Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 9, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

In some ways, the answer to all prayers is about the same. You are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. You are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

If you come here feeling alone, know that you are not alone. You are among friends, even if you have not yet met them.

If you came with guilt over your sins of commission or sins of omission, know that you are the healthy company of others with the same guilt over the same kind of sins of commission and omission.

If you come wishing your life were more whole, more satisfying, perhaps even more perfect, know that the honesty of those wishes marks you as someone who belongs here, where we come to face the truth unafraid, even when we are afraid. Because we know, even when we do not want to know, that the truth can set us free. Perhaps not painlessly, but the truth can set us free.

And so: Know that you are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. Know that you are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

Amen.

SERMON: Original Sins and Blessings

The theme of this series of four sermons is “What’s the true story of our origins, our human nature, the human condition and what we need?” Never mind what different religions may say, what do we really believe to be true? The sub theme is “How and why have the religious teachings of our society strayed so far from the truth?” The truth is empowering, it can set us free. Bad creation stories, false pictures of human nature and unhealthy concepts of God diminish and demean us. Part of the road to salvation is learning to tell the difference between religious stories that empower us, and those that enslave us; between healthy and unhealthy myths.

Last week I began by talking about the true story of creation: how the universe got here, what it’s made of, what life on earth is made of, and how deeply it’s all related. We’re made of stardust, the stuff of the universe. And here on earth, life is made from just five chemical building-blocks that make up DNA and RNA. We are more deeply related to one another, more deeply a part of one another, that we can begin to imagine. The dynamic powers of the universe are within us, if we will see them and free them. We are part of a linked continuum of life; we should expect similarities with all other life on earth.

And yet the creation story in the Bible distorts this, takes the power and dignity away from us and gives it to the Hebrew God who was created as a projection of an ancient tribal chief. For historical reasons we can understand, the ancient writers turned it from a true story of empowerment to a false story of enslavement and obedience to the priests who spoke for the God they had constructed.

Religious myths are to be judged by whether they serve the truth or not. Some do, some do not. In Western religions, the myths as interpreted by the dominant orthodoxies do not serve the truth well. I want us to look at that, no matter how rude it may seem to do so.

Today, I want to look at human nature. What kind of creatures are we? How is this odd species we call homo sapiens put together? What are our original blessings and sins?

I want to do this as I did last week, by beginning with the true story, then bringing in biblical myths to compare with it. By the true story, I mean one we can verify through sciences, but also from common observations and experience, as you’ll see. It’s what we can demonstrate to be the case about humans, regardless of our beliefs. In computer language, human nature includes both hardware and software. Most of the hardwiring is obvious and easy to find examples of, though we don’t think about it much:

1. We are a social species. There is an old German saying “Ein Mensch ist kein Mensch.” It means “one person is no person,” and it echoes an ancient Greek proverb that said the same thing. We are, as Aristotle noted 2400 years ago, a profoundly social species. Alone, we’re not complete. We need a connection to others, which we have to learn how to make wisely and well.

2. We are hardwired to be in “families” of about four to twelve. When we think of intimate groups, groups small enough for us to feel known in, that’s the size we seek. Most of our small social and professional groups are in this size range: bridge groups, church committees, covenant groups, Evensong. Our sports teams also fit this: basketball, baseball, football, soccer. Almost all are in that range of four or five to a dozen. Juries are a dozen; church boards are usually a dozen or fewer. If you ask Why, the answer is that this is the kind of species we are. It isn’t about free will, it’s about predestination here. Each species has its characteristic family or brood size, and that’s ours. It helps shape most of the small groups we create, in most areas of our lives.

3. Each species also has a characteristic troop size, and ethologists say the characteristic troop size of our species is about 150 to 200. That’s about the most people each of us is likely to be able to know, to keep in mind as our real “community.” It’s almost amazing, the number of times and places this size comes up.

A. Back in graduate school, I read a book by the German scholar Hannah Arendt on the 1917 Russian revolution, which she witnessed firsthand. She was interested to see that the chaos didn’t last long. Some charismatic leaders seemed to emerge from nowhere, and people gathered around them in groups. However, when the groups got to about 200, they always divided. That was the biggest group that seemed stable.

B. When I spoke at the LAMP group at the University of Texas last year, I mentioned some of these facts. Later, one of their leaders said they had tried for years to increase the number of people who were active, but had never been able to get it above 150: the number present on that day. This is predestination, not free will: it’s who we are and how we are made.

C. Church consultants use these numbers, too. The hardest and most unlikely growth is for a church to grow from an average attendance of 150 to one of 250 or more. Most don’t make it over that hump, because that’s as big as our biologically-wired troop size has prepared us for. You have to learn how to grow larger. You have to learn how to grow beyond our biology, which has not prepared us for the modern world. Ironically, when a church does figure it out, it can do a much better job of providing structures of intimacy than a smaller church. Because in a small church, you have a troop, with a few de facto alpha males and females who control its power. If you don’t like their style, you don’t have a home there.

But in a larger church, there are many sub-communities, and you can move more freely between them, finding places that feel more homey to you. When they are well-done, large churches have much better structures of intimacy than small ones. Because in small ones, there’s one de facto troop leader or small group that defines the group. If you don’t fit with their politics, you won’t fit with the group. In larger churches, there are subgroups, and you have choices.

Still, it takes intelligent work to create structures of intimacy that can let a church grow, because our biology hasn’t prepared us for the modern world, and we have to work to grow into it.

We can say a lot more about our species, about the kind of creatures we are. Here are some other traits. A century ago, none of this was controversial. A generation ago, some of this was controversial; now it’s not very controversial again:

We are a profoundly territorial species. We build fences around our yards, for goodness’ sake! We identify with our ‘turf,’ our nation, our state, our neighborhood. The next time you’re walking down the street and a dog barks at you from behind his master’s fence, remember that the dog is barking for the same reason the master built the fence: it’s their turf, and you’re a potential intruder.

All territory is really conceptual, not drawn on the ground in yellow lines. We think of this with humans, but territory is conceptual for all animals. I used to raise a breed of French shepherd called Briards: extremely territorial animals. They still use them in France to herd sheep. We saw movies of ranchers waking the dog around the boundaries of their territory – no fences. Then the dog learned that territory, internalized it, and kept sheep inside of it. The tendency is hard-wired, but the content is learned. We learn what counts as “our territory”: UT? Austin? Houston? Ann Arbor? America? The world?

We are a profoundly hierarchical species. We think in terms of categories like top dogs, “The Man,” kings, presidents. We seek to identify the “top” one: Miss America. I’ve never heard of a beauty contest to find “the seventh most attractive woman in Travis County.” We only care about #1. We award gold medals to the winners, and put some of them on cereal boxes. Nobody even remembers the names of the athletes who won silver medals: they were the losers. Grocery story magazines inform us who “the sexiest man alive is” – this week, I think it’s still Ben Affleck, in case you had forgotten. We don’t think to ask how, in a world of six billion people, anyone could ever think of narrowing that category down to below about a million people. We’re not built that way. We want to know who’s on top. We only reward the winners. I’ve seen some of the football fever here in the fall. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, another football superpower. And never in either city, and never on any televised game, have I seen players and fans excitedly screaming “We’re Number Two!” Something inside of us thinks that number two doesn’t really count. We’re wrong, but it’s how we’re made.

There are good things about us, too. We are naturally altruistic. Cats and dogs will risk themselves for their young, monkeys do, so do horses, cows, and humans. And sometimes altruism extends beyond species lines. We stop to save an endangered dog we don’t know. Why do we do that? Maybe we just feel related to them. You’ve read the stories of dolphins saving humans from drowning. They swim under the person, lift them to the surface and take them into shallow water. Why? It’s how they’re made. We are caring, altruistic animals. Our behaviors show we are linked very deeply, and recognize the connections. Our altruism doesn’t come from religion, it wasn’t a gift from the gods, it comes from nature.

This next one will sound kind of mushy, like I’m moving from science into mystical gobbledygook, but it isn’t. There just isn’t a clear word for this next trait. But every animal has a soul, a self, a style, a character, that distinguishes it from others. You can sense this being around them. If you’ve watched a litter of puppies or kittens for long, you see that each one has its own “personality,” its own style. Some are trusting, some more afraid. Some are adventurous, some are shy. And if you’ve raised those kittens or puppies, you know they keep those styles all their lives, just as we do. Human babies have different characters from the start. But so do other species.

A member of this church, Clare Tilson, has her Ph.D. in entomology, and once spent several minutes explaining to me about the individuality she found in, of all things, moths. For a graduate school project, she had to feed a few dozen very large moths each day, and found great individual differences between them. She had to grab them, turn them on their backs, and put some sugar water into their mouths. She could identify the individual moths based on their different styles. Some fought her every day. Others quickly learned the procedure, and flopped onto their backs as soon as she picked them up. Some even stuck their tongues out for her. And one moth, she said, was just so sweet that she kept feeding it even after the experiment ended because she had grown to like it.

Each creature seems to need and want to live in a way that is consistent with its unique style. This is something everyone here has struggled with. We know that we must be true to ourselves, to our styles, to our “souls” if you like, and that if we don’t do it, we are not living integrated or authentic or very satisfying lives. One of Jesus’ famous rhetorical questions was “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” That’s what this is about. A “soul” isn’t some little metaphysical gas bag, it’s that inner integrity of remaining true to our own soul, our own style.

In a social species like ours, there is a necessary conflict between each individual’s unique style, and the style of its troop and world. The effort is to find an integrated way of living that honors all levels of our identity, all our territories and individualities, has marked humans from the beginning of recorded history. When we talk of getting our lives together, we mean something like this: living in a way that is true to ourselves while also fitting into “the world” in a harmonious way. It isn’t easy to do, you know?

Our original blessings are considerable. We’re curious. We want to learn about ourselves, our environment, about the difference between life-empowering and life-enslaving values – what some have called the difference between good and evil. We feel connections to others and to much of life, and we’re a caring species that wants to act on these deeply-felt connections. All these are blessings, gifts to us from life.

Our original sins are also considerable. And our biggest and most dangerous original sin is that we can’t tell the difference between good leaders and bad leaders, good stories and bad stories, good groups and bad groups. We follow leaders, especially charismatic ones, and follow them into untrue stories that enslave, into wars that slaughter, into stories of such nonsense they should but don’t boggle even our minds.

I was just remembering the Heaven’s Gate cult of about five years ago. You recall that Matthew Applewhite led a group of people to believe that they needed to commit mass suicide – all dressed alike and wearing Nike tennis shoes – so they would be transported up to the Mother Ship, which was hidden behind the Hale Bopp comet.

The media, thankfully, identified Applewhite as an Episcopalian, for which we can be grateful. But last week I learned that he had also been the music director of the First Unitarian Church in Houston. As a Unitarian who used to be a musician, I’m not sure which eccentricity finally drove him over the edge. But I watched several of the videotaped interviews of his people before their suicides. And they looked absolutely at peace, completely sure of what they were doing. They were wrong, but they were certain. They followed a man they saw as a spiritual leader and it cost them their lives. Others have strapped bombs to themselves and walked into crowded buildings to kill themselves, or flown planes into buildings, because some nut has told them seventy virgins will await them in heaven for dying like this. I can’t imagine that anyone thought to ask the virgins what they thought of this. Our worst original sin is that we often can’t tell the difference between good stories and bad ones, and often serve gods that aren’t worth serving at all. We’re easily distracted and misled. Advertising, politics and bad preachers count on it.

The only hope we have is good education, to teach us the difference between good and evil, health and unhealth, sanity and insanity. But in doing that, we’re growing beyond the limits of our biology, which has not prepared us for the kind of world we’re living in.

These are a few of the things we know to be true about human nature, a few of the things we know about how we are put together and who we are.

Now let’s look at the story in the Bible to see what it says about who we are and who we are supposed to be. Listen to the story against this background, and see if it strikes you as an empowering or an enslaving story:

Genesis 2:15-17: The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Genesis 3: 1ff – Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, “You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened ….

Afterwards, God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” – therefore God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. (RSV, emphasis added)

And so: education, learning to make distinctions between good and evil, gaining wisdom, takes you out of a fool’s paradise. But look at this story. Here it takes humans, born curious, whose great hope and strength is our ability to learn, to grow bigger, to learn the difference between good and evil, and to become more godlike by doing so. These are among our original blessings. But this story condemns humans for their very strengths. This was the god shaped in the image of a tribal chief, who wants people to be obedient rather than empowered. Do you see how clearly this shows up when you begin to look for it? It isn’t hidden, we have just not been taught to look for it.

This is an untrue story and a bad myth that does not offer empowerment. Christianity made this concept of God central for many centuries. For most of its history, the Roman Catholic Church taught that its people were not to read the bible for themselves, but were to be taught its meaning by the priests. Some in this room grew up in that kind of a church: I’ve talked with members here in their 30s who went through 12 years of Catholic schools, and said they were still being told not to read the bible, just fed the relevant passages with their interpretations. That isn’t an empowering or ennobling style of taking life seriously. The churches should be ashamed.

The message of Jesus reverted to a loving rather than an authoritative God, and for the first four centuries of Christianity, it was often a religion that empowered women, poor people, and social outcasts. You hardly ever hear about those first four centuries of Christianity, when there was very widespread theological diversity, including some very non-supernatural varieties with which most of us would be comfortable.

But in the early 5th century, when the Roman Empire was crumbling, St. Augustine believed the church needed to take some of the authority the Roman Empire had had, to structure and stabilize society. The story of Eve eating the apple had been celebrated for the first four century of Christianity, as a story about our free will.

But Augustine changed the story. He made it part of his new notion of original sin. This original sin meant that people couldn’t be trusted, and couldn’t be trusted even with their own lives. They needed to be kept in line through the Authority of the Church, like sheep kept in line by shepherds.

It’s impossible to measure the harm that story of original sin has done. It’s important to say, as clearly as possible, that the story was a lie. It was not true to human nature. It became a story of enslavement rather than empowerment.

Even worse, it hid the real answer from us. The real answer to the human condition was provided by the serpent, and acted on by Eve. We must eat the apple. We must learn the difference between good and evil, and begin to reclaim some of the power transferred to this God so long ago. We must transform stories that enslave into more honest stories that empower. That’s how we grow up, that’s how we leave the fool’s paradise of childhood and grow into powerful, confident adults.

The snake was right. Eve was right. That concept of God was wrong, untrue, and disempowering. Next week I’ll wrestle with the concept of God. But look back on your own religious stories this week, and ask what parts of them were empowering and life-giving, and what parts were enslaving or demeaning, taking power and dignity away from you. I think you’ll find that the places you felt empowered were places where the true story broke through. Maybe through a preacher, a Sunday school teacher, a parent or mentor. Or maybe you just found the hidden truths for yourselves.

As you look back through these stories – and this can be a painful process – remember those things that are the answer to almost every prayer:

Know that you are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. Know that you are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 2, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER:

Once in awhile – not often, but once in awhile – a very painful moment gets our attention. It breaks through all the mind-numbing manipulations of our best advertising and political geniuses, and wakes us up, often rudely. It hurts. And, if we will let it, it may bring us some wisdom.

I love that paradox of wisdom coming through unwanted pain. The best statement of it I’ve ever read was written by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, some 2500 years ago:

Pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop

upon the heart

until in our despair

there comes wisdom

through the awful

grace of God.

Yesterday another of those awful moments got to us. Our space shuttle Columbia exploded and disintegrated over Texas around 8:00 yesterday morning, less than 15 minutes before it was to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Here was a crew of seven people, an international crew: a black man, an Israeli, two women – one from India – a couple American Top Gun Air Force pilots, some doctors and scientists. Different sexes, races, nationalities, and religions.

Yet we all knew immediately that all these lives were equal, not ranked according to their ethnicity or ideology. If we hadn’t realized it, there would have been something dangerously missing from us, I think. Perhaps that realization is some of the wisdom that comes through what Aeschylus called “the awful grace of God.”

Yet the timing of this tragedy will bring a revelation, if we will let it. For our elected leaders are preparing to invade a sovereign nation and slaughter an estimated tens of thousands of innocent civilians. They and we try to ignore this human sacrifice by calling it “collateral damage.”

But no one yesterday dismissed those seven deaths as collateral damage from our space program. It would have been vulgar to do so. We showed each of their faces. We told their stories. We cried for the families they left behind.

Yesterday we remembered that all the lives lost were equally precious, regardless of sex, race, religion or nationality. Can we really now forget it again so quickly, and resume our talk of unprovoked war, of using our weapons of mass destruction to destroy huge masses of our brothers and sisters in Iraq?

If we are to squeeze a lesson from yesterday’s tragedy, let it be to remember that all lives are equally sacred, and that war – even if it were an honest war – is the ultimate failure of our imagination, our leadership, and our humanity.

Let us pray that those seven deaths do not go by without letting them remind us that no other people are enough different from us that we have license to kill them in an unprovoked war.

SERMON: In the Beginning…

Those of you who heard the Rev. Donald Wheat preach here on December 29th will remember he said one reason liberal religion loses out to the many more literalistic varieties is because we don’t have a good story. He meant a story of creation, of human nature, of the human condition, and of prescriptions for the yearnings and fears that always seem to arise for those of us in the human condition.

Last summer, my 16-year-old niece had an even more pointed accusation. She’s a Christian fundamentalist, and she and my brother visited me in Quebec while thousands of UUs were mobbing the city for their General Assembly. She studied this odd tribe as though she were doing fieldwork in a foreign, and weird, island. She engaged some of them in conversation – just gathering data, I suspect.

On about the third day, she announced “Uncle Davidson, I know why your religion is such a miserable failure.” “Well,” I said, “that would be interesting to know.” “It’s simple,” she said: “You don’t have a Book.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I said, lamely, that we had lots of books, but that wouldn’t wash: “Nope, you can’t just tell people to go browse around the library and see if they find any wisdom. You’ve got to have a Book so you can say “Hey: go read the Book.” But you can’t say that ’cause you don’t have a Book. That’s why your religion is so miserable.” I think (or at least hope) I thanked her for her insights, but didn’t have an answer for them.

I suppose my answer to the “Book” issue would be that one book isn’t enough, that the range of life’s questions surpasses the scope of any one book or any one religion. No, I don’t think she would have bought it.

So I’ll return to the easier challenge of Rev. Don Wheat. This month I want to offer four sermons to address his critiques. I think we do have a coherent story, and a true one; but I don’t know that it has ever been put into the form of a good myth. And when it comes to showdowns between facts and stories, good stories will win almost every time. Even the sciences rely on stories to make their points: like the story of the Big Bang and the story of evolution.

The kind of stories people really seem to yearn for have to help us find answers to a lot of very basic questions: like who we are, where we came from, how we should live, how we should live together, and what, if anything, will remain after we are gone, to testify to the fact that once, we lived, loved, and gave our lives to things we thought enduringly important?

These are the questions we have been asking for, probably, hundreds of thousands of years. Only a fool would try to address them in four sermons. Let’s begin.

Most religions start with a creation story: “In the beginning….” Non-theistic religions like Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism don’t use creation stories. But all our Western religions begin with essentially the same creation story.

Creation stories are very powerful. They tell us where we come from, what we’re made of, where the real power in life lies, and how to get it. If you know someone’s creation story, you can understand their salvation story, for the two are almost always linked, the one being a mirror image of the other.

That point alone is worth a half dozen sermons. You might think of asking about your own story: what you think you’re made of, what gives you your worth, what you need to do to become more whole.

But for now, let’s think about our creation story, about how everything came to be: us, life, the universe, everything. Forget about religious myths for now. Just think about how we really believe it all began. The myths will come in later.

Most of us answer these questions with our sciences. That’s where we go for our most convincing stories. About fifteen billion years ago, we’re told by our scientific storytellers, it began with a Bang. It all exploded and expanded faster than we can imagine, but everything in the universe was once all together in a little sort of ball.

This means that everything in the universe, including us, is made of stardust. Our birthplace was literally in the stars. And it means that everything everywhere, the whole shebang, is made of the same stuff.

This seems to be true. We have discovered 109 different elements so far, and all the information we’ve gathered through our space probes and spectrographic analysis of images from the Hubbell Space Telescope hasn’t found any others. We’re made of the same stuff that everything else is.

Here on earth, life evolved in ways we’re still just beginning to understand. But again, it’s the case that a very few materials make up the warp and the weft of all life on earth. All DNA, from ours down to the DNA of bacteria, is made from just four different building blocks:

A = Adenine

G = Guanine

C = Cytosine

T = Thymine

When you consider RNA as well, you add one more chemical: Uracil replaces Thymine.

And when they combine, each one is always and only attracted to just one other: the adenine always links with the thymine (or uracil), the guanine always connects to the cytosine. Very simple building blocks, simple rules. They have formed millions of shapes, millions of kinds of living things, but once again, the whole shebang is made up of the same stuff. Animals, plants, all intimately related, made of combinations of the same five building blocks. All life on earth is part of the same family.

And it’s a cycle. We live by killing and eating other plant and animal life. Then when we die, our bodies are broken down and become the bodies of plants, then the plants become the bodies of other animals, from the beginning of time till the end of time. It’s nature’s great plan, reducing life to its basics, then recycling it over and over again.

I’m not trying to sell you on reincarnation. But I am trying to sell you our most honest story of creation, which is that we are deeply linked with all life on earth, all the way down. That is our deepest identity, and carries powerful suggestions for how we should think about each other and treat one another.

The great poets and sages of the world’s religions seemed to intuit this thousands of years ago. And they built it into their myths, myths that survive today. Native Americans had rituals like the Buffalo Dance, done to repay the buffaloes they ate by helping them regenerate. I’ve read other Indian rituals of talking to trees before cutting them down for a canoe or for tipi poles, treating the tree as a brother and explaining why it was necessary to cut it down. They felt, and expressed, a familiar connection that sciences show us is really, deeply, there.

Even the most ancient Neanderthal burial sites discovered in China, dating to more than 100,000 years ago, show a sense of our being a part of the whole world. Those Neanderthals buried their dead in womb-shaped graves, curled into a fetal position, facing east, the direction of the rising sun. While they didn’t explain it in words, it looks like they are entrusting their beloved dead to mother earth, returning them to her womb curled up like babies, ready to be reborn as the rising sun is reborn. And similar burial practices have been found among the ancient Peruvian people, and the Dogon people on Mali.

The true creation story tells us that we’re not strangers here. This is our home. We are one with everything here, intimately connected with all life and all matter.

The ancient Greek myth of creation expresses this by saying that in the beginning Father Heaven mated with Mother Earth, and everything here was born from that mating. We’re the children of heaven and earth, the children of the gods. Every particle of us is sacred, just as every atom is stardust.

It’s poetry, but it’s good poetry, poetry that tells the truth. Remember, one of the most famous of all religious prayers is that it become “on earth, as it is in heaven.” We may be made of earth, but the earth is made of stardust, and we want to regain a sense of our regal beginnings and our true home.

This is the real story of creation, and of the creation of life on earth. It’s all made of stardust, and is all intimately interconnected. Here is the plea for universal peace and brotherhood that sings like a leitmotif through every great religion in the world. The power that created the universe is within us; it is our own power. If we would remember our real creation story, if we would claim that power and if we would act in ways that are consistent with our interrelation with everyone and everything else, how different our local, national and international worlds would look!

That’s the good news: there really is a true creation story, which can be verified not only by our most advanced sciences but also by some of the greatest myths in the world’s most ancient religions.

But there’s a problem, and it is an absolutely gigantic problem. It’s one of the most important things to learn about religion, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and how they become demonic. And that’s that the true story has usually been changed by priests (or politicians) into a story that takes the power and the dignity away from people and transfers it to priests, tribal leaders, religions and rulers.

Archaeologists and biblical scholars are now fairly sure that the ancient Hebrews developed from the more ancient tribe of Canaanites. Modern scholars are beginning to say with some force that there was never an Egyptian chapter in ancient Jewish history, and that Moses was not a historical character in their actual history. They came from the Canaanites, and developed their religion in large part to contradict the older Canaanite religion.

We know the Canaanite religion was a powerful nature religion, with an Earth Mother who gave birth to all. This is the same basic story the Chinese Neanderthals acted out 100,000 years earlier: the earth is our mother and our natural home. It was a religion that might have empowered its people through rituals to put them in touch with the power of the earth and their own power, though we don’t know that.

But the Hebrews created a new religion, in direct opposition to the Canaanite religion. You can see it in their creation story, which was obviously adapted from the creation story of a Mother Earth. Why? Because when you read a story about a deity creating everything by itself, you know it is a woman’s story, not a man’s. Mother earth can do it, but not Father Sky.

Scholars have argued that the god invented by the ancient Hebrews was a simple projection of their tribal chiefs, with the same powers and duties as their tribal chiefs. The chiefs set the rules, laid out rewards and punishments, and defined the way of life for the tribe, just as old Jahweh did.

And other scholars have shown that the covenant made between God and humans in the bible was modeled after ancient Hittite treaties between tribal rulers and their people. The people were expected to have no other ruler above the tribal chief. They were punished if they disobeyed, but were rewarded and protected as long as they were obedient. This is the basic structure of the covenant between the ancient Hebrews and the God they created.

And so their male god, they wrote, created the whole world and all the life on it, all by himself. In their new creation story, we were made out of dirt, and were nothing but dirt until this male tribal-chief-god breathed his breath of life into us. By ourselves, we were nothing. We had nothing sacred in or about us. It was all loaned to us by this new God. In return, we had to obey him. Or, more accurately, we had to obey those who claimed to speak for him: the priests and rulers.

Even if you were never Muslim, Christian or Jewish, you were soaked in this creation story just because you grew up in this society. And we’ve not been trained to back off from the story, look at it critically, and ask bold questions like whether or not it is a true account of creation, or even if it is a good myth. But that’s what I’m asking you to do: to back off far enough to see that the dominant creation story, and the dominant style of religion in Western civilization, may in fact be bad religion based on a false creation story.

And this is important because creation stories are so closely related to salvation stories. They can either empower or enslave us, and it’s our job to try and find out which kind we’ve given our hearts and minds to. The true creation story empowers us. It says we are carriers of the dynamic power of the universe, related to all of creation, and the power is ours to claim and act on, to make it “on earth as it is in heaven” by acting like all other life forms are related to us, in our family. The power and the responsibility are ours. What would such a world look like? Jesus called it the Kingdom of God: the world in which we simply treat all others as our sisters and brothers. Buddhists could call it living in Nirvana, connected with true life by being freed from our misleading illusions about it. Honest religion needs an honest creation story, or it isn’t likely to have a healthy salvation story.

But in the ancient Hebrew revision of that story, everything is different. Now there is nothing sacred about us at all. We are dirt, God is God, and the most we can hope for is to establish an obedient relationship with this God – through the priests and the rulers who claim to represent him.

The first creation story says our salvation comes through realizing our identity with the sacred forces of the universe. The second says all we can hope for is a relationship with those forces – now identified not with the universe, but with this God – a relationship defined by our being obedient to the priests and rulers who speak for this God created so long ago.

The first salvation story is found in advanced Hinduism, when the teacher points the student outward toward the whole world, the whole universe, and says “That art thou!” That is a religion of empowerment, grounded in the true story of our creation and birth. It is found in all mysticisms, which also teach our fundamental and unmediated identity with all that is sacred.

The second is taught by religions that teach obedience rather than empowerment, and threaten all who disobey their church’s rules with damnation. It’s a dishonest religion, founded in a dishonest creation story, and we need to say it loud and clear.

Religious liberals and millions of secular people who reject the biblical creation story and its authoritarian God are routinely attacked as heretics, as though they weren’t really seeking the truth. But the facts show otherwise. It was the ancient Hebrews who falsified the real creation story. It seems to have arisen from their boundary disputes with their closest religious kin, the Canaanites. But they created a creation story that was untrue, and a God who disempowered people and transferred both their dignity and their power to the priests who claimed to speak for that God. And that habit has continued all the way down to the present, as we know.

Power belongs to those who control the story. If we don’t know the true story, we’re not likely to have much power or dignity at all. And the churches aren’t likely to have any honest authority, either, no matter how many costumes they wear.

This last point was made clear to me in an unexpected way last week. While I was in Berkeley, I spent a little time with John Dominic Crossan, an acquaintance of mine who was the cofounder of the Jesus Seminar. Dominic spent nineteen years as a Catholic priest, then left the priesthood, married, and raised a family. But he is still a Catholic who fights much of what his church is doing, and fights it on the basis of his forty years of work as a biblical scholar. Dominic spoke of the arrogance of the bishops, cardinals, and the pope today on the terrible cases of sexual abuse – where they want to be regarded as authoritative even though they are wrong. He said “We Catholics are yearning for the days when the worst thing the Church did was sell indulgences.” (The sale of indulgences was the church practice that led to the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago.)

What Catholics and non-Catholics alike have come to see is that religions that aren’t grounded in the real truth have no necessary moral or ethical authority. The good news in religion is that you really can’t fake it.

The other good news is that if you know the truth, the truth can set you free. It may not make you popular with members of your tribe, but it can set you free. It may be the only thing that can set you free.

This morning, I began our four-part sermon series by telling you the true story of creation. There’s much more to consider in the coming weeks: the nature of human nature, good and evil, and the prescription for what ails the human condition. But this was a beginning. Think about the story this week, and about the difference between religious stories that empower you and stories that enslave you. If you find yourself feeling a little more free, it’s a good sign that you may be a religious liberal. And that, for the record, is also good news!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

15 December 2002

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 our prayers be like Christmas stockings this month, hung by the chimney with care. Let them be simple, even childlike, sewn together out of hope and anticipation.

Let us dare to ask for what we really need, and believe that if our prayers are heartfelt and honest, there is always a chance our stockings will be filled.

And even if our wishes aren’t granted, our honesty will gain the respect from those who matter most, including ourselves.

Let us sing the song of our heart’s true desires like a Christmas carol: dashing through the days, laughing all the way.

Because we’ve remembered what it felt like to be a child for whom dreams really might come true if only we could be open to them and prepare a manger within ourselves where they might be born.

‘Tis the season of good dreams. Let us welcome them, as we prepare for the holidays in the hope that they may also be holy days.

Let our prayers be like Christmas stockings this year, hung by the chimney with care, and with faith, hope and love. And let us allow, even dream, that like our Christmas stockings, we might be filled to overflowing.

Amen.

SERMON: Dreamcatchers

I think Christmas is a tough time of year for an honest preacher. We say this church offers a religion for both head and heart. We say you don’t have to check your brains at the door, but you don’t have to leave your heart outside either.

It’s a bold boast, and the Christmas season always threatens to make a mockery of it.

Who would dare to tell the truth about Christmas during the Christmas season? We know all the supernatural stuff never happened. The world isn’t built that way. Not now, and not two thousand years ago. We know it, but how could you say it? Especially now?

Some few people do say it, of course. Nine years ago at this time of year, the Jesus Seminar published their book The Five Gospels: the Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. In it, they said that an eight-year study of every saying attributed to Jesus had convinced a large international group of scholars that fewer than 20% of the sayings should be considered authentic, the rest written by the people who wrote the gospels, or taken from other sayings and sources at the time.

The choice of timing – bringing the book out just before Christmas – was the publisher’s decision, not the Jesus Seminar’s. But as the publisher explained, Christmas and Easter are about the only times of the year that people much care for the subject of Jesus. Still, telling the truth can change the world, even when it’s unpopular.

If you think the book didn’t make a difference, consider that every magazine cover or network television program on Jesus since then has come either from this work of the Jesus Seminar, or in angry opposition to it. The last I heard, it had sold over 300,000 copies: an amazing number for a book only a tiny fraction of the public would even be interested in.

Still, everybody already knew a lot of what it said. The miracles didn’t happen, just as the miracles in other mythologies didn’t happen. Neither Jesus nor anybody else walked on water or was raised from the dead because the world isn’t built that way, not now or then.

Sure, we knew that. But how could you say it out loud, especially at Christmas?

And they said more. The stories about Jesus were written about him long after he died by people who hadn’t known him. The gospels were not written by his disciples. They were written anonymously. They weren’t assigned their present names until the second century, when a rich layperson named Papias thought it would look better if the gospels were given the names of some disciples, and donated enough money to make it happen.

This probably isn’t surprising. All history looks a lot less dramatic when you strip away the veneer. But how could you say this, especially around Christmas?

And of course there’s a lot more that scholars have said. The baby in the manger, the star, the wise men, the gifts, the colorful trip with the donkey, none of it is historical. We know absolutely nothing about just when the man Jesus was born. In the early centuries, his birth was said to have come in May, in March, in August, probably in a few more months.

December 25th was the date of the winter solstice in the ancient calendar, and wasn’t adopted by the Christian church as the official date of Jesus’ birthday until the year 336, the same time that Sunday was adopted as the religion’s holy day. Both December 25th and Sunday were taken from the religion of Mithraism, where they were the birth day and holy day of the god Mithras.

Still, how could you say this around Christmastime?

One answer – you’ve probably noticed since you’re such a quick group – is that I just did say all this. And if you look in that 1993 book by the Jesus Seminar, you’ll find that my name is listed in the back among the Fellows of the Seminar.

So one answer to the question of how you can keep religion honest by speaking the truth at Christmas time is that you do it in sneaky ways, by saying it while pretending to wonder how on earth anyone could say it.

So far, you didn’t have to check your brains at the door today, and being honest was pretty painless. In truth, liberal religion has always been good at honoring your mind. Even in the first century, religious writers were saying that no literal reading of scriptures is ever religious, and no religious reading is ever literal. St. Paul said that the letter kills and the spirit gives life. Everyone who has ever read any religious writing symbolically and metaphorically knows it’s true.

A lot of times, though, honest religion is also sterile religion that may let you feel smug, but can’t nourish your spirit. So we can’t stop here or you wasted time by bringing your heart to church this morning.

If we did stop here, with these academic critiques of Jesus, Christianity, and Christmas, we would be stopping too soon. So far, we have treated it as though stories like this were meant to be no more than empirical science or dry history. And of course they are not. The hardest part of this is still remaining, for the Jesus story, like similar stories found in most of the mythologies of the world, are not primarily history-catchers or fact-catchers. Like all religious stories, they are primarily dream-catchers.

I think the native American dreamcatchers are doing what honest religion tries to do. The web is like the honest part, keeping bad stories out. And the little hole in the middle is like the religious part, letting the good stories through.

In that story of a baby both human and divine, a baby born to the poorest of parents, in whom the whole hope of the world resides – in that simple and timeless story, a lot of dreams have been caught. For if the birth of the sacred can come even to poor parents at a manger in a stable, surely it can find us too.

No, of course the story isn’t true. So what? The story doesn’t have to be true to be magical, any more than the story of Santa Claus has to be true to work its magic. We have to help. When we are children, our naivet” lets us into the stories. As adults, we have to work harder to regain our suspension of disbelief.

The native Americans who make dream-catchers know perfectly well how they work. They require faith. If we can believe that sticks and string can keep back our fears and bad dreams, then they may indeed keep back our fears and bad dreams. That is the miracle of both myths and dream-catchers.

You know the same is true in the story of Santa Claus. If we can enter into the really odd story of a fat man in white fur who slides down chimneys without getting smudged, then Santa Claus may also become a dream-catcher, and bring us a miracle or two.

Let me ask a question of both your mind and your heart: Does knowing that the story of baby Jesus born in a manger wasn’t true ruin it? Even during the Christmas season? It’s a trick question, be careful how you answer. For if it does, then all the scholars and preachers who ever lied or sugarcoated the truth were justified in their low opinion of the human spirit. Because if hope and confidence can not find a comfortable home within the world as it really is, then there is no hope at all for us. And then the best teachers and preachers would have no choice except the choice of misleading or lying to their people.

But no, there is far more to us than that. Let’s give ourselves some credit here. We are not that destitute of imagination, especially during the Christmas season. Good lord, this is the season of imagination! As incredible as it sounds, this is the season when millions of people – probably including some of you – line up and pay good money to see the story of a Nutcracker that comes to life! And large mice, that dance! Full-grown people have been known to cry during the Nutcracker. I’ve been one of them.

This is the season when we again watch the story of Scrooge visited by ghosts from Christmas past, present and future. It didn’t happen, you know, it’s just a story. They’re actors. But everyone who has ever been moved by that story knows there is a deep and important kind of truth to it. This is also the season when Jews light their Menorah to symbolize a light kept burning by faith through eight long dark nights, even though that never really happened either. And the Grinch: we don’t actually need to be told that the Grinch never really lived, do we?

A good myth is true, but it isn’t scientific. A good myth is something that never happened but always is. It’s that kind of true: way more true than mere facts.

Must a story be true to transport and transform the human spirit? If that were so, no one would ever buy a novel, watch a soap opera, cry at a movie, or cherish a song that brings back to life a memory and a hope so long gone you thought you”d never find them again. With good stories, whether they are true or not is the least important thing you can know about them. It is far more important to know whether, with our help, they can be transformative. Good dream-catchers are hardly ever made out of straightforward truth.

I wish for us this Christmas season the innocence and trust of our most childlike parts, so that we can enter once more into stories of unlikely veracity, because those stories offer us much more than mere facts. They offer us new life for old, joy in place of tiredness, a free ticket to some unearned merriment, and another visit to a place where all things are again possible, even if they seem as unlikely as a visit from the angels. And oh yes – there are indeed angels. They are messengers from the place where dreams live. And they always visit during this season to bring, to anyone who wants them, a few good dreams. All you need is something to catch them in.

Merry Christmas – and sweet dreams!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

8 December 2002

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION:

PRAYER:

SERMON: The Advent of…

What the heck is Advent? We have some sense of what Christmas is, and Hannukah, and the winter solstice. Whether we find any of those stories compelling or not, we have some idea what they’re about. Hannukah is past now, the other two aren’t here yet. But according to the calendar of Christian festivals, we’re now in Advent. So what the heck is Advent?

One answer is that Advent is the time of massive advertising hooey designed to make you feel guilty unless you buy at least $600 worth of Xmas presents in the next two weeks, and spend a total of over $1300 on holiday expenses. That’s about the American average, including about $300 spent online. It will take an average of six to eight months to pay off the credit card debts. Some people just pay off last year’s Christmas bills in time to begin shopping for the next one. Retailers in America make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So Advent also means we are paying the highest prices of the year for a lot of stuff we didn’t even know we needed a month ago.

If this doesn’t sound like a spiritual exercise, it’s because it isn’t. The idea of giving gifts for Christmas only began about a century ago. Before that, gifts were given on St. Nicholas Day, December 6th, until merchants decided the two days could be combined to mix the secular and religious holidays together into one big frenzied buying spree.

While we’re at it, December 25th doesn’t have any necessary connection with Christianity, either. As many of you know, it was the date of the winter solstice in the ancient calendar. Christianity adopted it as the symbolic date of Jesus’ birth in the year 336. Before that date nobody celebrated Jesus’ birthday because nobody knows when he was born. The winter solstice goes back to prehistoric times. So that too predates Christianity by thousands of years.

The real origin of these holidays is from deep within the human spirit. All our holidays grow out of, and are ways of expressing, our need to feel more convincing connections: to the earth, to our most cherished values, and to one another. We create our holidays like we create our gods, from our own longings for reconnection to sources of life and hope. We are like spiders, spinning our connections to the world from something inside ourselves seeking a place to stick to.

And whatever our religion is, whether it’s a brand name religion or a boutique faith, we know it’s always possible that new hope and renewed trust can be born to us. That’s easy to say, but the truth is that it’s hard to believe this sometimes. It’s hard for me, it’s probably hard for you too.

We also know it doesn’t always happen, and doesn’t necessarily happen. Life can go on being frustrating and hard. It’s happened before, hasn’t it? That’s what makes it so hard to keep hoping. Maybe we’re afraid we’ll just be fools. We hope, we yearn, but we don’t have a lot of faith that it’s likely.

There’s a colorful story about this that comes from W.C. Fields. Fields was a great comic actor of the 1930s and 40s, a curmudgeon who loved being an old grump. One of his most famous famous sayings, for example, was “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.” It’s no surprise that he hated Christmas, too.

One Christmas, a young reporter had heard that Fields hated Christmas, and asked him about it in an interview. The young man was kind of a gosh-and-golly fellow who just couldn’t grasp Fields’ style.

“Mr. Fields,” he began, “people have said that you hate Christmas, but…”

“That’s right,” Fields interrupted. “I hate it.”

“But gosh, Mr. Fields, that can’t be true. I mean, nobody can really hate Christmas. It’s just so wonderful with all the songs and angels and lights and everything. You don’t really hate it, do you?”

“No,” said Fields, “I understated it. Actually, I detest Christmas. I loathe it.”

“But how, how could you possibly hate Christmas, Mr. Fields? How?”

“Well, I’ll tell you how,” the old curmudgeon snarled at him. “You know all that rot they tell you about how this is supposed to be a season of love, how the world should be filled with generous spirits and all the compassion we never see the rest of the year? You know about all that hokum?”

“Gosh yes, Mr. Fields, but how could you hate Christmas for that?”

“Because,” growled Fields, “I believe it!”

That’s one of my favorite Christmas stories, maybe because it’s easy to identify with. Like W.C. Fields, I believe it, too. But every year I still have to struggle against the cynicism. If you only watch TV commercials or see chocolate angels and video games of war and violence being hawked for you to buy as part of the $30 billion each year spent by and for kids, it’s easy to feel that not much is going on here that’s sacred.

I don’t know whether W.C. Fields ever experienced a holiday season warmed by those poignant things he really believed in, or if his hopes just languished like a dream deferred, like a raisin in the sun, like a hope abandoned before it could blossom. But if he didn’t, it was probably because he missed the point. He didn’t understand holy days because he didn’t understand what the heck Advent was about.

Advent is the time we have to spend getting ready for holy days, so they have a chance really to be holy. We have to prepare for the advent of sacred times. We have to create a place where these warm and lovely possibilities can come into our hearts. We have to provide the manger in which sacred possibilities might be born.

W. C. Fields built a wall instead of a doorway, a gravestone rather than a manger. He had dreams, but didn’t know that he had to prepare a place for them to be born.

A manger is really built out of an attitude. An attitude of hope, faith, and trust that it really might happen, that this year we really might find ourselves opened like a present. Mangers are built from the expectation of miracles. Not David Copperfield kinds of miracles, simpler kinds. Like the miracle of loving and being loved, the miracle of watching young children light up in the certain knowledge that Santa will come, of remembering what it felt like when we knew Santa would come. A manger is a kind of mindset, not a box of wood and straw.

Without preparing ourselves, the holidays have no chance to become holy days. It’s hard to do. Especially now, you might say. For many, the times ahead look very dark and scary. We are watching our government become a right-wing command-and-control government. Individual rights are being restricted under the attitude of fear that both our leaders and our media are working so hard to maintain. Women’s rights to safe abortions will certainly be curtailed, as will civil rights and the right to dissent. A war of unprovoked aggression will almost certainly be waged against a country with no connection to the events of 9-11 at all, but with strong connections to 112 billion barrel oil reserves and a strategic position in the Persian Gulf for our economic and military ambitions.

What’s to hope for? Why be optimistic? All the elves in the world can’t change our political mess. The truth is, there is always enough misery and fear in the world to justify feeling hopeless.

We always have that choice of materials available to us. We can build our attitudes from cynicism, or from hope and faith. But if we build our mangers from cynicism, nothing life-giving can be born there.

Holidays are easy. But preparing for the possibility of a holy day is an achievement. It takes some work, and a lot of faith. The attitude that can make advent happen and build a manger in which something lovely might be born is like the image of a little green shoot growing up through a hard crusted path. New life is only possible if that unlikely little green shoot can appear, even in our lives.

We can still go into an eight-month debt buying glitzy presents without doing any of this work to prepare. But if that’s all there is, the glitz and the presents are really a kind of seduction, as though what we really need in our lives is more toys, and higher credit card bills. That may be a merchant’s dream, but there’s nothing religious about it, even if the department store has a cr”che in front and sells Santa candy and Jesus-shaped candles. Giving presents is the showy part. The gifts stand in as symbols, or substitutes, for the quieter kind of gifts we’re really hoping for. We make the manger, and determine in advance what’s likely to be born there, whether video games or the gift of a holy spirit.

And what if we do pull it off? What if we do manage to get ourselves into the attitude of Advent? What if we can again find the faith that life might become more? What if we do manage to enter into Advent with the ability to trust and hope that this year some miracles might happen? What will come of it?

Like W.C. Fields, we know all the things this season is supposed to bring, and like him we’re usually at least a little afraid because we really want to believe it, but we often really don’t believe it. We fake it.

It’s always easier to disbelieve, it says that nobody’s going to fool us, we’re too smart to be fooled again. But like Fields, we really do believe, no matter how unlikely it is. At least we want to believe.

I don’t mean we believe the old Christmas myths of a baby born under a special star with all the supernatural hokum attending it. The world isn’t built that way, and it wasn’t 2000 years ago.

I mean that somewhere inside, we really believe that life, love and hope can be reborn even within us. We know we can’t earn it, can’t command it, but we really hope it might happen, even if we won’t admit it.

That manger: if we build it, will miracles come? Will those hopes and dreams really be fulfilled, or will we just be fools again, like Charlie Brown falling on his fanny when Lucy pulls the football away again? I don’t know. I only know that if we don’t build it, the miracles probably won’t come. And really, which is the greater gift anyway: the presents, or the ability to believe that miracles could still happen?

I don’t like talking about miracles for too long. It can get seductive and misleading. We do need some realism when we start talking about wishing for miracles. There are lots of things we would be foolish to wish for. There is a difference, after all, between miracles and delusions.

I was reminded of this just awhile back. Since I’ve been in Austin, I’ve used the same hairdresser. Over the two and a half years, we’ve developed a nice familiarity. A few months ago when I sat down in her chair, she said “Well Davidson, how do you want it?”

“I want it to make me look like Brad Pitt,” I said.

She poked me and said “Hey, I’m a hairdresser, not a magician!”

There is a difference between a miracle and a delusion. If we think we’ll find prince or princess charming, win the lottery or undergo a complete personality change for Christmas so all our problems will disappear, we’re not being serious. Those aren’t miracles, they’re delusions.

So hey, you’re probably not going to look like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Heather Locklear or J-Lo. But you might come more alive this season. You might open to the possibility of seeing and experiencing all the wonder that’s always around us. You might express some warmth or love you’ve felt for a long time but have never said out loud. You might strengthen or reestablish a relationship with someone you’ve gotten in the habit of just passing time and doing chores with. Those are miracles too, and they might really come to pass, if we can prepare for them.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, my favorite philosopher, once said something cryptic and almost magical. “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.” (p. 73, Culture and Value) Another poet named Piet Hein said the same sort of thing in a poem, and even drew a picture of it, which I’ve put on the cover of your order of service so you can have a mental image of this.

Advent is like this. It takes walking on a thin tightrope of faith as though it might hold us up. The support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. You know?

The holidays are coming. Perhaps, if we really want them, some holy days will come, too. In the meantime, we need to build some mangers.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

17 November 2002

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

CENTERING:

(Selections from the beatitudes in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, read interspersed with the lyrics to Bette Midler’s recording of “Hello in There.” written by John Prine)

SERMON: Homeless in Austin

You probably recognized the words I read in counterpoint with the song “Hello in There” as the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.” You may not know that there are two versions of those beatitudes in the New Testament, and that they are quite different. They were edited by two very different kinds of early Christian communities.

The version most of us know comes from the gospel of Matthew.” It’s the spiritual version:

Most biblical scholars are clear that this is much more like the other messages of Jesus: very down-to-earth and concrete.”

Even though I’m not a Christian, I have always liked Jesus’ sayings, because they make people so uncomfortable.”

Churches are polite, well-dressed, refined places compared to the streets.” The sermons are always rated “G”; even last week’s war stories wouldn’t be rated worse than “PG.”” We gather here with our kind of people, you know.” They look like us, think like us, are probably educated or over-educated like us.” They’re clean; they dress well.” They don’t embarrass us by coming up to us during coffee hour to beg for spare change, and they don’t smell.” Sure, they may be spiritually hungry or homeless, but they all eat regularly and have a warm place to live.

Things aren’t so neat with people who are really poor, hungry and homeless.” They aren’t always fed.” They can’t always find a warm or safe place to lay their weary heads.” Their clothes are usually dirty, and they often smell.” They’re not our kind of people.” Not much like the people who gather at any church.”

And when we think of giving some spare change to them, we usually do it kind of furtively, seldom meeting their eyes.” We do it because they made us feel guilty, or because it makes us feel better for a bit.” But it’s almost never anything you would call a spiritual experience.”

Jesus sided with them, but then he was homeless himself.” He had no home, no job.” He begged for his food.” So of course he felt at home with the street people: he was one of them.

Christianity has always had this double message, about both the spiritually hungry and homeless, and the really, physically, hungry and homeless.” So have most other religions:

In some of our worst inner cities, the Black Muslims have become well known for their work on the streets, among the poor, hungry and homeless.

Hinduism probably has the most spiritual and least literal of all god-images.” They have four arms, or the head of an elephant, so that nobody could ever take them literally.” They’re all spiritual symbols.” And yet right here in Austin we have the largest Hindu temple in North America.” It’s the Barsana Dahm temple south of the city, where many of us will be next Sunday afternoon, as they’re hosting the 19th annual AAIM Thanksgiving service.” And as anyone who’s been there knows, one of the most dramatic and impressive things in the whole compound are their two huge commercial kitchens, with cooking pots over three feet in diameter that can cook more than fifty gallons of food at a time.” They routinely feed two to three thousand people there: real, down-to-earth delicious vegetarian food.”

And some Buddhists take this physical care for other life more seriously than any of us would want to take it. Since they believe that all life is linked, that all living creatures were once humans in a former life, some Buddhist monks are carried through the streets, lying in beds filled with bedbugs. They collect money for food, but the food is the monk, whose sacred duty is to feed the bedbugs.

OK, that’s going way too far for me.” I couldn’t be a good Buddhist in that order of monks.” Still, all religions teach about caring for both the spirit and the body.””

But so far, these are all kind of superficial teachings, about duties we owe to those less fortunate.” Frankly, while I agree with them, the argument has never moved me very much.” I think they’re true, but not very compelling.” Nor are they particularly religious.”

When I’m being brutally honest, I have to admit that I don’t feel any particular kinship to beggars.” I’ve worked hard, I have a job, and I don’t always understand why they can’t.”

On any given day, about 300,000 of those homeless people are Vietnam vets.” I have some feeling for their pain, because it’s a pain I have felt myself.” But it’s been thirty years!” Something in me cares for them; something else in me wants them to get on with it.

I’m speaking only for myself here, not for you.” But if you look at our actions, I’m betting they show that we look at helping the homeless as a charitable act we would do, in which they really couldn’t offer anything in return.” A condescending kind of charity, where we do all the giving, they do all the receiving, and we get to feel virtuous.

As long as we see it just as a matter of economics or exchange, it might be ethical, but not very spiritual.”

But there’s another dimension to this idea of interactions between fortunate and unfortunate people that opens this out in directions that are profoundly spiritual.”

Whenever we deal with stories about spiritual transformation, we’ll almost always find they’re written in supernatural, fantastic language, with magic, gods, miraculous transformations and so on.” This seems to be because this kind of magic goes beyond the reach of our ordinary language.”

Here’s one of the stories, for example.” It’s about a poor man who was told a great treasure would await him if he could find gods and cover their heads.” He was given five brand new beautiful hats, and he started home.” He was looking for gods, though he didn’t know exactly what gods looked like, so it wasn’t easy.” On the way, he was very tempted to exchange one of these beautiful hats for his own hat, which was old and dirty.” But he didn’t.”

He walked home slowly, looking everywhere for gods but not finding any.” He was almost home, when he saw six filthy beggars sitting right in front of his house.” One was blind, two were crippled, and all looked thin and smelled bad.” They had clothes, but the winter wind was blowing bitterly, and their heads were exposed.” He stopped to think about it, then said to them “Well, my friends, I am home and I couldn’t find any gods, so I give these hats to you.” It is said that if you can place them on the heads of gods you will find a great treasure.” I hope you have better luck than I did.”” He placed the five hats on the first five beggars, then stopped.” The sixth beggar looked into his eyes, and he couldn’t bear to refuse him, so he took of his own tattered hat and put it on this last beggar.” Wishing them well, he walked into his house, but he could hardly recognize it.” It had been transformed into a mansion of marble and gold, with sacks of gold coins everywhere.” He looked outside just in time to see the six beggars begin to glow with a bright golden light, then ascend back up into their home in heaven. They only looked like beggars; but their essence was sacred.

Here’s another story.” A certain Jewish synagogue had fallen on hard times.” It was now very small, no new members ever stayed, and all the old members picked and griped at one another, each blaming the others for their sad state of affairs.” They knew this was punishment for some undiscovered sin.” Finally, when they heard that a famous rabbi was coming through their town, they sent one of their members to ask him what was wrong, and who was at fault.”

He explained the whole story to the visiting rabbi, who began nodding knowingly before he even got to the end.”

“Yes,” the rabbi said, “you are being punished for a sin.” Your sin is the sin of ignorance.” You see, one of you is the Messiah, and you act like you do not know it.”

The old Jew walked back to his community completely puzzled.” And when he told them what the rabbi had said, they were all puzzled.” The Messiah, among us?” How could this be?” Who could it be, they all wondered silently?” Surely it couldn’t be this one; he was nasty.” And that one was too rude, and the other too selfish, and all the others are so very ordinary.” Still, the rabbi said it was one of them, and they obviously couldn’t tell by looking which one it was.

Gradually, they began treating each other kindly, just in case.” Rather than blaming, they began offering to help.” Before long, the word got out in the larger community that there was a synagogue in town where everyone who came was treated like he might be the Messiah.” Soon, they had more members than they could hold, the place was bursting at the seams, and they built a new synagogue, dedicated to the belief that the Messiah was always among them, so they should treat everyone as if it might be them.”

When you look at people and see the holy in them rather than just their failings, it can transform both of you.

How many fairy tales are there with a similar plot?” The princess kisses a frog, and he turns into the prince of her dreams.” Or was she just able to see that he was already a prince, needing a tender kiss to awaken his sleeping soul?

Beauty performs the same miracle with the beast, and probably in the same way.” He was never really a beast; people just couldn’t look at him through the eyes of love.”

The ugliest duckling becomes the swan, Cinderella becomes the princess, and beggars turn out to be incarnations of God.”

The miracle happens, I’m convinced, when we can look into another’s eyes, see their spirit, and say “Hello in there.””

Jesus once said “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.”” It’s that same story.” Treat them like dirt, and we betray the fact that our religious vision can’t see beyond our own kind of people.” Treat them like children of God, they feel more like our own brothers and sisters, and we realize that, my God, we are all in the same family, we’re all in this together.

It’s the season when we will start providing dinner, a warm place to sleep and breakfast for about fifty adult homeless people here on nights when the temperature is close to freezing. The woman who works at the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless which coordinates freeze nights told me her people really like coming to churches.” “Why?” I asked.” “Our floors are hard, we don’t have cots.” “No,” they said, “but in the churches, people talk to them.” They are so hungry to be spoken to, to be treated like people.””

What she’s saying is that more than almost anything, almost more than food, they wish someone would meet their eyes and say “Hello in there.” When that can happen, at a very human level they suddenly become our kind of people.”

We’re hosting a panel here tomorrow night called “Faces of Homelessness,” with the panel made up of present or former homeless people.” Come hear them, see if you don’t feel these people are much more like us then not.” They bleed when they’re cut, shiver when they’re cold, cry when they hurt, and hurt when they’re sloughed off as though they weren’t people at all but only dirty things that clutter up our streets.

One trap for liberals in preaching on subjects like this is that it sounds like Democrats or Green Party people wrote all of our examples.” So I was delighted this week to find a “Republican” reading.” It comes from the great Hindu writer Rabindranath Tagore’s book Gitanjali:

“I had gone begging from door to door in the village path, when your golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings!” My hopes rose high and I thought my bad days were at an end, and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.” The chariot stopped where I stood.” Your glance fell on me and you came down with a smile.” I felt that the luck of my life had come at last.” Then you held out your right hand and said, “What do you have to give me?”” Ah, what a joke it was to open your palm to a beggar to beg!” I was confused and stood undecided, and then from my wallet I slowly took out the least little grain of corn and gave it to you.” But how surprised I was when at the day’s end I emptied my bag on the floor to find a least little grain of gold among the corn.” I bitterly wept and wished that I had had the heart to give you my all.” (Tagore, Gitanjali, #50)

What would happen to us, what would happen to our society, if we began to believe these people homeless in Austin really were our brothers and sisters?” What kinds of laws would we then fight to change?” What kind of safety nets would we then work to create?” Even the most fortunate of us is little more than one serious brain injury or a few financial disasters away from the streets.” We don’t think it could happen to us.” But once, they didn’t think it could happen to them.

What happens to us when we stop seeing these poor, hungry and homeless people as things, and see them as our brothers and sisters?” What is the treasure that both religious myths and children’s fairy tales say can come to us when we treat them as though they might be incarnations of beauty, of ultimate worth, of God?”

Something in us looks into them; something in them looks into us and we say “Hello in there.” Hello.” I recognize you.” You’re like me.” I know your hopes and dreams and fears because I have them too.” Hello in there, my brother, my sister, hello.””

One thing I’m sure of is that once we see how much alike we are, how much we really are all sisters and brothers, that it can change our world.” We can easily let subhuman strangers live lives of dangerous desperation, but we can’t as easily let it happen to those to whom we have said “Hello in there.””

Because when that happens, we feel that we didn’t encounter a beggar after all.” We encountered something holy; we encountered God.” Then the homeless people are no longer the dregs of life; they’re the essence of life.” We know, then, that our souls came from the same stuff, are woven of the same fabric of hopes, yearnings and fears, that we are all trying to find ourselves a home in this world.” In a spiritual sense, we become homeless together, as children alone in the world with only ourselves and each other to count on.

You may wonder how that could really change the world.” The truth is that it’s about the only thing that can.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

10 November 2002

Text of this sermon is not available but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Though I’ve had an article of my experiences in Vietnam published, I’m very uncomfortable talking about it for a reason that may seem perverse: they were sacred experiences. But if we’re going to war, let’s not pretend it’s a video game in which people you love won’t be killed, wounded or broken. I’m one of many, many thousands of Americans who had the experience. Perhaps I have a duty to share some of the stories, to talk about real wars.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

27 October 2002

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION:

PRAYER:

In everything we do or fail to do, we’re making memories, 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 we are confused and our vision is clouded.

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 ourselves of our higher calling. Let us be open to hearing the voices of gods rather than idols, entertaining 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.

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 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.

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.”

Amen.

SERMON: “Making Memories”

This sermon theme came to me from two very different stories.

The first happened a dozen years ago in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I was visiting friends. They wanted to take us out to dinner at a memorable restaurant, so we all got in their van. Don was driving, and after about fifteen minutes it was clear that he had no idea where the restaurant was, and not much of an idea where we were.

“You’re lost!” his wife started teasing him. “Good lord, we invite our company out to dinner, try to be good hosts, and all we can do is get ourselves hopelessly lost in the back streets of Milwaukee!”

Don wasn’t phased. “Naw,” he said cooly, as he turned onto another dark empty street, “we’re not getting lost. We’re making memories.”

He was right. I don’t remember the dinner that night at all, but I’ll never forget the memories we made driving aimlessly around Milwaukee. I’ve always believed that if we could reframe all of our mistakes as times we were just making memories, we’d all be under a lot less stress. It would help even more if we could all convince our bosses of this.

The second story about making memories is a different kind of story, and an ancient one.

It comes from the Book of Joshua in the Bible, and is the story of the twelve tribes finally crossing over the Jordan River into the Promised Land. This was the land of milk and honey, the heaven on earth, that they had been wandering around the desert for forty years looking for. I’m sure that both I and my friend Don are descendants of one of these tribes.

The story of crossing over the Jordan River into the Promised Land was written over 2500 years ago, while the ancient Hebrews were captives in Babylonian. And it was written about events that happened – if they happened at all – six or eight hundred years earlier. It is a retelling of the story of crossing through the Red Sea to escape from Egypt.

Here is a story about leaving a familiar slavery for an unfamiliar wilderness, or leaving a now-familiar wilderness for a Promised Land that may last only until the next Babylonian captivity. Both times, the people didn’t want to go. After Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, they spent the next few years whining at him, wishing they were slaves in Egypt rather than wandering around the desert. They were used to the slavery; this was unfamiliar, even if it was “freedom.”

As Shakespeare said, we would rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. We may be in a rut, but it’s our rut.

You don’t have to be an ancient Jew to feel this. It’s almost disheartening, how often we will refuse to change our situation or our strategy, even when it is painfully obvious it isn’t working.

Many of you know of the battle of Galipoli in the First World War, or have seen the Australian movie. Thousands upon thousands of men climbing out of their foxholes, obeying orders to march into machine gun fire and dying in huge heaps. Tens of thousands killed on one day. One of the stupidest single days in the history of warfare.

You can see it a lot closer to home too, as people who work with battered women can tell you. To the frustration of everyone else, women who are battered usually return to the home where they will be beaten again because they prefer the suffering they know to the fear of what might happen if they leave.

It’s also what makes it hard for so many people to leave an old religion that seems to own their soul even though it does not nourish them. We are an easy species to manipulate; we’re slow to leave old habits and ruts.

But back to the story of the people crossing the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. When they finally reach the Jordan River, they have to cross it, and it’s dangerous to cross it. The priests of the twelve tribes go first. They’ve been told that if they have the courage to walk into the river, the waters will stop. So the priests walk into the rushing waters of the Jordan, sustained by their faith. Sure enough, the waters stop, the priests cross, and the people – who are a thousand yards behind watching – see that it’s safe and cross over.

Then comes the really magical moment in the story. As they cross over, they pick up big rocks from the bottom of the river. They carry the rocks across, and pile them up to make a marker. They stopped to make a memory: because a miracle happened here, and when miracles happen, we simply must stop to make a memory, because it would be terrible to forget that they can really happen to us, these miracles. So they make a memory, from the rocks that marked the place where they showed the faith and courage to cross over a significant boundary.

In real life, it is hardly ever the priests who lead us. I’ve gone to one of those locked shelters for battered women, and asked the women what advice they got from their pastors when they go to them for help. Many said their ministers told them God wanted them at home, as their husband’s helpmate. I have spoken with some of the women who worked on the locked floors of a YWCA where battered women could seek refuge, and they have told me that the most astonishing calls they get are from the pastors of the battering husbands – ministers who tell them that they are to release these women so their husbands can take them back home.

Far too often, priests don’t help people choose life. Far too often, political leaders don’t lead, either. Far too often the print, radio and television media don’t have the courage or the freedom to run the most important and revealing stories, so they offer programs of sensationalist distraction instead – a kidnapping, sniper shooting, plane crash, stories that draw crowds but don’t educate or enlighten them. Those who should lead, too often mislead.

Most of the time those who are first willing to cross over dangerous boundaries are ordinary people, like the police and firefighters on 9-11. Most often, those who lead the way are regular people who found the courage of their convictions and stood firm as a symbol for others, as a memory of the uncommon courage of common people, and the real hope of the world.

What does this mean in your everyday life? It can mean a lot of things.

You have a friend who is involved in a relationship where they are being abused: psychologically, physically or both. What do you do? If you care about them, you do what you can to help them see where they are and how to get out of it.

You tell them there is another way to live, that they need not stay in a relationship that insults them, that they can escape from their slavery, and that it is worth escaping from their slavery, even though it has become familiar to them.

You have a friend who is enslaved by an unhealthy religion. They wish they could leave it, but they are scared to go because that religion has got a hold of their soul even though it doesn’t nourish them. Or you know someone with no religion, and an emptiness in them that needs an honest style of religion for both their head and their heart. You can say “I know a church you might like, where you can be uplifted rather than put down, and where you can find inspiration without intimidation. Why don’t you come to church with me this Sunday?”

But there is another level of this old Bible story that hadn’t occurred to me until this week. One of the marvelous things about great stories is that the more time you spend in them, the more windows and doors they can open for you.

It’s the difference between leading and just posturing. The priests in this story were actually leaders. When they crossed the river, the people followed. But as any of us who have been involved in many political rallies know, especially now over this war, a lot of the time the positions are stated with such self-righteousness it seems the people are just posturing, just wanting others to see them and think of them as virtuous. The speeches are designed to rouse an audience to applause rather than make them think. They aren’t meant to persuade those who believe differently. That’s not leadership.

A colleague in Michigan wrote me about a march against the war a couple weeks ago. The sign that stopped him cold was the one carried by members of a local Unitarian church. It said “UUs for Social Interaction.” What on earth is that about? Social interaction? Is the idea that if we’d all play together everything would be just swell? Who is that supposed to persuade, and what could it possibly lead them to do? That’s posturing, not leading.

Another story comes from San Francisco, where a huge herd of four hundred costumed clergy gathered on the Golden Gate Bridge a couple weeks ago. They wanted to protest the war, so what they did was stand on the bridge in their robes, holding hands. They wondered why, even though the media were there, they didn’t ever air this. What would they air? What would the story be? “Four hundred local clergy gathered to be seen in public holding hands?” Here’s a looming war with a lot of complex and interrelated issues and arguments that must be researched, understood, and addressed. If all the ministers can do is dress up and hold hands, I think that’s posturing, not leading.

I’m not saying leading is easy. I struggle with it all the time. I spent most of yesterday at a six-hour program of speeches and panel discussions on the prospect of war in Iraq.

The high points of the day came early. Our Congressman Lloyd Doggett and a community activist named Bert Sachs from Seattle each said that it is a waste of time and energy to preach to the converted, that we must try to communicate with people who see these issues differently than we do. One of them said those who want to prevent or stop this war must not demonize anyone. I know they’re right, but it’s hard to remember it.

After that high point, I participated in one panel discussion and listened to another. It seemed to me that most speakers were posing rather than leading. It seemed to me that they felt morally superior to those who want war, and had no strong interest in communicating with them. That’s not leading, that’s posturing. It’s a waste of spirit. We can’t afford it.

And there’s still another message hidden behind this story. It’s never stressed, but always had to be there. Behind the scenes, during all that wandering and dramatic crossing over, life went on. And that’s important to remember now.

When war is in the air, the job of ministers is more complex. I must remember that war can’t be allowed to numb us to the fact that life still goes on. There are still joy, laughter, tender moments with friends. People still fall in love and get married, babies are still born, and there are memories to be made with children and loved ones. There are still important jobs to do as mothers, fathers, people of faith and citizens.

Personally, I must try to speak out in Austin against what I believe is the foolishness and the deception of our proposed war. I will struggle to learn how to lead rather than just posturing, and I think that’s hard to do.

But the war will not be our primary focus here, even though the experience of war will be the focus of the Veterans’ Day service in two weeks. My primary focus and our ministerial intern Cathy’s primary focus will remain on you, your lives, and the life of our church.

This morning, I needed to remind myself that in everything we do or fail to do, we’re making memories and writing the story of our lives. Maybe you needed reminding too. So the prayer I offer is for myself, for you, for our political and religious leaders, for all of us:

Let us remind ourselves of our higher calling. Let us be open to hearing the voices of gods rather than idols, entertaining 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.

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 act as though God were watching, as though those whom we love were watching.

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 I knew how to be. And that is enough, it is enough.”

Amen.