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© Davidson Loehr

15 December 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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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

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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.

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Davidson Loehr

17 November 2002

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CENTERING:

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

SERMON: Homeless in Austin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Davidson Loehr

10 November 2002

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

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Davidson Loehr

27 October 2002

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INVOCATION:

PRAYER:

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

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

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

Sometimes we are confused and our vision is clouded.

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

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

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

For we are the gatekeepers of our better tomorrows.

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: “Making Memories”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us remind ourselves of our higher calling. Let us be open to hearing the voices of gods rather than idols, entertaining those angels of our better nature rather than the little demons and goblins of our lesser selves.

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

For we are the gatekeepers of our better tomorrows.

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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Davidson Loehr

20 October 2002

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Storytime – “The Great Stone Face”

Once there were people who lived in a valley at the foot of a large mountain. High at the top of the mountain there was a face, a great face carved in the stone. The people said it was the face of a god. And if you could see that face clearly, they said, it would show you who you were, and how you were meant to live your life.

That sounded easy enough, but it was not. For the face was in a part of the mountain impossible to climb, and so high up clouds or fog almost always obscured it. Furthermore, the face seemed to look differently in different light, and no two people ever saw it exactly the same.

But it was important, this face, because if only it could be seen clearly-well, then you would know who you really were, and who you were meant to be. And so the people studied what they could see of the face, as best they could, and they told others what they thought they saw.

Stories even arose, stories about times that the great face had actually spoken to someone, and what the great face had said. People wrote these things down, and tried to make a list of do’s and don’t for living, but no two lists ever completely agreed. Still the people told their stories, and listened to the stories of others, because after all there was so much at stake, if only they could get it right.

And as they believed they understood the message of the great face in the stone, they tried to live in the ways they felt they were meant to live. Usually, this meant they tried to be kind to one another, to be good neighbors, to work hard, to make their little valley a better place for their having been there, and so on, as you would expect. There were always a few, of course, who did not care much about making the valley a better place. They lived to chase after power or wealth or other things like that, and they too, if pressed on it, would argue that this was the way the great face of stone had intended things to be.

From time to time, as you would also expect, there were people who said that all of this was just nonsense, that there was no face at all in the stones above, that these were just these silly myths. And it was certainly true that if there was a face up there in the rocks, it was very faint, so faint that you couldn’t even be sure you were seeing anything at all.

Yet others would then say that without the face, and the stories about the face, the people in the valley might not have been so eager to be decent to one another, and then what kind of world would they have? After all, you needed something to live for, and some kind of rules to live by.

But as any visitor or other objective person could see, if there was any face at all up there, it was too vague to be clear about, even on a sunny day. All you could be sure of was that the people had these stories, and they lived by them. Should there be an expedition to the top of the mountain to try and see once and for all what the great face of stone was trying to say? Or should they instead be paying more attention to their stories, and their lives? If they could never see the great face clearly, then all they had were their stories, and their efforts to live well together. And if someone swore that the great face had indeed spoken clearly but the way it wanted them to live made no sense, either to individuals or to the community, then who would have cared what the great stone face said, anyway?

Well, as you can tell, this is not settled, neither within that valley nor elsewhere. And yet there is something here of importance, and we cannot seem to stop thinking and talking about it.

Prayer:

We use words to move us toward an awareness beyond the reach of words. We offer prayers not to appease a powerful creature, but to awaken ourselves, to take ourselves and our lives more seriously, to remind us of our higher possibilities and nobler callings.

We pray we can feel safe enough to remove our masks, and the hard crust created by our fears.

Let us get in touch again with our soft center, that place of hope, doubt, vulnerability and possibility.

Let us be open to those softer voices within us: the pleadings of our most tender mercies, the inspiration of the angels of our better nature.

Words fail us in prayer: these things don’t have clear names, though they come from real yearnings.

But we don’t have to know what to call them, so long as we can call them forth.

Let us call forth those gentle hopes and tender mercies, and say “Be with us here, be with us now, be with us always, and let us live in ways that are worthy of you.”

Amen.

SERMON – What If There Isn’t a God?

This is one of those sermon titles so ambitious you wonder if it could possibly be serious. Yet it’s dealing with a confusing word.

You have probably been asked at one time or other whether you “believe in God.” Pollsters love it; everybody writing about religion seems to think it is the most important question to ask.

But the question is incoherent, as are answers to it. It is the oddest thing: we think this “God” business is so important, yet nobody ever wants to say just what they mean by the word. That’s the elephant in the room of religious discussion, and has been for a few centuries: what exactly do you mean by the word “God”? Once that’s clear, it will be pretty clear whether many people would “believe in” that sort of a god. Let’s just take three definitions for the word “God,” you’ll see the question of “belief in God” dissolves once you’ve settled the definition:

God is a physical being with kneecaps, toes and ear lobes. He occupies space and has weight; a video camera could record him. He lives somewhere where we can’t see him, probably “up above the sky.” I don’t think I know anyone who believes in this God. The better theologians have always considered this kind of literalism to be vulgar.

God isn’t a being, isn’t physical, you can’t see him/it, but is still objectively present as very real energy – and not just psychic energy. If we could get the right scientific instrument, this God-energy could make the needle jump. Once this is spelled out, I’m not sure many would want to defend this one either. It would certainly not be the “God” discussed in the bible. And it would be hard to imagine projecting anthropomorphic attributes to such a pure-energy-God. And then, why would this sort of God care about us? It might have an attraction for electromagnetism or gravity, but why (and how) would it care about a carbon-based life form on an obscure planet?

“God” is a symbol, a metaphor, an idea, a concept. It takes no more space than truth, beauty, justice, love or “America” do. Yet it is profoundly important, in spite of the fact that it is just a concept. Most of our most powerful words are just concepts: love, truth, justice, America. God-language isn’t about a heavenly Critter. It’s an idiom of expression, one way of talking about the enduring human concerns.

By the time you get to the third definition, almost everyone I know would subscribe. But now the question “Do you believe in God?” has no meaning. It isn’t about believing in some “thing”; it’s about recognizing that idiom of expression as a significant one.

So learning about God isn’t like exploring outer space in search of a great cosmic being with whom we might sit down and talk about the meaning of life. It is more about exploring inner space.

Religious stories tell of hundreds of different gods. But we don’t live in a world where hundreds of gods walk by us on the street. We live, instead, in a world of stories people have made up about the gods. Many of them are great stories: stories about gods who created the world, created us, who interact with us in various ways — not the physical way we interact with each other during coffee hour, but the way our conscience or our love for someone interacts with us and affects our lives.

But if there isn’t a God in the sense of a Guy in the Sky – and I don’t know anyone of any religion who really wants to argue that there is a guy in the sky – then all we have are our stories, which become terribly important.

It’s like the story of the Great Stone Face. People may quibble about whether it’s literally there, but nobody quibbles about the fact that what is most important is learning how to live more fully and responsibly. I want to weave together some ideas from wildly different places to help sketch the picture I’m trying to make for you.

The first comes from the writer Jorges Borges. He wrote something I use at most memorial services. He says we die twice. The first time is when our body dies and is no longer present. But the second and final death comes, he says, only when there is no one left to tell our story.

The same is true of Gods. Gods also have two deaths. The first death comes when our understanding of the world no longer makes a place for the gods to exist except as ideas and concepts. So the deities of ancient Greece have died their first death, but not their second death. 2400 years or so after people stopped taking those gods literally, we still tell their stories, and the names of their gods and mythic figures still provide us with the names for our space programs (Apollo) and millions of Americans who would never think of “believing in” the old Greek gods know and love their stories, and use them to help make a better kind of sense out of our lives.

The second death comes when even the ideas and concepts are no longer compelling.

In Western religion, we have been between the first and second death of God for a couple centuries. As a being, a critter, God has nowhere to live now. Yet the stories, poems, music, prayers devoted to the idea of God are still with us, and for many of us still quite powerful and precious. And so it feels important to us to tell these stories.

In the Hindu tradition, one of the two central stories is called the Ramayana. I’m reading it now and already, there has been a scene where Rama entrusts his story to a character called Hanuman. He grants Hanuman conditional immortality, meaning that Hanuman will live as long as he keeps Rama’s story alive. When he stops telling the stories, he no longer lives.

You have heard of Sheherezade, and her 1001 Arabian nights of telling stories. She told stories to a deranged king who would have killed her in the morning except that he wanted to hear the next installment. She was no dope, and continued the installments for 1001 nights until she had finally softened his heart and converted his soul. Sheherezade told her stories in order to live. But we are all under the spell of Sheherezade; we all tell our stories in order to live, and in order to keep our gods and high ideals alive.

The concept of God found in the Old Testament has a kind of life cycle. It began, as biblical scholars have long noted, as a projection of a tribal chief, the man who makes the rules, sets the boundaries, and offers protection to the obedient and punishment to the errant. The covenant between God and the Hebrew people was modeled on ancient Hittite treaties between minor rulers and their people, in which the rulers promised protection to their people as long as the people didn’t follow after other competing rulers.

By the time of Christianity, people spoke as though this God existed up above the sky, in heaven, which was a place Jesus could go “up” to and where we might all somehow “go” after we died. In the first century, most believed the universe was a small affair, and heaven wasn’t all that far away: that anthropomorphic kind of God had a place to live in their worldview.

But for centuries now, we have known there is nothing above the sky except infinite space at temperatures near absolute zero. Western theologians have been saying for centuries that the word “God” doesn’t exist in that way.

In other words, that God has already died his first death, he can no longer exist as a being in the world as we know it to be made. That leaves the stories.

The stories are entrusted to the religions, or at least claimed by them. Most religions teach the stories of their God as though they were true, as many of you know. It’s as though God made these pronouncements long ago before human history, and they were faithfully recorded, we preachers now tell you what God said and wants, and you obey – and pay us for it.

In part one of this two-part series, I joked about the better divinity schools having some hidden and secret courses that we take that tell us the answers that you don’t know, so we can sit here and tell you the secrets on Sunday. There is something to this. There are things you learn in any good and extended study of religion that fundamentally change what you once thought religion was about. There are lots of “Aha!” kinds of experiences that seem to reveal some of the best-guarded secrets of religion.

I hate to risk punishment from the union of those who protect religious secrets from the people in the pews, but I’ll tell you one of those stories that I learned, that helped me understand how religion, belief, and gods work.

It’s the story of an Australian tribe that Joseph Campbell reported on, a tribe where the “bull-roarer” plays a major role. The bull-roarer, if you’ve never seen or heard one, is a long flat slotted board tied to a rope. When you swing it in a big circle above your head, it makes an absolutely eerie kind of sound, a kind of ominous moaning.

The bull-roarers were sacred and secret objects. Only the male elders of the tribe were allowed to have them, and everyone was constrained to keep their existence a secret, under the penalty of death. In one case, a chief’s young daughter found the bull-roarer hidden under his sleeping roll, brought it out and asked what it was: the chief killed her. So this was a terribly powerful, sacred and secret object. It played a central role in holding the whole world together for the tribe.

When the male elders decided that their people were straying from the behavioral rules they thought were right, they would sneak out into the woods at night with their bull-roarers. Then, in the middle of the night, they would swing them and the night sky would be filled with that low and awful rumbling and moaning. It would terrify the children, and the women would pretend to be scared (though, really, they knew the story).

The next day, the elders would call the village together and explain to them why the gods were mad and what they wanted the people to do. The bull-roarer was the symbol and instrument of absolute authority in that tribe.

The magical, amazing moment came during the secret initiation rites during which boys became men. When a boy reached the right age – about 13 to 15 – some of the elders, dressed in scary masks, would come into the village from the woods and kidnap the boy. His mother would pretend to protect him, but in the end the men always carried the boy off.

They took the boy deep into the woods and tied him to a table. Then the masked men performed bloody initiation rituals of circumcision and subincision on the frightened boys.

Finally came The Moment. An elder dipped the end of the bull-roarer in the boy’s blood, and brought up very close to his face so he could see it. Then the man removed his mask, revealing a face the boy recognized. And he whispered into the boy’s ear the magical secret: “We make the noises!”

Without knowing that secret, the boy could never become a man. And the same is true in the study of religion.

Learning about religion is a lot like this – though it’s usually far less bloody. As you read theologians and philosophers and preachers, you begin to realize that the words you’re reading are not the words of gods, but the words of men, of theologians with their own agendas, their own limitations. That’s why you have to read so much: most people only get a little bit of it right, and you have to piece together for yourself your own mature picture of what a word like God needs to mean.

What you learn, in other words, are two important things. One is that we make the noises. People who preach, pray, write about religion, make the noises that define religion. You can do this yourself. Try writing a prayer to God, and you will find you have created the image of what, for you, is God. We make the noises.

And the second thing you learn is that there is something behind the stories about our gods that is very real, and which we are charged with protecting. A good minister knows there are things in life worth believing in, ideals that give life and raise us up, and that we must try to protect, articulate and advance these. Yes, we know we make the noises, but we believe that if we can learn to do it well, the noises will be in the service of values, ideals and allegiances that have the power to give more and better life to us, to those we love, and to our world.

This isn’t only about the gods. This is also the way it is with most of our other important ideals: love, justice, even America are things that exist as ideas, concepts, stories, but not as things that can speak for themselves. And look at all the stories we invent for these things.

A million love songs teach us what love is, says, does, and wants. Cupid, that little critter we made up with the magical arrows, shoots someone with an arrow and they fall in love with the first person they see. Cupid didn’t tell us that. This story was not an eyewitness account. Long ago, some poet said that’s how it seems love works.

And the American symbol of justice is Lady Justice, blindfolded, holding scales in which she weighs – and our lawyers and courts, as her servants, are to weigh – the facts impartially, to give us justice. In Washington she’s made of stone, a stone-face. Downtown on our own state Capital, the Goddess of Liberty stands on top with her sword and her Lone Star, and everything that goes on in that building is, according to the myth, supposed to serve her. But she doesn’t tell us how to do that. For that, we turn to the laws we have made: the stories we have made about how to do justice.

The word “America” is like this too. There’s nothing you can point to and call it America and ask it what it’s like and what it wants. It’s a symbol, and the noises are made by us, by those who presume to speak for America.

And the stories we tell about God are the same. Some tell stories about a God who wants war, wants obedience, dispenses punishment, and is a terrible fearsome thing. Others tell stories about a God to whom war is destroying his creations, slaughtering his children. The real America never speaks up to correct us, and neither does God. All we have are the stories. We make the noises.

If there really were a God in the sense of a being more powerful than any we could imagine, we would all know it. The rules would be clear, the punishments would be clear, and the bloody battles between the theological arrogance of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews could never have arisen. There couldn’t be hundreds of thousands of different beliefs, because God, the Goddess or the gods would have settled it, if they cared at all.

But if we make the noises, if the gods are ideas and concepts rather than beings or critters, then the world would look as it does today.

We would spin out our stories like a spider spins a web, making it from what is inside of it and connecting to the world around it. We would live in terms of our stories, spun from yearnings and hopes deep inside of us, and connected to the world around us. Then, like Hanuman and Scheherezade, we would tell our stories in order to live.

And then everything would depend not on the gods, but on the quality of our stories. For now our guiding myths would take on the role and the power of gods. The stories would create our worlds, give us our meaning and purpose. And competing stories that denied or ignored ours would be seen as dangerous rivals, threats to our world and our way of life. Those who believe differently would be dangerous enemies of the story that holds our world together, enemies who must be controlled or destroyed.

Unless” unless our stories were large enough to include all others as our beloved equals. And that would mean that attending to the quality of our most powerful stories and symbols is one of the most important responsibilities we have.

It would mean that when people degrade a word like “God” by turning it into a mean and hateful thing, we must speak up. We must say “No, whatever the word “God” means, it must mean more than something so petty.”

The same would be true of our other powerful words and stories. When “justice” is defined as something the poor can not hope to afford, we must speak up to say No, whatever Lady Justice means, it must be more inclusive than that.

And when “America” is defined as a belligerent and imperialistic nation claiming the divine right to invade and destroy weaker nations at will, we must speak up to say “No, an America worth loving may not be reduced to that level of warlike, bloody arrogance.”

If the gods were real, it would be our job to choose carefully and serve only the noblest and best among them. If they were merely powerful ideas and concepts, then it would be our job to choose and serve only the noblest and best stories.

Either way, our task is to develop an absolute relationship to absolute things, a relative relationship to relative things, and to learn how to tell the difference. And either way, it is our move: both alone and together, it is our move.

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© Davidson Loehr

22 September 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION:

What better place than a church to wonder about the existence of God! These are questions you can hardly raise in polite society. You probably wouldn’t feel comfortable raising them in most churches, either. But here, we’re safe, and our questions are safe. All of them. It’s one way we know that

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

A place for questions more profound than answers,

Vulnerabilities more powerful than strength,

And a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

PRAYER

We pray not to something, but from something,

to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are,

and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people, those experiences, and those transformations

that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes

with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

Amen.

SERMON: What if there really were a God?

What if there really were a God?

That’s probably the first time you ever heard that question asked in a sermon! Did you ever wonder why? Why do churches, synagogues, mosques and seminaries so studiously avoid this most obvious, most fundamental, question?

Maybe there’s something vaguely offensive about wondering, in church, whether there is or isn’t a God. Maybe something blasphemous, like there are church rules and one of them is that churches are supposed to tell people, above all else, that there is a God, then tell them what that God promises them and asks from them.

Like you don’t know, but ministers know because we went to preacher school, and in one of those courses – a hidden, secret course that you people don’t get to take – we learned the secrets about what God is and what God wants and so now we come out here to enlighten you, and you pay us for it.

If that were true, it would be easier just to offer that special secret course to all of you, so we could eliminate the middleman and we wouldn’t have to keep meeting like this. Unfortunately, no one has met or seen these gods, and those who do claim to talk to God are usually locked quickly away. There are no photos, videos or DVDs. It’s all just hearsay evidence. What we have are the stories and histories told by religious scriptures and historical sources.

So how do we find out whether there’s a god, and what it’s like? We can’t take a television crew out the way some have gone hunting for Big Foot or UFO’s . We know there would be nothing to photograph, no one to interview.

In seminaries and divinity schools, preachers look in books, like bibles. But one thing we learn in those courses is that religious scriptures don’t answer as many questions as you might hope.

The Bible makes the matter more confusing, not less. Judaism has been monotheistic since around 539 BCE, after their Babylonian captivity. But earlier stories in the Bible show that the early Hebrews worshiped several gods and goddesses – if you didn’t know that, it shows you haven’t been reading your bible.

Scholars have said that Jahweh was modeled after a tribal chief. Others have shown that the covenant between God and the Hebrews found in the Bible was modeled directly after international Hittite treaty formulas of over three thousand years ago, where the kings demanded exclusive allegiance to keep people from serving other kings, in return for protection. So from one angle, this whole God-business can be seen as a kind of protection racket.

The Canaanite religion, from which some scholars believe the Hebrews took their entire religion, was a nature religion, and the most important deity was the goddess Asherah or Astarte. So she was older than God.

Even Solomon in the Bible praised this goddess, and his son Rehoboam erected an image of her in the temple at Jerusalem. Even the Ten Commandments acknowledge that the Hebrews have other gods; they just insist that Jahweh be the number one God (The first commandment says, ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me.”)

And in Mecca, the center of the religion of Islam, the famous black stone there is thought to have been originally sacred to the Arabian goddess al-Uzza, the “mighty one” whose shrine was at Mecca until Islam suppressed this ancient goddess worship. So the goddess al-Uzza was older than Allah.

This means the question is not only what do we mean by the word God, but which God do we mean, of all that were worshiped: the newer one, or the more ancient ones? It seems the older gods and goddesses were there first. And if we’re seeking the more ancient gods rather than the latecomers, we want to look for the original deities.

Well, goddess worship was first, and it was practiced throughout the ancient world, all the way back to more than 30,000 years ago in Paleolithic times.

At those early times, carved goddess images outnumber male gods by ten to one. Inanna, the chief goddess of the Mesopotamian cultures where the ancient Hebrews lived, goes back to at least 3900 BCE, nearly six thousand years ago, long before anyone began telling stories about the much later God of the Bible. Maybe Inanna is God?

She was the principal deity in the first urban society of Uruk. Inanna was later and elsewhere known as Ishtar, Astarte, and worshiped by the early Hebrew people as Asherah. And she was almost certainly far more ancient. Lots of small goddess statues from 10,000 years ago have been found in the Jericho region. So is that what we need to mean by the original God? A goddess?

It was in the case of the Hebrews, and it seems to have been for the Greeks as well. The primary mystery religion of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries, concerned Demeter, the mother goddess, and her holy daughter Persephone, who was raised from the dead. Here is a mother and daughter god, long before the Christian story emerged of a father and son god.

The Egyptian goddess Nut, the sky goddess, was the mother of all deities, and the goddess Isis was called ‘the oldest of the old,” the one who made the universe spin. In Greece, it was Cybele who was the mother of all deities, and Tyche, or “fate,” was an Aegean goddess far more ancient than Zeus. And the Greeks always considered the fates to be more powerful than Zeus. So the ancient and apparently original goddess was still regarded as superior to Zeus even in the age of classical Greece.

Going farther around the world to Japan, the Shinto religion teaches that the world was created by a divine creator couple, the god Izanagi and goddess Izanani. They gave birth to the sun goddess Amaterasu, and up through WWII in ‘the land of the rising sun,” the Japanese emperor was seen as her descendent.

Everywhere we look to discover the original god, we find that before the gods there were goddesses. As an article in the Encyclopedia of Religion has put it, “In the lands that brought forth Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God was first worshiped as a woman.”

When we look into the history of civilizations, we find that the emergence of virtually every civilization was associated in some way with goddess worship. The phenomena of goddess worship is unbroken from Paleolithic times more than 30,000 years ago.

Many have thought that all goddesses were just symbols for fertility and feminine things, but that’s not true. They have symbolized everything imaginable. Throughout the ancient world, these goddesses represented rule, judgment, control, fate, writing, war, healing, ethics, morals, truth, architecture and building, as well as fertility, and the creation of all life on earth.

These goddesses weren’t dainty ladies, and they seldom needed men. In Greece, the goddess Athena was the goddess of war, and the protector of all the military heroes.

If we look for the original God, we find it wasn’t a god but a goddess, everywhere. But though that may be true, it doesn’t answer our real question. Whether a god or a goddess, what is it? Where or how does it exist? How can we investigate it in a cool objective way?

When we look at what religions have to say about their gods, it isn’t much help.

Take the religion of Islam. It’s the newest of the three main Western religions, with the most recent word on the subject of God, or Allah. But when you check the Encyclopedia of Religion, it says Islamic scholars agree on only two points about God:

1. First, the essence of God exists.

2. Second, the only other thing you can say is that this essence is eternal, and is not like any created things.

There are great differences of opinion on all else in Muslim thought. So God exists, has no physical or visible form and nothing else about this God can be known for certain – except, as one famous line says, they teach that God is closer to you than the jugular vein in your neck.

And in the Hebrew bible, the authors are clear that God can not be pictured, sculpted, seen, or even named – though again, one famous line says that God sometimes comes to us in a ‘s till, small voice.”

If this is all the hard data we have, it’s hard to make much of a case for the existence of God. There’s a famous philosophical puzzle used to address this question of the existence of God:

I tell you there is a dragon in your garage.

Well, you say, I don’t believe you, so I”ll open the door and prove it to you.

Ah, I say, that’s good, but you see it’s an invisible dragon.

An invisible dragon, you say. Very well, then you”ll spread flour all over your garage floor, and his footprints will show.

Another very good idea, I say, but you see this is an incorporeal invisible dragon. It doesn’t have a body, and doesn’t leave footprints.

Does this dragon breathe fire like real dragons do? You ask.

Oh yes, I say, this dragon breathes fire.

Very well, you say, then you will hang thermometers, and you will set up an infrared camera, and they will show whether or not there is any invisible and incorporeal source of heat in your garage.

Once again, I commend you for your good ideas, but must point out that the fire this dragon breathes is the same temperature as the air around it, and it doesn’t create any wind.

About now, you realize that there doesn’t seem to be any difference between my invisible, incorporeal, undetectable dragon, and no dragon at all! A dragon that can’t make a difference in our world doesn’t need to make a difference in our minds either, you say.

So perhaps this is it. Every religion says their God, or goddess, can’t be seen, doesn’t have a body, doesn’t exist as we do, can’t be detected by human means, and can’t be described by human words. Then perhaps God is like the invisible, incorporeal, undetectable dragon. There’s nothing there at all, it doesn’t exist, and we’re wasting a lot of time thinking and preaching about it. The majority of Americans and the vast majority of Europeans don’t go to church any more, after all. It looks like that’s what they”ve decided, and maybe you”re convinced too. So maybe that’s it: the word “God” is useless and we should stop using it.

Picking up the other end of the stick

And yet” yet something about this isn’t satisfying. Even though I agree with the logic of all the arguments, something is still missing. Because I have these feelings, and I am betting that you have similar feelings, that I still need to account for. I feel that I’m somehow part of something much bigger, that things like truth, justice, love, even though they”re invisible, are terribly real. And I need a way to call forth these feelings of connection to the larger context of which I feel myself a part. I feel that it makes demands on me, this larger context, that some ways of living are better than others, and that the best way to live is in harmony with the noblest and proudest values I can call forth. I even want to feel that I’m living in a way that serves these ideals and values, that they almost command me, that I’m more whole and authentic when I live in harmony with them, and less so when I don’t.

What are they? For me, they”re feelings of a need for connection, a call for me to become a person of character, a kind of blessing to my little part of the world. That’s almost a magical way to speak, but it’s how I feel.

And it doesn’t stop there. Other things also fill me with feelings and yearnings I can’t explain. Birth, whether the birth of a human baby, a puppy, or a baby bird from an egg, seems miraculous to me. The beauty of sunrises and flowers, the feel of rain and a gentle wind.

On any day, we can look up in the sky and see amazing machines that let humans fly. But while that’s interesting and convenient, it doesn’t impress me as much as the fact that a fly can fly. That I don’t understand at all. The myriad miracles of nature often leave me breathless. And so many more things!

Unexpected kindnesses from strangers: why do they do that? And you and I do it too: why do we do it? And how kids grow up into adults who have the same kinds of hopes, dreams and fears that you and I have.

The amazing sameness of people, such that I can read wise writings from three thousand years ago written by people living in a completely different kind of world than I, and they speak to me, I recognize all their human yearnings and hopes and fears and pains. That’s amazing to me. It makes me believe that we are all somehow connected, all somehow one, and I want to know more about how that is, and how it works.

And music; music is a miracle to me. I don’t understand how Mozart did it. I don’t even understand how Stan Getz or Charlie Parker did it. How can a few well-chosen notes, hummed, plucked or bowed, have such emotional impact, and affect so many people in similar ways?

It is as though, invisibly, everywhere, there are forces that connect us, that stir our souls, that can open our little worlds and our hearts until we want to learn how to strengthen those connections we feel, how to create bonds of compassion and love rather than remaining so separated by ignorance or indifference.

When I am open to it, when I will have the humility to be awakened and moved, an entirely different quality of life seems possible for me and those whose lives I can touch. And I want it, I want that bigger, fuller, more connected world.

The awareness of those connections, these powers, makes me feel unfinished. There is a tendency in me – I think it’s in you, in nearly everyone – that wants to take life more seriously and deeply, that wants to grow into a fuller kind of humanity.[1]

Or is it growing into a quality of divinity that I’m after? Words fail here. These powers and connections are bigger than I, they seem eternal while I’m merely transient. I can’t control them, they seem to be the enduring rules for living. I feel enlarged when I become aware of these greater possibilities. And I feel small in comparison with them. I’m born, live and die, they seem to last forever.

You all know these things, you know what I’m trying to talk about, though you may have different ways of putting them. Not only that, I think you value them much as I do. I think you have, as I do, high opinions of those people you have known who have felt these larger aspirations and tried to respond to them.

There is a drive in us to become conscious of and grow toward relating our own life to the lives of others and the forces in the world that seem most life-giving, most sacred.[2]

And what shall we call these drives, these powers, these still small voices? They”re invisible, incorporeal, not like us, not like anything we can see or touch, yet so important. Shall we call these connections Mother? Father? Nature? Shall we call them God? Through time, we have called them all these things, and more.

Something here is so very real. Even if we aren’t sure what to call it, we must try to call it forth, you know?

Now see where we have arrived in this morning’s journey. We started by asking what if there really were a God, and realize it’s not the right question. Almost immediately, that question dissolved into others.

But now, by giving voice to some of the enduring questions and yearnings we seem to share with all people who have ever lived, we have arrived at a special, even a sacred, place. It is that place of awareness within us which is the womb that gave birth to God, the birthplace of all our gods and goddesses. And we find that in this womb are questions more profound than answers, vulnerabilities more powerful than strength, and a peace that can pass all understanding.[3]

There’s another paragraph from the Encyclopedia of Religion that fits here, though it sounds a little academic:

“In human religious experience, manifestations of sacred power provide centers of meaning, order, worship and ethics. Humans have always felt that real life is in close contact with sacred power. Ideas and experiences of these powers, [usually expressed as goddesses or gods], thus are not so much intellectual reflections as existential concerns, revolving around the fundamental human question of how to live authentically in this world”. Their power meets human existence precisely at the most vital and crucial areas of life, in connection with such matters as food, fertility, protection, birth, and death. The fact that [we assign] personality and will [to our divine beings] means that human existence is not just aimless and haphazard but is related to the sacred pattern created or structured by the will of the gods and goddesses.”[4]

If you look seriously at religions, at every religion in which people have ever had faith, you”ll find that many of them are now dead, and their teachings have degenerated into a long series of empty customs, into a system of abstract ideas and theories. For many people, the same is true of Western religions. But when we examine the original elements, can’t we see that this dead rock was once the molten outpourings of an inner fire, a fire that we also share? Religions are the sum of all relations humans have felt to the enduring forces of life and the universe. By whatever names their gods or goddesses are called, it is this reconnection we have tried to call forth.[5]

And what shall we call these feelings we have, feelings that there is more to us, that there are more noble possibilities for our lives and our world? Shall we call them messengers from a higher power? The angels of our better nature? Holy spirits? We meet like this in churches to explore life’s most important questions. But today, we started with the wrong question. All religions have been clear that their gods don’t exist like we do. Looking for them through history or archaeology is a dead-end. The gods aren’t archaeological or physical realities. They”re psychological realities. And the feelings, fears, hopes and yearnings that continue to give birth to the gods are so deep in our souls that we wouldn’t be fully human without them.

The real question isn’t about God. It’s “What if these feelings we have are real?” These yearnings for more, these feelings that we are really a part of all of this – of one another, of the world, and the yearning to be more connected, more whole. What if those yearnings are real? Sometimes they seem the most deeply real things about us.

And as long as that’s true, we should probably keep meeting like this.

——————

[1] Adapted from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1799 book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, pp. 11-12, where he argues that religion comes from ‘the human tendency” that wants to take life seriously, to grow to our full humanity.

[2] Schleiermacher says the drive to becoming religious “is only the endeavor to become conscious of and to exhibit the grue relation of our own life to the common nature of man.” (Ibid., p. 149)

[3] Schleiermacher puts it this way: “”Man in closest fellowship with the highest must be for you all an object of esteem, nay, of reverence. No one capable of understanding such a state can, when he sees it, withhold this feeling. That is past all doubt. You may despise all whose minds are easily and entirely filled with trivial things, but in vain you attempt to depreciate one who drinks in the greatest for his nourishment. You may love him or hate him, according as he goes with you or against in the narrow path of activity and culture, but even the most beautiful feeling of equality you cannot entertain towards a person so far exalted above you. The seeker for the Highest Existence in the world stands above all who have not a like purpose.” (p. 210).

[4] Theodore M. Ludwig, “Gods and Goddesses,” in the Encyclopedia of Religion, volume 6, pp. 59ff.)

[5] Schleiermacher: “I invite you to study every faith professed by man, every religion that has a name and a character. Though it may long ago have degenerated into a long series of empty customs, into a system of abstract ideas and theories, will you not, when you examine the original elements at the source, find that this dead dross was once the molten outpourings of the inner fire? Is there not in all religions more or less of the true nature of religion, as I have presented it to you? Must not, therefore, each religion be one of the special forms which mankind, in some region of the earth and at some stage of development, has to accept?”

“the whole of religion is nothing but the sum of all relations of man to God, apprehended in all the possible ways in which any man can be immediately conscious in his life. In this sense there is but one religion.” (pp. 216-217)

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© Davidson Loehr

15 September 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

This is the time of year when Jews celebrate their highest holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. “Atonement” is, I think, the only English word that became a theological concept, and its meaning is it’s spelling: At-one-ment. It is the time Jews re-establish their relationship with God by confessing their sins.

It is customary for Jews to wear white on this day, symbolizing purity and calling to mind the promise that our sins can be forgiven. The realization that our sins can be forgiven without an intermediary would be enough all by itself to make this a High Holy Day. In respect and honor of this tradition, I would like to lead us in a prayer of atonement:

We confess we have not been perfect. We have missed the mark. We have done things we should not have done. Some selfish things, hurtful things, thoughtless actions and words, sins of commission and sins of omission.

We have failed in the past; we will fail in the future. Yet even knowing we are not going to be perfect, we are determined once more to aspire to be authentic and whole.

Before our God, before the spirit of life and the habit of truth, let us dare to dream again.

We dream of living out of our highest possibilities rather than our lower compromises. And we would again make promises before all that is holy to us, by whatever name we call it forth.

We promise in the year ahead to speak the truth in love rather than living in easier half-truths.

We vow to try our best to live out of compassion rather than indifference, to grow beyond our habitual blindnesses by seeking fuller understanding.

We say in the face of all that is sacred and makes a claim upon our hearts that we will always try to seek the counsel of the angels of our better nature, in whatever forms they come to us.

We vow to remember that our world can not be made whole without our participation in it, and we will participate.

We desire to be inspired by the hope of a more loving world, a more just world, what some have called the kingdom of God. We commit ourselves to this vision, and ask those who love us to help us remember our commitment.

Together we can be and do more than alone, and we commit ourselves, once again, to being together, as we resume the sacred work of making our lives more authentic and our world more whole.

Let these wishes of our hearts become the mission of our lives. We are forgiven the sins of our past, so that we may enter fully into the dreams for our future, and the future of our world. Let us help one another remember, and let us help one another. Amen.

SERMON: The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes

I can’t think about preaching on Bible stories without remembering my friend Todd. Todd was a Christian minister, my closest friend. He was a liberal minister in the Disciples of Christ, a denomination that covers the whole spectrum from fundamentalism to liberalism, and it really made him crazy. Todd loved stories too, but it seemed that every time he used one, half the people didn’t know it and the other half didn’t understand it. Todd suddenly died of a heart attack almost five years ago at the age of 46, and I still miss him and think of him, especially when I preach on a Bible story.

It was a dozen years ago when Todd called me as soon as I got home from church. He was so frustrated he was near exploding, and wanted me to meet him for lunch so he could vent.

He had preached that morning on the story of the Prodigal Son. He’d worked hard on the sermon and thought he had done a good job on it. Afterwards, in the line outside the sanctuary, a woman came up to him. She had been a member of that church for two dozen years and had taught adult Sunday school a few times. She shook his hand and said, “that was a really nice story. Did you write it?” Todd did a scene like the comedian Lewis Black, screaming “It’s the story of the Prodigal Son! How can she not know the story of the Prodigal Son! You can’t come to church for twenty-five years and not know the story of the Prodigal Son! It just isn’t possible!”

A lot of Unitarians don’t know much about the Bible, but the truth is that most Christians don’t know it well either, and don’t understand its stories. It’s a common complaint from Christian ministers: in order to preach on a once-famous story from the Bible, they have to tell the story, and often explain it as well, because many people will be hearing it for the first time.

This problem with stories isn’t new. When you read the stories Jesus told, you realize that most of his disciples didn’t understand them either. One of the most common themes in the Christian scriptures is Jesus telling a symbolic or metaphorical story and his disciples hearing it only literally. Nearly the entire gospel of John is composed of these examples. The disciples were literalists, he was telling them parables and metaphors, and they didn’t get it.

So it’s risky, telling Bible stories.

Last week I played with the story of Adam and Eve getting thrown out of Eden, and paired it with a Turkish folktale to offer a new way of looking at the idea of justice. This week I want to get into another story from the Bible, the story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. You probably all know the basic story. Jesus wanted to feed all these people who had formed a kind of loose congregation around him. He had seven loaves of bread and a few fish, and his disciples didn’t see how they could feed four or five thousand people. But they began feeding them, and the loaves and fishes multiplied until everyone was fed and there was lots left over.

I don’t want to know how many people think the story of the loaves and fishes is a story about an amazing magic trick where Jesus the Magician created a few thousand fish out of thin air. I can just hear my friend Todd going berserk over it. But Jesus wasn’t a magician; he was a teacher. What a shame if we miss the point of these great stories because we think of them as mere magic tricks.

They’re never about that. Jesus was not the first century equivalent of David Copperfield. Religious miracles aren’t magic tricks. They’re always participatory. You can only experience the real magic from inside of them, not outside of them. You have to get inside the stories, and let the stories get inside of you, just as you have to do with any other good story.

This story about the loaves and fishes wasn’t an eyewitness account. It was written many decades after Jesus died. He was hardly known at all during his life, and never gathered large crowds, certainly nothing like hundreds or thousands of people.

If you take courses in the Bible, you’ll most likely learn that the story is understood as a story not about Jesus but about the church. It’s found in the gospel of Matthew, the “church gospel.” It’s a story saying the way a few words of wisdom, a few bits of spiritual nourishment, can feed thousands is because the church multiplies the loaves and fishes through the participation of its members.

Both with real food and with spiritual food, a church is a gathering of people who spread the nourishment to others. Over three hundred of you experienced some of this here last night, at that lovely church party where we fed hundreds of people. The same happens with spiritual food. Here’s a church with one minister and one ministerial intern, yet there are more than a half dozen adult classes, covenant groups, Tai Chi classes, men’s breakfasts, a whole host of offerings, plus e-mail chats and all sorts of discussions here and with your family and friends during the week.

Now just describing it that way, it doesn’t feel very miraculous; it just feels like potlucks and various kinds of classes. But there is something else going on, and I want to see if I can show you what it is in these few minutes we have together.

Jesus died around the year 30. The gospel of Matthew, where these stories are found, was written more than fifty years later. What had happened during that half-century was that as the church began to grow, people came to hear its messages and they felt fed. They felt a kind of hole inside of them being filled, and it was a feeling they’d never had before. They found a community of people who were also asking questions about who they were, who they were meant to be, and how they were supposed to live. They felt their lives were being taken more seriously, and at a more significant and personal level, than ever before. And as they got fed and filled up, they wanted to feed others with the overflow.

And so they did. History says the early church had common meals like we had last night, that they fed the hungry and cared for the poor, both the economically poor and the poor of spirit, just as we try to do. In the version of Christianity that “won,” Paul’s sect, communion is a magical act involving eating the body and blood of a savior. But in most of the Christian communities even by the end of the first century, it wasn’t about that at all. The Christian communion was simply a common meal, much like what today we call a potluck. Early Christian documents (The Didache) never mention any association with the body or blood of a savior.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes was that the people who had been fed brought their own loaves and fishes to feed others, until the food that had first fed a few people began to feed a few thousand people. What does this mean in simple, down-to-earth ways?

I’ve heard some of our people here in their 20’s and 30’s talk about the small groups, or covenant groups, they have joined here. Some have said that after a month or two in such a small group they find that they’ve learned how to know and feel close to a half-dozen other people on a personal level, and they’ve never once talked about how much money they made or what they did for a living. They find their lives being measured by a new currency, a kind of personal or spiritual currency, and it feeds them.

If it ends there, they’ve just been fed. But when they start a new covenant group, or invite friends to come join them so that others are being fed, something miraculous is happening.

Whether you’re new to the church or have been here awhile, I strongly urge you to think about trying these small groups out. You can call the office for more information on them. They are one way we are taking a simple idea and using it to help a growing number of people feel nourished, and feel known.

I think any good church, including this one, is trying to turn a few simple ideas into spiritual food to nourish their people. Simple ideas like the idea that we want to take our lives seriously. We want to examine how we’re living, what we’re serving with our lives, and whether it’s worth serving with our lives. What actions bring us satisfactions, how can we live so we’ll be glad we lived that way when we look back on it in years to come? And how can we work, alone and with others, to improve the quality of our lives and of our world?

Those are the simple questions being asked by every church worth its salt. Simple questions, but the pursuit of them can feed us, and can make us want to help feed others too. That’s the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

I think of that passage in the gospel of John where Jesus tells his disciples “I have food of which you do not know,” and they don’t get it. They’re thinking hamburgers; he’s thinking soul food. It’s the deeper hunger that religious teachers are concerned with. Once a church has been formed, people always seem to want to help feed hungry people with both kinds of food: real food for food pantries, freeze nights for homeless people, and so on, but also spiritual nourishment, soul food.

That’s what this loaves and fishes business is about, but there’s more to it, too.

Did you even wonder, when you read or heard this story, what it might have felt like to Jesus, being able to feed others with his words?

Don’t get sidetracked because the story is about Jesus. Don’t start thinking “Oh, but he was the Son of God! That couldn’t have anything to do with me!” This isn’t about genetics; it’s about potential, and about transformation.

Consecration

There’s another concept from early in the history of Christianity that helps here. It was the early church’s notion of “consecration.” People brought their ordinary tools of work to the church. Carpenters could bring their hammer; women might bring rolling pins or baking pots. They brought them to have the church consecrate them, and they dedicated those objects to serving something bigger than themselves, then they took them home and built houses or baked bread, but with a huge difference. For now they were doing these ordinary things “for the greater glory of God,” and that changed everything. The money they gave for the church’s work was consecrated too, devoted to a higher purpose. Money that would have gone to buy bricks or flour now went, they believed, to making ‘s oul food” for the spiritual nourishment of others.

It’s like the story of King Midas, in reverse. King Midas had the power to turn everything, including people, into gold, and it drove him to despair. Consecration is about taking money, time, energy and care, and turning them into things that give life to others.

Spend a few minutes on this with me. When we work for something bigger than ourselves, when we can feed others, the time, money and energy we spend doing it blesses both them and us. That’s the secret of the loaves and fishes. The act of giving gives more to those who give than it does to those who receive. The saying “it is more blessed to give than to receive” isn’t just pap from Hallmark cards, it’s a deep truth of life.

That’s where the social witness of people of faith has come from – soup kitchens, homeless shelters, hands-on housing, food banks and clothing drives. Your clothes keep someone else warm. Your food fills the stomach of a person who was hungrier than you. Your money makes possible things that would have been impossible without it.

And because of this, the time and money you spend on things that feed others, both their bodies and their spirits, that time and money are transformed, consecrated. And so are you.

I can prove this to you from your own lives. If you eat three meals a day, you’ve had almost 1100 meals in the past year. How many of them do you remember? That’s a lot of time, a lot of your life spent eating; how many of the meals do you remember?

And of those you do remember, isn’t it because something else about the meal made it memorable? Someone’s birthday, a conversation over dinner where another person’s life opened to you, or you felt known, a meal where the conversation got so real there were tears, or deep laughter. And you knew you would never forget this moment because it was magical.

Suddenly, it had been defined as partaking of higher things, nobler things, more important things. It was consecrated and, for that moment, so were you. You went expecting a steak and instead found that food that you didn’t know of and didn’t expect. Food for the spirit. Nourishment for your soul. Ordinary time transformed into extraordinary time, mealtime become miracletime.

And then, during the past year, have you ever helped feed others, people you didn’t know? Fixed dinner or breakfast at one of the Freeze Nights here, where we offer food and shelter to about fifty at a time of Austin’s eight thousand or more homeless people? If you did, you remember those times. Among the 1100 meals of the past year, those are some you remember, because your time and those moments of your life were transformed and transfigured by being consecrated to the service of others, the service of something larger than you, outside your personal world.

When we consecrate our time and money to the service of high ideals and people in need, we experience the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the miracle of having the very quality of time change, the miracle of making those donations and those actions serve something bigger makes us bigger too.

I can only go so far on this topic, then sooner or later many of you may feel that I’m speaking from a world that’s different from the one you spend your days in. We live so alone today, we have taken individualism to such an extreme, we hardly know how to define ourselves as parts of something larger any more.

The book Bowling Alone that came out a few years ago talked about this, about the fact that there are more bowlers today, but fewer bowling leagues, because everybody’s bowling alone. If you grew up this way, it may simply sound strange or foreign to hear someone talk about consecrating your time or money by making them serve values and ideals you cherish, or provide services that help make positive differences in the larger world around you. We need to learn or relearn how to see ourselves as parts of something larger than ourselves, and a church is the safest place to do it.

Maybe even the idea of joining or supporting a church is a new idea that feels odd. If it is but you know it’s time to start, then start where it’s comfortable. There are people in this church who regularly pledge ten percent of their pay, ten percent of their gross pay before taxes. I envy and admire them, but I’m not one of them. That still feels too hard for me.

I pledge just half that, five percent of my salary and housing, and for now that feels right to me. I know some of you give a higher percentage, and I respect you for it. I’m not trying to seem holier than you, I’m just trying to be honest here, this is a place where we need to be able to be honest about everything. If you’re just starting and this still feels new, start at a percentage that feels right. Start out at just two percent if you like, just two cents on every dollar that you decide will go to support a church that is trying to feed people with the kinds of values and ideals that you honor and want to support. Then as it feels right, you can raise it a percent at a time, whether next year or next month.

But don’t look at it as just paying another bill. You’ll get more out of it if you look at it as a way of consecrating your gifts of money, time and talent to work toward offering soul food to others. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes wasn’t what happened to those who ate the fish. They just got a meal. The miracle happened mostly to those who fed them. They learned that simple acts done in the service of high ideals consecrate and transform us. They really do, and the miracle can occur on any day.

The poet Denise Levertov wrote a wonderful short poem about such a day, which I’d like to share with you. But think of particular days when you have experienced this kind of transformation, consecration, as you listen to it, and you’ll be able to feel it more fully:

“Variation on a Theme by Rilke,”

by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me – a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic – or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

What wonderful words: – “and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.” I can. And you can. And we can, and we can do it together.

Now I invite you to come forward and place your pledge card in this basket. If you are a visitor, I don’t want you to feel excluded. You can just bring your offering and put it in the basket with the pledge cards.

(Commitment ceremony follows.)

BENEDICTION:

From the beginnings of civilization, people have shared their resources to accomplish together what they could not do alone. Above all, they have set aside a portion of their money to be consecrated, dedicated to teaching and serving the values and actions that give life to themselves and others.

The multiplication of our gifts makes possible the multiplication of our efforts. As it has been throughout our history, so it is again here today. Together, we consecrate these gifts to our higher callings, and together we shall serve those higher callings.

And now for those who seek God, may your God go with you.

For those who embrace life, may life return your affection.

And for those who seek a better path, may that better path be found,

And the courage to take it:

Step, by step, by step.

Amen.