Davidson Loehr

Published in the Austin American Statesman
December 29th 2001

As a Unitarian, I’m a religious liberal. And for me, religion isn’t about God. It isn’t about Allah, Jesus, Shiva, Vishnu, the Buddha or the rest. Religion is about the music, not the individual songs.

The distinction between the songs and the music is what sets liberal religion apart from other spiritual styles and opens it to dialogue with all sincere beliefs.

Why go to church? Because we are trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. So salvation for us is salvation by character. (The word “salvation” comes from a Latin word meaning health or wholeness.) Few of us think of the payoff coming after we die. The goal is to grow into a deeper, more aware, compassionate and responsible kind of person in the here and now.

When I look for a simple way to explain what I think life and religion are about, I’m often drawn to the old Hindu parable of the blind people and the elephant. A bunch of blind people discover different parts of an elephant and try to explain to the others what this elephant is.

“It is like a tree,” says the man who grabbed a leg.

“No, you fool, it’s like a hard, thin rope!” says the woman who grabbed the elephant’s tail.

“You’re both wrong,” says the third, who holds the elephant’s ear. “It’s a huge flat leathery leaf.”

The fourth shouts back, “How can you all be both blind and stupid? An elephant is like a very thick, strong, snake!” — this, of course, from the one holding the trunk.

Our “elephant” is a metaphor for life, which is bigger and more complex than any one of us can ever grasp. Each blind person symbolizes one way of perceiving — one religion, one philosophy, one kind of science or art. We each have a tiny piece of the truth about life embedded in our different religious, cultural or scientific traditions. And like the blind people, we are always tempted to mistake our pieces of truth for The Truth.

Yet the quality of our beliefs is shown not by our certainties but by our actions toward people who hold a different piece of the truth.

For sermons, I draw from a variety of world religions, literature, myths and folk tales. I look for what is both useful and worthy of the highest ideals to which we can aspire.

The opposite of liberal religion is literal religion. After Sept. 11, we learned that fundamentalism of any kind is the mortal enemy of both freedom and democracy. It was sobering to hear that the “hate list” of the Taliban — liberated women, individual rights, homosexuality and freedom of religion — was echoed in our own country in that remarkably unguarded interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on “The 700 Club.” Against this background, religious liberalism may be the most American of all faith styles. In the Hindu story, it is comical to reduce the elephant to just a tiny piece of it. In religion and politics, it can be deadly.

That is part of the reason I am an active member of the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries. I know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full choir. Goethe once said, “The person who does not know two languages does not even know one,” and it’s even more true in religion. Unless we are learning to understand several religious idioms, we are not likely to be part of the solution and may well become part of the problem. We show our religious maturity through dialogue, not proclamation.

It’s true that we lose something when we can no longer pretend that our particular beliefs are the center of the universe — when our “songs” are heard as just small but important parts of the more universal music of the human spirit. But we gain something, too. We gain a bigger world and a bigger family of brothers and sisters. If that enterprise isn’t sacred, I’m not sure what could be.

© Davidson Loehr

November 18, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

This is the season when we start hearing endless harangues about the “real” meanings of these holidays. I’m not sure there’s only one meaning, though it’s easy to lose patience with all the hokey meanings that get glued to these holidays.

A few days ago I received in the mail from a woodworking place here in town the announcement that they have a Thanksgiving sale on drill bits. So you can use Thanksgiving as sort of a warm-up for the biggest commercial season of the year which is coming up immediately following. Thanksgiving can also be and is usually taken as a time of an annual reckoning when we count our blessings. When we look around and realize that the friends, the families, the life that we have is much more blessing than curse, that we’re lucky to have it and the appropriate response is to give thanks for it. This is good, even better than drill bits.

But I want to take this to another level this morning. This is the fifth in a five part series of sermons, though I think I’ll add a sixth part to the five part series next week, just to keep it confusing. But this is the fifth in a five part series of sermons on stages of grieving something that has died for us. It’s used in a lot of ways, but I’ve been using it primarily to talk about old religious beliefs that may once have served us, that may have been familiar, but that no longer give us life. Things that even if you could say you believe them – which in many cases you can’t – you still wouldn’t have any idea what possible sense they make. It’s an old habit and it may be a rut, but it’s your rut, and you’re not sure how to get out of it. There’s a that was developed by Elizabeth Kubler Ross about thirty years ago for dealing with the stages that people go through in dealing with the loss of something. And these are the stages we have been using and applying to religion.

The first thing we do when we’re threatened with the loss of something important and life-giving and from which we have derived our identity is to pretend that nothing really happened. That’s the stage of denial, otherwise known as “the ostrich school” of response. When denial doesn’t work, we can get angry about it. You can see two-year-olds throwing these tantrums where they are trying to use anger to control everyone around them to do things their way: two-year-olds of any age. We have all done it. When anger doesn’t work, we try to make a deal. We try to keep what we can of the old ways so that we don’t have to make the major change that is still scary. So we make a deal, we play at Bargaining.

There are a lot of deals going on in religion where people who have outgrown beliefs of their past, whatever their beliefs were, still go through the motions and still pretend that they really believe things that they have no idea how to make any sense at all of because they want so much to remain a part of the world that once gave them life. And they make a deal and the deal seems to feed them. Some deals are good deals as long as you don’t lose yourself in them. But a lot of times the deals don’t work.

And then you come to the fourth stage which is really the most frightening of the bunch. Elizabeth Kubler Ross called it depression but it was severely under-named. It’s at least a despair and it’s sort of a terrified despair at that. This is what happens when you realize that you have lost a world. You have lost who you were and how you thought things were and you don’t have a story to live within and you don’t know who you are and if you don’t know who you are and what your story is you literally don’t know how to go on. Our stories are our road maps through life.

I told you a story three weeks ago from some of the works of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen about this kind of despair, this kind of losing a world and how severe it is. There’s nothing romantic about it. This isn’t Hallmark greeting card stuff. It was a story about a young college athlete, quite a football star in California, who had his right leg amputated above the knee because of cancer, and who didn’t want to go on, he lost his entire life. His life had been big man on campus, fast cars, fast women and the rest of it, and it was over for him. That’s the despair of losing a world. He would never be again who he had been until then. Never. And you’ve got two choices, you accept a different kind of life that you never thought you would have accepted just a year earlier, or you don’t go on.

So the acceptance that comes isn’t something light and fluffy. The kind of acceptance involved in this stage means that you’re accepting an identity for yourself and an identity for life that you would not have found acceptable a year ago. This doesn’t mean that you’re defining yourself at a lower level at all. It’s usually at a higher level. It does mean that you’re defining yourself at a deeper level.

I like the Thanksgiving story as one of the most powerful, classic stories of at least the last two stages, though all of the stages were involved in this. I think it’s a classic story not only for Americans, but for the human condition and one we should know and know well. And we should tell ourselves this story at least once a year. I also like the story of the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving because when you learn more about them you realize there’s a lot about the pilgrims you can not respect or like.

Now we see them dolled up on posters and matching gray costumes with big, white collars cooking a twenty six-pound Butterball turkey and making happy with the Indians. We see the pilgrims wrapped in the American flag. Many fundamentalists will talk about the vision of the country’s founders that we have lost; they don’t mean the founders. Those are the people in the eighteenth century who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When fundamentalists look back nostalgically for the image of a nation made in their image, they mean the pilgrims.

And one of the things we can be thankful for every Thanksgiving is that we don’t live in the kind of country the pilgrims wanted! The pilgrims were what today we would call fundamentalists. And the social agenda, and I’ve said this before, the social agenda of fundamentalisms are the same worldwide regardless of their religion. We saw it in the Taliban, we saw in that amazingly unguarded interview between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And we can see it 380 years ago in the story of the pilgrims.

So let me tell you about the pilgrims. They started in England, but they left England because they didn’t have the freedom to believe what they wanted to believe. Now so far they sound like our kind of people. We’re all about religious freedom and freedom of belief and will go to great lengths to make sure that people have them whether their beliefs agree with ours or not.

From England the pilgrims went to Holland because Holland in the early seventeenth century was a wildly pluralistic kind of country, much closer to the United States of today than England was. And they certainly had freedom of belief in Holland. You could believe anything you liked in Holland but no belief was going to take precedence. And that’s when one of the dark sides of the pilgrims was shown because while they wanted freedom to believe their things, they did not want the freedom for anyone else to believe things that were wrong. And they were lucky enough to know what was right.

So when the pilgrims left Holland to come to this country, they left it ironically because it had far too much freedom of belief. More than they wanted in the new country. They came here to civilize the Indians after they got here, to civilize the wilderness, and to Christianize America and to establish a country where there was freedom only to believe what they believed. And if you know your early American history, you know that is exactly how our colonies began.

Our colonies were on the verge of perpetuating the religious warfare that tore Europe apart and the only thing that prevented it was finally the founders setting up a Constitution with a Bill of Rights including a first amendment. The pilgrims would have absolutely detested the United States of America and its Bill of Rights and they would not have permitted it. So we need to know that about them. Don’t just wrap them in an American flag, they would have hated it.

Nevertheless, they showed a courage and a perseverance that are absolutely astonishing. And we have a lot to learn from them. I don’t know how many worlds they lost. They lost a whole world in England. They lost their families, they lost their grandparents, great grandparents, they lost uncounted generations of history that they would never see again. Imagine how this feels, to leave England to go to Holland willing to lose an entire world, to redefine life and start again in Holland and then they lose it again because the world is much bigger than their beliefs can allow. And they lose a second world. And they came here to start a third one.

Originally, they started out in two ships, but one of them wasn’t seaworthy. So they returned and all of them came in just the one ship, the Mayflower. There were 102 pilgrims who came here in 1620. They arrived in Massachusetts to face an absolutely record breaking, brutal, deadly winter. They come to the New World and the world knows them not and loves them not. During that winter – these are numbers I think we should all know – out of the 102 pilgrims that came, during their first winter, 47 died. Almost half. If you think of winter as four months in Massachusetts, that means that they lost about three people a week, all winter long. How long could you do this? Without losing your own will to live? Without losing your own spirit? The courage and the perseverance of these tough pilgrims is something that we need to make a part of us.

In spring, they planted crops, the crops had to be near the graves of 47 of their people, graves they dug in frozen earth during the winter when they weren’t hunting for food to stay alive themselves. They planted crops, they hunted for food and according to all the stories I’ve read, they made friends with the Indians that were here. The Indians were apparently very friendly towards the pilgrims at first.

Maybe if the Indians could see 300 years into the future, they wouldn’t have been so friendly, but they were friendly in 1621. And in the fall of 1621, as was their custom from England, they had a Harvest Home Festival. It was a very old English festival, when the harvest comes in, you have a big Harvest Home Festival. And the pilgrims re-instituted that here, it’s what we now call the first Thanksgiving. It was quite an event.

The records seem to say that this thing went on three days. Three days of eating and merriment. And the menu was pretty spectacular for the first Thanksgiving, it still sounds good. They had venison stew cooked over an open fire. They had spit roasted wild turkeys stuffed with cornbread, sweet corn baked in its husks, and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. After dinner, according to legend, Chief Masasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popcorn, which the pilgrims had never before tasted.

Perhaps, in life, all’s well that ends well. But this didn’t end well without great loss, great pain, and great resolve. Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday for people who have never lost anything. Without the loss, you can still have the turkey but it doesn’t have the meaning, or the victory, that it had for these first pilgrims.

t first, they must have tried denial. When the first one of them died the previous fall, and then the second and third, they must still have thought that might be all, that the rest of them would make it. We have no records of their anger, and in their style of religion it doesn’t seem likely they would have expressed it – at least not towards God. But inside, how could they avoid anger at the loss of so much and so many? I wonder what were the bargains they offered God in their private prayers? “Just spare our family God, and we will work even harder for your glory.” Then, “at least spare our children,” and “spare something, spare someone, anyone.” In return, they would convert – whom, the Indians?

At some time during that cruel winter, though, despair had to settle in. My God, almost half of them were dead, there was no reason to think the other half wouldn’t follow them the next winter. If this was the land God had chosen for them, he certainly had a perverted way of showing them its bounty! We don’t know the depth or style of despair these pilgrims went through. What would you feel, losing half your people, uncertain whether the rest of you might soon join them? I’ve never had as many good reasons to feel despair as they did. They had at least 47 good reasons for giving up, another 55 reasons to keep holding on, but it had to feel like a close call, don’t you think?

What they were being offered, finally, wasn’t what they had wanted or hoped for at all. Little glory, limited joy, many grave markers, many searing memories, a long long way from their homeland, their relatives – everything and everyone. What did they get? Life, and even then only for half of them. Life, food, the chance to survive another year, and the chance to do something else. Something that still stuns us by its audacity, its unlikeliness, its irony. Right there, right in the middle of the fields of suffering and death, in the heart of this new land which had still not decided whether it would let them live, right there with some new friends, they stopped, they celebrated, they threw a party, and they gave thanks.

I like to think that just that simple act of giving thanks offered them freedom and courage to go on, and began the healing of wounds they would wear like battle scars forever. Just their ability to accept the gift of life – however it was to be offered to them – and to accept it with praise and gratitude, just that. I like to think that offered the most and the best healing and blessing they were going to find. I like to think that just that simple act of giving thanks blessed them, and blessed those who followed them.

I know it works for us.

© Davidson Loehr

 November 11, 2001

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

We love war stories. We always have. We still make WWII movies, 56 years after the war ended. And one of them (Saving Private Ryan) won several Oscars a few years ago, and almost won Best Picture. The Rambo movies tried singlehandedly to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, letting us win it.

I think there is a select group of war movies that should be required viewing for people in our society who have never been in a war, to get some small feel of the bloody and seductive power war has always had – at least for most men. On that list, I would include Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, as well as some powerful anti-war movies like The Americanization of Emily, Gallipoli and All Quiet on the Western Front.

The great combat general George Patton once famously remarked that next to war, all other human achievements shrink to insignificance. I’d hate to see history’s greatest artists, diplomats and geniuses dismissed by this modern incarnation of the god Ares, but for sheer power and excitement, Patton is probably right. Every veteran I have known still defines their war time as the defining experience of their life – as I also do. It isn’t kosher to say it, but I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for my 53 weeks in Vietnam – and almost every veteran of every war will understand.

We love war stories. The oldest story we have preserved in Western Civilization is a war story – Homer’s Iliad, probably written down 2800 years ago: the story of the Trojan war of three millennia ago.

Our notion of the hero goes back to those stories, too. For the Greeks, a “hero” was half way between humans and gods: someone of nearly superhuman personal courage and skill in the service of some higher ideal the Greeks admired.

That’s the key. It isn’t just courage, it’s a selfless courage in the service of a higher ideal. Heroes fight for others. So do the soldiers we admire. When they fight for small or selfish ideals, we never think of them as heroic:

Mafia fights have often been bloody, and required some courage to pull off. But the slaughter was tribal, in the service of one family’s greed, usually involving profits from prostitution, drugs or gambling, nothing nobler. So we may be fascinated by stories of the Godfathers, but we don’t regard them as heroes. We don’t have holidays to celebrate them.

Mercenaries, soldiers for hire, also risk their lives. But we think of them as opportunists with way too much testosterone, not heroes.

And violent atrocities during war are never regarded as heroic. Many of us remember Lt. Calley and the Mai Lai massacres of the Viet Nam War, where his platoon slaughtered an entire Vietnamese village of men, women, children and babies. He was court-martialed, not given a ticker-tape parade.

We have similar reactions to the military violence of the Nazis, the Salvadoran death squads, the horrible acts of “the killing fields” in Cambodia and so many others. Bullying, brutality and barbarism have never been admired, even though they continue to be imitated. We know the difference between barbarism and heroism, and it is a nearly sacred difference for us.

On Veterans’ Day, we try to remember the nobler, more selfless and heroic acts of men and women who put themselves at the service of orders they believed served the best parts of our country’s history and heritage. Few of our veterans were in actual combat. In the Vietnam War, about 90% of our soldiers were support troops, only about 10% saw actual fighting, and I imagine it’s still about the same. But every one of them made themselves available, and was there to do whatever was asked of them, the clerks and cooks just as much as the infantrymen.

There is something here that is striking and heroic. These are ordinary people who will do what they are told because they trust that their country would not ask them to risk their lives if it weren’t necessary. They trust their captains, their generals, their president. They trust us.

There is an unwritten, unspoken covenant that soldiers make with their countries. It’s a deceptively simple covenant. They say, “I’ll risk my life, maybe even lose it, in a cause I can’t fully grasp, in a battle that is part of a larger war I’ll never understand. I’ll do it for you because I am one of you and you have asked me to do it. In return, you must promise me two things. First, you must promise that you will do everything in your power to make sure it is a war that is worth my life. Second, you must promise never to forget. You must promise never to forget me, us, and what we did, because we did it for you. You must promise never to forget.”

Veterans’ Day is one of our annually scheduled times to try not to forget, to keep up our part of this holy, bloody, covenant. But in truth, we mostly do forget, don’t we?

It’s hard, almost contrived, to celebrate Veterans’ Day in a liberal church like this. I took part in a service with another Vietnam veteran in St. Paul a year and a half ago, and when all veterans were asked to stand, only six stood, including the two of us on the stage. Six out of about three hundred. Here in the South, the percentages are higher: we had 12-15 out of the 300 present at our second service. Still, it isn’t a big percentage. If you want to see a bigger percentage of veterans, you’ll probably have to travel east of I-35 to some of the black churches, or up the road to some of the big Catholic churches where there weren’t as many college deferments. But here, and in Episcopal churches and churches on the west side of Austin, we aren’t the warrior class. We get others to fight our wars for us.

And once the wars are over, the veterans become almost invisible – especially the broken ones, who are embarrassments in peacetime. Occasionally, you see a license plate on which a veteran wants to remind you that he or she served, and in which war. Once in awhile, we may be dimly aware that somewhere in almost every major city there is a Veterans’ Administration Hospital, where wounded, broken, disabled vets languish away out of our sight and out of our thoughts.

Even our good wars leave many veterans with wounds that will never completely heal. Our bad wars are much worse.

My veteran friend in St. Paul wrote a book about his experiences in Vietnam, and during his research he discovered that more Vietnam veterans have died of suicide than were killed in the entire war. That’s sixty thousand or more suicides. The fact that this is probably the first time you’ve heard this is one measure of just how invisible veterans are.

With the wisdom of hindsight, we can look back on Vietnam and realize that we didn’t keep our part of the covenant back then. The soldiers never promised it would be a good war, because that’s not their job. That’s the part we were supposed to guarantee. It is our responsibility to insure that it is the right war to be fought in that place at that time, just as it is our job to ask those questions in our present war. The soldiers only promised to serve, to risk and even lose their lives if necessary. We were also supposed to remember them for it. But after the humiliation of defeat in Vietnam, our society blamed the veterans for losing a war that should never have been fought, and many of them – tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans – were undone by it. The effects on their families, children and friends are incalculable.

People who attend liberal churches like this where over 90% of the members hold college degrees are never likely to be well represented in the warrior class. But Veterans’ Day still has a powerful message for us. In fact, it brings challenges which fall more directly to us than to almost any other sector of our society – especially since we are now getting drawn into a new war, whose effects may be with us for a long time.

Our favorite war stories reconnect us with those rare and powerful times when character is put under pressure and under fire. Remember, that’s how diamonds are made. And at its best, war’s ability to shape and temper character is like the story of coal being converted into diamonds through intense heat and pressure. The potential for that clarity and strength was always there, but it would never have emerged without the terrible pressure. Some, of course, can’t withstand the pressure: sixty thousand suicides from Vietnam veterans are a small measure of this.

In times of war, and observances like Veterans’ Day, we are offered the chance and the challenge of putting our own character under that same pressure and seeing what kind of precious jewel we can produce. It will not be the jewel of combat warriors, for that’s not the stuff of which most of us are made. I’m not made of it either. I was on a lot of combat operations, but as a combat photographer. I carried a camera instead of a gun and shot pictures rather than people. And while I was shot at as much as most of them, I was a watcher, not a warrior.

It left me believing that we owe something to those who have fought for us. I believe that every act of bravery that serves us is a kind of debt that we owe, and that we must repay when the time has come for our kind of courage. This Veterans’ Day is, perversely, the two-month anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, so the one day leads to the other. These times since the attacks of September 11th do offer challenges that fall particularly to us and other cultural liberals.

One of the most important revelations after the attacks came from that amazingly unguarded interview between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, where they blamed the attacks on liberated women, abortions, gay rights, the ACLU and all liberal organizations that work for individual rights and freedoms. The revelation was that this was the same hate list produced by the fundamentalist Muslims of the Taliban. The lesson is that fundamentalisms of all kinds are among the most dangerous enemies of freedom and democracy in the world.

Pat Robertson has been very clear about this. He has said that democracy is not a fit form of government unless it is run by fundamentalist Christians under their (and his) rules.

Religious and cultural liberals must be awakened by the fact that any religious or political effort to tie one religion to the political and military machinery of our country will be America’s version of the Taliban, and has the potential to do far more harm than the attacks of September 11th. When God is ordered to bless America, that God has been reduced to a puppet of the government and the media. It isn’t allowed to challenge or question America, only to bless its wars. When that happens, it is no longer a God worth serving. It’s bad theology, and worse public policy. It calls for resistance from the people with the gifts of intellect and articulation that characterize us here this morning. This is our combat zone, our war front.

And the reason it is ours is also because the only antidote to the deadly narrowness of fundamentalisms — again, regardless of which kind of fundamentalisms — is the openness and inclusion that are the very soul of liberal religion. In this church and other liberal churches in Austin and elsewhere is the spirit that this community and this country need desperately as we are being dragged into this new war. It is our job to proclaim the religious alternative of openness and trust over religions that preach fear and obedience.

No, we don’t have the single answer to the world’s problems in a simple set of mandated beliefs, because there isn’t one. What we do have is the deep conviction that the world’s problems can only be addressed through opening the dialogue to a whole range of religious and political answers, learning how to listen to those whose beliefs differ, and asking how those beliefs can be a healthy gift to a world not made in their image. And that, I think, is the answer to the world’s problems.

Friends, nobody in the world can do this better than we can. It is our calling and our mission, and if we don’t engage in this battle for the hearts and minds of our own people we will have failed to answer the call of our times.

What I am suggesting is that you need to spread the good news that there are churches where all sincere beliefs are invited, where a variety of paths toward compassion and inclusion are sought, where the only heresy lies in pretending that there is only one way. That is the Good News I’m trying to spread through my involvement with the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries. I accept every writing assignment or newspaper interview they ask me to accept, because I think it’s my job to accept them. And always, I’m trying to spread the Good News that there is a religious alternative in this community that teaches expansive rather than constrictive visions. It is also the message I will be trying to communicate through my occasional columns in the Austin American Statesman. I’ve already written my first column, to explain this Queen-of-the-chessboard nature of healthy liberal religion, and have been told my first column will be printed on December 8th. We don’t offer a religion here; we offer the possibility of becoming human religiously, along a greater variety of paths than any single religion can offer. That’s Good News. Spread the word.

Churches like this have a terribly important role to play against the background of war. We must ask whether this is a just war, or whether it is being used primarily as a cover, as a tactic of misdirection, while Congress continues to pass bills taking money from the lower and middle classes and transferring it to the top couple percent, as they have been doing in Washington almost since the attacks of September 11th.

Behind the flag-waving, in stories that seldom make the front twenty pages of our newspapers, the real agenda of the people who control our country has been gaining such speed that the restructuring of our economy and our society’s possibilities may be just about over.

The Heritage Foundation and other think-mobs that see 98% of our people as disposable workers for the enrichment of the few who control the capital have been clear that they want “government” shrunk to a size where they can drown it in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist has put it. “Government” here means “all binding restraints on the power and greed of those who control the capital.”

This agenda isn’t subtle; only our willful denial can keep us blinded to it. This president’s cabinet is stocked with a far higher percentage of corporate sponsors and interests than any in our history. Their agenda can’t be a mystery. Under the cover of this new and contrived “war” they are finally able to rush through new bills and laws, unseen, that can change the form of government here into a pure plutocracy — or, as others have suggested, a corpocracy, the rule of the people by the economic ambitions of our major corporations.

The scale and boldness of the greed has even pushed observers like the normally calm Bill Moyers into anger, as he has written in his October 16th speech to the Environmental Grantmakers Association in Brainard, Minnesota:

“While in New York we are still attending memorial services for firemen and police, while everywhere Americans’ cheeks are still stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by terrorism, they are cashing in.”

What else can be accomplished under the cover of the patriotic fervor designed to distract the ignorant masses? “Why, restore the three-martini lunch — that will surely strike fear in the heart of Osama bin Laden. You think I’m kidding, but bringing back the deductible lunch is one of the proposals on the table in Washington sacrifice in this time of crisis – by paying for lobbyists’ long lunches.

“And cut capital gains for the wealthy, naturally — that’s America’s patriotic duty, too. And while we’re at it don’t forget to eliminate the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, enacted fifteen years ago to prevent corporations from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. But don’t just repeal their minimum tax; give those corporations a refund for all the minimum tax they have ever been assessed. You look incredulous. But that’s taking place in Washington even as we meet here in Brainerd this morning.

“What else can America do to strike at the terrorists? Why, slip in a special tax break for poor General Electric, and slip inside the Environmental Protection Agency while everyone’s distracted and torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson river of PCBs. Don’t worry about NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC reporting it; they’re all in the GE family.

“It’s time for Churchillian courage, we’re told. So how would this crowd assure that future generations will look back and say ‘This was their finest hour’? That’s easy. Give those coal producers freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy companies; and open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling — that’s something to remember the 11th of September for. And while the red, white and blue wave at half-mast over the land of the free and the home of the brave — why, give the President the power to discard democratic debate and the rule-of-law concerning controversial trade agreements, and set up secret tribunals to run roughshod over local communities trying to protect their environment and their health. It’s happening as we meet. It’s happening right now.”

Moyers’ anger is uncharacteristic, but he’s hardly alone. Consider some of the comments by Paul Krugman in the Sunday 11 November New York Times (Reckonings: “Another Useful Crisis“).

He reminded us of the California energy crisis and how “… it illustrated, in particularly stark form, the political strategy of the Bush administration before September 11th. The basic principle of this strategy – which was also used to sell that $2 trillion tax cut – was that crises weren’t problems to be solved. Instead, they were opportunities to advance an agenda that had nothing to do with the crisis at hand.

“It is now clear that, at least as far as domestic policy is concerned, the administration views terrorism as another useful crisis.”

Now the administrations “economic stimulus” proposals have nothing to do with helping the economy, but everything to do with its usual tax-cutting agenda. The administration is now favoring a program with huge retroactive tax cuts for big corporations, and a total cost of $220 billion over three years – less than $20 billion of that total having anything to do with economic stimulus. The rest consists of “tax cuts for corporations and high-income individuals, structured in such a way that they will do little to increase spending during the current recession.”

“Why does the administration’s favored bill offer so little stimulus? Because that’s not its purpose; it’s really designed to lock in permanent tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, using the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse. … Politics, while never completely clean, didn’t used to be this cynical…. It’s something new to see crises – especially a crisis as shocking as the terrorist attack – consistently addressed with legislation that does almost nothing to address the actual problem, and is almost entirely aimed at advancing a pre-existing agenda.

“Oh, by the way; the administration is once again pushing for drilling in the Arctic. You see, it’s essential to the fight against terrorism.”

These certainly aren’t the only voices trying to wake the slumbering people of our country – people being kept drugged and drowsy through the collaboration of a cynically manipulative administration and spinelessly compliant media. The list of greedy activities slithering around under cover of all the flags is a long and growing list. Some feel we may be losing the last remnants of democracy and the hopes of the vast majority of Americans right now, while we are being so brilliantly distracted by the super-hyped war (with complete and shameful collaboration by the media).

Could it happen? Of course it could happen. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and we the masses are being successfully lulled into a sleep from which we may not awaken as the same nation. Of course it could happen. And then how would our current “war” be seen in retrospect? What could we then tell the families of these new young dead soldiers when they ask us to remind them, again, just what we thought was worth having their loved ones die for?

In retrospect, we now see that the Vietnam War was almost certainly not justified, and that all those people died for no reason we can be clear about. We failed in our most fundamental covenant with those soldiers, and we simply must not fail in that way again now.

We also need to insist that religious dialogues be kept open, and that our Muslim brothers and sisters are not harrassed or harmed out of an ignorant fear of those who look and believe differently. We’re the ones who believe that sincere differences beautify the pattern, and that the whole human sound goes up only from the full orchestra. We need to say so, out loud, to our friends, neighbors, to people in the grocery store, anywhere and everywhere the subject arises. And if they don’t believe there is a church where such things are taught, invite them here. We are certainly not the only open and healthy church in Austin, but we are one of them, and an important one.

This is Veterans’ Day. And the way we serve the sacrifices made by those veterans who have fought for us is by rising to meet the same level of moral challenge. Our mission is not one where we will carry rifles or shoot bullets to kill people. Our mission is to offer an educated vision, articulated in ways that can make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and the larger community and nation. We are called to respond to these challenges just as surely as soldiers are called to respond to challenges on their own battlefield.

I’ll try to wrap my message in a story. This is a parable I wrote a dozen years ago for a different topic, but parables offer many applications. It is called “The ABC of Music.”

The ABC of Music

A. A girl walked by a building she had not seen before. Looking in the window, she was stopped by an odd sight. There was another girl, about her age, standing in a far room of the building, doing what looked like a kind of dance, or at least a dance done from the waist up, for her feet hardly moved at all. She seemed to be biting the end of a metal rod. She was holding the rod in her hands, out to her right side, and she seemed to have the other end of the rod in her mouth, biting it, or at least chewing on it. As she bit it, she moved a little, a kind of gentle swaying motion.

The girl could not see clearly, for the window was dirty, or cloudy. Still, it was the strangest sight! She began stopping by this building each day to watch the strange dance, always about the same, and soon found herself wondering whether perhaps she wasn’t looking into the window of some kind of a hospital-a hospital where they put people who did these slow little dances while biting metal rods.

B. One day when she walked by, the window was open. And now, when the girl looked in, she heard the sound of a flute playing. It was a flute player, not a dancer, and the point of it all had not been the movement, but the music, which the girl had never heard before. “Aha,” said the girl, “now I understand!” Then, no longer interested by the spectacle, she turned to leave.

C. But the flute player saw her, and called out to her. Surprised, the girl stayed by the open window as the other girl approached. “Here,” said the flute player when she reached the open window, “wouldn’t you like to play? This is yours, after all, and it is your turn now.” With that, she handed the flute through the open window to the girl who had, until then, been only a spectator.

And then the flute player disappeared, the whole building disappeared, and the little girl found herself standing there with her whole life still ahead of her, holding a flute-and trying to remember the movements, and the music.

Courage is like this kind of music:

A. From a distance, it can look like strange, foolhardy or Hollywood-style actions of cartoon characters like Rambo or GI Joe.

B. When we understand it more deeply, it isn’t about the dramatic actions as much as it is about character. Courage is what character becomes under pressure, much as diamonds are what coal becomes under pressure.

C. But finally, we have to realize the one thing we hadn’t wanted to realize: that this is always about us, too. When the times call for courage, they call for courage from everyone, each in our own way.

That pressure that turns coal to diamonds asks us where and how we must act now.

The people who fought for us have let us hear the music of courage. But they have offered us that flute too, and told us that the flute is also in our hands. Whether we like it or not, it is also our turn to make our own variety of courageous music.

What can we do? What must we do? What will we do?

© Davidson Loehr

October 21, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

CENTERING:

Let us make a bargain with our souls. Let us not trade integrity for approval or trade authenticity for anything at all. Let us learn to ask for what we need in work, in relationships, from our friends and from our religion.

A wise man once said, “Knock and it shall be opened, seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive.” We need help in believing this for, though it is true, it seems terribly unlikely. And so we often seek too little and let ourselves be treated badly, even like dirt.

If we let ourselves be treated like dirt for too long, it can begin to feel natural. We’re not dirt; we’re stardust. We’re the stuff of which the universe is made. Let us honor that.

Let us seek relationships where we are cherished and not settle for less. Let us never make bargains where we lose our souls, our authenticity, for that’s no bargain at all. And it’s a terrible price to pay for the pretense that everything is still together.

We cannot love our neighbors as ourselves until we know how to love ourselves. Yet how many times have we sold out for something so much less than we are. How many times have we treated or allowed ourselves to be treated, not as people, but as things. Let us not settle for less.

Let us make a bargain with our souls and remember that within each of us is a seed of God, a spark of the divine, and the hope of the world. It is so important. Let us take these few quiet moments to get in touch with our true centers.

SERMON:

We’re in the middle of an extended series of sermons that are talking about the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross developed in her 1969 book on stages of death and dying. There are five stages that we tend to go through when we are grieving the loss of anything important.

Her has been used mostly in hospice work and hospital care, but I first began to realize how broad the is when I was invited to a three day business conference in Chicago ten or twelve years ago. One of the key speakers was going to be Mortimer Adler. I had read some of his books and attended his university and wanted to hear him. So I went in mostly to hear this 90-something year old man (who was still sharp as a tack).

During this business conference, one junior executive from the Bose Company that makes those great little speakers did a presentation on how his company struggled going through what you could call a paradigm shift in understanding the sound business and their future in it. He went through graphs, charts and pictures. I realized what he was doing was going through the five stages of grief that had been used to deal with death and dying. And that’s when I realized that these are the stages that we go through to grieve the death of anything that’s been important to us, to resist having to change.

The first thing we do when significant change comes is to resort to the “ostrich school”, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and we look silly only to everyone else. If that doesn’t work, then we get mad. If you were here last week, you got to see the full-blown tantrum that I got to throw at the beginning of the sermon. And we try to use anger to control people, to frighten people or the universe or God back into line. We’re saying, “Look, I really mean it!”

When that can’t work, we come to the third stage, which is called bargaining. In some ways, it’s the funniest of the stages. It is certainly the most creative. Bargaining is where we ask our brain to trick us. We’ve all had the wool pulled over our eyes by charlatans somewhere or other. But in bargaining, we contrive with ourselves to pull the wool over our own eyes. It’s really quite a trick. Many of the bargains we make are dramatic and very funny. You can think of examples in your personal life and relationships and your job, from all over the place.

I brought you just three from religion because I’m trying to focus on how we change or try to avoid changing dealing with religious beliefs that may have served us once but that have died a long time ago and we just don’t know what to do with them or how to replace them.

The first example is the longest but probably the most fun. When I was in graduate school, there was another doctoral student who was a couple of years ahead of me. I’ve told this story before and I’ve always protected his name. But I figure it’s been twenty years, he’s past it and he could certainly deal with it anyway. It was Steven Post. He was the grandson of Emily Post. And though his family was pretty well off, Steven was a very bright young man and was on, I think, a full ride scholarship at the University of Chicago. He also had a wicked sense of humor and he loved tormenting people.

We were sitting at a Wednesday luncheon one week. This university really didn’t have much of a sense of community. You mostly sat at home in your apartment or you sat in the library and you read and that was called Life. But they tried to fake community by subsidizing a Wednesday luncheon once a week. And we would have a very nice lunch with wine and guest speakers, sometimes world famous speakers. I went to all of them that I could.

Students and faculty would sit together at tables and have a chance to talk. I was sitting across from Steven at this table and we were sitting next to a professor who had been the dean of the school for fifteen years. I knew Steven slightly because after the Wednesday luncheon, he and I were in a very intense, advanced seminar that met from 1:30 to 4:30 every Wednesday afternoon and we were always the two who showed up about twenty minutes early after the luncheon and took notes or read or chatted a little bit. But I didn’t know much about him.

During the luncheon, somehow we began talking about cults and Steven said, “Well, you know “cults” is just what we call other people’s religions.” The professor said, “It’s sounds like you’ve studied this.” Now this is a man already in denial. And Steven said, “No.” He said, “I’ve lived it. I’m a Moonie.” Now that’ll stop a discussion! The professor, still clinging to denial, said, “Oh you were?” “No,” said Steven, “I am.”

This went on for awhile and then Steven said he was also the second person kidnapped by the de-programmers. His family had him kidnapped and taken to the de-programmers because he was an embarrassment to their blue blood. This wonderful professor said, “So, then that ended it?” Steven said, “No.” He said, “I saw through them from the start.” And that really did end the discussion.

After lunch, for no reason I can be proud of, I didn’t want to go to that room with Steven. I didn’t want to be trapped there with him for twenty minutes. I just didn’t. So as I left the room, I turned left and I made it two or three steps before Steven grabbed my arm. He said, “Oh, no you don’t. We’re going up there! – He said, – You’re going to play.” I said, – Steven, I am not going to play!” He said, “You’ll play.” I said, “I won’t play!” He said, “You’ll play.” You’re too curious not to play.” I said, “I’ll go up there, but I won’t play!” He said, “See, you’re almost playing already.”

So we went up to the room and he said, “Come on, this is your chance of a lifetime. You’ve got a Moonie in front of you. You’ve got to be curious.” I said, “I’m not going to play.” He said, “What do you want to know?”

I said, “Alright, I’ll play. What I don’t understand, Steven, is how you keep what you learn here in the same head where you keep the stuff you learn there without being schizophrenic. That’s what I want to know.” And he said, “Oh, that.” He said, “That’s easy. You just have to keep what you know and what you believe separate.” And while I was thinking about that, he reached over and poked me: “You know, there’s a lot of that going on!”

There’s a notable historical example of this kind of bargaining, keeping what you know and what you believe separate. Not well known, but it ought to be better known. It comes from the early 18th century, It was Anglican priests in England and it was called latitudinarianism – one of those words for which the inventor should just be shot. These were priests who wanted to say, “Look, look, we know all these stories are myths. We know this isn’t true. I mean, nobody believes in, you know, virgin births and walking on water, and that corpses get up and walk and float up in the sky, We know this isn’t true.” So they said all of this out loud to regain their intellectual integrity. Then they went back to church and repeated all the creeds and all the stories they just said they didn’t believe. That was called latitudinarianism because they took such great latitude with the teachings. It’s also called bargaining, because they kept what they knew and what they believed separate.

A third example is more current and it’s one I’m involved in, though I’m involved in it as a heretic. That’s the Jesus Seminar. This is a wonderful group of scholars, biblical scholars that have been meeting since 1985. Their stated purpose is to say, “Look, just like the latitudinarians, let’s just be honest about this. Let’s get scholars who’ll use their names to come out in public, make real arguments about the difference we have all known for two hundred years exists between myth and history, between symbols and metaphors and facts. Let’s have them say it out loud and put their name to it and invite any other scholar in the world who wants to come and join the argument to come do so on the conditions that they do it in public.”

Now that’s good stuff. That’s brave and remarkable scholarship and I was attracted by it as soon as I heard about it, which was about five years after they started. I called the founder of it, Bob Funk, on the phone and I said, “I read an article in the paper about this Jesus Seminar thing,” And I said, “I don’t know what it is.” He said, “What are your questions?” And I said, “Alright, it’s this.” I said, “This could really be absolutely honest, exciting and candid scholarship, or it could be a bunch of Christ-sating savages trying to destroy a religion. Which are you?” And he said, “Well, you know, you couldn’t trust any answer I give you to that. If I were the latter, I’d lie about it. So the only way you’re going to find out is to come out and spend a few days with us and make up your own mind.”

So I did. And I was stunned. This was some of the most honest religious scholarship I’d ever seen. They were really doing it. However, in the background, they were playing a mental game. Ninety nine percent of the fellows in the Jesus Seminar are Christians, and they are making about the same bargain the latitudinarians did. Once you’ve thrown out the three-story universe, once you’ve said, “We know there isn’t anything living up there above the clouds. We know that God isn’t a being, God is a concept. It’s an idea, not a critter.” Once you’ve said all of this out loud, you can no longer have a God who sees, hears, cares, or loves. Now take your pick, but you can’t have it both ways. And most of them don’t or won’t see that. That’s bargaining. This is bargaining going on by some of the scholars that I respect as much as anybody in the world. So I’m not making fun of people for doing it. I do think it’s disingenuous, but it is a disingenuousness that we all do.

What we’re doing in bargaining is we’re taking a God, to put it that way, that was alive once, maybe not in our lifetime, but was alive once and it’s dead now. And we stuff it and we prop it up on the altar where it used to sit and we bow down before it and we pretend nothing has changed. But it has changed, because it is no longer giving life to us. We’re faking it. That’s why it’s bargaining. Theologians call this idolatry. A god for theologians is a center of allegiance and orientation and if we live around it, it can give us a more authentic sense of life.

That’s what a god is about. It isn’t a critter. This isn’t a creature at Disney World. It’s a center of value, orientation and allegiance. And an idol is something that pretends to be like that, but we find, usually too late, that it got it’s power by sucking the life out of us rather than helping put more worthy life into us. An idol cannot give life. I think of bargaining as a kind of idolatry.

But I have another image from my childhood that I think of too. I grew up in the North where we had oak trees everywhere and acorns all over the ground in the fall. And I used to love acorns. I liked the little things and I would keep some in my room. I never knew why, but I think part of it, looking back on it, was that it always seemed to me that an acorn was a miracle waiting to happen. Somehow that little nut knew how to become an oak tree. That’s amazing to me. Put the thing in the ground and give it water and give it the right conditions and this thing will become something just immense. And I thought it was miraculous.

Later on, when I was older, at an art fair, I saw a truly magnificent acorn about three inches high that had been carved by an artist. Now the part of it that made no sense at all, and that has always bothered me, was that the artist had carved it out of walnut. If you know woods, you know oak is hard to carve. It splinters and walnut is very easy to carve. Still it was cheating and it wasn’t right. But it was a pretty acorn and I bought it and I liked it and it really was a magnificent carving.

I kept it for some years and looking back was surprised to find that after a few years, the fascination wore off. And the fascination wore off because it wasn’t really an acorn. It was a fake acorn. What makes acorns real is their potential: the fact that they know how to become alive and become something big. Bigger than you can handle. That’s the miracle in an acorn.

This thing, this was just an imitation of an acorn carved by an artist. It was dead. It couldn’t come alive, ever. It couldn’t do anything. It was a fake acorn. That’s what bargaining is like. Bargaining is like putting up a fake acorn and pretending it’s a real one when it has no potential to come alive and no potential to give life. It’s only the memory of the yearning for the nostalgic feeling that once maybe this old belief was supposed to give life though it doesn’t anymore. And we do this in religion all the time and we do it in life all the time.

One of my current favorite authors is a physician, a woman named Rachel Naomi Remen who has worked for about twenty years in San Francisco with terminal patients, cancer patients, AIDS patients. And since she’s so gifted at this, she’s also worked with a lot of physicians and done workshops for other physicians.

One of the exercises she has them do is to make two lists. One is a list of the things they really truly value in their personal life; the other is a list of the things they really value and work by in their profession. She said the two lists are never the same and they’re often very, very different. Sometimes someone will put something like kindness number two in their personal life and number fifteen in their professional life. There are so many things more important than kindness. I mean, you have to know your chemistry, you have to know your biology, you have to know your anatomy, you have to be able to do the diagnosis. There’s a whole list of things that count for more than kindness in the practice of medicine. And yet, in their personal life kindness is one of the things that makes them feel real and makes them feel alive. So living by values they don’t really care much about is the bargain they have made with their profession.

What we do in bargaining is to try to protect life in the wrong way. It’s trying to protect life the way you try to protect butterflies when you stick pins through them and put them under glass. It’s the way you try to protect something when you take that magnificent carving of an acorn (out of walnut), and you put it in a glass museum case and you put it on display. It truly is magnificent – but it’s dead. And it can’t ever give real life to anything.

Part of what is so ironic and sad about all of this bargaining is that all of these games we’re playing are being played against the background and within a world where the possibilities are miraculous and are all over the place and we won’t see them. One of Jesus’ famous lines was to tell a story and then say, “If you have eyes to see this and ears to hear this,” and for the most part the people who listened to him didn’t and we don’t either.

To care for life the right way, to use the image of the glass case, would take a different kind of glass case. Instead of a glass museum case, the way you’d care for life would be with a greenhouse. Something big and protective and nourishing that can let little living things grow into big living things. Even bigger living things than we know how to handle.

But it can’t happen until we’re ready for it. Because until we have eyes to see, we couldn’t see it if it were put right in front of us. Naturally, there’s a story about this too. It’s comes from Hinduism. It’s a great story about Shiva, the Lord of the universe in Hinduism and Shakti, his divine consort. They’re sitting up there in their heavenly space sort of watching mortals, and they are filled with compassion for the suffering that they see as a part of life and with respect for the efforts that people make in so many ways and the love that they see and all of the human drama that they see below them.

Shakti is moved particularly by one poor man that she sees, a poor beggar who is wearing sandals so worn through that they’re tied together with string and a coat so thin, it won’t help him if the night gets too cold. And she turns to her husband and she says, “Look, look at this man, this is a good man, I’ve seen into his heart, it’s a good heart. This is a good man and he’s suffering. Can’t you do something for him?” And Shiva looks down for an instant and says, “Nope.” And she says, “What do you mean, nope? You’re the Lord of the universe! You can do anything! What do you mean, you can’t do anything for him? Give him some gold.”

Shiva said, “Wouldn’t matter, I could give him gold and it wouldn’t matter. He’s not ready for it.” So Shakti said, “Give him the gold and let him see if he’s ready for it!” This is apparently how divine husband and wife arguments go. So Shiva drops a bag of gold in the path, in front of this beggar. The poor beggar in the meantime is coming around the corner thinking to himself, “I’m so hungry. Will I be able to beg enough money today to have food or will I go hungry again tonight? Is it going to be too cold? Where am I going to sleep? Am I going to freeze to death? What am I going to do?” And then he sees this thing in the road and says, “Oh my God. Look at that! A rock and I almost kicked it! If I had kicked the rock, I would have torn my sandals apart and now I’d have to go be going barefoot. It’s a good thing for me that I was watching.” And he stepped over the bag of gold and went on his way.

When religious stories talk like this, you know, they’re always using words in imaginative ways. This didn’t mean a bag of gold coins. This meant the bags of “gold” that are lying all over the place all the time. What are bags of gold? They’re the possibility of finding a religion for your head and your heart. They’re a possibility of bringing together what you know and what you believe. A possibility of bringing together what we love and what we do, how we live and who we are. These are the bags of gold that lie in the road around us that we don’t see until we’re ready.

There are miracles that can happen here on the road of life. And sometimes those bags contain things even richer and more miraculous than gold. Sometimes, they contain acorns.

© Davidson Loehr

October 14, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

OPENING WORDS

From our many private lives and as many individual worlds we gather here for a hundred different reasons. There are people who are mostly curious or who could use some new friends, people with the vague feeling that there could be more to life than there has been, and those with the very strong feeling there could be more. Some who bring hungry minds and want questions and answers, and others who bring hungry hearts and want comfort.

Some here are young, hoping for direction for the life which lies mostly ahead. Others are closer to the end of their journey and do not want to be ignored just because they are old.

There are parents missing children, students missing home, lovers, ex-lovers, and those who would be lovers. There are those in whom life is bubbling up and others over whom dark shadows may have crept, who wonder how to go on.

We’re here for all the obvious reasons and for some secret reasons known only to ourselves. Everyone who has come here hopes for something from this morning. And perhaps we shall find it, for this is a good and a safe place to be. I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad to be here again with you, for

it is a sacred time, this,

and a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this.

Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING

There’s a story about two Buddhist monks, an old master and his young student. There had been a heavy rain the night before, and what had been a tiny creek had become by morning a raging torrent of water more than a foot deep.

Standing by the edge of the new river was a young woman. She clearly wanted to cross the river, but she was very frail, and was unlikely to survive the swift current.

The young student looked away from her because this order of monks had sworn strict vows against ever talking to a woman, let alone touching one. The young monk had learned his lesson well, so he ignored her. The older monk, however, walked over to the young woman and asked if she would like help crossing the river. The astonished woman nodded yes, surprised that he would even acknowledge her. “Then, please, climb onto my shoulders,” said the monk, “and I will carry you.” She did as he asked and he carried her across the river. On the other side, he set her down, bowed silently to her, and went on his way.

The young monk followed along behind his master in angry silence for several hours, but the farther they walked the angrier he became. At last he couldn’t control himself, and he confronted his teacher with his bottled fury. “How could you? How could you touch her? What about your holy vows? How could you touch that woman?”

The old man looked into the angry face of his student, and at last he said quietly, “My young friend, I set that woman down three hours ago. Are you still carrying her?”

This is, among other things, a time to set down loads we’ve been carrying too long. Angers, resentments, grudges, accusations, and a whole host of furies that can both possess and cripple us. If we cannot let go of them, they will not let go of us. We’re all carrying loads, small or large, that have outlived whatever usefulness they may ever have had. It would be a shame for us to leave here with the same heavy loads we came in with.

What are you still carrying that you ought to set down?

Think of those things, name them to yourself, and you may be halfway to setting them down. Let us become more aware of those angers and fears we have carried too long. In these quiet moments I invite you to turn them into prayers or turn them into flames in the candles of memory and hope.

SERMON

(The following was a kind of loud and angry dramatic tantrum. It was shouted, screamed, accompanied by a furious expression and the violence of hitting chairs, pulpit, and walls – hard – with a rolled-up magazine).

“NO! By God, no son of mine is going to do anything that stupid!” 

“As long as you live under my roof, you’ll do it my way. Aagh!”

“You may be my daughter, but you’re an idiot!”

“Son, no real man would have been such a wimp.”

“And, , you wouldn’t behave that way if you were a bit more feminine! Aagh!”

(flinging the rolled-up magazine across the stage, then sitting on the stool, holding the microphone.)

Recognize that?

Everyone here knows that voice. And that face. We’ve done it or had it done to us. We’ve seen and felt it. We seem to be hard-wired for it.

Years ago I read a study done with some monkeys, juvenile monkeys that had never seen an male monkey of their species. They’d been raised by their mothers. When they were several months old, they were shown a movie of an male monkey doing his anger face, his fear face, with his screaming and gesturing just about like I just did. All of the young monkeys who had never seen an male monkey before in their lives shrieked and ran terrified to hide behind their mothers.

We seem to be programmed to know how to control others through anger, and how to be controlled through it. It seems to be absolutely natural. Being natural doesn’t mean it’s good. Revenge and greed are also natural. And I have read that revenge and greed are the two emotions that produce the most stress in our lives. Anger is full brother to both revenge and greed. Like them, it’s concerned with keeping things our way, inside ourboundaries, ourcomfort levels and our beliefs. It’s absolutely natural.

So it’s no wonder that anger turns up in a list like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ list of the five stages that humans tend to go through in grieving the loss of something. She wrote the book in 1969 about terminal patients who had to come to terms with the one fact that they didn’t want to come to terms with at all – the fact that they were going to die. But since then many others have realized that this is a that works in a tremendous number of cases. These are stages we recognize in going through the loss of a religion, of a belief system, of a world view, of a relationship, of anything we once trusted and believed was the way things should be and which we have to come to terms with losing.

The first stage we go through is avoidance or denial. This is the “ostrich” school, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and look silly to everyone but ourselves – trying to pretend that nothing’s really changed. Everything’s the way it was. It’ll be okay. I don’t have to worry about this.

When that doesn’t work, the next thing many of us try is anger. And the anger is used to say, “Look, I really mean it! Get back in line! Stay the way it’s supposed to be! Don’t make me change my world!”

We use anger when a person, or a belief system, or a world, or a god, has become bigger than we know how to be comfortable with it being and bigger than we are willing to permit it to be. It’s immensely powerful, this anger stuff.

Now, there is legitimate anger. There’s anger that can be a very healthy sign. There are many kinds of anger. Those would all be different sermons. Today I only want to talk about anger that’s used to control people, and how anger controls us.

It seems to happen at two levels, in two ways. First it happens as the “fear face” and the shouting and the threats help to control us by creating fear. There is a threat of violence. Someone that angry could do God-knows-what to you. And if they’re bigger and stronger than you, you should be afraid. But some of the fear that anger can create will stay with you forever. It’s awful.

And that’s the second way that it works. It works first through creating fear, and it works secondly through infection. We get infected with anger, and we carry it with us, sometimes, for the rest of our lives, unwilling and unable to let loose of it, like the young Buddhist monk in the story.

I know people, you know people, who went through this in religion. They had a religious experience in their past, in their youth, whenever. Some idiot taught them about an angry, hateful God, and taught them only that. Someone told them about a religion or a God that wouldn’t allow them to be who they really were and needed to be, whoever that was. The religion wouldn’t respect their questions, and it wouldn’t respect their souls, and it wouldn’t respect them, and they are angry as hell – still. I have met people sixty years old who are still angry over something they heard in church with force when they were ten. If anger infects us, it can last an entire lifetime.

One of the most famous sermons – not the best, but one of the most famous sermons in American history – is still, from about 250 years ago, a sermon by Jonathan Edwards. This was an amazing man. He enrolled at Yale University when he was thirteen years old. This was one of the most brilliant minds in American history. Some have called him America’s most original theologian. He’s influenced a tremendous number of horrible religions. Jonathan Edwards was a Calvinist, and the sermon that’s so famous – and I’ve read it, and it’s terrifying to read – is called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and if you ever are tired of watching “Halloween, Part Thirteen,” find that sermon and read it, it’s amazing.

He draws pictures of how hateful we are to God. He says, “Imagine, we’re more hateful to God than a spider. This was apparently not a man who loved arachnids, either. Imagine, he said, God is holding us between his fingertips like He would hold a hateful spider by a thin silken line, over the flaming pits of hell. There’s nothing about us that’s attractive or lovable, and the only thing that keeps him from dropping us into hell is the fact that he’s God.

You can get infected with that notion of a hateful God in ways that can keep you infected forever. It’s absolutely powerful stuff. And it doesn’t only happen in religion, as you know.

About ten or twelve years ago I was the theme speaker for a week-long Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. That’s about 500 s and 300 kids and teenagers who were there for a week, and the theme speaker does a sermon each morning, so you can develop a theme over the five programs.

I didn’t know many people there. They come from all over the country to this camp. But since I was the most visible person there that week, I got hunted down a lot and was surprised at the number of people who wanted to confess something that week. I listened to a fair number – five or six – confessions that people just needed to make, things they needed to feel that they had somewhere safe to talk about.

The most memorable was a woman, one of the angrier people I’ve seen, who was talking about her ex-husband – who, if he had a soul, it was evil. She went on for ten minutes in detail so rich, so vivid, almost so bloody, it was clear that this wound was absolutely fresh and dripping. It was horrible to hear. I don’t know what any outsider might have really thought of the relationship if they’d seen it, but it was clear how it affected her, and she hated it and was still furious. And finally I said, “When was this over? When did this happen?”

“Ten years ago.”

Ten years ago, and she’s still so infected by anger she cannot live. Ten years. It’s astonishing.

And it can be worse than that. It can be cosmic. There are, if you think about it, a lot of things to be angry about. Life isn’t fair.

On September 11th a whole new generation learned that life cannot be made safe. Friends desert you. Governments murder and lie. Partners, lovers, wound up being who they were instead of who your needed them to be. And you won’t forgive them for it. It can happen anywhere, and you can hate an entire world for it.

The most classic version of this story, still one of the best to read, is the story of Job. It’s a little boring to read; you just kind of have to read through it fast and then tell the story to yourself in less time, and it gets better. Now, since I suspect some of you have not been reading your bible this week, or this year, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version:

Job is a righteous man, a good man. He’s never done anything wrong. Probably even his butler loved him. He has a wife and children and land and money and everything. And God and Satan are up there? whoever wrote this story have God and Satan sitting up on a cloud somewhere looking down watching this, and they can see it pretty clearly. And God is saying, “Look how faithful Job is.” Why he loves me with all his heart.

And Satan says, “Of course he does. You’ve been good to him. He’s got everything. Of course he loves you. Start taking stuff away. See if he still loves you then.”

God said, “Oh no, his faith is pure.”

Satan said, “All right. Tell you what. You let me mess with him, and we’ll see how long he keeps loving you.”

So God says, “All right.”

Satan starts messing with him. And the man loses everything. He loses his land and his children, his family. They die. He loses everything. And throughout this, his faith is certainly tested. And it comes to the point, which for some people is the most famous line in the story. I know that in the seventies I heard some feminists say it was the only character in the story worthy of respect. Job’s wife’s line is, “Curse God and die!”

Now, let’s take this out of mythic language. Otherwise we’ll have this cartoon picture of someone yelling at a cloud and some lightning bolts making him dead and so on and so forth, and whoever wrote the story didn’t think that’s the way the world worked. “Curse God and die? is something that today we would say differently. We might say, “When life is unjust, curse life, curse it to its core.” And if you do that, you will find, something inside of you dies. Something in your spirit will die. Something in your ability to greet life with joy will die. Curse life and die. That’s one option.

Job took the other route. He said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Now, you can make that sound like Job was just a pious wimp. But take that out of mythic language too, to understand what that sounds like when you say it in real life. This is someone saying, “Life is hard. It is a mess. It is a mixed bag. It’s been just awful. I’ve lost everyone I loved. I’ve lost everything I thought I had. I’ve lost all the things that I thought were the real blessing of life.” That’s the package life comes in, and you don’t just take it or leave it. If you just take it, like a rotten deal but the only deal you’ve got, you lose your verve and your joy. You become cynical. You don’t just take the gift of life, you bless it. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Not “I’ll put up with him because he’s the only god whose name I know.”

You don’t just accept this miserable, rotten life. That’s the gift that’s offered. That’s the package the miracles come in. It also hurts. You bless it. The miracle in the story of Job that’s not commented on often enough is that what Job succeeded in doing was in transforming anger into gratitude, and gratitude is the antidote for anger.

The studies that say that greed and revenge are the most stress-producing emotions we have also say that gratitude is the most stress-reducing emotion we have. The only durable escape from anger is gratitude, and it is one of the hardest transitions we are ever asked to make. After every great loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and it’s hard.

I saw the Job story played out, actually played out in reverse. In Job everyone died but him. I saw this story nineteen years ago. It’s one I’ve never used in a sermon before.

I was doing my chaplaincy training in the summer of 1982 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, and I chose the leukemia ward for my assignment. I wanted heavy work. I wanted real work. And when I got on the ward the first day and went to the staff meeting to introduce myself, the nurses said, “Oh, so you’re the new student chaplain.”

“Yes.”

“Good! You go see the woman in Room 11.”

“Why?”

“Cause it’s your turn. We can’t stand any more of her. You go see her. Oh, and welcome to the ward.”

This didn’t sound like the introduction to something pleasant, and it wasn’t.

I went into Room 11 and saw the angriest human I have ever been around, with one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard. It was a 29-year-old woman who was dying of leukemia. When I came in the room, she said “What are you?”

I told her I was a chaplain. I can’t repeat a single word that she said. The fact that I was a chaplain was such a vile, vulgar betrayal of any notion that there could possibly be a God, that she spent ten minutes telling me what a vile, miserable, slime-ball (these are the kind words) I was. I remember thinking during that ten minutes. She has used every profane and vulgar word I’ve ever heard, and she’s even used them in some creative new combinations I’d never thought of. It wasn’t pleasant. I also thought, I have no idea how to respond to this woman. I agree with everything she’s saying.

It is a miserable story. She’s 29. She and her husband had had some rough years, but then they worked it out, and for the last half dozen years they’d had a wonderful marriage. They had two young children who were delights. Life had finally settled in to being absolutely idyllic. And then four months ago she’d been diagnosed with an extremely aggressive kind of leukemia. And she was dying, and there was nothing that could be done. And she was so furious. There weren’t enough things in the world to absorb the hate that she had. I listened for ten minutes, looking for some way to get out of the room and finally found it, and I got up to leave and she said, “You’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll page you. You’ll be here every day ’til I die, and you’ll listen to this story every day until I die.”

God, No!

She paged me the next day and the day after and the day after and every day the story got angrier and louder. The nurses closed the door as soon as I went in the room. It was very painful. I never knew what to do. It was my very first assignment as a student chaplain, and it was clear that I had failed absolutely, completely at every part of it.

I thought about it over the weekend and on Monday I took it to our chaplains’ group and I confessed. I told the story I’ll admit it was fun using all those words. And I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to go back there again.” John Serkland was the chaplain who taught this – he’d been a chaplain 25 years; he was really quite gifted at it – John said, “Do you want me to save you?”

And I said, “Save me? Hell yes, John! I have no shame left. You save me and I’ll bow at your feet. I’ll worship you. I’ll put up an idol of you at home in a little shrine. Anything you want.”

And he said, “All right.”

I said, “Do you honestly think you can do something here?”

“Yes.”

Part of me wanted to see him fail. Part wondered what “succeeding” might look like, and whether he or anyone could really do it in Room 11.

John went with me the next day. He said he had to get in costume. He wore his chaplain collar, so there’d be no mistaking what he was. We walked into the room together the next day, and this woman spotted immediately what was going on. How I wish I could tell you the words she really used. But the gist of it was, “Well, this young fool has failed, so he’s brought the old fat fool.”

I closed the door. John sat in a chair near the head of the bed, and she let him have it. For ten minutes, the same story, which had become much more polished, much more violent, much more vulgar, even much more angry than it had been the week before when I’d heard five performances of it. And at the end of the story, John sat there – he had never taken his eyes off her – and he said just three words: “You expected more.”

She tried to answer. She’d form words and grit her teeth and go through six emotions, and words wouldn’t come out, and she’d form more words. The words wouldn’t come out.” And finally tears ran down both of her cheeks.” She looked at John and quietly said, “Yes.”

And he reached over for the first time and took her hand and said, “Yes. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

I think that’s the most magical moment I’ve ever seen. Those three words broke the spell. There wasn’t anything to add. There was no need to insult the woman’s intelligence by saying there isn’t more. Any idiot could tell that. That’s what was so frustrating and infuriating. She expected more. Of course she expected more. She’s 29 years old. She’s got a marriage that had just become healthy and good in the past couple years, and she expected to grow old and wise together with this man she loved. She’s got two little kids she expected to watch grow up and have kids of their own. Of course she expected more. There wasn’t more. There’s just that. Die in anger or find a way to pull off a miracle.

She died about two weeks later. But from that afternoon, from that Tuesday afternoon on, she was a different person. At least she was a different person for me. Her husband and kids said that she was the person they’d always known. She was loving, she was caring, she was kind. It became terribly important to her, in her last few days, to tell the people she loved how much she loved them.

I had a short talk with her three days before she died. She was getting weaker, and we all knew that it wouldn’t be long. I said, “How do you sum it up now? I know how you summed it up two weeks ago. How do you sum it up now?”

She thought about it, then smiled and finally said, “With gratitude. Compared to infinite, she said, this wasn’t much. Compared to the 85 years I thought I’d have, it wasn’t very much. But this is what there was. The gift was for 29 years, with some trouble, some pain, a lousy ending way too soon, a lot of love, two amazing children, and more miracles, more miracles than anybody could deserve. I am so grateful for the chance, for the gift.” We held hands and cried together – not in anger, but in gratitude.

Blessed be.

© Davidson Loehr

30 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

This morning will be the first of a series of five sermons that will end with the Thanksgiving service. These are taken from a model of dealing with change and grief developed about 32 years ago by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross whose book on death and dying came out in 1969. She was dealing with terminal patients and what they were trying to come to terms with was the fact of their own death.

But many people have seen that this is a model with many applications outside of chaplaincy where I used it when I worked with terminal patients for a year. It’s a model that deals with the death of any belief system or any worldview. It deals with the death of our comfortable way of seeing things and the stages we tend to go through when trying to find a new way to do it. After September 11th, models like this seem to have an immediate and obvious application as we’re all going to be dealing, individually and as a society, with some stages in trying to come to terms with having to look at life and safety very differently than we did two weeks ago.

What I want to focus on in this sermon series, though, is much much narrower. I want to focus on the death of beliefs, of faiths, of religions that many people have experienced sometimes many years ago and the stages they go through or the troubles they have going through stages to get past it and to find a new kind of faith and trust. It’s surprising to me how many people still talk about faith experiences they had 25 years ago as though they had happened yesterday. They’re still so vivid and the people still feel so angry and so burned about it.

I remember a discussion I had with a fundamentalist friend, probably 15 years ago, a man who had grown up until he was 25 or 26 as a fundamentalist. And then the world cracked and it fell apart for him and this was now 20 years later and he was still furious. I said what are you angry at? You are out of it now. He said “I’m angry because I was betrayed.” He said, “I’m angry because people I trusted lied to me.” He said, “I’m angry because I once had a picture of life that was so whole and so complete, that I had no worries and no questions. And I’ll never have a picture that simple again.” Powerful stuff.

What happens to many people – and it happened to this man too even though he was a professor of religion – is that when they have a bad experience with religion they decide the whole field of religion is no damn good. I tried it once, it stunk, I’m never trying it again.

I can understand the pain but I cannot understand the plan. The plan sounds to me like someone who went to a restaurant and once got a bad case of food poisoning so swore off eating. What they needed was healthy food, not no food. And the same is true with religion.

But this distrust and distaste for religion is part of the reason that the word “religion” is a bad word now in popular speech, and “spirituality” is a good word. Somehow that’s lighter and a little easier and it’s sort of about feeling good, whereas religion is something deep and dark and evil and awful with which we want to have nothing to do. Now if we stay there, if we follow that, we can easily become the character of the eagle from the story of the eagle and the chickens. The eagle didn’t belong there. It wasn’t a chicken and the things the eagle needed to learn the chicken couldn’t teach it, because it needed to learn how to fly and chickens can’t fly.

There are a lot of stories like this and if we pervert them, they give us the same picture. That story I told the kids this morning is a perversion of another version of the story where the eagle does finally realize it’s an eagle and it flies and joins the eagles and protects that little hen house forever and everyone lives happily ever after. That movie’s probably done by Disney. But you can take popular fairy tales and change one item in them and come up with the same perverse plot. This is the story of Cinderella who never went to the ball, who never escaped from the house where she was hated and the kitchen where she was misused and abused. It’s the story of Rapunzel, who never let her hair down and never escaped from the tower that she’d been put into because of her mother’s fears. It’s the story of denial and I think denial is a bad thing, after the first few minutes or days.

Now I’m taking this a little differently than Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did. There are two sides to denial. One is the fact that we are denying that we are carrying with us something that isn’t serving us and doesn’t work anymore. And if you’re stuck in an old religion that has you under its control- whether you love it or whether you hate it, it doesn’t matter, you have to get past it.

It reminds me, since my mind works this way; of a standup comic I saw 10 or 15 years ago, a Canadian comic. He never made it very big but he had one joke I’ve always loved. He’s a master at playing the audience and he played the audience with 3 or 4 very funny jokes in a row. Very quick punch lines, and had the whole audience rolling and then he set them up by telling a joke so bad, so stupid, that they booed. And he’d been waiting for it. He said, “That’s all right, whether you clap or whether you boo, you are under my control!”

That’s true with a religious past too, you know. Whether we love it or whether we hate it, we’re in orbit around it. And denial is a form of faithlessness. It’s just about as faithless as it gets. Because the other half of denial is the fact that we are not seeing that after every significant loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and that it is always worth finding a way to do that. Furthermore, we’re playing the game of denial against a background of life and of the world that, if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, is overwhelmingly positive, life- affirming, and trustworthy.

For instance, 2 weeks ago here in addition to the regular offering that we took, we took, as we are today, a special collection for disaster relief. From our 3 Sunday services we collected over $9,400 to send to New York and Washington for disaster relief. From the 270 people in the 1st service we collected about $3,000. From the 480 people at the 2nd service, we collected just under $6,000, and from the 135 people who were at the evening service we collected $480. $9,400 collected to be sent to people we didn’t know, for uses we’ll never see, simply because they are humans and we are too, and we knew we owed it and we wanted to do it.

You could look on television 2 weeks ago and I don’t know why no one remarked on this. You see all these New Yorkers. Now these are the New Yorkers who have been made the butt of jokes in many churches for decades because they are so secular, so completely secular that the only thing sacred to New Yorkers are work, bagels, coffee and New York City. Here were these secular New Yorkers–firemen and policemen– sacrificing their lives for strangers. Walking up 60 flights of stairs in a burning building and sacrificing their lives for people they didn’t know. If you want to go to another extreme, for an example, I read this week about a prison in Louisiana, called Angola, a horrible prison for serious criminals that deserves a sermon of its own. The lifers in Angola have virtually no benefits. Any money, anything they want for television, for books, for any kind of benefits, they have to earn the money for themselves. And they do it in the Angola prison through only one fund-raiser; they have an annual rodeo that’s become fairly well known.

This year that rodeo raised $30,000. And these lifers, many in there for violent crimes and murder, donated all $30,000 to disaster relief. Now that’s the background against which we are playing games of denial and it should make us feel silly. The message of it is that goodness does not come from religion, goodness comes from our humanity. It’s inside of us. And what we need from religion isn’t an infusion of goodness into people who are originally sinful. That just isn’t true. We need help from religions in recognizing and nourishing the goodness that’s already in us. There’s a creation story from the Kabala, the medieval, mystical Judaism, that talked about how in the beginning there was the great light Ein Sof, and that at the beginning the great light was broken into millions and millions of little sparks of God, and inside of every living thing was a spark of God. And the job of every living thing was to recognize that spark of God and to nourish it, so that it too may burst into a flame to illuminate a dark world.

It’s a wonderful story. It is true; there are religions that don’t do that. We’ve seen a couple of varieties of them, right now, the last few weeks on both sides of the Atlantic. There are religions of narrowness of exclusion and of hate. There are bad religions. The Taliban was one. The Taliban has a list of people it hates and whom it assumes Allah hates. They speak for Allah and say that Allah hates liberated women–women outside of the veil. There are women who have had acid thrown in their face for being unveiled over there. It is a religion of hatred that preaches that. It’s not true to anything about Muslim religion. Not true to anything in it. It’s a perversion of it. They hate homosexuals and hate anyone whose sexual orientation and lifestyle isn’t like they think theirs is. Not counting all of the things they are repressing to say that. They hate foreigners, they hate non-believers, they hate anyone whose truth is bigger or much different from theirs.

That’s a religion of exclusion and narrowness and hate, and that’s a bad religion. It can’t nourish life. And we’ve seen exactly the same religions spring up in this country through that amazingly unguarded interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson when they created exactly the same hateful list of people they thought responsible for the slaughter of over 6000 innocents. There are religions that are hateful and narrow and cannot feed life and should not be supported. It is simply not the case that whatever anyone believes is fine. We believe all kinds of things that are hurtful and hateful. But that isn’t all. We don’t need no religion, like we don’t need no food after we get food poisoning. We need healthy religion and we need honest religion for head and heart that can recognize the Godspark inside of us and help us. Nourish it, so that it too grows into a flame. God knows the world needs more light. And that positive and hopeful religion is all around us too. It is in the poem we used for Centering this morning. I want to read you that poem again:

“The man whispered, God, speak to me, and a meadowlark sang. But the man did not hear. So the man yelled, God, speak to me, and the thunder and lightening rolled across the sky but the man didn’t listen. The man looked around and said, God, let me see you, and the stars shined brightly but he wasn’t watching. Then the man shouted, God, show me a miracle and a life was born, but he was looking elsewhere. So the man cried out in despair, touch me God and let me know you are here, whereupon God reached down and touched the man but he brushed the butterfly away and walked on. He cried God, I need your help, and an e-mail arrived reaching out with good news and encouragement from someone who loved him. But he deleted it and continued crying. He’s crying still.”

Jesus used to talk about people needing the eyes to see and the ears to hear the simple truths in his stories. We need the eyes to see and the ears to hear that we live in a world of blessedness. We have a Godspark inside of us that is the most important thing about us that we need to find and nourish and help burst into flame. And that plot seems to be the most popular plot we have in all of our stories. Religious stories, fairy tales. You can talk about the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel by the river Jabbok. Jacob, this scummy, scurrilous little man who, for the first time in his life, did something that showed some character and courage. He wrestled with this demon angel messenger of god at the river, and he wrestled all night and would not let go until it blessed him. And it blessed him with a new name and this Jacob; this horrible scurrilous little man then became Israel, the father of the twelve tribes of Judaism. This is a wonderful story. All the heroes we need are made out of very common stock. Just like us. We just need to take a moment to recognize a spark inside of us and wrestle with it and hold on until we are blessed by our struggle.

You find this plot in fairy tales. It is the story of Cinderella without the perversion. There is something holy in Cinderella that she believed in and held onto until birth was given to it. It’s the story of Rapunzel who does let down her hair. It’s the story of sleeping beauty. It’s the story of beauty and the beast. It’s the story of so many. And if we stay in denial about this we’re going to miss one of the most important simple truths there is. That’s the realization that “human being” is a verb, not a noun. “Human being” is a verb. It takes a healthy religion to become really human religiously. It isn’t for lazy people. It isn’t just a feeling of feeling good and groovy about yourself. It takes work and it takes focus to become human.

And now I wonder on all these stories, if we’ve read them right yet. Can it really be that in the stories of Cinderella, Rapunzel and all the rest of them, only the main character is meant to become human? I don’t think so. All the other characters – the stepsisters, the stepmother, all the wicked people in the stories – are in denial. They are in denial of the fact that they too have a Godspark that’s so covered over with neglect and dirt and dust that its little flame is on the verge of going out.

What about the story of the eagle and the chickens? What if the chickens are also really supposed to be eagles and what if the story of the eagle and the chickens and all of the rest of these stories aren’t really about eagles and chickens and Cinderella and Rapunzel at all. What if they’re really stories about us? They are, you know. Now what?

© Davidson Loehr

23 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave.

Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

CENTERING: “The Dance of Life”

It was the great Dance of Life: countless people, holding hands, moving and dancing over the fields.” They often didn’t seem to be aware of one another, yet they danced on in that great human circle, as they had been doing since before time counted.” Occasionally, parts of the circle would pass over a deep chasm, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, tornado or lightning would strike, and some dancers would be lost.” But immediately, the loose hands sought each other out, the circle was closed, and the dance went on.” After each loss, the dancers would recite their special stories:” stories to explain why they had been spared.” “It was God,” said some, “looking out for us.”” For others, it was a kind of cosmic energy that safeguarded the enterprise.” Others had their own explanations: guardian angels, Fate, and more exotic plots.” There were disagreements over just what it was that kept the dancers safe ” they seldom spoke of those who were lost from time to time.” And there was no pattern to the periodic losses and accidents.” Still, each time the circle was broken it seemed to heal itself, and the dance went on.” Yet the question hovers: with so many different stories, what should dancers believe?” In what, if anything, should they put their faith?

NOTE: This sermon was delivered without notes, then transcribed from the recording of the 11:15 service on this date, and edited by Dr. Loehr. While the sermons will necessarily vary some between the 9:30, 11:15 and 5:30 Sunday services, this is a fair approximation of the original. This is also why it reads more like an oral presentation than an essay.

SERMON: More Aftermath from September 11, 2001

Every generation, it seems, has its defining moment, the watershed event when we suddenly realize that the world isn’t as we thought, we’re not as safe as we thought, perhaps not as innocent as we thought. In that moment, a new generation is rudely and painfully taken forever out of a world of innocence and naive trust.

There aren’t many of these moments. They stand out in history as dates we’ll never forget:

December 7, 1941, “the day that lived in infamy” was such a moment and the world never felt quite as safe to those who lived through it again.

November 22, 1963 was a moment for people who grew up when I did. We all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard that President Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas. The world never seemed quiet as safe again.

Another moment took me by surprise when I was in graduate school. I was stunned to see how powerfully the events of December 8, 1980 affected people in their 20’s the day that John Lennon was murdered. And I remember how many of them cried, held each other, and talked about not feeling safe anymore.

And now September 11, 2001 has joined the list of world-shattering moments. They almost seem to come in 20-year intervals. For many people it was the first significant time that the world didn’t feel safe. And I can assure you from having been through a couple of such moments, you will never feel as safe again. There’s a loss of innocence and a loss of naive trust in the world that happens at these powerful moments, and it tears us from feeling that life is completely trustworthy and sacred and nourishing.

That’s something we all went through twelve days ago. What comes next is something that many here have not been through and something that many others here have been through and that’s the threat, the noise and probably the reality of war. As one who’s been through a war and been in a war, all of the feelings coming over the airwaves and coming from speeches of leaders are suddenly very familiar. I feel like I know what we’re getting into and what’s next.

When people are threatened, they band together within a common identity, and war offers one of the oldest and deepest and absolutely most powerful senses of reconnection that we can find. You can unite a country of 280 million people with a war against a common enemy, even an invisible enemy without a country, without a religion, without boundaries. Just the idea of a common enemy is enough to unite 280 million of us as one people, with one voice, one God, and one purpose. It is seductive as hell. War makes everything simple and it comes at a time when the complexity of things overwhelmed all of us.

War makes everything simple. It gives us very simple, black and white pictures of everything and it’s so easy to fall into them. A war for infinite justice to end all evil in a world so simple that all countries are either for us or against us. Never mind the fact that British and European newspapers for years have been writing that our country has created the economic and military conditions that foster the hatred. Never mind that in other parts of the world this story has been written only in nuances and grays. It is black and white. It’s cowboy logic. You are for us or against us. It is very simple-minded and seductive. There are, of course, no problems in the real world that are as simple as such solutions.

I thought of this when I began watching the interviews: the people who are carefully chosen to have their interviews aired on the screen. The news is managed and the news is selected for the effect it will have on the viewing audience. And the effect that’s desired on the viewing audience is that it unites us as one people, with one voice, and one God behind one goal, without necessary nuances or quarrelsome questions. “A people” becomes much like “a herd” – if they ever differed at all.

I saw the interview of the blonde wife of that brave man on the fourth plane. The man who was part of a crew who fought with the hijackers and succeeded in crashing the plane into the ground killing all aboard rather than letting them fly the plane into another building — perhaps the capital, perhaps the White House. The man and all aboard were absolutely heroes with no qualification of any kind.

But there were lots of relatives and friend of heroes who wouldn’t have said that what got them through it was their faith in God and their knowledge that their husband was in heaven where they’d see him again. It was that combination of someone with the right religious message, the right picture and the right words to support the speeches that had just been heard in the capital that were chosen to be aired. The “news” was carefully selected to present the picture needed to hunker us masses into a herd.

Every bit of news we see is going to have been chosen for us and carefully selected. There is another way of saying this. The other way of saying this is that there are nuances and there are stories and there are facts and details that will not be printed and will not be aired and which we may not find out about for a year, if ever.

I don’t know what they’ll be in the new war, but I do know what some of carefully avoided facts and stories were in our last war. So I’ll take the Gulf War as an example. That’s emotionally less loaded than the unknown territory that we are getting into now. You could also go back to the Vietnam War and mention the Pentagon Papers, which brought about a tremendous amount of disillusionment in people who discovered how intricate the scheming had been to deceive the American people. But from the Gulf War there are 2 stories I’ll tell you. And I wonder if you knew either of them. If you didn’t know either of them, you need to be very worried.

The first appeared in a one-paragraph story in the inside of the December 3rd, 1990 issue of Newsweek. The Gulf War was declared January 15, 1991. Six weeks earlier in Newsweek there was this little story under the heading “Where Are the Troops?” This followed several months of our being told that the reason that we had to send troops to Kuwait was because several hundred thousand Iraqi troops had crossed over the border into Kuwait and it was a desperate situation that demanded a strong and large military force.

This story said that some independent investigators had bought satellite photos and had hired retired CIA people to interpret them. They were satellite photos taken of the Iraq – Kuwait area in, I think, mid August and in mid November — during the time that several hundred thousand troops were said to have passed on the highway into Kuwait. The photograph in mid August showed the lone highway leading from Iraq to Kuwait. At one point a large sand dune had blown over about two-thirds of the highway, making it barely passable. The photograph in mid November showed the same highway and showed that by now the sand dune had blown all the way across the highway. It was covered completely between August and November. No troops had been driven down that highway.

The satellite photo that was so precise that it showed the make of the aircraft, showed no troop formation or locations anywhere in Kuwait. We think that about 2000 members of the Republican Guard of the elite Iraqi troops were in Kuwait, and that’s a large force. But it’s not 200 to 300 thousand. Where were the troops? Those photographs were published on the front page of the St. Petersburg Florida paper on January 6, 1991. Once war was declared nine days later, to the best of my knowledge, they were not published in any newspaper in the United States for the rest of 1991. At the end of 1991, the Columbia Journalism Review, which does this sort of thing every year as a watchdog, listed that story as one of the 10 most underreported stories of 1991. Can you say “understatement”?

The second story concerns what happened shortly before the vote was taken to declare war on Iraq and to send troops into Kuwait. Some of you will remember it was a very close vote. We voted for war by only five votes. The voting followed not long after some terribly poignant testimony by a young, 15-year-old girl named Naiyira.

Naiyira testified that she had been in the nurseries in the hospitals in Kuwait when the Iraqi soldiers came in and bayoneted babies, threw babies onto the floor and murdered them. It was a repulsive, gut-wrenching, story. After the vote, at least six of our congressmen said publicly that they had changed their vote on the war. All six were going to vote against the war until they heart Naiyira’s testimony, then all six changed to vote for the war. Just in those six votes was the difference in going to war and not going to war.

But the story that Naiyira told was a complete fiction. She was the daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the United States. The Kuwaitis had hired Hill & Knowlton, one of the largest public relations firms in America, to help them prepare a story that would convince America to send our soldiers (almost as mercenaries) to protect their (and, of course, our) oil interests.

The story was completely concocted by Hill & Knowlton, and rehearsed with Naiyira, who had not been anywhere near Kuwait at the time. Now if you didn’t know this, at least know that this story is a measure of how completely and how effectively stories and important facts can be kept from us during the atmosphere of war, because it will certainly happen again. I don’t know what facts or stories will be invented or buried this time, but it will happen again. Because the only way to mobilize people for war is to keep it simple. Make it one people with one voice and one mind against one common enemy. We’ll be pulled in this direction.

The same thing happens in religion that happens in politics. The theology of war is a very different theology from the theology of peace in any religion. The theology of peace — whether it’s Christian, Muslim, or any other — is a theology with a very big God but no army. In a theology of peace we sing hymns and read poems about how we are all brothers and sisters, all the children of the same God. We speak of how there are no significant distinctions between races, nations, sexes or anything else – we are all children of the same God. It’s a very big God. And in the theology of peace there’s no mention of weapons.

The theology of war is the reverse. Churches are expected to, and do, provide a theology for war — or theology for imperialism, however you want to put it. And now it’s a very small God and a very big army. If you want to read the theology of war, there are two places you can read it right now. It’s the same theology in two different religions. One is to read Statements from the Taliban. You’ll read what a theology of war sounds like. Here are people who have taken a noble, broad, powerful, compassionate religion of Islam and found instead only things to hate. They hate liberated women. They hate women whose hair is uncovered. During Khomeni’s regime in 1979 they had some fundamentalist Muslim scholars writing that – this is hard to say with a straight face, because I remember reading it and I couldn’t read it with a straight face – saying that scientific discoveries had proven that there are emanations from a woman’s hair that drive men mad so their hair must be covered.

They hate anything outside of a very straight and narrow path on which you find only people who look just like them. They hate Westerners. They hate American culture. They hate our television; they hate the sexuality of our culture. They hate the range of sexuality in our culture. They hate the range of sexual orientation in that it finds a welcome in America but cannot find a welcome there. This is the theology of war. It’s a very tiny God who’s very angry and willing and eager to strike out against the evil in the world. It’s frightening stuff.

Now if you can’t read Arabic and don’t want to read the Taliban anymore, you can read the same theology of war from the interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Look at the list of things they hate: it’s the same list. The women’s liberation movement is responsible for the attack, gays and lesbians are responsible for the attack, women who had abortions because they don’t think breeding is a high calling for our species are responsible for the attack.

This is the same list of hate objects that you find in the Taliban. And it’s one of the most important things to understand about the theology of war. All religions are reduced to the same theology in the theology of war. It’s a list of a very tiny in-group and a very large out-group and it’s focused to be able to direct anger and hatred and weaponry against the source of evil. This reminds me of a story from Native America that I just heard this week:

A young boy went to see his grandfather because he was angry. He was angry because one of his friends had committed a terrible injustice against him and he wanted revenge and he wanted his grandfather’s advice on how to get revenge. His grandfather sat him down and said “I know these feelings. I’ve had them myself.” I too have had the feelings of hatred and anger and lust for blood and a lust for revenge. It’s as though there were two wolves inside of me fighting to control my soul. One is a good wolf who takes care of its pups and who is a peaceful wolf that only fights when it’s necessary and only as far as it’s necessary. And the other wolf is an angry, angry, angry wolf that strikes out in all directions whenever it’s given a chance. And these two wolves, the grandfather said, “are inside of me all the time fighting to dominate my soul.” The grandson thought about it for a second and he said, “I don’t get it grandfather, which wolf wins?” And the grandfather said, “The one that I feed.”

We have those two wolves now fighting for control of our soul as a nation and fighting for control or our individual souls. And the wolf that wins will be the wolf that we feed. I can’t resolve this problem this morning. But we need to say it out loud. We’re in a time of great pain and hurting. More than six thousand people have been killed. We have no idea of how many people on what will now be called “the other side” will be killed. We may wonder what to do about our hurt and about our deep sense of disconnection.

There’s another story for us here, about a woman who was sad to the core of her soul because she had lost her son. She went to see a wise man and she said, “I’m hurting so much I cannot go on with life because of the sorrow I feel for the loss of my son. There must be some magic potion or spell or something you can do to make all the hurt go away.” The wise man said “You’re very lucky that you came to me.” There is such a magic to make the hurt and the sorrow go away. All you have to do is bring me a mustard seed, a tiny mustard seed, from the home of someone who has never known sorrow.”

So she went around. She went first of course to the palaces, because certainly rich people don’t know any sorrow. And she found at every palace and every castle story after story of people who had lost a daughter, lost a son, people who had been visited by horrible tragedies, by diseases, by all of the woes of humankind. And each time she heard one of these stories from one of these families, she’d stop and stay with them for awhile to help them, because she knew what it was like to feel sorrow and she knew how to help them.

And after six or eight of these visits to families and people who had known sorrow and stopping to help them, the woman finally realized that the sage she consulted had been right. That magical mustard seed was the seed within her that made her reach out her own hand to take the hand of others who suffered. In our days and weeks and perhaps months ahead, I hope that we can find ways to reach out our hands to help those others that are suffering, here and abroad. And if when we reach our hands and take theirs we find that we don’t know how to stop the suffering, then let us hold hands and try to remember together the Dance of Life.

© Davidson Loehr

9 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

NOTE: This sermon was delivered without notes, then transcribed from the recording of the 11:15 service on this date, and edited by Dr. Loehr. While the sermons will necessarily vary some between the 9:30, 11:15 and 5:30 Sunday services, this is a fair approximation of the original. This is also why it reads more like an oral presentation than an essay.

What is truth? Usually when we ask the question, we’re asking it like a grand inquisitor, standing outside of it and treating it as an intellectual thing. We want to know what it is so we can judge it and tell you whether it is right or wrong. When we let it get inside of us, to quote one of America’s current philosophers, Chef Emeril Legasse, “we really kick it up a notch.”

When we let the question “What is truth?” get inside of us it is a whole different kind of question and it’s a lot scarier. Now its like looking at the “mirror mirror on the wall” and asking who really is the fairest of us all, and we might not like the answer we get.

We talk a lot about truth as though it were a dangerous thing to be near. I think a lot of truths are things we try to avoid more than we try to seek. Sometimes we avoid them because the truth that’s offered to us is just too small to qualify as “true.”

There’s an example of that going around the University Baptist Church down on the UT campus right now, where some bigots from Topeka, Kansas have come here to picket outside the church because UBC welcomes gays and lesbians just as Jesus might have. They carry signs with a couple sound bytes from hateful parts of the Bible – you can read it all on their web site, which is – believe this or not – www.godhatesfags.org.

Anything that is so small that it separates life and divides it into little pieces and pits the pieces against each other isn’t truth in the sense that we’re looking for in religion. It’s only a tormented fractured piece that can’t find its way home to the whole. When I hear the salvation story from Christian fundamentalism I’m struck this way. This will be two-sided in a second – I don’t like to throw stones unless I throw them up in the air so that some of them land on us too. But when I hear that least imaginative version of the Christian salvation story, a story primarily of obeying until you die, and then going to heaven, I think this just isn’t an interesting story. It’s too small. I can’t fit into it the parts of me that I have to fit into it if I’m ever going to be whole. The story can’t make me whole. It would just put me in a little compartment. So it won’t do for me.

I had a friend a dozen years ago in the ministry who was a fundamentalist minister, a wonderful man, absolutely as caring a person as I’ve ever met. And I asked him when he became a fundamentalist and he said he used to be mostly a secular humanist and when he was in college he took a biology course.

He talked to his biology professor one day about this notion that we have a special place in the world, that there was something precious about us because we had somehow been created by some loving intelligence. And his biology professor said he was an idiot for thinking like that. There was no God. Nothing had been created. There wasn’t anything special about us at all. We just evolved like slugs and slime mold does. The only rule of evolution is that whatever fits the environment best survives no matter how sleazy or crummy it is. That’s the end of it, his professor told him. Get used to it.

He said you know, my response to that story of indifferent mechanical evolution is about the same as your response to my story of special creation. And I thought you’re right, there is nothing in the story of evolution that gives people a home, gives anyone a special place to be. I think there’s another story that can, a story of which indifferent mechanical evolution is an intrinsic part. But explaining that would take a lot longer, and he’s already found something that gives his heart someplace to live and has helped him be a loving person. It sounds like he’s got the right religion for now. So sometimes we reject the truths that are offered because they are too little for us.

We can take it down another level though and say sometimes we reject the truths because we’re afraid the truth will be bad. And we’ll stay in any kind of denial offered to us rather than moving into a truth that we think will be bad. The place you find this happening most often – you find it everyday, we’ve found it in most all of our lives – is when people have a terminal illness. And you find that in early stages of dealing with their prognosis and the jargon for it is that the prognosis is negative. In ordinary language it means you’re going to die. And almost no one wants to accept this right off.

The truth is bad. Of course they don’t want to accept it. And yet there’s an ironic lesson that comes from working with terminal patients. I spent a year doing this in Chicago while I was writing my dissertation in graduate school. I worked the afternoon and evening shifts in a 900-bed hospital in downtown Chicago. And I worked almost exclusively with terminal patients because that’s where the serious work was to be done.

What you find when you work with people who are dying, and it is quite ironic, is that when they find peace — and everyone I worked with found peace before they died, partly because I was such an activist in this — when people find peace they only find it after accepting the truth that terrified them the first time they heard it. They only find it when they accept the fact that they are going to die. And there’s something about being able to get in harmony with that kind of truth that lets them forgive life, forgive God, forgive the universe, make peace with the people they’ve loved and find peace in their own hearts.

Watching that transformation was not only one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. It was one of the most uplifting because it gives you faith in the fact that we can make a home in the truth if we work at it, and that it pays to do so. I think there’s a third reason that we sometimes choose not to tell the truth or not recognize it. And that’s that even though we know it’s true and we know it’s right, we don’t know how to live in it.

The most famous story of this, my favorite, comes from the ancient Hebrew scriptures. It’s the story of Moses leading his people from slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land and freedom. And my favorite part of the story is the part that says the people didn’t want to go! They wanted to go back to Egypt. It’s true there was suffering there, but they knew how to suffer. They’d done it all their lives. But they didn’t know how to be free. And they’ll pick the familiarity of being in their rut over a freedom they have no idea how to live in.

We’ve seen little pictures of this in some of the communist countries that have flirted with democracy, when all of them seem to be going back toward a form of totalitarianism. It’s what they knew. It’s what they’re comfortable with. So sometimes we don’t choose the truth because we do not know how to live in it.

There’s a five-line poem by Stephen Crane. It’s one of my favorite poems, and it puts all of this more succinctly than any story I know. He wrote:

I was in the darkness.

I could not see my words

nor the wishes of my heart.

Suddenly, there was a great light.

Let me back into the darkness again!

Suddenly, there was a great light and it showed me a world so big, so free, so unconstrained, so open with possibility and hope that I was terrified all the way down to the bottom of my soul. Because I’ve never lived like that once. Let me back into the darkness again. I don’t know how to be free! This poem outlines a tragedy. But it’s a human story to which every one of us can relate in some ways from some times of our life.

So where do you find the courage to tell the truth? While I think we each find our own path to it I’ll tell you part of my path and how I found it and how I still think of it. Maybe some of it will be useful.

When I was in graduate school I read a lot of theologians. That’s what you get when your Ph.D. is in theology, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science. You read a lot of philosophers and scientists and theologians.

One of the theologians I read is regarded really as a fairly conservative theologian of the 20th century (Karl Barth). But like my fundamentalist preacher friend of a dozen or more years ago, he was also someone who was so warm, so full, so alive, that I liked fifty percent of what he wrote very much. And fifty percent isn’t bad. One of his best insights came from a short talk that he gave to a group of young ministers who were in school and were preparing to go out into the ministry. They wanted to know what this world-renowned theologian had to say to them that might help them save souls. And what he told them was this. I memorized it because it was so powerful for me as soon as I read it. He said:

“Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”

I think that’s dead right. And it is a thought that comes to me several times a month. Anytime I’m trying to think how do I serve this congregation of people who are actually giving me your attention for twenty or thirty minutes in a week. You deserve something that I think is worth saying, that I think is worth hearing even though your lives are in many ways so different from mine.

I think I have to try to take you more seriously than you may be taking yourself. And I have to trust that it’s what you want and that you won’t forgive me if I fail to do so either.

There’s a story from Buddhism that I like better that most of the stories of western religions. Buddhism doesn’t start from the idea that we are estranged from God, or that we are sinful and need to somehow make amends. Buddhism starts from the idea that every single person can be a Buddha. In every single person they say there’s a Buddha seed. There’s that within us which can be nourished and turned into a flower of awakening and enlightenment in Buddhahood. And our job, they say, is to act from that seed in us and speak to that part of other people.

Now that’s saying the same thing. That’s saying that the mirror mirror on the wall that we’re talking about is the same mirror that we have to be able to look at ourselves in and live with in the morning. And that means that the mirror mirror is on the wall of our soul, not our hallway. It’s that mirror inside of us that we have to be able to live with.

So the courage to tell the truth, I think, comes from knowing that what we owe one another, perhaps more than anything, is to recognize that each one of us has that kind of a Buddha seed, that kind of a God-spark, and that’s the level that we need to communicate with. We have to take others more seriously than they take themselves and we have to take ourselves more seriously than others may take us.

And those parts of us that dwell there can only live in the truth: nowhere else. There’s also a penalty for not doing it right. If we live in fear, if we live by incorporating the fears of others and if we live by the values of others we may find at the end that we have lived their lives. And that nobody lived ours.

There’s only one person in the world who is able to live your life. What a tragedy it would be if that life weren’t lived! And the kind of truth that makes us whole and connects us with each other and with the world is probably the only route there is or has ever been toward living that kind of life. That truth really can set you free. And for the record, that’s the truth.

© Davidson Loehr

17 June 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Last fall, in a silent auction at church, I agreed to offer the right to name a sermon topic. Ian Forslund was the highest bidder, and asked that I reflect on what I think it means for this church to be a “Welcoming Congregation.” Taken narrowly, that refers to the fact that this church is on record as a church that welcomes gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people into fellowship. But how? As tokens? I have overheard the greeter in a UU church (not this one!) tell a visitor “Oh yes, we have lesbians – there’s one over there!” How welcome would that feel? It’s an important topic, I’ll borrow some wisdom from the man Jesus, as we explore it together on this Father’s Day.

STORY: The Welcoming School

Once there was a small school in a small town somewhere in Texas where everybody was alike. They had all been born in Texas, they all had dark hair and brown eyes. They all got along, and it was a quiet and peaceful place. But times change, and they changed in this sleepy little town. People started moving in, from all over the place, and before long people didn’t all look alike. Some actually had blonde hair; they had never seen a real blonde in person before! And some had blue eyes: what an odd color for eyes! And some had actually moved there from other states, or from Mexico. They weren’t all native Texans any more.

The school principal didn’t know what to do, though he knew they needed to find some way to make all these new kids feel welcome. But he didn’t know what to do, so he decided to pass the problem on to the students. He called a school assembly and told them that people were starting to come to the school who were different from them, and they needed to find some way to make sure and notice them and welcome them to the school.

The kids talked and talked about it. They decided they needed a way to identify all these different sorts of people. And before long, they had one to practice on; a girl named Susan came to town with her family. She had been born in Austin. And though she had brown eyes, she had blonde hair!

Well, they were ready for her. “Oh great!” they said as they gathered around her on her first day in school. “We’ve been waiting for somebody to come who had blonde hair, and you’re it! We need a way to mark you so everybody will know you’re here, so they can all make you feel welcome. Here, wear this!” And they put around her neck a special kind of necklace they had made by tying together about thirty jingle bells. “Now whenever you move, you’ll make noise! Then when you come into a room, the first person who hears you will shout “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” and then everybody in the room will shout “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” and they can gather around you and make you feel welcome!” And that’s what they did.

Within a couple weeks, they had another new student. Stevie moved with his family from Dallas. And his hair was the right color (brown), but he had blue eyes! Amazing!

Again, though, the students were ready. “Here Stevie,” one of them said, “you need to wear this. It’s hard to tell you have blue eyes till we can get up really close to look at your face, so this will make it easier to mark you. Just wear this around your neck.” They gave him a very big capital letter “B” (for “blue”) made out of thick blue paper. “Now whenever you come into a room, the first person who sees the big blue “B” will shout “Woop, woop, woop!” and a signal that you’re here. Then all the other kids will should “Woop, woop, woop!” and gather around you to look at your eyes and make you feel welcome.” And that’s what they did.

Before long, another new family moved to town, and another new kid enrolled in the school. Her name was Maria. She had the right hair and eye color, but she wasn’t from Texas. Her family had just moved up from Mexico.

The kids were ready for this, too. They had learned a new work in their vocabulary-building exercises for people who came from strange places: alien. And here was their chance to use it. So they went up to Maria and explained that they were the welcome team from the school, that they needed to mark her so the other kids would know she was different. But since she had black hair and brown eyes, nobody could tell by looking at her that she was really an alien. So they had made something for her to wear, too. It was a very big capital letter “A” kind of a scarlet color. “Here,” they said, “you need to wear this. Then, whenever you come into a room the first person who sees your big “A” will shout “Alien! Alien!” and then everybody will shout “Alien! Alien!” and we can all gather around to see just what an alien really looks like and make you feel welcome. And that’s what they did.

Well, as more and more new kids moved into town, that became a very noisy school. The kids looked for all the differences they could find in every new kid, and invented new kinds of noises and letters to mark each one with, so the new kids would feel welcome.

But while a few of the new kids just loved all the attention, most did not. And, they told the principal, they didn’t feel one bit welcome there. The principal was stumped. Gosh: what should they do?

SERMON: Welcome!

If you’ve been coming here long, you’ve probably noticed by now that I don’t talk much about Jesus. It’s not that I haven’t heard of him. I’ve studied a fair amount about the man, I’ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar for a decade, so I’m not completely ignorant of the man and his teachings. But for me, he’s never been the most interesting or insightful religious teacher. It’s a personal thing. For me, the teachings of the Buddha and Lao-Tzu were wiser and more useful, and I have quite a few books from quite a few thinkers whose insights seem more relevant and useful. So I’ve just not used Jesus much.

All that is a negative way of saying something positive, which is that this morning I think one of Jesus’s insights is more useful and more on point than others I can think of. That insight was his most important teaching, and the teaching that was also most important to him: his idea of what he called the Kingdom of God.

That phrase “the Kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus, it was used by a lot of people in the first couple centuries. Jews, Christians, Greeks and Romans wrote about the kingdom of God, which they also called the Kingdom of Wisdom. They all used the phrase to mean the ideal world, the kind of world with the best chance of sustaining peace, justice, and love among people who were different. That’s the challenge, of course. It doesn’t take much talent and isn’t much of a victory to get along with people who look, think, and talk like you. That’s more like looking in the mirror and approving of your reflection. The challenge is to do it among people who are not like you. And the ideal world, in which that challenge was met well, was what many called the Kingdom of God.

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was not supernatural. It wasn’t something coming, had nothing to do with any sort of end of the world. It was, at least potentially, here and now, within and among us, and his frustration was that we couldn’t see it.

For Jesus, our deepest human failing – you could almost call it our “original sin,” though he never did – is our destructive but abiding habit of defining ourselves in terms too small to do justice to the idea that the whole world is God’s creation, to put it poetically.

The Jews – and of course Jesus was a Jew – often defined themselves by their differences from others. They defined themselves by their customs of animal sacrifices in the Temple, by their language, their dietary restrictions, and a dozen other ways. These differences made them feel special. They thought of themselves as God’s chosen people.

But to the man Jesus, if I understand him correctly, everyone was a child of God. And the exclusive identity of the Jews was too narrow, too small to serve life. He wanted the walls broken down, he wanted small identities sabotaged. This is the meaning behind his telling his disciples – who begged for their food, as he also did – to eat whatever was put before them.

That didn’t mean “eat your broccoli.” Jesus and his followers were all Jewish, and they all begged for their food. They lived in a world with Romans, Greeks, Samaritans, and a whole array of other ethnic and religious styles, each of which had different food laws. When Jesus told his followers to eat what was put before them, it meant “When you beg from a Roman and they offer you pork, eat it! Eat shellfish, eat whatever is put before you by the Greek, the Samaritan, and the others from whom you will be begging food.”

He was saying “Don’t allow yourself to be defined by your differences from others. Insist on defining yourselves by your similarities to others: you are all brothers and sisters, all children of God. And when people realize this and act this way, the Kingdom of God will be here.” Amen, end of sermon, end of religion, now go do it! This kind of talk is what makes the lives of prophets nasty, brutish and short. After all, nobody would ever have bothered to kill someone who just told you to love one another and have a nice day! That you can get from cheap greeting cards or bumper stickers. No, the most significant prophets and sages are deeply disturbing, because they are rearranging the foundations of our world.

I think Jesus’s teachings here are profound and disturbing. I believe if we could ever understand and act that way, the world would indeed become something that might as well be called the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Wisdom, because I can’t think of a better kind of world, no matter how unlikely it may be.

Now if this were a different kind of church and I were a different kind of preacher, I might get away with saying to you, “There, you’ve heard it, just listen to Jesus and obey, Amen!” Odds are though, it isn’t likely to work here. Most of you wouldn’t care who said it, unless you were persuaded that it was wise and might work. Knowing that I can’t just proclaim to you, but must also try to persuade you, is one of the things I like most about this profession.

So I’ll leave Jesus for awhile, and come at this from a different direction.

Remember: There’s never a problem accepting or welcoming people who are just like us. We know they’re the right kind of people. But how do we accept and welcome people who seem to differ from us in important ways? That’s the test of every personal belief system or religion, I think.

As you may know, the right to name the topic for this morning’s sermon was auctioned off to the highest bidder last fall. It feels a bit odd, being so bought and sold so openly! It’s the first time I’ve ever tried this. Ian Forslund, the lay leader this morning, was the highest bidder, and he asked me to reflect on what I think it should mean for a church to be a “welcoming church” – that is, to welcome into full participation and membership people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.

You know all the liberal platitudes here about how, by golly, just everyone is welcome here because we don’t have a prejudiced bone in our collective body. I’m just not going to say those things. I won’t pretend that it’s easy, because it isn’t. I won’t pretend that it always really happens, even here, because it doesn’t. And if there is blame for this, I think it is shared by everyone. To persuade you of this, I’ll come at this from an odd angle, because the point I want to make runs counter to most of the talk I hear among cultural liberals – of any religion.

I want to look at this through the lens of some of our history as a society. Somewhere around 35 years ago, some time during the civil rights marches and the Vietnam War, we began losing our center as a society, and we haven’t got it back yet. We used to consider ourselves Americans. We were black, white, Hispanic, theistic, atheistic, liberal and conservative, but we were all Americans.

Then it started pulling apart. We began identifying ourselves by smaller and smaller identities, splitting ourselves off from one another by our differences. We became, and remain, Afro-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and the rest. This was a battle that had already been fought and won in the early decades of the 20th century, when we were taught not to hyphenate our identities – the hyphen was defined as a minus sign – but to define ourselves simply as “Americans.” But 35 years ago, it all began coming undone. Drugged by the narcissism of the 1960s and 1970s, we began defining ourselves by what was local, special, or different about us. Freud wrote about what he called “the narcissism of small differences” over 70 years ago, and we are still living it out.

I see our current “victim culture” in the same way: as definitions of one another isolating us through our differences rather than identifying us through our similarities. It’s almost as though we want others to like us because of the ways that we’re not like them. If there is much that’s more naive than that, I don’t know what it is.

Why? Because I don’t think we ever accept or welcome others based on their differences from us. We feel kinship when we feel related. We feel we all belong to the human family when we identify ourselves as brothers and sisters. And we can only feel related when we define ourselves by our similarities, by those things we share that we value more than those things we do not share.

For example:

If someone saves your life at the risk of their own, how much else do you really need to know about them? How much else do you really care? Or if a teacher finds a way to reach your troubled teenager for the first time, and it turns her life around – how much else do you need to know about that teacher who just saved the soul, maybe the life, of your kid? A young athlete scores the winning touchdown for your school, a young woman kicks the winning soccer goal. They just became local heroes. Nobody’s asking anything else about them.

Maybe it’s easiest to make the point I’m trying to make in sports, so let’s take some sports stories.

In the 1930s, a whole generation before the civil rights movement, the status of black people in this country was far worse than most of us could imagine. There were still a few lynchings in the South. Restaurants, restrooms, even drinking fountains were segregated, marked “whites only” or “colored.” I remember as a young boy living in Tulsa, Oklahoma seeing all of those signs. No one would argue that colored people, the negros, as they were called then, were in any sense full citizens of this country.

Also in the 1930s, our country was building a growing antagonism with Germany. Hitler had come into power, and was teaching the German people that their white race was the Master Race, immeasurably superior to blacks, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and others. When Jesse Owens beat the fastest runners in the world – including Germany’s best – to win a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, held in Germany, he was celebrated back here as an American hero. He was black, and he was a hero. And “hero” trumped “black.”

Joe Louis agreed to fight the great German boxer Max Schmelling around the same time, and we called him “America’s Hope.” He lost to Schmelling the first time and the Germans gloated. When Louis fought Schmelling again, and knocked him out in the first round, he was an American hero.

Jesse Owens and Joe Louis were not celebrated because they were black. They were celebrated because they were American, and they were great. The categories of being an American and prizing excellence were categories they shared with about 100 million other Americans. As long as they could be defined by their similarities with us, they were welcomed. When they were defined only by their differences – as they were in other areas of their lives – they were not welcomed.

After World War II, major league baseball – known then as America’s Favorite Pasttime – began to be integrated when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Many people, including many baseball fans, hated him at first, because they just saw him as colored. They identified him by his differences, and they hated him.

But before long, they began to see him, instead, as a baseball player, and a very good one. Then they accepted him. Not as a negro, but as a remarkable athlete who made America’s favorite game better.

Today, it’s hard to believe that a half century ago all major professional sports in this country only allowed white players. Today, white players are a distinct minority in baseball, basketball and football. It has been a big change in the right direction.

Thirty years ago, as some of you will remember, the most famous person in the world, the man recognized by more people than anyone else on the planet, was Muhammed Ali, the loudmouth boxer. He changed his name from Cassius Clay – which he called his “slave name.” He refused to go into the Army to fight in Vietnam, and he converted to become a follower of Elijah Mohammed, the white-hating leader of the Black Muslims. If you’re out after three strikes, that’s at least four. Ali was attacked, reviled, his boxing championship was stripped, and he was forbidden to fight for about three years. But during this time, as he spoke at college campuses and everywhere else, people began to realize that he had a strong sense of integrity and authenticity. When he returned to the ring, he demonstrated both great boxing and great character, and became the best-recognized and one of the most admired people on earth.

Being accepted in all these other and larger categories made his race nearly irrelevant. He is still one of the most admired people alive. When he appeared as the mystery person chosen to light the Olympic torch a few years back, there was hardly a dry eye to be found. Sure he was still black, still a Muslim, still a loudmouth. But he was also a man of great integrity, a man of principle, a man with a great sense of humor, and a champion. And for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, those are far more important facts than the color of his skin.

Today, though we don’t mention it nearly enough, heroes and role models can be any sex, any race, and any sexual orientation. Five years ago the most famous man on the planet, and one of the most admired, was Michael Jordan. His Chicago Bulls basketball jersey, number 23, outsold all other team jersey numbers combined. You saw them on kids of all colors, because color didn’t matter any more. Everybody wanted “to be like Mike.”

If anyone had simply said “love him because he’s black,” we wouldn’t remember his name now. But we were saying we loved or admired him because we had learned to define him in much larger categories. He embodied values we respected but could not demonstrate as dramatically as he did. Jordan was fiercely competitive, he played fair, he was the best player the game had ever seen, he seemed almost to will his Chicago Bulls to six world championships – defeating at least two teams that were better.

And whether you saw him in press conferences, commercials, or funny and satirical comedy skits on “Saturday Night Live,” you saw a quality of character you couldn’t help but admire – and, probably, envy. Michael Jordan, like Muhammed Ali, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis, embodied the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., who hoped we would someday be able to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Slowly but surely, we are making progress in this, the most heterogeneous society on earth. Thirty years ago, interracial marriages were hardly ever seen. Today, 10% of the marriages in this country are between different races or ethnicities. And as it is with race, it is also becoming with sexual orientation, though we have farther to go there.

But Elton John was king of the world as an entertainer, and nobody cared that he was homosexual, and about as garish and flaming as you can get. Today there are many entertainers and actors who are openly gay, lesbian or bisexual, and who draw crowds because, more importantly, they’re talented, and we love talent.

Martina Navratilova was hated by some because she was a lesbian, but she was admired and applauded by far more, because for about a decade she was the greatest women’s tennis player in the world. The bigger categories trumped the smaller ones. She excelled in things we really cared about, and her differences from the sexual norms of the country became secondary, if they were even that important.

The social norms are changing for the better, and I think it is clear how they are changing and what the secret is, the secret of expanding our boundaries and welcoming people who differ from the social norms. We do have work to do, of course.

For one thing, we have to learn to accept a wider range of behaviors and life styles as parts of the social norm. We’re used to seeing couples holding hands. And the more couples we see holding hands who happen to be of the same sex, the more we’ll come to see it is natural that while most love is heterosexual, some love is homosexual, and what is important is that it is love. The more families we see where both parents are of the same sex, the easier it will be to understand that what we really value are loving parents. And if they’re loving parents and loving partners, we’ll be glad those kids have them, and glad those two people found each other.

It happens gradually, the way the rate of interracial marriage moved from almost zero to around ten percent.

But do you see what’s happening here, how and why it works? What’s happening is that when we begin to stop identifying ourselves by small or exclusive identities, it gets easier to feel related to one another. I think it is a self-defeating mistake for blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians – or for that matter religious liberals – to define themselves, or allow themselves to be defined, by the things that make them different from others. We should all want, instead, to be known by the content of our characters and the courage and compassion of our deeds.

So: how do we become welcoming people? The same way we become welcome people: by identifying ourselves and others only under the most important values and categories, the traits we all admire, the traits that can unite rather than divide us.

What are those? There’s no mystery here. We value people of integrity and courage, people of character. We value people who try to love, and try to offer their love out into the world in ways that give the world a blessing as they pass through it. We need and admire people who want to be in committed relationships, whether those relationships are with another person or with the larger human community. We admire and need good parents in our society, honest citizens, good workers and fair employers.

You know this list. You can finish it as well as I can. We admire and welcome people who act like they really are children of God, people with a little spark of divinity in them, folks who try to become better people, partners, parents and citizens: people who make our world better because they are in it. And the more we can identify ourselves and others by those standards rather than by lesser ones, the better our world will be. I do not believe that gay people want to be accepted merely as gay people, or that black people only want to be welcomed as our token blacks. I think they want what we all want: to be recognized and welcomed as our brothers and sisters, as children of a God of love. That’s the better world we need to create together.

How good can it get? Well, Jesus once taught that such a world, where we simply see ourselves as brothers, sisters and children of God, would be a world so perfect it could only be called the Kingdom of God. I can’t improve on that, so I’ll say “Thank you Jesus” – and Amen.