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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.

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© Davidson Loehr

28 March 2004

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: Theological Mistakes

Henry Hug

Those of us raised in a Judeo-Christian household were told at an early age that God created the universe, including the earth and all its beings. We had no concept of the Big Bang when I was a young boy, but it occurred to me and many of my friends and classmates; then who created God? Well, we were told that God existed forever. I think that was the origin of what came first, the chicken or the egg.

Let me give you a little of my background so you know where I am coming from. I was born and raised in Argentina, where there was no separation of Church and State. The Constitution required that the President be Catholic, if only nominally. There was no divorce; abortion was illegal, but widely practiced in private hospitals for middle class people and back alleys for those not so fortunate.

But worst of all, religion, Catholic religion was taught in all public schools. 5 to 10% of our classmates who were Jewish, Protestant or from atheist families were herded to another classroom where they were taught “Ethics”. A course taught by Catholic teachers in a course heavily tainted with Catholic dogma. If that doesn’t make you detest the clergy, nothing else will. (Present Company excepted)

Having lived under the dictatorship of Juan Peron in the 40’s and 50’s I saw firsthand the pernicious effects of an unholy alliance of church and state can do. The same could be said for Spain’s Franco, Portugal’s Salazar, Italy’s Mussolini and even Germany’s Hitler.

My mother was a very devout Catholic and my father was an agnostic or at least a non-practicing Protestant, his parents being French Calvinists. I seem to have inherited my father’s genes rather than my mother’s teachings.

As I went on to college I remember talking with two of my classmates about something more elaborate than the chicken and the egg argument. This time it was about all the “Omni’s” that God was, omnipotent, omniscient, omni benevolent, etc and more absurdities came to view.

If God was omni benevolent, why was there war and famine? Why were children born with severe congenital defects? Why did a young mother die of cancer or a young father die in an accident leaving their children orphaned? That list could go on and on.

Then came this “omniscient” thing. That was supposed to mean that God knew what everyone was doing, because, as Catholic dogma taught, everything was in the present for Him. That of course would mean that He (Or She as the case may be) knew what we would do, the next minute, the next day or the next year. That was another conundrum. If She knew what we would do, then there was no free will, our entire future was preordained, just as the past could not be changed, neither could the future.

Well, it turns out that we were not wrong, or at least someone with far more knowledge of these things came to our rescue.

This book (“Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes”) explains it in much better detail than I can in the few minutes allotted. It was written by Charles Hartshorn.

How many of you knew Charles Hartshorn? He was a member of our church; he always sat there in the fourth row. That is hallowed ground (Sir or Madam). At 5 foot 2 tall, he was a giant of a man.

Harvard educated, professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Emory University and finally at UT. Also visiting professor at the Sorbonne in Paris and Oxford in England. He died in October of 2000 at the age of 103. If you joined the church in 1999 or later you would not have met him because he was very frail and unable to attend church services.

He used to say that he wanted to be the first philosopher to live in two millennia and three centuries.

By less than three months he missed this one of his ambitions.

He wrote or co-authored 20 books and more than 100 articles, the last one when he was 99 years old.

His obituaries occupied about a quarter of a page in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post among others.

Most of his writings were well over my head, but this one; “Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes” was written for the layman such as myself and explains these contradictions much better than I have today. I feel vindicated after all these years.

Finally, I would like to quote from another centenarian who was a bit of a philosopher, Nathan Birnbaum… He was better known as George Burns the comedian, who once listed the attributes of a good sermon. He said: “A good sermon should have a good beginning and a good ending. And the two should be as close to each other as possible.”

PRAYER:

In so many ways, our world seems divided between those who are alive and those who are afraid.

We know those styles, of being afraid and being alive. And we know how the first suffocates the second. We know well, even intimately.

Let us remember that persistent optimism can break through the most rigid obstacles, just as tender green blades of grass will eventually crumble even concrete.

Let us remember that trust is more empowering than suspicion, and that almost all people can be trusted, if we will see them as our brothers and sisters rather than as disposable people to be dominated.

Let us be witnesses and workers for a world in which fear’s insidiousness is overcome by the persistent optimism of faith, hope, love and work, given force by people who have come alive.

Amen.

SERMON: Spiritual Aeronautics, Part 2

A sermon title like “Spiritual Aeronautics” is such an ambitious name. It could almost cover a year’s worth of classes in religion. I was thinking what a very small part of that I’m really trying to work with in these two weeks, and thought that maybe borrowing some concepts from Hinduism might clarify what I can and can’t hope to do here.

Hinduism has four different paths, or disciplines, or yogas, to fit four very different kinds of people, because we have different styles of being spiritual. Jnana yoga is salvation or wholeness through understanding, insight. That’s closest to our Western intellectual religious traditions, including Unitarians. Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion and love, and we have tried to include a bit of that path with the many candles in the windows. Karma yoga is the path of action or works, like the people here who are more interested in social action than sermons. And Raja yoga is the meditative path of insights into your own soul’s divine nature, which we don’t really do here as a group.

But of the four paths, the first one is the one most characteristic of Unitarians. Salvation, wholeness, through understanding, through a more complete kind of knowledge. What do we think we believe and what kind of coherence do those beliefs have in our life and the world we’re living in? Those are the kinds of questions behind what I’m trying to do with you this morning.

One bold rule in the study of religion I learned a couple decades ago comes from this approach to religion. The rule is that the first word in religion should always be No! No to the nonsense, the superstition, the empty jargon, the idiosyncratic beliefs we tend to exalt as though they had an authority from beyond us.

And when I hear stories like Henry told about his school experiences in Argentina, I always think he was more serious about religion by saying No than the pious priests were by chanting old statements whose meaning and relevance to real life they couldn’t have explained.

In terms from last week, they were giving the students a set of fully packed luggage, packed for a trip in which Henry was not interested. Many of you can probably relate to this business of having been given fully packed religious luggage for a trip you weren’t interested in taking.

Those stories always irritate me because the best religious teachers in any tradition always said No to this kind of nonsense, no matter how often it is packaged for take-out by the masses of that religion. It’s like the Greek image I used last week of spiritual growth as the metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a butterfly.

I really like that image. So I was momentarily disturbed when, after the service last Sunday, Hannah came out to the line. She was nearly cackling with glee as she told me “I hate to burst your bubble, but only 2% of caterpillars become butterflies. All the rest get eaten!”

OK, I hadn’t thought of that. I figured some of the caterpillars must get eaten, but not 49 out of 50! Still, I’m not giving up a favorite metaphor that easily. In fact, this new information just makes the metaphor that much better. For significant spiritual growth is hard, and not many want to do it.

And one reason that so many spiritual caterpillars never become butterflies is because they are eaten by doubt, fear, or intimidation.

Henry’s concern with theological mistakes (literalisms in a field that can only be done symbolically) has happened in all ages.

A second century Christian thinker named Tertullian once said that people hated Christianity because they were ignorant of it, and once they stopped being ignorant, they would stop hating it. But he is also famous for asking, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Athens meant the philosophy, culture and education of the Greeks; Jerusalem meant Christian faith. And he said faith and intelligence can and should be separated. It’s hard to combine those two statements, and what Tertullian was really demanding was not understanding but obedience. But religion has mostly been taught so poorly, especially in church-sponsored schools, that it has kept people ignorant.

Almost every great religious thinker has written against the dumbing down of religion, the fact that it is treated like caterpillar food when it’s meant to help people learn spiritual flight. Many early Church fathers protested, and throughout the centuries the best religious thinkers have attacked the versions of Christianity that were like religion for caterpillars.

In the 19th century, the Danish existentialist and Christian thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote a wonderful piece on this, not using the image of caterpillars, but using the image of geese.

The Tame Geese: A Revivalistic Meditation,

by Soren Kierkegaard

Suppose it was so that the geese could talk – then they had so arranged it that they also could have their religious worship, their divine service.

Every Sunday they came together, and once of the ganders preached.

The essential content of the sermon was: what a lofty destiny the geese had, what a high goal the Creator (and every time this word was mentioned the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed the head) had set before the geese; by the aid of wings they could fly away to distant regions, blessed climes, where properly they were at home, for here they were only strangers.

So it was every Sunday. And as soon as the assembly broke up each waddled home to his own affairs. And then the next Sunday again to divine worship and then again home – and that was the end of it.

That was the end of it. For though the discourse sounded so lofty on Sunday, the geese on Monday were ready to recount to one another what befell a goose that had wanted to make serious use of the wings the Creator had given him, designed for the high goal that was proposed to him – what befell him, what a terrible death he encountered. This the geese could talk about knowingly among themselves. But, naturally, to speak about it on Sundays was unseemly; for, said they, it would then become evident that our divine worship is really only making a fool of God and of ourselves.

Among the geese there were, however, some individuals which seemed suffering and grew thin. About them it was currently said among the geese: There you see what it leads to when flying is taken seriously. For because their hearts are occupied with the thought of wanting to fly, therefore they become thin, do not thrive, do not have the grace of God as we have who therefore become plump and delicate.

And so the next Sunday they went again to divine worship, and the old gander preached about the high goal the Creator (here again the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed the head) had set before the geese, whereto the wings were designed.

So with the divine worship of Christendom. Man also has wings, he has imagination… (Soren Kierkegaard, from A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited by Robert Bretall, p. 433)

Both Kierkegaard’s geese and the ancient Greek caterpillars were creatures that clung to the ground rather than rising to their high calling of spiritual flight.

In some ways, this clinging to the ground could come from one of the foundational metaphors of Christianity. In the Bible, there is a passage that has Jesus saying to Peter that he was the “rock” on which Jesus would build his church That was a pun, for in Greek, and especially in Aramaic, the words for “Peter” and “rock” are the same. Jesus never said such a thing, for several reasons. One was that he did not come to build a church. Another was that, of all the disciples, Peter was the one who didn’t get it at all.

Nearly all of the better thinkers have always spoken against low-level or literal religion, in favor of the higher kind. Still, that picture of faith as a rock – the “Rock of Ages” – has been a central part of literal versions of Christianity ever since. It’s the image of adding creeds and other beliefs to that “rock,” building a kind of “mountain,” and the idea is that if you stand firm on that mountain you will be secure.

There have always been those who used the concept of God to empower the church and the rulers and to frighten the people into obedience rather than empowerment. It’s telling and typical that as soon as Jesus was dead, Peter won a vicious power struggle with Mary Magdalen over whether the religion built on the name of Jesus should make people empowered or obedient, fearful or alive. Like Kierkegaard’s geese, they seemed afraid of those who actually lived with courage and trust. Those who founded the religion about Jesus founded it for the 98% who get eaten alive by doubt and fear. I think this was a move of profound faithlessness, a faithlessness that Jesus never showed. For he believed the power, the acceptance, the wisdom we need is available equally to all of us here and now.

But any religion based in fear, trying to save you, give you a rock to stand on, is a religion made to empower the leaders of the church and the empire at the expense of ordinary believers. Jesus would have hated it.

Since the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels sixty years ago, we have many more gospels and writings from the first centuries, which give us a much different understanding of Jesus’s teachings than traditional Christianity has taught.

One of the most pointed and revealing comes from the Gospel of Thomas, probably written in the 50s, a couple decades before the New Testament gospels. Here, Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

(Gospel of Thomas, #70, translated by Elaine Pagels).

The real Jesus never spoke of sin and repentance; he spoke of illusion and enlightenment, of growing from simple to mature awareness. That’s what honest religion is about: awareness and enlightenment, not memorization or obedience.

In graduate school, I got to work with some very good theologians who were also honest, and who used their faith to fly rather than to crawl. It was a revelation to me. I remember talking with one of my teachers, a Catholic theologian named David Tracy, still one of the leading Catholic thinkers. He once defined Christianity as his myth. I asked him what he meant by that; I said it sounded like he was saying he knew Christianity was a fiction. Of course it is a fiction, he said: a profound and useful fiction, for him even a necessary or ultimate fiction. It contained the myths and stories within which he chose to live, and those stories let him rise above where he would be without such imaginative myths.

I remember being surprised, as though there must be some kind of a law against theologians being allowed to be this honest. But almost all the good ones have been that honest in their own ways.

This may be the turning point that marks a caterpillar becoming a butterfly or a goose taking flight: the ability to hold lightly to one’s beliefs, to understand that they are not truths like rocks are truths, but are truths the way really good stories are truths. But doubt, fear and intimidation from family or friends can eat you alive here, can pick you off like a caterpillar.

Many beliefs can be adequate, but only if you own them rather than being owned by them.

Maybe “flying” is rising above beliefs, knowing they’re useful fictions, holding lightly to them. Like theologians who call Christianity their necessary fiction, useful fiction, even the ultimate fiction.

Buddhists sometimes speak of beliefs as a raft you used to cross over a difficult transition in your life. But it would be a mistake, they say, to then pick up the raft and carry it on your back forevermore just because it was once useful. No, put down the raft and go on. Likewise with beliefs. It is wiser to see them as rafts that might help you cross rivers but not mountains, so to speak.

Others speak of beliefs as a ladder that gets you to a certain height, so you can see better. But once you’ve seen more clearly, remember not to worship the ladder, but to set it aside and go on to your next challenge, where you might need a raft instead, or a still different kind of belief.

Maybe fixed dogmatic beliefs are the caterpillar stage of religion, and the butterfly stage is the ability to hold lightly to them, knowing that life itself sustains us, that life is bigger than beliefs, and that “all will be well.”

Or remembering that wonderful saying from Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, that “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

See how this comes together? Both the Greeks and Kierkegaard are mocking the religion of superstition and fear that Henry had taught to him in Argentina and so many others have had taught here.

Orthodoxy is like a religion of rocks, piled on each other to make a mountain on which to stand to feel safe. That’s a religion for caterpillars, and it’s a terrible misuse of a good mountain.

I can imagine what Kierkegaard would do with the image of his geese on top of a mountain, just standing there. How he’d be saying, “Look, you’re already in the sky! Now all you have to do is hold out your wings, the wings the creator gave you, and let the wind lift you up.”

One of the most important of religious lessons is that the highest religious faculty is not memorization, but imagination, not obedience but awareness. We must help shape the gods we will serve, must help provide nuance for the myths out of which we will live.

I think again of my teacher David Tracy’s wonderful definition of Christianity as his myth, his ultimate fiction. That is using beliefs in the right way, as imaginative tools to help you bring forth what is within you rather than not bringing forth what is inside of you and being eaten alive by fear. It is using beliefs as a launching pad for your spiritual growth and flight, rather than treating beliefs like a pile of rocks to stand on.

I am going to end with a story. I’ve told you several stories so far, about religions of piles of rocks, about geese who refuse to fly, about caterpillars and butterflies. So I’ll end with a story I won’t bother to interpret for you. You’ll get it.

It’s adapted from a story I read in Rachel Naomi Remen’s book My Grandfather’s Blessings. This story came from one of Remen’s patients, who had spent her life striving for success, building a career that never fed her, and creating levels of stress that may have led to the cancer she had. During treatments for the cancer, she re-examined her life, saw it in a new way, and had a kind of revelation, which came to her in an odd dream.

I dreamed, she said, that I saw a woman building a mountain. Rock by rock, she was building a mountain, piling innumerable heavy rocks on top of each other, climbing to the top and piling more rocks as her mountain grew bigger and bigger and she ascended higher and higher. At last it was a truly magnificent mountain, rising high into the sky covered in snow-capped peaks, impressive from any angle. And she stood there, on top of her mountain of rocks, triumphant and alone.

I marveled, she said, at what an amazing accomplishment it was, building a whole mountain and then ascending it, standing there on top with your arms stretched up to the sky. The woman, of course, was me, so I also felt great pride at the scene.

But then something frightening and terrible happened. As I stood there atop the huge mountain, there suddenly appeared a large crack near the mountain’s base. The mountain shook. The crack grew bigger, shot upward, and the whole mountain began collapsing in on itself. My feet slipped off the rock, and the rocks all began turning to dust and falling to earth.

Then, she said, just as the whole irrelevant thing crumbled beneath me, I suddenly discovered that I could fly.

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© Davidson Loehr

28 March 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

How deeply has the fearful and suspicious spirit of the times we’re living in invaded our own hearts and minds? The distressed spirit of our times makes its presence felt everywhere.

– Consider the invasion of Iraq, with its hundreds of American deaths and thousands of Iraqi deaths.

– Or the outright deceptions of our government to justify the invasion of Iraq.

– Or the rise of a vicious underbelly of religious fervor, with its hatred of gays and lesbians, its vendetta against women’s rights, its indifference to the poor.

– Or the establishment of an economy so greedy and brutal that this proud nation now boasts the highest percentage of old people in poverty, the highest murder and youth suicide rates in the developed world, with public monies given to the rich at the greatest rate in the past century.

All those troubling and uncivil spirits of our times – how much have they taken possession of our thoughts, our feelings, and our dreams?

Let us pray for the exorcism of these dark spirits from our hearts and minds.

Let us pray for their exorcism from the hearts and minds of those leading our nation.

Let us pray for their exorcism from the spirit of America, even from the face of the earth.

Let us pray for the exorcism of these spirits. Let us pray.

But not only pray.

Amen.

SERMON: The DaVinci Code, Part 2

It has been months since I did the first sermon on Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code. Since then, I’ve read some more in some of the many areas of study involved in the many theories he weaves together. I’ve also read several critiques of his book, mostly by religion scholars trying to protect orthodoxy from this sudden public interest in what Dan Brown presents as twenty centuries of schemes and lies by the churches to keep believers from understanding the real message of the man Jesus.

There is a whole industry around some of these theories, with books of all kinds appearing. The industry began over twenty years ago with the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but there are wild and wooly theories on every aspect of this complex story.

I want to grant the critics their due, and identify some other theories which, though very intriguing, simply cannot be proven either way.

But even after eliminating all these things, including some fascinating theories which may well be true but can’t be proven, enough remains to justify a best-selling book. So I’ll want to talk about those things which are clearly true, are the real center of Brown’s message, and which all by themselves justify the charges of two thousand years of misleading and flat-out dishonest misrepresentation of the religion of the man Jesus.

Theories that can’t be proven

Probably the most colorful of the theories that can’t be proven even though they may be true are those saying that a child of Jesus and Mary Magdalen survived in France where Mary came around the year 44, and that their bloodline continues to this day. A lot has been written about this. The stories are wonderful and intricate. But there is no way ever to prove this. So we’ll set it aside here.

Another colorful story, closely related, is that Mary Magdalen was the wife of Jesus, and the mother of two or three of his children, including the one brought to France. I know the scholar who has championed this theory. She is a world-renowned biblical scholar in her 70s who has read nearly everything there is on the subjects, and I think she is probably right. Still, it can’t be proven, so we’ll let that go too.

Still related is the weaker claim that Jesus and Mary had at least a sexual relationship. This was believed well into the middle ages, and resulted in the Catholic Church slaughtering thousands and thousands of Cathari in the Albigensian Crusades. So the fact of the belief is well established. But again, it seems impossible to prove the truth of the belief.

Then there is the theory of all those secret societies, committed to preserving these secrets through the centuries. These include the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, Freemasons, Rosicrucians and a small slew of others. It includes the theory that Leonardo DaVinci was among the enlightened members of this conspiracy, as were Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. DaVinci, this theory says, included coded clues in some of his most famous paintings, including The Last Supper, portraying himself as a non-believer, and picturing Mary to the right of Jesus as that extremely feminine-looking person in the Last Supper, wearing clothing with a complementary color scheme to Jesus’ clothing. Personally, I like a lot of this, and think there is enough information to insist that there is something to it, and that the theory must at least be left on the table for further discussion. But for here, that too can be left aside.

That is most of the major sensational theories in Dan Brown’s book, and I’m willing to let them all go for now, because what is left is really more important, and much easier to prove. These theories include the following:

– That Mary Magdalen was Jesus’ favorite; he ranked her above the other apostles, and trusted her more. Some of the Gnostic Gospels discovered in 1945 show this clearly. The Gospel of Philip says Jesus loved Mary the best, and was often seen kissing her on the mouth. The Gospel of Mary relates a bitter power struggle between Mary and Peter, a power struggle that Peter won. It shows the hatred Peter had for her, indeed for all women, and that the other apostles were clear that Mary understood Jesus’ intended message better than they did, and that he ranked her above them. She was called the Apostle of the Apostles. All of this is well enough documented that I think it has to stand.

– A second is that many or most of the Cathedrals of Notre Dame in France, including the most famous Cathedral at Chartres, were dedicated not to the Virgin Mary, but to Mary Magdalen. This alone is enough to support the claim that Mary was far more important than history has allowed. And its truth seems well established.

– A third, an odd one, is that in many of these cathedrals in Southern France, a cult of Mary Magdalen is mixed, oddly, with cults of the Egyptian goddess Isis and cults of the Black Madonna. I think the theory tying these three together is one of the most fascinating of all, though probably impossible to prove.

– Finally, and most importantly, it is absolutely true and easy to show that the religion of Jesus is diametrically opposed to the religion about Jesus that became Christianity. That alone justifies a best-selling book and a serious and widespread investigation into the teachings of Jesus and the origins of Christianity.

There are still some parts of these theories that are very complicated and vague, especially the odd coincidence of the cults of Mary, Isis and the Black Madonna. But let’s start just with the last point, which is that the religion Jesus taught is diametrically opposed to the religion Peter began as Christianity.

The evidence for this comes directly from Jesus’ teachings in the gospels, and also from many of the Gnostic Gospels. In sayings from some of the other gospels found in 1945, his message is very clearly about as far as you can get from traditional Christian teachings.

Take the Gospel of Thomas, for instance, which is the best known and most highly regarded of the additional gospels. Many scholars believe it was written down in the 50s, about twenty years before the first gospel appeared. In it, Jesus says some very surprising things. For instance, he says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (Gospel of Thomas #70, translated by Elaine Pagels). As the scholar Elaine Pagels puts it, the Jesus of these texts “speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal – even identical.” (Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels).

Jesus says, for instance, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.” (Thomas #108). Jesus’ teachings were about becoming aware and enlightened, and showing it through the way in which we treat others. It wasn’t about belief. He never threatened with hell or promised heaven. He never talked about another world at all, just this one, though those who wrote the gospels added those other supernatural parts in changing the religion of Jesus into the religion about Jesus.

Biblical scholars have known and said for centuries that the religion of Jesus was very different from the religion about Jesus. A Roman Catholic scholar I know wrote all this up in thorough detail back in 1986, in what is still one of the best books on the subject. The book is called The First Coming, by Thomas Sheehan. Thomas taught at DePaul University in Chicago for years, a Catholic university. Now he is at Stanford.

He shows how throughout the gospels, Jesus is complaining that his own disciples don’t get it, don’t understand what he is saying. And none of them seemed duller than Peter. Remember, it was Peter to whom Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan.” He said it when Peter kept completely misunderstanding Jesus’ teachings. Peter kept wanting to make Jesus a kind of supernatural savior. Peter, you may remember, was a simple fisherman, not a philosopher, and he just didn’t understand.

Peter was also not courageous. He is the one who denied Jesus three times after his arrest, to save his own skin. And in one of Thomas Sheehan’s most memorable lines, he added that “Peter continued his denial of Jesus by inventing Christianity.” That’s a first-rate Roman Catholic scholar, not a religion-hating atheist.

This is really a key part of Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code, that Jesus’ real message has been distorted and hidden by the Church. I think it is true and clear that Jesus preached a religion of self-awareness, of understanding our own direct relationship to God, saying the kingdom of God was within and among us, or that it was “spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.” (Gospel of Thomas, #113) There was no sin or repentance in his teachings, no priests or popes, no sacraments, no creeds, no required beliefs, none of the things that have been used to empower the officials of the churches and set them above ordinary believers. Jesus spoke to ordinary believers and had no mediator in his religion. Christianity has insisted that the priests, the churches and the creeds are the mediators that define people’s relation to God and state of salvation, and that all those things are controlled by, as they were invented by, the churches. Jesus would have detested that.

Another book you can read on this is Elaine Pagels’ newest book. She describes herself as a religion scholar who long ago lost any belief in the religion as it has been taught, and she has devoted her career to showing how the teachings that won, that became Christianity, were victories of politics and power, but not truth.

This was the sub-theme of her monumental 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels. It is also the theme of her newest book Beyond Belief, the account of the political fights to put the Gospel of John into the New Testament canon, and keep the Gospel of Thomas out. The reason is because these two books show a completely different religion. The Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas teaches to empower people, to tell them that the salvation they need is available to any of them, unmediated, as soon as they are ready to do the work of gaining insight into themselves: to bring forth what is within them, which can save them.

The Gospel of John, on the other hand, is completely authoritarian and hierarchical, with Jesus no longer as teacher but as supernatural savior and son of God, whose authority comes only through the one Church. As civil and military leaders throughout history have also found, it fits well with the idea of one king, one ruler, and gives rulers a bible that can easily be used, and has continuously been used, to keep people obedient to their ruler. Even St. Paul taught this religion of obedience, writing that the civil authorities have been placed over people by God. Nothing could be farther from the teachings of the man Jesus. Again, he would have detested them.

These findings are easy to establish, I think, in any open scholarly debate, and they undermine the religion about Jesus taught by the churches for twenty centuries. That’s enough to justify a best seller, and to get millions of people interested in saying No to the nonsense and finding out the truth for themselves.

I want to back way off and ask a very different kind of question about Dan Brown’s book and the interest in the real teachings of Jesus in a few minutes. But first, in order to offer you some of the lascivious titillation I know you came for, I want to tell you about some other theories connecting the odd coincidence that in southern France, the cult of Mary Magdalen overlaps with a cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis and cults of the Black Madonna. I don’t think this can be definitively proven, but I think there may eventually be enough information to make it at least plausible if not likely. At any rate, it is intricate and interesting, and reads like The DaVinci Code.

One criticism of Dan Brown’s book concerns his linking Mary Magdalene with Jesus in southern France, even though the Magdalen cults don’t mention Jesus at all. Instead, they link Mary with John the Baptist. There were religious groups in the first century who regarded John the Baptist as their teacher, and regarded Jesus as the Man of Lies, even accusing Jesus’ people of having John the Baptist murdered.

In fact, the only remaining Gnostic sect today, the Mandeans, still teach these things: that John was the Teacher of Righteousness and Jesus was the Man of Lies, whose people murdered John.

So after John’s murder, this theory goes, Mary then took up with Jesus and had at least a sexual relationship with him, if they weren’t in fact married.

Now the obvious objection to all this is to ask what possible sense it makes to say that Mary would take up with the man who had had her man killed.

Good question, you think. But ah, no, say others, it makes perfect sense. For remember the guiding story of the Isis cult. I’m sure you’re all up on your ancient Egyptian mythology. Isis was married to her brother Osiris. The evil Set murdered Osiris. And Isis later took up a sexual liaison with Set, in order to destroy him. So this, they say, is why Mary, as a priestess in the Isis cult, was also paired with Jesus – and, perhaps, why she was so close to him at his crucifixion.

Oh yes, and some scholars say that Mary Magdalen was also Egyptian, and also black. That she came from the town of Magdala, in Egypt.

This might explain another odd thing about the Magdalen cults in southern France: the fact that these cults seem to overlap not only with Isis cults, but also with cults of the Black Madonna. If Mary Magdalen was a priestess in the Isis cult and a black Egyptian, it would explain the existence of all three religious cults existing together: Mary Magdalen, the Isis priestess, and the Black Madonna were all the same person.

So far, I don’t think these theories can be either proven or disproven. They lie in that area of interesting possibilities to keep you awake at night.

What is still near the center of all these stories is the idea that the goal of spirituality was a union of opposites, a combination of male and female, perhaps symbolized or enacted through a rite of sexual union, which was a common feature of the Isis cults of the time.

The notion of uniting male and female also harmonizes with a saying of Jesus (Thomas 106): “When you make the two into one you will become children of Adam and when you say “Mountain, move from here, it will move.”

There is your dose of titillation.

Now finally, I want to leave you with a quite different question that takes all these stories out of novels, and into current events and our daily lives in the year 2004. In its own way, it’s as intriguing as Dan Brown’s book, though it’s not as complex. The question is a very simple one: Why is this particular fight surfacing so much and so often since 1980? So much that one list of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century listed Elaine Pagels’ 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels as #2? Why would a country like the United States, especially since 1980, want a close tie to a religion of obedience like the repressive versions of Christianity that came into office with the Bush administration?

Perhaps it’s because a religion of empowerment like the religion of Jesus may be the spiritual voice most desperately needed now as a corrective to the spirit of our times, the strident religious voices that want to disempower women, gays and lesbians, and a government declaring unending war, removing civil liberties, and working to turn America into a country of desperate, poor and obedient serfs rather than an educated and empowered citizenry.

It’s just a thought. I could be wrong.

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© Davidson Loehr

March 21, 2004

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: Writing Your Creed

Jonobie Ford

My topic has undergone a metamorphosis since I first proposed it for a service. When I suggested the topic of writing a creed, I was planning to tell you about the intellectual and technical aspects of writing, how I thought the attempt was an empowering exercise, my suggestions for structure, and so forth. And while trying to write that, I ran up against my old nemesis of writer’s block. I realized, after pushing at the block for a while, that the problem was that the topic I was “trying” to write about had somehow turned too heady and intellectual to really be appropriate as an affirmation of faith. The problem is that although I think that figuring out what you believe by writing it out is important, I don’t think my talking about it in the way I had planned does justice to this podium.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you a neat and tidy view of my religious beliefs, by sharing my creed and explaining what it means to me. Today, I’m going to show you the less orderly side of my beliefs.

I started thinking about my creed and its relation to my daily life. When I think about what keeps me on the treadmill even though I’m exhausted and don’t feel like running another step, and when I think about what sends me to work each day, I can’t point to any part of my written creed and say, “That’s the principle at work here.”

I think that means that there’s something rather important missing. My creed contains an important statement of my beliefs, but if it’s not capturing what’s driving me each and every day, it’s definitely missing something. I wish I could share advice on how I fixed that, but honestly, I haven’t, and I’m hoping that I’ll figure out how to by listening to more of Davidson’s sermons, reading more books that speak to me, and just by going out and living some more to try to further my understanding.

A large part of my current creed’s purpose is to point to the transcendent and wondrous in the world. One of the things I’ve noticed is that I always try to put religious sentiments in poetic language; not to obscure the meanings, I think, but because it seems to me that poetic language is the most appropriate language for handling religious ideas. It imbues them with a sense of beauty and importance.

Sometimes, it feels as if modern life has lost much of this beauty and sense of wonder. As Karen Armstrong says in her book A History of God, “One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. One of its consequences is that we have edited out the sense of the “spiritual” or the “holy” which was once an essential component of our human experience of the world.” My current creed reflects this desire to imbue life with a sense of spiritual or holiness.

Keeping the transcendent and wondrous in mind is important while thinking about religion, but it’s equally important to stay grounded in what it is that drives me, day in and day out, to live, to work, and to play. That’s the part I think I’ve left out of my creed, and that’s the part that’s the hardest for me to compose. I don’t yet know the answer to that piece; and even though I believe it’s somewhere inside me, I haven’t yet figured out how to write it down.

I’m left suspecting, and hoping, that, like my creed, I’m still a work in progress.

PRAYER

The theologian Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

It sounds so easy, but often seems so hard. Let us focus today on what makes us come alive, that we may go and do it.

Let us seek those things that know our true name and make them our friends. And those places where we feel safe, real and cherished: let us seek them as well, and learn to dwell near them.

Let us muster the courage to listen for those voices that demand only the best from us, and let us grow comfortable in their company. For they are angels of our better nature, and we need their hard, honest, faithful voices in our ears.

Of the paths ahead of us, let us choose the most true path, even though it be a demanding one. For our calling is a high one. We are made, as scientists and poets have told us, entirely of stardust; of the stuff of gods are we made. And that noble origin grants us much honor, and a task.

The task begins with asking what makes us come alive and going to do it. Because more than anything, the world needs people who have come alive. Let us seek that which makes us come alive, nothing less. Amen.

SERMON: Spiritual Aeronautics, Part I

It isn’t easy writing a statement of what you believe, as Jonobie found. Then when you’ve written one, then look at how you’re living, it seems to leave out so much of what really drives you. It isn’t easy.

And one reason it isn’t easy, as ironic as this sounds, is because we have already inherited the words and the styles in which we’re supposed to be thinking of our beliefs. In our culture, beliefs are supposed to involve God, sin, and salvation, even if we don’t think of our lives that way. And not any god, either. Just that one taken from the religious scriptures of Jews and Christians.

If we say “Well, I don’t think God is a useful concept, I think in terms of trying to be awake rather than living in illusions” – if we say that, we’ll be made to feel that we haven’t done it right, that we didn’t use the right materials, even though it would be a perfectly good Buddhist statement.

We’ve inherited this set of religious luggage we’re supposed to use. One suitcase says “God” and is filled with over 25 centuries of traditions, poetry, fantasy, feeling, wisdom and nonsense, all packed in that suitcase under the word “God.”

Another suitcase may be called Sin, and it too is loaded with centuries’ worth of stories, a lifetime of personal experiences, the teachings of our childhood church, our classmates, and the low-level religion we see in the media. It isn’t a neutral word; it comes to us already packed with other peoples’ meanings.

And there are more suitcases in this set of spiritual luggage. Salvation, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, Jesus, angels, demons and the whole array of fanciful and metaphysical concoctions of millions of believers over dozens of centuries.

All that luggage is really a kind of partial do-it-yourself kit, a set of materials or recommendations, for us to use or reject in building our own adult faith, though we’re not taught to think of it that way.

But if we just use the luggage we’ve been given, without ever unpacking it, we will never grow up spiritually. Rather than owning our beliefs, we’ll be owned by them. When we repeat beliefs we’ve learned from others, we’re using words with meanings given to them by others. And to live others’ beliefs in others’ terms is in a sense to live someone else’s life.

So in thinking about how to unpack all this luggage, and how to prepare for the kind of personal spiritual trip that might be a whole lot more honest and relevant for us, I decided to try something a little heady to shed a certain kind of light on all of this.

My focus in graduate school was in what’s called language philosophy, and my dissertation was on the philosopher who was the giant behind language philosophy. (My dissertation title: The Legitimate Heir to Theology: A Study of Ludwig Wittgenstein, University of Chicago 1988.) I’ve never preached on his complex thoughts or that kind of philosophy, but a little of it might be a useful way to think about this.

Language philosophers say that most of our confusions come from putting things in the wrong way. Don’t let that sound too abstract. It is very close to the Buddhist teaching that we live in illusions we have created by our ways of thinking, so the freedom we need comes from changing the way we think about the problems.

That’s why, whenever we’re dealing with powerful words, and all kinds of jargon, we always need to ask what we think we mean by words like Truth, love, justice, America or God. Without knowing what we mean by these things in plain ordinary language, we literally don’t know what we believe. And if we follow, or swallow, the word when someone else is using it, we may be following something really untrue, unjust, un-American or ungodly. I’ll give you a real-world example, from a House Bill now before the U.S. Congress that most of you may not have heard of.

It’s called the Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 also known as H. R. 3799, introduced into the House of Representatives in Washington last month by Representative Aderholt, R-Alabama, to limit the jurisdiction of Federal courts in certain cases involving the invocation of God as the supreme authority of the United States. It would amend the United States Code to prohibit the Supreme Court from reviewing cases in which federal or state officers have used God’s rule “as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”

What this says is that those in power may define God in their own way, use their allegiance to their God to trump every law or restraint in the country, and that their behaviors may not even be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

This bill comes with a very specific definition of God in mind, one that Pat Robertson has been advocating openly since at least 1978, when he wanted the Supreme Court prohibited from questioning or overriding his concept of God.

I’ve checked with the Washington office of the UUA, and nobody thinks this bill has a chance of getting anywhere, though they think it is a scary sign that it was even introduced.

You know the concept of the word “God” packed in the luggage of this bill – as well as the implicit concepts of truth, justice and America – is a narrow and brutal concept that would discriminate against women, gays and lesbians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and anyone else who didn’t fit the shallow and finally vicious mold of the worst kind of fundamentalism.

That’s why it is so important to understand that God isn’t a being, a critter, anything that exists in time and space, but is a concept, an idea. If it’s a critter, than we don’t get to vote about what the critter is like. But it’s a concept, like Justice and America are concepts. So it is terribly important that we do accept our creative role in defining that word, or rejecting it as just not being language that is useful to us.

Many people here lost all interest in God when they thought he was a Guy in the Sky, and knew that the idea of a supernatural being was useless, if not just insulting.

And this loss of faith doesn’t only happen in religion. It can happen with all our most powerful concepts. For some, it happened a generation ago to the word “America.” I remember vividly when radicals in the Vietnam War era burned American flags because they accepted the administration’s definition of America as an invading warrior nation, rather than accepting their role in challenging and changing that definition of the concept of America to something nobler.

And for many poor people in our society, the word “Justice” has mostly died as a useful concept, because the kind of justice they see is designed to exclude them.

Most of our really powerful concepts have been defined down, dumbed down, to levels too low to be either admirable or useful – words like Truth, Justice, America or God, for instance. It’s as though someone held a contest to define these words, and the dumbest answers won.

I have a refrigerator magnet given to me by the president of a church I once served that says “It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkeys.” As you might imagine, that was a church with some colorful problems!

I do like that refrigerator magnet, but there is a more elegant way of putting this. It comes, as so many of my favorite images come, from the Greeks.

I talked a couple weeks ago about the Greek image of the human soul as a spider sitting in the middle of a web, feeling and attending to all her connections to the world around her.

But they also had other images and stories. For their word psyche meant both “soul” and “butterfly.” They’re saying that growing a soul is like the metamorphosis from something that crawls along the ground like a caterpillar, to something that flies, that soars.

And it can happen, they say, only by changing from one thing into another. It makes it sound natural, automatic. How hard could it be when even caterpillars can do it?

Still, if you have had gods die, or if you’ve lost faith in America, Truth, Justice, Love or the rest of those powerful words, you know there is nothing easy about it. It can feel awful, and cosmic. Because those most powerful abstractions are like guiding stars that we follow. We hitch our wagon to the star. And when a star like a concept of God or America or Justice dies, it can feel like, “Well, there was just that one star and it went dim, so the heavens must be dark now.”

But what language philosophy – or Buddhism – would say is that what really died was a word, a way of talking about something important to us, so we need to grow into other ways of thinking about those things. We need to find a structure of thinking, a grammar of ultimacy that is useful to us and worthy of those things that are most sacred to us.

For me – as our ministerial interns and worship associates have learned, sometimes to their dismay – it must be done in ordinary language, because that’s where meaning is really located, I think. Jonobie spoke of going to poetry to preserve the feeling dimension of her beliefs, and that’s important too. But first, I think, we need to know what on earth we actually believe, before we augment it with poetic and metaphorical images.

So instead of using jargon like saying “I try to live as God wants me to live,” I think things like “I try to live by the highest values I can find.” Instead of the poetic statement that “I know God loves me,” I think less poetic things, like “I’m all right. In the grand scheme of things, I believe I can be a valuable part of all this.” I don’t say, “I want to work for social justice” – since “justice” is a word like God, that is defined differently by every ideology. I say I want to work toward a society in which individual rights are balanced by individual responsibilities, where we accept our freedoms at the price of being equally committed to the freedoms of all others. It lacks poetry. I could make it more poetic by saying “The whole human sound goes up only from the full choir,” though that still doesn’t make a good bumper sticker. But I know what I mean by it, and so do you when you hear it. So for me the clarity of thought and expression are more than worth the loss of poetry or easy jargon.

I’ll admit that putting beliefs in ordinary language takes away some of their magic and their sparkle. They suddenly sound very down-to-earth, not quite as grand as thinking we are serving “the truth that passeth all understanding.” But we know who we are and what we believe, in ways others can also understand. There is a kind of integrity there that we lose when we don’t understand or own our beliefs. Ordinary language can still express truth that passes understanding; it just won’t allow truth that bypasses it.

Think of that House Bill 3799 again. If I got to define the word “God” there, got to determine what it meant and how it was to be used, I’d be happy with it. But I don’t, and neither do you. An immensely powerful word has been put in a political bill, carrying with it a terribly narrow, ignorant and bigoted meaning and hiding an equally dangerous and bigoted agenda. All those things are hiding inside that three-letter word. God may not be like a being, but it is like a Trojan Horse; an immense amount can be loaded inside that single syllable. That’s why loaded language, like a loaded gun, is potentially so dangerous, why it’s worth asking just what we mean by words like God, justice, America and truth.

Buddhists say that powerful words and symbols are like fingers pointing at the moon, so a word like “God” would need to point toward an ideal world in which all were accepted as children of God, in which women, gays and lesbians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists and others were all equally embraced as citizens. But you know, as I do, that’s not what the framers of this bill have in mind. They’re not using the finger to point at the moon. They’re not giving us the moon, they’re giving us – well, you can finish that sentence.

When we accept the prepackaged meanings of powerful words like Justice, America or God, we are like caterpillars gnawing on the leaves in our small part of the garden, inside a fenced yard whose boundaries are no bigger than the vision of those who have given our powerful words their meanings.

This is the caterpillar stage: not looking up, no concept of the great amount of space there is to live in, because we’ve accepted a definition of life, Justice, America or God that is too small to allow life that grows beyond narrow limits. And when we do grow beyond them, and oppose them, that narrow world often grows quite mean.

You know this, if you’ve ever been part of a community – religious, political or social – where you outgrew the group’s notion of truth, justice, God or America. You can lose friends, relatives, and relationships by outgrowing their vision. Once you can see beyond their horizons, for you they become terribly earthbound, limiting, too small to contain the life you are growing into. Everyone here has probably experienced some form of this.

Then what do you do? Do you go back where it’s safe, ignoring the little voice that says you don’t really believe this stuff? Or do you listen to the voice saying you are somehow commanded to become more, bigger, healthier than your group will endorse?

Yes, sometimes the little voices telling you to ignore the rules of others are the wrong voices, and may even be dangerous. I mentioned people like Curt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, or Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday a few weeks ago, as people who listened to the wrong voices and lost their lives. Sometimes, we need to listen. But sometimes, those little voices are the angels of our better nature, and we need to heed them.

That’s the need for metamorphosis. It’s when a turkey decides it’s not really a turkey but is an eagle. Or, for a better biological metaphor, it’s like when a caterpillar grows into its true calling as a butterfly. It requires a metamorphosis. Changing gods, changing centers, probably changing communities and losing some friends.

If I lived in the community that had produced House Bill #3799, it would make my skin crawl. No matter how much I might love those people, I couldn’t be around them, couldn’t live in their world or with their notions of Truth, God, Justice or America. To me, they would be as caterpillars, and I would have to leave them or die.

They wouldn’t support my growing away from them. And they wouldn’t think I was becoming a butterfly, either. They would see me as deluded or damned, would threaten me with their hell and withdraw the protection of their community.

To grow away, to grow up spiritually, sometimes we have to leave a whole world, a whole way of being. It can be one of the noblest things we ever do, but it isn’t quick and it isn’t easy.

And it’s a transformation we usually have to do out of sight, tucked away inside something like a cocoon. That’s the next part of spiritual aeronautics: the cocoon.

Like so much in spiritual growth, it is seldom clear just how to do it. We have teachings like that Buddhist insight that the great teachers and teachings of the world are like fingers pointing at the moon. But it’s hard to see the moon, especially when it feels like the sun has gone out.

Still, there are clues. And I will leave you until next week with one that you heard earlier. It comes from the theologian Howard Thurman, who said: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

We weren’t meant to be caterpillars. Or turkeys.

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© Davidson Loehr

7 March 2004

Worship Associate: Jonobie Ford

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:

Jonobie Ford

Working on distilling some of my religious beliefs into a short segment to share with a large group of people has been interesting, emotional, challenging, and, a little intimidating. Oddly, the end product of having a several-minute written description makes it sound rather more tidy than it feels in real life. That said, I’d like to share with you what I consider to be the central parts of my religious belief.

My religion helps me to interact with others, with myself, and with the Divine.

The first component — the one that’s about my interaction with others — is based upon my more expansive version of the golden rule. It’s more than just treating people well. It’s the idea that other things in this world and I are similar in some way, and that I should treat all parts of Nature respectfully. I’m not exactly like my cats, but I recognize that they and I share something — what some might call a soul, what I usually term the “breath of life”. But regardless, something that deserves my respect. A mountain and I are even more different, but there’s still something there that should be respected.

The second component — the one about my interaction with myself — is how I gain perspective on life. In particular I celebrate cycles in my life and in Nature. Spring turns to summer to fall and to winter, repeating in sequence year after year. Children are born, grow up, and have children of their own. I recognize my place in these universal patterns. I am also reminded that my life has cycles, including a physical process that repeats each month, and an emotional range from high to low and back again in a more irregular pattern. My current condition is impermanent, and I am prepared for changes.

The third component — the one about my interaction with the Divine – is about the honoring of my Gods. I take a polytheistic view, that there are many Gods that watch over different spheres of life. Gods aren’t all-seeing or all-powerful, but rather act within their limited spheres of influence. Interacting with one is akin to what happens when I call my mother in law to ask for her advice about a meal I want to prepare. She can give me encouragement and suggestions, since she’s an excellent cook, but in the end, it’s up to me to cook the dish. Who I call up on a particular day depends on what I’m doing and who is good at it.

For example, my main passion is writing. I’m a technical writer by trade, and write a fair amount of nonfiction on the side. Because of that, and because of religious experiences I had while exploring my faith, the main part of my worship is devoted to Brighid, a Celtic Goddess whose spheres of influence are, loosely, writing, healing and crafting. Historical writings about Brighid talk about the “fire in the head” that She brings to people — the inspiration or creative spark that strikes while trying to write or speak. Honoring that creative spark is important to me. In turn, there are times that I’ve felt blessed by Brighid’s fire of inspiration.

I do hang a lot of concepts on the word “God”. It is a complex word that simultaneously means different things to me. I consider myself a theist, believe that my Gods exist in some manner, but I also view them as archetypes and ideals to aspire to — somewhat like heroes. I honor Them by striving toward excellence at the activities within Their spheres of influence. For example, when I trained for and ran in a race for the first time, I considered that to be an act of devotion to Lugh, a storm God with strong sport associations. The preparation on the morning of my race included a short devotion to Him. By choosing which Gods to honor at a particular time, I can concentrate my focus on different areas of my life.

I’ve tried to talk about my beliefs in a way that you can connect with and understand, but when I step down and return to my life, where my beliefs are alive and real, I express these ideas in the shorthand of a creed that I wrote for myself. My creed has these three statements:

First, that I should recognize and honor the breath of life within all things.

Second, that just as cycles repeat in Nature, they also repeat in my life. As such, I celebrate the changing of the seasons and cultural holidays as my holy days.

And finally, that it is important to honor my Gods. My Gods are mentors to learn from, archetypal ideals to strive toward, and symbols of the great unknown.

Regardless of whether you view Gods as real or as archetypes, or both, I hope you’ll consider the value of occasionally viewing the world through a polytheistic framework.

PRAYER:

Let us attend to our sacred connections. We live suspended in a web that bind us to all the people, relationships and beliefs that can give and sustain life, and we must attend to those connections.

Who are the people who cherish us, who see what is sacred in us and affirm it? They are among the angels of our better nature; let us attend to our connections with them.

Who are the people who empower us, who urge us to sing our special songs and offer our unique gifts? They help attach us to our task in life. Let us attend to our connections with them.

Where are those rare and sacred places in our life where we find power, purpose and a mission capable of granting us both honor and a task? Let us accept them both: both the honor and the task. Because there are so many others who also need to attend to their connections, and sometimes we are the only help they have at hand. And so let us attend both to the connections coming to us and those going forth from us. Let us attend to our connections.

Amen.

SERMON: Oh, Gods!

When I was 21, trying to sort things out, I went to see my minister. I told him I was seeing a psychologist, but wanted to talk to him too. I asked what the difference was between what he did and what my psychologist was trying to do. “All I can do,” he said, “is try to help you understand the gods you are serving, and whether they are worth serving.” All these years later, I’m not sure that what we do can be put any better than that.

Years later, in Divinity School, I learned how hollow the traditional God-language of Western religion has become even among people who know it well, and how incapable it is of truly binding together our whole pluralistic world. The students who clung most tightly to the old language formulas could not explain what they meant by any of them. They were saying what they had been told to say, going through the motions as though it were still, perhaps, the 18th century. But when they got clearer about what they actually believed, it was never traditional, seldom systematic or very cosmic. A few stories here and there that they used to get them through. They planned to take the old stories to their parishioners in the faith that somehow they might work better for them than they did for their minister. And stories do have that power; they can awaken hope and meaning sometimes.

But mostly, we have no deep or nuanced knowledge of even our own Western religious stories. Mostly today, we have lost the names and stories of our gods. We aren’t sure what to call the forces of life within and around us: those forces, which sustain us.

Jonobie spoke of the inspiration she sometimes feels, which she associates with the stories of the Celtic goddess Brigit, because she knows those stories and has found connections in them to her own life. But few people have heard of Brigit or many of the Celtic deities; few even know much about the Greek gods, or those of Egypt or the Norse bunch.

And in our critical and often cynical age we are more aware, perhaps, that both gifts and seductive words come without patterns or guarantees. Not all gifts are useful; not all powerful words are wise.

Think of just some of the famous people who have great gifts and great demons, and can’t seem to sort them out:

– Curt Cobain heard the sounds of music and the sounds of madness, and finally listened most to the madness that drove him to suicide.

– Robert Downey, Jr. is an immensely gifted actor who can’t seem to stop listening to the Siren songs of his cocaine habit.

– Wynona Ryder has immense gifts from what the Greeks would call the Muses as an actress, but can’t seem to stop the voices that lead her to shoplifting.

A generation ago, it was Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix; and before that Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker, geniuses with gifts from the gods and addictions from demons, and the demons won.

I like Jonobie’s way of thinking of her writing as a gift from a goddess. I think there is something both humble and honest about seeing some of our abilities as gifts rather than achievements. The first time I really understood gifts was over thirty-five years ago when I began doing photography. I had never done it, never owned a camera, but I was in Vietnam and wanted to see more of the war, so interviewed to be a press officer and combat photographer in the Vietnam War.

After the interview, another lieutenant said, as I was being shown the way to my new tent, “I didn’t know you were a photographer.” “How hard can it be?” I answered. During the next couple weeks I had to buy a camera, film, and spend time figuring out how to load the film, focus, and set exposures. It is literally true that I shot my first combat operation holding a Nikon in one hand, and that little slip of paper that comes with film, trying to figure out whether the light was “hazy” or “cloudy bright” so I’d know what exposure to set – I knew so little about cameras, I had neglected to buy one with a light meter. You know, those little slips of paper are remarkably accurate. I shot the whole war that way. And I discovered, quite by happy accident, that I had a natural gift for photography.

I shot only one roll of film on my first operation, 36 pictures. I only saw 36 things that looked like good war pictures, so that’s all I took. Of those 36 photos, 21 were released to the media, and all were picked up by UPI, AP, Reuters, and a dozen other media outlets. It was kind of an amazing surprise, but this really was about as easy as I’d thought it would be.

I did have a chance to work with Co Reentmeister during that year. Co was the 26-year-old photographer who shot all the pictures and cover shots for LIFE Magazine, and was clearly a photographic genius. I wasn’t a genius, but I was good, and I couldn’t understand it.

I never felt like that gift was a part of me. It always felt like something that somehow came through me but didn’t have much of anything to do with me. I even opened a photography studio after the war, and did some expensive and award-winning portraiture and wedding photography for several years. One year, at the urging of some customers, I entered some outdoor portraits in the statewide professional photography exhibition at Cobo Hall in Detroit, and won First Place, over 900 other professional entries. I was so detached from photography that I could be as objective about my pictures as I was about others. I remember walking through the exhibits looking at the other entries, and thinking, “Well, I’d have voted for mine too – it is the best here!”

And, odd as it sounds, I had no ego connection with it. It just didn’t seem like anything of which I had any ownership. The Gift had done it. Usually, we think if we have a gift, it’s a kind of Calling, a clue to what we should do in life. But I never liked photography. It was a gift that gave nothing to me. And a gift that doesn’t give anything to you is like a god that’s not worth serving. It isn’t a gift, it’s a trap. I sold the studio, all the equipment, didn’t take pictures for 25 years and never missed it.

I never thought of it as the gift of a god, just a talent life had dealt me that would have been better off given to someone else.

Maybe we should have a word about this word “gods” before going on. There are thousands of gods in the religions of the world, and thousands of more that have died and faded from history. And most of the religions have always said that their god was here from the very beginning. You need to understand that it is not the case that, fifteen billion years ago, there were these thousands of gods sort of hovering in between time and space. The, billions of years later, human evolved, and some of them wound up living in the territories of some of these gods. This crew lived in the land of Brahman and his many imaginative representations; this other bunch wound up in the land of Mithras, Jahweh, Odin, Zeus, Brigit and the rest. That’s not how it happens.

First, humans evolved and separated into many different cultures. Then, within each culture, the more religiously creative humans concocted their gods as local deities arising from their interactions with the forces and powers they experienced in their culture. And then – as a sort of brand-name campaign – they all claimed these gods had been there from the get-go. Gods represent imaginative concretions of the experience of mystery and power, fear and trust. They’re our children, created in the image of our experiences and biases. Then they and their institutions return the favor by shaping the people of a particular culture in “their” image. There are more gods than you can count, most of them long dead.

But my minister’s words from forty years ago still ring true: about searching for the gods we’re serving and whether they’re worth serving. There are so many examples of people serving gods, living out gifts, that give them everything but a life worth living – which it’s a god’s job to help bestow.

When I was in the fourth grade, one of my friends’ fathers was some kind of an accountant who must have been pretty good at it. They had a nice house, two cars before everyone had two cars, nice things, belonged to the classy clubs, and his kids had a lot nicer toys than I did. He apparently had some gifts that most accountants apparently didn’t have. I couldn’t imagine why on earth anyone would want to spend their life looking at numbers. I’m one of the Damned in that theology: someone destined to wind up in Accountant God Hell because I can’t balance my checkbook. Ok, I’ve never actually tried, but I can’t imagine it.

So one day I asked my friend’s father why he did that work. He stopped to think about it, and then said he said he didn’t know; it just seemed so easy he didn’t feel he had a choice in the matter. At the time I chalked it up to Confusing Adult-Speak. Years later, after I sold my studio, I looked back on that conversation, and my heart went out to him.

Because that fourth-grade year of mine was the year my friend’s father was arrested in a city park, where he used to go at night and expose himself to strangers. His gifts gave him a good living but not a good life, and he felt so invisible he resorted to sad and furtive activities in dark parks just so he could feel that somehow, somewhere, someone actually saw him.

It sounds kind of funny to speak of these things as involving gods today. In our daily lives, few of us associate these things with gods.

Today, I’m not sure it’s really the gods we need to get in touch with, as much as we need to get in touch with the creative powers that create the gods, to reconnect with that power within and around us. For those powers, and their connections to sacred and powerful constellations, are all still here.

So I’ve thought of two stories about how these nexes of power and potential, these proto-gods, are formed in our lives today.

The first is a 2002 novel I just finished a couple weeks ago, an odd and remarkable book called Life of Pi (by Yann Martel). It has the most surprising and transformative ending I’ve ever read, one that makes you realize you’ve just finished a book that wasn’t about what you thought it was about. I won’t spoil the ending, but can tell you that this unlikely book is about a long ocean voyage in a 26-foot lifeboat occupied by a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi, and a 450 lb. Bengal tiger named Richard Parker – and that the tiger turned out to be a kind of god, a manifestation of power, survival, transformation, a fierce and fearsome will to live, who both saved and transformed the boy’s life.

The second story is more down-to-earth, and quite true. It’s by a remarkable physician in the San Francisco area named Rachel Naomi Remen. She is a woman gifted in understanding deeply and wisely, whose gifts have caused many doctors and psychiatrists to refer difficult and complex patients to her. Mostly, she works with terminal patients with AIDS, cancer, and so on.

She tells a wonderful story about creating gods, creating small sacred centers that are both life-giving and life-saving, though it’s not quite how she worded it. For over twenty years she has offered a very simple but powerful ritual to some of her patients before their radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery.

She suggests they meet together with some of their closest friends and family the day before their procedure. It is important that the group be made up of those who are connected to them through a bond of the heart. She suggests that they find an ordinary stone, big enough to fit in the palm of their hand, and bring it to the meeting with them.

The ritual begins by having everyone sit in a circle. In any order they wish to speak, each person tells the story of a time when they too faced a crisis. People may talk about the death of important persons, the loss of jobs or of relationships, or even about their own illnesses. The person who is speaking holds the stone the patient has brought.

When they finish telling their story of survival, they take a moment to reflect on the personal quality that they feel helped them come through that difficult time. People will say such things as, “What brought me through was determination,” “What brought me through was faith,” “What brought me through was humor.” When they have named the quality of their strength, they speak directly to the person preparing for surgery or treatment, saying, “I put determination into this stone for you,” or, “I put faith into this stone for you.”

Often what people say is surprising. Sometimes they tell of crises that occurred when they were young or in wartime that others, even family members, may not have known before, or they attribute their survival to qualities that are not ordinarily seen as strengths. It is usually a moving and intimate meeting and often all the people who participate say that they feel strengthened and inspired by it. After everyone has spoken the stone is given back to the patient, who takes it with them to the hospital, to keep nearby and hold in their hand when things get hard.

Dr. Remen has had several patients go to their chemotherapy, their radiation, or even their surgery with their stones strapped with adhesive tape to the palm of one of their hands or the bottom of their foot.

Over the years, many of the oncologists and surgeons in her community have learned about these stones from their patients and are very careful about them. One surgeon even had the staff go through the hospital laundry in search of a stone that was accidentally thrown away with the sheets in the recovery room. She asked him why he had done this and he laughed and said, “Listen, I have seen people do badly after surgery and even die when there was no reason for it other than the fact that they believed they wouldn’t make it. I need all the help I can get.” (pp. 151-153, Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen)

That’s a story about how gods are created, and about the kind of power and the kind of connections that can create them. Neutral things, stones, get loaded with powerful stories, meanings, wishes, and carry them for those who carry the stones. Those stones become invested with so much power they literally can hold the power of life or death over patients who have them taped to their hands or feet before a scary surgery. That’s how gods are created. Names and stories of gods get loaded with messages of power and hope and passed on. Messages, hopes, dreams, powerful stories and experiences connect with our own hopes and fears and become almost supernatural for us. The patient in the next bed wouldn’t get a thing out of your stone. You may get courage from it, even life. Those stories are like portable altars, so people can carry the reminder that they were touched and blessed by life.

There’s a passage in the Bible that says, “Build altars in the places where I have reminded you who I am, and I will come and bless you there.”

We do need to mark the places where we felt power and connection. Remember that religion means reconnection. It’s like an ancient picture the Greeks had, of our soul, Psyche. They sometimes pictured her as a spider in the center of a web connected by its radials to all the points that held it up, where the spider’s job was to attend to the connections, to keep them in good repair. That’s our job, attending to those connections. It’s a way of setting up altars where we feel touched by life.

Don’t let this sound spooky or supernatural. It’s very down-to-earth. There’s an example of this kind of altar here in our sanctuary. It is our side windows, with their recessed racks containing 150 votive candles in their red or blue glass holders. Before and during every service, we make time for people to light candles, and to give the candles they have lit their own meaning, to let them mark sacred or perhaps scary parts of their own lives.

On average, more than a hundred of you light one or more candles each week here, sometimes many more. This year, it looks like we will use over 3,000 of these 4-1/2 hour tea lights in them, which is about 12,000 hours of candles burning for memories, hopes, markers that become bright little altars of places where many of you have found connections. That window may be one of the strings in your web, a kind of connection. Like the stones, the candles can become connected with your own private associations and thoughts.

Think of the other times and places in your life where you have felt that power, where you have felt called out, empowered, connected. It doesn’t have to have happened a lot of times, though we need to be able to call those times forth, to reconnect with their power.

One reason we have so much freedom of belief in liberal religion is precisely because we each need a different combination of gods, voices and gifts, who are for us worth serving, who give us life. If yours don’t work for me, there’s a fair chance mine won’t work for you either. We are all here to try and become better people, partners, parents and citizens, but no two people will take the journey accompanied by exactly the same gods.

Stories, stones, candles are like little seeds of meaning and empowerment – little God-seeds that might, with our care, blossom into centers capable of reconnecting us with ourselves and the best parts of our world.

We are all in the position of that old Greek picture of the soul as a spider in the center of its web attending to all its connections. Those are the ties that bind us to one another and to the amazing powers of life, those powers that are the stuff of which the gods are made. Let us attend to our connections.

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© Davidson Loehr

29 February 2004

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:

Don Smith

The theme for today’s service was generated from an idea that I have pondered for a long time now. Being aware that the history of our religious tradition is one that has had a series of orthodoxies, and that those orthodoxies have always excluded certain persons or views, I wondered whether there could be an orthodoxy that is more inclusive and, if so, what form that orthodoxy would take. By that I mean to say “Around what center could all of humanity gather, and agree that the center is more important than any one radius that might extend from it.”

I believe that it’s important to identify what it is that brings us together and keeps us together. I believe that if we remain focused on that, then we can deal openly and honestly with each other–even when we disagree. Many ideas are tossed about that can be both attractive and seductive, but are not, in the long run, healthful or life giving. They do nothing to build one up, to make one a better person, or add to one’s life.

In fact they can drain our energy and leave us more cynical. We may exercise freedom of belief, but we are not protected against the negative impact of bad belief systems. And so we need to be very critical of what things we believe; to demand that the beliefs and ideas serve us, and not just that we serve them.

I’ll be speaking to you again in a month or so, during a service on Transcendentalism, and will try to express something more of my personal religious beliefs at that time. But today I wish to speak about what I would have our community be, and the best way I can think of to do that is to tell a little of my own history with this church; from what tradition I came, why I left that tradition, and what I found here. It will probably be a familiar story to most of you.

I was brought up in the Church of Christ. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Church of Christ I would only say this: it is as fundamental as fundamentalism can be, and as narrow in its teachings as any church could ever be. It is a church that insists on both orthopraxy and orthodoxy. One must do what is right and one must do it for the right reasons. My parents are both simple, loving, G’d-fearing people who believe with complete earnestness all the things that they taught me. I respect them more than I can say, even though I disagree with them totally when it comes to matters of theology. I know that their love and respect for me is equally strong, even though they no doubt wonder how this tree-hugging, gay, agnostic could be the product of the upbringing they provided.

It was at about the age of twelve that I began to think that I didn’t believe the theology that I had been spoon-fed from the cradle onward, and by the time I left for college I was certain of the fact. I never rejected or abandoned the orthopraxy that I had been taught, but only the orthodoxy. I rejected all Religion – with a capital R, meaning organized religion – but I don’t guess I ever lost sight of the values that my religious upbringing had instilled in me. Those values have served me well in life and I embrace them wholeheartedly.

I know that many of you have heard this more times than you care to remember, but when I came to this church it was for one reason and one reason only: to do t’ai chi. But once I got here I began to get to know the people, and I began to read the postings on the bulletin board-became aware of the diversity of thought and beliefs that were embraced here. I attended a class on Sunday mornings for ten weeks that compared Taoism with UUism, and I became curious to know what a service here would be like. I attended a service and was moved in a way that’s hard for me to explain, but the feeling produced was one of keen awareness. Awareness of the organic whole of which we are all a part, and a feeling of belonging. I continued to come and to explore what this church has to offer. The more I explored the more deeply I was drawn into this community.

A community of tolerance and acceptance, of support and encouragement, of thoughts that challenge, and challenges to thought. This is the community of which I partake, and this is the community that I wish to help build up, maintain, and see flourish.

PRAYER

Let us pray that the prayers of those who love us best will be answered.

Out best friends pray that we will be people of good character. They hope we will hold ourselves to high standards, and welcome constructive criticism when we stray.

Let us hope their prayers are answered.

Those who care about what is best in us pray that we will honor what is best in us. They hope we will listen to the angels of our better nature, not the angels of our lesser selves.

Let us hope their prayers are answered.

And those close to us know, as we know, that what we really believe, the gods we really serve, will be judged by our actions – not our words, but our actions, whether noble or ignoble, loving or mean. And they hope and pray, those who love us best, that we will serve, and be defined by, those angels of our better nature. That’s how we know they love us best. Let us pray that their prayers are answered.

Amen.

SERMON: The Danger in Handling Sacred Things

My favorite philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once cautioned a student not to get too familiar with sacred things, to grant them a respectful distance. In part, it’s because of the great power of sacred things, the great spirit in them – and the fact that while you think you’re playing with them, they may take your measure.

I was reminded of this again by this sermon topic, combined with two events in the news the past weeks. Sermon topics can be planned carefully in advance, but then sometimes current events will intervene, which must be addressed. Then the sermon topic modulates to a key in which thought about the topic and the current events can both be addressed. That’s what happened this week.

The first was the super-hyped release of Mel Gibson’s move on his peculiar version of the Passion. The second was President Bush’s equally embarrassing move to write discrimination and bigotry into an American Constitution revered the world over for its inclusive freedoms. And all these things have to do with the high cost of using sacred and noble words, words like God, country, justice, truth and love, in low, mean or inadequate ways.

As several movie reviewers have observed, Mel Gibson has made a movie about his own personal obsession with suffering. Most of his most famous roles – Braveheart, Payback, Lethal Weapon – are obsessed with Mel Gibson’s suffering in order to save people. His other obsession is with his very idiosyncratic version of Christianity. He’s described kindly as a “traditional” Catholic. That means he rejects Vatican II and all advances in Catholic thinking of the past forty years: like the kinder and more inclusive attitude toward Jews and people of other religions, or translating the Mass into English so believers could understand it. He is against all of that, and I understand he has built a church near his home where he has hired a minister to preach religion the way he likes it.

In a way, his movie raises him to the height of what must be his greatest fantasy, for he has now cast Jesus Christ to play Mel Gibson. But as more and more religious writers are beginning to note, it is a willfully ignorant and embarrassingly narrow vision of Christianity. He is very obsessed with picturing the goriest details of a torture that did not come from the bible but from a secular book by a Catholic mystic, where she described the awful Jews and the horrendous wounds inflicted on Jesus.

He has his right to play with religious symbols and religious stories. But he doesn’t have a right to have his playing respected. That depends on how well he handles the religious symbols and stories he plays with, whether he gives them a high or a low meaning. And like Wittgenstein said, it’s dangerous to get too close to sacred things.

Because picking up religious symbols is a little like a violinist picking up a Stradivarius: the instrument will take the measure of you, will let all with ears to hear know that you had no business handling something this fine.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd saw the movie in a theater not even one-quarter full, and wrote an over-the-top review of this over-the-top movie. She said it was like one of the “spaghetti westerns” directed by Sergio Leone in the 1960s and 70s that made Clint Eastwood famous. She described Gibson’s film as a “spaghetti crucifixion,” and suggested its name could have been “A Fistful of Nails.”

I suspect, when the dust created by Gibson’s own PR crew to stir up controversy around the movie settles, it will disappear quickly from memory, as a very bad movie with an embarrassing, even silly, reduction of Christianity to his own fascination with physical suffering – suffering he has endured only as a movie actor, with lots of special effect and make-up teams so he would feel no pain.

Mel Gibson’s simplistic and sensationalistic treatment of Christianity is of the same kind as President Bush’s treatment of America in his new political move toward a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriages. It is also, like Gibson’s, an act showing no awareness of any advances in thinking over the past forty years. Though, unlike Gibson’s, it’s a thoroughly political move.

Then to see and hear Christians, and Christian ministers, coming forward to say their God hates gays and lesbians – that is even lower than a spaghetti crucifixion. It’s a betrayal, even a crucifixion, of the spirit of Jesus, and the highest spirit that has been served by the best Christians of history. It is a pornographic insult to the spirit of Jesus, and to the compassionate spirits of millions of good Christians.

Some people don’t like to hear things like this in church. They just want uppers, happy pills. Some think that being religious means always saying only nice things about even very bad behaviors and the people who do them. Some think being religious means never judging anyone.

That’s not how it is in the Bible. The prophets in the Hebrew scriptures were always angry. They saw the rich selling the poor for a pair of shoes, and they were outraged and said that God was outraged. They were angry whenever one kind of person thought his kind was superior to other kinds.

Orthodoxy means right beliefs. To claim to have right religious or patriotic belief, we have to let the high symbols of religion or nationalism raise our sights to their level, not drag them down to ours.

America has gone through low points in our history where many citizens – perhaps even a majority – have discriminated against blacks, women, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews, gays, lesbians and others. We have often taken the counsel of the angels of our lesser natures. We look back on these times with some shame because they degraded our high ideals, and the spirit of those high ideals judged our behaviors as low and mean. We played with high ideals in low and mean ways, and took our measure in ways we cannot, in retrospect, be proud of.

We’re talking about character. That’s what the word “orthopraxy” really means: behaving in ways worthy of people of character. And when we speak about character, we value the same things humans in all times and places have cared about: honesty, integrity, responsibility, authenticity, and moral courage. We don’t approve of those who side with the stronger against the weaker, or who use others as “things” to serve their own personal hungers or ideological agendas.

Questions of character aren’t fancy. They’re very ordinary sorts of questions that extend our horizons beyond the biases of our little in-groups to reconnect us, through our common humanity, with all people. And in our efforts to live like people of character, some of the best teachers we have are our highest ideals, whether religious, civic or personal. Words like God, country, love, justice, and truth – these are the words that can both take our measure and build our character.

In the 3rd century, there was a brilliant Christian thinker, and some of the things he said remain among my very favorites. One was his instruction in how to read a religious scripture – how to handle sacred objects. We must search for two things at the same time, he said. We must seek for what is useful to us, and worthy of God. Nothing less.

That is the cost of using holy words. It is like picking up a Stradivarius: it will take the measure of us.

This isn’t the way much nationalistic or religious language is really used, though, is it? Mostly it’s dragged down to the level of spaghetti crucifixions or a fistful of bigots. It has always happened that way. It made the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures angry. It made Jesus angry. Now it’s our turn to deal with it in our own time. In every time and place, people of character must rise to protest the dirtying and demeaning of our highest ideals. Those ideals are the most sacred property of our culture. They’re the angels of our better natures, the tools we need to help mold people of high character.

I don’t think Jesus would take Mel Gibson’s picture seriously enough to get angry. But I do agree that it might make him throw up. And if you’re going to be a Christian, I don’t think you should behave in ways that would make Jesus throw up.

Being religious isn’t just about being sweet and forgiving, any more than being a responsible citizen is about waving a flag or supporting highly questionable wars or policies.

Religion, citizenship and love aren’t about making it easier on ourselves. They’re about raising the standards, playing by more demanding rules than we had to when we weren’t claiming to be religious, loving or patriotic.

In the Hebrew scriptures, all Jews were the sons and daughters of God. He was their father, they were his children. It was their covenant with God. They would be his chosen people and he would be their God. But if you read the Bible, you see this did not mean God let them off the hook. It meant he held them to higher standards than he held anyone else.

When you pick up sacred teachings, they take your measure. You may think you can make a movie like a spaghetti crucifixion to reduce a noble and complex religion to your private obsessions, but you can’t. You’ve violated something sacred, and you’ll eventually be exposed for it, because it is our job, the job of all believers, all citizens, all who believe in justice, truth and love to expose those who degrade our noblest ideals.

Wittgenstein was right, I think. We should be very careful of claiming too much familiarity with sacred things. Because they are not trinkets, and we may not use them however we please. They have a kind of spirit about them, and when we dishonor that spirit, others who see and understand it judge us for demeaning something we didn’t have the right to demean.

Don’t get me wrong. I think we should try to define ourselves by the light of our highest ideals, our noblest words: God, country, truth, justice, love and the rest of them. Holding a religious belief means we want to be judged by the highest standards, nothing less.

The poet Rilke once said that we are blessed by the ideals we pursue with a good heart. We become what we worship, which is both the hope of following high ideals, and the danger of worshiping unworthy ideals or simplistic religious or national identities.

And if orthodoxy means holding the right beliefs, we should want to be orthodox in the highest sense. We just have to be sure they are the highest beliefs, not the lowest. We need to keep asking, when we find something that suits us, whether it is also worthy of God.

For that is what is demanded of those who would handle sacred things. Nothing less.