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© Davidson Loehr

28 March 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH: Theological Mistakes

Henry Hug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAYER:

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Spiritual Aeronautics, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tame Geese: A Revivalistic Meditation,

by Soren Kierkegaard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

28 March 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not only pray.

Amen.

SERMON: The DaVinci Code, Part 2

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

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

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

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

Theories that can’t be proven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is your dose of titillation.

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

March 21, 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH: Writing Your Creed

Jonobie Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAYER

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

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

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

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

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

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

SERMON: Spiritual Aeronautics, Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

7 March 2004

Worship Associate: Jonobie Ford

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Jonobie Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAYER:

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Oh, Gods!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

29 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Don Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAYER

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

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

Let us hope their prayers are answered.

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

Let us hope their prayers are answered.

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

Amen.

SERMON: The Danger in Handling Sacred Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

8 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is the second service in our new experimental format adding Worship Associates to the preacher, to bring more voices and passions into our worship services. We’ve included both their written remarks here. Sloan’s was essential; it really set the tone and level of the entire service, as well as the sermon. Sheri’s comments were at the beginning of the service. They are included to give you who are reading this online or away from our church a better feel for the atmosphere of the worship service.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sloan McLain

Hello. My name is Sloan McLain, and I’m happy to be a member of the Worship Associates.

A year ago today I lived in Thailand, Southeast Asia. I loved my well-paid, respectable job as head of Wichai Wittaya’s Bilingual Elementary School’s English program. I had a small but comfortable network of Thai and Western friends. I felt like my soul was thriving in Thailand’s community-centered, modest, easy-going culture. Moving to Thailand felt like coming home.

But outside – just outside – of the ideal Thailand I searched for and embraced, was the reality of my life behind closed doors – the reality tied to my abusive Thai husband. The more I blossomed in Thailand, the more my husband tore me apart.

It wasn’t all the time. If anyone has been in an abusive relationship, they know it’s down and up. Some days with my husband Nop were wonderful. We’d take road trips in our new pickup, driving on country roads (sing John Denver) leading us through temperate forests and breathtaking mountain views. We’d stop at noodle shops overlooking rice farms; sit on lonely beaches to watch the sunset, stay in luxury resorts with waterfalls outside our windows. Or perhaps we’d stay in town in Chiang Mai, and browse the Sunday street festival.

But those positive experiences with Nop could not outweigh the insults, the demands, the restraints, the anger, and the manipulation, that threatened my life at home, at work, at the mall, in the movie, at my friend’s house, in the truck, at the cafe, and in our own antique shop.

Last March, I planned a trip home to visit my family in Dallas for one month. But as March approached, I watched the dysfunction of my marriage as though I were an anthropologist living in someone else’s home, taking notes on the bizarre behaviors that kept this husband and wife together or, rather, were pulling them apart. I knew the honeymoon bond that once connected Nop and I had been replaced by pain, distrust, fear, confusion, and plain disgust. I was coping with my husband to try and keep our family together – to give my son his father.

But on March 16, 2003, when I walked through the security gates at Chiang Mai International Airport, without my husband, with my baby in my arms, I felt safe for the first time in months; and I knew I couldn’t go back to Nop, or to Thailand. And I started to process the reality that I was moving to America, not just visiting it.

It was time to get a divorce from the man who locked me in the house so he’d know where I was when he went out for drunken business meetings, who threatened to sleep with other women on a regular basis, who announced to my colleagues at school that I was an unsuitable wife and unfit to be a mother.

And yet this week, on Thursday, February 5, 2004, my husband was finally served the divorce papers in Thailand, and I find my heart weeping for him. I’m scared; I’m furious; I’m disturbed by what I’ve gone through the past few years, but my heart aches for Nop – and all other abusers – to be happy and to feel loved – only that can stop abuse in this world.

Buddhists believe that all things are connected; it is only an illusion that we are separate from one another. Therefore, if we seek a peaceful heart, let alone a peaceful world, we must practice forgiveness and compassion toward all beings, since the peacefulness of our own actions affects the degree of peace in everyone else. By opening our hearts, even toward those who embody beliefs we despise or toward those who have hurt us, we start to experience the interrelatedness of life: we learn how to work with our anger and fear rather than get caught up in it. Instead of separating ourselves from what we don’t agree with, we take the challenge of transforming and dissolving those conflicts instead.

I’ve been practicing some form of Buddhist Christianity for the past seven or eight years, and it is the teachings of interconnectedness and “every moment is a new beginning” that help me reconcile the pain I have experienced.

So often it’s my nature to separate life into good and evil, right and wrong, hero and bad guy, as though I understand the difference and the decision is up to me. But no one is completely right or wrong all the time. I can’t override my husband’s honest actions with his dishonest ones in order to satisfy my image of the “bad guy”. I do think my husband’s actions were wrong, but I don’t think I can judge him solely based on his actions during our marriage. Nop had many experiences before he met me, and those experiences and all those that have occurred since March 2003, make up a man who is more than Sloan’s abusive husband.

I’ve learned that if I punish Nop, I hurt myself as much as I hurt him. But what about revenge, a voice inside of me asks? What does revenge really accomplish but pain, I answer? I know from holding grudges in the past, that I cannot heal pain with pain. I didn’t used to think I needed to make amends with someone who’d hurt me. Why give that person the time of day after what he did? But if I look deeper in my heart, I know the only way to heal my pain is to deal with my pain: “work through the pain, not around it.” In other words, it’s not just for my husband’s sake that I’m trying to deal with him compassionately; it’s for my sake as well. And in order to fill my heart with compassion, I must start with forgiveness – forgiveness for the fact that abuse exists in this world, and then forgiveness for the abuser: Nop Yoosupap. Not until I use compassion to forgive my husband, can I open my heart to others, without the fear I’ll be hurt again.

I’m not there yet – my heart hasn’t reconciled the pain; my mind hasn’t forgiven the memories. But I know in my gut, that’s the direction I need to move toward – the more I confront my anger with compassion, the more I can open my heart and free my mind to love again. And if this is accomplished, I’ll be able to bring a little more peace into the world, rather than hate. And if I can continue this practice of forgiveness and face all beings with compassion, my spirit will thrive, just like it did in Thailand.

PRAYER

We are so often hurt when others sit in judgment on us.

Let us remember that we are, all of us, children of God, gifts of life’s longing for itself, and that we are precious unto the world. Let us bless our best selves.

But don’t stop there. For those close to us are also precious gifts to the world. Let us remember to bless them as well.

And all the people we don’t know, even those we don’t like, even those we may hate – aren’t they also precious gifts, even if we don’t want to admit it. Can we bless them too?

Then where shall the blessing stop? Where can we ever say No, these people do not count, these we can ignore; we’re nothing at all like these people? We know the answer is Never. Nowhere and Never. If one is precious, all are precious. If one is to be blessed, all are to be blessed.

If this is our task in life, let us remember one more thing. Let us remember to forgive ourselves our lapses of compassion, even as we forgive the lapses of others. For compassion begins there, in forgiveness – of ourselves, of others. It begins there. Before we can move toward real blessings, it begins in forgiveness. Let us begin.

Amen.

SERMON: The Strings of Compassion

When we began talking about this topic, it was very airy and abstract. Sloan had written a guided meditation for her affirmation of faith, and I was going to reflect on Buddhist teachings about compassion.

Compassion is a subject the Buddhists probably do better than any other religion. It’s the central aim and attitude of the religion, even its great secret. They have hundreds of things they call “metta” meditations. “Metta” is a word that means “friendship” or “loving-kindness.” They sound simple but they’re not. The metta meditation Sloan and Sheri both liked has just five lines:

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you have ease of well-being.

May you be safe from danger.

May you be free from all suffering.

It sounds like the kind of thing little groups of New Agey people might sit around saying, and grooving on how marvelously compassionate they all felt. But it isn’t a Hallmark card; it’s only easy if you’ve never tried to do it. It’s part of a discipline as high and as difficult as any in world religions.

First, you say a metta meditation for yourself, to heal your own wounds and fears. Then you direct it toward the people close to you, and feel your intimate connection with them. Then you say it for the people you don’t like, are angry at, or even those you hate, to regain an awareness of your intimate connection with them, too. Then for all the people in the world, and all life in the universe.

Somewhere along the line in all this, I was getting confused by all the abstractions, lost in the clouds. So I asked Sloan why she cared about this topic, what it had to do with her real life. That’s when the story came out, the one that became her second version of an affirmation of faith, the one you just heard.

And suddenly, this subject had become very real, and hard to preach about. Hard, because the subject is bigger than I am, and more expansive and inclusive than I know how to be. I would love to think that I set the curve for compassion, but I strongly suspect that it isn’t true.

While reading through that metta meditation, trying to imagine that I had that quality of consciousness and care for people all over the world, I suddenly asked myself how often or how deeply I had thought about the 10,000 to 40,000 Iraqi citizens who have been killed since we invaded their country, or the hundreds of thousands of others who are touched by those deaths. I knew the details, I’d read the stories, but emotionally I had hardly thought of them at all. So I’m not doing very well with loving-kindness toward even some of the most recent and dramatic of the world’s victims.

Closer to home, I asked how often I really thought about all the homeless people begging at every intersection, about the others I drive by downtown, about the estimated five to ten thousand homeless people in Austin, or even the fifty of them who spent the night here during the Freeze Night Friday. Once more, I’ve hardly thought of them at all. Once in awhile, I’ll put the window down and give one of them five bucks, but if I’m honest I’ll admit that it’s usually because it makes me feel better, not because I’m really thinking seriously about their plight, or what a caring citizen or a caring society should try to do about it.

Nor do I really think much about the more than 100 million Americans who have no health insurance. Or the fact that we have the highest infant mortality rate, youth suicide rate and poverty rate for those over 65 of any country in the developed world. If you add all the others who are touched by those tragedies, it must be more than half of our country. If you corner me, I’ll probably try to claim that oh yes, I’m aware of their plight, and I even mention it in sermons. But if I corner me, I have nowhere to hide from the fact that I hardly ever think of it much at all, and I certainly don’t do much of anything about it. And if a tree is known by its fruits, I don’t show much useful compassion at all, and I’m hardly doing anything that might make a positive difference.

The word “compassion” means “to suffer with,” and except for the people whose stories I know on a one-to-one basis, I think the hard truth is that I don’t suffer with many people, really.

If they’re close to me, I can recognize that kind of compassion. My best friend died six years ago, and I suffered with him and with Marsha, his widow. And Marsha, one of the most loving people I’ve ever known, died this past Wednesday of breast cancer that had spread to her brain, and I suffered with her in our recent talks, and with their one son Tyler when we spoke this week. Tyler is 26, and yesterday morning he went to the small cemetery in southern Michigan to see his mother’s casket lowered into a hole. Next to that hole, he saw the gravestone marking his father, who died at age 46. And next to that, he saw the gravestone of his father’s father, who also died at age 46. And I know that for the next twenty years, Tyler will wonder if that’s all the time he is going to have. It’s so very easy to suffer with him.

But compassion at a distance? I don’t have a record that would impress anyone, including me. Maybe you’re way ahead of me here. But maybe you’re not.

I am inspired by Sloan’s attempt to bless her husband. But that’s a terribly high aspiration, isn’t it? It’s not the sort of thing we normally think of doing. And it’s easy to ask, as she asked herself, why on earth we would want to do such a thing. We don’t hear much about really suffering with others, especially those we’re angry with. We hear about defeating them, beating them, but not suffering with them. Instead, we hear slogans like “Don’t get mad, get even.”

I don’t think we have very good models of compassion in Christianity, either. I think of Jesus’ teaching, to turn the other cheek, and I think what a dumb idea! Jews usually criticize that teaching as acquiescence to injustice, and I agree. If you’re in an abusive situation, first you need to get out, then worry about these higher goals. It’s like the instructions you get on airplanes: in case of an emergency, put your own oxygen mask on first, before trying to help others.

And if I don’t like that teaching of Jesus, I think even less of one of Paul’s famous lines, where he actually says “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.” (Romans, 12:20) I’ll admit there’s something sort of nasty about it that is seductive. It’s kind of like a little compassion with a lot of passive-aggressive vengeance thrown in. But I don’t think it’s anything to be proud of.

It helps me to back off and remember why we come to church, what religion is really about. It is about very basic things, you know. Honest religion of any flavor is about trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. It’s about using our time here to try and make a positive difference in our own life, in the lives we touch, and in the larger world. Religion is about reconnecting with an attitude toward life that reminds us that we are meant for very high callings, that nothing less is worthy of us.

But these Buddhist aspirations of loving-kindness toward everyone – they are so high I don’t know how to reach them. I fail daily at them; I imagine many of you do too. It gives me a whole new appreciation of why so many Buddhists believe in reincarnation. If we have to rise to a level of compassion that high, it’s going to take more than one lifetime to do it!

I remembered two years ago at this time, when I was in Thailand. I also flew out of the Chiang Mai International Airport that Sloan mentioned; I can still remember it. I remember one of the Thai guides we had in Bangkok, a very spirited woman. She told us that Americans needed to understand that Buddha was not a god, but a teacher. Then she talked about how they were to live in such a way that they improved a little in this life, so when they came back in their next life they would come back at a higher level.

During one of the breaks, I told her I didn’t know much about this, but thought that the Buddha had said the object was to get beyond reincarnation, so you didn’t have to come back for more rounds of “re-death.” “Oh sure!” she said, ” the Buddha can do that! He’s perfect! But me? I’m coming back!” I’d have to come back too, at least a few times.

Since the Buddhist notion of compassion is so very high, and so very foreign to our American ways of thinking, I decided to try a different way of talking about this with you today. You can think of it as “Compassion for Beginners,” or “Buddhism lite.”

It’s a story from my childhood that most of you know, too: the story of Pinocchio. Though I’ve never heard him presented this way, I have decided that Pinocchio was really a bodhisattva with a message for us. I hadn’t read the story in decades, so had to go buy the book and read it again. Let me refresh your memory of this. (The original story was written in Italian between 1881-1883 by Carlo Collodi, 1821-1890. Walt Disney’s original movie of Pinocchio was made in 1940, with a remake in 2003. The original has some elements Disney omitted.)

The old woodcarver Geppetto carved a puppet from an amazing piece of talking wood. So Pinocchio came into the world as a block of wood, but one with awesome potential.

He didn’t actually have visible strings, even though he was called a puppet. But he had invisible strings that pulled him in two different directions. One set pulled him toward selfish fun that hurt those who loved and trusted him. His guardian angel, the blue fairy, even died of a broken heart when he abandoned her! And soon, as you remember, he grew long ears and a tail, and became a donkey.

Finally, he was able to respond to the tugs of other strings, strings of compassion. He seemed to come to his senses. The blue fairy came back to life – luckily, our guardian angels can be resurrected just by a change of heart. He nursed old Geppetto back to health, and in reward for his compassion the blue fairy turned him into a real boy. The puppet, the book says at the very end, was after all “nothing more than just a piece of wood.”

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but the story tells us – in pretty dramatic terms! – that the choices Pinocchio made determined whether he became a human, or just made an ass of himself. His choices make him a little bodhisattva.

Still, why should we act really big when others around us are acting really small? Remember the five lines of that metta meditation:

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you have ease of well-being.

May you be safe from danger.

May you be free from all suffering.

It’s asking a lot to expect us to feel that way toward the whole world. Wouldn’t it be more fun, when we’re angry with people, to take St. Paul’s spiteful path and act compassionate just to dump hot coals on their heads? It’s so much easier than really being compassionate. That would take an expansion of character, rather than just a clever way of taking revenge. And aren’t you at least a little tempted by the advice “Don’t get mad, get even”? Don’t lie – your nose might grow!

But think of our little wooden bodhisattva again. When Pinocchio finally acted out of compassion rather than self-centeredness, look how many things happened. It was like the “butterfly effect,” where a small change in one place creates huge changes elsewhere. Old Geppetto was saved, Pinocchio’s guardian angel returned to help him; he became a real human rather than a donkey. He got a life worth living and a story worth telling. It’s a profoundly religious story, through and through. We’re all a bit like Pinocchio.

We all come with strings attached. We must choose which set of strings we’ll respond to, but so much depends on what we choose. And our choice has so much creative power to affect the lives of so many others!

1. Even considered only selfishly, compassion makes less suffering for us. Acting out of spite, even St. Paul’s self-righteous spite, lowers us to the level of the kind of people who hurt us in the first place.

2. Compassion also surrounds those we care for with fresher air. Being loving and kind to an ex-spouse we’re furious with is a gift of love and peace to our children – who are always watching, and always learning not from what we say, but from what we do.

3. And compassion puts less poison into our world. It means that we did what we could to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. That’s our job.

In our culture, the notion of having strings attached is seen as a bad thing. But the Buddhists, and that little bodhisattva named Pinocchio, show us that we always have strings attached. If we follow the right ones, it can make us more human, and help us mend our relationships and our world. Otherwise, like the little puppet, we might wind up just making asses of ourselves.

This does not mean you turn the other cheek when someone is hitting you, or become a patsy for aggressive or passive-aggressive people trying to build themselves up by tearing you down. It just means that, as you act to serve what is precious within you, as you get yourself to a safe place, you try as well to serve what is precious in them, and to recognize that even when they act like donkeys, they are more like us than they are unlike us. They react poorly when they are frightened, just as we do. They can be driven to a hurtful anger, just as we can. And when they feel cornered, they sometimes act in ways that no one could be proud of, just like we do.

How far and wide must our strings of compassion reach? That’s our choice. But those choices determine what we are making of ourselves. Those choices determine what we are making of our relationships. They determine what we are making of our world.

In the end, we are all like Pinocchio, trying to lift what is truly human out of what is “nothing more than just a piece of wood.” Like him, if you reduce us to only the cost of our materials, we’re not much. But also like Pinocchio, we come into this world bearing possibilities that are simply awesome, simply awesome!

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© Davidson Loehr

1 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This was the first service constructed under the new “Worship Associates” (WA) program we are trying. Church members may apply to be considered for this program. They are chosen by the ministers, who will have to work with them (in our case, by the minister and the ministerial intern). They are chosen by several criteria, including whether they “play well with others,” whether they might make for good chemistry, with preference given if they are new voices for this aspect of the church’s mission. The UU church in Oakland, CA, which developed the model and wrote the book, now has about thirty applicants a year for thirteen positions. We are hoping for a similar ratio. We began with eleven Worship Associates, who nominated and voted on general themes for the worship services for that quarter. The minister and intern have veto power over themes on which neither of them have strong interest for preaching (only one theme was vetoed this time). The WA who proposed the theme is asked to write a 3-4 minute Affirmation of Faith, about their personal interest in and passion for this topic, as the minister who will be preaching on it decides how to narrow it down to a preachable topic. It’s a new experiment, so we will learn by trying it, just what changes need to be made as we go. As you can read here, this first attempt to blend the passions of a Worship Associate with the prayer and sermon by a minister found a good match and created a good service. The theme chosen was “Women’s Spirituality,” which was narrowed down to the topic of some of the women’s stories that were omitted from the Western religious traditions.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Dennis

Every summer between third and ninth grades, I went to a Girl Scout camp in far southwestern Oklahoma for one to two weeks. The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I began a five-summer-long career as a camp counselor. Between singing songs, building campfires, teaching archery, leading hikes, and pulling cactus spines out of socks and ankles, I also taught many cooperative games. One of these games required the players to stand in a circle shoulder-to-shoulder, then turn so everyone was front-to-back and pretty close together. Please bear in mind that July in southern Oklahoma is just as sticky as July in Austin, and we don’t have air conditioning. Now everybody is in place, and everybody is wondering when we’re going to get to go swimming, and the leader (me) asks the group to sit down. Each player is now wondering two things: Am I strong enough to hold up the girl who’s about to sit on my knees? And: Is the girl behind me going to let me fall? But, the leaders says, “Trust me. It’s going to be okay.” So everybody sits, and everybody learns a vital lesson: The group, working together, can support the weight of everyone in the circle. Ah, the team-building moment we have! The game can be finished at this point, but the lesson is driven home even better if the leader takes a few players out of the circle. Even the removal of just one player works wonders. Without tightening ranks, the group is asked to sit again. Just the space left by one player is enough to make everyone fall over. We’re playing on grass, so nobody’s hurt, and everybody learns an even more important lesson—everybody has to be involved and working together, or else we all fall down.

When Dr. Loehr and I were first discussing women’s spirituality, we were talking about the Greeks, and their goddesses. Dr. Loehr asked what I like about ancient Greek polytheism, what exists there that’s not available in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and I kept talking about the accessibility of the gods, how human they are, and how much they’re something that everyone has to contend with. The Greeks didn’t like women any more than the Hebrews did, but somehow they managed to produce plays such as The Trojan Women or Lysistrata, illustrating women’s reactions to events over which they had no control. Eventually, I started telling Dr. Loehr about my days as a camp counselor, and about how this game could perfectly sum up my thoughts on the need for women’s involvement in spiritual matters. If everybody in the circle doesn’t get to participate, doesn’t get to make his or her own impact, share his or her voice and spirit, then the group will fall down. If our culture were a cooperative game, our team would not be doing well at all. Our history is full of places where many of the people in the game haven’t been allowed to play. Sometimes they’re women, sometimes they’re from a race or ethnic group; sometimes they’re men. For me, a great part of the reason why I’m a UU is the fact that here we know we’ve lost some of the participants in our religious game. We’re trying to get them back now. That’s why we have women in the ministry, gays, minorities. That’s why this is a Welcoming Congregation. I’m here because I want everybody to sit in my religious circle, and I think the rest of the people in this room want that as well.

(By Sally Dennis, member of First UU Church of Austin.)

PRAYER

One of Jesus’ most interesting statements was “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.” He was pointing to a group of children, so perhaps it was only a one-time local saying without any broader meaning.

But he also said that the kingdom of God was spread out across the earth and people wouldn’t see it. What if “the least of these” is part of the kingdom of God, and how we treat them shows us the size of our God, the size of our concept of the sacred?

Then “the least of these” is a changing group, different for each of us. It’s what we hate, what we can’t incorporate or love, and it shows us the limits of our love for the world, society, even our own psyches.

Let us examine who, for us, are “the least of these.” Are they an economic class, a race, a people whose beliefs we hate?

For better and worse, they mark the edges of our world, the limits of creation that we can allow. When we have identified “the least of these,” we have drawn the limits of our compassion.

And inside. What about those parts of ourselves we cannot love, cannot convert to our higher purposes, and so we reject or deny? Our shadows, our smallnesses, those places where fear keeps us too small.

From our souls to our world, the size of all we hold sacred is abridged by what we can not let into our circles of compassion.

Who, for us, are the least of these? What would it take to bring them into our hearts and into our world? Even those weak parts become stronger when they are made parts of a connected circle. Even the least of these.

What would it take and what would it cost to bring safety and strength to all the parts of our lives? All parts of our society or our world?

Let our hearts be tugged by the cries of the least within us, and the least among us.

Amen.

SERMON: Missing Stories

One of the most important and most neglected facts of life are the stories we live in, the stories that assign us our roles and identities, our social and economic status, our worth. And if there’s a single sin we fall into more than any other, it may be the failure to claim a role in writing the stories of our lives, our relationships, our country, and our world. It’s my candidate for our real original sin.

When I first began baking bread years ago, a friend gave me a recipe for a bread she loved. She knew it so well, she just wrote it out on some notepaper for me. The bread was so bad you couldn’t eat it. I invited her over, gave her a piece of it and the recipe she had written out. She took one bite, made an awful face, looked at the recipe, and said “Oh, I left out the salt!” I knew what the recipe said, and I followed it, but I forgot that someone first wrote it down, and may have left something out, without which the whole recipe was ruined.

All our stories have those same three steps. The first step, which we usually forget like I did, is that in the beginning, somebody wrote the recipe, the story. The second step is that we read or hear the story, and think we have learned how things are, what’s true, what’s important, and who we are and what we are to do. The third step is doing it, playing our role, acting out our assigned part in this story that reflects the way things are, the way God or the State or someone else wants them.

Real-life stories are more important than a bread recipe; and whoever writes the stories is sure to give themselves and their kind a better role than they’ll give others. If stories are written by the rich, the poor will fare poorly. If Hispanics write them, they’ll probably have the best parts, just as whites, blacks, yellows, men or women would if they wrote the stories.

We aren’t taught to think of our identities and roles in life as playing parts in stories. We’re taught that it’s who we are and how we are to live. But that’s not quite true, you know? First, somebody wrote a story.

Attending to our stories is a big thing in this church. That’s why we try to open doors for as many people as possible to add their gifts to the mix. We have two people helping with the service this morning rather than the usual one. And you heard each of their voices, and parts of each of their stories. It’s a new experiment we’re trying with worship services, to bring more voices and passions to the pulpit.

And we’re using a new approach to finding people who would like to serve on the church’s governing board. It’s a process open to all members who think they have the skills, experience and passion that can help move this church ahead. We recently learned that we are the fourth fastest-growing church in the UUA, and that’s partly because we are trying very hard to help you find a beloved home here. If you have leadership skills and think you might have something to offer to the church board of governors, you are invited to apply: to send a letter with your experience, your skills, and some words about your passions and your hopes for this church. The Nominating Committee will be publishing the skills and styles they’re looking for, so you can watch for them. It may seem like a little thing, but it is so important to get a lot of voices involved in creating our story, because stories with missing parts misshape us and our world.

And we are surrounded, defined, by stories with missing voices. In politics, we know that elections now are largely bought and paid for by wealthy corporations and individuals. That’s been true for over twenty years; it’s what’s behind all the clamor for campaign finance reform. We know that President Bush has brought more former high executives of large corporations into his cabinet than any president in history.

We know that taxes on corporations and the very wealthy have been cut by over a trillion dollars since 2001. We know that over 40% of Americans have no health insurance: the worst record in the developed world. We know that we have the highest poverty rate among people over 65 in the developed world, and that while the pay of CEOs and the top 1% rises, the pay, benefits, job security and future of the vast majority of America’s workers has fallen steadily and dramatically, as indicated by the fact that in 2003 we had more than 1,660,000 bankruptcies filed, the highest number in our nation’s history.

And we know that all these facts are related. A different set of people gained the power to write America’s story, and they did just what we would have done: they wrote starring roles for themselves, and supporting roles for everyone else.

We are told, again and again in the media, that a healthy economy is to be defined by how well the stock market does, rather than by how well the vast majority of our citizens do. You don’t have to ask who wrote that story, or who it benefits.

If we ask whose job it is to write the stories, it’s easy to see that it is all of our jobs to write them. Anybody who doesn’t help write the story will probably not do very well in it. As citizens, we must all help write the stories that define our nation’s priorities. As world citizens, we have a sacred responsibility to write a script that takes better care of the world.

It is so important that stories have all the voices represented! If you ride in a car with the wheels out of balance, the car will veer off course. The same is true of riding in a society living out a story that’s out of balance: it veers off course, in the direction dictated by those who got to write the script.

Sally Dennis painted a powerful and wonderful picture of this in her story of the cooperative camp game where everyone stood in that circle, front to back, close together. As long as they were all there, they could all sit down and be supported by the person behind them. But remove just a few people from the circle, and everybody falls down. Take half the people out, and it’s a farce. Most of our scripts have voices left out.

But of all the stories leaving people out, the biggest, oldest, most persistent are the religious stories that have left out 50% of the human race for almost all of recorded history in almost all times and places. These are the stories of women and women’s perspectives, omitted from the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Some of this is due to the men who wrote the Bible, most is due to those who have interpreted it. But some is due to the fact that so few people have read the book that we don’t even know there are some better stories there.

For instance, most people don’t know there are two very different creation stories in Genesis. Here’s the one you may not know, though it’s the first one in the Bible:

Gen. 1:26-28: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them.”

This is the first creation story to appear in the bible. No mention of Eve created out of Adam’s rib, no mention of her as a helpmate for him, but equal creation, and “the image of God” is defined as “both male and female.” What a different religious tradition it might have been if that had been the creation story we had used!

But the only creation story most people have ever heard of is the second one:

Gen. 2: 18, 20-23: Then God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” So God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

You might wonder, especially if you’re a man, what the big deal is with some old stories. But we and our worlds are shaped by the stories we tell. And leaving out half the stories, all the women’s voices, has been more destructive to both women and men than we can begin to measure.

You could point to the fact that in the book of Leviticus the worth of women was 3/5 that of a man (Lv 27:2-4). Which creation story did this have to follow? Two hundred years ago in the Constitution of our own country, slaves were also valued at 3/5 of a free man. Where do you think they got that particular fraction for something that is less than a man, if not from these old stories from the Bible? It matters, what we omit from our stories.

Let me share just three more passages from the Bible that rely on this second creation story, and the story of Eve eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. These all come from the Christian scriptures, or the New Testament:

A man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man was not born of the woman; but the woman born of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. This is why it is right for a woman to wear on her head a sign of the authority over her. (I Corinthians 11:3-9)

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. (I Corinthians 14:34-36)

“I do not permit a woman to be a teacher, nor must she domineer over man; she should be quiet. For Adam was created first, and Eve afterwards; and it was not Adam who was deceived; it was the woman who fell into sin.” (I Timothy 2:14, NEB) p. 109

The price women have paid for living within these stories has been horrific, in almost every religion. In the West, it has had dramatic effects. The link between the bible and witchcraft, for example, is a very strong one. And it didn’t come from the lunatic fringe, but from some of the most famous thinkers in Christianity. Martin Luther said that witches were the devil’s whores, and he would burn them all. John Calvin also insisted, on the basis of Exodus 22:18 that all witches must be killed.

In 1768 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said that “Giving up belief in witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible.” William Blackstone, the famed English jurist, wrote that “To deny the . . . existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God.” And we should remember that eight of the original 13 US colonies recognized witchcraft as a capital crime.

Women have been called the lustful, seductive sex for centuries, even though virtually all rapes and sex crimes are committed by men. Why do we listen to such stories without protesting their nonsense?

Eve’s desire for knowledge of good and evil, in any sober discussion, would be regarded as profoundly good, a great gift to the species. How on earth did we ever buy the notion that it was bad? If Adam and Eve were our children, we would compliment and reward Eve for wanting the knowledge of good and evil, and might well tell Adam that he could learn a few things from her. Why did we ever buy such a silly story? I think it’s because we forgot that it began when somebody wrote it to benefit his kind at the expense of her kind, and that no one has the authority to do that without our say-so.

And think of some of the voices that are missing from the Bible:

Eve’s story. Sometime this week, rehearse in your mind what she might have had to say about that business of seeking the knowledge of good and evil, and what she might have to say to both Adam and God, and see how much the story changes.

Abraham’s wife, Sarah. One of the most psychologically and theologically horrid stories in the whole Bible is the story of Abraham hearing voices telling him to murder his son Isaac, and being willing to do it! Where was his wife Sarah’s voice? Where is she in her incredulous fury, asking him what in hell he thinks he is doing to her son? Where is the humanity, the compassion, even the common sense in this story? It belonged to Sarah, and she was omitted.

Miriam, the sister of Moses. We learn that she was also a prophet in her own right, and a woman of considerable power and influence. That’s all we’re told. How would it have changed religious history if we had been given powerful models of women prophets and priests?

Mary Magdalen. Since the book The DaVince Code came out, it has become clear to millions of readers, as it has been clear to biblical scholars for a long time, that Mary Magdalen had one of the most powerful roles and interesting stories in the whole story of Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls brought us gospels that show us that she was called The Apostle of the Apostles, and was Jesus’ favorite, whom he was often seen kissing on the mouth. If that story, if her voice, had not been left out of the story, how might it have changed Christianity and Western history? Perhaps, since she was Jesus’ favorite, and he ranked her above all the other apostles, only women would be able to become Pope!

“In the bible, as in soap operas, woman’s concerns center almost exclusively on childbearing and on her relationships with men.” (Roslyn Lacks, Women and Judaism, Doubleday & Co., 1980, p. 88)

“The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.” (Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 13)

What can we do?

We can speak up and act up to challenge and change stories with missing voices, circles with missing people. Let me share one more quotation with you. It comes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived from 1815 to 1902. In 1892, in a long series of studied commentaries on the Bible, she wrote this:

“Take the snake, the fruit-tree and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, nor frowning Judge, no inferno, no everlasting punishment—hence no need of a Savior. Thus the bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology. Here is the reason why in all the biblical researches and higher criticisms, the scholars never touch the position of women.” This was written 112 years ago, and its theological implications are still right on.

So what can we do? We can speak up, and demand a voice in writing the stories of our lives, so that we are not assigned roles that demean and endanger us. Don’t let people tell these stories without wondering aloud to them whether such a story could possibly be worthy of God. Sometimes it’s just worth saying something as short as “Boy, you know a man wrote that story, don’t you!”

What can we do? We can act up and claim a better role. Last year, my 19-year-old niece, who was in ROTC as a junior at Boston University, heard her sergeant tell them that BU had four slots to send ROTC students to the tough three-week Army Airborne training, and suggested that some of the really macho guys might want to apply. It made her so mad that she applied, and last June I flew to Ft. Benning, GA for a week, to photograph her jumping out of airplanes, and to pin her Airborne wings on her at graduation. In my office, I have a whole wall of photos from that trip, of this small and fierce little warrior, which you can see by looking in the door. They inspire me; maybe they will do the same for you.

The whole human sound goes up only from the full choir. We’re all in the choir: even the least among us. Let us sing songs, tell stories, and act in ways that are worthy of us, worthy of God, worthy of all that is holy, all that is necessary to make our circle complete. Let’s end with an old story:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them” Both of them. Equally.

Amen.