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© Davidson Loehr

19 October 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

Where we find ignorance, let us bring understanding.

Where there is despair, let us bring hope;

Where there are walls, let us make doorways;

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

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

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

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

But not only pray. Not only pray.

Amen.

SERMON:

Under the Banner of Heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Davidson Loehr

October 5, 2003

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

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

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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.

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© 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.