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© Davidson Loehr

6 June 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:

Sixty years ago today, U.S. forces landed on the beaches of Normandy for the D-Day invasion that began turning the direction of WWII toward victory. But the cost was very high, paid in the currency of young dead soldiers. While the sacrifice of soldiers is something we must not underestimate, it must be balanced by a sense of the terrible loss, the human tragedy, in a game played by sacrificing young soldiers as wars do. So for our prayer this morning, I have chosen Archibald Macleish’s poem to speak for these concerns. The poem is titled “The Young Dead Soldiers.”

The Young Dead Soldiers

by Archibald Macleish

The young dead soldiers do not speak. Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them? They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.

They say: we were young. We have died. Remember us.

They say: we have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.

They say: we have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.

They say: our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them.

They say: whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.

They say: we leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

SERMON: Religion 101

I’m trying something old this morning, reworking a sermon I wrote in my first year of ministry, in the fall of 1986. I was surprised to find how long it was: 4500 words! I’ve cut out about 2,000 words here. So let’s talk about “Religion 101.”

At the end of his book The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran’s “prophet” is asked to speak of religion, and he gives a brief lesson in Religion 101 when he says:

Have I spoken this day of anything else?

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, and that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?

Who can separate our faith from our actions, or our belief from our occupations?

… Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all….

Here’s another short quote about religion 101, from the American psychologist William James, who was quoting one of his favorite professors:

“Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 487)

The words are taken from James’ book The Varieties of Religious Experience, written in 1902 and still better than anything in its field. There are, as the title of his book says, many varieties of religious experience. Not just one kind, not just one path, not just one flavor or style or rhythm, but many varieties of religious experience, many roads to this nebulous thing that answers to the name of ” religion.”

” Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.”

For many people, there is nothing of value in religion. As a physicist I knew in graduate school said, ” religion is just a dangerous mental virus: it takes over your mind, and if you don’t get rid of it, it metastasizes, and before you know it you’re a slobbering mystic.”

A more famous, if less picturesque, definition of religion came from Karl Marx, who called it ” the opium of the masses.” But to lift only that last phrase out of what Marx said is to miss the poignancy of the two sentences which preceded it. What Marx really wrote was this:

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opium of the masses.”

(from Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Marx and Engels, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), p. 263)

It’s worth a paragraph to explain what it meant, calling religion the opiate of the masses. In Marx’s time, the wealthy routinely used heroin for a high-priced high that they accepted as solace and enlightenment. But heroin was strictly an upper-class drug then, and Marx was saying that the masses got their sense of solace and enlightenment at a much cheaper price from religion.

If we want to understand what religion is about, let’s start with the word itself. The key parts of the word are the “re-” and the ” -lig”. The prefix “re-” means the same that it means in other words, like re-make, re-turn, or re-do: it means to do something again. And the “-lig” means the same that it means in words like ” ligament’ or ” ligature:’ it refers to something that ties or binds together, that connects. So the word “religion” means a kind of re-connecting, re-binding things which have become separate. Specifically, religion means the reconnecting of life with meaning, of the human spirit with an enduring purpose, of people with themselves and their world.

It is a special kind of re-connecting, the connecting involved in religion. It is a connecting with orientations, values, and centers that can give to life a deep sense of balance, harmony, and peace, with a picture of the world that provides a caring place for us in it. There seems to be the feeling that, sometime, we must have been connected. That may not in fact be true, but it comes, in part, from the deep feeling in almost all people that they know what they are seeking. And how, then, could they know about the sense of peace, balance, and harmony which they are seeking unless there were something profoundly natural and innate about it.

It is as though we each had a kind of hole inside. A Southern Baptist minister friend of mine calls it, predictably, a “God-shaped hole”, but that is only partly right. For the kinds of insights and wonderings and gropings which have been put into God-language are only a few of the ways in which people have tried to put a name to that which could fill this hole, this need, this persistent sense that there could and should be more to life.

Basically, and to be a little too simple about it all, there are two directions that this search for connection takes. And, while they seem very different, together they show us much about what is really being sought in this religion business.

The first direction is to look for reconnection to a bigger sort of reality outside of us, to try and find patterns in the cosmos of which we are a part, and to feel ourselves anchored in this larger reality in a comforting yet challenging way. This is the route that could be called the path of all the sciences. The task of our grand speculative sciences is not only to describe some kind of outside reality, but to make the universe meaningful in human terms, to make it meaningful to us. Or, to take it a step farther, the task of the sciences is to present us with an understanding of the cosmos that can make it feel like a home to us, a grand reality of which we are a part, in which we have a place. If a science stops short of this, if it doesn’t present us as part of its grand picture, we have the feeling that it isn’t quite done yet, that further developments or discoveries are needed to make it all more relevant to us.

What has all this got to do with “religion”? It has to do with the deep and persistent yearning that we have for a sense of the whole of things that includes us in meaningful ways. If we look out to the world around us, that religious impulse is pursued mostly through our scientific endeavors. But the need to find a place for ourselves in the grand scheme of things, it’s worth mentioning, is not a scientific problem at all, but a religious one. It’s the yearning for a sense of re-connection to a larger reality, to the over-all scheme of things, for a persuasive feeling that we are somehow included in the grand scheme of things.

You can put some of the aims of religion in much simpler terms. In plain language, every religion worthy of the name is the attempt to become better people, better partners, better parents and better citizens. It is the attempt to make a positive difference in the lives of ourselves, our children, and our larger community and world. It’s concerned with trying to feel re-connected in meaningful ways with a larger and more enduring reality. The first route, the one I’ve been trying to sketch up until now, looks outward, to the world and universe around us, and tries to paint a picture that finally includes us in significant ways. The direction, to reduce the whole field of science to a grand gesture, is to look outward, to trace the outlines of a horizon of all that is, in a way that at last brings us into it.

But there is also a second direction where the religious impulse carries us. This is the journey within ourselves, that deep looking-within for value and purpose, for worth and direction. While the direction is different, however, the goal is the same. It is the goal of re-connecting us with a larger picture of ourselves and the world around us.

The first route is the route of science, and pseudo-science and even of superstition. The second route is the route of psychology, philosophy, and the more existentialist approaches to religion. One poetic way this second route has been characterized is as “the soul’s search for God.” Or, in the older terms of Greek mythology, Psyche’s search for Eros: the soul’s search for divine love. It is written about not in the language of science, but the language of poetry. This is the route you’ll find in so many of the wonderful psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is also the route taken by the mystics of all times and places. In order to recognize the religious dimensions of writings along this second route, we have to read them not as science but as poetry. I’ll read you one, to make this both more clear and more beautiful. It is a paragraph from the great fifth century Christian thinker known to us as Saint Augustine.

Augustine’s influence in western religious thought cannot be overestimated. He was the most profound single person in the whole history of Christian thought, and easily the most influential. His theology became the orthodoxy of Roman Catholic thought for a thousand years or more, and he is often called the grandfather of the Protestant Reformation, as well. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, and both Luther and John Calvin, the other great Protestant reformer, quoted Augustine’s writings more than all other thinkers combined. But besides being a first-rate theologian, he was a first-rate religious poet. Listen to this single paragraph, taken from his autobiography, where he tries to talk about his God. Don’t think of the word “God” here as meaning some sort of a giant critter, some kind of a large old man with a beard, or fingers and kneecaps, or you’ll miss it completely. This is not science, but religious poetry, and religious poetry of the first order. Here are Augustine’s words, written nearly 1600 years ago:

What do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not blown away by the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God. (Confessions, p. 211)

When at last I cling to you with all my being, for me there will be no more sorrow, no more toil. Then at last I shall be alive with true life, for my life will be wholly filled by you. (p. 232)

Augustine, here, uses the masculine pronoun for this “god” of his, but it’s pretty clear that he’s not talking about a male, a man, or a superman. Nor would it be any more helpful to use feminine pronouns, for he’s not talking about a female, a woman, or a superwoman, either. It is clear – and this is true of most of the great theologians – that the anthropomorphic language is being used for poetic reasons, not scientific ones. Grand scientific theories, when they work, can make us feel included in the grand scheme of things. That’s the goal of the first road to religion, the road that leads outward. But the second route is quite different: Augustine didn’t feel merely included in reality, he felt cherished by it!

Every mystic, every poet, and the artists, musicians, dancers, and romantics of all times and places would recognize a kindred spirit in these words of Augustine’s.

Less poetic and more modern versions of this interior route to the quest for connectedness are the hundreds of psychotherapies to which people go in search of the elusive sense of reconnection. Nor should that seem odd: remember that the Greek word psyche, the root word in both “psychotherapy” and “psychology”, means soul. So the therapy of the soul consists, as it always has, in re-connecting it with a sense of wholeness.

By now you are perhaps picking up a pattern here, which is that I can find religion everywhere. And that is true. I find it, as so many others have, underlying most of our scientific wonderments; I find it in fairy tales, children’s tales, in mythology, literature, the arts, music, psychology, meditation, cultural anthropology, yoga, and a hundred other human endeavors. If our religion is our search for wholeness and connectedness, then it is like a sacred melody, singing through everything we do.

And it is. I began by speaking of religion, and then I went on, it may have seemed, to speak of many other things. But, to repeat the words of Kahlil Gibran with which I began,

Have I spoken this day of anything else?

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, and that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?

Who can separate our faith from our actions, or our belief from our occupations?

… Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all….

You bring your religion, as I do, into everything you do, and woven deep into the fabric of all our endeavors we’ll find that golden thread, that part of our very core that is seeking for a kind of connectedness and re-connectedness above, beneath, and through it all.

Think, this week, about what your own religion really is: the ways in which you look for connectedness within yourself and in the world around you. Think of the things that seem to work, and those that do not, and the blind alleys that may exist. Think of the difference between feeling merely included in your world, and feeling cherished by it. And wonder about some things, as well. Wonder what it is you are trying to be re-connected to, and whether it is worth it; wonder who has helped you to be more connected to meaning and purpose in your life, whether you have ever told them so; and wonder who you might help connect to those things worth connecting to.

My friend the physicist was partly right. Religion is sort of like a mental or spiritual virus, and – if we’re persistent – it can indeed begin to take over our life. At least that’s the hope. Religion is about trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. It is about trying to make a positive difference in ourselves, our children, and our society and world. It is about returning to the place where we began, recognizing that place, and our place within it, for the first time.

But this is all so much talk, so many words about what religion is! Really, it is much simpler. Really, when we think of religion, we shouldn’t think of it as a noun. We should think of it as a verb, as an action word urging us into motion. Then, when religion is understood, the whole subject of “Religion 101” can be summed up in just two words: your move.

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© Davidson Loehr

23 May 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

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 Four Faces of Jesus”

It was a time of terrible fighting. Everywhere people were divided into separate groups, like little clubs. And everywhere they fought against all the people who weren’t in their little club.

They all said they hated the fighting, of course. But they all knew that only the people in their little club were really right – and it is so important, being right. And as long as so many others were wrong – well, they all prayed that God would give them victory so the fighting could stop. But in the meantime, it was a time of terrible fighting.

One day a young magician came to the area. He didn’t belong to any of their clubs, but he was a wonderful magician who did some amazing tricks. And he had that kind of “star quality” about him that drew people to him. Many people loved watching him, though they didn’t much care for listening to him, because of the things he said to them.

What he said to them was that if they weren’t divided into so many little clubs, there wouldn’t be so much fighting. Their clubs, he told them, were the cause of their wars.

To the people, this was about the dumbest thing they had ever heard. Their little clubs gave them a tiny area of peace and friendship among people like themselves, in an otherwise hostile world. They liked their clubs. So they almost never listened when the magician tried to teach them. But they loved his magic, and so kept coming to watch him, and they started telling stories about what a great magician he was.

Years later, after the young magician died, a funny thing happened, though it wouldn’t have seemed funny to the magician. People formed a new club. And to be in this new club, you had to believe all the stories they told about the young magician. They even made pictures and statues of him, and put them up in their meeting-places, so people could remember how great he had been.

The club became very popular, and soon had thousands of members. Before long, they even had an army.

That’s when they finally decided that they could use their army to end the fighting once and for all. Their priests and generals went to their meeting-places – which had become churches – and sort of talked to the pictures and statues of the dead magician, as if to ask his blessing. After all, hadn’t the young magician always talked about bringing peace?

Then they went to war. It was a long war, and many people were killed or wounded. But their army was bigger, so they won. And they forced many, many people to come into their club, because they wanted them to be right – it is just so important to be right.

After the battles, their priests and generals went to church to give thanks. They stood before the pictures and statues of the dead magician, and told him their proud story of the victorious battle.

That’s when the miracle happened. Just as all the priests and all the generals were looking up at the statues telling them about their successful wars, it happened: all the pictures and all the statues began to cry.

The young magician, of course, was Jesus.

There are risks in stripping a man like Jesus of his halo and asking what kind of man he was, and how wise his teachings really were. It offends the popular romantic picture of Jesus as the Son of God and supernatural savior of humankind. Yet for over two centuries, scholars have known that those were mythic attributes invented by his followers long after he died, and that the real Jesus was 100% human – since that’s the only category there is for us. Calling him a “son of God” was poetry, not biology or genetics. We don’t like in a world constructed in such a way that people can receive half their chromosomes from a human and the other half from a sky-god – and neither did they.

I want to respect the truth without worshiping the myth this morning, by suggesting that this man Jesus had at least four different aspects, or “faces.” One aspect was useless, a second – the most “magical” – was real, but not supernatural. A third was just wrong. Then there is that fourth face of Jesus, which still seems to look into our souls with uncomfortable accuracy.

1. Jesus as an Itinerant Cynic Sage

The first face of Jesus concerns his life style, his personal values, the kind of role model he would have been. This is the dimension of Jesus that has hardly even been discussed, because it is so bizarre. For instance, see how many sermons you’ve ever heard preached on these quotations attributed to Jesus:

“Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be a follower of me, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters – will not be worthy of me.” (Gospel of Thomas 55) – Not the text for a “family values” sermon!

On another occasion, a woman from the crowd spoke up and said to Jesus, “How fortunate is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” It was a conventional way of handing a compliment to the mother through the son, like saying “your mother must be very proud of you.” But Jesus replied, “How fortunate, rather, are those who listen to God’s teaching and observe it!” (the Q Gospel, in Luke 11:27-28). – This one would be a bad Mother’s Day text!

And the last quotation is the most extreme and the most famous. It comes from the gospel of Luke, where Jesus says “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Q Gospel in Luke 12: 51-53) – You seldom hear the Christian Right preaching on this one, either!

These sayings don’t fit the traditional picture of a sweet Jesus who preached family values. They show us some of Jesus’ personal values and lifestyle, and make him seem very strange and foreign, not to mention unappealing. For most of the styles of living that Jesus exemplified have never had many takers.

This is the profile of someone on the fringe of any culture at any time. Scholars recognize this profile, however. It was a marginal but well-known style of living in the ancient world. From about the fourth century BCE until the sixth century CE, there was a name for this style of living exemplified by Jesus. These were the people called cynics.

Some scholars describe Jesus as an “itinerant cynic sage.” The name itself is derogatory, given to the “cynics” by their detractors (the way most such names originate). It came from the Greek word for “dog,” and was meant to imply that cynics lived like dogs. They had no home, no property, no spouses, no fixed circle of friends, no jobs, and no love for the society in which they lived. Cynics didn’t offer a correction of society so much as they offered an alternative to society.

The best of the cynics were astute social critics: they were like secular versions of the Old Testament prophets, standing outside the accepted order of things, trying to subvert it.

Someone who could live a life in this manner had to be, among other things, extremely focused and dedicated to his particular vision. For history’s most famous cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, the vision was one of personal autonomy, freedom from the unnecessary demands of society. An old story makes the point:

The king’s messenger came to find Diogenes, who was squatting in the street, eating his simple meal of lentils. “The king invites you to come live in his castle,” said the messenger, “and be one of his court advisors.”

“Why should I?” asked Diogenes.

“Well for one thing,” said the messenger, “if you’d learn to curry favor with the king you wouldn’t have to eat lentils.”

“And if you would learn to like lentils,” replied Diogenes, “you wouldn’t have to curry favor with the king.”

The message of cynics was always extreme, and they were willing to sacrifice everything for it. Furthermore, they generally thought that everyone else would also be better off abandoning the society’s vision of life and adopting their cynic vision. Their message was to individuals. They didn’t belong to or care about a real community. They weren’t social reformers. They thought society was fundamentally wrong, and people should “tune in, turn on and drop out,” to recapture that slogan from the Hippie years.

Jesus fits very neatly into this conception of a cynic sage. He had no home, property or job. He didn’t respect the accepted images of “the good life” or the normal expectations made upon people in a civilized society – the religious and cultural rules that gave people their social identities, for example. His vision of the “Kingdom of God” was, for Jesus, the only thing worth living for. His parables presented the “Kingdom” in this extreme way over and over again: it was a “pearl of great price,” a “treasure buried in a field” for which the lucky finder would sell everything.

What must be noted about cynics, including Jesus, is that their message is never likely to be heard or followed except for the extremely marginal person – another cynic. Husbands, wives, children, the joy of working at a job, making a contribution to society, nationalism, ethnic or religious pride of identity – all these counted as nothing for cynics compared with their singular vision. In Jesus’ case, his entire family was treated as though they counted for nothing compared with his vision of the “Kingdom of God.” This doesn’t make Jesus exceptionally cold or uncaring, it just identifies him as one of history’s great cynics – and a sage whose vision was sometimes too extreme to be either useful or wise to the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, then or now.

And so the first face of Jesus was his cynic lifestyle. It was a huge part of who he was and what he valued. For nearly everyone in history except other cynics, however, it was not a wise road to follow, but a useless aberration.

2. Jesus the Faith-Healer

Virtually all biblical scholars agree that Jesus was a man with great charisma, and a remarkable ability for what we today call “faith healing.” While almost all scholars agree that the stories have been greatly exaggerated, and that scenes like”walking on water,” raising Lazarus from the dead or feeding 5,000 people from a few fish are all Christian mythmaking, the core fact remains that Jesus was primarily known in his time and in the early centuries as a gifted healer. It was this almost magical power that really attracted people to him, even if they didn’t understand, or didn’t want to hear, the things he wanted to teach. His followers also shared this healing power, though not to quite the same extent as did Jesus.

There is nothing here to debunk, except to note that this kind of charismatic power doesn’t necessarily imply that the healer is wise or good. There are still lots of faith healers today, from Oral Roberts to Bennie Han. Furthermore, the principle of faith healing is behind placebos — those sugar pills that can often make your symptoms disappear if you think they can. It is easy to think of other historical figures who also had immense charisma and personal power over other people, who were unwise or evil: Rasputin, Hitler, Jim Jones, Matthew Applewhite, and David Koresh come quickly to mind. Not all wise people are magicians, and not all magicians are wise. Still, Jesus was one of history’s gifted faith healers.

3. Young Idealist Without a Concept of the “Sangha”

The third face of Jesus shows a severe limit to his vision, one that would have almost undoubtedly relegated him to the dustbin of history without the contributions of St. Paul. That statement alone is enough to upset or enrage many who love Jesus and can’t stand Paul.

The ethical teaching most associated with Jesus is the Golden Rule. While he is reported to have said it means to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” it has also been equated for twenty centuries with another of Jesus’ sayings: “turn the other cheek.” Some radical Christian sects, like the 14th Century Cathari group in France or the 16th century Mennonites in Germany, took this literally and refused to resist the violence of others altogether. This led to the slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of Cathari, and the slaughter of most of the first generation of Mennonites.

It wasn’t a new teaching. It had been around at least five hundred years before Jesus came along. We know this because we have the story of one of Confucius’ followers asking him five centuries earlier what he thought of the idea of repaying evil with forgiveness. Confucius thought it was a dumb idea. “With what, then,” he asked, “will you repay goodness?” Instead, Confucius taught that we should repay evil with justice and repay good with good. Confucius lived to be much older than Jesus did; perhaps this just shows the greater wisdom of a much older man.

Others have said that if you want to see a place where people have lived by the rule of turning the other cheek, go to a battered women’s shelter. It was a very idealistic teaching, but not a wise one, unless you are in a community where all are treated with respect.

And that’s the second and more important limitation on the teachings of Jesus. All of his teachings were directed to individuals. He did not come to reform Judaism; he didn’t come to start a new religion or found a new church. He had no home, no job, no community, and he never addressed the necessity for a healthy community in his teachings.

A quick look at Buddhism can help understand what Jesus omitted. Buddhists say you must have three things to become awake, enlightened. You must have Buddha, dharma, and sangha. Buddha means a center, a source of authority and inspiration. Dharma means the personal work that you must do. Jesus, you could say, taught that you must have God and dharma: you must live as God wants you to live. But he had nothing at all to say about the sangha. The sangha is the supportive community devoted to serving these high ideals, like a good church. And the Buddhists are right: we’re not likely to do the growth and awakening we need alone. We need a supportive community, a faith community, a church. Jesus never mentioned this.

It’s ironic – especially for people who like Jesus but dislike Paul – but the concern for community was what Paul contributed, making it possible to create a religion out of the memories, myths and teachings of Jesus. Without Paul, Jesus was just another teacher who stressed individual duties but neglected to address the necessity of being part of a community of faith.

4. Subverter of Artificial Identities

It’s hard to know what to call the fourth face of Jesus. As all biblical scholars know, Jesus’ primary concern was for what he called the Kingdom of God. What Jesus meant by this Kingdom of God was fundamentally different from what most Christians have meant by the phrase. Properly understood, it was Jesus’ most radical teaching. It was also his most profound and timeless, and his fourth “face.”

The phrase “the kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus. It was a popular phrase in the first two centuries, used by many people. It meant the ideal world, the kind of world that could have the most compassion and justice. John the Baptist, who had been Jesus’ teacher, said the world was too far gone to save, that we should wait for God to destroy it all and start over with the right kind of people — those who believed as John the Baptist did.

After John the Baptist was killed and the end of the world didn’t come, Jesus emerged as a charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him. But Jesus’ message was very different. John’s “kingdom” was to be supernatural; for Jesus, the kingdom of God was existential, here and now, not in a world to come.

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God wasn’t coming. It was already here, at least potentially, within and among us. Or as he said in another place, the kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.

How do you rejuvenate a hostile world? That has almost always been the question to which our greatest sages have offered their different prescriptions. For John the Baptist, as for many apocalyptic preachers today, we have to wait for God to act. For Jesus, God was waiting for us to act. And we act, we create the kingdom of God, or the best possible world, simply by treating all others as our brothers and sisters, as children of God. What Jesus was doing was attacking and subverting exclusive identities, identities that make us feel special or “chosen” at the price of casting others into a second-class status.

This sounds sweet and nice, but it’s a dangerous thing to teach. For instance, the food laws of the Jews set them apart from their neighbors. So Jesus’ instructions to his followers were to eat whatever was set before them: pork, shellfish, goat, whatever the host was serving. The Jews hated the Samaritans, who bordered them to the north, more than they hated almost anyone. So Jesus told a story about a beaten Jew lying by the side of the road, when priests passed him by and the only person who helped him was a Samaritan. During their high holy days, the Jews ate only unleavened bread. So Jesus said the kingdom of God is like leaven that you put in dough to make it rise. Over and over, he spurned the artificial identities that set us apart from others. There was only one identity possible for us in the Kingdom of God: to treat one another as brothers and sisters.

Do you see how subversive this is? This is a message that could threaten any form of government, all ideologies, and all religious or racial identities. The world is in chaos, we’ve lost a shared center, so we create a hundred little artificial centers, or “clubs,” from which we get our identities. The problem is, they’re all too small, all exclude those who believe or live differently than we do, and so they’re precisely the structures that keep the world hostile.

Today, his message might be Stop joining clubs! Stop identifying yourselves with your nation, your race, your religion, your political party or your sex. All of these are ultimately divisive identities that make a peaceful world impossible. You want the Kingdom of God? You want a world of peace and justice? It’s in your hands, and only in your hands. You’ve been given everything you need, now it’s time to act.

This is a message that would still get the messenger killed almost anywhere in the world. Imagine going into Northern Ireland a few years back, telling the fighters that neither side is Christian, both are agents of evil, and they need to stop thinking of themselves as Protestants and Catholics, because those identities are themselves the problem. The only thing the two sides would agree on would be lynching you from the nearest tree.

Imagine trying to sell that message to the Jews and Palestinians, telling them the only way to stop the murderous fighting is to grow beyond thinking of themselves as merely Jews or Palestinians, and begin seeing each other as brothers and sisters, the children of God. You’d be shot!

I don’t want to imply that Jesus was the only person in history to see this vision of a world kept small and hostile by our artificial identities and our territorial impulses. You can find this idea that we are all brothers and sisters in many religions, many cultures. You also find it in cultures that never had contact with any Western civilization. Remember these lines from this morning’s responsive reading by the Lakota Sioux Medicine Man Black Elk:

And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight. And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

These things aren’t true just because Jesus or Black Elk or the others said them. They are true because they have seen to the essence of what it means to be human, with a clarity few people in history have ever had. I don’t know of any way to argue against that insight. It seems deeply, profoundly, eternally correct. Our human or animal tendencies to create artificial identities for ourselves are the original sin of our species. We feel bigger and more worthwhile as parts of a family, a nation, a race, a culture. So naturally we join the little clubs and wave their flags, and we wait for Jesus’ second coming so there might be peace in the world.

The real tragedy of a man like Jesus isn’t that he has had so much silly hokum dumped on him through the ages – though God knows he has. The tragedy is that we elevated him into a man-God, then joined the religion of John the Baptist who expected this man-God to come save the world for us, as we sat silently by reciting whatever creeds our little religious or political or social cult has declared to be the current orthodoxy. We took the man who lived and died preaching against divisive identities, and created a club around his name. It is a cruel and ironic fate for the simple Jew from Galilee.

The tragedy is that this strange man, this marginal Jew without family, friends, property or job, really did have something to offer us, and nobody wants it. It’s too hard. It asks too much of us. So we found a simpler route. We made thousands of mental and physical pictures and statues of this man Jesus, whom we turned into a Son of God. And we pray that he, through his infinite power, will bring peace to this world in which we’re making war by identifying with our tiny religion, nation, party, race or territory. Then we say Amen, go outside, and prepare for the day’s battle against the infidels in the next church, next town, next nation.

And then I imagine the rest of the story. I imagine that all over the world, as people leave their churches, they turn their backs on the pictures and statues of Jesus they’ve made. And after they’ve gone, all over the world, in the cold darkness of the empty churches, all of the pictures and all of the statues begin to cry.

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© Davidson Loehr

9 May 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

READING: Mother’s Day Proclamation,

by Julia Ward Howe

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

PRAYER:

It is Mothers’ Day: Let us give thanks:

For mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them,

For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.

For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;

For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us,

And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.

It is Mothers’ Day. Let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in gratitude and prayer.

And let us remember in prayer those other names, which we now speak aloud or in the silence of our hearts.

Amen

SERMON: Mother’s Day 2004

Mother’s Day is an annual ritual when we expect images and words of peace, life, gentleness, and a well-deserved recognition for the many mothers of all kinds whose job, we say; it is to embody those things.

It’s worth wondering why we only give ourselves a couple days a year for these voices to be recognized, isn’t it? Christmas, Mother’s Day, Easter, and Valentine’s Day – there aren’t many days that we set aside to remind us of the gentler voices, the angels of our better nature.

It isn’t that Mothers’ Days are new inventions. In prehistory, the Greeks held festivals to honor Rhea, the mother of all the gods. And they honored Demeter, the earth mother. Egyptians made pictures and statues of their goddess Isis holding her god-son Horus, and those pictures became the models for nearly identical pictures and statues of Mary and Jesus, another mother of another god. In Hinduism too, there are similar appeals to great mother goddess figures. I found this short prayer to Mother Durga, a many-armed symbol of many-faceted powers:

May the All-Compassionate Mother

be a welcome guest in our hearts.

May she consent to carry us safely

across the ocean of life

to the shore of Liberation.

This could be a prayer to any of the great mothers, the mothers of gods and mothers of dreams, life and hope.

In Buddhism, the prayers are to Kwan Yin, the feminine counterpart of the Buddha. In Taoism, they are to Yin, the feminine principle associated with the moon, and with becomings, the vulnerable but necessary counterpart to the kind of male force represented by Yang.

So these voices arise from all times and places, and they say much the same things. They plead for life, love, peace, compassion, understanding, and comfort. They’re all variations on one voice coming up from the depths of the human soul, a voice that pleads for compassion to balance combativeness, love to balance lust, generosity to balance greed, the power to give life to balance the power to destroy life. All these are voices of mothers, of mothering, of mothers’ days, and they span all times and places, these voices.

But why are they so rare? Why do they speak out so seldom? Why do we have only a few days of the year when we’re supposed to trot these voices out and listen to sweet words of love and compassion?

They are like fragile little spring flowers, these voices, always having to break through the hard soil of harder attitudes – attitudes of greed, lust, power, destruction, war, imperialism, and domination. That hard soil seems to be the ground of history, the ground on which are built all our tragedies, on which we stage our battles, in which we dig our graveyards. That hard soil is made of the coarser and dirtier aspects of our human nature. To become fully human, to become whole or balanced, we have to educate these coarse voices, like we would educate a teen-aged boy who thought only in terms of joining gangs, fantasizing about violence, domination and war, a show you can watch kids playing in a thousand video games and half the top-selling movies.

We like to fool ourselves about this. We like to pretend that we are really just, honest and peace-loving, and seem to be more surprised when war breaks out than we are when peace breaks out, though peace doesn’t break out as often. It’s a kind of anesthetic that lets us make war, enslave third-world workers to make us cheap goods, and do all manner of unspeakable things.

I want to honor the spirit of Mother’s Day here by being blunt about the background noise, the hard soil, that motherly spirits always have to break through. I think we forget, at our peril, that the reason voices like those of Mother’s Day need special occasions is because those are not the voices that run our world or write our history.

The voices against arrogant violence don’t always come from women, but they do come from that feminine part of us, what Taoists call Yin. One of the most ancient and famous of these voices came from a man, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes. In 410 BC, he wrote his play “Lysistrata,” about a sex strike by the women, that is to continue until the men stop playing war. Yin has arisen to confront Yang here, to say you may not go destroy life then come to us to enjoy its sweet pleasures. If you would be served life at night, you must serve it in the daytime. That’s the spirit of Mother’s Day, in its ancient form. It is saying that the feminine force, the power of Yin, can be just as powerful as the testosterone-soaked power of Yang.

Buddhism has a wonderful story about the nature of true power. It is this same voice of Yin, this same feminine wisdom, attributed to the Buddha.

A powerful macho bandit comes up to inform the Buddha that he is a ferocious bandit, the mightiest in the world, and is going to kill the Buddha to demonstrate his great power. The Buddha says “Ah. Well, then surely you can first grant me two wishes.” The bandit says to get on with it. The Buddha points to a small sapling nearby and says, “cut off the smallest branch on that young tree.” The bandit laughs, waves his sword, it is done. “And what is your final wish?” The Buddha bends over, picks up the small branch and hands it to the bandit, then says, “Now put it back.” Legend says the bandit achieved enlightenment in that instant, as he finally understood the true meaning of power is to create life, not to destroy it.

That is the message of all Mothers’ Days, too, in all times and places: that we need to remember that honorable power is the power to create life, not destroy it. The spirit of Mothers’ Day is always this spirit of Yin, of the mother goddess, the earth mother, the fierce determination of the gentle sex in Aristophanes’ play, the overwhelming power of the Buddha’s gentle wisdom, breaking through the hard soil of our everyday minds, the hard soil of human history and human nature.

In England, they don’t celebrate our American Mother’s Day, but instead have a Mothering Day, in March. On the surface, it looks like hearts and flowers. It’s a day when children come home and bring their mothers flowers. But its history is darker. It came from the 19th century, when the wealthy had bought and owned the government, had looted all they money they could get, and reduced the masses to starvation levels, much as we find in many countries around the world today. Girls often left home at age ten to go find full-time work to stay alive, far from home. Mothering Day was the day when they were allowed to return home to see their mothers. Beneath the surface of hearts and flowers was a story of broken hearts and uprooted flowers.

Our official Mother’s Day here began by President Wilson’s proclamation in 1914, as mostly a hearts-and-flowers thing – a day on which florists and restaurants make small fortunes, which is why they buy most of the advertising to remind you of Mothers’ Day – but the original Mothers’ Day wasn’t.

That was the one you’ve already experienced, in the reading, the Mothers’ Day Proclamation written by Julia Ward Howe around 1872. She was quite aware that hers was a voice fighting up through the hard soil of greed, destruction and war, a voice fighting up through the forces that define history to oppose them. I want to read you some of what Julia wrote about the origin of her Mothers’ Day Proclamation, from her memoirs, so you can understand the manger in which it was born, the hard soil through which she was trying to speak:

“I had felt a great opposition to Louis Napoleon from the period of the infamous act of treachery and violence which made him emperor.

“As I was revolving these matters in my mind, while the [Franco-Prussian] war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?” I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed.

“The little document which I drew up in the heat of my enthusiasms implored women, all the world over, to awake to the knowledge of the sacred right vested in them as mothers to protect the human life which costs them so many pangs. I did not doubt but that my appeal would find a ready response in the hearts of great numbers of women throughout the limits of civilization. I invited these imagined helpers to assist me in calling and holding a congress of women in London, and at once began a wide task of correspondence for the realization of this plan. My first act was to have my appeal translated into various languages, to wit: French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and to distribute copies of it as widely as possible. I devoted the next two years almost entirely to correspondence with leading women in various countries. I also had two important meetings in New York, at which the cause of peace and the ability of women to promote it were earnestly presented.” (Taken from online version of Julia Ward Howe’s memoirs.)

In the spring of the year 1872, Julia visited England, hoping by her personal presence to affect the holding of a Woman’s Peace Congress there. She noted, though, that as she put it, “The ladies who spoke in public in those days mostly confined their labors to the advocacy of woman suffrage, and were not much interested in my scheme of a world-wide protest of women against the cruelties of war.”

I don’t think the spirit of Mothers’ Day can have its true meaning or power without understanding the background against which it is taking place, the nature of the hard crust it’s always trying to break through, just as you can’t understand Yin without understanding Yang.

But we don’t want to acknowledge that. We don’t want to reveal our own dark sides, the untutored and murderous layer of our human nature. This week, for example, we’ve seen and heard testimony from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the vicious and vulgar abuses of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. That was the infamous prison that Saddam Hussein used for years as his center of torture and murder. That’s the prison we took over, closed and then re-opened. After these stories began to break, comedian Jon Stewart said it seemed that Abu Ghraib hadn’t actually been closed, it was just under new management.

You’ve seen or read about these vulgarities. A video showing American soldiers, including American women soldiers, laughing and giving thumbs-up signs as Iraqi prisoners are stripped naked and forced into humiliating positions. You’ve read about the U.S. soldiers riding a 70-year-old Iraqi woman on all fours, like a horse. These are despicable acts – and I expect that we or our soldiers will pay for them. Donald Rumsfeld, in what struck me as a disingenuous speech, characterized them as completely un-American.

But that’s not true. Unfortunately, they are completely American. The New York Times carried a short article yesterday claiming that “Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, routinely takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern.” (“Mistreatment of Prisoners is Called Routine in U.S.” by Fox Butterfield, New York Times, May 8, 2004)

“Some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court” – who sometimes attends this church, and is worth getting to know – “imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.”

Yesterday’s New York Times also pointed out “that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.”

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, was handpicked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild Iraq’s criminal justice system. These behaviors weren’t un-American. They were both disgustingly American and completely predictable.

The behavior we saw in videos was distinctly, characteristically, behavior Americans practice and permit in our own prison systems right here. It may be the lowest and most despicable level of our American behavior, but it was American behavior nonetheless.

And while this administration – just as the administrations before it – tries to claim that our methods of war are humane and noble, the high activities of peace- and justice-loving people, this is no less a lie than it was 13 years ago in the first Gulf War or 35 years ago in the Vietnam War.

Remember that all over the television stations before we invaded Iraq – in a spectacle I hope none of us would have been willing to believe if we had not seen and heard it – our President, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State actually referred to the invasion and slaughter of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens under the proud title of “Shock and Awe.” No blood, no bodies blown apart, no crippled, orphaned children, just something really exciting and fun.

It wasn’t wholesale murder during the invasion of a country whose oil and strategic position we had lusted after for fifteen years. No, it was something exciting, like special effects from an Arnold Schwarzenneger film: Shock and Awe. You could try to imagine how whoever thought up that line might describe the vicious and vulgar tortures of Iraqi prisoners. But we don’t have to imagine it. You could have tuned into Rush Limbaugh this week, to hear him laugh it off as being just like fraternity hazing, and an understandable way for soldiers to let off steam. Is this the most we have come to expect of Americans? No higher values that that? This is part of the background against which today’s Mothers’ Day takes place. Those are the violent voices we need to counter; that is the hard soil through which messages of truth and responsibility must strain to break through.

We need to claim the power to describe events more truthfully, in order to retain our own integrity and sense of sanity. These were vicious, vulgar, disgusting actions. But they were not un-American. Nor were they subhuman. Humans are the only species that do things like this to one another. They were part of human nature: the vulgar, untutored, unevolved part of human nature.

The great tragedy of humanity is that the violent and vulgar behaviors write human history, while the truly noble and life-giving voices are relegated to occasional shouts from the back of the room, and sparse annual holidays.

And yet life is bursting up all around us. We are surrounded, embraced, cradled in the great power of life. Even here. This week, working on this sermon, I’ve been thinking of some of these things, and have felt positively engulfed by life.

Our last year’s intern, Cathy Harrington, is preaching her final Candidating sermon this morning up in Ludington, Michigan. I read her draft of it Friday; it’s a Mother’s Day sermon drawing a lot on her own experience as a single mother who raised three kids and sent them all through college. I served that church seven years ago as a half-time interim. And the other church I served at that time, also as a half-time interim, called their new minister last week. Her contract begins August 1st, though she won’t be doing full-time ministry until November 1st, because she is expecting her first baby in August, and will begin her ministry on paid maternity leave.

Hannah Wells, this year’s intern, is looking forward to marriage and to having children, and sometimes talks about it in our weekly private meetings. She’s bursting to burst forth. Vicki Rao, next year’s intern, will arrive here with her husband and their six-year-old son.

And Betty Skwarek, our Director of Religious Education, told me that last Sunday here in this church we had 39 kids in the pre-kindergarten classes. Thirty-nine kids age 4 and 5! You don’t think life is bursting up all around us? God, it’s everywhere! And it’s wonderful! That’s why the voices of Mothers’ Day and the spirit of Mothers’ Day is such an important spirit to honor, not only today but every day. These are the voices of life and love and compassion and nurture, without which we cease to exist as healthy, mature people.

There’s another problem with hearing these voices so seldom, and that is that we can under-rate them. It’s easy to value the voices of war, greed, piracy, or imperialism more because they get more headlines and write the scripts for more movies. And then we neglect or undervalue all the life-giving and life-serving voices that are our own lifeblood. We undervalue motherhood and parenting. Over 60% of women with children are also working outside the home. And when they come home to their “second shift,” they are doing an average of about two hours per day more work at home than their partners.

We hear these things, and it’s easy to get angry in all directions. The husbands feel they are overworked, and they are. The wives feel they are overworked, and they are. The kids, when polled, say the one thing they would most like to have, is more time with their parents. So then the parents feel guilty for being gone so much, in order to earn enough money to support their family in a good way. It’s like a trap with no exit, and I suspect all of us have felt some of these feelings.

Well, it would be so easy to let this become completely dark, especially if we reflect on the rest of the changes in our society that are likely to happen during President Bush’s almost-certain second term. We can’t fix history today. We can’t change the hard soil, or the fact that gentle voices of life, love and compassion must always struggle to fight their way through it. The forces that write history will continue to be the forces of Yang, not Yin, because Yang owns the guns and the politicians and makes the laws.

But we can try to give a little recognition to the voices of Yin, those who are doing their best to serve life, add love, and bring compassion to the world. And the good news is that this includes most of us.

It is Mothers’ Day. Let us give thanks for all the many kinds of mothers there are among us. Let us give thanks for that spirit of mothers and mothering, that spirit which knows that real power is the power to give life, not the power to destroy or demean it. Let us give thanks that these gentle voices of the angels of our better nature do speak up at least on these few days of the year we have allowed them, for when we listen to them, they have the power of making us all better people, partners, parents and citizens, making us all more whole and more holy, a credit to ourselves, our species, and to life itself.

Let us be raised to those higher aspirations today, and show it in higher behavior. And let us remember that what we are capable of some times we can also rise to most of the time, if only we will. It is Mothers’ Day, a day which holds sacred the tender mercies within all of our hearts. Let us give thanks.

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© Davidson Loehr

25 April 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

You may know the story of the frog and the scorpion. A scorpion wanted to cross a swift river, and asked a frog to carry him on his back. The frog asked “How do I know that you won’t sting and kill me as soon as you get on my back?” “Well,” answered the scorpion, who was good with words when he wanted something, “then I wouldn’t be able to get across the river.” “Well,” said the frog, “then how do I know that you won’t sting and kill me as soon as we’re across the river?” “Oh,” said the scorpion, “because I’ll be so grateful for the ride, why would I want to kill you then?”

This convinced the frog – apparently, frogs are easy to convince in stories – so he let the scorpion on his back, and began swimming across the river. They were about 2/3 of the way across the raging river, when, to his great surprise, the frog felt a painful sting and looked around to see the scorpion pulling his stinger out of the frog’s back. Very soon, the frog felt himself becoming numb. Just before he was completely paralyzed, the frog had the breath to ask “Why?” “It’s just my nature,” said the scorpion, as they both sank into the river and drowned. “It’s just my nature.”

Of course, the story was never really about scorpions. It was meant as a warning against certain rare but dangerous kinds of people whose nature, like that of scorpions, is to destroy others even if it destroys them too.

I think the reason this is such a frightening story is because a person like the scorpion, a person who lacked even basic compassion, isn’t quite human.

One of the scariest things we can imagine is a machine-like thing with a will, that seeks to harm us, and feels nothing when we suffer, cry, or die. Think of those android-type men in the “Matrix” movies, for instance. Or the Orcs and Sauron in “Lord of the Rings,” or the governor of California as The Terminator, that robot programmed only to destroy until it was destroyed.

I suppose the most famous story like this is still Mary Shelly’s 1818 tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he created from spare parts. For nearly two centuries, the Frankenstein monster has been a symbol of creating something inhuman, giving it life and immense power without a soul, then living to see it turn on us, as the monster even killed Frankenstein in the end.

There have been a lot of movies on this theme in the past decades. The Terminator, Total Recall, Darth Vader in Star Wars, the casual indifference to life in “Pulp Fiction,” the powerful forces of greed and destruction in “Lord of the Rings” – you can probably each think of another half dozen.

When I was growing up, the most powerful movie like this was the original 1956 version of “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” For me, it was a movie about the difference between real people and pathological people. You probably know the story. A mindless life force from outer space drifted from a desolate, dead planet and wound up on this one.

It operated under a simple program. When a human fell asleep near it, it produced a giant pod that duplicated the sleeping person, taking their body, looks, even their memory, and draining their life, then destroying the original and taking their place. You could hardly tell the difference. They looked the same, had all the same memories. But they had no soul. They had no compassion, no feeling for anyone. The squeals of a dog getting hit and killed by a car in the road twenty feet away didn’t even make them care to look.

Life didn’t matter to them. Only reproducing their kind, to no other end than reproducing their kind. Eventually, like the frog and the scorpion, they kill everything. Then if the cosmic winds are right, they may blow across the galaxy and suck the life out of yet another planet. I’ve met a half dozen people who grew up when I did, saw that movie, and were similarly moved to think of real versus unreal people, the way kids 150 years ago probably thought in terms of real people versus Frankenstein monsters. In both cases, they were persons lacking humanity, lacking the concern for others that makes them frightening and dangerous persons.

When humans act like this, we think there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Theologians call them evil, novelists call them monsters or body snatchers, and psychologists call them psychopaths. Since psyche means soul, the word really means people with sick souls. Here’s a list of psychopathic traits I recently read. Psychopaths are:

Irresponsible

Grandiose, self-absorbed

They lack empathy

They won’t accept responsibility for their destructive actions

They are unable to feel remorse

They’re finally quite superficial: all power, no depth; all manipulation, no connection

(Joel Bakan, The Corporation, p. 57)

I can see you making a mental list of some of your ex-friends .

Now what is this about? Why am I talking about persons who are not real persons, psychopaths and scorpions whose nature is to destroy, even if it also destroys them? What on earth does this have to do with a respectable church sermon?

It’s a way of introducing the business of trying to understand the powers that have largely taken over our American society and are on the verge of taking over the world. That sounds so dramatic it almost needs a science fiction movie with special effects to make it scary enough.

But I am talking about a person that we have created, a person that is not a real person, that has immense power, more money than God, and which, like the invasion of the body-snatchers, is seeking to, and succeeding in, destroying the compassionate qualities of both societies and real people.

You’ll think I’ve badly overstated the case when I say that this dangerous person who is not a real person is the corporation. So let me try and persuade you.

Only a very few of these insights are mine. I got the rest from a remarkable new book of only 167 pages by a Canadian law professor named Joel Bakan. The title of the book is The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. He also made a movie of the interviews he conducted in writing the book, and that movie, called “The Corporation,” is playing to sold-out and standing-ovation crowds in theaters all across Canada right now, where it has become a national phenomenon. I spoke with the film’s promoters last week, who said they are now arranging a tour of more than 200 cities in the US for the movie, beginning on June 4th in San Francisco, with Austin tentatively scheduled for July 29th, at a location still to be determined

The author explains the nature, the character and the danger of large corporations in a few pages, and I’ll try to reduce it to a few minutes. But make no mistake: this is like a horror movie. Even though there is some hope at the end, I want to scare you.

Corporations formed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, to pool the money of a large number of people in order to give the corporation more power than any single business could have. Very early, laws were passed saying investors had no real liability for whatever dastardly deeds the corporation did. This gave the corporation limited liability, but unlimited ability to make money. It’s something you can’t imagine ever wanting to do with a person, isn’t it?

And from the start, as a matter of structure and law, the only purpose of a corporation was to make as much money as possible for its stockholders.

By the late 19th century, the courts had transformed the corporation into a person, a legal person, and even spoke of it in that way. And in 1866, lawyers representing this newly-created “person” won a ruling from the Supreme Court saying that, as a legal person, corporations were entitled to be protected by the 14th amendment for “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws.” These provisions of the 14th amendment, as you may remember, were written for the protection of freed slaves after the War Between the States. But since 1866, it has been used almost never by freed slaves, and almost exclusively to protect corporations – even when they make slaves of workers all over the third world and, some would argue, within our own country. I am betting that not many of you knew that. Until a few years ago, I didn’t know it either. Isn’t that odd, that we didn’t know that?

Since being christened as persons, corporations have done what any person would do: they have fought for both survival and dominance, lobbying for laws that favor their aims, and buying influence, lawyers, judges, politicians and presidents when they can. It isn’t seen as evil, just doing business, just their nature.

And what are their aims? You might say that it depends on the corporation, that they are free to do whatever they want. That’s not true. If the corporation sells stocks, its sole legal purpose, under U.S. laws, is to make as much money as possible for its stockholders. The corporation can pretend to care about society or the environment, as long as the money they spend makes more people want to buy their products and so increases profits for stockholders. But they may not, legally, spend money for social good unless they really aren’t interested in social good, but only in profits.

Milton Friedman, who had been regarded as a second- or third-rate economist until he was adopted as the official economist of the greediest kind of capitalism, calls making money the corporation’s only moral aim. He compares little acts of apparent social conscience to car manufacturers using pretty girls to sell cars. “That’s never really about the girls,” he points out, “it’s just a trick to sell cars.” Likewise, a corporation can donate to the special Olympics or civic projects, but only if it will sell more of their product. They can’t do social good for the sake of doing social good.

Peter Drucker, perhaps the oldest living guru of corporate character, says if you have a CEO who wants to do social good, fire him fast!

And there are laws supporting this perspective. Ninety years ago, when Henry Ford was becoming astoundingly rich from selling his Model T Fords, he decided that he was making too much money. So in 1916, Ford “cancelled the stock dividends to give customers price reductions because he felt it was wrong to make obscene profits.” (Bakan, p. 36)

Two of his major investors, the Dodge brothers, took him to court, arguing that profits belonged to the stockholders, not the company, and the court agreed with them, establishing a precedent that still rules. Corporations exist as persons only to do whatever is necessary to maximize profits for their stockholders. Even if it harms people. (Yes, the Dodge brothers then started their own car company.)

In a 1933 Supreme Court judgment, Justice Louis Brandeis finally made the obvious connection, when he stated that corporations were “Frankenstein monsters” capable of doing evil.

The author cites another famous case from 1994, in which General Motors was sued because on Christmas Day 1993 a mother with her four children in the car was hit from behind while stopped at a stop light, causing her gas tank of her 1979 Chevy Malibu to explode, burning and badly disfiguring all five of them. During the trial, a report was introduced showing that GM knew the gas tank was set so far back that it could explode on impact, killing the car’s occupants. In fact, about five hundred people were being killed this way at the time of the report in 1973 when the new Malibu style cars were being planned. He figured that each fatality could cost the company $200,000 in legal damages, then divided the figure by 41 million, the number of cars GM had on the road. The engineer concluded that each death cost GM only $2.40 per automobile. The cost of ensuring that fuel tanks did not explode in crashes was estimated to be $8.59 per car. That meant the company could save $6.19 per car if it let people die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid such fires. (Bakan, pp. 61-63)

While the jury made a huge award, it was later reduced by 3/4, and GM appealed the case. In support of GM, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a brief defending the practice of using this kind of “cost-benefit analysis in corporate decision making.” The jury’s decision, they said, was deeply troubling, because manufacturers should use cost-benefit analysis to make the most profitable decisions. (63) The corporation’s legal makeup, its nature, requires executives to make only those decisions that create greater benefits than costs for their stockholders. Executives have no authority to consider what harmful effects a decision might have on other people or upon the environment, unless those effects might have negative consequences for the corporation. (p. 64)

Do you see what has happened here? This person we created through our own laws, by following its legal nature, can and does endanger and kill human beings in the pursuit of profit.

Now let’s jump to a very different area of society, one you might not think is even related to corporations. It’s the subject of our armed forces, what they are really serving, and what our soldiers are really dying for.

Joel Bakan’s book tells of a chapter in American history I was never taught in school. It involves a Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, one of WWI’s most heavily decorated soldiers. On August 21, 1931, Butler had stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

“I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

“I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

“In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested . I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions . I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.” (p. 93)

Given that speech, and Butler’s disgust with the role the military played, not in serving democracy but in serving the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly stunning.

Franklin Roosevelt was president, and he was bringing government regulations in to stop the disastrous greed of the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Big business hated him. In fact, big business was in love with fascism at the time. In 1934, Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of fascism and the economic miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating greater profits for the corporations.

On August 22nd of 1934, General Butler was approached in a hotel room in Philadelphia by a messenger of a group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment. The business interests wanted General Butler to assemble a volunteer army, take over the White House, and install himself as the fascist dictator of the United States, with the financial support of big business. Some observers believe that if they had picked a different general, it may well have worked. Butler refused, and told the story.

In 1934, the business interests believed they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or destruction of everyone else. This was the invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to succeeding.

“Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a well-organized minority again threatens democracy. Corporate America’s long and patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters’ clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted: freedom from democratic control.” (p. 95)

And their reach is now worldwide. The World Trade Organization, which Clinton had created in 1993, has already sued or threatened to sue nations, including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into the corporation’s profits. In 2005, their full power will come into effect, enabling them to prevent governments from enacting environmental or health regulations that would unduly impede their profits. (Bakan, p. 23)

NAFTA, another Clinton creation, was an investor protection plan enabling corporations to use cheap labor to force American wages down, break unions, and steal jobs from the U.S. society by the hundreds of thousands, “out-sourcing” them to cheap labor markets around the world in order to let rich corporations and individuals get richer by destroying the lives of American and other workers, gutting entire societies, then leaving their husk and blowing on to drain the life from another society, exactly like the invasion of the body snatchers.

There are many more details, and the picture is considerably worse, than I’ve had time to sketch for you. I don’t think there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of them.

Is there hope? Can anything be done? Yes, but only if we remember that we created this Frankenstein monster, and it is only a “person” because we said so, and we can change our views and change our laws and change the way in which corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world. You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just the greed of a few men and women.

And New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer recently said that if “a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at public auction.” (p. 157) Eliot Spitzer isn’t anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn’t bad, it’s a neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine the acceptable role of corporations in our world. We created corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us. They need to be taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy’s expenses, just as the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised. In 1960, the tax rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes. That is why our middle class was empowered after WWII, because the money was being distributed fairly. Today, we have socialism for the rich, and a brutal kind of capitalism for everyone else. We can stop it.

And now we’re at war again, a war General Butler would recognize immediately. Haliburton, the company from which Vice President Cheney came back to Washington, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven’t even had to bid on. Other large US corporations that contributed to the presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to risk getting killed making profits for the stockholders.

Meanwhile, many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a year, a pay so low that they are being given food stamps with their pay, and many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all. They are dying, like General Butler’s soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose only purpose in life is to help Haliburton, other major U.S. corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money. If they get killed, at least they’re cheap to replace. There’s cost-benefit analysis at work.

This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if they become beggars or corpses by doing so. It is un-American. It is ungodly. It is inhuman and it is disgusting. And it is continuing. Only the American people are likely to stop it, and then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get going.

I can’t write an ending for this sermon. It would have to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people. But there is something riding on our backs that doesn’t belong there, and that does not have our best interests at heart. It will, if it is allowed to remain there, eat our soul and our society. Nor can it really stop itself. It has been programmed with a very simple program: it’s just its nature.