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© Davidson Loehr

28 December 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

It is the end of another year, and time to take stock of ourselves and of our gods.

Are we serving worthwhile gods? Are we serving them well, and are they worthy of our service? Could we be convicted of neglect or abuse of our own spirits?

Don’t let us be called faithless. For we have a kind of faith, and we serve our gods well even when we do not serve wisely.

We play our roles. We act the parts of characters in the stories of our lives. Yet how often do we examine the scripts we have agreed to play?

It is the end of another year. Let us pause for a private meeting with our gods before going on into the next year. Let us pause, not only to ask how faithful we are, how well we are serving the gods whose ideals direct our energies, but also to ask whether these are gods worth serving, whether they are worthy of us.

Do they cherish us and call forth the best in us? Does serving the gods of our lives make us more authentic, more of who we need to become to honor our unique gifts, and bring them to the world?

Or have we become means to someone else’s ends, cogs in a machine that drains us rather than empowering us?

For though the world can be a sacred place, we too are sacred. And unless the gods we serve reward that, they are not worthy of us, and not worthy of our world.

And so it is the end of another year, a time to pause and take stock of ourselves and of what we are serving with our lives. Let us take stock of our gods.

Amen.

SERMON: Endings

In every tradition, the end of one year and beginning of the next is a time for introspection, for reviewing the past year, for judging whether it was lived well or foolishly, lived by high standards or low ones. It is a time for us to check in with ourselves, with the story we are living out with our lives, to see if it is still the story we want to be living, or whether we want to change something.

If we take this challenge seriously, it can be a very upsetting task, especially when any honest assessment tells us we haven’t fared well, haven’t been true to ourselves or our gods. It’s been said that children want justice in their stories, while adults pray for mercy. I found, in thinking about “endings,” that both yearnings came up: both for justice and for mercy.

I want to put together a couple new movies, a 19th century play and an old parable by Jesus to help focus on “endings” this morning. The movies and the play can be seen as offering that kind of justice kids love because they have all the time in the world, and adults find uncomfortable because we don’t. The parable of Jesus, one of his oddest and most controversial, offers a kind of mercy that you may find both surprising and welcome, as I do.

Writing endings is tricky, not as easy as it might seem, because the ending has to grow from the story, not contradict it. Winston Churchill once famously said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” In fact, though, history has been pretty kind to him because in the eyes of those who did write it, Churchill demonstrated eloquence and leadership put into the service of character and courage during some of the most critical moments of W.W.II. Sir Winston didn’t have to worry about the judgment of history, for his life directed his epitaph.

Still, at the level of governments, power often does trump truth, and official stories that were not true can last for decades or centuries. I’m still amazed that the Warren Commission Report on the murder of JFK is taken seriously, for instance. One simple reason we know it can not be true is because, as many have shown, in order for there to have been only one gunman, the unmarked bullet found on Kennedy’s stretcher would have to have passed through two bodies and shattered two or three bones without ever getting a scratch on it, and this is impossible. Still, it has been over forty years, and there’s no indication that the true story is any closer to coming out.

And for a current example, polls are still saying that 70% of Americans actually think that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had some connection to the attacks of 9-11, though there was no connection at all. But 70%! It gives weight to the cynical revision of Abraham Lincoln’s famous saying, that goes “You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time – and that’s enough.”

So I know that no matter how much I might wish it weren’t so, it seems true that at the level of governments and mass communication, power can trump truth, character, and courage, even for a very long time.

But at the personal level, this doesn’t happen often. Here, we really don’t fool anywhere near as many people as we like to think. Here, there is a kind of judgment at the end. Because in life, we almost never get to write our own endings. They are written by those who survive us.

Oh, you can go online and buy eulogies for $30 or $40. They’ll send you three, and you can mix-and-match them to get the effect you want. Let me save you some money. Even if you buy them, you can’t count on their being read at your memorial service. For those decisions will not be made by you, but by your survivors. And they will have their own ideas about how your story should be ended.

I’ve been at enough memorial services to believe that the truth usually comes out at the end. If it isn’t spoken from the pulpit, you’ll hear it buzzing through the audience. We want the ending to have an organic relation to the whole life.

I was reminded of some words from one of the most honest and wise writers in history, Michel de Montaigne. If you’ve never read his Essays, I recommend them to you. At one point, he said, “If we have not known how to live, it is wrong to teach us how to die, and to give the end a different shape from the whole.” (p. 329)

The ending, the eulogy, needs to fit the life we’ve led. We don’t fool people, and the people we don’t fool will write our endings. This is one reason I wish more people attended memorial services, to hear this quality.

Sometimes, preachers can be pressured not to tell the truth. But if they don’t speak the truth from the pulpit, it will usually come out from somewhere else. Sometimes, it’s the open-microphone time; sometimes it’s just a buzzing in the congregation. I have been in the congregation at two memorial services when the preacher didn’t speak the truth, tried to cover over ugly facts about the deceased. And both times, I was delighted to hear the buzzing spread through the congregation, as congregants told one another the truths they weren’t hearing from the pulpit. Frankly, I think whenever the pulpit is used for dissembling and hiding the truth, the preacher has committed a great sin, for which he should be punished by spending eternity listening to bad sermons.

Still, when the honesty goes past a certain point, we are always shocked, no matter how much we thought we wanted to hear it. The most brutally honest eulogy I know of was given by an old preacher I knew in Michigan. It was the memorial service for a member of his church who had been wealthy and powerful, but who had used and abused others his whole adult life. The preacher met with the family and told them what he would have to say if he conducted this service, and they agreed with his assessment. And so a few days later, at the service, the preacher’s eulogy began with the words “Michael was an evil man, a stark and sobering example of all that good people must try to avoid.” Before he turned the eulogy towards a lesson in what we should live toward, he detailed some of the ways in which this man had used and harmed those who loved him – and all over the church, heads nodded. They knew the truth, and they knew how this man’s story should be ended; they just wondered if they would hear it from the pulpit on that day.

I think we know when the ending is right. We know what we want to accept as an ending that fits with the life that has ended. You can either see this as a kind of tyranny, or as a kind of assurance that, finally, there may be a kind of justice in life.

But you don’t have to go to churches to hear this sermon. You can find it anywhere people are telling their favorite stories. This month, you can take two of the big moneymaking movies that opened in the past two weeks that are making similar points in very different ways.

The first one I saw was the conclusion to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which was very long, but pretty spectacular. It was a morality tale about the eternal war between greedy power, and the more subtle force of character and courage. And it ended, as we like all our favorite stories and myths to end, by saying that in the end, power should bow before truth, character, and courage, and that sometimes, if our character and courage are strong enough, it will.

The “Lord of the Rings” can be seen as asking the question “Who is finally the more strong and noble; whom do we respect and wish to be like: evil forces with big armies, or a lot of common people with character and courage?” And the heroes of the story are the commonest of the common people, Hobbits.

The other movie is “Mona Lisa Smile,” a move with some wonderful ensemble acting. Again, it’s a conflict between a nasty kind of power and the quiet persistence of character and courage.

The questions of this movie are “What is the difference between high-class people, and low-class people with money and power?” and Jesus’ old question “What does it profit you if you gain the world and lose your soul?” And again, the trump suits, those we feel win in the end, are “truth, character and courage.”

But we knew, at each step, how we would write each person’s ending, if that’s all there was to their life. We have a sense of how to complete the story of a person’s character, based on what we’ve seen. And they have the same sense of us. I don’t think we fool many people.

I’m reminded of some lines from a great theologian of two hundred years ago. His name was Friedrich Schleiermacher, he is known as the father of liberal theology, and he also believed that we knew what was required of us, knew the difference between noble and ignoble paths, and that we didn’t fool others even if we managed to fool ourselves.

He said that we recognize those who seek for the most true, courageous and authentic life, and we admire them more than all who have lesser aims. That’s another way of saying that we also judge those who aim lower, and when we write their eulogies, we compose them in a minor key.

Movies like the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy have such an effect, strike such chords, I think, for some of the same reasons that the book The DaVinci Code did. Partly, they’re just good movies, stories well-told. But also, we recognize those stories, because they are dramatizations of the stories we find ourselves living among.

If we tell these stories over and over, it’s because we need to remind ourselves of the higher values to which we want to aspire, whether we are living that way or not.

And one of our favorite lessons is that it matters how we live; that our lives are judged, there is something like a judgment day when our ending is written for us, and that when our time comes, we don’t want to fail.

“Judgment Day” sounds so hokey and supernatural that it’s hard to hear without getting the worst kind of images of preachers shaking their bibles at you for theatrical effect, while interpreting those bibles in low and mean ways that Jesus, for one, would have abhorred.

But I’d hate for us to lose the powerful notion of a judgment day just because we’ve outgrown the supernaturalism. And that’s one of the services that great literature and especially great drama serves: to remind us of these lessons we don’t want to hear, but can’t afford to forget.

One of my favorite plays is Peer Gynt, written by the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen in 1867. I’ll use almost any excuse to expose people to it, and it’s a natural for talking about endings. Ibsen was strongly influenced by the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, whose searing mark has been left on this play. It is a play I wish more people knew. I think it is one of the most disquieting plays ever written, perhaps especially for Americans.

It features, among others, Peer Gynt and a bunch of Trolls. Trolls are the way that Ibsen portrayed inauthentic human beings in this play, just as Tolkien portrayed them as Orcs – an idea he may well have taken from Ibsen. The difference between humans and trolls, mainly, is that they live by different mottoes. Trolls live by the motto “To thyself be sufficient,” while humans, in order to become humans, must live by the motto “To thyself be true.”

And Peer Gynt was a human who lived by the motto of Trolls. He became wealthy and influential as a shipping magnate. At the end of his life, he returned home, mostly to gloat. But what awaited Peer Gynt was Kierkegaard and Ibsen’s version of an existentialist Judgment Day. His ending was written for him by the voices of all that he had never become, the life he had never lived. The Judgment came in the form of voices that called to him as he walked through the woods. Listen to these words, and see if they aren’t scarier than merely supernatural creations:

We are the thoughts you should have thought;

Feet to run with you should have given us.

We should have soared skywards as challenging voices,

But here we must tumble like balls of gray yarn.

We are songs, you should have sung us.

A thousand times you have pinched and suppressed us.

In the depths of your heart we have lain and waited. . . .

We were never called forth-

Now we poison your voice!

We are tears-you should have shed us.

We might have melted the icicles that pierced your heart. . . .

But now the wound has closed over, and our power is gone.

We are deeds; you should have done us.

Doubts that strangle have crippled and bent us.

But on Judgment Day we shall flock to accuse you;

And woe to you then. . . .

(Act Five, scene Four: adapted from several translations)

After the scene with these horrible voices, Peer Gynt met the Button-maker, a strange character who had come to take Peer and put him back into the casting-ladle, to melt him down and try again to make what the Maker had intended to make in the first place. And what was that? A human being. That’s what Peer Gynt never was. He was never true to himself, and so he was never really a human being. He may have been sufficient to himself, but a human is what he was supposed to have been, and humans live by the motto “To thyself be true.” And so a human he was not, and the Button-maker has come to get him.

Now there, written in the fantastic language of Trolls and Button-makers, is a Judgment Day which awaits us all. This is the same message we get in stories like “The Lord of the Rings” or “Mona Lisa Smile” or a thousand other favorite myths and fairy tales. In the end, we don’t get to write our ending; it will be written by others we probably didn’t fool, even if we fooled ourselves. That’s the message of judgment, of justice. Kids might like it, but most of us adults start to feel a little uneasy, wishing for a bit less justice and a bit more mercy.

Now if you would rather have some mercy, let me read you a famous and controversial parable by Jesus. It’s a very strange story:

“The kingdom of God is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” When those hired about five o’clock came; each of them received the full day’s wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage….” (Matthew 20: 1-16.)

This parable has confused many people, and has seemed manifestly unfair. But don’t look for an economics lesson, or a blueprint for workers’ unions. Look for a religious lesson, and a profound one. It is saying we can change our life any time we are ready to do the work, and no matter how late in the game we finally see the light, we can use that light to light our paths for the rest of the way.

In the movie “Mona Lisa Smile,” this is shown in the character of Betty, played by a wonderful actress I don’t think I’ve seen before. She was a formidable antagonist, brilliant and aggressive, playing the role which had been assigned her without ever looking into it to see whether the role was worthy of her life. It was a role designed to be sufficient to her, but not to be true to her. And so this beautiful young woman became a Troll.

She married; she played the phony role to the hilt, irritating everyone around her, including her husband, who began straying as soon as he could. When she finally saw the light, when she finally came to work in the vineyard of her own soul, that powerful character of hers shifted its center, and she went as resolutely in a new and more authentic direction as she had been going in a shallow and unworthy direction before. In religious language, she was saved. It took her awhile to go from troll to human, but when she saw the light, the whole light was still available to her, and she had the merciful chance to rewrite her ending before it came.

Thinking about endings gave me a new respect for the profound mercy of this old parable from Jesus: that all the way up to the end, there is time to change.

Once we’ve lived our life out, whether as human or as troll, the ending is out of our hands. It will be written, and we will be known, by the words spoken by others: others we never fooled as well as we thought we did. There’s the kind of justice that kids think they want.

But adults want mercy. So in the meantime, we have reached the end of another year, and it is a time to review, to see whether we have been true to our best selves, or merely sufficient, selling out the higher for the lower ideals.

Look at the work of fashioning a life, the work of taking ourselves and our lives seriously, as though it were working in a vineyard. The pay, the only pay there can be, is the reward of an authentic life that can walk through the woods late in our days without needing to fear those voices, without needing to fear them at all.

We may be early in life, in the middle of it, or living our last chapters. It doesn’t matter. Whenever we see the light of a more authentic life, it is there to light our path from then on. We get the full days’ pay whenever we finally show up to do the work.

Endings are tricky, because our ending will be written by others, in the same key as the life we have led. That’s judgment and justice. But while we’re alive, while we’re awake and attentive, we can make changes in our story, in our life, that can make all the difference in the days and years ahead. Montaigne was correct: if we will just live the life right, the ending will take care of itself. And for an end-of-year message, that’s about as good as true mercy gets!

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© Davidson Loehr

Hannah Wells

21 December 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Let us prepare a manger in our hearts, where we can welcome the birth of the sacred this Christmas.

We work all year to be grateful for the holidays. Yet when they arrive, we are unprepared. It is just more busyness, more things to do, to buy, to wrap and ship, stressing out over whether we remembered everyone, whether they will like our gifts.

Holidays are supposed to be holy days, we’re not sure how that’s supposed to happen.

So let us make a space where we are open to life’s miracles.

It needn’t cost money; life’s greatest gifts are free, though they’re not cheap. They ask us to accept ourselves and others as blessings, as beloved gifts. No gift is as rare or as cherished as that gift of love. It is the gift that transforms holidays into holy days. There is no room for it at the Inn. It can only be born in simple and honest places that make room for it.

And so let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something precious wants to be born, and it needs our help. Let us prepare a manger in our hearts.

Amen.

HOMILY: Merry Christmasing!

Hannah Wells

Christmas has a sneaky way of making us think about the past. What were the best Christmases of your childhood? What made them memorable? If you close your eyes, can you remember what your favorite Christmas smelled like? Does it smell like the pine warmed by the lights of the Christmas tree, or the smell of gingerbread baking? Do you smell peppermint or hot chocolate? Or, are you thinking more of that distinctive smell of your grandmother’s house? That smell you’ve never encountered anywhere else in your life.

One set of my grandparents are dead now, but if I take a whiff of the green felt of an old Christmas tree skirt my Grandmother stitched – complete with sequins – I can smell that old house in Georgia again, and her essence comes back to me full force. I understand that the sense of smell is the most powerful route to memories of someone. More so than looking at pictures of someone, or hearing songs associated with them, it is that specific smell of someone that soaks all the items they leave behind that brings back the most poignant memories.

Christmas offers itself to our senses. It’s easy to get caught up in the part of our minds that worry about details, last minute gifts, or the deadlines we have to meet before vacations. Wouldn’t it be great if we could fully wake up the part of our minds that interpret the signals of our senses? Stress dulls the senses. But it is the tempting and indulgence of the senses that we have to be so thankful for at Christmastime – whether that is listening to the harmony of holiday choirs, smelling the spicy aroma of an orange stuck with cloves, or popping that delectable bourbon ball into our mouths.

When we take time to devote to our senses, it’s more than acknowledging our gratitude for the simple pleasures in life. That’s very important, but on a deeper spiritual level, when we pay attention to our senses we can be assured that we are living in the present.

Sometimes Christmas is a painful reminder of who’s missing, or of who’s no longer with us. Grief can feel very awkward for a family during a holiday that is supposed to be joyful. There might be a need to find ways to cope, to find ways to be in the present moment, rather than fall into the vortex of the past.

The past is often calling to us, especially at Christmas, because it’s a time when we think about the people we love, whether or not they are in our lives now. One message that so many of the great spiritual teachers have in common, is this business of intentionally living in the present. There is a time to grieve, and as you know if you are grieving now, it is exhausting. Even in the deepest throes of grief, it’s good to take breaks and become aware of the present, of the life happening around us.

Buddha taught that the present moment is all that we really have. There’s a New Yorker cartoon in which two Zen monks, one young and one old, are sitting side by side, crossed-legged on the floor. The younger one is looking quizzically at the older one, who is turned to him saying, “Nothing happens next. This is it.” Of course many things will happen in our future, but when we understand that “this is it,” it allows us to let go of the past and the future and wake up to what our life is now, in this moment.

Many agree that the cornerstone of Jesus’s teachings is to awaken to the present. In Stephen Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus, he puts it like this:

“What IS the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present, beyond longing. Most of us can remember a time (it may have been just a moment) when we felt that everything in the world was exactly as it should be. Or we can think of a joy (it happened when we were children, perhaps or the first time we fell in love) so vast that it was no longer inside us, but we were inside it. . . Like all the great spiritual Masters, Jesus taught one thing only: presence. Ultimate reality, the luminous, compassionate intelligence of the universe, is not somewhere else, in some heaven light-years away. It didn’t manifest itself any more fully to Abraham or Moses than to us, nor will it be any more present to some Messiah at the far end of time. It is always right here, right now.”

If this is true, that the present is always there for us, then it is up to us to find ways to access it. This can be easier said than done. Because it’s not only easy to live in the past, it’s also easy to romanticize the past. I know I tend to daydream about what Christmas was like many decades ago, in what seemed like a simpler and more noble time. It reminds me of what I used to read in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, the Little House on the Prairie series. The lives of the early pioneers have always fascinated me. It seemed to me that the physical labor of survival required of those families meant that the few pleasures they did receive were appreciated to their fullest. I remember a Christmas described in one of those books in which each child received one piece of maple sugar candy shaped like a maple leaf.

That was a powerful thing to read when I was just 10 years old. That only present given could be just one piece of delicious candy. Would I have saved it, just to enjoy the thought of possessing it and looking upon it, or would I have eaten it right away? Would I have taken it like communion with my brothers and sisters at the same time, all of us looking at each other with our mouths busy, our eyes expressing the delight of such a sweet taste. Then the sugar would melt away on our tongues and the moment would be over – but Christmas wouldn’t be over quite yet. The gift of one piece of maple sugar candy might have excited us enough to go outside and make snow angels, or go sledding. The joy of life would be so easy to define.

I think it’s true that, nowadays, joy is a little harder to define. The Buddha also taught that we mustn’t be too attached to anything, we shouldn’t be too attached to our ideas about the way things should be. The higher our expectations, the more likely we are to be disappointed. I don’t know what a disappointing Christmas would have been in the little house on the prairie. But I don’t think it would revolve around something as transient as a present.

We all know on some level that it is the very simple things we have to be grateful for that matter the most. We may not have the job we want, or even the family we want, but that we don’t live in poverty is actually a miracle that goes beyond our comprehension. We’ll never completely understand why we are so blessed with the material needs in life and others are not. Sometimes it can be hard to be truly thankful for our simple blessings because it doesn’t make sense to us that we should be so fortunate.

But I am certain that the best way to express our gratitude is not only to pray, it is not only to say grace over the food before we eat it. These are good things to do, but to pay attention to how delicious the Christmas dinner is, to notice how comforting the mashed potatoes and gravy are as we swallow each bite – if we are noticing these kinds of things as they happen, we are embodying an expression of gratitude, which is also joy in motion.

And when we look up from our food we see the people we are spending the holiday with. Whether they are your parents, your children, your friends, or strangers, is it possible that this mix of people will only happen once? What can you notice about the unique chemistry of the people you happen to spend the holiday with this year? How is each person important to what they are contributing to the group energy? It’s amazing what we can notice about our loved ones when we are entirely present to them. We can see their inner beauty, we can see their flaws, we can see if they are happy or sad. Through listening and observation we can use our senses to gauge the wellness of those around us.

There is great beauty to behold at Christmastime through any of the senses: tasting, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching. Even though it is the darkest time of the year, there is light and warmth if we let ourselves feel it. This isn’t about over-indulging ourselves. We cross the line into escape mode when we do that. It’s about noticing that we have everything we need, and realizing what a gift just in itself that is. It was a spiritually enlightened day for Mick Jagger when he wrote the song, “You can’t always get what you want, but you’ll find sometimes, you get what you need.”

Why is it so easy to forget that? I think it’s because we hold so tightly to our ideas about the way things should be. But if we can say, “this is it,” that how it is is how it should be, then what a tremendous gift of acceptance we have given ourselves. Sometimes the greatest gift we can give to our loved ones at Christmas is to just commit to being in a good mood.

Of course, that may not be possible. Christmas brings up so many emotions from those memories that creep in – we can find ourselves feeling melancholy even though we know life is good. A good mood may be too much to ask. It helps to just be present to each other, to a moment, to step back and notice, I have all I need. Then the extras – all the fancy food and things we get at Christmas – these gifts seem extraordinary.

Indulging our propensities for nostalgia at Christmastime should not be totally discouraged. Remembering loved ones who are no longer with us is a gift to ourselves. Memories awaken the senses just as the senses awaken our memories. I have a collection of old Christmas cards of my grandmother’s I found when we went through all the things in her house. Sending Christmas cards is one my favorite traditions around the holidays. It’s an excuse to tell people I love them, that I’m glad they’re in my life, even though they are far away and I don’t see them as much as I’d like to.

The ritual of sending cards appeals to my senses. I like using the Christmas stamps, sprinkling confetti of little gold stars in each card, sealing the envelopes with stickers of stockings and Santa’s reindeer. Looking through the images of my Grandma’s old cards reminds me of her and her love of Christmas. The cards are pictures of old-fashioned Christmas scenes – people sledding, a small town scene with just a General Store, a church, and a skating rink, the caption inside saying, “Warm Christmas wishes for good, old-fashioned happiness.” I know I couldn’t say it better myself! After I seal the envelope of each of my Grandma’s old cards I write on the back, “this is a Polly Wells vintage card.” I want people to know, because eventually they will all be sent.

Engaging nostalgia can be a field day for our senses. We can remember how things felt, how they tasted, how they smelled. We can remember these types of things about people, too. I invite you to take just a moment, right now, to close your eyes, and think of a memory you have that is associated with a smell, or a taste, or a sound. Take a moment now to remember it.

It’s good to remember these things at Christmas – just don’t hesitate to make new memories, don’t forget to devote your senses to the present moment as well.

It’s not just a nice thing to do for yourself and your loved ones, it is a spiritual sensibility of high regard, encouraged by the Buddha, encouraged by Jesus – it is a spiritual practice that is joyous and wise.

This year may you indulge your “warm Christmas wishes for good old-fashioned happiness!”

The present is a present. Merry Christmasing!

HOMILY: Christmasing

Davidson Loehr

I want to think of Christmas this year as the time we might reflect on the gifts brought by the man Jesus, two thousand years ago.

But that’s easier said than done. Like over-wrapped Christmas presents, the real gifts of Jesus have been nearly smothered by twenty centuries of hype and saccharine.

The gifts of Jesus do not have anything to do with the religion of Christianity. Jesus, we must remember, was a Jew.

He didn’t promise heaven or threaten with hell; that was added by the gospel writers who came much later.

He didn’t respect the authority of priests, or even of scripture. He never heard of the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed, and wouldn’t have understood either one of them.

There was no original sin in Jesus’ religion, and he would have hated that awful idea that St. Augustine invented 400 years later. Jesus’ God was mostly a God of love. That was his Good News: that God loves you, and wants you to pass it on.

This sounds a little like New Age fluff, but it wasn’t. New Age messages often say just to look inside for your own truth, and you’ll find how loveable you are. Jesus didn’t think people knew this, and I think he was right. He thought it was news that they were infinitely loveable, that even God loved them.

It sounds funny to say that today. We’re so used to talk that just describes cold hard facts, we can lose the ability to hear love-talk. Saying God loves you and he wants you to pass it on is love-talk. Poetry. A song sung from one heart to another. It isn’t about critters above, it’s about hungers within.

I got a Jesus story by e-mail this week. It isn’t about Jesus, but it’s about that message, that good news. I’d like to share it with you in case you haven’t heard it.

One day a high school math teacher asked her students to list the names of the other students in the room on two sheets of paper, leaving a space between each name. Then she told them to think of the nicest thing they could say about each of their classmates and write it down.

Over the weekend, the teacher wrote down the name of each student on a separate sheet of paper, then listed what everyone else had said about that person.

On Monday, she gave each student his or her list. Before long, the entire class was smiling. “Really?” she heard whispered. “I never knew that I meant anything to anyone!” And, “I didn’t know others liked me so much.”

No one ever mentioned those papers in class again. She never knew if they discussed them after class or with their parents. But she thought the exercise had accomplished its purpose. For one day, the students were happy with themselves and one another, and a warm and welcoming feeling had enveloped the whole room, like magic.

Several years later, one of the students was killed in Iraq. The church was packed with his friends. One by one those who loved him took a last walk by the coffin. The teacher was the last to say goodbye to him. As she stood there, one of the soldiers who had acted as pallbearer came up to her. “Were you Mark’s math teacher?” he asked. She nodded “Yes,” then he said “Mark talked about you a lot.”

After the funeral, most of Mark’s former classmates went together to a luncheon. Mark’s mother and father came up to her. “We want to show you something,” Mark’s father said, taking a wallet out of his pocket. “They found this on Mark when he was killed. We thought you might recognize it.”

Opening the billfold, he carefully removed a very worn piece of notebook paper that had obviously been taped, folded and refolded many times. “Thank you so much for letting Mark see how much he was loved,” his mother said. “As you can see, he treasured it.”

All of Mark’s former classmates started to gather around. Charlie smiled sheepishly and said, “I still have my list. It’s in the top drawer of my desk at home.”

Bill’s wife said, “Bill asked me to put his in our wedding album.”

“I have mine too,” Marilyn said. “It’s in my diary.”

Then Vicki, another classmate, reached into her pocketbook, took out her wallet and showed her worn and frazzled list to the group. “I carry this with me at all times,” she said, and added, “I think we all saved our lists.”

When I sent this story to some friends, I got a response from a woman I knew as a student 24 years ago as she was preparing to become a minister. She’s a tough lady, a frontier lady born one or two centuries too late. She lives in Montana with the mountains, the snow, the Blackfeet Indians and her beloved Big Sky. Her name is Mary Scriver, and for three years, she served three small Unitarian churches in Montana, driving between them in her van and living in it, camped out there in the middle of Montana winters. Tough lady.

Mary wrote back to say that more than fifteen years ago she led a workshop at a UU summer camp, and the people in her class filled a whole sheet of newsprint with the things they loved about her. She still has that sheet, she said, folded up, tucked safely away, where it will be near her for the rest of her life.

That’s the kind of gift it is, hearing and believing that we are precious people, beloved by others. That was the message of Jesus: God loves you. That was his Good News. And even those who don’t care about Jesus or God care a lot about that message. It wasn’t true just because Jesus said it; it’s true because it cuts to the heart of so much human longing.

It’s the simplest message in the world, isn’t it? That you are valuable, that you are loved, that others are glad you’re here. The simplest message, yet it always seems to come as news to people. They fold it up, carry it into combat in their billfold, carry it around their life in their purse, put it in their wedding album, their top desk drawer, keep it in their mountain cabin in Montana. Or they wear crosses around their neck to remind them, or say prayers of thanksgiving, needing to say Thank You to people and to a world in which they matter, in which they are loved. It’s not just Good News. It’s about the best news there is. And it was the heart of Jesus’ gift, two thousand years ago.

It’s true that there were some responsibilities that went along with the good news. Jesus thought we all needed to know that everyone else was also beloved by God, including the people we can’t stand. And we needed to treat them that way, the way children of God should be treated. It’s our job to hear the good news, and to spread it. The more we give this gift away, the more it multiplies – like the story of a few crusts of bread and some fish feeding thousands of people, thousands.

If you’re wondering what to give this Christmas, I would pass on this old suggestion that you give the gift of love. It won’t run up your credit card bill. It’s free, but it’s priceless. It is a gift measured in the deepest, warmest and most enduring of all currencies. It’s the message that we are beloved. Or, in the love-talk of religious poetry, it is the good news that God loves you. That’s it: God loves you. Pass it on – and Merry Christmas.

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© Davidson Loehr

7 December 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

As we enter the Christmas season, let us remember the difference between glitter and real gold.

We are so easily seduced into thinking the gifts of the season are to be measured by their price tags.

Let us remember that the richest gifts of this or any season are gifts of the spirit that don’t have to cost much money at all.

Jesus of Nazareth once asked what good it did if you gained the whole world and lost your soul. In a world where this distinction is often lost, let us try to give gifts to nurture the souls of those for whom we care.

For the highest of holy days and holidays, let us measure our gifts by the highest standards that such gifts deserve. May we and those we love remember the coming holidays with warmth and gratitude, as days then we gave and received gifts of life and love, not something less.

Let this be our holiday prayer: that we are opened to give and receive gifts of the spirit in this most spiritual of seasons, and that we may be grateful for the opportunity once more to give and receive in gratitude for the manifold blessings of life.

Amen.

SERMON

There’s a saying in theology that the first word in religion should always be “No!” The reason is because there is so much nonsense going around dressed up like religion that you have to get it out of the way before anything worthwhile can be discussed. The first word in religion should be “No!” so that later we’ll be able to say “Yes” to something worth saying Yes to.

There is hardly anywhere that this rule of first saying “No” applies more than the subject of Christmas! There is so much nonsense around Christmas that every year it feels like I have to shovel through more bad stuff to find the good stuff.

You may be thinking, “How can a minister not like Christmas? Isn’t that part of their job description?”

How do I dislike Christmas? Let me count the ways:

One is just a knee-jerk reaction to anything that is so overhyped. The Christmas ads are now starting before Thanksgiving! There ought to be a law against that.

Another thing I have against Christmas is that Jesus would have hated it, and that should count for something.

And when we wrap something just in sweetness and light as we wrap Christmas, then the shadow side of it grows. And the shadow side of the Christmas season is that there is more depression, there are more people feeling lonely and left out, than at any other time of the year. And if you don’t have a family, especially one that looks like a Hallmark card – well, there aren’t any pictures of single people enjoying Christmas alone, you know?

And pretending this is a religious holiday is a lie: it’s about selling stuff, and everybody knows it. We read that we’re expected to spend an average of $1,000 each on Christmas presents, and I think that’s both irritating and rude. We create these pictures of happy, simple people, and into it, we throw people who are frazzled, tired, working more hours for less relative money than they got thirty years ago, pressured by hokey ads to buy things their kids don’t need but have been taught to want. And all this is wrapped in tinsel and accompanied by a chorus of digital angels singing not to the prophets of the Bible, but to the profits of the bottom line.

Finally, I always struggle with the fact that ministers must do a sort of “command” sermon, finding reasons to be joyous, trying to convince you that this is, after all, a wonderful time of year. – Yes, this sermon will be one of those, but not yet.

Some people say that this is an important time because it’s the time of the winter solstice, which has been celebrated for 30 or 40 centuries, probably more. Well, the solstice was a big deal many centuries ago, a sign the sun was coming back and there would be more light, winter would be gone and we’d be warm again. But the seasons of the sun don’t mean much any more. We can buy fresh food from all over the world every day, electric lights make all our nights as bright as we want them, and the last time any snow was seen in Austin, there was a Democrat in the White House who was being impeached.

These are some of the reasons that I begin every Christmas season rooting for the Grinch.

And you know I’m not alone in this. You might be surprised, as I was, at the huge number of anti-Christmas web sites on the Internet. Do a Google search, type in “anti-Christmas” and you’ll find 11,000 sites for for it. Type in “Bah humbug” and you’ll find 58,000 sites. There are 587,000 sites under “Christmas depression,” and typing, “I hate Christmas” for a Google search brings up 1,200,000 web sites. Some other site names aren’t fit to repeat. But you can type almost every vulgar word you know, pair it with the word “Christmas,” and find hundreds of thousands of web sites put up by others who are saying No to Christmas – hopefully, because there is something deeper and more true that they want to say Yes to.

So this bah-humbug stuff isn’t just one or two grouches. There’s a conspiracy: millions of grouches, millions of them. Heck, this could even be a movement.

It’s the kind of movement that reminds me of my all-time favorite graffiti, penciled in the grout between the tiles on a men’s restroom wall in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Placed just where all men were sure to see it, someone had written “We hide in the cracks now, but soon we will take over the tiles!”

So this could be that kind of a conspiratorial movement, hiding in the cracks of our culture between all the Christmas hype, waiting to burst forth and take over.

There are really at least three different parts to the Christmas season. Somewhere buried under all this glitter is the idea of remembering a man named Jesus who lived once and taught some things worth remembering. Then, buried even deeper, is the fact that when Christmas was assigned the date of December 25th in the fourth century, it was to cover the ancient winter solstice festival of the religion of Mithraism.

I don’t want to talk about either of those things now. Today, I want to talk about the star of Christmas, the real center of all the decorations and sales. Of course I mean Santa Claus, the patron saint of the Christmas shopping season. We’ll talk about some of the solstice and religious dimensions on coming Sundays, and on Christmas Eve we will retell the traditional Christmas story and sing a lot of nice Christmas songs. But today, I want to talk about Santa Claus. That’s where we get the idea that Christmas is about getting and giving presents.

Our name Santa Claus is a corruption of St. Nicholas. The original St. Nicholas lived, at least according to legend, in the 4th century. He was a bishop, and a man with a generous heart. The most famous story about him concerned a poor widow with three young girls. The only way young girls without means could survive then, as also in many countries today, was by becoming prostitutes. To help them avoid this fate, Nicholas tossed three bags of gold through their window, one to serve as a dowry for each of the girls.

St. Nicholas was one of the most beloved of all Catholic saints. Besides being the patron saint of children, he was the patron saint of spinsters, sailors and travelers, and a reminder of his story could be seen up until just a few decades ago as the three balls hanging outside of pawn shops, representing those three bags of gold.

Nicholas first became associated with Christmas during the Middle Ages. An agent of this transformation may have been a 13th-century French nun who left gifts for the poor on the eve of St. Nicholas’ Day, which is December 6th.

As the patron saint of sailors, he was a favorite of Christopher Columbus, who named an island for him on his voyage here in 1492. But he wasn’t heard of much after that until the 19th century, because the Protestants who settled this country didn’t want anything to do with Catholic saints and holidays like Christmas, which they regarded as a pagan solstice celebration. The Puritans hated Christmas and wouldn’t allow it to be celebrated here. There was a time in the 17th century when you could go to jail if you were caught celebrating Christmas in this country.

But Santa Claus was just an imaginative image of the spirit of giving. Every culture has characters to represent this notion of the spirit of giving. German children awaited the arrival of Kris Kringle or Weinachtsman. (And “Kris Kringle” was another pollution. It began as Krist Kindl, “Christ Child,” in Lutheran Germany, where Germans replaced the Catholic Saint Nicholas with this invention of their own, a Christ Child that left gifts for poor people.) British tots dreamed of Father Christmas. In Russia, it was a female babushka that visited homes leaving treats for children. France had Pere Noel. The Dutch had long celebrated the feast of St. Nicholas on December 6th with gifts, food and parties. When they immigrated to America in the 1600s, they brought their version of “Sinter Claes” with them. Over time, Sinter Claes was anglicized to Santa Claus, and Santa’s story took shape by combining parts from most of the other stories about gift-giving spirits.

Still, it took a long time before Americans were willing to give Christmas any legal recognition. Americans said No to Christmas because they didn’t think it was a good thing. The first state to make Christmas a legal holiday was Alabama in 1836. It wasn’t a holiday in Texas until 1879.

What finally brought Christmas into our consciousness and gave us the holiday the way we have it today was the Romantic era. In the nineteenth century art and music and sort of the whole atmosphere were concerned more with feelings than with facts and rules. Christmas cards began around 1850 in England and caught on in this country by 1880.

Then in the 1860s, the famous Civil War cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the picture of a fat Santa in his sleigh, dressed in that fur-lined costume he still wears in a million shopping malls, and our culture’s picture of Santa was complete. (Thomas Nast was also the cartoonist who gave us the elephant as the symbol of Republican elephantine lumbering, and the donkey as the image of Democrats’ mulish obstreperousness.)

So what is this center of the Christmas season, its star performer, Santa Claus, really about? The spirit of giving that has been celebrated for the past thousand years has been a very special kind of spirit. It is secular, but holy – a rare combination. Secular means it’s dealing with this world, and holy means it’s doing so at a level both deep and live-giving. It has been a spirit of generous giving to people who need some gifts. They aren’t to help people fit in with their peers by having the same toy everyone else has. That may be the spirit of Wal-Mart, but it’s not the spirit of Santa Claus. They are gifts given to recognize the humanity of someone, like the three bags of gold given to ransom three girls from lives on the street. It isn’t about giving a lot of presents, it’s about giving gifts of the spirit in tangible form.

There are examples of the spirit of Santa Claus everywhere, and we need to learn how to recognize and celebrate them. Friday night, which was St. Nicholas Eve, we had a Freeze Night here, when a couple dozen church members and friends fixed dinner and breakfast for about fifty homeless men who spent the night in our social hall. These folks were on Santa’s team.

We could all be on Santa’s team. It’s a time to be possessed by a certain kind of spirit, a spirit of giving, but a very high and precious form of giving. It isn’t about the money, it’s about caring, and recognizing someone as a child of God, seeing what the Buddhists call the Buddha seed inside of them. The gifts themselves can be simple, and don’t have to cost much.

From my own childhood, I can’t remember many of the presents that cost much. The gifts I remember were the personal things. A sweater an aunt made me, with sleeves of almost equal length; mittens from another aunt, a little big but really warm and handsome.

And when I remember the most touching gift, it was probably the cheapest of the lot. It was from my Uncle Franklin. He sent the same thing to all fifty-two of his nieces and nephews. We could spot it by the shape: long, with two small lumps in it. Inside, always, were two yellow wooden pencils, a small plastic pencil sharpener with a bubble top to catch the wood shavings, and a package of Wrigley’s chewing gum, either Spearmint, Juicy Fruit or Doublemint. Then there was a little note that said “Merry Christmas,” and had our name printed on it.

At the time, we joked about it, that same silly-looking present every year. I only met Franklin a couple times, I’m sure he never met most of the recipients of his gifts. But every Christmas, no matter whether we had been good or bad, naughty or nice, there would be those lumpy little gifts that said “Merry Christmas,” sent by our family’s incarnation of Santa Claus.

They weren’t given to impress us with Uncle Franklin’s generosity. They were just given. They were like the background against which Christmas came every year. Nothing to do with Jesus or the winter solstice, everything to do with the spirit of giving, the spirit of Santa Claus with no frills at all, except for the plastic bubble top to catch the wood shavings.

Years later, I imagined Franklin sitting each year, gift-wrapping fifty identical gifts and mailing them to nieces and nephews scattered all over the world, whom he didn’t know and would never meet.

But he knew who had been born, what our names were, and when we were ready to receive those little gifts – around age three or four, I think. And he sent them every year until we graduated from high school. He obviously had a list, and was checking it twice. Uncle Franklin was on Santa’s team.

I don’t care what you think about Christmas, I wish more of us were on Santa’s team. You don’t need a religious bone in your body to enjoy getting and giving the most precious gifts of this season. Gifts, given simply because you care about someone, because you see how precious they are, and want them to see it too, of just because you want to be on Santa Claus’s team.

It doesn’t need to cost you a thousand dollars. It doesn’t measure worth or meaning in that currency. It’s a gift of the spirit, because life is short and we shouldn’t let much of it get past us without trying to be at least a small blessing to those whose lives touch ours.

This isn’t the Christmas hype or hoopla; it’s the good stuff, the quiet background that’s there after you have said No to all the nonsense. It feels wonderful to both the giver and the receiver, and the wonderful feeling lasts a very long time. And you can be a part of it.

Actually – this was kind of an early Christmas present you’re hearing about for the first time – you were a part of it without even knowing it: yesterday afternoon about 4:30 in Berkeley, California. That’s when our ministerial intern from last year, Cathy Harrington, came out from meeting with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.

I knew they would approve her for entering the ministry. So on your behalf, I had a lovely, classy bouquet of huge two-tone Ecuadorian roses delivered to her as she came out of the meeting room, along with two pounds of really good chocolates. The note in the flowers said “Congratulations and love from your Austin family – we never doubted for a minute.”

Yesterday was December 6th, which just happened to be St. Nicholas’ Day. And I gave the gift in your name because generous spirits want company, and the generous spirit of Santa Claus wants all the company it can get. Cathy phoned a few hours later, excited to be finished with the Fellowship Committee, and wanted me to thank all of you, from the bottom of her heart. Every member of this church will be part of a warm and lovely memory for the rest of her life, just like my Uncle Franklin.

And so yesterday, we all played Santa Claus. It’s wonderful to be on Santa’s team. But we need more people in on this, so spread the word. It’s a kind of conspiracy. It could even turn into a movement, you know. We hide in the cracks now, but soon….

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© Davidson Loehr

30 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Instead of a prayer this morning, a kind of guided meditation, best heard in an attitude of prayer:

Imagine a great circle, a great dance. It is the circle of Humanity: countless people, holding hands, moving and dancing through life. They often don’t seem to be aware of one another, yet they dance on in that great circle, as they have been doing since before time counted.

Occasionally, parts of the circle pass over a deep chasm, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, tornado or lightning would strike, and some dancers are lost. But immediately, the loose hands seek each other out, the circle is closed, and the dance goes on. After each loss, the dancers recite their special stories to explain why they were spared. “It was God,” said some, “looking out for us.” For others, it is a kind of cosmic energy that safeguards them. Others have their own explanations: guardian angels, Fate, and more exotic plots. There are disagreements over just what it is that keeps the dancers safe – they seldom speak of those who are lost from time to time. There is no pattern to the periodic losses and accidents: they usually just happen. And each time the circle is broken it seems to heal itself, and the dance goes on. Yet the question hovers: with so many different stories, what should dancers believe? In what, if anything, should they put their faith? Is it their stories, or the dance?

SERMON: “How to Become Big and Strong”

One way that the difference between conservative and liberal religions has been put is to say that conservative religions offer life-preservers while liberal religions offer swimming lessons. I have conservative friends who say they become big and strong by knowing that they and the whole universe rest in the hands of a God who is big and strong. Liberals, for all our cocky talk about swimming lessons, have to admit that we don’t have answers as solid and certain as that.

We are, all of us, a lot like Sheherezade, the woman who invented stories for 1001 nights to save her life. We’re all under the spell of Sheherezade; we all tell stories in order to live.

Still, I’ve always thought that all efforts to make it seem like we have life wrapped up in a sufficient story are just whistling in the dark. I want to take you to some of those dark places this morning, against the background of that question of how we really become big and strong.

Last month, I gave a sermon derived from Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book Under the Banner of Heaven, about some of the dark stories contained in Mormon teachings, and the violent form they have taken among some Mormon fundamentalists (19 Oct 2003).

This morning, I want to use another of his books, called Into the Wild. It is a book showing the self-deception of one of our favorite stories, which Joseph Campbell called The Hero’s Quest. It’s the plot of most adventure stories. An ordinary person finds themselves plucked from the safety of life and plunged into dangerous adventures, whether physical or psychological. If they succeed in slaying their dragons and winning their adventures, they develop a heroic character, and return to life bigger and stronger than most around them. The great gift of heroes is that they earn an authenticity that helps rejuvenate the world.

It’s hard to think of a great adventure story that doesn’t have this plot, from The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, to Frodo and the Lord of the Rings. It’s the small and weak characters whose moral courage and strength of character make them victorious over the forces of evil and elevate them into heroic stature.

This is the story that Jon Krakauer took on in his 1997 book Into the Wild, about a young man named Chris McCandless, who was an honor graduate from Emory University, and could have become a success at about anything he chose to do. But inside of him were these ancient voices that used to torment the classic heroes. They were dangerous voices, calling him to emerge from the conventional limits of his world, to bring to life the powerful will to live inside of him that had to be fought to be freed – it’s a plot any mythmaker would recognize.

McCandless’s extreme character needed the most extreme ordeals. He gave away the $15,000 trust fund set aside for his graduate school, and simply disappeared. He wanted to test himself against all of Nature, and spent two years learning how to survive in cities and in deserts with nothing but his wits. These first two years were his self-training like training for the knighthood, as he learned about how to survive in the wild.

Finally, he was ready to run the ultimate gamut, to win his heroic soul, to earn his sacred name, and he went to Alaska, to survive the Alaskan wilderness.

He went prepared, and in fact he did defeat the elements of the Alaskan wilderness. He survived, with only a knife and a .22 rifle, for about five months in an Alaskan winter wilderness that would have killed nearly anyone else. He hunted and trapped and fished, he gathered plants. He had studied plants for two years, knew which were edible and which were not. He even had a copy of the most authoritative book on plants from that area, and had marked in it to identify the plants he found around the abandoned school bus where he lived.

After about four months, the transformation inside McCandless seemed to be complete. He had finished his hero’s journey, and prepared to return home. The wild urges and demons that had driven him to the edge of life and death had been mastered and, in the most ancient style of heroes, had won his soul. And so he left the wild to return to the world.

This is the point in hero stories that carries so much excitement, so much promise. This is Buddha emerging from under the Bo Tree, Jesus returning from his wild scene of resisting the devil’s temptations. This is every hero who has finally gained enough mastery over their own inner powers to defeat the lesser voices, to rise above the ordinary fears of us ordinary people, and begin the return to the world. When they return, they bring back the gift of life with them. They bring a hard-won authenticity with them, an immense power of integrity and character, capable of rejuvenating their world.

The seasonal thaw had flooded the nearby river, and McCandless couldn’t cross, so returned to the bus to wait for the waters to subside. He was hungry: the life of a hunter-gatherer is always just a few days from desperation and starvation, and he was dangerously thin. He consulted his book, and raided the surrounding plants for the few things left, some potato seeds his book identified as edible and safe. But the book was wrong. The most authoritative book on plants was wrong. The potato seeds were poisonous. Before long, Chris McCandless realized it, and wrote out some notes identifying them as the deadly culprits, a few days later, he died.

That’s not the way the Hero’s quest is supposed to end. There’s supposed to be a cosmic kind of reward at the end. McCandless played the extreme game by its extreme rules; he became big and strong like a classic Greek hero, and he won. He did everything he was supposed to do. He learned, he did his homework, he went through two years of methodical and rigorous training. He confronted and defeated the inner and outer demons that had to be defeated. He won. Then he died. It isn’t fair.

If it had been a Greek story, the gods would have admired his character, and come to his aid – at least Athena would have, as she did for Osysseus and so many other male heroes. But there were no gods in this story, and no salvation. He risked all, he won, then he died.

When I read the book six years ago, Chris McCandless’ hero’s quest reminded me a lot of what my best friend was going through. Todd wasn’t bizarre or extreme like McCandless, he was more like most of the rest of us. But he had that heroic kind of courage and daring, in his intellectual way.

Todd Driskill had been a minister for a dozen years. He’d switched from the Methodists to the Disciples of Christ, and the switch was part of a much deeper struggle going on inside of him. He struggled against all the theology taught by the churches, because he thought most of it was demeaning nonsense.

He had no superstition left in his Christianity. He didn’t believe there was a Fellow living above the sky, and he didn’t believe that after he died he would show up somewhere else to go on living forever. These were myths, and he knew it. But beneath the myths, he saw some deeper, down-to-earth truths, and those deeper truths called him to serve them.

I saw Todd struggling with these inner voices during our weekly lunches together. He was trying to give birth to a larger religious vision, a larger truth, a larger self, and the struggles really took him to the mat.

Finally, in 1991, five years after I met him, Todd took a bold step and resigned from the ministry. He told me he could no longer preach the things he believed, no longer believed the things his church members were pressuring him to preach, and said he would lose his soul if he stayed.

So with his son in Jr. High School, Todd quit his job and the family moved to New Jersey, where he began Ph.D. studies at Drew University. His wife found a nursing position nearby. In our phone conversations, letters, and finally e-mails, Todd wrestled with the huge chasm between the wisdom he found in the Bible and the drivel he said the churches teach.

Through his intelligent reading of the Bible, Todd found wisdom and insight into the depths of living a more authentic life, and that was the “good news” he wished people would hear, rather than the supernatural nonsense they got instead. He would say, “If only Christians would learn how to read this book like grown-ups, Christianity could transform their lives and the world!”

I thought it was too bad he was never going to return to the ministry, and he certainly wasn’t likely to earn a living by teaching people how to read the Bible intelligently.

Then, as he was finishing his Ph.D. dissertation, he got a call. The voice at the other end wondered if he would be interested in interviewing to become the Director of the Society for Biblical Literacy for the Disciples of Christ churches worldwide. The job would involve traveling around the country and around the world, teaching both ministers and lay people how to read the Bible intelligently. The former director had died, they had already interviewed several candidates, but a minister who knew Todd had called them to say he thought the job was made for Todd Driskill. Todd flew to Atlanta, and they offered him the job at the end of the first interview.

As Todd said, this was a script written in Heaven by God and the angels, too good even to make a believable movie.

So six years ago at just this time of year, Todd was loading a truck for the move to Atlanta, more excited and more alive than any of us who knew him had ever seen him. He loaded all those boxes of books. Then he lifted an air-conditioner into the back of the truck, slumped forward and died of a heart attack at the age of 46.

We have hundreds of stories about heroic quests. We hardly ever talk about stories of heroic failures. But they are all around us. The year I read Krakauer’s book and preached the eulogy at Todd’s funeral, the movie “Titanic” came out. It was presented partly as a story of the arrogance of rich industrialists who thought they could build an unsinkable ship, and sped through a huge field of icebergs.

But there are other stories there, too. There are the stories of 1500 people, mostly 3rd class passengers, who died in the North Atlantic 92 years ago. Many or most of these people were poor working people from all over Europe. They were leaving everything and everyone they had known, risking everything they owned for the chance of a better life in America. Wasn’t this a hero’s quest? Hadn’t they done everything they were supposed to do? And weren’t they coming to the New World filled with the zeal and determination we try to teach through our hero stories?

And what of the millions of students, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other successful Cambodians who were hunted down and killed by Pol Pot’s armies during the time of Cambodia’s “killing fields” twenty years ago? What of the intellectuals, the patriotic and devoted Jews, homosexuals and others whose efforts were rewarded in the Nazi death camps nearly sixty years ago? What of all the innocent deaths of history, where the undeniable message is that life isn’t fair? What does it all do to our stories of justice, fairness, the rewards for hard work and sacrifice, the great and abiding gift brought by a good character?

There is something frightening about admitting the role that Chance plays in life. The Greeks saw that even the gods were the playthings of the fates, as we also are.

It can be put more bluntly: once Chance is acknowledged, all the gods lose all pretense to being in charge of anything at all. The only existence left for them is as ideas, concepts within our minds, limited to the kind of power ideas can have.

The best of religious writings have always known that even our most profound and necessary stories are fictions. That’s what the book of Job is about in the Hebrew Bible: that there is no cosmic justice, no God in charge of making sure everything will work out well. We don’t reflect enough on the fact that in the Jewish ordering of their bible, the book of Job is their last word on the subject of God. Buddhists teach that no one is really spiritually mature until they no longer need to be lied to – something my friend Todd despaired of ever being able to teach as a minister. Like Sheherezade, we tell our stories in order to live. And the greatest paradox of religion and of life is that, like Sheherezade, our lives are sustained in part by stories that we really know are not true.

It’s like a picture of all humanity, in a big circle holding hands. We dance, we sing, we work and play, live and die, always in that huge circle of humanity, and as we go through life, we tell each other our stories. We tell our stories about God and his Providence, how his eye is on the sparrow and on us as too, about how all things happen as part of his divine plan, and the plan is good. We tell our stories about truth and goodness and doing the right thing. We say in a hundred ways that there is a kind of cosmic justice underlying everything.

These are the stories we tell, as we hold hands in the big dance of life. And once in awhile we pass over a chasm, and someone falls through and is lost. Chris McCandless, Todd Driskill, hundreds of hopeful people aboard the Titanic, millions of innocents in the Nazi death camps, the Cambodian killing fields, thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, millions of Africans dying of AIDS. They fall through, they’re lost, and we rush to close the holes, to grasp the nearest hand and complete the circle again, so life’s dance can go on.

We pretend that our stories explain all about life: how we’re safe because God is watching, or because there is a cosmic justice on the lookout or because what goes around comes around or because death isn’t real and we’ll all come back in some other form, some other time. But they’re just the stories we tell ourselves while we’re still safe. They’re the necessary fictions we tell while holding hands and spinning in the dance of life, above an Abyss we seldom mention.

Then, on those few occasions in life when the circle breaks and we lose someone we shouldn’t have lost, the inadequacy of our stories is momentarily exposed. But just for a moment. For then we feel that tug, and we respond to it. It is the tug of the hands holding our hands, the hands of the others in that huge circle of humanity reaching out instinctively to pull us to them, to cradle us while we cry and heal and gain the faith to go on again.

So how, really, do we become big and strong in life? Is it by adopting a religious story that has all the answers and assures us that everything will be all right? Or is it, instead, by learning how to reach out and feel the touch of the hands next to ours, of the whole circle of humanity, how to respond to them, how to trust, and how to dance?

This is one of those sermons that preachers aren’t supposed to give. They’re too much like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where the little dog Toto pulls the curtain away, showing the illusions for what they were.

But we began by talking about some of the differences between religious conservatives and liberals, so I will leave the question with you: When you know that, like Sheherezade, we live by telling brave and hopeful stories that we know aren’t always true – when you know this, does the knowledge make you feel smaller and more afraid, or does it make you, as I hope it will, bigger and stronger?

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© Davidson Loehr

16 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

STORY: The Prince Who Was a Chicken

Once there was a kingdom where almost everything was perfect. The king was perfect, the queen was perfect, and the prince – who was only four years old – was being trained to be perfect. He had to become perfect, because one day he would become king.

Each day, the young prince would be brought into the great hall and dressed in a small crown, a junior-sized king’s robe, and seated in a very small but kingly throne. And for thirty minutes every day, he had to stand in front of a full-length mirror, looking at himself dressed up like a little king, and say over and over again “I am the king, I am the king, I am the king.”

It was a pretty silly thing to make a four-year-old prince do. And it didn’t get any less silly when he was five, six, seven, or ten. Every time he grew a little, they would increase the size of his crown, his kingly robes, and his throne. And every day, for more days than he could or wanted to count, he stood in front of that mirror, dressed up in his crown and robe, saying “I am the king, I am the king, I am the king.”

It went on for so many years! Then one day, when the prince was about sixteen, he did a very odd thing. Coming into the great hall, he didn’t walk over to the tailors waiting to fit him with today’s kingly crown and robe. Instead, he went over to the great banquet table, took off all of his clothes, and crawled under the table.

The king and queen were shocked and disturbed, to say the least! “What are you doing?” the king shouted at him. “You’re a prince, you’re going to be a king. What are you doing? Put your clothes on and sit at the table for dinner!”

The prince looked at his father with kingly confidence, and said, “I am a chicken. Chickens don’t need clothes. And chickens don’t eat from plates.”

Never in the history of the kingdom had such a ridiculous thing been heard. “You are not a chicken!” the king yelled. “You’re a prince and a future king!”

“No,” said the prince from under the table, “I am a chicken. And I am hungry. I want food brought and thrown on the floor so I can eat.”

Well, as ridiculous as this was, the servants couldn’t let the young prince starve. So they brought his food and put it on the floor, and he began pecking at it, much like a chicken might.

The king and queen were nearly crazy with this idea that their son was going to be a chicken. They sent for experts in “strange and terrible diseases infecting the minds of young princes,” and several showed up. But they got nowhere. To every assertion to the contrary, the young prince would calmly reply “I am a chicken.” And he would peck at his food on the floor, and that would be the end of it.

One day an old farmwoman came to the king, and told him she could cure his son. The king laughed: “You’re not an expert! You’re just an old farmwoman. Do you know anything about the mental demons that have invaded his mind?” She allowed as how she did not know of any such things. “Then why do you think you can help him?”

“Because,” the old farm woman said calmly, “I understand chickens.” Well, the queen said, they hardly had anything left to lose, so she might as well try.

She entered the great hall, took off all her clothes, crept under the table, and sat down next to the prince. The prince said nothing. In a while, a servant entered and scattered a few handfuls of food, and when the prince began to eat, the old woman also pecked at the food. Even though the prince had been practicing this new way of eating for weeks, she was immediately better at it than he was. She really did understand chickens. They sat together in silence for some time longer. Finally the prince said to the old woman, “Who are you?”

“And you?” she replied. “Who are you?”

“I am a chicken,” said the prince.

“Ah,” said the old woman. “I am a chicken, too.”

The prince thought about this for several days. Gradually he began to talk to the old woman about the things that are important to chickens, things that are different from the things important to kings and queens. She understood as only another chicken could understand. They spoke not about the world as it is but about the world as it could be. They became friends.

After several weeks, the old woman called to one of the serving girls and told her to bring some clothes. When the clothes arrived, she dressed herself. The prince was horrified. “You have betrayed me!” he shouted. “You told me you were a chicken! You’re no chicken!”

“But I am a chicken,” she said. “I can wear clothes and still be a chicken.” The prince thought about this for some time. Then he turned to the pile of clothing and dressed himself also. They continued their conversations as before and ate their food from the floor together as before. (This eating food from the floor wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The floors in the great hall were so clean you could … well, you know.)

After a few days more, the old woman called to one of the serving girls and told her to bring a fine meal and set it on the table. When the meal arrived she crawled out from under the table and, sitting in a chair, began to eat. The prince was appalled. “You have lied to me!” he shouted. “You told me you were a chicken!” “But I am a chicken,” said the old woman. “I can sit at a table and eat from a plate and still be a chicken.” The prince thought about this for some time. Then he, too, crawled out from under the table and joined the old woman. They ate in silence for some time. Then the prince began to laugh.

The prince went on to become a wonderful king. Under his rule, freedom grew in the kingdom much the way that peaches and potatoes had grown in the past. Each person became free to be the person that they were meant to be, and the people who had once been productive and happy became wise.

And all over the kingdom, wherever he went, the people said to him “You are the best king ever!” And so he seemed to be.

But you know, there were stories…. Some people said – though not where anyone from the castle could hear them, of course – that sometimes, on bright moonlit nights, they swore they saw someone who looked a lot like their king, running naked through the fields and shouting “But really … I am a chicken!”

(Adapted from a story told by Rachel Naomi Remen in My Grandfather’s Blessings, pp. 285-287.)

PRAYER

We gather here as faithful people seeking truth that can make us free, love that can bind us together, and spiritual nourishment to sustain us during our journey.

We lose our way so easily.

We stumble over the difference between the transient and the permanent, the illusory and the real.

We accept roles, which enslave us rather than empowering us.

We need truth, yet are too often seduced by habit and convention.

We seek warmth, acceptance, and love – how many times we settle for so much less!

Life is so short, so precious, those we love and those who love us seem to pass so quickly.

We would clarify our thinking, educate our wanting, and harmonize the yearnings of our mind with the longings of our soul. This is the miracle we seek.

We confess our imperfections, our failings, our sins of commission and of omission, and seek the saving truth: the truth that in spite of our human failings, we are children of God, children of the universe, and the world is more blessed because we are in it. If we can live out of that simple but abiding truth, other saving graces will be revealed to us as well. This we believe; this we know.

Amen.

SERMON: How to be a Chicken

This begins, as so much begins, with a story. Years ago, I was a combat photographer and Press Officer with the Army in Vietnam. Besides covering the war, I usually spent a couple days a week in Saigon, making the rounds of war correspondents: the Associated Press, UPI, LIFE Magazine and so on, trying to get them interested in doing some feature stories on my unit. As a result, I knew Saigon fairly well, including some of its fine French and Chinese restaurants, and whenever I came in from the field, I usually visited one.

You could tell what the restaurant owners thought of Americans just by looking at their menu. If they weren’t interested in attracting Americans, they wouldn’t print the menu in English. On this particular trip into Saigon, I visited a new French restaurant called Le Cave. It was pretty ritzy, but the menu was printed only in French, which was like posting a sign saying, “Chinese and Americans stay out!”

I went anyway. Since I couldn’t read French, the menu was a challenge. The food was supposed to be good – it was very pricey – but I had no idea what the food actually was. I recognized a couple famous words, like Chateaubriand and Pomme Fritz, but not enough to make a meal. Finally, I decided to order one item from each section of the menu, thinking they’d probably fit together into some kind of a gourmet meal. As I picked a salad, soup, an entree, a side dish and a dessert, I looked for famous words, thinking if I recognized the word – even if I didn’t know what it meant – the food would probably be great.

This made the whole dinner kind of an adventure. The waiter brought out the salad I had ordered. I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it.

Then they brought the soup. I ate one spoonful, and couldn’t believe it! I waved for the waiter, and pointed to the bowl: “The soup’s cold.”

The expression on his face was a combination of shock and revulsion. “Monsieur,” he tried to explain in a polite but revolted way, “It is Vichyssoise!”

“It’s cold,” I said. “Please take it back and heat it up.”

He looked at me like I was the one who had done something weird! “But Monsieur” – it was a desperate, pathetic pleading voice now – “It is Vichyssoise!”

Now, I’d tried to be polite and all, but we’d been over this already, and I was hungry. “Look,” I said: “I understand you: it’s Vichyssoise! But it’s cold Vichyssoise! Now take it back and cook it!”

The waiter disappeared into the kitchen with my bowl of cold soup. When he returned, the soup was steaming. It was very good. Once it was properly heated up, I realized that heck, Vichyssoise is just potato-leek soup! The waiter was very quiet and polite for the rest of the meal. I figured he was probably pretty embarrassed over having served cold potato soup, so I left him a big tip to show there were no hard feelings.

Back in the field a couple weeks later, I was in the Officers’ Club having some drinks with our Colonel and his staff. We had just finished a major combat operation, and the Colonel was talking about going into Saigon for some high-level meetings – and to sneak in a couple days’ relaxation. I was telling him about the good hotels, bars and steam baths, when he took a slip of paper out of his pocket. Somebody had recommended a new French restaurant named “The Cave” to him. He had lived in France, spoke the language fluently, and wanted to know if I’d heard of this place.

What a coincidence! I told him I’d been there just two weeks ago, that I had had a great salad, French-Fries, an excellent Chateaubriand and my first Crepes Suzettes. In fact, the only complaint I’d had was that my waiter tried to serve me cold Vichyssoise. They were all very attentive, so I told them the story.

Suddenly the Officers’ Club got very quiet. My Colonel had an expression just like that waiter had had. He looked very sad. He told me he didn’t think I should be allowed to leave the base camp any more. The other Colonel asked me if I’d ever read the book The Ugly American. Then they told me that Vichyssoise is always served cold, that the French actually think it’s supposed to be eaten that way! Amazing!

I’ll admit that after my Colonel tried to give me that lesson in culture, I thought of my experience in the French restaurant somewhat differently. And I never went back to that restaurant. But I’ve never looked at that story the way my Colonel did, or that waiter.

Instead, the word “Vichyssoise” became a metaphor for me. And the story has always reminded me of how easily we get confused by the difference between matters of fact and matters of taste.

We human beings always operate out of at least two different kinds of identity, which we seem to have trouble keeping straight. We have our individual identity, that’s marked by our innovations, our differences from others. Those are the things that make us “chickens,” like the prince in the story. And we have our group identities, our regional, national, or religious character. And these group identities are defined not by our innovation but by our imitation, by how faithfully we adopt the customs and tastes of others, whether they make sense to us or not.

It’s not that group tastes and identities are senseless. It’s just that they are arbitrary. They’re matters of taste, not matters of truth. They’re matters of fashion, not matters of fact. And that’s a distinction we have always had a hard time making.

Whether you like your potato-leek soup hot or cold is an issue of food preferences, not right and wrong. It’s your soup; you can eat it any way you like. If you want it cold, go to a French Restaurant. If you want it hot, order it that way. The French aren’t being more correct by serving their potato soup cold; they’re just being more French.

Once you start looking at things like this – like a chicken – everything looks different.

For instance, Protestants aren’t more correct by rejecting Catholic sacraments and authority – that just makes them Protestants. Catholics aren’t more “true” by rejecting Protestantism, Buddhism and other religions; that’s just what defines them as Catholics. The same is true of Democrats, Republicans, and all other religious, political and social identities. Their list of certainties and prohibitions identify the terms of membership in their club, their group identity. That’s all. This isn’t about Truth; it’s about convention. And one of the most important tasks of religion is to help us tell the difference between Truth and Vichyssoise.

I want to try and persuade you to think of this word Vichyssoise as a metaphor for matters of personal taste that pretend to be matters of truth. It’s a good word, it has a funny sound, and I want to make that funny sound memorable for you this morning.

So to help expand the meaning of this word, I have brought you a couple Vichyssoise stories that don’t involve food.

My favorite example of Vichyssoise in religion comes from a tract in the form of an election ballot printed by the Moody Bible Institute in the 1920s. At the top of the ballot is the question “Will You Be Saved?” Then it says “God has voted YES; Satan has voted NO – A Tie! Your vote must decide the issue.” And below there is a place for you to make your X with God or the Devil. Now this may sound a little silly, and the ballot looked even sillier, but it’s the basic recipe for Vichyssoise, because the “Yes” meant you had to affirm their particular way of cooking religion. (Data taken from George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 100.)

A second bowl of Vichyssoise is a musical example. Some of you may know of Wanda Landowska, who was a brilliant and very opinionated harpsichordist whose favorite composer was Bach. Once another musician quarreled with her interpretation of Bach and argued that there were, after all, many possible interpretations of the master. Wanda’s response could have come from a Moody Bible Institute tract: “You play the music your way,” she snapped, “and I’ll play it Bach’s way!”

That’s Vichyssoise!

Since there are dozens of different recordings of the master, Bach-lovers can usually find someone who plays it their way, and so Wanda Landowska’s fundamentalism just added some sparkle to her character, without doing much harm. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes the authoritative suppression of divergent views has important and far-reaching consequences. Rules, laws, religions are to enhance life, not enslave it. When we forget that, we’re serving Vichyssoise.

Nearly every major religious figure in history has made their name by saying that what their listeners had been taught as God’s word was not necessarily sacred after all. They were chickens, and the greatest of them helped turn others into chickens, too. Jesus ate and worked on the Sabbath, the holy day of his people. We weren’t made to serve the Sabbath, he said; the Sabbath is made for us to use. And all the teachings to the contrary — which they held sacred — were just arbitrary teachings without authority. He would say “You’ve been taught such-and-such, but I say unto you…” and then dismiss their teachings as Vichyssoise.

You could say that Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation in 1517 by saying that the Catholic Church was serving its own recipes, which no Christian really had to swallow. When the Unitarians began a couple decades later, they rejected two-thirds of the Trinity as bad food.

I would say that religion is about learning to tell the difference between Vichyssoise and Truth, between customs and wisdom.

Betty Skwarek, our Director of Religious Education, and I recently finished an eight-week adult education course on religion. As part of it, we talked about the fact that some sociologists of religion have studied the way in which we fool ourselves into thinking that opinions are facts. It’s part of the way that we “create reality.” (One of the classic books here is named The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.) It’s the recipe for making Vichyssoise, and it’s pretty simple. It has just three steps, but the whole scheme depends on your forgetting the first step:

1. Somebody comes up with an idea: God, women’s roles, acceptable sexual orientations, the requirements of patriotism, the right way to believe, cold potato soup, and so on. Somebody has an idea; that’s where it starts. “The word of God” doesn’t begin when some chap sits down with a regal, glowing fellow named God and takes notes. It begins when a poet, a prophet, or a demagogue has an idea that something feels so important that it is, they’re sure, just the sort of thing God would say if God could talk. So they write the words “Thus saith the Lord,” and it begins with their idea.

2. The second step is that this idea gets projected out onto a really powerful word or symbol, like God, Nature, America, Justice or Love. Then we forget the human origin of the idea, and we are told that God said this, or it’s a law of Nature, or part of being a True American, or that Justice or Love demand this – or because potato soup is always served cold, as though the idea really had an authority from some other realm.

3. Then, since the idea comes from God, Nature or Tradition, we feel that we and others must obey it, so that it will be “on earth as it is in heaven.”

That means that all such absolute rules present us with a dilemma. If we forget the first step and pretend that the rule really came from God, Nature, etc., we lose our creative role in the process, and the rule begins to enslave us rather than enrich us. Then we’re conformed not confirmed. Our soul and our mind are relinquished, not replenished, because somebody has served us Vichyssoise and passed it off as Truth. On the other hand, if we acknowledge that this rule, like all rules, had its origin in someone’s idea, someone’s personal opinion, then the whole idea of a “transcendent authority” vanishes. The idea of “God” vanishes, because Toto has pulled the curtain back, showing that God was, after all, a projection of the dreams, ideas, beliefs and fears of ordinary people. (This three-part process of “creating truths” comes from Peter Berger’s classic little book The Sacred Canopy. It was an elaboration of the theme that Berger and Thomas Luckmann had developed earlier in the even more classic The Social Construction of Reality. I think both books are necessary parts of any adequate education in religion, politics or science.)

Do you see how tricky, this is? And we’re not just the victims in this very human game. We’ve all served up our own kind of cold soup to others. It isn’t evil. It isn’t something deranged or malevolent. We do it with the very best of intentions. We learn our lessons of life, we collect what we take to be wisdom, and naturally we want to help others learn it. If our life became centered only after we had found Christ, we’ll tend to think that everybody’s life would be more centered if they could discover Christ as we have. If we finally found our sense of integrity only after dumping all kinds of mythic religion and putting our faith in science and rationality, we will probably be pretty sure that everybody else will be better off jettisoning their religion and becoming rational as we have.

It is such a hard lesson! We mean so well, we want so much for others to have a better life, to believe the kinds of things we know to be best. It’s so hard really to believe that life grows beyond even our grasp, that possibilities exist that we are unable even to imagine, that even those people we hate are worthy of love, that even those who disagree with us may well be right. It’s so easy to lose patience with those who can’t find our path, who can’t see what we see so clearly.

And so we stifle them. And so they stifle us.

How many times have you wanted someone just to let you be, to love or accept you even when you had to grow away from them? How often have we all felt alone and distraught because someone stood in judgment over us, and rejected us; because someone was sure there must be a command of God, a law of nature or an official recipe to prevent us from doing and being what we knew we must do and must be? How many times have we played God, and how many times have we had it played against us? And what an awful game it is, playing God! We believe it, so it must be true. And since it’s true, others must need to believe it too. That’s the recipe for Vichyssoise. And when you’re being served Vichyssoise that’s being passed off as truth, it’s time to think about becoming a chicken.

This isn’t to suggest that nothing is true, or that religion is just a matter of personal taste. Some things are, I believe, abidingly true, and necessary to live with hope, with integrity and authenticity. You recognize them when you hear them. Here are just a few things I would argue are really Truth, not convention:

We are all precious and sacred people, with a special gift we need to discover, cultivate, and offer to the world. And what is true of us is equally true of all others, too: including those we don’t like.

There is a peace that passes all understanding, even ours, and we need to leave room for it to enter our lives.

We are not perfect, and need to attend to our imperfections. But we are not condemned by our imperfections. They are part of being human. We are not called to be perfect. We’re called to be alive, awake, aware, and whole.

We should live in ways that open us to the mystery and miracle of life, that let us recognize all others as our brothers and sisters, and that try to make a positive difference in our world, each in our own way.

I think all these things are true. They are true whether we believe them or not. Our lives and our world are enhanced when we incorporate this wisdom in our lives. And the quality of our lives and our world is diminished to the extent that we can not live in obedience to the kind of wisdom embodied in such simple insights as these.

But not everything passed on to us in an authoritative voice is bread for the soul, truth for the mind, or health for the spirit.

When someone says you must accept Christ or God or Allah or you are damned, that is not true.

When you hear that certain types of people are second-class citizens, not qualified to be priests – or bishops – you have not heard the truth.

When you hear any message that judges and sorts people on the basis of their sex, race, sexual orientation, their beliefs, political affiliations, education, or wealth, when you hear anyone from anywhere restricting life to those who look, act or believe just the way they do, you have not been served a truth that can sustain life or cherish its precious mystery and variety.

That’s not truth. That’s Vichyssoise. Vichyssoise!

It’s a good word. Say it with me: Vichyssoise!

Let’s say it again: Vichyssoise!

And one more time, with great feeling: Vichyssoise!

Hallelujah – and Amen!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

2 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

For this Veterans’ Day, let us remember the sacred covenant we have with our soldiers.

As they promise to risk everything, to risk even their lives, we must promise that the cause for which we send them forth is worth the sacrifice of their lives.

We are humbled by the sacrifice they offer us. But our covenant binds both ways; we must meet their courage with our own.

Let us fight for those who fight for us.

Surely, there are causes worth the ultimate sacrifice. But just as surely, they are few and far between.

We must be able to say that the motives behind their war are worth the cost of their lives and the lives of the thousands of those we tell them to kill.

And if we do not believe that, then let us haved the courage to speak, to act, to make it right before it can never be made right again.

Times that call for soldiers call, as well, for our courage. Let us never forget our part in the sacred covenant with our soldiers. Let us have the courage and the will to fight for those who fight for us. That much courage, that much will, nothing less.

Amen.

SERMON: Veterans’ Day 2003

Veterans’ Day is always hard for me to translate into a sermon. I believe the covenant between a society and its soldiers is one of the most sacred covenants in the world. Soldiers do their part by being willing to serve, to fight, perhaps to die. Our part is to assure them that the reasons for going to war are worth the sacrifice of their lives, are worth robbing these young soldiers of the chance to marry, raise children, and grow old, illuminated by the glowing embers of a full life, well lived.

As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I know that soldiers carry more than just their weapons into combat. They also carry the political baggage of their war. If you can be in a Good War – and WWII is the only one we’ve had that is still considered a Good War – then soldiers carry the respect of their country and the approval of history. But if your turn comes up in a bad war, or a war fought for selfish or stupid reasons, then you carry that on your back, forever. Sometimes, the load seems to get heavier every day, as those who served in Vietnam during the early 1970s learned.

So, 36 years after my war, I can’t look at today’s soldiers without wondering what they are carrying on their backs as they go into their war. And you don’t have to be psychic to know that our soldiers in Iraq have a load on their backs. We’re already starting to see headlines like those that came mostly at the end of the Vietnam War. Here are just a few of the headlines from stories I’ve seen this week:

A Fiction Shattered by America’s Aggression

Assassinations Surge in Iraq

Rebel War Spirals Out of Control As U.S. Intelligence Loses the Plot

As Casualties Mount, Doubts Grow

18 Americans Dead, 21 Wounded, a Deadly Day in Iraq

How Many Body Bags?

When Will Bush Address Mounting Casualties?

Judge is Shot Dead as Iraqis’ Hatred of Occupiers Grows

Rage Erupts over Iraq War Profiteering

A High Price for a Hollow Victory

White House Ignored Iraqi Bid to Avert War

And yesterday (8 Nov 03), while I was attending a district meeting in San Antonio, military Families from across the state held a press conference in San Antonio demanding an end to the US Occupation of Iraq and the immediate return of all troops to their home duty stations. These families represented soldiers from all four of the military bases in Texas. And again, it’s very early in the war for this level of outrage and accusation to be surfacing.

You wonder how we got into this mess, and I think of the old story about how to cook a frog. If you drop a frog into hot water, it will devote all its effort to jumping out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and gradually raise the heat, the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late and it’s cooked. Mind you, I haven’t actually tried this with a live frog, I just trust the old story. And if you have tried this with a frog, I don’t want to know about it!

Oh, I can hear conservatives saying “There go those liberals again, always criticizing, never trusting their leaders. They’re not good Americans. Good Americans follow their leader and support the troops and the war.”

Here’s a quote I just read this week that seems to endorse this view, a quote from a fairly surprising source:

“The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets.” –

Those words are from Lawrence Grossman – longtime head of PBS and NBC News. When the head of NBC News believes the job of the press is to follow the leader rather than informing those who are being led, it’s easy to feel that these darned liberals are just out of touch.

But then I remember another quotation, which you have probably heard at least part of. It’s much older,

“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” — John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790. (Speeches. Dublin, 1808.) as quoted in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations

These two quotations seem to represent the options we find offered to us: conservatives preaching obedience, liberals preaching vigilance and critical inquiries into the motives of those who are now leading our country. These options are framed as though they were merely partisan political choices, where there are no truths beyond our individual opinions. Republicans are supposed to embrace obedience while Democrats try and awaken a country falling asleep in hot water.

But it isn’t that simple, now or ever. The families who protested in San Antonio yesterday came from both political parties, from conservative and liberal religions or no religions. They are among the voices saying that this is not about partisan politics. This is about the fate of America, and the dangers that are beginning to surround us.

I am one of those who believe we are being dangerously and unwisely misled, but I will no longer accept it as a partisan statement. It is a patriotic statement, the kind that must be made by all who realize that liberty is always given to us on the condition of eternal vigilance, that failing to be vigilant is failing to be patriotic, and that we have a sacred covenant with our soldiers.

I want to borrow some comments from two news articles and mix them with my own, to try and show you why some people fear that we are violating our sacred covenant with our soldiers, and with ourselves as Americans.

First, I want to provide a kind of historical background by sharing parts of an essay written by Thomas Hartman on March 23, 2003, on “When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History.” These are the kind of historical parallels that some feel are unwarranted and rude. I feel they are honest, and timely – part of the eternal vigilance we owe ourselves and our great country. Reflecting on economic crises, terrorists and wars, Hartman says:

“It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings. The media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed.

“But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language – reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state – and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

“When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he … called a press conference.

“He used the occasion – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

“Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation’s now-popular leader had pushed through legislation – in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it – that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people’s homes without warrants if they thought the case might involve terrorism.

“Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. Instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as “The Homeland.”

“His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a “New Christianity.” Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared “Gott Mit Uns” – God Is With Us – and most of them fervently believed it was true.

“Soon, he proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland…

“To consolidate his power, he reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation’s largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the terrorists, and to prepare for wars overseas. … He built powerful alliances with industry…

“He then began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe – at first – denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar’s Rome or Alexander’s Greece.

The story, of course, is about Hitler and the rise of Nazi power seventy years ago. It looks to this writer, to me, and to many others like we are resolutely following the course that Hitler’s Third Reich followed in our ambition to establish an American empire – the German word for empire is “Reich.”

None of this is new information. The seeds were planted in essays going back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, when some neoconservatives argued that it was time for America to gain immediate military and economic domination of the world: the Fourth Reich, if you like. Nor were they mincing their words. One 1989 essay by Charles Krauthammer was titled “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World” (National Interest 18 (Winter 1989), 48-49; Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70 (1991), 23.)

In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then-under secretary of defense for policy, supervised the drafting of the Defense Policy Guidance document, in which he outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil” and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.

He called for preemptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when “collective action cannot be orchestrated.” The primary goal of U.S. policy should be to prevent the rise of any nation that could challenge the United States. When the document was leaked to the New York Times, it proved so extreme that it had to be rewritten. The first President Bush rejected these extreme ideas of Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense in 1992. These concepts are now part of the new U.S. National Security Strategy.

That strategy follows the ideas in an earlier paper from September 2000 published by a group of called “Project for the New American Century.” The paper, called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” was the product of twenty-seven neoconservatives including Wolfowitz and Cheney. The report was called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” and was a product of the Project for the New American Century. Six of the key authors of that report now hold high positions in the Bush administration. Others, like Donald Kagen and Richard Perle, hold influential positions as unofficial advisors.

The 2000 paper on “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” directly acknowledges its debt to the 1992 document written by Wolfowitz.

If you believe these plans for an American empire of military domination of the world are the primary mission of the Bush administration, as many people do, then everything going on makes a new kind of sense where all the pieces seem to fit together.

(The following ideas taken from article by Jay Bookman for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9-29-02, titled “The president’s real goal in Iraq”.)

It means “this war [in Iraq] marks the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire…. Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

“Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

“And why did the administration dismiss the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. … The plan dismisses deterrence as a Cold War relic and instead talks of “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.”

Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy — he served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project — describes the new world order in cowboy-movie metaphors: “You saw the movie ‘High Noon’?” he asks. “We’re Gary Cooper.”

Kagan also acknowledges that we will most likely establish permanent military bases in Iraq. “We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time. … When we have economic problems, it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.”

Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview a few months ago that the reason we cared about Iraq but not North Korea was because Iraq was “swimming in oil.” But even in his 1992 paper he had identified Iraqi oil as a major reason for ousting Saddam Hussein and taking effective control of the country. So if people actually claim it’s wrong to accuse the administration of murdering for oil, they either have not done their homework, or are being disingenuous.

To see who the new American empire would serve, you only have to look at the changes in economy and taxes since Bush was elected. It is to be an empire rewarding the corporations and the very wealthy and, as far as possible, eliminating the middle class to create the kind of two-tiered economy that has enriched the few and impoverished the many in Mexico.

Putting Americans out of work to be replaced by cheap foreign labor isn’t only happening at Wal-Mart; it’s happening in the high-tech industries too, as many of you know first-hand.

Corporations such as Cigna, General Electric and Merrill Lynch are already using a loophole called the L-1 Visa to import low-wage technology workers from India to replace their American employees, and have already brought some 325,000 computer ingineers, programmers, and other high-tech employees from abroad, mostly from India. (Jim Hightower, “A Loophole for Busting High-tech Wages,” September 23, 2003)

This is a full-scale drive toward the military domination of the world and the subjugation of anyone and everyone who could protest. That’s why civil rights are being curtailed as part of the “security for the Homeland.” It is also why it is likely that repressive forms of religion will gain both power and influence.

Here’s one more quotation from another important neoconservative named Richard Perle, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, and is in another influential role with this administration, in case it seems like I’m overstating things:

“This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it… If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” (Go here for one source of this quote.)

These are the battles our soldiers are being used to fight. They are battles for a concept of empire so similar to the vision of Hitler’s Nazi party of sixty years ago that it’s hard to consider the similarities accidental. This is the ideology our soldiers are carrying into battle with them as they fight, kill and die not for freedom or the American way, but for greed, arrogance, and a murderous lust for power that seems terrifyingly insane.

As the water heats up, it is worth considering again some lessons of history from the 1930s and 1940s. Both America and Germany were deep into economic depression.

“Germany’s response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society’s richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.” (Thomas Hartman)

America’s leaders and America’s soldiers fought for democracy, which means a powerful middle class and rigorous controls on the natural greed of wealthy corporations and individuals. We’re still proud of those soldiers .

Germany’s leaders and soldiers fought for an economic and military tyranny that is the mortal enemy of democracy. They looted the working class and transferred money, power and privilege to their wealthiest individuals and corporations, while restricting the rights of ordinary people to protest. No one is proud of them today.

It is time to celebrate Veterans’ Day 2003, so it is time to ask about the sacred covenant we have with our soldiers. Can we honestly tell them that the mad dreams of a few dangerous leaders are worth their sacrifices, worth their lives, let alone the lives of more than 15,000 Iraqis estimated killed?

If our motives are indeed the motives of dominating the world, then these deaths, on both sides, are not casualties of war, but murders. And the actions of our current administration are, by the definitions we used at Nuremburg, war crimes.

Our soldiers carry into battle not only their weapons and supplies, but also the weight of the cause for which we are asking them to fight and die. Can we honestly look them in the face and tell them that we have honored our part of this sacred covenant with them?

This isn’t a question for our leaders, who seem beyond caring about such matters. It’s a question for those who understand that the price of liberty is always eternal vigilance. It is a question for us, and we must pursue the question wherever it leads. Our soldiers are counting on us.

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© Davidson Loehr

26 October 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Prayer

Let us prepare for the unmasking.

We come here from many places.

We come seeking many things.

Some come for the company,

or at least the stimulation.

Some bring unspoken joys or pains that need the closeness of others.

But beneath it all, we come in the hope that here, somehow,

we may catch a glimpse of something enduring, something true;

something which can support and nourish us,

coax and guide us toward a better life.

We come to remove life’s masks – and our own masks, too.

Let us prepare for the unmasking.

Amen.

SERMON: Boo!

Halloween is a holiday that comes to us in drag. It wears a mask and a costume, covering a much older, costume and mask.

Uncovering Halloween is like going on an archaeological dig, where we go down through layers put down at different eras, each building on what had come before it, and each more watered-down than the earlier versions.

The most recent change came in 1967, by decree from President Johnson. That’s when Halloween officially became UNICEF day, when little children, sometimes dressed as make-believe goblins, frighten you into making the sacrifice of some spare change.

Going back farther, Halloween first became a national event here after more than a million people from Ireland emigrated to the US after the Irish potato famine of 1848. At that time it was the adults rather than the children who dressed up in costumes, pretending to be all kinds of evil spirits and other supernatural beings. They visited homes where friends made offerings of food and drink to them. And I’ve read that the costumes they used to wear were almost always cross-dressing, with men dressing as female characters and women dressing as male figures – so it was a holiday in drag. But that too was a caricature, a cartoon. Halloween itself is a kind of mask put on over something far older, more primitive, more powerful – and, perhaps, more healing.

The Christian church invented Halloween and All Saints Day in the 9th century, then added All Souls Day a century later. They were invented to “cover” an ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (“Sow-en”), just as Christmas was moved to December 25th in the 4th century to “cover” the pagan Mithraic festivals, and Easter is a Christian “cover” over older festivals celebrating the vernal equinox. Our November first was their first day of winter, and first day of their new year.

For the ancient Celtic people, this was the most magical time of the year. They had only two seasons: summer and winter, light and dark, and their new year began at the beginning of the dark season. Their days also began at night. Our days and years also begin in the dark, but we have forgotten the reason for it. For the Celtic people the darkness was the time of beginnings because they believed the dark holds whisperings of secrets that we need to know. That’s pretty good psychology, and it’s true.

They had great feasts during the three days of Samhain. The crops were in; they slaughtered livestock and threw a big banquet. Afterwards, they threw the bones into the roaring fire, both as thanks for this year’s feast and as a kind of prayer for good crops and livestock next year. The fire was originally called a “bone-fire,” which we have shortened to the kinder, gentler name of bonfire.

Above all, Samhain was a time when the barriers between the human and supernatural worlds were broken. They believed that the whole spectrum of nonhuman forces roamed the earth to take revenge for human violations of sacred duties.

The Irish also believed this was the best time of the year for looking into the future, and they had some great rituals. Many of these involve apples, which were the sacred fruit of this season, for a couple reasons. First, Celtic mythology talked of an enchanted land over the waters where an apple tree grew in the center, with magical apples. Some old myths told of explorers taking trips over the water to find these magical apples, and some say that the Halloween practice of bobbing for apples is a distant echo of this story.

Also, if you cut an apple in half crosswise, you’ll see that its center is star-shaped, five-pointed, enclosed in a kind of circle. This symbol of the pentagram is prehistoric, with dozens of layers of meaning. It has been found in Mesopotamian artifacts of 5500 years ago. And until the Inquisition, the pentagram was a common Christian symbol, as well.

I’ll tell you a few of their old rituals, in case you’re feeling especially Celtic this week. But listen to them, to understand what they are really about, because they reveal one of the secrets of Halloween we usually don’t see:

1. Go into a dark room lit only by a candle or the moon before the stroke of midnight. Turn your back to a mirror, cut an apple into nine pieces, eat eight, and throw the 9th over your left shoulder. Then turn your head to look over your left shoulder. Let your focus go soft, and look for telling shapes/patterns that speak to your intuition. You may find subtle hints to problems that trouble you.

2. Dreaming Stones. Get three stones from a boundary stream between your thumb and middle finger. Put them under your pillow; ask for a dream that will give you guidance or a solution to a problem, and the stones will bring the dream.

3. Slice an apple through the equator to reveal the five-pointed star center. Eat it by candlelight before a mirror, and your future spouse will then appear over your shoulder.

4. Or, peel an apple, making sure the peeling comes off in one long strand, reciting,

“I pare this apple round and round again;

 My sweetheart’s name to flourish on the plain:

 I fling the unbroken paring o’er my head,

 My sweetheart’s letter on the ground to read.”

5. Or, you might set a snail to crawl through the ashes of your hearth. The considerate little creature will then spell out the initial letter as it moves.

Can you hear how these are working? They are like a psychological Rorschach test, where you can read into ambiguous patterns the sign you want to see, it’s a way of getting in touch with your unconscious desires.

So don’t think of this as what the ancients used for science; it wasn’t meant to be science. That’s the first secret of Halloween; it isn’t about another world, it’s about tapping into the depths of this one. Think of it as what the ancients used for psychology. For the meaning of all these myths and rituals is psychological, and a lot of it is pretty good psychology. After all, they wouldn’t have kept doing it century after century if they weren’t getting results.

There is a witty little poem, a Grook, that I’ve liked for years, that tells the secret of how rituals like this work. It is called “A Psychological Grook.” It’s a little silly, but also a little wise:

Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind

and you’re hampered by not having any,

the way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,

is simply by tossing a penny.

No, not so that Chance shall decide the affair

while you’re passively standing there moping.

But the minute the penny is up in the air,

you suddenly know what you’re hoping!

Piet Hein, Grooks, Doubleday, 1966.

There is a second important misunderstanding about Halloween, a second secret. It looks like the one day of the year when we wear masks and pretend to be something we aren’t. If you were here for the Halloween party last night, you saw just how scary you all can be!

But Halloween isn’t the only day we wear masks; it’s the only day we admit that we’re wearing masks. We wear masks every day, and each of us probably has at least a dozen different masks we wear, depending on the occasion.

Our understanding of masks goes back to the Greek theater. Greek actors would come on stage holding large masks in front of their faces. The purpose of the mask was both to hide the real face of the actor, and to give the audience some information about the character. It was called a persona, a role, a fake identity being worn for the purpose of playing a role. And that’s still the meaning we have for masks.

But if you think Halloween is the only time we wear masks, you’re kidding yourself! During the week, we’ll take turns playing the roles of worker, spouse, parent, customer and others. And we play differently and use different vocabularies in each role, each persona. Each persona, each mask, calls for different nuances, and we play them, every day of our lives, don’t we?

It’s not bad. But the danger is that we forget to take the masks off, then they start playing us. And then we understand the meaning of a saying like “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world but lose their soul?”

I remember an old “Twilight Zone” program about people putting on powerful masks that made them fearful and mean. The power was addictive, and they didn’t want to take off the masks until it was too late. Too late, because when they finally took them off, they discovered that the mask had shaped their face into its own image and they were stuck playing that phony role, forever. They realized they had lost their souls, and everything else they gained no longer meant much to them.

So don’t think of Halloween as the one night we get to wear a mask. Think of it as a time when we are asked to be more aware of the masks we wear all the other days, and see if we still believe those masks serve us, or if we’re losing our integrity, our authenticity, our soul to the masks.

And not only our personal masks, either. It is a good time to ask what masks we are wearing as a society, and to ask whether there too we may be gaining a world at the expense of our national soul.

I’ll talk more about the war in Iraq for the Veterans’ Day service, but we need to talk about our economy, and the masks under which it is operating. We have been in a state of hypnosis about our economy for several years now. Most people want to believe that whatever is directing it is basically good or at least well-intended, and that perhaps it’s just going through normal ups and downs. That’s the pure and honest character we want to believe we have as a society, both for our people and for people in other countries.

But is it? Going into too much detail about corporate scandals is simply – as my Jr. High English teacher used to say – redundundant. Democrats have attacked them, Republicans have attacked them, “Business Week” and The Wall Street Journal have attacked them. But it’s worth just remembering a few of the facts and figures, with the point of asking whether the drama that is unfolding is America at its best, or a kind of masquerade, a masked ball where the leading players include some of our greediest rather than our best.

Among the great corporate frauds of the past few years:

Global Crossing, lost $47 billion for stockholders through intentional fraud, phony bookkeeping

Qwest’s exceptionally greedy accounting trick-and-treating cost stockholders $108 billion

Harken Energy Corporation, when George W. Bush was its Director, engaged in insider trading and accounting trickery which was, like so many others, covered up by the Arthur Anderson firm. Harken shareholders lost $850 million.

Haliburton, while Dick Cheney was CEO, used accounting trickery and lost $22 billion for shareholders.

Enron bilked employees and investors out of $68 billion before declaring bankruptcy. Ken Lay was the biggest personal contributor to the presidential campaign of George W. Bush.

Tyco, the business conglomerate which, through exceptionally greedy self-dealing and tax evasion, bilked shareholders of $100 billion.

Worldcom, the exceptionally greedy telecommunications company that bilked shareholders of $191 billion.

Over the last 2-1/2 years, the nation’s stock markets have lost over $5.5 trillion, or about three times what the government spends in a year. Does it sound like the motives driving our economy have lost their soul, like a masked ball where the dance is carrying us over a cliff?

And above all of these shenanigans there is the notion that it is impolite or politically partisan to talk about it, as though economic policies that affect millions are somehow private and personal beliefs to be protected from discussion. No. The “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was a bad idea when applied to the military, and it will be disastrous if we don’t start asking blunt questions and removing some of the masks, before they too transform the face of our country into something rapacious and evil.

We’re preparing for Halloween, for Samhain, the time of year when ghosts make contact with us to demand reparations for the violations of the past year. It is a time, and they are ghosts, worth anticipating.

Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.” One lesson of Halloween, and of Samhain, is that all of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears.

I’ve tried to honor the ancient traditions of Samhain by unmasking some of the ghosts that haunt our lives and our society, having a short feast, then throwing their bones into the bone-fire as the outward and visible sign of an inward hope.

The bone-fire seems important, because another secret of Halloween is that ghosts, like vampires, vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can turn into possibilities. Let us confront our fears, secure in the faith that beneath our fears lie unexplored possibilities. Even here. Even now. Even for us.

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© Davidson Loehr

19 October 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us pray without ceasing to the gods worthy of prayer.

Let us pray to the God of love, to guide us in the ways of love, whatever the cost.

To the goddess of compassion, let us ask for enough to grace our relationships with those we know, and those we don’t know who are nevertheless affected by our actions.

To the forces of justice and fair play, let us pledge our allegiance.

Let us, as well, vow to seek understanding rather than prejudice, peace rather than war, and empowerment rather than subjugation – for the many, not just the few.

Where we find ignorance, let us bring understanding.

Where there is despair, let us bring hope;

Where there are walls, let us make doorways;

Where there is loneliness, let us offer familiarity and friendship.

And where the young green shoots of hope, faith and love struggle to survive, let us water them – with out sweat and tears, if necessary.

Let us pray without ceasing to the gods worthy of prayer – the gods of life, love, compassion, hope and courage.

Let us pray to them with all we have in us.

But not only pray. Not only pray.

Amen.

SERMON:

Under the Banner of Heaven

When I read Jon Krakauer’s current best-selling book Under the Banner of Heaven, I decided it wasn’t really about Mormon fundamentalists whose God has told them to kidnap young girls like Elizabeth Smart, to collect women in harems of twenty to fifty or more, and to murder people who got in their way. I decided it was a like a Greek tragedy about America today, and about us.

However, it is also about Mormon fundamentalists, about kidnap, rape, murder, and all the rest of it.

The book begins with the story of two brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who murdered their youngest brother’s wife Brenda and her fifteen-month-old daughter Erica because Brenda seemed to be convincing her husband that his brothers were dangerous people he should stay away from.

Shortly after she stood up to Ron Lafferty, he received a personal revelation from God, informing him that Brenda and her baby daughter needed to be killed. On July 24th 1984, they brutally murdered the 24-year-old woman and her baby girl.

They were arrested soon afterwards, and lied about the murders until the evidence was overwhelming. Then they admitted that yes, they had committed the murders, but they had not committed a crime, because they were following God’s orders.

A jury decided Ron’s revelation came from his own psychopathic mind rather than from God, and convicted both brothers of first-degree murder. Both men are still in prison in Utah, with no possibility of parole.

The book then traces this idea of self-serving revelations back to the founder of the Mormon religion, the 19th century figure Joseph Smith. As a young man, Smith used to put a special magical rock in his hat, look at it, and receive visions telling him where secret caches of money were buried. After six years of charging people for finding money but never finding any, he was convicted of fraud. But Joseph Smith is known today for his other visions, which he said came from God and gave him instructions for a new religion – which he was to lead.

The books he discovered were written in a language called “reformed Egyptian,” of which no one but the angel Moroni has ever heard, but the angel also gave Joseph a pair of magic glasses that let him translate them to his scribe. Later, he used a chocolate-colored, egg-shaped, magical rock to translate the ancient language. He said that he and his people were like the saints of the early days, but these were the saints of the latter days. They were not tainted with original sin, had nothing to atone for, and they were meant to receive the riches of the earth. After they died, they were to continue receiving money and power, and would even become like gods, each couple getting to populate their own planet, like Adam and Eve.

The religion began with fifty people. A year later, it had a thousand. Now, with over eleven million members, it is the fastest-growing religion in the world. At any given time there are about sixty thousand Mormon missionaries at work making converts at high rates. One sociologist believes that within sixty years it will become impossible to govern the United States without Mormon cooperation. Some say the church of the Latter-Day Saints can be considered the first new major religion since the birth of Islam in the 7th century.

At first, Joseph Smith told all his followers to seek their own “direct impressions” from God. But when he incorporated his religion in 1830, he realized all the personal revelations could undermine the authority of his own revelations. Soon, he received a new message from God, making it clear that only Joseph Smith was authorized to receive revelations.

But it was too late, and the teaching that some chosen individuals can receive direct revelations from God continues to this day among fundamentalist Mormons.

Joseph had immense charisma, and several women have written that they found him completely irresistible. Though he was married, he had an almost insatiable lust for other women and young girls. Over the years, he married about forty women, and had many visits to prostitutes. When Emma, his first wife, protested this new kind of philandering, God sent Joseph a revelation telling him that he could have as many women as he wanted. When Emma then said she thought she might receive a similar revelation, Joseph went back to God, who sent a new message telling Emma that only Joseph could have multiple partners, that she had to serve him alone, or she would be destroyed.

The word “destroyed,” as later events showed, meant killed. Jon Krakauer has subtitled his book “A story of violent faith,” because beginning with Joseph Smith, it has been established that those who oppose the will of God as interpreted by the men who receive his revelations might need to be killed. The book tells of dozens of such murders, including nearly twenty by the members of one clan during the past thirty years.

For the past century, the main Mormon church has repudiated polygamy and all notions that revelations can ever sanction murder. But these early ideas continue a vigorous existence among many communities of Mormon fundamentalists, among whom polygamy, child abuse and occasional murders are, according to this book, facts of life. I know someone raised in one of these families, who has told me that the book understates the case, that it was much worse growing up in it.

There are dozens of themes worth pursuing in this book, but I want to pick just the one about people expecting their opinions or private revelations to be respected by others.

This is a great question for liberals, since we are widely assumed to bless every goofy opinion that comes down the road, as though whatever anyone believes is just fine. Liberals, whether political or religious, can be counted on to defend individual rights, individual choices in everything from religion to abortion. We often forget that freedom of belief really means the freedom to believe things that others don’t respect.

Yet I suspect almost everyone here believes that the jury in Ron Lafferty’s case returned the right verdict when they said his private revelations had no authority at all.

The whole murder case played out like a Greek drama, and the jury played the role of the Greek chorus, who condemned the main characters as unworthy and scurrilous.

The truth is, I think Jon Krakauer intended this book to be about America, about us, and about what these times demand of us. And what these times demand of us is a way to challenge and reject some individual beliefs and choices.

The direct revelations from God seem distinctive to the Mormons. Mystics may feel they commune with gods, but they don’t hear the gods telling them to take teen-aged children as their spouses, threaten them with destruction if they refuse, or exhorting them to kill people who have gotten in their way.

There’s a story that comes to mind, a favorite story of mine that I have told before here, that might point to a way through this morass.

It’s a story Joseph Campbell tells of an Australian tribe of aborigines in which the gods spoke to the tribe in the middle of the night when they were displeased. They didn’t use words, they created a horrible low sound unlike anything anyone had heard, created by a secret and sacred object known as a bull-roarer: a long thin board with slits cut in it, attached to a string and swung around in the air to create the eerie noise. Then the next day the tribe’s priest would interpret the sounds, much as Joseph Smith used his magical glasses to interpret the ancient language.

This practice of the priest telling the people what the gods wanted kept order in the tribe, because the gods were angry when the people behaved badly. So the night noises of the gods were the sacred power that maintained order and defined the tribe’s character and culture.

The story gets interesting when young boys reach the age of initiation into manhood. It is a frightening and bloody event. Men wearing masks and painted like monsters kidnap the boy whose time has come, and drag him into the woods at night. There, they tie him to a table, and perform the painful and bloody operation of circumcision and subincision. It must be absolutely terrifying for young boys going through this, not to mention painful.

Then, after the operation is over, one of the masked men dips the end of a bull-roarer in the boy’s blood. He brings it up near the boy’s face. Then he removes the mask so the boy can recognize him as one of the men of the tribe he has known all his life. And that is when the older man reveals the most important secret of life to the boy: “We make the noises.” We make the noises. Not the gods but us, in the woods at night swinging sticks with slits in them. We make the noises.

This is really one of the most important and sacred secrets of all religions, and it is protected by all religions. We make the noises. The revelations always come from us, not to us.

I said earlier that this story was like a Greek tragedy about America, and about us. It is really surprising just how much it is like a Greek tragedy. In those ancient plays, written 24 to 25 centuries ago, the characters were also spoken to by gods; they had their own private revelations. The characters justified their actions as obeying the will of the gods, just as the Lafferty brothers did. Yet at the end of these plays, the Greek chorus declared whether they were innocent or guilty, noble or shameful.

In other words, even 2500 years ago, when everybody was receiving oracles from the gods, people also knew that we make the noises, not the gods. This is such an important point, because we really know it today too, we just sometimes pretend we don’t. But the role of the jury in the trial of the Lafferty brothers was precisely the role of the Greek chorus.

They listened to the brothers tell them that God spoke to them to order these murders. Then they listened to a psychiatrist tell them Ron Lafferty acted out of a narcissistic personality disorder that let him treat other humans as mere things that could be murdered as he wished.

In other words, the psychiatrist said the murders weren’t serving God, but were serving the selfish and evil desires of Ron Lafferty, and that God played no role at all. The jury, like the Greek chorus, weighed the evidence, and decided unanimously that the defendant was a psychopathic murderer, not a prophet, that he made the noises, and that the noises were evil and unforgivable.

They knew that there are standards much higher than individual choice. And we know it, too. We know that we make the noises, we just usually let people get away with it because the noises aren’t harmful to others.

If Mother Teresa felt God wanted her to hug and cleanse lepers, we might still feel those were her values, but we don’t mind if she projects them onto her God because it seems so good-hearted, so compassionate. We say “Well, this is the sort of thing that is worthy of God.”

The word “God” is one of those words we use when we want to claim ultimacy, when we want to claim that we are acting out of the highest and noblest motives we can understand. It’s a word that makes demands on those who use it, that holds them accountable. And something in us knows that such words can not be used lightly. Almost every religion has this notion:

– Zeus & Semele (Sem’-uh-lee), the mortal woman who was mother of Dionysus. Zeus’s wife Hera, always betrayed and always jealous, sought revenge on Semele, so in disguise instructed her to ask Zeus to promise her a favor. Once he had promised, she was to ask him to reveal himself in all his splendor to her. Anyone who has read much world religions knows this is a death sentence, because we can neither hold nor behold the truly sacred. When Zeus complied, the brilliant heat and light of his essence burned Semele to ashes.

– Even if you don’t read Greek mythology, you probably remember Stephen Spielberg’s movie about the Ark of the Covenant, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” When the raiders opened the Ark and looked on it, the bright light melted them right on the spot. It’s the same story.

– A less lethal practice in religions all over the world is the practice of removing your shoes before entering religious places of worship, in Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic religions. And you may remember a similar passage in the Hebrew scriptures, the instructions to remove your shoes because you are on holy ground. These commands don’t come from gods; they come from the human psyche, which knows that the quality of the sacred that we allude to is more than we can behold.

– And in the Mormon religion, only Mormons can enter their sacred Temple. Again, the sacred center is protected from casual interlopers.

Why? Because one of the amazing things about humans is that even though we make the noises, even though all our gods are born from the manger of our own yearnings, we are aware that we can create words and concepts that point beyond us, that allude to transcendence we can’t grasp but can merely allude to. We can put names on things we cannot see, understand or control, but which feel holy. Jews won’t pronounce the name of their god because there is something about naming things that feels like it gives us power over them. And at our best, we know our ultimate concepts, are beyond our control. They can’t take directions from us, or our religion is just a puppet show, where we drag our gods through the mud of our own lusts, envies and angers.

And whose responsibility is it to police the use of our concepts of ultimacy – words like Nation, America, Justice, Equity, Truth, Beauty and God?

In our courts, it is the responsibility of the state, of judges, and of jurors. More broadly, it is the responsibility of all of us, and it is a sacred duty. Every cheapening of religion, every degradation of our highest concepts, lowers the bar by creating dishonest government, greedy economies, imperialistic wars and tawdry counterfeits of religion.

Owning those norms is the sacred task of all of us, and abuses of our languages of ultimacy must always be challenged, or they lose their ability to call forth our best. As Camus put it, it is our task to purify the language of our tribe. We are always on call for jury duty in the Greek choruses that are needed to comment on the most powerful words in our culture. It is a sacred duty. We cannot shirk it.

If you doubt this, I can prove it to you from within your own heart and mind. Imagine how you would have felt if the jury had acquitted Ron Lafferty. The story really isn’t about Ron Lafferty. He is a narcissist, a liar, a psychopath and a murderer, and he is where he belongs.

But all of Jon Krakauer’s books have used their subjects as lenses for viewing larger aspects of life in our times, and so does this one. In important ways, this story is about the sacred role of the Greek chorus in transcending and trumping individual choices, when those choices demean and degrade our highest values.

The murders of an innocent woman and her baby were sad and tragic. But the worse tragedy would have been if the jury had decided that whatever Ron Lafferty believed was fine, and if his God told him to kill others, who were we to judge the quality of his private revelation?

We now live in times when our society’s highest symbols are being demeaned and degraded by those who claim to have personal revelations about them, and most of our people act as though we have no power and no role to play in the local, national and international dramas that continue to unfold.

But if religion is reduced to ignorant and disingenuous censorship of textbooks and if God is reduced to a subordinate local deity whose role is simply to bless America, then religion is being reduced to an instrument of cynical control rather than empowerment, and the chorus must respond.

If the American flag is waved over wars of greed and aggression, our highest national symbol is being dragged through low and mean lusts, and our soldiers are dying not for noble causes, but for low and selfish ones. And again, the chorus must speak out.

If the laws are changed to permit the wholesale robbery of billions of dollars from employees and stockholders by companies like Enron, then the rules of fairness and justice are being dragged down to the selfish horizons of the most rapacious among us, and the chorus must speak out and do its duty as the jury, the guardian of our highest collective values.

To live under the banner of heaven, we must remember what our highest values demand, and speak up for them. If we don’t, those high values – like Ron Lafferty’s sick little God – will be dragged down to low and mean levels: banners used to sanction disreputable motives and actions. And then we will be living not in heaven but in hell.

One important lesson the Greek chorus carries for us is that we are accomplices to all deeds done in the service of values which we have failed to confront.

Heaven or hell? It’s too early to tell whether religion, economics, civil rights, foreign relations and war will fly under the banners of hell or under the banner of heaven. The jury is still out.

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Davidson Loehr

October 5, 2003

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This morning I want to take you on a trip to the heart of almost all religions, all philosophies, all psychologies. It begins with the idea of atonement which most of us know as the center of the Jewish festival…