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© Davidson Loehr

28 September 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

It is time to take stock of who we are, what we serve, and whether what we serve is adequate to who we are meant to be.

Let us choose our beliefs and our religion as we choose our companions and mates. Let us not go where we are not honored and cherished.

Let us seek spiritual paths that take us more seriously than we take ourselves, that lift us up rather than bringing us down.

Let us remember that all great religious prophets have said that the way that leads toward life is narrow, and few take it. We would aspire to be among those few.

May we seek not an easy religion, but a hard one, not a partial challenge but a complete one.

Let us, in this time of taking stock, treat ourselves and others as though we were all, equally, children of God, sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself, made of stardust enfolded in dreams and nearly unlimited possibilities. For we are, we are, we are.

Amen.

SERMON: Happy New Year!

When I began planning this sermon, I didn’t think it would have anything to do with last week’s sermon on the book The DaVinci Code, but it does. One theme in that book, and in the huge interest it has stirred up, is the message that some religions lie, mislead people, or are simply inadequate vehicles for providing enough help with our life questions.

At first, I didn’t think about, or even want to think about, the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah in that way. I’ve always liked it, and found it to be very moving, whether you’re Jewish or not.

But then, when I realized that there was another religious festival that also began yesterday, one that is both very similar to and very different from Rosh Hashanah, it reframed the subject.

So now I think what we are doing this morning is taking a trip. It’s a trip through time, around the world, within and without us, a trip to God and a trip beyond God.

That’s one of the things I love most about liberal religion; we don’t need to stop asking questions at conventional borders of religious thought. The only religious “convention” we need to take seriously is the convention of taking ourselves, our lives, and our relationships seriously. And in this quest, we can and do travel beyond the boundaries of any and every more particular religious orthodoxy. It’s comparative religion in the same way we do comparative politics, comparative ideologies, even comparative diets.

Let’s begin with Rosh Hashanah. It is one of the holiest days in the Jewish year, and marks the beginning of their new year. This is now the year 5764 in Jewish tradition, though the Hebrew traditions go back only about 3500 to 3800 years.

Rosh Hashanah is not like our January 1st New Year celebration, except in one important way. It is a time for repentance and serious introspection, for looking back at the mistakes we made during the past year, and correcting them. If you take the tradition seriously, this is important because God keeps books in which he writes who has been good and bad, and who will have a good and bad year next year. The “Book of Life” on last year will be sealed on Yom Kippur in a week, so it’s important to repent, pray, and do charitable deeds this week to impress God with your good intentions, so he might give you a better “report.” Not all Jews care about this part, like not all Christians care about Communion; but it is an ancient part of the tradition.

Saying it this way makes God sound like a Boy Scout troop leader, but that is one of the things about the God of the Bible. Scholars have shown that when he was created, he was created in the image of a Hebrew tribal chief who set the laws, prescribed the behavioral boundaries, and rewarded or punished the people of his tribe. Even the covenant between God and His people was modeled on Hittite suzerainty treaties that predated them.

And Rosh Hashanah shows much of this history, for Jews are supposed to make amends to people in their community they have wronged, before they can “get right with God.” The focus is on us, our tribe, and our tribe’s God. This isn’t news; anyone raised in a Western religion is familiar with those traits of this God. But they’re worth remembering.

Now I want to leave the “Jewishness” of this festival to focus on its insights into the human condition: our human condition. Because it is really quite profound, and there is something for all of us here, whether we are Jewish or not. Many parts of religions are particular, meant to give members, insiders, an identity as parts of that religion. And those outside the religion can ignore those parts, as members of the other religion would ignore our own odd rituals — like lighting a chalice to begin each service, or having 150 votive candles to light in the side windows.

But in most religions, there are “universal” elements with insights into the human condition, and those are often precious fruits, even for outsiders. There is something important, for example, about not just tumbling from one year to the next without stopping to take stock, and that’s what Rosh Hashanah is about. The ancient Hebrews are given credit for inventing the idea of a rhythm to the week, where six regular days are followed by a holy day when we are to stop working and focus on our gratitude for the gifts of life. All of Western civilization owes the Jews a huge debt of gratitude for this notion that time has a rhythm, that we must stop from time to time and take stock.

And Rosh Hashanah continues this sense of rhythm in a bigger way, by saying we should take ten days at the end of every year to look at ourselves and how we are living with real honesty, and make changes rather than just running blindly on from one year to the next.

And we owe Jews another debt of gratitude for insisting that before we can make our peace with God, we must make our peace with each other, with those in our community, our tribe, from whom we have grown estranged. Don’t pray to God for forgiveness until you have done all you can to earn it from those you have harmed, whether intentionally or not.

Think of how much better off we would all be if we did that every year, if we took ten whole days for the task of taking ourselves seriously, our relationships and our relation to all we hold most sacred seriously, and changed our behavior accordingly.

We can go astray for only a year before we need to seek reconciliation with those we may have wronged. Is that worth ten days? Is there anyone here who wouldn’t benefit from this kind of discipline? I know we can all think of ten friends who would be a lot better off if they did this. But the odds are, they’re thinking it might help us, too.

We’re not told how to do this, just that it’s up to us, and God is watching and judging and will write the results down in that Book he’s keeping on us. Frankly, I don’t like that part much. I keep thinking of Santa Claus keeping a list of who is naughty and nice, or of Big Brother watching me. But that has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t think religion is about God, and that the concept of God is often more misleading than helpful.

The Hebrew religion began, in the opinion of some biblical scholars and archaeologists, as a departure from the Canaanite religion, which was a powerful nature religion with a goddess, a Divine Mother, a Mother Nature, as the focus. In their early years, up until about 2600 years ago, the Hebrews were not monotheists, but polytheists, worshiping the gods and goddesses of their surrounding cultures, as well as Jahweh. King Solomon, regarded as the wisest of the wise Hebrew rulers, worshiped both Jahweh and the goddess Asherah, and had a statue of this great goddess in his temple. And even the Ten Commandments endorse polytheism, saying only that “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

But around 2600 years ago a very conservative and exclusive change came, and the goddesses were banished from a central place in the religion. The creation story of a nature goddess who created everything out of herself was turned into the highly illogical creation story of a male deity who created everything by himself. It became a religion in which both feminine power and women were second-rate citizens, as hundreds of millions of women in all three Western religions have known for many centuries.

Does it necessarily seem that way to the women in those religions? Not all of them. Even Muslim or Christian fundamentalist women will say they choose and cherish their subordinate roles. But to most of us, it looks very unbalanced. I think it would look equally unbalanced to the men in those religions, if their central deity were a Goddess, most ecclesiastical leaders were women, and men didn’t count toward a minyan, had to veil their faces, or were told it was shameful for them to speak in church, as St. Paul said.

Jahweh remains a kind of tribal chief who wants his people to get along and to worship him, but who has no room for people finding alternate religious paths, or alternate gods. And this notion of a “jealous God” is central to all three Western religions (four, counting Mormons).

In fact, we know it so well you may wonder why I’m bothering to bring it up. I bring it up as a segue to the other religious festival that started yesterday, from an even older religion. Yesterday was the Hindu festival of Navaratri, also known as the Durga festival. I’m betting that almost nobody here has ever heard of it.

Like Rosh Hashanah, this is a time for Hindus to take stock, though the scope is much broader. Hinduism has the broadest horizons and most nuanced depth of any religion I know, and all that shows up here.

The most abiding human failing in Hinduism isn’t sin or estrangement from God, but ignorance. We do not realize our real identity, and live our lives in the service of lesser identities that are not worthy of us. Our real identity is infinite and eternal, not just limited to this life here and now.

Our modern physicists tell us that the universe began with a Big Bang, and that everything in the universe, including us, is made up entirely of stardust. A Hindu teacher could have written this story, perhaps forty centuries ago.

But Hindu understandings of God and gods is very different from Western understandings. The overall reality is called Brahman, the sum of all creative, sustaining and destructive forces in the universe. But Brahman is not a god. Brahman is an abstract concept, which can’t be reduced to a human-like god.

Still, Hindus know that people can’t relate well to abstract concepts, and so they have created many gods and goddesses to give more useful images for people to focus on. But all these gods: Krishna, Shiva, Vishnu, and all the goddesses, aren’t beings, don’t exist in any except a highly imaginative sense.

And both male and female powers are recognized as essential. In fact, as in all ancient nature religions, the power belongs to the goddesses, not the gods. As one Hindu teacher explains it, the Divine Mother is the cosmic energy, the omnipotent power, of God. She is called by many names, one of which is Durga.

The supreme power of God, they say, is manifested as knowledge, activity, and strength. And each of these is represented by a goddess, on whom we can focus to draw ourselves closer to that kind of energy.

It surprised me to realize how much this is like the teachings of the Gnostics in the first century of the Christian era. They also taught that the highest god was impersonal, a concept much like Brahman, and that Jahweh was just a second-order deity, made to create things. So they said the Jews and early Christians had completely misunderstood the nature of God by worshiping Jahweh, much as the Hindus teach that all the gods and goddesses are imaginative creations to represent some of the attributes of Brahman, the impersonal and ineffable reality behind all reality.

Like all religions, Hinduism grew out of the kinds of human questions and yearnings that have always been with us. So even though it may sound odd and foreign, it really isn’t. All religions grow from the hopes, fears and yearnings of the human heart, given form by the human imaginations of different times and places.

What we’re talking about is that same condition of being disconnected and out of sync that the Jews are focusing on in Rosh Hashanah. But here, our identity is not as members of a tribe or worshipers of a tribal god. In Hinduism, our identity is as parts of all the infinite and eternal elements of the universe; we are made of stardust, and our true home cannot be contained by anything less than infinity and eternity.

What keeps us blinded to our real nature? It is at least three things that we are to try and combat during this time of year, aided by the Divine Mother Durga in several of her forms.

First, we are blinded by ignorance and the unhappiness that goes with it. The goddess Saraswati, one of Mother Durga’s manifestations, aids by drawing us toward knowledge and happiness. We must seek paths that lead toward knowledge and happiness rather than their opposites, and the infinite and eternal energy of the universe is our friend and ally here as the goddess Saraswati, rather than a judge that keeps score in a Book.

Second, we are misled by pursuing the wrong kind of wealth. We are easily misled to put ourselves in pursuit of material wealth. Almost all religions have realized this. Ancient Hebrews wrote about the people fashioning a calf-god out of their gold as soon as Moses was out of sight, which sounds surprisingly modern. In the Christian scriptures, Jesus asks, “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world and lose their soul?” and the ancient Hindus ask the same question. Here, the powerful and sexy goddess Lakshmi is the part that wants to help awaken us to and excite us by the spiritual and physical pleasures of life that are free for the taking. She wants to make us fall in love and in lust with life. Sex, for Hindus, is a good and natural thing, rather than a sin as so many Western religions often regard it. Again, Lakshmi is not our judge; she is the part of us that is there to help if only we will awaken to her.

And third, we are held captive by inertia, indolence, sleep, and laziness. We may be in a rut, but it’s our rut, and we prefer it to the more unfamiliar life that could be happier. This inertia is very strong, and requires a very strong force to break it apart, to shatter it.

And that’s a job for the goddess Kali, the terrifying aspect of Mother Durga. Kali has the power to break us free, to shatter our denial, to shatter the pretense that we are being true to our highest calling while living according to our lowest callings.

Kali is a terrifying goddess, often pictured with blood dripping from her teeth. But her enemies are spiritual, not mortal. She seeks to destroy the demons of our lower nature, and is there to help us shatter their hold on us.

So we may appeal to Kali to combine with the other aspects of Mother Durga, the Divine Mother, Mother Nature, that great source of feminine powers of creation and nurture who has gone by so many names. She has been excluded in Western religions, but is prominent and powerful in most others. And again, even Kali is not here to frighten or judge us or write our names in a Book. She is the fierce and powerful part of the universe and of us that is always here to help.

And the Durga Festival, or Navaratri, is a reminder, just as Rosh Hashanah is, that we need to stop, take stock, look inside ourselves and at our lives, and retune them. Just as an orchestra gets in tune by listening to the “A” pitch before a concert, so we need to get in tune by listening to those still, small, and powerful voices within us.

In some ways, these two festivals are what religion is about. They are the voices saying “Wake up!” Don’t be less than you are called to be! Don’t spend life living out low values when your deepest nature yearns only for high values. Don’t get walled up in pettiness or hatred when you can become animated by knowledge, life-pursuing passion and a strength of spirit, a strength of character, that will amaze you if only you will take this time to attend to it. Wake up! Life is too important to sleep through, and you are too important to be sleeping when so much knowledge, passion, excitement and happiness are all around you for the taking!

But look at the difference in how these two great religions of Judaism and Hinduism go about calling us to our higher calling. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all struggled throughout their histories to outgrow the shadow of the old tribal deity who lays down commandments, rewards and punishes, and seems unable to offer us the other half, the feminine half, of the holy forces that create and sustain life — except in the mystical forms which make up relatively small parts of these religions. And there is always the theological limit, the hidden message that whatever we do must be in the worship of that one male deity.

How different is the prescription of Hinduism! You can appeal to these powers through either the three-part Divine Mother, or the three-part male deities of Krishna, Vishnu and Shiva. If you protest that you don’t think any of these really exist as beings, Hindu teachers will remind you that of course they don’t, they exist as imaginative vehicles to help carry these important reminders of our highest and deepest nature.

Now you see why I said this was like a trip through time, around the world, within and without us, a trip to God and a trip beyond God. The great German poet Goethe once said that the person who doesn’t know two languages doesn’t even know one language, because they’ll mistake their way of talking for the Truth. The same is true in religion. For centuries, people in Western civilization have been taught there is only one basic religion. They have killed hundreds of thousands of others who didn’t see it that way. That couldn’t possibly be in the service of a true, or even an adequate, concept of God.

We are left with the same kind of insight suggested by that book The DaVinci Code: the suspicion that major religions have misled us in major ways, that they have often failed to give us adequate help, and that they are making us more out of balance, rather than more whole. Examining our religions and beliefs is an essential part of the self-inventory that are at the center of both religions.

And so it is the season of Rosh Hashanah, the season of the Mother Durga festival, when we are asked to take stock, to repent of ways of living that do not honor us or our highest calling. If I were a Jew, I might tell you to think of this in terms of Jahweh or that Book of Life. If I were a Hindu, I might suggest that you honor the divine energies you seek through the imaginative goddesses Saraswati, Lakshmi and Kali.

But I’m a 21st century religious liberal. So instead, I’ll remind you that this is indeed the beginning of a new year, and it is time to take stock. It is the beginning of a new school year, a new church year, a year with a new ministerial intern, a new pledge drive for the money needed to make this church vibrant and aggressive in pursuing its many duties.

It is time to take stock. All around us are materials, people, stories and myths with clues about how we might do it. Some of you will call this power God; some may call it the Divine Mother. Both personally and professionally, I don’t care what you call it, as long as you can call it forth. Call it forth. For that power, if you will seek it, can help you focus on your most holy calling. It’s always here, always available, just waiting to be called forth.

Now it’s our move.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

21 September 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

We are enlarged by an attitude of reverence. We are enlarged by putting ourselves in the service of ideals so transcendent they deserve to be called gods. And so let us be reverent. But let us not worship too quickly or thoughtlessly, for there are many gods, and most are not worthy of worship.

Let us never accept other people’s revelations if those proclamations demean us, or if they empower the few at the expense of the many.

Let us never say Amen to a sermon that does not teach abundant life for all God’s children, all children of the universe.

Let us worship at the altars of those ideals and gods which call us all to service, but which condemn no one to servitude or an attitude of servility. For above all things, God is love and not arrogance.

Let us worship only where it is a higher goal to serve truth than to bow before orthodoxy, for truth ever eludes our attempts to put it in the cages of our own limited understanding.

Let us gather where our minds are honored, our hearts nourished, where the angels of our better nature are helped to lift us up toward our true calling.

Our true calling. For we are all the children of God, the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself, in all its wondrous multiplicity. We all carry, and are carried by, what Hindus call the atman, that god-seed that is part of all that is holy and creative in the universe. Let us remember who we are meant to be, and honor that, nothing less. Nothing less.

Amen.

SERMON:

The DaVinci Code, Part One

Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code has generated more curiosity and excitement than any book about religion in years. Partly, it’s because he’s just a very good writer, and it’s a good read. But it is a book that basically says that Christian churches have been lying to their people for two thousand years about things as fundamental as who Jesus was, what he taught, whether he was ever really crucified, and his relationship with Mary Magdalen, who is really the central figure in this story.

The book is a novel, but it weaves together a lot of theories, and every theory presented is shared by some biblical scholars; some are shared by many. Some are pretty exciting, some are even sexy. But at a deeper level, the book grows out of, and is a powerful example of, a profound loss of trust and belief — not in God or Jesus, but in the things that Christian churches and teachers have said about them for twenty centuries.

This morning, I want to introduce you to some of the theories about Jesus, Mary Magdalen, their teachings, and the distortions created by those who ruled the Christian churches to hide these truths and mislead believers. Those are strong statements, but if any of the theories are correct, they are justified. And some of the theories are almost certainly correct.

I’m not trashing Christianity, as much as I’m exposing some of the ways it has betrayed and suppressed the original intent of Jesus. For what it’s worth — and to me it’s worth a lot — from my study of the teachings of Jesus, I think Jesus would hate what Christianity has done in his name.

There are so many threads woven together in this story, I’ll just tell the story first, then unweave some of the individual threads. Here’s the story, which will sound fantastic and unbelievable to almost everyone raised in Western civilization:

It revolves around Mary Magdalen, who was portrayed as a whore by the Catholic Church for centuries, it was only a few years ago (1969) that the Church acknowledged that there was no truth to the story that she was a whore, that the story had been invented by the Church. That was 25 years before the Pope acknowledged, in 1994, that they knew Jesus hadn’t really been born on December 25th, the date of the winter solstice in the ancient calendar. The reason such a scurrilous story was invented about her was to hide the fact that Jesus ranked her above all the apostles. The Gospel of Philip, one of the works recovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls, says that Mary was Jesus’ favorite, and he was often seen kissing her on the mouth.

But even more, some say, she was Jesus’ wife. It was a special kind of marriage, a holy marriage that represented the symbol of the highest spiritual union in their religion, which was not Judaism but the cult of Isis, which Jesus, and perhaps Mary, learned in Egypt. Jesus was a magician who learned his trade in Egypt with the priests of the cult of Isis, which was a very popular cult in the Middle East at the time. Even the Talmudic writings of the first century say that Jesus went to Egypt to study magic with the priests of the Isis cult.

Mary’s name, according to quite a few scholars, contains the clue to her greatness. While some in the Christian tradition claim it just meant she came from the town of Migdal, others say the word Magdalen meant “the greater.” Mary the greater. Greater than whom? Greater than Mary the mother. Some very good and respected biblical scholars think this is correct. (Others suggest her name may have denoted her hometown: of Magdala in Egypt. These suggest that this Mary was black, which is the secret behind the cult of the Black Madonnas, that she was a priestess in the Isis cult, and that her “anointing” of Jesus with the oils described in the gospels was the anointing that made him the Christ: literally, “the anointed one.” However, this would have made Jesus the anointed one in the cult of Isis.

Jesus and his father Joseph were of the tribe of David, one of the two remaining tribes of the earlier ten tribes of Israel. Mary may have been from the tribe of Benjamin, the other tribe. So their marriage was a kind of holy marriage, uniting the remaining tribes of Israel. (Yes, this is a wholly different story than the one suggesting that Mary was an Egyptian. There are many plausible stories. But almost all the alternative stories make more sense, insult the mind less, and have more objective history behind them than the orthodox story.)

But Jesus, as even the gospels make clear, was considered to be born illegitimate. This didn’t mean that Joseph and Mary hadn’t been married. Joseph was a priest in this radical Jewish sect, and legitimate heirs to the line had to be born in September. A priest and his wife were only permitted to have sex in December, to insure this. But Jesus, some scholars say, was born in March of 7 BC. [1] So, ritually and technically, he was illegitimate. Once a son was born, there could not be sex for six more years, so that sons were to be separated by seven years. Jesus’ younger brother James was born seven years later, in September. To many, this made James, not Jesus, the legitimate heir to the rulership of this tribal religious group.

But by staging a crucifixion, Jesus could claim that he had been “raised up” by God, which would give him the political edge over James. That was the purpose of the crucifixion, which was phony but not fatal. Jesus died in the year 67, at the age of 74.[2]

Some scholars believe that Jesus and Mary Magdalen had at least two children: a daughter born in 33, and a son called Jesus Justus, born in 36 or 37, and mentioned in the Book of Acts. Mary was involved in volatile disputes over the leadership of the movement, with Peter. Peter said in one of the recovered gospels that Mary should be sent away because women were not worthy of life. And Mary, in another gospel, said she feared Peter because he hated the whole female race. The misogyny and patriarchy of much Christianity is a reminder of this early struggle — and of which side won.

In the year 44, after losing the power struggle with Peter, Mary went to southern France, as the New Testament gospels say. She took her daughter by Jesus. Some scholars say she also took Jesus Justus, others say he remained in Judea.

But once in France, Mary became immensely important. Everyone knows there are hundreds of Catholic cathedrals dedicated to “Notre Dame,” or “Our Lady,” throughout France. But it is now clear that for over two hundred of them, including the most famous of all, the cathedral at Chartres, the “Lady” referred to in the many cathedrals of “Notre Dame” was not the Virgin Mary, but Mary Magdalen. It is undeniable, I think, that there was a powerful cult of Mary Magdalen in France that has continued to the present day. There is also a town in southern France where the locals participate in an annual sacred festival — a kind of parade through the streets where the skull of Mary Magdalen, encased in metal, is paraded through the streets each year. While it seems unlikely that we could ever verify through DNA or other testing that this is Mary Magdalen’s skull, there’s no clear way of proving that it isn’t, either.

Her worship was mixed with the cult of the Black Madonna and, in southern France, churches whose symbols and history showed them to be concerned with the cult of Isis, the very ancient Egyptian cult of the goddess Isis, of her dead and resurrected husband Osiris, and their holy child. Christian scholars have long acknowledged that the statues of Isis and her son were the models for the sculptures of Mary and Jesus. The lines between these cults of Mary Magdalen, the Black Madonna and Isis seem blurred and confused, as least from the reading I’ve done so far.

So one great secret hidden in this story was the fact that, according to some biblical scholars, Jesus did not die in the crucifixion, that he married, had children, and preferred Mary Magdalen above Peter and all the other apostles.

Another secret, according to the story, is that the royal bloodline of Jesus and Mary continued in France, and continues to the present day. It produced the line of Merovingian kings of the 4th and 5th centuries, who were later betrayed by the Catholic Church. But the bloodline continued, later producing the Stuart kings. Some other books on these subjects have photographs taken in 1979 and later, of a man and a young boy in France who are claimed as living descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalen.

There are other secrets involved in this complex story, and not all of them seem to be known. Perhaps the existence of Mary’s skeleton or other skeletal relics, or of John the Baptist’s head: John the Baptist is regarded far more highly in these groups than Jesus is. I’m not yet clear on the exact role of John the Baptist, but it does seem clear that he had a different and more important role than the tradition has given him. Many scholars who studied the Dead Sea Scrolls are quite sure that the person called The Teacher of Righteousness there was John the Baptist, and that his enemy, called the Man of Lies and similar things, was Jesus.

There’s sex in this story, too. The highest spiritual union in the Isis cult was symbolized and acted out in a ritualized sexual union. This, some say, was the nature of the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalen. It was also reenacted at least annually in the secret religious rites. Historically, this seems to be true, and it seems to be true that these rites were practiced in some of the religious groups in southern France that were known publicly as Roman Catholic Christians, but which were secretly still following the ancient teachings and rituals of the cult of Isis, as taught by Jesus and then Mary Magdalen.

This may sound like a bad soap opera or a worse “reality-TV” program, and a student of history or religion might wonder “So what?” But these teachings, and these sexual rites, had an important theological message which posed a fundamental threat to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, if not of all Christian churches.

What Jesus and Mary were teaching, they say was a kind of salvation that was the complete opposite of the kind of salvation taught by the Catholic Church, as well as nearly all other Christian churches. The message was that salvation — which meant a kind of wholeness, completion, here and now — was achieved, in the perfect union between a man and a woman, as symbolized by the sexual rite. Salvation is free, it is open to all, and it involves embracing life and sexuality.

About now, a politically correct question comes to my mind, as it may also to yours. That question is “What about homosexuality?” And while it isn’t included in The DaVinci Code, it is a recent historical discussion. I’ll tell you this side story quickly. In 1958, a biblical scholar from Columbia named Morton Smith said he found, in a library in a monastery near Jerusalem, some papers stuck in the endnotes of a 17th century book. These papers were transcriptions of a letter supposedly written by Clement of Alexandria, a late second century giant of the Christian church. Clement was explaining that there was a secret ending to the gospel of Mark which was not put into the Bible because it would confuse or offend new Christians — he and others called them “Babes in Christ.” These teachings, he said, were only for the initiates, the insiders, not the Babes.

The passage is shocking. It is about a naked young man covered only in a white robe who approached Jesus. It says Jesus spent several nights with him, and introduced him to the kingdom of God. The Greek language used is specifically sexual. It is referring to a homosexual encounter between Jesus and this naked young man.

When Morton Smith published this forty years ago, almost no one took him seriously, and for a variety of reasons. For one, no one else had ever seen these papers. For another, Smith was homosexual, so people didn’t trust his motives. However, it was curious that the monastery would not let anyone else in to look for these papers. It remained a minor mystery for decades.

But a few years ago, other scholars did go into the monastery, and they found the documents, which said exactly what Morton Smith had said they did. The Jesus Seminar has now published photographs of these documents in their quarterly magazine for all the world to see. Was Jesus involved in a cult in which sexual initiation played a key role, and did that initiation involve both heterosexual and homosexual unions? So far, there is not enough data to know, or to make a very strong argument. But the papers about the secret part of Mark do exist. Maybe we’ll learn more about this in years to come. Some people feel this would be terrible news if it’s true; others could see it as a liberation that’s long overdue.

All of this, as you can imagine, is highly damaging to the orthodox picture of Jesus, Mary, Christianity and the churches. That’s why it has had to be kept secret.

And history shows us a very real and bloody example of the danger of letting this secret out. In the 13th century there was a Christian group in France known as the Cathars, or Cathari. Among their beliefs was the assertion that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were sexual lovers, though not married. The Roman Catholic Church organized armies of men to capture, torture, murder, and burn alive all the Cathars they could find in what are called the Albigensian Crusades, named after a town where many Cathari lived. Tens of thousands, perhaps many more of them, were slaughtered in what may be the first example of genocide in the past thousand years, perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church to exterminate those who held this belief. So it was indeed dangerous to hold beliefs about Jesus that threatened the authority or teachings of the Church.

The book The DaVinci Code, and quite a few other books in these areas, argue that several organizations have been created to protect these secrets. The one mentioned most in the book was the Priory of Sion. This is a fascinating organization, which seems to have existed and may still exist. Its grand masters have included some of history’s most brilliant geniuses, including Leonardo DaVinci, the scientists Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. One thing all these men had in common was a profound interest in the occult. As many of you may know, Isaac Newton spent four decades practicing alchemy, and his personal writings include more than ten thousand pages on the subject.

But other groups involved in protecting these secrets have included, they say, the Knights Templar from the late 12th century, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. And while I’ve read a few books on these other groups so far and am still not clear on all the details, there seems to be something to this, too.

So what do you do with all of this? After I’ve done more reading in these areas, I’ll add another sermon or two to this series. But for now, there are some important things hidden behind the fascination so many people are finding with the ideas presented in The DaVinci Code.

To borrow the title from Al Franken’s understated new book, you could say this story is about Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It is a story of a major religion which has betrayed and suppressed the message of Jesus, a message which empowered people directly, without the need for any mediators. Jesus didn’t come to start a church; he came to set people free by telling them that God loved them, loved all of them equally, and that when we treated one another as children of God, the kingdom of God would be here. Amen, end of sermon, end of religion.

Jesus never preached sin and salvation, he never promised heaven or threatened with hell, though the writer of the gospel of John does. He came to empower people. The church changed the story to empower the leaders of the church and, later, the political and military rulers of countries, Christianity is still being used this way by our president and many conservative preachers even today, when they order God to “bless America” and whip up the believers for a holy war against Arabs and Muslims who coincidentally happen to own a lot of oil. The same tactics are being used by fundamentalist Muslims who demean and dishonor the teachings of Muhammad by reducing Allah to the same kind of patriarchal, hierarchical, violent deity.

In Jesus’ religion, there is no mediator; no one stands between you and God. In Christianity, the pope, priests and churches become mediators, who write the rules of your salvation. The two could not be more opposed.

Jesus celebrated life. In his own time he was called a glutton and a drunkard, and there is growing evidence that he was indeed married and a father, and may even have played a role in the sexual initiation of a young man. These secrets, even 1800 years ago, were hidden from the newcomers, from the “Babes in Christ,” who the church leaders thought needed the superstition and magic, and were not ready for the simple teachings of Jesus that could set them free from the powerful rule of the church. Both political leaders and churches have suppressed this through most of Western history, to make leaders powerful and people obedient.

It is a question of trust, of truth, of lies, betrayal and deception of several billions of people who were sold a religion that Jesus would have detested.

The orthodox will see this, I suspect, as a bad thing, an assault on faith, an enemy of God. I see, or at least hope I see, something else behind this. I see some glimmer of hope that some of the “Babes in Christ” have had enough, that they want the truth that sets them free rather than the untruths that bind them to inadequate models of human life and bad theology.

I see, or at least hope, that we might be seeing people in our time decide to replay the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Originally, Eve’s decision to seek knowledge and to share it freely was condemned. Maybe this time Eve will win. And if Eve wins, maybe we will too.

———————–

[1] The source of this dating is the Australian biblical scholar Barbara Thiering. She is a controversial scholar, which means she colors outside the orthodox lines. I know Barbara, and have been on an invitational worldwide e-list of scholars discussing her work with her for three years. I respect her absolutely; her arguments are footnoted with references to original sources in several languages. But though I think I’ve read a fair amount in this area, I don’t have a clue whether she’s right. She is being quoted fairly regularly by other authors working in these non-orthodox areas of interest.

[2] Barbara Thiering again. See her books Jesus the Man (also called Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and Jesus of the Apocalypse: the Life of Jesus after the Crucifixion). While other authors (like Lawrence Gardner) have made similar claims about Jesus’ life, marriages (two), and children (two with Mary, one daughter with Lydia), Barbara says all such claims have come from her work, or from distortions of it.

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Davidson Loehr 14

September 2003

The text of this sermon is unavailable but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This Holy Cross Sunday Dr. Leohr focuses on the Christian symbol of the cross seen in a new way: As two axis, one horizontal and one vertical.

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© Davidson Loehr

31 August 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button..

Prayer

In everything we do or fail to do, we’re writing the story of our lives.

Too often, the fantasy and the reality of our lives are a world apart.

Sometimes we can’t find our way, or can’t recognize the way when we have found it.

Sometimes it seems the cost is just too high to take the high road, so we settle for a lower road because we believe it is all we can really afford.

Let us take this time, this place, these moments, to remind us of our higher calling. Let us be open to hearing the voices of gods rather than idols, consulting those angels of our better nature rather than the little demons and goblins of our lesser selves.

Let us think and act in ways that can do honor to us and to those who love us.

Let us act as though God were watching, as though those whom we love were watching, as though all the great and noble souls of history were watching.

For we are the gatekeepers of our better tomorrows.

We are, all of us, brothers and sisters, children of God, and the best hope of a more compassionate world.

Let us live in such a way that when we are finished, we can say, “In my time here, I was as compassionate, as courageous as I knew how to be. In my time I was, if even only in my small way, a blessing to those whose lives I touched.

“I came, I cared, and in the most important matters I tried to be authentic. I wasn’t perfect; but I was the best person that I knew how to be. And that is enough, it is enough, it is always enough.”

Amen.

SERMON: The Shadow Knows

One of the most famous and ancient story plots we have is about people going out on long adventures in search of a treasure they finally discover was buried at home all the time. I think of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” where Dorothy left Kansas and went to Oz, which had the same characters she had known in Kansas. She finally discovered that the home she was looking for was always as close as clicking her heels.

Also in that movie, the three other main characters were searching for something they thought they didn’t have: brains, courage, a heart. But it wasn’t true: they had them all the time, they just didn’t know it.

I try to look at religion and life’s questions in a lot of different ways here, because the same road doesn’t work for everyone, so I think it’s worth knowing a lot of paths. This morning, I’m looking at life through some lenses from Jungian psychology. I think the Jungians offer some fertile ways of understanding what we think of as salvation, or a kind of healthy wholeness.

For Jung, that especially meant bringing together the favorite parts of our personality, which he called the persona, and the equally important parts that stay hidden, which he called the shadow. The notion of a shadow may sound spooky, but it really isn’t.

Our society, our families and our relationships tend to “edit” us. They prefer certain parts of us, and encourage them. But there’s a lot more to us, and it doesn’t go away. When we shine a light on the parts of us we like, our other parts go into the shadows. The shadow is the despised quarter of our being, or at least the unknown part. It often has as much energy as our ego does. If it gets more energy, it can erupt with its own terrible purpose, and run our lives like a mad puppeteer.

In our culture, especially recently, when we find two opposing forces we are taught to use the bigger one to destroy the weaker one. Whether this will work in international relations remains to be seen. But it doesn’t work psychologically, or in relationships. The two sides are both parts of us, and must be integrated. Otherwise, we’re more likely to flip from one extreme to another: the abused boy who becomes an abuser, religious fundamentalists who attack heretics, or a country that defines itself as peace-loving while claiming the right to declare preemptive war on anyone it chooses. These are some ways the shadow can erupt to define or control us, if we can’t grow big enough to integrate it.

Since we don’t have effective means of integrating our shadow sides today, we project them into our horror movies, gangster epics, violence, rap, garish or shocking fashions, etc. But that can’t integrate them.

To refuse the dark side of our nature is to store up the darkness. Then these things erupt as symptoms: a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents – or war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance, etc. The front pages of our newspapers hurl our collective shadows at us every day.

It is a dark page in human history when people make others bear their shadow for them. Men lay their shadow on women, whites upon blacks, blacks upon Hispanics – as I learned when I moved to Austin – Catholics upon Protestants, capitalists upon 3rd world countries, the poor and powerless, Muslims upon Hindus, on and on.

– That was all a kind of theoretical introduction for those who like theories. Now let’s get more specific, because in real life, examples of people whose shadows control or cripple them are usually simpler. I’ve brought you three examples of this, from a personal, institutional and societal scale.

On an individual level, I think of a woman I knew some years ago named Betsy. She was in a shadow rut. She dated a series of men who were all just as judgmental and dismissive of her as her father had been. Her shadow was running this show, trying to win approval from her father through this succession of stand-ins. She was doomed to repeat this plot until she finally got in touch with the parts of her that needed her father’s approval, understand she was never going to get it, and get on with her life. Then, when her father or others like him charged her like bulls with demeaning and hurtful remarks, she could play the matador, just letting the dangerous bulls pass by, without trying to confront them.

For an institutional example where the shadow is running the show, I think of Christianity, especially now as we see the fundamentalist versions gearing up for holy war against Muslims. Hucksters like Jerry Falwell are teaching that Islam is an evil religion teaching war and murder – apparently ignorant of the Christian Crusades, where Christians were told to kill Muslims and promised an eternal reward in heaven for doing so. This entire script is being acted out by the shadow, because it is these Christians who are teaching war and murder, and embodying an attitude Jesus would have regarded as evil. For this kind of wounded Christianity to become healed, it would have to grow big enough to integrate its own shadow, to acknowledge its own contributions to hatred, war and evil in the world today. Only then could Christianity have power to focus the profoundly good energies and ideals of that great religion. This is the task many liberal Christians are taking on, though they have an uphill fight.

And for a really broad current example of a script written by a shadow, I think of the U.S. and our claim that we are the only country on earth with the right to wage preemptive war against any country we choose, without provocation.

We do this while wanting to believe we are a peace-loving nation. It is already having effects that our administration seems not to have expected. William Kristol – who has been a shadow figure in U.S. neo-conservative politics for twenty years – has been interviewed on national radio and television, calmly acknowledging that yes, members of his group, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, had been urging that we invade Iraq and control it since 1991. Yes, he says, we will control Syria and Iran next, and think we can do it without using our armies. What would you expect the effect of these statements and plans to be in Arab and Muslim countries? When people all over the world know our blueprints to establish economic and military dominance of the world, including plans to prevent Asia or the European nations from becoming a threat to these imperialistic goals, what do you think the effect will be in Asia and Europe? Our media don’t carry the stories that we have become the most hated nation on earth, and that G.W. Bush is regarded as more dangerous and murderous than Saddam Hussein. But a quick check of world news outlets shows us this is the background against which our denial is operating.

North Korea has already made public its plans to mobilize and strengthen its forces in response to U.S. imperialism. Don’t we think Europe will too? Do we honestly believe we can boss the entire world around, invading wherever we like without consequences? We claim to be a nation of democracy, goodness and peace, but people all over the world, and a growing number here, see our behavior as arrogant, murderous and evil, as our shadow side acting out a kind of adolescent and deadly imperialism that we are publicly trying to pretend doesn’t exist.

There are encouraging signs that the shadow side of America will make it into our collective consciousness. The fact that “Bowling for Columbine” could win an Oscar and get a standing ovation, the fact that Michael Moore’s incendiary and angry book Stupid White Men rose to the #1 bestseller in non-fiction four or five times in the past year and a half, the fact that America’s imperialist plans are being discussed by some of our own journalists in prime-time spots, and by others all over the world, the fact that the protests don’t seem to be diminishing – these are much stronger signs that the citizens are awake than we had anywhere nearly this early in the Vietnam War. So maybe we will insist on facing our own dangerous shadow sides. Maybe not. Time will tell, along with the collective vision and courage – not of our leaders, but of our citizens.

We tend to think of our shadow sides as bad, like these examples. Often, it is. The shadow isn’t necessarily bad, though; it’s just invisible to us, not integrated into our consciousness, so it has great power to mislead us. But a lot of our very best traits are also hidden in the shadows.

Hero-worship is also projecting our shadow. And it’s dangerous to us too, if we then expect the hero to save us, as we become passive.

And falling in love is projecting parts of our shadow, when we fantasize that this person exists to complete us, then later get angry when we find they were, after all, just a human, and their job really wasn’t to complete us.

Still, sometimes someone can help us find our shadow in a way that’s healing. But even then the power hidden in the shadows usually blindsides us.

One of my favorite stories about this is a story about my oldest friend, John. We met in 1968, while I was finishing an undergraduate degree in music theory and he was working on his Ph.D. in psychology. John rode a big Kawasaki motorcycle, which he could take apart and put back together. He loved fixing things. He loved fixing people, too. And it seemed that every woman he dated had something wrong with her that he thought it was his job to fix. This produced a fairly colorful list of girl friends, none of whom lasted very long – usually because they got tired of being another of John’s work projects.

Once when he was between girlfriends, I said, “John, what would happen if you found a really healthy woman who loved you, was compatible with you, but didn’t need any work done?” “Oh,” he said, “that wouldn’t be at all appealing!”

About 25 years ago, after visiting England several times, he finally moved there. He said the U.S. felt like an adolescent society, and he wanted to live among grown-ups. A few years later, he wrote to say he’d met a woman named Mary, so I realized that, grown-up or not, England had some work projects for John. Mary was going through a divorce, and the legal and emotional hassles of dividing the assets from a successful travel agency she and her husband had owned. I couldn’t imagine that John would know anything about much of this, but I was sure he could find something to work on in her, so he’d be content.

Then they visited while I was living in Chicago, and I got to meet Mary. She was John’s worst nightmare: a perfectly healthy woman who loved him, was compatible with him, and didn’t need any fixing at all. I said I didn’t understand why she was attractive to him. He said it had blindsided him. Since she was stressed out when he met her, he thought she could be another good work project. When the divorce was over and the business had been divided, he suddenly discovered that she wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing at all. But by then, he said, it was too late. They’d learned to love each other, and he had been seduced into a healthy relationship in spite of himself. They’ve been married over twenty years.

His shadow, the part of himself he hadn’t learned how to integrate, was the part that simply enjoyed living, that could find healthy people attractive because they were healthy. It was the part that trusted life and trusted others. He had moved to England because he wanted to live among adults rather than adolescents. And then he met one of those adults, and outgrew his own adolescence.

In some ways, I can identify easily with John and Mary. But in others, they are very different people from me. They are both into every screwy supernaturalism known to humankind: astrology, numerology, palm reading, crystals – they’ve got ’em all. They also told me that they had been together in a previous life, where they needed to work through some things, but this time around it was just about perfect.

I was alarmed by all that supernatural hokum, and I thought about trying to make them a work project. Then I realized I was in the presence of two people who had found their own path toward wholeness and happiness. I decided to leave them alone, and just bless them.

So much life comes from the shadows, you’d think we would get over our fear of them. Yet we are often afraid of the dark. We are afraid to go there, to find what hides there, to face it. We are afraid because we fear that the truth will be bad.

Betsy was afraid she could not live without her father’s approval. But in truth, she couldn’t really live until she no longer needed his approval.

Some Christians are afraid that if they welcome Islam and all other religions as equally legitimate paths to salvation, then theirs will lose its special appeal. In fact, for many people, a religion secure enough to build bridges rather than walls is much more appealing, and much more religious. Many Christian apologists feel that if they ever acknowledge the truth about a very human Jesus or the fact that there are many roads to spiritual fulfillment that need not go through Christian doors, that they’ll lose their flocks. Maybe. But I think what they lose through fear they might more than make up for through what they gain in trust and respect.

Our current administration seems to think we can only be safe by threatening everyone else on earth. That too seems unlikely.

It is easy and natural to wonder how the answers could come from what seems our weakest area. But thousands of years of mythology and religious teachings say it usually comes from the shadows.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah says the stone the builders rejected will become the cornerstone. In the Christian scriptures, a voice asks, “What good could come from Nazareth,” a backwater place of low repute. Yet that’s where they said Jesus came from.

In virtually every great story we know, the hero comes from the fringes, the shadows. From Jesus to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, to Frodo in the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, it is the weakest character who turns out to be the strongest, the one able to build bridges between parts of a disjointed world.

Within and among us too, it is often our hidden parts that hold the power and knowledge we need. And so we perch between two kinds of life, two kinds of belief: the belief that the truth will be bad, and the belief that the truth can set us free. We perch between fear and life, even as we know there are mostly two kinds of people in the world: those who are alive and those who are afraid. And the message I’ve tried to pass on this morning is a simple message, taken from ancient religious insights and modern Jungian psychology. It is simply this: don’t be afraid of the dark. Those things you need to know to be more alive are as close as clicking your heels. You can trust the shadow. The shadow knows.

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© Davidson Loehr

24 August 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION

“Today is a day the Lord has made,” says an old religious writer, “let us therefore rejoice and be glad in it.” It is indeed!

It is so good to be together again!

For it is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this: let us begin it together in song.

PRAYER

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think.

Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships that might, with our help, expand our souls and our worlds.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us toward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.

SERMON

I hardly ever do sermons on old theological arguments – especially on topics as arcane as whether we are saved by faith alone, or whether we’re to be judged by our works as well as by our words. It really is an old argument, in both Eastern and Western religion. Eastern religions are pretty clear that your deeds determine your karma, and the kind of reincarnation you’re likely to have. They usually don’t give a lot of credit for just thinking good thoughts.

Judaism has always taught that the two great commandments are to love God with heart, mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Those teachings didn’t originate with Jesus. He learned them as a Jew. Even on their day of atonement, which they celebrate on September 15th this year, it is made clear that in order to make atonement with God, you must first make peace with those friends and neighbors you have wronged.

And Catholicism has also taught that it takes both faith and good works – plus a little grace – to be saved, and that the grace is most likely to come to those who have done good works. All of these teachings came from times when the vast majority of people were illiterate, and almost all teaching was done through stories passed down from generation to generation.

But after the printing press was invented and people began reading, things changed. Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation nearly 500 years ago by teaching that we are saved by faith alone. We need to read the book, to know what we believe, and we are saved by faith alone without the necessity of doing the good works to earn it, he taught.

I’ve always thought Luther was dead wrong there. But since I’m one of those people who likes to read and think, I’ve also always hoped he might be right. It’s easy for me to slip into believing in salvation by bibliography. Like if I can just get all the footnotes in the right places, I’ll be ok.

Luckily, when I get that far gone, I usually wake up, or whomever I’m talking to will roll their eyes or doze off. Then I snap out of it and remember, again, that life is both bigger and better than books – even my books.

But I’m not alone here. Everywhere, I think, in all times and places, those who love to think about things have always been in danger of falling off of the world. It’s the special curse of intellectuals.

One of our oldest Western stories is about an early Greek philosopher who was walking around one day, head in the clouds, staring at the sky, when he fell into a well. For centuries afterwards, the Greeks told this story about those who think too much: people whose heads were so full of the heavens that they were of no earthly use.

It’s the same story we still tell about absent-minded professors, who forget where they left their hat or parked the car, or who drive to school without their shoes on.

We think over here, the world’s over there, and we lose touch with it as we get seduced by our thoughts. You know what I’m talking about!

It’s the story of thinking rather than doing, faith rather than works. It comes out again and again in some of the jokes about intellectuals.

A friend who taught undergraduate philosophy courses told me that every year, her students’ very favorite story was the one she told about another great intellectual, the French philosopher Rene Descartes, whose most famous line was “I think, therefore I am.”

One night, Descartes went to a fine restaurant, and each time the waiter suggested another course, Descartes ordered it until he was so full he could hardly move. When the waiter returned to ask if he would like to order dessert, Descartes said “I think not” – and he disappeared.

Sometimes I think that’s the abiding fear of people who think too much. We’re afraid that if we stop thinking we’ll disappear. As though thinking were enough. As though faith is enough, as though it isn’t really necessary to spend time in the world after all. We tend to follow Martin Luther’s goofy idea in this, whether we’ve ever been inside a Lutheran church or not. This tendency to over-intellectualize shows in some of the best jokes about Unitarians, too.

I’m remembering a famous scene from the television series “Welcome Back, Kotter” from twenty or thirty years ago. Someone had been hurt, or was lying unconscious. One person shouted “Get him a priest!” Another said “He’s a Unitarian.” “Oh,” said the first, “then find him a math teacher!”

And the great joke about what you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah’s Witness: Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason. In a perverse sort of way, I think we like these stories, because they imply that we’re smarter than the average armadillo, and we like thinking that religion is about being smarter, rather than being more whole and authentic.

But there’s another side to these jokes, another side to the idea that just faith, just thinking, is enough to make a religion or a life out of, and it isn’t always funny. Maybe you’ve had the experience of running into someone who didn’t live in their head, and whose down-to-earth style brought you up short, and made you question the incompleteness of your intellectualizing. I certainly have, and I love these experiences, because they always teach me something and help me grow.

About a year ago I had a sobering experience in this area. I was preaching in Fort Worth, and went a couple days early to have some time with my colleague Diana and her sister Georgia’s family. We were guests at Georgia’s home in Ponder, Texas. Ponder is a small town (about 450) north of Fort Worth, known for a great Texas restaurant (The Ranchman’s), and the bank that “Bonnie and Clyde” robbed in the movie of thirty years ago. (They also have a great bumper sticker that just says “Ponder, Texas – Just Think About It!”) Georgia owns the bank, it’s where I sleep when I visit.

We were all sitting and rocking on Georgia’s front porch – it’s what you do in Ponder – and Diana and I were heavy into talking about work: how to talk to Unitarian churches about giving money to the church, since we were both getting ready for our church’s annual pledge drive.

Georgia belongs to a fundamentalist Baptist church, I think it’s in the holiness movement. Diana and I had been talking for about ten minutes when we realized we had left Georgia completely out of the conversation, and were ignoring her on her own front porch. Diana said something about not meaning to be rude, but thought Georgia probably wasn’t very interested in this topic.

Georgia allowed as how she had been listening in, but was very confused. “I just can’t imagine having to plan tactics to talk to people about supporting the church,” she said. “Each week when I go to church, I put a $100 bill in the collection plate. If I don’t have money that week then I don’t, but usually I do. I figure if we don’t support it, who will?” I don’t mean to be offensive here, but I honestly don’t understand how ministers could be confused about this!”

Georgia’s little church has sent their youth to Montana for a summer to help Blackfoot Indians clean and repair the homes on their reservations. They’ve done this for years, the church pays for it. They’ve also paid to send youth into Mexico for two or three weeks at a time to do the same for needy people there. And one of Georgia’s daughters has had two trips to Thailand, where she spent two months teaching English to Thai adults. She went back again this summer. Thailand is 95% Theravada Buddhist, about 4% Muslim, less than 1% Christian. When I asked her daughter if she thought there was much chance of converting the Thais to Christianity, she seemed shocked and said no, they’re pretty happy being Buddhists. “Why are you doing it?” I asked. “In our church,” she said, “we were taught to serve, because faith without works is dead. Isn’t that what you teach at your church?” I lied, convincing myself that it was really just a “little white lie.”

To me, it was astounding that a little Baptist church could do such far-ranging good works. I don’t know what percentage of her pay Georgia is giving to her church, but it must be 15-20% or more. And she isn’t doing it because she’s scared of hell. Georgia isn’t scared of anything! She’s doing it because she can’t imagine ever doing otherwise. She’s doing it because she really believes that faith without works is dead, and that a religion without a spontaneously generous heart is a contradiction in terms.

I wasn’t raised that way. The Presbyterian churches of my youth never taught us to serve like that, and we never discussed money in church. We weren’t taught to believe we could make a positive difference in the lives of Indians in Montana, or strangers in Mexico, or in Thailand. I never belonged to a church that routinely sent its youth to other states and countries to lend a helping hand to people they have never met. In the churches I grew up in, we weren’t taught how to have generous hearts that open out to ourselves and others. So it’s something I had to grow into as an adult.

Why is this so hard for liberals when it seems so easy for Georgia’s church and other conservative churches? I think it’s because there’s an assumption in a religion just of faith, or thinking, that we haven’t examined, an assumption which is false. There’s a lot more to religion than just thinking or having discussion groups.

Liberal religion often acts like it’s only for adults, like people are already finished by the time they arrive, like their character is already formed, and all they need to do is discuss interesting ideas. Salvation by faith, salvation by thinking, we think therefore we are. But that’s not true. We’re not finished. We come to church partly to get finished, to learn and experience more of the activities and involvements that can make us more complete people.

A healthy church is the best place we have to develop a whole range of sensitivities and skills that make us more complete people. And while faith – thinking – plays an important part, it doesn’t play the biggest part. The biggest part of becoming whole comes from doing, from works.

Faith without works, thinking without doing and being, are dead because they can’t give us the depth and breadth of life we need. The form of today’s service was unusual because its real message came in the prayer. The sermon was designed to flesh out the prayer. Now see if this morning’s prayer makes a different kind of sense to you:

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think.

Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships that might, with our help, expand our souls and our worlds.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us toward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.

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© Davidson Loehr

15 June 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON

One of my favorite discussions of religion happened some years back with a group of Presbyterians. Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and most others, as you may know, say all the same things about their uniqueness as a group that UUs do. You’ll hear them say that steering a bunch of them is like herding cats, you’ll hear them say things like “Presbyterians are all like that,” “What would you expect of a bunch of Lutherans?” or “Nobody tells a Baptist what to believe!” and the rest.

About fifteen years ago, I belonged to an ecumenical ministers’ group. About thirty or forty of us met together every Thursday for lunch, and our churches took turns hosting the lunches, so we got to meet a nice variety of people from other religions – mostly the women who prepared and served the lunches. We were visiting a small rural Presbyterian church one Thursday, and before lunch I overheard a small group of Presbyterian women talking. They were trashing Catholics or Baptists, and one of them said “Well, I’m glad we’re Presbyterians!” After a little silence, a second woman said “We’re not supposed to be Presbyterians. We’re supposed to be Christians.” After more silence, another said “Even that sounds arrogant. We’re supposed to love one another, that’s all.”

There is a whole graduate-level course in the difference between religion and a special club in that little interchange. Social clubs are about who we are, what we believe, what is distinctive about us. So this includes political parties, fraternities and sororities, college boosters, and parts of all religions. But these identities are always about who we are. I think of them as roosters crowing to draw attention to themselves. They’re not really doing anything, just crowing.

But religion has always been very different. It isn’t about who we are or what we believe. It’s about what we owe to others, to the world, how we are commanded to behave, like the third Presbyterian woman knew. Religion is always about trying to get people to seek a higher identity than the ones we usually seek. Left alone, we identify with ourselves, or with our club, our class, our kind of people, our political party, fraternity or sorority, even with the sports team we root for. These identities can be so powerful people will kill or die for them, as has happened a few times in world soccer matches.

That Presbyterian discussion about the sacred and the profane reminded me of a bible passage, and a movie made about that bible passage. The bible passage is in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus says, “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” (Matthew 7:9, NRSV)

And the movie, which is one of the favorite movies of many who have seen it, is a picture that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1988. It’s a Danish film with subtitles, about a small religious group whose favorite Biblical question was “Who, when your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” Yet the movie showed it was this dour little group that was doing just that. They taught conformity to their style, they really just worshiped their way of being. Even the bread they served at their meals was stale.

Who offers a stone to people who ask for bread? Lots of people, and lots of groups. It’s what the first two Presbyterians were offering: club membership rather than a transformed life and world. All you have to offer is being called a Presbyterian or a Christian, a Unitarian Universalist or a Muslim? Those are stones, not bread. And it became clear when the third woman spoke and said they were just supposed to love one another, just that. There was bread. Manna, bread from heaven, bread for the soul and for the soul of the world.

Do you see and feel the difference? It matters so much!

I want to use another word to talk about the difference between honest religion and lesser identities like club or denominational identities. It’s about the different kinds of authority that religion and clubs, political parties or social groups have. These latter, the social and political clubs, have only the authority of their group. They say “This is true because we say it is, and if you don’t agree you need to join another club or church or party. If you don’t like our truth, join the club down the street.” Political parties are not concerned with the truth as much as they are with toeing the party line, and the same is true of all religions at their most superficial level. It’s always about them: so Presbyterians are people who say they believe this but not that; Catholics believe that but not this. It’s never about their character, the kind of people they are, how they treat others. Religious wars and heresy trials are never about character or behavior, always about public profession of the beliefs demanded by the club with the club.

Religious truth must always rest on what is called ontological truth. Sorry for the two-dollar word, but it means a truth that is not determined by what we do or don’t believe, not determined by any authority. Saying something is an ontological truth is saying this is really the way life is, taken deeply, whether we like it or not. It is the only authority an honest religion can ever claim. Every religion I know has a way of saying that the quality of our life is determined largely by the quality of the values we’re living out, and that the focus isn’t on how special we are, but whether we love one another, especially those who are different from us.

The Greeks had a formula for this that I’ve always loved:

Plant a thought, reap an action;

plant an action, reap a habit;

plant a habit, reap a character;

plant a character, reap a destiny.

The Greeks believed that the authority for living well is written in the depths of the human condition, understood rightly, and that we must try to live this way or pay the price. This is so similar to the messages of Taoism, Buddhism, almost all religions. Some religions make some of the eternal dynamics and values into gods, to indicate that they are powerful and persistent and must always be dealt with. This is one way to understand the whole pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses: projections of natural and psychological dynamics that have always been with us, that frame the possibilities of living.

And the task of living wisely is the task of Zeus: to mediate between competing desires and demands, in service of a balanced life directed toward serving the greater good of ourselves and others. What is the prize for this? It is salvation by character, it is personal and communal authenticity.

You can’t get that second-hand. You can’t get it by joining a club, a denomination or a church, or putting fish named “Jesus” on your car trunk. You only get it by doing the self-examination and the work. It’s free, but it isn’t cheap.

And, as every religion I know teaches, there is a penalty for not taking our lives this seriously. Hinduism and Buddhism have you coming back until you get it right. Taoism and many nature religions talk about being out of touch with the essential balance of life, saying you pay the penalty of a diminished and less connected life. Western religions talk about Hell as a place for those who failed worst. But you don’t have to think in supernatural terms. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t think in supernatural terms.

I’ve quoted a paragraph here before from my favorite Western religious thinker, the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Movie critics say the movie “Babette’s Feast” was all about Kierkegaard’s ideas, too; and it was certainly shot through with them. He didn’t think you could fool yourself, others and life forever. He thought there was a price to pay for identifying only with clubs, churches, denominations – Lutheran, in his case. It was a kind of existential Judgment Day he called “the Midnight Hour.” It could come in the morning when your face looks back at you from the mirror and says “Who are you? Why weren’t you your more true self?” –

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself.” (from Either/Or, in A Kierkegaard Anthology edited by Robert Bretall, Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 99)

When something posing as an adequate identity short-circuits the process by giving people prizes simply for being Christian, Unitarian Universalist or Republican, then it has become a betrayal of the religious calling that’s lost beneath the shallower rewards of a group identity.

And I want to persuade you that the difference between liberal religion and a religion called UUism defined by the seven principles is the difference between religion and a social club, a political party, a secular or cultural identity. It is the difference between the authority of life taken deeply, and the authority of a club.

Now how did this brand-new faith called Unitarian Universalism, defined by those seven principles, come about? This isn’t hard to see. The UUA is funding an advertising campaign in Kansas City costing about a quarter of a million dollars, to establish brand-name recognition for UU churches in a city where almost nobody has ever heard of them. One of the women working with the project called me a few weeks ago to say that while more visitors are coming to their churches, the visitors want to know what the religion is, and when she shows them the seven principles they just roll their eyes and often don’t return. “I don’t like them either,” she said, “but it’s all we’ve got.”

They have brand-name recognition, but they don’t have a product to sell, which means a lot of the money is probably wasted. People are coming asking for spiritual bread, and feeling like they’re being offered stones. Even the woman offering the stones is aware that something is missing. That something might be called religion.

One of the slogans used in this billboard campaign is very helpful in understanding what the problem is. That billboard reads, “Many religions, one faith.” Look what they are saying – and saying honestly, I think. There are many religions in our churches, we all know that. You can be Christian, atheist, Buddhist, wiccan, whatever you like. But then there is this “one faith.” The “one faith” that they call Unitarian Universalism. This means that the “one faith” is not a religion. And it sounds like that “one faith” trumps the religions, is the higher category that defines everyone who joins the churches, no matter what they may personally believe. Where did this “one faith” come from?

Let’s look at the origins of UUism – the faith defined by the seven principles. We don’t have to go back very far, it’s a brand-new faith. But its origins were not religious.

When the Unitarians and the Universalists merged in 1961, both religions were moribund. American Universalism had the supernatural teaching that all dead people go to heaven, there is no hell. But people really haven’t worried or written much about where dead people might go for over a century, especially in liberal circles. By about 1900, the Universalists had an answer to a question few liberals were asking any more. Their last seminary closed in the 1970s (Crane, at Tufts University).

And the American Unitarianism of the 19th century as a bible-centered monotheistic religion was also about dead in liberal circles forty years ago. Most who came to our churches were asking their questions in scientific language, language about this life in this world, and they weren’t talking much about God.

Both Unitarians and Universalists, however, were cultural and political liberals, usually supporting the same individual-rights causes. So there was a common identity, it just wasn’t religious.

So as soon as the two religions merged 1961, the question of what on earth they believed arose. Some of you will remember this arising in the 1970s, when Unitarians were saying “The problem is that our children don’t know what to tell their friends they believe!” That, for the record, was a lie. That wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was that the adults, including many of the ministers, no longer knew what they believed, or even what was worth believing. They were really in about the same nebulous place as most of the liberal culture in America – as they still are.

Imagine what might have happened if Unitarians, 25 years ago when they realized they didn’t know what was worth believing, had actually become leaders and asked religious questions. They might have used some of their grant money to bring together theologians and religion scholars from around the world, to discover common themes and common beliefs that underlie all the world’s religions. They might have discovered that there is a core of beliefs that have marked people of good character in all times and places, and might have made those beliefs central – not to their shared cultural habits, but to their religion – hopefully, something with a name shorter than eleven syllables.

Theologians, sociologists of religion, cultural anthropologists, existential psychologists, historians, philosophers – think of the panels of experts, poets, religious thinkers from around the world that could have been assembled! And the results might have marked a watershed in religious history. The first time people might actually have looked beyond confessionalism, beyond religious jargon, to ask what on earth really is worth believing, what ideals must command the attention of all good people. I’m not exaggerating, I think it could have been revolutionary, both for our churches and for others.

But nothing like that happened. Nobody was interested in it. The early 1980s were very self-absorbed times in our country – it was the “Me” generation – and our people reflected that as products of the times. Also, as a religious movement that didn’t have a clear religion, there was a lot of defensiveness, and almost no faith that a set of real and necessary beliefs could be discovered.

So instead of looking outward, they looked inward. Instead of conducting a study, they took a poll. It was a poll taken to ask what current members in the early 1980s happened to believe. Not what they should believe, not what things could be argued to be most profoundly true, not what beliefs have been accepted through history as necessary in helping to form people of good character. No religious questions were asked, no religious scholars were consulted. They just took a poll. They held a mirror up to themselves to admire the beliefs they happened to bring into church with them, since they weren’t clear what beliefs worth having anyone would pick up in church.

What such a poll had to reveal, and what it did reveal, were the secular assumptions that cultural liberals of the early 1980s brought into church with them, the beliefs they had absorbed from the broader liberal culture. And the principles have been used, since then, to describe “our kind of people” – not their religion, which is at best a secondary concern, but the secular faith of cultural liberalism: the “one faith” that constitutes the ersatz new faith called “Unitarian Universalism.”

“UUism” is the religion for our masses, just as Presbyterianism is the religion for those masses. It was created by people who wanted to be able to speak for their masses, people who were frustrated by religious pluralism and wanted, finally, “one faith.” That is only likely to happen in a mass religion, a group faith. And mass religions have a different faith than religions do.

The faith of religions for the masses is the faith that there is safety in numbers and security and identity in belonging to a group of like-minded people. The faith of honest religion is fundamentally different; it is the faith that life really does have some abiding truths that can guide, strengthen and comfort us if only we will listen, hear, and obey them, even when they put us at odds with our group – which they usually will.

Club membership, society identity, religion for the masses, is easy and secure, and can feel really good if what you seek is acceptance without work, just for being you in a group of people just like you. It’s the feeling a Democrat gets at a Democratic convention, but – curiously! – doesn’t get at a Republican convention. It’s the feeling a Republican gets at a Republican convention, but – again, curiously – not at a Democratic convention. This is because political parties, like denominations and other group identities, aren’t in the pursuit of truth; they’re in pursuit of conformity with a party line that can bestow an identity on their kind of people.

I am not and have never been a “Unitarian Universalist,” though I’ve identified with the American Unitarian tradition. But even as an outsider to this new “faith” called UUism, it’s easy to see that it is in trouble, lost in the woods. Even Bill Sinkford, the president of the UUA, has said publicly that the principles are so empty and boring that nobody would want them read by their bedside in a hospital. This isn’t just my rant: even the president of the association knows that the emperor has no clothes – and suspects it isn’t a real emperor, either. That’s the definition of stones, not bread. Who would give stones to people asking for bread? The UUA would and does.

I imagine people coming to the UUA twenty years from now, or even one week from now, saying “We came to you asking for bread, and you gave us this silly faith based on principles that came from taking a poll. How could you do that? We trusted you to take us seriously. How could you do that?”

It is sad and frustrating to have watched the new and vapid “faith” called Unitarian Universalism replace the focus and purpose of an honest religion with such self-absorbed pap. Because bad faith drives out good faith. It’s also sad to observe that when a religion is dumbed down to the self-descriptive boasts of its members, people follow it to that lower level because they trusted their leaders to lead them in the ways of righteousness and wholeness, and to feed them bread rather than stones.

This isn’t finished. The mistakes made 20 years ago through lack of vision and courage are related to the fact that the adult membership of the UUA has declined 44% since 1970, and has declined 5% per decade since 1980 relative to the population of the U.S. [1]

The lack of religious vision and courage are also related to the president of the UUA saying that the seven principles of the “one faith” of UUism are so hollow and boring that nobody would want them read by their hospital bedside – even as we spend more money creating religious education programs based on them. It is material for a Garrison Keillor joke, and might be funny if we weren’t paying for it – in more currencies than we care to count.

So this isn’t finished. And I can’t finish it today with one critique. This “movement” – the one that’s moving backwards – is lost in the woods, led there marching to the chant of the “one faith” composed of seven principles no one can remember. The way out, I believe, will not be under the banner of “Unitarian Universalism.” It will only come, I think, when individuals, ministers, churches and leaders (probably in that order) forego the simple comforts of club membership for the engaging challenges of the same spirit of honest religion that has animated every great religion, every serious quest for noble character, in history.

I think a motto we use in this church could help the UUA shift their vision toward something that might point toward an exit from the woods. Not “Many religions, one faith,” but – as you see printed on all our orders of service – “One church. Many beliefs.”

The many beliefs are variations on timeless themes. Those themes are the range of commandments that have always stirred the human soul to higher and nobler aspirations, to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. They sing through the prayers of every honest religion of history, and are recognizable immediately:

– Don’t to do others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.

– Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your god.

– Whatsoever things are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, or good report – think on these things

– Be a blessing unto the world

– Speak from the Buddha-seed within you to the Buddha-seed within others.

– A good man is a bad man’s teacher; a bad man is a good man’s job.

While these themes are legion, they are all sung in the key of honest religion, not the self-absorption of smaller identities. We know them by their sound and the seriousness with which they take both us and all of life. No two people will find exactly the same combination of variations on these themes to find their own way out of the woods, so though we can be one church – meaning a sangha, a place where religious concerns are valued higher than lesser concerns – there must be many beliefs, many variations on these themes. The variations are negotiable; the themes are not.

The way out of the woods can, I believe, only be walked along paths of religious beliefs, not the mass recitations of groups in love mostly with their kind of people. It is an unending journey, this succession of paths out of the woods, and along the way are many stones to trip us up. But there is also food for this trip, nourishment for head and heart, body and soul. We’ll be serving – well, you know.

————————-

[1] “UUism” and its growth or decline, compared with the growth in the US population since 1970:

in 1970, UUs (167,583) were .081727% of the US population (205,052,000)

in 1980, UUs (139,052) were .06138% of the US population (226,545,805)

in 1990, UUs (145,250) were .0584% of the US population (248,709,873)

in 2000, UUs (155,449) were .05524% of the US population (281,421,906)

The 2000 figures show UUs have lost over 32% since 1970 (.05524% is 67.6% of .081727%) They’ve lost 10% since 1980, 5% since 1990.

Here are some more ways to play with those figures:

Since 1970, the US population has increased by 37.244%, while UU adult members have declined by over 7.2%. If UUs had kept up with US population growth, there would be about 229,998 adult members today instead of the 155,000+ we have. So we are about 44.5% behind where we would need to be, to have kept pace with US population growth. And we’re about 45% behind where we’d need to be actually to say we had GROWN in the past thirty years.

(Figures obtained from the UUA and the Internet.)

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© Davidson Loehr

June 1, 3003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INTRODUCTION

I began writing soliloquies for the characters in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son in 1988, as a more creative way to explore the many depths and insights of great stories. As all who write stories learn, the characters have their own integrity, and once you’ve found it, the characters determine what they will say, not the storyteller. So the exercise of trying to put yourself inside the spirit of different characters is almost always eye-opening, and the stories usually lead to unexpected places. This was especially true with these four soliloquies. I wrote them in order of increasing difficulty – the older brother’s story is the easiest to tell, because everyone identifies with his complaints. In 1990, I wrote the second installment, a soliloquy for the fatted calf. This began almost as a joke, I expected the story to be very simply, whiny or angry, and straightforward. I was astonished when I found that the fatted calf had a voice and a perspective, and I was a little shocked to see what it had to say. I’m not aware that I had ever seen the story in this way before.

But after 1990, I left the project. Something about the last two characters felt harder, and felt like it would take a turn I didn’t know how to make. So it wasn’t until 2003, fifteen years after I’d begun the project, that I had two Sundays in a row to fill, and decided it would be a good time to finish what I had begun so long ago. The father was hard to write partly because I had to forget the confessional spin traditionally put on it: that the “father” is really God, so we must build this part up to be wonderful and wise. When I could finally just see him as the father of these two sons, he turned out to have a very different perspective on the story: less wise, perhaps, but much more human.

But the hardest to write, and the most surprising, was the soliloquy for the Prodigal Son. It has always seemed to me that his father’s actions put him in a tough place, living out his life among people who thought he was a shiftless cheat. As I got into him, it became clear to me that this parable – at least as I read it – contains the essential message of the man Jesus, at least as I understand it. And the lack of an ending to the story also seems to have been true to Jesus’ message: that this revolution can not be finished by one person or one God, that it is a conspiracy against the ways of the world into which we are all invited. This gave me a new appreciation for how unpleasant and unwelcome a message like this would be, in any time and place.

I don’t mean to inflict these soliloquies on you as the only way to speak through the material. I invite you into the story yourselves, to find for yourself the voices that seem to speak to and through you. And you may want to add more characters to the tale: a mother, for instance. For me, this was a spiritual exploration of the message of the man Jesus and some of its unsettling implications, as well as an exploration of my own spirit, and a challenge to my own beliefs. All great stories contain buried treasure, I invite you to dig here for a bit. – Davidson Loehr, June 2003

READINGS: Christian and Buddhist versions of the Prodigal Son Parable

I decided to contrast Jesus’ story with an older Buddhist version of a very similar situation. The two thinkers, and two religions, see things very differently, and their wisdom points in quite different directions, as you’ll see.

1. The Christian version comes from the gospel of Luke:

There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.” And he divided his living between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.” And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his servants, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” And they began to make merry. (Luke 15: 11-24, RSV)

2. A Buddhist Version of the Prodigal Son story

A young man left his father and ran away. For long he dwelt in other countries, for ten, or twenty, or fifty years. The older he grew, the more needy he became. Wandering in all directions to seek clothing and food, he unexpectedly approached his native country. The father had searched for his son all those years in vain and meanwhile had settled in a certain city. His home became very rich; his goods and treasures were fabulous.

At this time, the poor son, wandering through village after village and passing through countries and cities, at last reached the city where his father had settled. The father had always been thinking of his son, yet, although he had been parted from him over fifty years, he had never spoken of the matter to anyone. He only pondered over it within himself and cherished regret in his heart, saying, “Old and worn out I am. Although I own much wealth – gold, silver, and jewels, granaries and treasuries overflowing – I have no son. Some day my end will come and my wealth will be scattered and lost, for I have no heir. If I could only get back my son and commit my wealth to him, how contented and happy would I be, with no further anxiety!”

Meanwhile the poor son, hired for wages here and there, unexpectedly arrived at his father’s house. Standing by the gate, he saw from a distance his father seated on a lion-couch, his feet on a jeweled footstool, and with expensive strings of pearls adorning his body, revered and surrounded by priests, warriors, and citizens, attendants and young slaves waiting upon him right and left. The poor son, seeing his father having such great power, was seized with fear, regretting that he had come to this place. He reflected, “This must be a king, or someone of royal rank, it is impossible for me to be hired here. I had better go to some poor village in search of a job, where food and clothing are easier to get. If I stay here long, I may suffer oppression.” Reflecting thus, he rushed away.

Meanwhile the rich elder on his lion-seat had recognized his son at first glance, and with great joy in his heart reflected, “Now I have someone to whom I may pass on my wealth. I have always been thinking of my son, with no means of seeing him, but suddenly he himself has come and my longing is satisfied. Though worn with years, I yearn for him.”

Instantly he sent off his attendants to pursue the son quickly and fetch him back. Immediately the messengers hasten forth to seize him. The poor son, surprised and scared, loudly cried his complaint, “I have committed no offense against you, why should I be arrested?” The messengers all the more hastened to lay hold of him and brought him back. Following that, the poor son, thought that although he was innocent he would be imprisoned, and that now he would surely die. He became all the more terrified, fainted away and fell on the ground. The father, seeing this from a distance, sent word to the messengers, “I have no need for this man. Do not bring him by force. Sprinkle cold water on his face to restore him to consciousness and do not speak to him any further.” Why? The father, knowing that his son’s disposition was inferior, knowing that his own lordly position had caused distress to his son, yet convinced that he was his son, tactfully did not say to others, “This is my son.”

A messenger said to the son, “I set you free, go wherever you will.” The poor son was delighted, thus obtaining the unexpected release. He arose from the ground and went to a poor village in search of food and clothing. Then the elder, desiring to attract his son, set up a device. Secretly he sent two men, sorrowful and poor in appearance, saying, “Go and visit that place and gently say to the poor man, ‘There is a place for you to work here. We will hire you for scavenging, and we both also will work along with you.'” Then the two messengers went in search of the poor son and, having found him, presented him the above proposal. The poor son, having received his wages in advance, joined them in removing a refuse heap.

His father, beholding the son, was struck with compassion for him. One day he saw at a distance, through the window, his son’s figure, haggard and drawn, lean and sorrowful, filthy with dirt and dust. He took off his strings of jewels, his soft attire, and put on a coarse, torn and dirty garment, smeared his body with dust, took a basket in his right hand, and with an appearance fear-inspiring said to the laborers, “Get on with your work, don’t be lazy.” By such means he got near to his son, to whom he afterwards said, “Ay, my man, you stay and work here, do not leave again. I will increase your wages, give whatever you need, bowls, rice, wheat-flour, salt, vinegar, and so on. Have no hesitation; besides there is an old servant whom you can get if you need him. Be at ease in your mind; I am, as it were, your father; do not be worried again. Why? I am old and advanced in years, but you are young and vigorous; all the time you have been working, you have never been deceitful, lazy, angry or grumbling. I have never seen you, like the other laborers, with such vices as these. From this time forth you will be as my own begotten son.”

The elder gave him a new name and called him a son. But the poor son, although he rejoiced at this happening, still thought of himself as a humble hireling. For this reason, for twenty years he continued to be employed in scavenging. After this period, there grew mutual confidence between the father and the son. He went in and out and at his ease, though his abode was still in a small hut.

Then the father became ill and, knowing that he would die soon, said to the poor son, “Now I possess an abundance of gold, silver, and precious things, and my granaries and treasuries are full to overflowing. I want you to understand in detail the quantities of these things, and the amounts that should be received and given. This is my wish, and you must agree to it. Why? Because now we are of the same mind. Be increasingly careful so that there be no waste.” The poor son accepted his instruction and commands, and became acquainted with all the goods. However, he still had no idea of expecting to inherit anything, his abode was still the original place and he was still unable to abandon his sense of inferiority.

After a short time had again passed, the father noticed that his son’s ideas had gradually been enlarged, his aspirations developed, and that he despised his previous state of mind. Seeing that his own end was approaching, he commanded his son to come, and gathered all his relatives, the kings, priests, warriors, and citizens. When they were all assembled, he addressed them saying, “Now, gentlemen, this is my son, begotten by me. It is over fifty years since, from a certain city, he left me and ran away to endure loneliness and misery. His former name was so-and-so and my name was so-and-so. At that time in that city I sought him sorrowfully. Suddenly I met him in this place and regained him. This is really my son and I am really his father. Now all the wealth which I possess belongs entirely to my son, and all my previous disbursements and receipts are known by this son.” When the poor son heard these words of his father, great was his joy at such unexpected news, and thus he thought, “Without any mind for, or effort on my part, these treasures now come to me.”

World-honored One! The very rich elder is the Tathagata, and we are all as the Buddha’s sons. The Buddha has always declared that we are his sons. But because of the three sufferings, in the midst of births-and-deaths we have borne all kinds of torments, being deluded and ignorant and enjoying our attachment to things of no value. Today the World-honored One has caused us to ponder over and remove the dirt of all diverting discussions of inferior things. In these we have hitherto been diligent to make progress and have got, as it were, a day’s pay for our effort to reach nirvana. Obtaining this, we greatly rejoiced and were contented, saying to ourselves, “For our diligence and progress in the Buddha-law what we have received is ample”. The Buddha, knowing that our minds delighted in inferior things, by his tactfulness taught according to our capacity, but still we did not perceive that we are really Buddha’s sons. Therefore we say that though we had no mind to hope or expect it, yet now the Great Treasure of the King of the Law has of itself come to us, and such things that Buddha-sons should obtain, we have all obtained. (Saddharmapundarika Sutra 4)

I. The Older Brother’s Soliloquy

My father has spoken of justice and of love, and claims to have played the one off against the other, letting love win out. He makes it all sound so easy, as though anyone with a warm heart would have done the same. But his justice is too weak, his love too soft, and he betrays them both, as he also betrays me.

He says he is a gatekeeper, and his task is to choose life and let it come through the gate and not shut it out. And so are we all gatekeepers, and so are we all charged with choosing life and letting it through. But first we must recognize it; and we must recognize it in its largest form, not its smallest; and in its most responsible incarnation, not its cheapest.

To choose life means to be able to make some distinctions: some distinctions which are necessary even to recognize life. And this my father has not done. This is where his big and soft heart has done long-term harm for the sake of short-term good.

It is true that both justice and love are needed in order to be a proper gatekeeper, but they are not as my father has understood them. For justice to survive, there must be fairness, there must be balance, and when necessary retribution. It is harsh but true that our decisions and our actions determine the quality of our lives, and the worth of our lives both to ourselves and to others. It is also harsh but true that lives can be squandered, even wasted. It happens every day, you see it all around you. And though it may be a cruel fact of life, it is still a fact of life, and there is a terribly important kind of justice in that.

For if our decisions do not matter, if our actions do not matter, if anything we do can simply be forgiven, then what good are ethics? Why teach our children to do good at all? Why not simply teach them how to play upon the soft hearts of others for forgiveness? Why care about education and religion and laws to help people become responsible and generous citizens if it does not really matter? If it is always an option simply to slough off the very responsibility on which we all depend and follow our own selfish whims, knowing that all will be forgiven anyway, then why even have words for goodness, justice and truth?

Words like duty and responsibility may seem cold and hard words, but they are not. They are deeply caring words, for without them neither fairness nor justice could exist. And one charged with being a gatekeeper of life cannot shrug off these notions with impunity, for without fairness and justice it is not life that is being served, but the special privilege of a select few.

Justice requires doing our part. Unless we do our part, there will be no whole, for the whole is made up of all of us doing our part to keep it together and make it work for ourselves, for others, and for those who will come after us. This is what is at stake in justice, and justice is what my father has betrayed.

But he betrays love too, even though he thinks he acts in its behalf. For his heart is too soft and mushy, and he confuses love with mere sentimentality. He loses the distinctions which real love demands. And there must be distinctions. No one can love everything and everyone, for that is not love at all, but only an insipid kind of indifference which permits everything because nothing is sacred to it. A parent who endorses everything is as irresponsible and as destructive as a physician who can not tell a nose from a boil or an arm from a deadly tumor and so lets them all grow together until the sick parts have at last killed the healthy ones because those who were charged to protect life did not make the needed distinctions.

This is why not all things can be forgiven, and why we must let even those we love pay the cost of their mistakes. Real love must know what is to be loved and what is not to be loved, and to make that difference important. That is a gatekeeper’s job. That is what is involved in choosing life rather than death, health rather than sickness. And that is what my father did not do.

Listen: to choose life is to choose the most responsible forms of it, not the least, and not to let your fondness for a part be the cause of your harming the whole. You cannot isolate one life from all the rest and act only on its behalf without regard for the implications of your act. For human life is not an individual thing: it is communal, collective. It is like a giant tapestry, in which we are all parts of the fragile weave. We may each be but a thread; but without that thread the whole fabric is weakened. Gatekeepers must keep the fabric from being weakened, lest it tear and be ruined.

Life is like music. But it is not like singing a solo, it is like being part of a whole ensemble. We must all play part of the melody, the harmony, or the rhythm, or the whole piece will suffer, and all will suffer who might otherwise have enjoyed it. You cannot simply sit out and refuse to play your part, or you hurt all of the others who have come in good faith and generosity to play their parts. And to reward the one who refuses to weave or to play is to harm the entire tapestry, the entire piece of music, because of your short-sighted preference for one non-player for whom your heart had a soft spot.

We have a supreme worth, but our worth consists in our participation, not our withdrawl. Our worth consists in our being a part of the whole, not being apart from it. And the truth which both justice and love must acknowledge is that some lives are more worthy than others. Some lives are more deserving of respect, and some deserve only our criticism, our correction, or our censure.

It is not easy to be the gatekeeper my father thinks himself to be. It means loving the whole more than loving the parts, and when necessary protecting the whole from one or more indifferent parts, no matter the cost. For where all is forgiven, nothing is holy. And to do disservice to the holy, as my father has done, is not only irresponsible and uncaring, but blasphemous as well. This was my father’s sin, this was his betrayal.

Now hear my story, and see if you do not agree.

I have worked here all of my life, and have been a faithful son and a faithful worker since I can remember. Since my brother left, it has been harder, with only the two of us to share the work, but we have done it. We have each worked harder in order to carry the weight which my brother dropped at our feet, but that is what life is like, and that is what we must do. Still, it has not been painful drudgery. There is a kind of joy in earning your bread, and contributing to the lives of others. Our wheat feeds many people, just as we are protected by the clothing some of them have made, made comfortable by the furniture others have made, and kept dry by the house which still others have built for us. We are part of a community, and there is a fullness in that.

And there is an end of the work to look forward to, at the coming harvest. That is why we have been fattening the calf for these many months, as a reward for those who have earned it.

Now what would you feel if you had returned home today as I did, tired and hungry, to find the makings of a great feast? “What happens here?” I asked a servant, and it was then and in that way that I learned that my wastrel of a brother had finally returned home, his money squandered and his honor gone, and that my father had been so overjoyed by this shameful return that he had killed our fatted calf. Our fatted calf, the one we had raised to fill our bellies at the harvest festival-that is the calf which was killed. There will be no fatted calf for the harvest festival this year. Those who have earned a feast will go without while it is spent instead on the one who did nothing, earned nothing, and made life harder for those of us who stayed behind. And to see that calf slaughtered for this feast to honor that brother who did those things-it is something I will not abide.

Do not tell me that you would not be outraged if this happened to you, for you would be. And I was outraged, and flew into a fit. “Come in,” the servant had the gall to say to me, “your father has bid me welcome you in.”

“Never!” I screamed back at him. “I will not come in through that door. It is unclean. It has been made unholy and unhospitable by my brother and by my father, and by this whole offensive feast. If I cannot stop this sacrilege, I can at least refuse to endorse it. I can at least preserve my integrity. My father may do this to me, but he cannot make me participate in it.

Well, that is my story, those are the things I have been repeating to myself as I sit out here on this hill, looking across at my house where my brother parades around in his robe and his ring and my father sanctions the whole unjust mess in the name of a cheap and misguided love. And I know that of all the people who hear this story, most will take my side in it.

Ah, but now the finale: for here comes my father. He has come out of that cursed door. He has seen me, sitting here on the hill in my grand pout, and now he comes to fetch me. Well, there will be no surprises. I know him well, and know well what he will say.

“Come,” he will say, “to the feast.” “I will not,” I will answer, “for it is an unjust feast.”

“It is a feast of forgiveness and gratitude,” he will say, “not of justice.” “I will not,” I will say. “I do not care if it is a feast of forgiveness and gratitude, it is an unfair feast of forgiveness and gratitude, and I’ll have no part in it.”

And then, after a few more exchanges like this, my father will look at me in that look of his that I know so well, and he’ll kiss me on the cheek, look me in the eyes, and say: “the door is open, my son, and it can be no more than open. It is open for you and for your brother, as it has always been. There is a feast of life going on, to which you are invited. If you refuse, it will be only your own pettiness and anger which keep you out, and only your own bitterness which you shall taste. And so: come into the feast, or sit alone on this hillside and pout. But the door is open, you too are welcome, and you too are loved.”

He’ll turn, after that, and walk back to the house.

And then, I shall have to decide . . . .

II. The Fatted Calf’s Soliloquy

A fatted calf doesn’t have a lot of choices. The end is known from the beginning; for we will be sacrificed for something, and we do not get to choose what it will be. Our whole life gets its meaning from the celebration at the end of it, a celebration we never see. We have no story of our own; you hear about us only through the story told about the feast we are given to.

I was meant for a harvest feast. Many months ahead they began to fatten me. I didn’t mind; in fact, I liked it, because I ate so much better than all the other calves. I thought I was special; I suppose I was, in a way. Still, it was just a harvest feast they had in mind. They do it every year. Every year there is a harvest, and every year a calf is fattened for the occasion. It is always the same, I was just this year’s main course. Nothing special, just part of the annual cycle, as regular and indifferent as a machine, like all of Nature’s cycles.

You may not be very interested in my story, since it sounds so different from your own. And you are different from fatted calves, it is true. But we are much alike, too. For your life is also given for something. Your days and years, your energies and allegiances, are given over to something, and you serve it mostly without thinking about it, maybe without even being aware of it.

You serve a job, a career, an army, a country, another person, even a set of beliefs. So much of your life is defined by the things you give it for; your whole life is a kind of sacrifice offered to your gods large and small, to your values good and bad, even to your lusts, your greeds, your habits and your whims.

And you are fattened, too. You are fed differently according to what you serve, but you are fattened. They feed you money, power, popularity, success, recognition, a sense of purpose, a sense of place, a kind of inner satisfaction – that is the fattening you’re given while your life is spent on the things you serve with it.

And much of your story, like mine, will be told by the things you have served. In truth, you give more of yourself than you think. You serve well, even when you don’t serve wisely.

Yet in the end, how often it is that the things you serve do not serve you in return, but only take from you until at last they take your life. And then when the story is told, you are just left out, forgotten. You were just a little part in some kind of a giant game, or a play (whether comedy or tragedy), like the sacrifice of a fatted calf at an annual harvest.

This is where you are really not so different from me as you think. You may chatter about being master of your fate: but did you choose your sex and race, your family, your gifts and handicaps, your social and economic station, your country, or the times into which you were born? No, much of your play had already been written for you, and you have mostly just acted out your assigned part, just as I have.

A soldier commits his service, even his life, to the commands of his country. But he does not get to choose his war, whether it will be a popular or unpopular one, whether his sacrifices will be respected or reviled. His life hangs from threads controlled by others, and he does not choose what his life will be given to, though he knows it may be given to something, and the value of that something may not even be assessed until after he has died.

A woman may serve a business, playing in good faith the small part assigned to her, only learning at the end that it was an evil business after all; all of her good works were part of a bad story, and she will be defined by that story for the rest of her days.

You are as innocent as I, and often as powerless. So you are more like the fatted calf than you may like to think. And now perhaps you will be able to hear my story:

I was born anonymous, I lived anonymously, and I was scheduled to die the same way: as an extra, just another calf being used as calves have always been used, serving an end of no great or lasting significance to anyone. I went along as we always have, because a fatted calf doesn’t have many choices. And if everything had happened as it had been planned, you would never have heard of me. My life would have been given to a routine harvest feast on a small farm in an obscure country, and I would never have had a story to be told, for there is not much in a fatted calf’s life that is worth retelling.

I did not choose any of this. The meaning of my life was defined by the things that were chosen for me by others, by the larger play in which I was just a small part. And I was chosen to serve routine and anonymous things, things which never acknowledged or cherished me but only used me up.

So you see: that is why my story is worth telling. It is worth telling because I have a story. That’s the miracle of it: that I have a story at all! And it happened because someone came alive. A younger brother broke from the routine. He could not find himself in it. His heart, his soul, something could find no home in the routine he was expected to serve with his life. And in a burst of foolish young courage he broke free. He wasted all of his money, it is true. But he was searching, however awkwardly, for something with more life in it, for something to serve that might know his name, that might give him a more authentic life than the obedient security brought by just doing your duty.

He failed. He failed miserably. But in his failure there was a great awakening, and it made all the difference.

First the younger brother awoke, and came back home. And then his father awoke, and reached out to him – not with justice, but with forgiveness and love. That was the miracle. And with that miracle, a whole new world was born: a world with a gentleness and a wholeness that offend the workaday mind, as they have offended the older brother. But it is a world with more space to live, for those who are imperfect, who don’t find their true path on the first try. It is a world of grace and of hope for those who must fail before they can succeed – those who hope and pray for another chance.

In that moment of his father’s forgiveness, a new son was born, and a new world of possibilities, for all who can listen to this story and hear its message. Then suddenly there was something more important and more urgent than a harvest feast, for something sacred had broken into ordinary life, something with the power to transform it.

And the moment of its entry, the moment of the birth of a new son and a new world, must not be allowed to pass by without celebrating it. The birth of sacred possibilities in life must not be allowed to slide by with stopping to give thanks, without making all of life stop and look and hear and rejoice.

And so in place of a harvest feast there was a sacred feast; a holy meal; a communion. A meal not of food to be gulped down and forgotten, but of food consecrated to a holy purpose, food to be cherished and savored and never to disappear from memory. That is how this feast took place, this feast which has changed everyone who has ever truly understood it.

And I was a part of it! My life was changed by the choices others made. For now instead of being consumed by life and then forgotten, I have become a part of it all, and I will never be forgotten as long as this story is told and heard and cherished.

If a miracle is a gift of life beyond understanding, then a miracle happened here, you see? And I was a passive recipient of this miracle. The meaning of my life was changed forever because of the choices and the decisions made by others.

It’s ironic, but I could not tell my story to other fatted calves, for we have no choices, and could not elect to change what we shall serve with our lives even if we wanted to.

That is why I tell my story to you instead: because, you see, that is where we are so different. Fatted calves can not choose what we will serve with our lives. We cannot choose whether we shall serve something that gives our lives a sacred kind of glow, or whether we shall just serve something that drains our life from us until at last nothing is left of us, not even our story. A fatted calf doesn’t have many choices. But you do: you can choose.

III. The Father’s Soliloquy

PRAYER

How often we dispense justice rather than compassion. We give people what they deserve rather than what they need.

Someone we’ve wanted to get even with for months finally leaves an opening, and we rush for it.

Our partner embarrasses us, so we wait for our chance, knowing their weak spots better than anyone because they trust us. When the chance comes, we jump at it, they’re embarrassed, we feel vindicated, and the game continues.

We can’t score points on the boss, so we bring the frustration home, waiting for someone we can score on. Then we are on our guard, for we know they’ll try to get even.

How many times in our life has this kind of behavior described us? Giving people their due, making sure they get what they deserve, not letting them off the hook, showing them that what goes around comes around, while hoping we never get the same kind of humiliating justice visited upon us.

It is this world, this very recognizable human world, into which we must bring the harder lessons of religion, the voices of our more tender mercies. It is of this world and of ourselves that we ask whether this is the highest road we can travel, the most we can expect of ourselves or others.

Christians ask “What would Jesus do?” Jews say we are commanded to love God with all our heart and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourself. Buddhists ask whether we are acting from out of the Buddha seed within us, and recognizing the Buddha seed within others. Confucius would ask whether our actions let our society move with more grace, or less. And the Tao te Ching says the great secret of life is realizing that a bad person is a good person’s job, and a good person is a bad person’s teacher.

When we look anywhere that people have tried to take seriously the human condition, we find that most of the suffering we experience comes from the way we treat one another, and the ways in which we get even for the ways in which others have treated us.

Let us remind ourselves once more of things we have always known. That two wrongs don’t make a right, that peace almost always begins through the actions of the bigger person, the person of better character. That understanding is more grown-up than undermining, and that when we score points against another by demeaning them, those points are taken out of our own moral stock.

And then … then let us ask, even in those cases where a hard justice is due, whether we, our relationships and our world are better served by justice, or by compassion. By giving someone what they deserve, or forgiving their trespasses, in the faith that they are good people doing the best they can, and they could use a break rather than a breaking.

For as wise preachers have said forever, it is by giving that we can receive, by understanding that we can be understood, and by forgiving that we may be forgiven.

It is so hard to do. Let us find the strength within and around us to do what is best and most compassionate, when it would be so much easier merely to do what is right. We seek the moral strength for these higher callings, and pray for the courage to do not what is right, but what is best.

Amen.

The Father’s Soliloquy

Do you really wonder why I did it? I hardly know how to answer.

Maybe I wondered what God would want me to do, or remembered that I am his father and he’s my son. Maybe I felt some guilt, wondered what I might have done differently, how I might have been a better father.

Some people say we’re on our own, that our mistakes are our own fault and we must pay for them. Most of my friends say that. I don’t know what they mean. Everything I’ve done in my life I’ve done as part of a family, a people, a religion, part of the whole human race. You may say those connections are invisible; I say they have supported me my whole life. If we’re alone, it is everyone’s loss and everyone’s failure. We’re not alone. Who could say such a thing?

I think of how awful he looked when he returned. What sad, desperate eyes he had. I had never seen him so completely undone, forlorn, lost, hollow, without hope or joy. He no longer approached me as my son, he no longer felt like my son.

My neighbors say he asked for this. He demanded his inheritance in advance, demanded that I give him the money I would have left him if he’d waited until I died. It’s one of our laws; sons can do that. It almost never happens, of course. For it cuts all ties to the family forevermore. They may never again make any claims on their family if they do this. Yet my son did it, and he could; it’s the law.

But to let an impersonal law rip the warmth of my son not only out of my home but out of my heart? Who could allow such a thing? No one I would want to know, no one I would want to be.

When I looked in his eyes, I saw his whole life there, from the day that red little baby came, all the growing up years, all the million little memories a father has. Silly memories, many of them, you know, the things parents notice and won’t forget.

I remember when he was young how he would get scared when it thundered. “Oh,” I’d tell him, “that’s just God. He’s upset, worried about something. But don’t worry about him, he’ll get over it. You’ll see, in the morning he’ll be all sunny again.”

It was our little joke, We must have played that thunder joke a hundred times. I remember just a few years ago – it seems like yesterday – when we were out working in the field trying to get the animals fed, and it thundered something fierce. He ignored it for awhile, then suddenly he looked up from his work and shouted “Hey Lord, we’ve got troubles too, but you don’t see us griping. Get over it!”

God, he was such a burst of life, that boy! So different from his older brother. The older one has always been so serious, so responsible. All work. Maybe he was trying to be the other grown-up after his mother died, I don’t know. He’s so good, so decent, but so rule-bound. I keep hoping he’ll make space for a little gentleness, replace some compulsion with compassion.

My younger son is almost the opposite. Oh, he worked, he did his share, but for him it was never about the work. For him, life was about joy, not jobs.

Every year at the harvest festival he would ask why we couldn’t do this much more often, why we had to make work common and joy rare. I would explain that joy is all the richer because it is so rare, that life has a rhythm, like nature. Bad times, good times, work days, holidays, seriousness, fun, it’s all too much without putting a rhythm to it. That’s why we rest on the Sabbath. That’s why we just have harvest feasts once a year, I told him.

But he never bought it. He didn’t complain about the work; maybe he should have. Instead, he kept it in until it exploded in that awful decision to leave.

My neighbors, my friends, all said good riddance, that any son who would demand his inheritance in advance was no real son anyway, that I was better off without him. Like he was a bad investment.

But if you’re a parent, you know that when he left, it broke my heart.

I think I know what he wanted. Work, duty, responsibility are so important, but they’re not enough. Where’s the softness to life, the humanity? When do our hearts touch? Only once a year at a harvest feast? That’s not enough joy. I think my son was freezing to death here, and maybe some of that’s my fault, I don’t know.

But how do you bring all that into the real world? The world you and I know, of work and duty – how do you bring compassion and love into that? It only fits at the edges, not at the center. At the center, there’s work to do.

My son wanted a different kind of world, with more life to it, more connections, more of a sense of family, something better than work and duty, that might transform our duties into activities that fed the spirit as well as the belly.

These things were in my mind when he returned. Where is there room for love in our world? How can we interrupt the endless cycles of responsibility, the functional relationships, to make it all a more gentle home for the human spirit, and for the Holy Spirit? We seem to see people only in terms of what they do or earn. My servants respect and fear me not because they really think I’m a superior person, but because I control the money, the power, their jobs. Where is the human relationship?

Why can’t we know each other as brothers and sisters, children of God? That could transform the whole world if it ever took root. I miss it too. I can’t create the new kind of world; one person can’t do that alone. But I thought I could start it by acting out of a different place, so I did it.

It was only a start. I don’t know what will come of it. But I do know the only way the world can be transformed is through people having the vision and courage to act from out of a different kind of center.

In some ways, I don’t envy my son. My act was easy. He has to live with it now, among people who don’t understand.

My older boy wants an explanation; my friends and neighbors want an explanation. They say it is a slap in my older son’s face for his dutiful work, and a slap in their face too, for it has planted irresponsible ideas in the heads of their own sons. There is this whole system of work, duty, responsibility, justice and honor, they say, and I have insulted it, maybe threatened it. If the failure to do your duty can be so easily forgiven, they say, then where is its necessity?

Did I have to have a whole philosophical system to act out of? Couldn’t I just love my son and act out of that? I don’t understand all their concerns. I’m just a father who lost his son, then found him again and threw a party to celebrate it. Wouldn’t it be a better world if others did this too?

Maybe there are implications to what I did. Perhaps this act can’t stand alone. I wonder how my younger son feels? Don’t you think he’d be grateful, or is there more to that, too?

The rabbis say that the whole substance of the Torah can be summed up simply by saying love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. But if you owe all that to a neighbor, what do you owe your son? You must owe at least as much. Don’t you even owe more? And even if it isn’t owed, can’t you simply give it? Can’t you give more?

I don’t know. I just acted out of love for my son. Once he was dead to me and gone forever. Now he is alive again, and here. Isn’t that enough? Figuring out the rest of it is up to you.

I did what I could. I planted a seed, in the hope that it might some day grow into something that could give more shelter. It wasn’t enough, but I did what I could to tilt my world toward compassion and love, away from functional relationships and toward human relationships, you know? I did what I could. And you – what about you?

IV. The Prodigal Son’s Soliloquy

PRAYER

Are gifts ever really free? Are there really any worthwhile gifts that don’t obligate us, somehow, some time, to reciprocate?

Aren’t all gifts really windows opening us to a different kind of world, where generosity of spirit is the rule?

There are gifts that could be called gifts from heaven, gifts from God, gifts from the warm heart of the universe, to warm our own hearts, to replenish our souls, to give us another chance, a chance we did not earn.

We have all received such gifts, whether large or small. How would our world be changed if we responded in kind, if we saw every unearned gift as a kind of torch we may carry in the relay race called life, may carry until we can pass it on to another, in the form of another unearned gift.

There is, hidden among the folds of our world, this other, hidden world where people are measured by what they need rather than by what they have earned. Everyone who has ever received such a gift has been initiated into this higher, this hidden, world. And every such gift we receive has two parts, is two things.

First, it is an unearned gift of understanding, of compassion, of life, a second chance. Second, it is an IOU that we carry to remind ourselves that we too are now players in this hidden and higher world, that we too owe generous actions from the warmth of our own hearts, in the form of unexpected and unearned gifts to another, perhaps to many others.

It is a kind of silent conspiracy, a conspiracy that has been going on since the beginning of time. Make no mistake. Its goal is revolutionary. Its goal is to remove our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh. Its goal is to teach us to see others through the eyes of compassion. Its goal is the subtle and silent birth of a new kind of world, a kingdom of heaven, a kingdom of God, where we become one with others, become creatures whose lives beat to the rhythm of the same heart, sing the same music. It is the heart of the universe and the music of the spheres.

And we are given another chance to recognize it every time we receive a gift that we did not earn. Great gifts are also great debts. Let us pray that we have the good sense to be humbled by the gifts we have received, and the good manners to pass them on to others.

In this way, as in perhaps no other way, we may be both the midwives and the firstborn children of a new heaven and a new earth. Right here, right now.

We pray with grateful hearts for the gifts we have received. Now it is our turn. Amen.

The Prodigal Son’s Soliloquy

Don’t envy me! I would give anything for the return of my naivete.

You hear the story from outside of my life, outside of my skin, and you think it’s just a lovely tale, a free gift, a story for the children, something to wrap candy in.

But from inside, it is a torment – a torment in need of a resolution that I don’t know how to find.

To nearly everyone hearing this tale, it will sound like the story of a young fool who got away with it, who had his cake and ate it too. But can you imagine trying to live surrounded by relatives, friends and neighbors who look at you like a good-for-nothing? They think I’m a brat whose soft-minded father has cheated both my brother and the whole idea of justice.

No, most of them don’t say it out loud. The servants know better. And you can always count on most of your friends for polite hypocrisy.

A servant looked at me yesterday, a woman who has raised me since I was a baby. She looked at me with those eyes I know as well as any in my world, and she said, “Well, wasn’t that nice for you? Wasn’t that nice for you.?” She says that with her mouth. But her eyes say, “Now you owe a great debt, my boy. How will you repay it?”

And behind even that message she and the other servants think “How spoiled you privileged people are. Can you imagine what would happen to us if we threw such a fit and stormed out of our jobs? You had a safety net that we don’t have. We’ve lived our lives accepting your privilege because we must. But when you returned and your father showed us all that you are also exempted from even the most basic consequences for your actions, you lost our respect. We may not say so, and are paid to lie if asked, but you will read it in our eyes until you have paid your debt – your debt to everyone who honors our responsibilities because we trust that you will also honor yours.

“Do you think we are not connected? Do you think you live and act in a vacuum, that your privileges and exemptions don’t have consequences? They do, and you will see it in our eyes until you have paid your debt.”

These are the voices I hear, the sounds I live among. The glances that greet me. I owe a debt and I don’t understand it. It is as though my father’s act has thrown me into a new world, a world whose rules I don’t know.

I want my naivete back. I understood my world when I was still naïve. There was a balance to it, a rough kind of harmony and justice. Things fit together, because we all knew the rules and we all played by them. It was a world of work and duty.

Here, we had the farm. We had it because several generations had worked and developed it, and passed it on to my father, who was to pass it on to us after we had done our years of duties. That’s what makes the world go: it’s a world of duties.

We all have duties. Our servants have duties. Our friends and neighbors have duties. And when we all understand that world and our roles in it, when we all do those interlocking duties, then the world works and there is honor.

No, it’s more than that. We’re all parts of the world, and when all the parts work together, the combination of our efforts, our trust, our mutual respect, it creates an invisible, almost magical kind of harmony, feels like a harmony of honor and justice. Without that subtle harmony, both honor and justice are lost, don’t you see? I see it. I understand it. That’s the world I know, and I understand it. I know you understand it too.

But what my father has done doesn’t fit in this world. It breaks that chain of honor and duty.

I knew what I was doing when I demanded my inheritance and left. I wanted out. I thought, “Give me my money and get out of my way. I’m tired of the farm, I’m tired of a life hemmed in by work, duty, this unending struggle just to live, without the time or energy left for joy.”

Most nights we were too exhausted for anything but sleep. And it was far worse for the servants. What kind of a life is that? The servants work for us, and we work … for what? More of the same? Is that life? Is that all there is?

There was something wrong with that world and I wanted out. I knew the cost of what I did. I knew I had given up my rights as a son, and given up my privileges. I knew that.

I returned to ask the man who was once father to be my employer, to hire me as a servant. I tried to find a better way to live, a way beyond the endless cycle of work and duty, duty and work, never able to earn enough joy to give life enough gentleness and grace. I failed. I couldn’t do it. I came back willing to pay the price. I was beaten by that world, I was defeated by it, and I came back to pay the price, for the rest of my life, to pay the penalty.

I hate that world, but I know it, all the way down into my bones I know it. You can say it was a rut, I say it was my rut, the one I knew. But now what? Now what do I do?

My father didn’t play fair. He made a move that was outside the rules of my world, and now what? It can’t end here, don’t you see? My father says he has trumped honor and duty with love, but it can’t end here. That’s what all the angry looks and snide remarks mean. It’s the one thing I do understand. My father has challenged a whole world, and it can’t end here.

Most people will tell this story as a story of cheap grace, when your father, or God, can make everything right for you, while you ignore the implications of that charitable act for everyone else involved. But it can’t stop here. Whether done by a father or by a God, one random act of kindness doesn’t change much. The system goes on, this merely distracts us for awhile. Only if my father’s actions became the norm would it make a real difference. And one person can’t do that, whether a father or a god. The world would have to be transformed, and that would have to be done by all of us. It can’t end here.

In a world defined by work and duty, random acts of mercy like my father’s might be seeds for a new kind of world if others can understand them, are persuaded that it could be a better world, and follow his lead. But unless they transform the world, they are just ornaments.

Do you see this? If one privileged man can negate the whole structure of work and duty by a random act of kindness, then that whole system of work and duty is arbitrary: true for the powerless, optional for sons of the privileged. And this must turn the powerless against the powerful, as it has turned the servants’ hearts against me.

But it also offends others who have privilege, like our neighbors; for they sense, even if only dimly, the danger such forgiveness represents. What if all their sons demanded their inheritance and left? What if no one thought they had to uphold honor or duty? What would hold the world together? Love? There’s nowhere near enough of it.

So my father has struck a blow against the world in which I was raised, the only world I know. And it can’t stop here.

– And yet … I can’t get over his welcoming me back with love rather than justice. It gave me a new life, another chance. It was a chance I needed but hadn’t earned; yet he gave it to me anyway. I have been moved by his act, shaken to the core of my being. That’s my real dilemma. I had wanted to escape from the iron rules of work and duty by escaping into a fantasy of endless irresponsible pleasure. I felt something wrong; I didn’t know how to remedy it. And somehow, I wonder if my father hasn’t found the answer. Perhaps the grind of the world can’t be relieved by hedonistic escapes, as I’d hoped. Perhaps it can only be saved by acts not of justice but of love.

But not random acts of love. Those can only be an anesthetic to numb us to the fact that the world is really and enduringly inhumane and inequitable.

That’s what is so maddening about my father’s act. Alone, it was madness, and I shall pay for it through losing my connections with those around me. Or, if I refuse to respond to them, refuse to meet their eyes, I’ll lose my humanity through acting superior and arrogant, wearing a smugness that exults in my unfair privilege over others.

So now what?

If I stay in the old world, what do I do? If I return not as servant but as son, yet get no inheritance, then after my father dies I will be a de facto servant, not a son – everyone will see to it. But if my father still divides what is left between my brother and me, all who are left alive, including me, will see it as a cheat, a theft from my brother, and an insult to our whole world of duty and work and the honor that can arise from duty and work.

But what is the alternative? What if I prefer a world where love trumps duty, where we are valued according to our human currency rather than the coin of the realm – what then?

How should I then react to my father’s offer? And what are the implications, if I accept it? What then do I owe my brother? If I say to him, “Sorry, but our father’s love has over-ruled your expectation of justice” – is that treating my brother in a loving way, or just using my father’s love to my own selfish advantage? What kind of world would that make?

And what of our servants? What would it mean to value them by their human currency rather than their lack of money and power?

What if the servants ask to be treated as equals? What if they say in words what they are saying with their eyes: that when I was on my own, I did no better than they have – I wound up feeding pigs – so how can I now think I have a natural right to privilege that I wasn’t capable of earning? I don’t know. But this is torment.

I would give anything for the return of my naivete, for my simple world. For now my eyes are open, but only dimly. I know I owe a great debt, and do not know how to pay it. Unless I and others work to transform the world, we are the enemies of the very compassion and love that my father has used to save my life?

So now what shall I do? And you: what shall you do? And what shall we do? For this isn’t just an old story. It is our story, the story of our world. We’re in this together. And what shall we do? What shall we do now?