to God will have to have, I think:

1. It must be reality-based, consistent with the findings of our best contemporary sciences. Pretending the Grand Canyon is only six thousand years old is an insult to the intelligence of an attentive twelve-year-old, and not worthy of us. If you can’t serve truth, you can’t serve God. And ignorant ideology does not trump truth, except under fascism.

2. The legitimate heir to God must be inclusive and expansive. The Greeks made the best picture of this that I know. They pictured the completed human being as a series of concentric circles. In the center was just the individual. Next were the relationships that expanded the individual’s awareness, compassion and responsibility. Next, the relations with other friends, other citizens, and society. Then the world, all of history, and all the high ideals often associated with gods, but which the Greeks of 2400 years ago associated with our own fuller humanity.

3. Liberals may not like this next one: the legitimate heir to God must be compelling, even commanding. Conservative Christians speak of the need to feel “convicted” before we can see the light, and this is true. We must not only hear of higher possibilities, but also be awakened, “convicted” and converted by them.

4. It must be – in Origen’s wonderful 3rd century phrase – both “useful to us, and worthy of God.” “God,” here, means the highest set of demands we can articulate, the highest ideals, the most inclusive attitude, and the most demanding kind of life. The way, as Jesus and many others have said, is very narrow, and not many enter it.

5. It must be the biggest, most inclusive, most compassionate framework we can imagine – otherwise, it wouldn’t be worthy of the name “God,” let alone God’s legitimate heir. And it must be both more accepting and more demanding of us than psychology, politics, religion or nationalism can be. Why must it be bigger? Because in a pluralistic world where people hold many conflicting beliefs, you either need a larger God, or a larger army. The path of nationalism and imperialism is always to go for the army; the path of honest religion is always to try and articulate a larger concept of God – by whatever name it’s called forth.

6. But it must give us life. That’s the mark of a God. The basic covenant people make with their gods is always the same, and it’s very simple. We say, “I’ll serve you heart, mind and body, I’ll give my life into your service.” Then whatever we have made into our God must give us a life worth living. If it can’t do that, it isn’t a real god, but a phony, or a hand puppet.

7. We need a bigger vehicle than the raft our society is offering us under the banner of approved Christianity or the God sanctioned by our loudest and worst preachers, politicians and media. We need a larger vehicle for the wisdom which has helped the great religions to endure in the hearts and minds of countless generations of people who are trying to grow into their full humanity, trying to grow into children of God, to realize their Buddha nature, to understand that atman really is one with Brahman, to incarnate the rhythms and rules of the Tao, and act out of that infinite and eternal identity rather than something lesser.

All of these are saying about the same thing, in the jargon of their individual religions. In a pluralistic world, however, jargon just separates us. We need to be brought together, and that means we need to be able to say what we actually believe, in ordinary language so people in other religions can understand us, and can realize that we’re not so different after all.

And the more we can put these things in ordinary language, the easier it will be to communicate with people of good character, no matter what their religion is. Because these are the goals of all decent religion. So this rebirth can happen within any existing religion. But it can also happen in ordinary language, without any religious beliefs attached at all.

I’m buying something for the church through my Minister’s Discretionary Fund that I hope will help us begin generating discussions of the things we believe, and help us create a church culture where high ideals are felt to be commanding to us.

I solicited some people I don’t think we’ve solicited for special donations before, in order to raise a little over two thousand dollars. We have enough promised, have collected almost all of it, and this week we’ll be ordering a new and powerful projector that can project VHS, DVD or from a computer, and a large screen.

I have a series of videotapes of the six-hour program Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers did almost twenty years ago, and have bought the DVD of the movie “The Corporation” for showing here and in other churches.

But I hope we will have Friday movie nights here, as many Fridays as we can get groups to organize. Movies on the economy, social criticism; anti-war movies, but also contemporary movies with powerful human themes that are worth exploring, as well as family movies meant to include children, but with themes that are uplifting and educational.

That’s enough for now. The subject of finding the next step, the legitimate heir to what was once called God, is one of the biggest and most important steps people can take. And it is taken, like so many things, step, by step, by step.

But spend some time with this, will you? Spend some time asking what you really believe, what beliefs you think might guide you better than the pronouncements about God you’re hearing – and will be hearing more of from our worst preachers, politicians and pundits.

We say we’re all in this together. But first, we must all be in this search for beliefs worth living by that we can live with. It’s your move. It’s our move. Like always.