Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

16 March 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

And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.

And he answered, saying:

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.

But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.

You would know in words that

which you have always known in thought.

You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.

The hidden wellspring of your soul must needs

rise and run murmuring to the sea;

And the treasure of your infinite depths

would be revealed to your eyes.

But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;

And seek not the depths of your knowledge

with staff or sounding line.

For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, “I have found the truth”

but rather, “I have found a truth.”

Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.”

Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”

For the soul walks upon all paths.

The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

– On Self-Knowledge – Kahlil Gibran

SERMON: He: A Salvation Story for Men

The myth of the quest for the holy grail began in the 12th century, the time many identify as the beginning of the modern world. One famous quote says that the winds of the 12th century became the whirlwinds of the 20th century, so this story may not be as foreign to us as you might think.

It’s the story of the wounded Fisher King, of Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail, of fair and Hideous damsels. It’s a kind of salvation story, especially for men, a story of what’s wrong, where modern men find themselves, and a prescription for what to do about it. It is a spiritual story, with deep roots into what we today call depth psychology of existential psychology.

I want to talk with you about this old myth. I’ll move back and forth between real life and the old myth, kind of tying them together from the inside out. It will be a little like walking the Chartres labyrinth, where we start way out, seem to move quickly toward the center, then get directed away from it, winding up a long way from the center before finally reaching home.

When a boy reaches adolescence, he discovers a new world, charged with power he hadn’t been aware of before. He is drawn to it as though it were part of who he must become, and in a way it is. But he’s far too young to handle it, and the experience of this new supercharged world makes an impression and issues a call that may be part of the rest of his life. The question of what must be done with that power will be with him until he resolves it.

It can happen emotionally, if he gets involved with a girl or woman he is in no way prepared for. My favorite movie about this was “The Summer of ’42.” Newer films include “Something About Mary” and a hundred others about boys falling all over themselves the first time they feel the feminine presence and realize both how powerful it seems, and how foreign, how far beyond their power. This is the Fair Damsel, who awakens his desire to become a man. In the Summer of ’42, it was a 15-year-old boy who was seduced by a woman ten years older who had just received a telegram saying her husband had been killed in the war. She was in such shock and grief she may not even have realized she was seducing him, and when he woke in the morning she was gone, he was never to see her again. There’s an initiation into a supercharged world that can stay with a boy, and will stay with a boy, his whole life.

Or the world of power may not be sexual, just very macho. An action hero, a video game that creates an imaginary world supercharged with deadly weapons, evil villains, mortal combat, and the thrill of the kill. You can watch this one being played out all over the country, every day. These boys are being seduced into a world with more power, and a different kind of power, than they’ve ever experienced before – especially when experienced through the haze of their new hormones. As video game designers know, they can barely tell the difference between the fantasy world on the screen and the real thing. Here, they’re a hero. Here, they have unbounded power over life and death. It’s so intoxicating that many boys withdraw into these fantasy worlds for hours at a time, day after day.

You can see boys practicing the bantam rooster activities of the quest for the Holy Grail everywhere, not just in the television shows of gangs and punks acting tough. You’ll see it in sports, both amateur and professional. That’s where our boys slay a lot of their dragons. And you see it in business behaviors. That’s why you see books on business strategy with titles talking about how to swim with the sharks, or Attila the Hun as a business model (I read this: it’s really dumb). You watch some of these guys as they progress, and you’ll feel the testosterone. They are learning what power is and how to use it.

In the myth, the King is a deeply wounded man. He can’t really live, but can’t die. He just suffers. He lacks the creative power he needs to find authenticity in the real world. His relationships are often a kind of role-playing, acting out, posing in costume.

Every night there is a solemn ceremony in the Grail castle. The Fisher King is lying on his litter enduring his suffering while a procession of profound beauty takes place. Fair maidens bring in a procession of wondrous things, until finally a maiden brings the Holy Grail itself which glows with light from its own depth. Each person (except the king) is given wine from the Grail and realizes their deepest wish even before they voice that wish. The king is barred from the essence of beauty and holiness when just those qualities are right in front of him. We can be disconnected and incapable of perceiving beauty, it happens easily.

The court fool had prophesied long ago that the Fisher King would be healed when a wholly innocent fool arrived in the court and asked the question “What does the Grail serve?”

The Grail is the symbol of the power of life itself: the power of God, shared with all, sustaining all. The king’s wound means that for all his efforts, he really hasn’t gotten it. He really isn’t partaking of the transcendent power of the universe as it is meant to be used. He has power, but it’s a kind of reflected light, not a light emanating from him. The light is from God, from the power of life, the powers of the universe. All the power there is loaned to the Grail by life, God, the universe, everything transcendent, from the whole tapestry of which we are a part.

The king would think he’s got control of that power. After all, he’s a king. He’s the star of the football team, the CEO of the company, the head of his unit, the studliest stud in his fraternity. He’s The Man.

But he doesn’t own this power, and he has not yet found his connection to it. That’s his wound, that’s why he suffers. In spite of his crown, he’s still an adolescent, playing adolescent games that he thought would make him a man, make him whole, bring him salvation. But they don’t. That takes something else, and he hasn’t found it.

The hero, the one who could save the king, is named Parsifal, which means “innocent fool” or “he who draws the opposites together” – like the meaning of the Chinese word Tao. Parsifal is another part of the king, of us. The king has power, but he can’t put the whole picture together, the picture of him and his world, including that transcendent power that he uses without owning. That’s what he can’t do, and only the fool, the innocent part of him, might do it, and only if he can learn to ask the magic question: What does the Grail serve?

In other words, the Grail that contains some of this transcendent power, and we who contain come of the transcendent power of life, the world, the universe – what do we serve? What is the point of our lives, and of having this power? A man’s search for that answer is his quest for the Holy Grail.

The myth came from a time when only men would be knights, or CEOs, or scholars or lawyers or even preachers, so these were men’s problems. Today, many women are playing these roles, are finding and using this power. And so today, many women are also struggling to put their power into a transcendent perspective.

Until we can do it, we’ll keep slaying dragons outside of us, fighting battles in the bedroom or boardroom or on the playing field or in the courtroom, in search of the Holy Grail, in search of that source of power.

This quest drives much of our economy, and fuels much of the advertising industry. Sexy sports cars, SUVs pictured in ads with people driving up remote mountains to do extreme sports, while the vehicles are sold to families, 99% of whom will never drive off-road anywhere. Or those $50,000 Humvees, those rough-terrain military vehicles, for your family’s assault on the shopping mall. Or $30,000 diamond bracelets. You can sell a man almost anything if he thinks it’s the Holy Grail, the source of the power of reconnection he needs.

All of these products are being sold as Holy Grails, as things that possess that kind of transcendent power we’re seeking. The advertisers are saying “Come on, buy this and you’ll have made it, man. You’ll have arrived. You’ll be saved.” And as long as we keep looking for salvation through outside things we’ll keep buying them, filling our garages with them, charging them on our credit cards, then forgetting about them because, somehow, they just didn’t give us that power after all.

The quest for the Holy Grail is the price we pay for remaining adolescents, for staying in a cartoon world. It’s a world, like the world of video games, of pure good against pure evil, where the answer to conflict is to destroy the opponent, to win the victory. And it defines more of our world and our economy than you can measure.

Right now, we have a president who speaks in terms of good against evil, where there are only two sides, one must be destroyed, where a massive bombing that will slaughter thousands of innocent women and children – and a few soldiers – in Iraq is referred to as an evening of “Shock and Awe.” Not violent, bloody murder and dismemberment, not the slaughter of the innocents, people who never harmed us – or the thousands of “human shields” who have now flown to Baghdad from all over the world. No, our government is describing the slaughter of these innocents in the adolescent language of video games: an evening of Shock and Awe. That is the quest for the Holy Grail, on the national level. The quest for power over people, for peace through pacification rather than through peaceful means, the quest for the power to invade any country at will, without provocation, and the feeling that this will lead to the ultimate kind of power – this is the quest for the Holy Grail, by wounded kings and wounded nations who have not understood and have not asked What does the Grail serve?

Well, they do ask it, and we ask it. But we think the answer is us: that the power serves whoever grabs it, however they get it. We think we are the center of the world, if we can compel or destroy all who oppose us. That’s the kind of power video games and action movies are about. It is not the kind of power the great myths are about. It is not the kind of power great religious insights are about. And it is not the kind of power than brings wholeness or salvation, only blood, terror, and retribution.

But the wounded kings do not know it.

I’m not taking liberties with this 800-year-old myth. This is what it is about. These are the dynamics of people seeking the wrong kind of power that the myth is about. And it insists that the salvation we seek can only come through asking the question no one is asking: What does the Grail serve? What does the power of life, God, the world, the universe – what does it serve? For the power must be reunited with what it serves, or the wound will remain and we will remain anxious, the most depressed nation on earth, the nation with the highest youth homicide rate in the world, the highest rate of imprisoning and executing our own citizens.

The quest for the Holy Grail, the drive to succeed, to control some of this power in some way, defines the adult lives of most men. It isn’t all bad. It motivates men, makes them work hard, succeed, provide a decent living for their families, offer some of life’s finer things to those they love. It isn’t all bad at all.

But there comes a time when men wonder if it’s enough.

In the old myth, the bubble is popped by a character called the Hideous Damsel. She brings the questions neither the king nor Parsifal have wanted to address their whole lives. She asks what they have done with their lives, why they think their lives have really been worth anything. She questions the worth of all their achievements, asks if this hasn’t just been a kind of game, without any real purpose.

These are the questions that today we identify as the male mid-life crisis. After working for twenty years and succeeding, men are plagued by the questions of whether they have really succeeded at all, or just spent their life chasing shadows. These questions are an invitation, finally, to bring the struggles inside, to do the self-examination needed to find whether this is, in fact, the kind of life they wanted. Hard questions. We’ll do almost anything to avoid them.

This is the time when many men, not surprisingly, try to find a new Fair Damsel to take their minds off the Hideous Damsel. Maybe if they can convince themselves they’re still young, they can start again with a new wife, a new family, and somehow take a path that won’t run into the questions of the Hideous Damsel down the road.

The role of the Hideous Damsel doesn’t have to be a woman, or even a person. Yes, it could be the man’s wife or mother, but it could also be his son or daughter, his best friend, a preacher or a therapist. Or it may have been a character in a movie he saw, like the movie “About Schmidt.” These are the events that play the role of the Hideous Damsels, asking the questions of what meaning his life had, and they suddenly hit him, and he realizes that he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know.

My own father turned this story into farce in his determination to avoid life’s hard questions. He married seven times. The last two Fair Maidens were mail-order brides from a magazine called “Foreign Women Who Want to Meet American Men.” His last marriage came at the age of 68, to a 28-year-old woman who wanted, perhaps desperately, to leave the Philippines. They had two young children together, now teenagers, which she raised alone after he died eleven years later.

But if men keep trying to relive their adolescent dreams, they never become whole. Salvation eludes them. What a frustrating labyrinth!

So what’s the answer? It’s really one answer, though it comes from many directions, many cultures. The subject, after all, is the same: the human condition, and what to do within it.

About 170 years ago the great Frenchman de Toqueville observed after his visit to America that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One can not pursue happiness, he thought; if he does he obscures it. If he will proceed with the human task of life, if he can relocate the center of gravity of his personality to something greater, outside himself, happiness will be the outcome.

Psychologist Erik Erikson wrote that as we get older, we must find a way to give back to the world, that our power and our work must finally be grounded in something transcendent like life or the world.

And where is this transcendence, this source of power, to be found? Again, one answer, many versions. A wonderful and unusual medieval Christian proverb says, “To search for God is to insult God.” A Chinese story tells of a fish that heard some men talking on a pier about a miraculous substance called water. This “water,” they were saying, could do everything: support you, transport you, nourish you, and it was abundantly plentiful. The fish was so intrigued! “Water,” it bubbled to itself, “why, I need some of that stuff!” So he called his fish friends together and announced he was going in quest of this wonderful water stuff. A few years later he returned, long fish beard, and his old friends gathered around him. “Well,” they asked, “did you find it? This “water” stuff: did you find it?” The old fish sighed. “Yes,” he said, “Yes, I found it. And you wouldn’t believe it, you just wouldn’t believe it!” And he swam slowly away. And the most advanced teaching of Hinduism is “That art Thou” – we are one with all that is, and our efforts and our lives need to serve it.

What does the Grail serve? The myth of the Holy Grail is Christian, so in their language they say the Grail serves God, that eventually all our power and all our efforts must be put in the service of God or we will never be whole, never find salvation.

But there are many other ways of saying this. We would agree with Tocqueville that the object of life is not happiness, but to serve life or the world. The creative powers of the universe, of life, created us, and we do not find our completion until we find a way of reconnecting, returning. The stardust wants its connection to the other stardust. The stuff of life wants to become one with life again. Hindus have another wonderful story of the salt doll who was also in search of this “water” stuff and made its way to the ocean. Now the salt doll was made entirely of salt. When it reached the ocean, it just waded right in – and began dissolving, of course. Just before it had completely dissolved, the last sound it was heard to make was a quiet “Aaahh!” We must return the power to its origins. The power serves the whole, not the parts.

This same motif appears in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, now a major motion picture nominated for several Academy Awards. The power must be taken from those who would exploit it. In the Grail myth the source of power is given to the representative of God. In Tolkien’s myth the ring of power is taken from evil hands that would use its power to destroy the world and is put back into the ground from which it came. Current myths often speak of returning power to the earth before we destroy ourselves. Jesus said “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.”

This isn’t mythology, it’s real life stuff. Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, has now put about twenty billion dollars into a foundation to help some of the weakest, poorest kids in the world. Why? Not for a tax write-off, I think, but because at some level he may know what the Grail serves, and is trying to find his own completion by serving it too. Former Austin resident and UT graduate Rene Zellweiger, who was just paid $10 million for her Oscar-nominated role in the movie “Chicago,” was on television the other day saying we must protest the injustices she feels our country is threatening to inflict on the world, and said she knows she will be arrested for these actions, but doesn’t care. She has gained great power and seems to know already that it is seductive, that she can’t be whole when the world is not. I do think many women see this sooner than most men.

I suspect this is the real motive behind a lot of philanthropy: the need to feel connected with the mysterious powers of life that created us, sustain us, and will claim us in the end.

We have a model of the famous labyrinth from France’s Chartres Cathedral in our social hall today. Millions of people have found walking the labyrinth to be a deeply spiritual experience. In a way, the plot of the labyrinth is the plot of the quest for the Holy Grail, and of this sermon. You start walking, and soon feel that you’re getting nearer and nearer to the center. Then suddenly you’re taken in the other direction, and are soon in the furthest ring from the center. This is like hearing the questions from the Hideous Damsel, wondering what your life has been about and whether it’s worth it. It’s easy to get depressed, or to want to start over and see if there isn’t a quicker route. But when you stay with it, the path turns toward the center and, with one detour, you’re suddenly there.

You don’t have to do it over again. You don’t have to start your life all over again, even if you could. You can do it from where you are right now. You just have to relocate the center of gravity of your personality, to put your soul in the service of that which is truly transcendent, ultimate, and enduring. This is what the great religions have always said. Always.

When you do it, return the power to the service of life, God, the world, when you re-center your soul’s quest around that, you’re suddenly home. It can be just that quick, just that quick: in the labyrinth, in life, and even in this sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

9 March 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION:

We come to seek beyond sight,

 to listen beyond sounds,

 to be opened to life

 at levels sometimes comforting

 and sometimes disturbing

 but always in that neighborhood

 where our minds, hearts and souls

 find their common ground,

 and their common purpose.

It is good to be together again, for

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

– and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING PRAYER:

I want to share with you a short prayer, a Yoruban prayer from Africa. Prayers often sound funny to many modern people, kind of foreign, as though they are talking to an imaginary friend up above the sky. This prayer can also be heard that way. But I invite you to let it get inside of you by asking to whom or to what, for you, could this prayer be addressed? It’s very short, I’ll read it twice:

O Divine One! I give thanks

 to You, the one who is as near as my

 heartbeat, and more anticipated than my

 next breath. Let Your wisdom become one

 with this vessel as I lift my voice in

 thanks for Your love.

O Divine One! I give thanks

to You, the one who is as near as my

heartbeat, and more anticipated than my

next breath. Let Your wisdom become one

with this vessel as I lift my voice in

thanks for Your love.

Amen.

SERMON: The Soul’s Code

We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives. We need better stories, more interesting plots to live out.

I don’t say this only because I recently spent four days in Lubbock, though it is related. I gave four talks there, one on a theological argument for abortion to an audience of Texas Tech students where I got over an hour’s worth of questions, almost all of them hostile. Lubbock doesn’t permit sex education in its public schools. It also has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Texas, which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the U.S., which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world. So it’s not surprising that they are living out of some pretty sad stories.

One young man told me that it didn’t bother him that some local 15-year-old girls were having their second child, or that Lubbock led the nation in births to teen-aged girls who can’t care for the babies, because “If even one of those babies comes to know the Lord, it will have been worth it.” Worth sacrificing thousands of human beings who, in his story, just don’t matter.

In some ways, this is a problem of organized religions, which have been in denial since the loss of the supernatural world. When God can be no more than a concept, the concept has had trouble competing with other, sometimes better, concepts, and stories to live by.

But it isn’t just organized religions that have trouble coming up with adequate stories. Yesterday I read in the new issue of Newsweek about a 52-year-old French chef who committed suicide because his restaurant lost its three-star rating. What was that story about? And the suicide rate of America’s teenagers is the highest in the developed world; so we have a lot of people without a story worth living by.

In some ways, the most important human question we have is “How do I put the pieces of my life and my world together into a coherent life? How do I find a story worth living out?”

Now consider this: What if we already carry within us a kind of dynamic force that can help lead us toward the kind of life story we need? What if the style of our integrity comes into the world with us, and we just need to learn how to hear it and listen to it?

What if you had a kind of guardian angel that was always with you? That knew your soul, that could help guide you toward authenticity? And what if it had a kind of invisible presence and power that could help you, hold you on course, help you be true to yourself, if you just stayed in touch with it?

This picture is what billions of people for thousands of years have believed was the true order of the universe. It isn’t quite the world of the gods, it’s more ancient than the gods. It’s the world of the invisible powers within our lives, both individually and collectively.

Since ancient times, most people have believed this is really the case. The Greeks spoke of the daimon that comes into the world with each person, and can guide us toward the kind of life we must lead. The Romans called this our genius. It didn’t have anything to do with I.Q., it had more to do with the word “genie,” from which it came. Our genie, or genius, was a kind of invisible spirit that’s a part of us. The great geniuses of history are people who have followed the lead of their most amazing genies. I’ve known just a few geniuses, and found them to be very driven people. They didn’t really have a choice, they had to do what they were doing. Those I knew did it better than almost anyone alive. The genie that drove them also blessed them. But we can all be blessed by our daimon, our genie, our soul.

Christians have this notion too, though it isn’t as intellectual. For centuries, Christians have written about our guardian angel, who acts just about like the daimon or the genius. And both Hindus and Buddhists talk about our karma as that invisible force that seems to contain our script, to point toward what we must do and how we must live.

A few years ago, this ancient theory was given another look by the Jungian psychologist James Hillman, in a book called The Soul’s Code. That code is the invisible sort of message we carry with us that can point us toward who we must try to become. Our soul, you understand, isn’t a kind of little bag of gas. It isn’t a “thing” in that way. It’s more like a moving style, the way we are, the way we need to be in order to be true to ourselves.

Though Hillman seems to dart in and out of supernaturalism when he writes, there is nothing spooky about this. A few weeks ago I talked about the fact we’ve all observed, that each animal, including us, comes into the world with a unique sort of character or style, and they always try to live in that style. It’s true with dogs, cats, horses and humans, nothing spooky about it, and that’s what the ancients were calling the daimon or genius or guardian angel though I don’t think dogs, cats and horses are presumed to have angels in Christianity.

James Hillman calls all this his Acorn Theory, which holds that each person has a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived. (p. 6) That’s the sense in which our character is our destiny. That’s the soul’s code.

Since this soul or genius is easiest to see in the really exemplary people where it is most dramatic, Hillman uses stories from some of their lives to make his theory come alive.

Consider this event. Amateur Night at the Harlem Opera House. A skinny, awkward sixteen-year-old goes fearfully onstage. She is announced to the crowd: “The next contestant is a young lady named Ella Fitzgerald. “Miss Fitzgerald here is gonna dance for us”. “Hold it, hold it. Now what’s your problem, honey?” Correction, folks. “Miss Fitzgerald has changed her mind.” She’s not gonna dance, she’s gonna sing.” Ella Fitzgerald gave three encores and won first prize. (10)

Or take the story of Golda Meir, who led Israel during the 1973 war. Her career was launched by her soul’s calling while in fourth grade in the Milwaukee public schools. She organized a protest group against the required purchase of schoolbooks, which were too expensive for the poorer children, who were thus denied equal opportunity to learn. This child of eleven rented a hall to stage a meeting, raised funds, gathered her group of girls, prepped her little sister to declaim a social poem in Yiddish, and then herself addressed the assembly. Was she not already a Labor party prime minister? (20)

When you see a story this dramatic begin to unfold, it is just mesmerizing, though I think many of us experience something similar, if less dramatic. The highlight of my four days in Lubbock was a young woman who may well belong in this kind of company. Her name is Shelby Knox, and she spoke very boldly and articulately about the need for sex education in public schools. In fact, she presented her speech to the National Education Association two years ago, followed by a camera crew from HBO, which is filming a documentary on her because two years ago when she delivered that speech, she was fourteen.

My hosts invited her to a dinner with some of us, and I had a chance to experience this girl first-hand. She knows exactly who she is and what she must do, and has absolutely no doubts that she will do it. She has a 4.0 grade average, and after she graduates from high school in 2005, she plans to attend either New York University or American University and begin to learn how to change the direction of politics, our country, and perhaps the world. I wouldn’t bet against her.

She reminded me of the theme of this sermon, so I talked with her about this acorn theory, and she identified with it immediately. Before she knew who she was and what she must do, she said she was confused and scared. But then after she turned eleven, everything became clear. She discovered an inner beacon that shines like a laser beam.

She reminded me of the story of the greatest of all Spanish bullfighters, Manolete. As a child, Manolete was timid and fearful, delicate and sickly, interested only in painting and reading. He clung so tightly to his mother’s apron strings that his sisters and other children used to tease him. He rarely joined other boys’ games of soccer or playing at bullfighting. This all changed when he was about eleven, and for the rest of his life, nothing else mattered much except the bulls. (15-16)

Don’t let this sound spooky. We live among a throng of invisibles that order us about: family values, self-development, human relationships, personal happiness, and then another, more fierce set of mythical figures called Control, Success, Cost-Effectiveness, and the Economy. Were we in old Florence or ancient Rome or Athens, the invisibles would have statues and altars, or at least painted images, like the ancient invisibles called fortune, Hope, Friendship, Grace, Modesty, Persuasion, and the rest. But our task here is not to restore all the invisibles but to discriminate among them by attending to the one that once was called your daimon or genius, sometimes your soul or your fate, or your acorn. (96)

In ancient times, the world had been permeated with invisibilities, a condition that Christianity called paganism. (111) Throughout history though, in almost all cultures, people have had ways of relating to the invisible forces that help guide and inspire their lives. That’s what prayers are really about, too. At their worst, prayers sound like selfish petitions for supernatural powers to do favors for us. Sometimes, they’re just poetic thanks for being alive. But at their best, I think prayers are our efforts to stay in touch with the powerful but invisible dimensions of life that seem to know our name, know our story, have our best interests at heart, and hints of our best kind of future.

That’s what I think the African prayer was about that I used this morning. If I think of it as referring to somebody up above the sky, it makes no sense. But if I think of it as trying to communicate with my own soul, with the angels of my better nature, with the source of wisdom inside of me that knows my name and who I need to be, then suddenly the prayer becomes real and honest in a new way.

Listen to it again in this way, as a way of your speaking to whatever it is that you do count on for the wisdom, the direction, and the courage to guide your life, and see if it doesn’t speak to you:

O Divine One! I give thanks

to You, the one who is as near as my

heartbeat, and more anticipated than my

next breath. Let Your wisdom become one

with this vessel as I lift my voice in

thanks for Your love.

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

23 February 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

Introduction

With every new revelation of the Homeland Security Act that appears, it seems clear that individual and civil rights are being threatened wholesale, while few seem to notice. The second section of this act, which a guest discussed with Bill Moyers a week ago on his NOW program, makes it clear that the government can declare war against not only sovereign nations without provocation, but that they can also declare war against individual citizens of this country. I know some people who scoff at this, saying only a paranoid individual would think the government would really do things like this that are characteristic of fascist governments but not democracies. Maybe. Maybe we’ll just have to differ on that.

But with or without paranoia, I’ve been thinking all week of the few famous lines written almost sixty years ago by pastor Martin Niemoller, after the fall of the Nazi movement in his Germany. He had been an outspoken critic of both Hitler and the Nazis almost from the start, and ended the war in the concentration camp at Dachau, freed by the American army shortly before he was to be executed.

In 1945, he wrote this short confession which has been quoted thousands of times, and which is beginning to appear in e-mails and critical news stories. I want to remind us of it:

Prayer

Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Communists,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time there was no one

left to speak up for me.

For me, Niemoller’s warning applies to religion as well as it does to politics: maybe more. And the soul of his message is one Jesus put in even fewer words: We are all our brother’s and our sister’s keepers. We are all our brother’s and our sister’s keepers.

SERMON

Since I didn’t grow up in a conservative religion, most religious jargon isn’t loaded for me. So I usually think of the word “God” as a symbol for our highest ideals and values. And I think of the word “salvation” in its original meaning: as health, wholeness (it comes from the same Latin root as “salve”). For me, the terms are kind of safe and abstract.

But when I hear many of your stories about why you left the churches of your childhood, or why your family avoided churches altogether, I realize that in the real world, “salvation” had a very different meaning, and not a very positive one. It meant getting a group’s or a church’s acceptance only as long as you agreed not to think outside the lines drawn by their orthodoxy. Neither my definition of God or of salvation would have worked in those churches. That’s partly why I grew up unchurched: I didn’t respect the few churches I tried.

I can’t count the number of times I have heard Unitarians talk about how they felt when they knew they had to leave their old church. Some felt angry, some felt hurt, to realize that they couldn’t stay because they didn’t believe those things, and it wasn’t safe to say so out loud. Not that you’d be shot, but people would look at you funny if you had said you weren’t so sure about this God-stuff. They might have called you an atheist or a heretic, as though that were a bad thing. And they would have made you uncomfortable, as though you weren’t quite clean any more. So you left. It’s also why so many people – a majority of U.S. citizens – neither attend nor trust churches. The gods are the hand puppets of those who speak for them, and salvation is your reward for going along with their game.

So I suppose what I really want to talk about here isn’t salvation, but the legitimate heir to what was once called salvation. I love that phrase, and want to footnote it. It comes from my favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), the thinker on whom I wrote my dissertation. I’d rate him as one of the four best philosophers in history (Plato, Aristotle, and Kant). When people finally understand him widely, it might change the nature of philosophy, and religion, in fundamental ways. At some point during his teaching years at Cambridge, another philosopher (could have been Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, or G.E. Moore, I forget) asked him what it was that he was doing: “It’s certainly not philosophy!” Wittgenstein’s response was “Perhaps not, but it’s the legitimate heir to what was once called philosophy.” Now I want to talk for these few minutes about the legitimate heir to salvation.

There are two facets to salvation, and it’s easy to emphasize the wrong one by thinking that all we have to do is just be honest and open about what we really believe, try to fashion beliefs that are true to both our heads and our hearts, then try to live them. But that’s the easy part, the part we don’t have to worry much about. Every one of you already has your sense of questions, yearnings, your way of saying what you do and don’t believe.

The second part of this salvation business – and the most important and most fragile part – is the thing Martin Niemoller was talking about in this morning’s prayer. It is a kind of atmosphere within which it is safe to voice your beliefs, whether theological, social, moral or political, without being made to feel that you are a second-class person, or a member of The Damned. That atmosphere is what was lacking in whatever church you felt you had to leave. Why was it lacking? Because are rules in all churches, and the church that offended you probably had the wrong rules.

In theological terms, these rules can be called an orthodoxy: a set of beliefs endorsed by a group, and used as the boundaries of permissible belief for everyone in the religion. Once an orthodoxy is in place, the choices are closed, even if you hadn’t finished choosing yet. And the theological word for choosing after some group has set up an orthodoxy is heresy. It comes from a Greek verb meaning, “to choose.” So heresy is only considered bad by those who closed off the choices before you were done. When you look at it this way, heresy is the sacred thing, and orthodoxy is the blasphemy. Heresy is the Holy Spirit, alive and well, helping you find beliefs that can make you whole. Orthodoxy is a kind of groupthink that would cut you – and God – down to the group’s size.

The Greeks had a different image for orthodoxy, in their story of Procrustes. He was this man with an iron bed. He was very friendly to his visitors, always offering them that bed to sleep on. But once on it, he tied them down, then either stretched them to fit the bed or cut off whatever parts hung over. He had his iron bed, and everyone had to fit it. That’s orthodoxy.

Another image comes from the television series “Star Trek.” It’s the group known collectively as The Borg. I suspect more of you watch Star Trek than read Greek mythology, so you probably know about the Borg. They are a kind of group, or cult, that simply assimilates everyone into them, erasing individual differences and essentially giving everyone the soul of the group, the collective, the cult, the Borg.

And that word “cult” is another one referring to the biggest obstacle to finding your salvation in a church. A couple weeks ago I was invited to a lunch with Daniel McGuire, a Jesuit scholar brought to town by Planned Parenthood to talk about religious sanctions for both family planning and abortion.

During his luncheon talk, he referred to his church, the Catholic Church, as a cult. This shocked one Catholic woman there, who asked what he meant. A cult, he said, takes away your beliefs and gives you theirs. It assigns authority only to its own teachings, draws the boundaries on what it is permissible to think, and seeks to exclude those who do not conform. In that sense, he said, the Church has always been a cult, and has always been an obstacle to salvation. And he pointed out what every religion student knows: that virtually every famous religious thinker in history was a heretic in their day, because they went beyond the beliefs accepted by their group. My favorite sound byte of the day was when he defined conservatives as “worshipers of dead liberals.”

I think all these images are good ones. So think of it as an orthodoxy, a Procrustean habit of cutting you down to fit someone else’s bed, of the Borg ignoring and absorbing your soul and giving you its own impersonal soul; or think of it as a cult that limits the acceptable beliefs to those that stay within the boundaries set out by whatever people got to define the beliefs of the cult, and turn the institution into their hand-puppet. Whatever you call it, it is the mortal enemy of your ability to find salvation in that community.

Think back on the anger or pain you felt in a church that wasn’t big enough for your questions or your beliefs, and see if this doesn’t describe it. You were being cut down to something so small your soul wouldn’t fit. Once the boundaries are drawn, once the “right” beliefs and opinions have been defined, everyone else becomes a second-class citizen, and slightly unclean. I know that you know the feeling, that all of us have experienced it at some time.

The most important facet of a quest for wholeness, authenticity, integrity, salvation, is the kind of atmosphere within which all sincere beliefs are equally welcome, equally “clean.” Without that atmosphere, no community is finally safe. Then it’s like Martin Niemoller wrote about in the confession of his that I used as our prayer this morning:

First they came for the Communists,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time there was no one

left to speak up for me.

That atmosphere was shattered, and so no one could be safe, let alone made whole or healthy.

I’m betting that none of you would have left your former church if they had been able to say “Look, we’re trying to explore what it means to be most fully alive and human, as individuals, partners, parents and citizens. Our tradition has had the habit of doing this in God-talk, or in terms of Buddha or Krishna and Brahman. But these are just ways of speaking. If you would put these common goals differently, please do. They’re only ways of talking, after all, not sacred words. And the more ways we can say it, the more likely we really know what we’re talking about. We’re enriched by a true diversity of beliefs on ultimate questions, so welcome!”

That’s the atmosphere I mean: the atmosphere or culture of the place that keeps all sincere opinions equally welcome. This doesn’t mean you have to respect those opinions, understand! Opinions have to get their respect the old-fashioned way: they have to earn it, in open dialogue. And I’m not talking about frivolous, narcissistic or sociopathic opinions – I’m remembering a church I knew where a disturbed member wanted to host a discussion group on the joys of pedophilia! But the people who hold sincere opinions have to feel welcome and “clean.”

Too often, to find yourself and your beliefs, you have to leave the community that wants to cut you down to fit their iron bed. We’ve had a couple examples of this in Austin, both involving Baptist churches. Several years ago, the minister of University Baptist Church had a story about him on the front page of the New York Times because that church ordained a gay deacon, in violation of the new orthodoxy of the Southern Baptist Convention. As a result, in order to live out their beliefs, they withdrew from the SBC.

And last year it happened again, when the First Baptist Church downtown withdrew from the SBC rather than conform to beliefs they felt were small and mean. The choices had been closed before they had finished choosing.

One of the least attractive things about human nature is our undying desire to make the world in the image of our beliefs: to turn our gods and our institutions into our hand puppets. If those beliefs are truly expansive and inclusive, that might be a good world. But they almost never are. They’re almost always partisan, following the party lines of some theology, some social ideology, some political platform. Iron beds. Iron beds, all of them. And the most abiding and mortal enemy of both the human spirit and the Holy Spirit.

Nearly all the great religious figures had to leave their communities in order to be saved, in order to find their distinctive wholeness and authenticity. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, all of them. And it’s true on a less cosmic scale, too. In the Unitarian tradition, we celebrate the courage of a Congregationalist minister named William Ellery Channing, who defined a nonsupernatural Unitarian Christianity back in 1819, and is cited as the first American-born Unitarian.

But we almost never tell the other story about Channing, one that’s really more to the point for us. And that’s that at the end of his career, he resigned from the Unitarian church he had served his whole adult life, because they drew up a creed of expected beliefs for their members. He would not be spoken for, and he could remain whole only by leaving the church he had served for decades. His church became a cult, another iron bed, and he left rather than being absorbed by the Borg.

It can happen so easily. That expansive atmosphere is so very fragile, so easily destroyed. During graduate school, I attended an unusually liberal Christian church because it was healthier than the Unitarian church a block away. They really did welcome all beliefs, and said so. They practiced an open communion, the only time in my life I took communion.

It was hard sometimes being clear about just where the boundaries were there, whether anything could be presumed about all the members. Some of the more rigid Christians were always trying to bring back confessional tests of faith. Finally, someone suggested to the board that the church say that whatever beliefs people had, we could all agree that our primary purpose was to help establish the kingdom of God.

That was a metaphor for the best kind of world, the world with the most justice, fairness, and compassion. The church was involved in social activism, and the board thought it fit. I was doing my student internship there, and I thought it fit too. After all, how could that metaphor be turned into something small and scary?

It didn’t take long to find out. It was done by a man named Dan, a student preparing for the ministry. Dan was perhaps the most dedicated and courageous social activist I’ve ever met. He marched, and was arrested with, Chicago union workers in their strikes. He and his wife learned Spanish and spent dangerous weeks in both Guatemala and Nicaragua during the 1980s when Reagan’s Contras were killing so many people there. Dan was a good, brave man. He was very active in Chicago politics, too.

So nobody saw it coming when he stood one Sunday during Prayers of the People to remind us that we all agreed we were there to help establish the kingdom of God. Then he reminded us that Tuesday was Election Day, and said, “You will either be working for or against the kingdom of God Tuesday. If you vote Democratic, you are working for the kingdom of God. Otherwise, you are an enemy of God’s kingdom. Remember that!”

Everyone was stunned. No one ever successfully confronted Dan, because he knew he was right, and right for the whole church. For my remaining three years there, the church was never quite the same. The next year a retired professor announced, during a week that he stood at the table for our monthly Communion, that Communion was a Christian sacrament, and as such was open to all Christians who had accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. That really finished it. That fragile atmosphere was shattered, and no one knew how to repair it. Some of us just left, and no longer had a church.

Don’t think this sort of thing happens only in Christian churches. It’s part of human nature, it happens everywhere. I know this first-hand, because I served a church where this liberal atmosphere necessary for the legitimate heir to salvation was shattered. There was a small group of secular humanists, about 5% of the church, who were unhappy with a style of liberal religion that used a lot of ways of talking about religious questions.

Finally, they got three of their group on the board, and one bullied the others into making him president of the board. Within a few months, he gave me a small piece of paper with a list of words I was told that I was not to use from the pulpit. The list included words like soul, spirit, God, and miracle. He insisted that I still had freedom of the pulpit, but said those words offended the humanists, and my job as a minister was to care for their feelings, so to be an adequate minister I couldn’t use those words.

Of course, I did use those words. I would be a liberal even if I were the only one in the room. An increasingly vicious fight went on for over two years. They were so sure they were right that one of them finally made a public death threat against me, in front of a board member and the church administrator. I preached the second service that morning while police were outside taking statements. That’s a cult.

I had a nine-year-old stepdaughter who said she was sick, and missed the next week of school. When she still didn’t want to return to school the following Sunday, we finally thought to ask her why she didn’t want to go to school: “I’m afraid they’ll kill me too,” she said. Since cults serve themselves rather than truth or life, they can do great harm, and cause great “collateral damage.” The attendance at that church is now about half what it was ten years ago. Once that fragile atmosphere is destroyed, it can be almost impossible to create again, even ten years later.

The most dangerous people on earth are those who think something is so simple there is only one right position, which coincidentally happens to be theirs. In religion’s orthodoxies and cults, in political systems that claim the right to arrest dissenters, or in other social, theological or cultural ideologies that work like the Borg.

The reason it is so easy for us to recognize images like Procrustes’ Iron Bed, cults, or the Borg is because all of these come from something deep within our human nature. Dangerous, but absolutely natural. We would all be most comfortable in a world where we got to prescribe some basic beliefs and values for others, just as our gods become the hand puppets of those who speak for them. We create orthodoxies at the drop of a hat: theological, political, social, even down to dress codes.

Salvation is like democracy: only eternal vigilance can make it possible. So here you are in this very liberal church. Among your questions, you may wonder what you need to do to make this a place that can provide the legitimate heir to salvation. Remember salvation has two parts. The first is that you have to bring your own questions, your own beliefs, and be willing to work on them until they feel adequate to live by, then keep working on them as long as you want to keep growing.

I don’t worry about that one. You bring your questions with you, and aren’t likely to be talked out of them, here or anywhere.

But the other one, the maintenance of that fragile atmosphere within which all sincere beliefs are equally welcome and equally “clean” – that’s where you owe something here. That’s where you owe your own vigilance, to counter that unquenchable desire we all have subtly to trim the acceptable beliefs to fit the bed in which we’ve grown so comfortable.

I think the legitimate heir to salvation is only available in healthy liberal churches. And they are only healthy if that invisible, fragile, life-giving atmosphere is preserved, within which all sincere religious, political or moral beliefs are equally welcomed into dialogue in a community of moral equals who will ultimately never agree on the best way to be saved.

And what is it? How else can it be put? I think there is something about this “legitimate heir to what was once called salvation” that is more advanced and challenging than the mere notion of salvation, even in its traditional liberal interpretations (health, wholeness, integrity, authenticity, etc.).

It goes beyond mere salvation to say that even more important than our own growth is our duty – it is a sacred duty – to preserve and maintain that fragile liberal atmosphere within which all may freely pursue their different paths to the kind of wholeness we call salvation. The Buddhists speak of the sangha, or sacred community, as one of the essential parts of enlightenment. Some very few might do it alone, but most of us need to be part of a community of seekers, people who know to regard ultimate concerns as ultimate rather than secondary, as society does. Our spiritual roots grow deep and our branches reach high only in serious soil, in a “garden” kept safe by the mutual protection of all in the community who know – as Martin Niemoller learned the hard way – that finally none can be free or safe unless all are free and safe.

There is an ancient image for the understanding of “truth” that underlies this picture: it’s the old Indian story of the blind people and the elephant. The “elephant” is life, in all its complexity and mystery. Each “blind person” is one person, or even one discipline (psychology, geology, theology, history, etc.). They can see only what the deep biases of their discipline (or their personal biography) permit. No one will ever see the whole “elephant”: it isn’t a problem that existed only because the ancients were ignorant while we are smart. And even if it were possible to see every possible view, understand all disciplines with something to say about life and the human condition, it would still be paltry. In terms of the metaphor, you can’t understand an elephant unless you are the elephant – and even then, you’d be only one “elephant”: there are so many more.

The legitimate heir to what was once called salvation exists in a pluralistic world where humility is part of the whole intellectual and spiritual enterprise and where, because of this, all sincere beliefs, investigations, perspectives and feelings must be allowed into the never-ending open discussions about life’s ultimate concerns. And they can not be welcome unless we in the spiritual community, the sangha, covenant to protect and defend that essential, life-giving, fragile atmosphere within which all sincere people and opinions are welcomed into both discussion and fellowship.

If I understand the teachings of Jesus right, he would have called this the kingdom of God. Buddha might have called it a community of the enlightened who recognize the Buddha-seeds in all others, and who protect and nurture those precious seeds.

Joseph Campbell once said that an authentic person rejuvenates the world. They really do. Imagine what an authentic community might do!

The fact that your political or religious beliefs don’t work for me should be all the proof I need that mine aren’t likely to work for you. It sounds, and is, a bit messy. But that’s the mess of people trusted with their freedom. In a church where all sincere beliefs are equally welcomed into dialogue, we can find – if not salvation, then the legitimate heir to what was once called salvation. In fact, it is the only kind of church where we can find it.

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© Davidson Loehr

16 February 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

A. Powell Davies

May the life of our minds and breath of our being bring us once more to full remembrance of our greater calling. Strangely do we walk through the days of our years, unseeing, unhearing, inattentive, and the glory of life is all about us and we do not know that it is there. We wrap ourselves up in the petty and the trivial, and sometimes even in the mean and sordid, shutting out life’s promise. We are afraid of life – afraid of its truth and goodness and its mighty claim upon us – and we wall ourselves in, thinking to be safe: and so we scarcely live at all.

Oh, may the walls be broken down! Let winds that have swept the far horizons blow now upon the barriers that we have built to keep us paltry! Let them all be swept away! That the light of the heavens may light our lives, the vision of good enlarge our minds, and the love of all that is noble and true find room in our hearts.

How vain are all our hopes, how empty all our prayers, until we ourselves are ready to fulfill them.

SERMON: Reconsidering the Concept of God

The hymn we just sang was in 7/4 time. It’s an odd meter, you almost never hear or sing it, and it feels like you’re in strange territory, doing something you shouldn’t be. This sermon may strike you that way, too. How often have you even thought of reconsidering the concept of God?

God is discussed in our culture like a cartoon character, like a Critter. Almost the only “theological” question anyone thinks to ask is “Do you believe in God?” That’s a question that only makes sense if God is a kind of Critter. Then it’s like a simple true-false quiz: “God is a big Critter living up there somewhere: Yes or No?” And that’s really dumb.

So let’s get straight from the beginning. God is not and has never been a Critter, or a “being” of any kind that would have weight or occupy space. That’s Disneyworld, not religion. God is an idea, a concept. And theological questions are about the content and style of the concept, and it relevance to life.

Still, it may feel like we’re trying to dance in 7/4 time. So let’s start with a story.

One of my favorite stories from any religious scripture is the ancient story in the Bible of Jacob wrestling with God. Technically, it wasn’t God he was wrestling with, just a local deity guarding the river he wanted to cross. That’s how we know what an ancient story this is. People used to believe that all boundaries were guarded by spirits, that to cross over, to grow beyond a boundary, you had to wrestle with the god that guarded that boundary.

Modern psychologists also know this is true. To grow beyond a boundary that’s kept us too small, too ignorant, too enslaved, we must be willing to wrestle with the gods that guard that boundary.

That’s kind of what we’re about this morning: wrestling with concepts of God that are unhealthy and small, that enslave rather than empower.

Still, it’s a risky thing to do. In the Jacob story, he held on all night, finally receiving the blessing of the god and the ability to cross over the river, and even getting a new name: Israel, the father of the Twelve Tribes. But he was wounded in the struggle, and came out with a limp. He had that limp for the rest of his life. So it’s risky. But we’re brave. Besides, we’re just pretending. Maybe.

I’m trying to do something hard as well as odd: I want to persuade you of something you need to know about gods by convincing you that it’s something you already know. And that is that all gods are more like hand puppets than they are like puppeteers. Everyone who tells you what God is like or what God wants or says is using the concept like a hand puppet, either creating or choosing which words their God can and can’t say. So whether it’s a decent God usually depends on whose hands he’s in.

I want to persuade you that you know the difference between healthy concepts and bogus ones, and that only you can decide whether a god is good or bad, is worth serving with your life or not. I want to show you that the power is in you, not in the gods, and want to convince you that you have known this, at some level, all along.

Here’s what you already know: we already and automatically wrestle with almost every authority claiming power over us. For instance:

1. Automakers routinely tell us their machines are perfectly safe. But both governmental and private firms are always testing them, always doubting that they’re really telling us the truth, and are routinely exposing the design flaws the manufacturers were covering up. Why did they cover them up? Because it benefited them, even though it didn’t benefit us. But we check it out, because lives are at stake.

2. Or think about food. Governmental and private agencies are routinely inspecting the meat supplies and waste disposal processes at our largest food processing plants. The owners always tell us the meat and food are perfectly safe. But we know they have millions of dollars at stake, and we know they can and do lie to benefit themselves. So we expose a hundred tons of hamburger with e-coli, or Mad Cow Disease or other dangerous or deadly problems. The fact that an authoritative voice wearing a suit or a white lab coat tells us it’s safe doesn’t fool us until we have checked it out through our own agencies. Lives are at stake.

3. Or pharmaceuticals. To pick just one, I remember when the manufacturers of Fen-Phen were on trial, how they insisted that the drugs were just effective weight-reducing aids with no serious side effects, that they had done extensive testing, that everyone was safe. But the FDA wouldn’t take their word for it. They did independent tests and found that Fen-Phen damaged heart valves and could be fatal. A member of this church died here a year ago from heart damage from Fen-Phen. Authoritative people lie. Even if they really believe what they’re saying, we know they could be wrong. So we check it. Because lives are at stake.

The Three-Step

All of these claims and investigations have three parts. In every case I know of, all the truths, beliefs and gods we create have the same three steps. Just knowing them can give you a kind of User’s Guide to Hokum. Here is the three-step process by which truths and beliefs and gods are created. I won’t go through the steps in order, because the first step is invisible. It has to be invisible for the game to work.

The second step is that a company spokesman or other authoritative-looking person tells us something is true.

The third step is that they then say that, because it is true, we should go along with it, and everything will be all right.

But what all our investigations show is that there is a first step that they kept invisible. And the first step is that there is a set of facts or a state of affairs that would empower or enrich them, if it were really true. They have a stake in it; it’s how they see the world.

So the whole three-step process goes like this:

1. First, I want you to believe something because if you do it will empower or enrich me, or will confirm my view of the world.

2. Second, I convince myself, then tell you, that this is true and good and safe.

3. And third, since it is true and good and safe, you should follow it.

But when we want to know whether it’s really true or good or safe, we check it out. You don’t ask true believers to investigate their own truth-claims. You don’t ask Ford executives whether the gas tanks on its Pintos are really safe. You don’t ask the manufacturers of SUV’s whether they have a high likelihood of tipping over and injuring or killing the passengers. You don’t ask the manager of a Jack in the Box whether it’s safe to eat his hamburgers. You ask a nonbeliever. An outsider. You ask someone who has left the Garden of Eden, who can tell the difference between fact and fiction, good and evil, and let them investigate.

And that’s how we find out what we feel most safe believing is really true. This process looks a lot like the scientific method. Someone proposes a theory and says it’s true. So immediately other scientists who don’t believe the theory run the same experiments to see if the results are the same for nonbelievers. If not, the theory is false. If so, it may be true, at least for now.

And we do these tests, every day, because there are lives at stake. Now you already knew all of this. No news here. But this is how virtually every truth and every religious belief works, through the same three steps, with the same need for checking by unbelievers to see if it’s true or just familiar and convenient to the true believers.

We seem hardwired to respond to authoritative people and voices, so we are easy to fool. Advertising agencies, political advisors and slick preachers all count on it. I’ll tell you one more story that makes this point in a particularly enlightening way. You’ll be able to spot all three steps, with the invisible first step last, in an exceptionally clear and dramatic form:

The story is one Joseph Campbell told, about a tribe in Australia whose social order was maintained with the aid of “bullroarers.” These are long flat boards with a couple slits cut in them, which have a rope tied to the other end, and are swung around over one’s head, producing an eerie low kind of humming sound that seems quite otherworldly. When the gods were angry with the tribe, the gods would sound the bullroarers in the woods at night. No one, of course, ever saw them do this. The next day, the males of the tribe would explain what that gods were angry about, and what behaviors had to change.

This was far more than just a game. Campbell reports the time that a chief’s daughter found his bullroarer under his sleeping pad, brought it out and asked what it was: the chief killed her for violating this sacred object.

But the revelation comes at a key moment during the initiation of young men into manhood in the tribe. It’s all very dramatic, and very ritualized. In the evening, some of the tribe’s men, wearing masks, come to kidnap the young boy. The women pretend to defend him, though they know the routine, and eventually the men overpower them and drag the boy into the woods.

Once there, the boy is tied to a table, and a frightening and bloody initiation rite takes place. Technically, it’s called subincision, which means that, using a flint knife, a slit is made the length of the underside of the boy’s penis. (Men who have been through this have said that this makes them complete, with the genital marks of both a male and a female.)

But the revelation comes at the end. One of the men dips the end of the bullroarer in the boy’s blood, brings it up near his face, then removes his mask – so the boy will recognize him as a man he’s known all his life – and says the magical words: “We make the noises!” We make the noises we attribute to the gods. It’s equally true everywhere, it’s just seldom acknowledged as openly.

That’s what our independent investigations of defective cars, infected hamburger and deadly pharmaceuticals reveals, too. The authorities with the most to gain are the ones who make the noises saying we should believe them. And we have learned not to believe them until we have checked it out for ourselves. This is how concepts of gods are created.

There are thousands of examples from religion. To keep it manageable, I’ll only take three, and just take them from the Hebrew Scriptures that are common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three of these come from the book of Deuteronomy, chapters 20 to 22. You can find dozens more like these in that book:

1. If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die. (Deuteronomy 22:22)

2. If upon marriage it is discovered that a woman isn’t a virgin, the men of the city shall stone her to death. (Deut. 22: 20-21)

3.If a son is stubborn and won’t obey his parents, then his parents will bring him to the elders at the city gate and the men of the city will stone him to death. (Deut. 21:18-21, all RSV)

When you hear such things, you know that’s a horrible concept of God that no decent or healthy person would admit into their lives. Even those bible-shaking preachers who insist that every word of the Bible is literally true never seem to quote these lines. They don’t believe them, either, and would regard anyone who acted on them as psychopathic or worse.

And we know it too, intuitively. You hear this ancient speaker claiming that these things are the word of God and so you should obey them. But instinctively, you know better. Every parent of rebellious teen-agers can understand the frustration in that last one. But every parent knows that anyone who actually did that, who actually had their own child murdered, was a repugnant person following a repugnant god, not a god of life or truth or wholeness. You sense that these awful sayings must have originated in a particular time and place maybe 2500 years ago, where whoever made them up was having trouble with authority or social control, so put those bloody words in the mouth of his god, trying to give authority to them.

Last week, I talked about escaping from the fool’s paradise pictured as the Garden of Eden. For the first four centuries of Christianity, eating the apple was celebrated as the human freedom that let us learn about good and evil. Seen this way, it’s a profound myth, saying that the price of growing up and learning to make necessary distinctions expels us from a child’s kind of paradise.

This is the same kind of story. Only by doubting the authorities – in food production, car production, drug production or god production – and trying to find out for ourselves what is good and what is evil, only by doing that can we ever escape from the fool’s paradise of believing that all advertising companies, politicians and preachers are trying to empower us rather than themselves.

So far, this sounds like a simple story of courage, of challenging authorities, defeating them, and exulting in triumph – like a bad martial-arts movie. But that’s not all there is to it. Because every time we find another manufacturer’s claims proven false, every time another group of politicians is caught lying to us, every time religious claims are shown to have been false and self-serving, we lose some of our naivete and our trust.

That’s the price of leaving paradise, the price of leaving Eden. Wrestling with gods usually leaves us with a limp. It’s never a cheap victory. Remember when you stopped believing there was this one Santa Claus guy who came down every chimney bringing presents to every child every Christmas – even though you didn’t have a chimney? Remember what you lost? Some people mark that as the end of their naive childhood.

And what happens when you reconsider the concept of God? You look at whose hands God has been in, and suddenly God looks more like a hand puppet than a puppeteer. You investigate and you realize God was never making the noises. People were making the noises: parents, preachers, politicians, people with their own agenda for you. They made the noises they had been taught to make. Maybe they even believed them. But what happens when you realize they were not true?

This three-step model isn’t one I made up. It’s taught in the best divinity schools and sociology departments, and has been for a quarter century or more. And when you understand how it works, you realize that it creates a dilemma for us, especially in the field of religion.

On the one hand, if you forget about the invisible first step, and simply internalize and obey the “truths” you are taught, eventually they will not fit the times, the situations, or you. Then they become kind of demonic – as they would if anyone really took the instructions in those examples from the book of Deuteronomy seriously.

On the other hand, if you take the liberal route, if you challenge and debunk those claims for truth or God, then in some ways the price is even steeper, and the limp is even greater. For if even the idea of God you’ve taught can be wrong, that what can’t be wrong? How and where could you ever again find absolutely unshakable certainty? And where, then, would you find your moral bearing?

You can lose faith in God. Do you also lose faith in even the idea of God? Many do. You don’t think that’s a limp? It’s a limp. Do you lose faith even in the idea of truth, or goodness, justice or beauty? That’s worse than a limp. Don’t do that.

You can always try to return to the fool’s paradise where you stay ignorant and don’t learn the difference. But the God in the Eden story was also created by priests and tribal chiefs who were served by that compliant ignorance. Why would you want to exalt them, or their self-serving idea of God? You might as well wrestle with God yourself, and cross over.

But crossing over, wrestling with God, isn’t cheap. For God is like Santa Claus in that way. You lost the child’s magical Santa when your eyes were opened. And you lose the child’s magical god in the same way – by having your eyes opened and realizing that we make the noises.

To wrestle with our gods is often to wind up disillusioned. I’ve had ministers tell me that’s why they don’t encourage their people to question the concept of God too deeply: they’re afraid they’ll become disillusioned. That sounds bad. But think about it: Is being disillusioned really worse than being “illusioned”? I’d think, if you’re illusioned, you’d want to get disillusioned! Or you can get cynical or desperate, thinking that nothing, after all, is sacred but the integrity of your own mind. But that isn’t true either.

To wrestle with the concept of God and win, I think we need to be armed with some of the things we’ve been examining in the last two sermons:

that we are made of stardust, we are deeply at home in the universe, intimately tied to everything, that the dynamic power of the universe is also in us, and that part of our destiny lies in reclaiming our noble origins.

that all life on earth is linked, too. We are not alone here, we are connected as members of a family, all the way down. All people are our brothers and sisters. Here, in Iraq, in Nicaragua, everywhere.

And we need to remember that authoritative claims that would take away our power and dignity and transfer them to others are always lies, lies and blasphemies against life and truth and everything that is whole and holy.

Wrestling with the concept of God grants us both honor, and a task. Since we make the noises, it is now up to us to see that those noises are sacred noises: noises of truth that empower, not that enslave, truth that sets us free, not that puts us or others in heavier chains.

Part of growing up religiously is escaping from a child’s Garden of Eden, understanding who makes the noises, and understanding that most of our truths and most of our gods are the hand puppets of the politicians, preachers and churches who benefit from using their voice to control people. Those are false gods and need to be unmasked. But there is still wonder and miracle and mystery, and the magic of transformation in the world. We lose an excuse not to act. We lose an excuse for not getting involved. That’s our human calling: to escape from the fool’s paradise and search for truth and wholeness East of Eden.

And what is left of the concept of God? Perhaps the Buddhists can help here. They tell the story of the finger pointing at the moon, and the poor people who spent all their time looking at the finger, never seeing the moon. Perhaps we will gain a fresh view of the moon. And once we can see the light, that pointing finger is just a distraction, isn’t it?

Good magicians don’t reveal their tricks at the end of the show. But I’m not a magician, I’m a preacher, so I’ll reveal mine here.

I hope you see that what I’ve tried to do today follows the same three steps I’ve been taking about. I start with what, to me, is the most true and useful way to understand how we make our gods. Then I’ve tried to persuade you that it’s true, so you will adapt it for your own life.

Am I right? Is this the best kind of truth for you here? It’s all I can offer you. From here, it’s up to you. This is where I came out when I wrestled with the idea of God. Eventually, you’ll need to wrestle, too. I recommend it. Even if the ordeal leaves you with a limp, it will bless you, and might give you a new kind of name. After all, lives are at stake. And one of them may be yours.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 9, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Original Sins and Blessings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 2, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER:

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

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

Pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop

upon the heart

until in our despair

there comes wisdom

through the awful

grace of God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SERMON: In the Beginning…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A = Adenine

G = Guanine

C = Cytosine

T = Thymine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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© Davidson Loehr

15 December 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Dreamcatchers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, how could you say this around Christmastime?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas – and sweet dreams!

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Davidson Loehr

8 December 2002

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION:

PRAYER:

SERMON: The Advent of…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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