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© Davidson Loehr

7 March 2004

Worship Associate: Jonobie Ford

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Jonobie Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAYER:

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Oh, Gods!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

29 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Don Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAYER

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

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

Let us hope their prayers are answered.

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

Let us hope their prayers are answered.

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

Amen.

SERMON: The Danger in Handling Sacred Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

8 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

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

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sloan McLain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAYER

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: The Strings of Compassion

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

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

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you have ease of well-being.

May you be safe from danger.

May you be free from all suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you have ease of well-being.

May you be safe from danger.

May you be free from all suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

1 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

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

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Dennis

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

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

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

PRAYER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Missing Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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© Davidson Loehr

28 December 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Endings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are the thoughts you should have thought;

Feet to run with you should have given us.

We should have soared skywards as challenging voices,

But here we must tumble like balls of gray yarn.

We are songs, you should have sung us.

A thousand times you have pinched and suppressed us.

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

We were never called forth-

Now we poison your voice!

We are tears-you should have shed us.

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

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

We are deeds; you should have done us.

Doubts that strangle have crippled and bent us.

But on Judgment Day we shall flock to accuse you;

And woe to you then. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

Hannah Wells

21 December 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

HOMILY: Merry Christmasing!

Hannah Wells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The present is a present. Merry Christmasing!

HOMILY: Christmasing

Davidson Loehr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

7 December 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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