© Davidson Loehr

April 29, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Prayer

We pray not to something, but from something, to which we must give voice;

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

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

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are,

and admit who we are not;

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

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people, those experiences, and those transformations

that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes

with an open heart, an honest soul,

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

AMEN.

SERMON: “The Four Faces of Jesus”

It was a time of terrible fighting. Everywhere people were divided into separate groups, like little clubs. And everywhere they fought against all the people who weren’t in their little club.

They all said they hated the fighting, of course. But they all knew that only the people in their little club were really right – and it is so important, being right. And as long as so many others were wrong – well, they all prayed that God would give them victory so the fighting could stop. But in the meantime, it was a time of terrible fighting.

One day a young magician came to the area. He didn’t belong to any of their clubs, but he was a wonderful magician who did some amazing tricks. And he had that kind of “star quality” about him that drew people to him. Many people loved watching him, though they didn’t much care for listening to him, because of the things he said to them.

What he said to them was that if they weren’t divided into so many little clubs, there wouldn’t be so much fighting. Their clubs, he told them, were the cause of their wars.

To the people, this was about the dumbest thing they had ever heard. Their little clubs gave them a tiny area of peace and friendship among people like themselves, in an otherwise hostile world. They liked their clubs. So they almost never listened when the magician tried to teach them. But they loved his magic, and so kept coming to watch him, and they started telling stories about what a great magician he was.

Years later, after the young magician died, a funny thing happened, though it wouldn’t have seemed funny to the magician. People formed a new club. And to be in this new club, you had to believe all the stories they told about the young magician. They even made pictures and statues of him, and put them up in their meeting-places, so people could remember how great he had been.

The club became very popular, and soon had thousands of members. Before long, they even had an army.

That’s when they finally decided that they could use their army to end the fighting once and for all. Their priests and generals went to their meeting-places – which had become churches – and sort of talked to the pictures and statues of the dead magician, as if to ask his blessing. After all, hadn’t the young magician always talked about bringing peace?

Then they went to war. It was a long war, and many people were killed or wounded. But their army was bigger, so they won. And they forced many, many people to come into their club, because they wanted them to be right – it is just so important to be right.

After the battles, their priests and generals went to church to give thanks. They stood before the pictures and statues of the dead magician, and told him their proud story of the victorious battle.

That’s when the miracle happened. Just as all the priests and all the generals were looking up at the statues telling them about their successful wars, it happened: all the pictures and all the statues began to cry.

The young magician, of course, was Jesus.

There are risks in stripping a man like Jesus of his halo and asking what kind of man he was, and how wise his teachings really were. It offends the popular romantic picture of Jesus as the Son of God and supernatural savior of humankind. Yet for over two centuries, scholars have known that those were mythic attributes invented by his followers long after he died, and that the real Jesus was 100% human – since that’s the only category there is for us. Calling him a “son of God” was poetry, not biology or genetics. We don’t like in a world constructed in such a way that people can receive half their chromosomes from a human and the other half from a sky-god – and neither did they.

I want to respect the truth without worshiping the myth this morning, by suggesting that this man Jesus had at least four different aspects, or “faces.” One aspect was useless, a second – the most “magical” – was real, but not supernatural. A third was just wrong. Then there is that fourth face of Jesus, which still seems to look into our souls with uncomfortable accuracy.

1. Jesus as an Itinerant Cynic Sage

The first face of Jesus concerns his life style, his personal values, the kind of role model he would have been. This is the dimension of Jesus that has hardly even been discussed, because it is so bizarre. For instance, see how many sermons you’ve ever heard preached on these quotations attributed to Jesus:

“Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be a follower of me, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters – will not be worthy of me.” (Gospel of Thomas 55) – Not the text for a “family values” sermon!

On another occasion, a woman from the crowd spoke up and said to Jesus, “How fortunate is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” It was a conventional way of handing a compliment to the mother through the son, like saying “your mother must be very proud of you.” But Jesus replied, “How fortunate, rather, are those who listen to God’s teaching and observe it!” (the Q Gospel, in Luke 11:27-28). – This one would be a bad Mother’s Day text!

And the last quotation is the most extreme and the most famous. It comes from the gospel of Luke, where Jesus says “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Q Gospel in Luke 12: 51-53) – You seldom hear the Christian Right preaching on this one, either!

These sayings don’t fit the traditional picture of a sweet Jesus who preached family values. They show us some of Jesus’ personal values and lifestyle, and make him seem very strange and foreign, not to mention unappealing. For most of the styles of living that Jesus exemplified have never had many takers.

This is the profile of someone on the fringe of any culture at any time. Scholars recognize this profile, however. It was a marginal but well-known style of living in the ancient world. From about the fourth century BCE until the sixth century CE, there was a name for this style of living exemplified by Jesus. These were the people called cynics.

Some scholars describe Jesus as an “itinerant cynic sage.” The name itself is derogatory, given to the “cynics” by their detractors (the way most such names originate). It came from the Greek word for “dog,” and was meant to imply that cynics lived like dogs. They had no home, no property, no spouses, no fixed circle of friends, no jobs, and no love for the society in which they lived. Cynics didn’t offer a correction of society so much as they offered an alternative to society.

The best of the cynics were astute social critics: they were like secular versions of the Old Testament prophets, standing outside the accepted order of things, trying to subvert it.

Someone who could live a life in this manner had to be, among other things, extremely focused and dedicated to his particular vision. For history’s most famous cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, the vision was one of personal autonomy, freedom from the unnecessary demands of society. An old story makes the point:

The king’s messenger came to find Diogenes, who was squatting in the street, eating his simple meal of lentils. “The king invites you to come live in his castle,” said the messenger, “and be one of his court advisors.”

“Why should I?” asked Diogenes.

“Well for one thing,” said the messenger, “if you’d learn to curry favor with the king you wouldn’t have to eat lentils.”

“And if you would learn to like lentils,” replied Diogenes, “you wouldn’t have to curry favor with the king.”

The message of cynics was always extreme, and they were willing to sacrifice everything for it. Furthermore, they generally thought that everyone else would also be better off abandoning the society’s vision of life and adopting their cynic vision. Their message was to individuals. They didn’t belong to or care about a real community. They weren’t social reformers. They thought society was fundamentally wrong, and people should “tune in, turn on and drop out,” to recapture that slogan from the Hippie years.

Jesus fits very neatly into this conception of a cynic sage. He had no home, property or job. He didn’t respect the accepted images of “the good life” or the normal expectations made upon people in a civilized society – the religious and cultural rules that gave people their social identities, for example. His vision of the “Kingdom of God” was, for Jesus, the only thing worth living for. His parables presented the “Kingdom” in this extreme way over and over again: it was a “pearl of great price,” a “treasure buried in a field” for which the lucky finder would sell everything.

What must be noted about cynics, including Jesus, is that their message is never likely to be heard or followed except for the extremely marginal person – another cynic. Husbands, wives, children, the joy of working at a job, making a contribution to society, nationalism, ethnic or religious pride of identity – all these counted as nothing for cynics compared with their singular vision. In Jesus’ case, his entire family was treated as though they counted for nothing compared with his vision of the “Kingdom of God.” This doesn’t make Jesus exceptionally cold or uncaring, it just identifies him as one of history’s great cynics – and a sage whose vision was sometimes too extreme to be either useful or wise to the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, then or now.

And so the first face of Jesus was his cynic lifestyle. It was a huge part of who he was and what he valued. For nearly everyone in history except other cynics, however, it was not a wise road to follow, but a useless aberration.

2. Jesus the Faith-Healer

Virtually all biblical scholars agree that Jesus was a man with great charisma, and a remarkable ability for what we today call “faith healing.” While almost all scholars agree that the stories have been greatly exaggerated, and that scenes like”walking on water,” raising Lazarus from the dead or feeding 5,000 people from a few fish are all Christian mythmaking, the core fact remains that Jesus was primarily known in his time and in the early centuries as a gifted healer. It was this almost magical power that really attracted people to him, even if they didn’t understand, or didn’t want to hear, the things he wanted to teach. His followers also shared this healing power, though not to quite the same extent as did Jesus.

There is nothing here to debunk, except to note that this kind of charismatic power doesn’t necessarily imply that the healer is wise or good. There are still lots of faith healers today, from Oral Roberts to Bennie Han. Furthermore, the principle of faith healing is behind placebos — those sugar pills that can often make your symptoms disappear if you think they can. It is easy to think of other historical figures who also had immense charisma and personal power over other people, who were unwise or evil: Rasputin, Hitler, Jim Jones, Matthew Applewhite, and David Koresh come quickly to mind. Not all wise people are magicians, and not all magicians are wise. Still, Jesus was one of history’s gifted faith healers.

3. Young Idealist Without a Concept of the “Sangha”

The third face of Jesus shows a severe limit to his vision, one that would have almost undoubtedly relegated him to the dustbin of history without the contributions of St. Paul. That statement alone is enough to upset or enrage many who love Jesus and can’t stand Paul.

The ethical teaching most associated with Jesus is the Golden Rule. While he is reported to have said it means to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” it has also been equated for twenty centuries with another of Jesus’ sayings: “turn the other cheek.” Some radical Christian sects, like the 14th Century Cathari group in France or the 16th century Mennonites in Germany, took this literally and refused to resist the violence of others altogether. This led to the slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of Cathari, and the slaughter of most of the first generation of Mennonites.

It wasn’t a new teaching. It had been around at least five hundred years before Jesus came along. We know this because we have the story of one of Confucius’ followers asking him five centuries earlier what he thought of the idea of repaying evil with forgiveness. Confucius thought it was a dumb idea. “With what, then,” he asked, “will you repay goodness?” Instead, Confucius taught that we should repay evil with justice and repay good with good. Confucius lived to be much older than Jesus did; perhaps this just shows the greater wisdom of a much older man.

Others have said that if you want to see a place where people have lived by the rule of turning the other cheek, go to a battered women’s shelter. It was a very idealistic teaching, but not a wise one, unless you are in a community where all are treated with respect.

And that’s the second and more important limitation on the teachings of Jesus. All of his teachings were directed to individuals. He did not come to reform Judaism; he didn’t come to start a new religion or found a new church. He had no home, no job, no community, and he never addressed the necessity for a healthy community in his teachings.

A quick look at Buddhism can help understand what Jesus omitted. Buddhists say you must have three things to become awake, enlightened. You must have Buddha, dharma, and sangha. Buddha means a center, a source of authority and inspiration. Dharma means the personal work that you must do. Jesus, you could say, taught that you must have God and dharma: you must live as God wants you to live. But he had nothing at all to say about the sangha. The sangha is the supportive community devoted to serving these high ideals, like a good church. And the Buddhists are right: we’re not likely to do the growth and awakening we need alone. We need a supportive community, a faith community, a church. Jesus never mentioned this.

It’s ironic Ð especially for people who like Jesus but dislike Paul Ð but the concern for community was what Paul contributed, making it possible to create a religion out of the memories, myths and teachings of Jesus. Without Paul, Jesus was just another teacher who stressed individual duties but neglected to address the necessity of being part of a community of faith.

4. Subverter of Artificial Identities

It’s hard to know what to call the fourth face of Jesus. As all biblical scholars know, Jesus’ primary concern was for what he called the Kingdom of God. What Jesus meant by this Kingdom of God was fundamentally different from what most Christians have meant by the phrase. Properly understood, it was Jesus’ most radical teaching. It was also his most profound and timeless, and his fourth “face.”

The phrase “the kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus. It was a popular phrase in the first two centuries, used by many people. It meant the ideal world, the kind of world that could have the most compassion and justice. John the Baptist, who had been Jesus’ teacher, said the world was too far gone to save, that we should wait for God to destroy it all and start over with the right kind of people — those who believed as John the Baptist did.

After John the Baptist was killed and the end of the world didn’t come, Jesus emerged as a charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him. But Jesus’ message was very different. John’s “kingdom” was to be supernatural; for Jesus, the kingdom of God was existential, here and now, not in a world to come.

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God wasn’t coming. It was already here, at least potentially, within and among us. Or as he said in another place, the kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.

How do you rejuvenate a hostile world? That has almost always been the question to which our greatest sages have offered their different prescriptions. For John the Baptist, as for many apocalyptic preachers today, we have to wait for God to act. For Jesus, God was waiting for us to act. And we act, we create the kingdom of God, or the best possible world, simply by treating all others as our brothers and sisters, as children of God. What Jesus was doing was attacking and subverting exclusive identities, identities that make us feel special or “chosen” at the price of casting others into a second-class status.

This sounds sweet and nice, but it’s a dangerous thing to teach. For instance, the food laws of the Jews set them apart from their neighbors. So Jesus’ instructions to his followers were to eat whatever was set before them: pork, shellfish, goat, whatever the host was serving. The Jews hated the Samaritans, who bordered them to the north, more than they hated almost anyone. So Jesus told a story about a beaten Jew lying by the side of the road, when priests passed him by and the only person who helped him was a Samaritan. During their high holy days, the Jews ate only unleavened bread. So Jesus said the kingdom of God is like leaven that you put in dough to make it rise. Over and over, he spurned the artificial identities that set us apart from others. There was only one identity possible for us in the Kingdom of God: to treat one another as brothers and sisters.

Do you see how subversive this is? This is a message that could threaten any form of government, all ideologies, and all religious or racial identities. The world is in chaos, we’ve lost a shared center, so we create a hundred little artificial centers, or “clubs,” from which we get our identities. The problem is, they’re all too small, all exclude those who believe or live differently than we do, and so they’re precisely the structures that keep the world hostile.

Today, his message might be Stop joining clubs! Stop identifying yourselves with your nation, your race, your religion, your political party or your sex. All of these are ultimately divisive identities that make a peaceful world impossible. You want the Kingdom of God? You want a world of peace and justice? It’s in your hands, and only in your hands. You’ve been given everything you need, now it’s time to act.

This is a message that would still get the messenger killed almost anywhere in the world. Imagine going into Northern Ireland a few years back, telling the fighters that neither side is Christian, both are agents of evil, and they need to stop thinking of themselves as Protestants and Catholics, because those identities are themselves the problem. The only thing the two sides would agree on would be lynching you from the nearest tree.

Imagine trying to sell that message to the Jews and Palestinians, telling them the only way to stop the murderous fighting is to grow beyond thinking of themselves as merely Jews or Palestinians, and begin seeing each other as brothers and sisters, the children of God. You’d be shot!

I don’t want to imply that Jesus was the only person in history to see this vision of a world kept small and hostile by our artificial identities and our territorial impulses. You can find this idea that we are all brothers and sisters in many religions, many cultures. You also find it in cultures that never had contact with any Western civilization. Remember these lines from this morning’s responsive reading by the Lakota Sioux Medicine Man Black Elk:

And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight. And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

These things aren’t true just because Jesus or Black Elk or the others said them. They are true because they have seen to the essence of what it means to be human, with a clarity few people in history have ever had. I don’t know of any way to argue against that insight. It seems deeply, profoundly, eternally correct. Our human or animal tendencies to create artificial identities for ourselves are the original sin of our species. We feel bigger and more worthwhile as parts of a family, a nation, a race, a culture. So naturally we join the little clubs and wave their flags, and we wait for Jesus’ second coming so there might be peace in the world.

The real tragedy of a man like Jesus isn’t that he has had so much silly hokum dumped on him through the ages – though God knows he has. The tragedy is that we elevated him into a man-God, then joined the religion of John the Baptist who expected this man-God to come save the world for us, as we sat silently by reciting whatever creeds our little religious or political or social cult has declared to be the current orthodoxy. We took the man who lived and died preaching against divisive identities, and created a club around his name. It is a cruel and ironic fate for the simple Jew from Galilee.

The tragedy is that this strange man, this marginal Jew without family, friends, property or job, really did have something to offer us, and nobody wants it. It’s too hard. It asks too much of us. So we found a simpler route. We made thousands of mental and physical pictures and statues of this man Jesus, whom we turned into a Son of God. And we pray that he, through his infinite power, will bring peace to this world in which we’re making war by identifying with our tiny religion, nation, party, race or territory. Then we say Amen, go outside, and prepare for the day’s battle against the infidels in the next church, next town, next nation.

And then I imagine the rest of the story. I imagine that all over the world, as people leave their churches, they turn their backs on the pictures and statues of Jesus they’ve made. And after they’ve gone, all over the world, in the cold darkness of the empty churches, all of the pictures and all of the statues begin to cry.

Davidson Loehr

April 21, 2001 

OPENING

Under the cover of war, stories circulate that all is not well with our nation, that serious things are amiss:

• hundreds of billions of dollars siphoned from our economy and given to selected corporations
• civil liberties being curtailed and threatened – some say dangerously
• growing evidence that our government knew of the September 11th attacks in advance, and may even have known specific details, including the targets.

As people of faith who are also proud Americans, these things must both concern and disturb us. If true, they have profound implications for our lives and for the soul of America. This morning and next Sunday, we gather to ask some hard and necessary questions. Our gathering is sanctified by the high and serious purposes that collect us.

And so once more, 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.

PUPPET SHOW:

CHARACTERS:

Two raccoons

Dragon

Baby Dragon (same voice as the 2nd raccoon)

– So only three voices for this one, though four characters.

All three characters appear at the beginning. The dragon is in the middle, with one raccoon on each side of him/her. The sex of the dragon doesn’t matter, whoever you have who’d like to be a good dragon here.

RACOON 1: (Doing a double-take at the dragon, looking around it to the 2nd raccoon, who’s also doing a double-take at the dragon and looking around it to the 1st raccoon). Hey! Like, uh, like you look a lot like a dragon!

DRAGON: (Dragon is always very cool, very in control.) Like, uh, that’s because I am a dragon – dude.

RACCOON 2: Wow! A dragon! I’ve never seen a real dragon before!

DRAGON: Most raccoons haven’t. Say, you’re a really good-looking raccoon!

(RAC2 kind of sashays, blushes, is really flattered.)

RAC1: Hey! Like what about me over here?

DRAGON: You wouldn’t think a dragon would be able to tell the difference between raccoons, would you? You’d think that to a dragon, you’d all look alike. But dragons can see some things very clearly, even though we don’t have good eyesight for big pictures.

RAC1: Well (grumbling) you sure are different from us, that’s for sure!

RAC2: Yes, you’re so very different from raccoons!

DRAGON: (To RAC2) Very different, very different. Tell me, what do raccoons do all day?

RAC1: Well, we work mostly at night.

(Dragon can upstage, turning his head when RAC1 answered his question to RAC2 with kind of condescending body language, then turning avidly, almost warmly, back to pay attention to RAC2 when RAC2 speaks.)

RAC2: Yes. We hunt for food.

DRAGON: Food? You mean like a nice medium-rare steak dinner with asparagus?

RAC1: Hah! No man, more like canned food. You know, like garbage canned food.

(Dragon can again turn his head toward RAC1 to kind of put him down or dismiss him through body language, before turning back to RAC2.)

DRAGON: (To RAC2) Oh, that’s not right, you should be eating steaks.

RAC2: (The flattery is working). Hey, you’re really nice, for a dragon. But what do you do all day?

DRAGON: Well, we guard the gold, mostly.

RAC1: The gold? Hey, gold’s so cool, ya know? Like what gold?

DRAGON: Oh, a whole mountain full of gold. Tons and tons of it. And diamonds and rubies and other jewels, too. (Looking at RAC2) Tons of the stuff. Here, like this. (Hands RAC2 either some gold, or a necklace, or jewels – whatever is easiest to handle that comes under the heading of “loot”).

RAC2: Oh, wow! Is this stuff real?

DRAGON: Is it real? Why, it’s as real as you are, you gorgeous little raccoon.

RAC2: Ooooooh! (Putting it on or looking at it, adoring the loot, whatever works.)

RAC1: (caustically mocking) “Your gorgeous little raccoon.” Argh! Like man, make me barf, why don’t you? Like whose gold is this you’re guarding?

RAC2: Oh, it’s probably the people’s gold, right? And you’re keeping it safe for them, huh?

DRAGON: (The dragon is much too powerful ever to need to lie). The gold belongs to the rich masters who own the people. They own the mountain, too. We work for them. And we get special things for doing it. (Dragon looks over to RAC2 with this last remark, as it’s intended to make RAC2 ask what special things.)

RAC1: What, you guard gold some rich finks have stolen from the workers? Karl Marx wouldn’t like that.

DRAGON: No, neither would Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson. But Milton Friedman does.

RAC2: What special things do you get for guarding all that gold? (RAC2 is getting interested, and starting to take the dragon’s side).

DRAGON: (Dragon turns full toward RAC2, ignoring RAC1) Well, we get to fly, and we can breathe fire whenever we feel like it, and everybody is afraid of us. Here, would you like some more gold/jewels? (Gives more to RAC2).

RAC1: Fly? Hey, I wish I could fly! Can you teach me to fly?

DRAGON: (Slowly, and barely, turning to acknowledge RAC1) Sorry, fuzzbutt. That’s for dragons. (To RAC2) But you might be able to fly!

RAC2: Me? Really? Me fly? Oh like wow, that’s so cool!

RAC1: Hey, how come he might fly but not me? Like, that’s not right, man!

DRAGON: (Ignoring RAC1, talking to RAC2). Here, you need some more gold/jewels. Aren’t they nice?

RAC2: (Loaded down with jewels/gold). Oh, these are just beautiful. And they must be worth a fortune!

DRAGON: They are. Several fortunes. And there’s a lot more where they came from, believe me.

RAC2: Oh, I’d love to see it!

DRAGON: Would you? Then here, have some more (gives a big pile of loot to RAC2. RAC2 starts SINKING under the weight, and as he sinks below the stage, the dragon speaks down to him.) – There you go, there you go! See how easy this was? And look at you! You look marvelous!

RAC1: (Feeling – and being – very ignored and left out). Hey, like I don’t know why we’re bothering with you at all, you scaley old lizard. Come on, you gorgeous little raccoon, let’s go. (Looking over around the dragon, sees that the other raccoon is gone.) Hey! Hey, lizard-face! Where’s my friend? Bring back my friend right now!

DRAGON: (Looks down below stage level.) Ah. Yes. Wonderful. (Turning to RAC1) OK, fuzzbutt. See how beautiful your old friend looks now!

BABY DRAGON: (But with the same voice that RAC2 had – the voice needs to be characteristic enough to be easily identifiable.) Oh my gosh! Look what’s happened to me! Why, I’m not a raccoon at all any more! I’m a ? a?

DRAGON: You’re a baby dragon! Congratulations! Now you really are gorgeous!

RAC1: Hey, hey! This isn’t right! This is all wrong!

BABY DRAGON: Watch your lip, fuzzbutt.

RAC1: Hey, he called me Fuzzbutt! What is this?

DRAGON: This, my dull-witted friend, is what this story was about.

RAC1: What? What? I thought this was a story about how different raccoons are from dragons! DRAGON: Nope. This was a story about how to turn a raccoon into a dragon. (Turning to baby dragon) Let’s fly away, baby, we’ve got a date with a big mountain of gold and jewels! (They start flying away, out of sight.)

RAC1: Hey, that’s not right! That’s not right! The story can’t end this way! I don’t like this! This isn’t the end!

BABY DRAGON: (Either just the voice, or the baby dragon comes back up) Sure it is, Duuude. It’s all over. We win and you lose. (Beats raccoon on the head with the THE END sign, though nobody can read the sign because it’s horizontal while he’s beating raccoon with it. Raccoon disappears from sight, saying “I don’t like this, I don’t like this!”)

After RAC1 disappears, Baby Dragon holds the sign up for the audience to see:

THE END

CENTERING:

500 years ago, Martin Luther said “War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families.

35 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. said “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

I want to talk with you about our nation’s body and soul this morning. Yet I know there are some here who have come with other needs, needs unrelated to this war.

Some come bearing the pain of private, personal wars: hurts and fears that are much with you this morning. Some come needing comfort, or quiet moments, or the hope of finding someone, somehow, with whom you can share your story. Some come for the first time, wondering what kind of church this is, hoping the service will be typical, and an informative introduction to this style of liberal religion, of being human religiously.

Whoever you are, however you have come to us this morning, I welcome you, and am glad you are with us today. If you have a personal matter or would just like someone to listen, please phone the church office and leave a confidential message in the appropriate mail box. We have a listening ministry of trained church members who can meet with you. And I am available to talk or meet with you. Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock, and the doors shall be opened.

For now, let us take some quiet moments to center ourselves. If you like, you can light a candle of memory or hope during the quiet music.

SERMON

How do you turn a raccoon into a dragon? According to the puppet show, you do it by giving them wealth and privilege until they get used to it. In real life, the question and answers are more complex.

The real question is more like “How do you command and control others, to get them to serve your agenda rather than their own? How do you colonize people?”

This sounds like a political coup, so we think of things like armies, guns, loud noises and the smell of gunpowder. But these loud and rude acts only give you the opportunity to win the people’s mind and heart. Really to win them, or to colonize them, takes more subtle means. Still, it can be put simply: To control people, you need to write their story. You need to write the rules of the game that assign them supporting roles in a story that benefits you – and get them to want to do this.

Most religious teaching teaches us that we live in stories. We don’t live in “facts,” but within the stories that assign those “facts” their meanings. These are our life stories, our myths, our necessary fictions. On a personal level, there are many such stories: be pure, be reliable, be hard-working, witty, popular, prove that daddy was right about us, or prove that daddy wasn’t right about us. We have, between us, hundreds of such personal life scripts that assign us some of our life roles.

But I want to talk about larger stories today. I want to back off and look at the stories we live out, and live out of, as a society. This too could get complex, but I want to keep it simple, by looking at our “official” story – that we are a democracy – and the “real” story that has usually controlled our society – that we are some kind of an aristocracy. Democracy, while a high and noble-sounding ideal, is such an unlikely form of government! Even back when our colonies still belonged to England, there were skeptics. Here are some lines from an 18th century English historian that sound very modern. I haven’t been able to shake them, maybe they’ll stick with you too:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always voters for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. (Alexander Tyler)

Let’s not pretend that this is easy, or that all good people are naturally and solely on the side of democracy here. If you could get the government to give you money that came from other people’s taxes, wouldn’t you take it? If it were legal, if you could actually get other people to pay your way, how long would it take you to rationalize it? I could do it in ten seconds. The problem is how to do it. How can you get other people to support you?

You do it, again, by getting others to play roles in your preferred story. So let’s go back to America’s stories. Since the 17th century, there have been two primary stories that have vied with each other for control of our society. Their descendents still do.

In the language of those writers, it was the choice between rule by the “masters of mankind” and “the majority of mankind.” It is the rule of the many by the few, or of all by the many. Or, in just single words, it is the choice between an aristocracy and a democracy.

Which is better? We have all been trained to answer “democracy, of course!” But opinions have always been divided on this, as they are today, and even in this room. John Locke, the English philosopher who influenced many of our own Founding Fathers, thought it must be an aristocracy because he didn’t trust the masses. He said that “day-laborers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids” must be told what to believe: “The greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe,” he said. Many still agree with him.

Thomas Jefferson took the other side. He said aristocrats are “those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.” Jefferson’s “democrats,” on the other hand, “identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as honest and safe?.”

Those who excel, after all, want excellence to rule. The vast majority want the needs of the vast majority to write the laws, so that all citizens can live rich, empowered lives that allow them to become the most that they can become, whatever that is.

The one story seeks government through command and control; the other, through empowerment and trust. You can already hear which one is more vulnerable and less likely to win, can’t you?

Still, there’s a tactical problem. How will the more powerful and wealthy (for example) pull this off, when they are the distinct minority? For all of our history, this battle between aristocrats and democrats has continued. For the first 150 years of our history, it sometimes seemed like a battle between those who had money and power, and everybody else. The courts (sometimes) kept regulating them through laws and statutes that limited their ability to earn profits at the expense of turning the rest of the country into subsistence-level workers or beggars.

The country, when it had a choice, wasn’t buying the story the aristocrats were trying to sell, and people weren’t willing to spend their lives as servants of the few. Here is the long story of labor disputes, monopoly and anti-trust laws, and other rulings designed to protect the rights of the majority from the extra power and skill of those who would be their rulers. If you know much American history, you already know all of this. There’s nothing new here.

But in the 20th century, something new did come along. It was a new invention that could become a tool powerful enough to let a smart few rule an unaware many. It came with mass communication, and was first noticed over 80 years ago, in WWI. It was the invention of propaganda. “Propaganda has only one object,” wrote one of its early masters: “to conquer the masses.” Propaganda is the tool used by a small minority to sell their story to a large majority. With enough slick spin, emotional power, and appeal to elemental yearnings and powerful symbols (as in “God bless America”), a few brilliant visionaries can convert and control an entire nation.

After WWI, people on both sides of the Atlantic wrote about this new invention. Adolph Hitler praised the British, and said the main reason that Germany lost the war was because its propaganda was so inferior to the British. He vowed to learn from the British.

And in this country too, President Woodrow Wilson formed a new group to adapt techniques of using propaganda to influence the American people in desired directions. This was in the 1920s. Let me read you a few quotes from that decade:

The great American journalist Walter Lippman was in President Wilson’s propaganda organization, along with Edward Bernays, who could be called the father of American propaganda. Bernays led the transfer of wartime propaganda skills to business’s peacetime problems of coping with democracy. When the war ended, he wrote, business “realized that the great public could now be harnessed to their cause as it had been harnessed during the war to the national cause, and the same methods could do the job.”

And the payoff? In the words of one of these early propagandists: “If the others let a minority conquer the state, then they must also accept the fact that we will establish a dictatorship.” There is the end of democracy that the 18th century English historian warned about. Once a group learns how to manipulate the masses to its own ends, democracy ends, replaced by a dictatorship, a rule of the few, an aristocracy. This last quote came from Joseph Goebbles, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. It was also Goebbles who said that propaganda’s one object was to conquer the masses, just as he described the masses as “the weak, cowardly, lazy majority of people.”

But the masses – and you realize, I hope, that this means us. We are the masses over whom sly leaders vie for control – the masses weren’t thought of any more highly on this side of the Atlantic. Walter Lippman wrote of the “ignorance and stupidity of the masses.” The general public, he said, were mere “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders,” who must not intrude in the management of public affairs, though they may be permitted to select periodically among the “responsible men” whose task it is to rule them.

Do you see that this is the tool the aristocracy had needed since our country began, a tool to let them write the story for the masses, to put a command and control government in place of a government of empowerment and trust. The invention of propaganda and its immediate use after WWI is one of the most important stories of the 20th century.

Propaganda was talked about pretty openly during its early years, before people realized that wasn’t a very smart thing to do. In 1934, the new president of the American Political Science Association said in his presidential address that government should be in the hands of “an aristocracy of intellect and power,” not directed by “the ignorant, the uninformed.” “The public must be put in its place,” added Walter Lippman, so that the “responsible men” may “live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd” as they rule them.

That “bewildered herd” – that’s us too, you know.

This is a chapter of American history we must know if we are to understand who is running our country and how they run it. But we don’t know it, do we? Why do you suppose that is?

This is a lot of new and probably strange information. Let me try to sum it up in a clear and simple way, borrowing from the writings of Alex Carey (Taking the Risk Out of Democracy):

There were three key developments in the 20th century which have shaped the world we’re living in today: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Corporate propaganda directed outwards toward the public has two main goals: to identify the free-enterprise system in popular consciousness with every cherished value, and to identify interventionist governments and strong unions – the only forces capable of checking the complete domination of society by corporations – with tyranny, oppression and subversion. The techniques used to do this are variously called “public relations,” “corporate communications” and “economic education.”

Corporate propaganda directed inwards to employees has the purpose of weakening the links between union members and their unions. From about 1920 through the present, US business made great progress towards the ideal of a democracy managed through corporate propaganda.

Those who run the best corporations didn’t get where they are by being stupid. They are among the most savvy and quick people in our society; few Ph.D.s would stand a chance against them in their court. Those who were entrusted with corporate power realized that one of the best investments they can make with their money is to invest in buying the politicians who make the laws.

Current struggles to pass meaningful campaign finance reform are attempts to undo this powerful structure of command and control by corporations. But for the past couple decades, many or most of our major political candidates are, like used BMWs, “pre-owned vehicles.” In order to get the money they need to compete in American elections, they must get large investments from large business interests. And for those investments, they owe something once they’re in office. They owe their investors the effort to slant the laws of the land in ways that let their investors “vote themselves money from the public treasure,” as that 18th century historian put it.

What does this mean? It means weakening or eliminating controls on environmental pollution or toxic emissions or burial of radioactive waste, letting chemical companies like Monsanto infect the entire continent’s wheat and corn crops with genetically modified organisms that have not, and can not be, tested.

It means reducing the taxes corporations pay, and shifting that tax burden to the citizens those of us in the bewildered herd, so that they can vote themselves money out of our personal treasuries. It means breaking unions, and redefining the economy as one that revolves around the price of stocks rather than the ability of regular citizens to earn good livings through an honest day’s work.

You can see how corporate investments in political candidates work by looking at NAFTA. NAFTA was carefully crafted as an investor rights agreement. It can’t be considered a worker’s rights agreement. Opening the borders means that America’s higher-paid workers must now compete with the far cheaper labor in Mexico. This threat has been used routinely to break American union demands for decent wages and benefits. If they refuse, the manufacturing is simply moved to northern Mexico, to workers who have low pay and few benefits, but see it as an improvement over abject poverty. NAFTA is an investor rights agreement. It is paying dividends on the financial investment that corporations and wealthy individuals made in our elections. They helped elect their candidate, and they want payback. It is only fair.

Or you can see how the paybacks from investing in elections work by looking at Texas’ own, Enron’s former CEO Kenneth Lay. Lay was the biggest single investor in George W. Bush’s campaign for president. In return for this investment, Lay was able to appoint White House regulators, shape energy policies and block the regulation of offshore tax havens, Enron had “intimate contact with Taliban officials” and the energy giant’s much-reviled Dabhol project in India was set to benefit from a hook-up with the oil pipeline we planned to run through Afghanistan.

These negotiations collapsed in August 2001 – a date that should begin making our ears stick up – when the Taliban asked the US to help reconstruct Afghanistan’s infrastructure and provide a portion of the oil supply for local needs. The US response was reportedly succinct: “We will either carpet you in gold or carpet you in bombs.” The notes of this meeting, which took place only weeks before September 11th, are now the subject of a lawsuit between Congress and the White House. Was the Taliban really destroyed for harboring terrorists? Or was it destroyed for failing to further the ambitions of Texas millionaires?

The London paper The Guardian also reports that US State Department officials in early July of 2001 informed their Russian and Pakistani counterparts of possible plans to invade Afghanistan in the fall.

To put this in the form of a question made famous during the Watergate investigation 30 years ago, we now need to ask “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

Once we began our new war, it provided a cover for other agendas that the administration had been trying to do since the election, to fulfill their promises to their corporate investors.

I read in early March that over $212 billion was transferred from our economy to our larger corporations in the form of retroactive tax refunds sometimes going back fifteen years. Democracy can only exist “until [some] voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure.”

Huge tax refunds were voted in, from which well over 90% went to the richest 1% of Americans. These are some of the returns on their investments in the president’s campaign.

And do you recall Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s recent statement? While requesting an additional $48 billion for defense, much of which will go to corporations closely related to this administration, he casually mentioned that the Pentagon had somehow misplaced $2.3 trillion. This makes me want Lewis Black to do an angry rant! It’s the wrong verb! Nobody “misplaces” $2.3 trillion. Someone took it, moved it to somewhere else, and others else got it. Who? Was it done without the President’s knowledge? If not, again, what did the President know, and when did he know it?

News reports from Der Spiegel to the London Observer, from the Los Angeles Times to MSNBC to CNN indicate that many different warnings were received by the Administration before the 9-11 attacks. It has even been reported that the US government broke bin Laden’s secure communications before September 11. The US government is being sued today by survivors of the Embassy bombings because, from court reports, it appears clear that the US had received prior warnings then too, but did nothing to protect the staffs at our embassies. Did the same thing happen again?

And does it get even worse? Could there be an even darker side to the events of 9-11? Maybe. I read an article in the March/April issue of The Humanist magazine that’s worth sharing. (I’ve since been told by several people at the three services on Sunday 21 April that these things were widely known and discussed back in September. But I don’t have independent verification.)

In the days leading up to 9-11, thousands of “put” options were purchased on companies whose stocks tanked after September 11. “Put” options are bought by investors when they are willing to gamble that a company’s stock prices will go down in the near future. Most prominent among these companies are American and United Airlines, whose planes hit the twin towers, and the investment firms of Morgan Stanley and Merril Lynch, whose offices were destroyed in the towers.

Between September 6 and 7, investors purchased 4,744 “put” options in United Airlines at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. At the same time, only 396 “call” options – where an investor bets on a stock price increasing – were purchased.On September 10, investors bought 4,516 “put” options in American Airlines versus 748 call options. In the three days prior to September 11, investors bought 2,157 “put” options in Morgan Stanley, a company which occupied fifty floors of office at the WTC. Volume during the previous week was a mere 27 “put” options per day. Likewise, investors bought another 12,215 “put” options for WTC tenant Merril Lynch.

Most embarrassing to the government, however, is the fact that many of the mysterious “put” options were purchased through an investment firm that was formally headed by Buzzy Krongard, the current executive director of the CIA.

Next week I want to keep exploring some of these issues. I want to look into propaganda more deeply, and to look at some disturbing developments indicating a new political ideology beginning to take over the religious right in this country – much to the dismay of some of their own Christian ministers. I’ll also want to look at much that is right and promising, and suggest some actions we might take.

But I have asked a lot of you today. I have tried to put some clear patterns to a tremendous amount of what will be new information for most of you. I may be wrong. My patterns and understanding may be wrong. The patterns I see suggest that the aristocracy controlling our election processes and much of our government is not serving, and can not serve, the interests or needs of the vast majority of the American people.

Under the cover of war, I believe there is a good chance that we are losing our American way of life, our civil freedoms, our economy, and the remaining vestiges of our democracy, just as that cynical historian predicted 250 years ago.

Where does this leave us? It reconnects me with some of my strongest and most basic convictions:

• We cannot lose faith. We must continue to appeal to the better angels of our nature, and the better angels of our leaders.
• We cannot lose hope. The future is not yet written, its options are still open.
• And we must try not to become self-righteous or mean-spirited, or attempt to harm our nation. We may and must criticize and chastise its errant ways. But we must struggle to do it in a spirit of love. I struggle mightily with this one, and often lose here.

I hope and I pray that we may indeed add our critical and caring voices to the dialogue. And even though we are few and our efforts may seem meager, they are essential – for us, for our nation, and for the world.

Let us go forth in faith, in hope, and in love.

Amen.

© Davidson Loehr

15 April 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

(This was the Easter service, which is also this church’s annual celebration of the Flower Communion created by Dr. Norbert Capek in 1923. While it doesn’t read like a straight sermon, all the words are reproduced here for those who would like to know more about this unique “communion” and how this particular church celebrates it.)

FLOWER PROCESSIONAL AND STORY OF THE FLOWERS

As the flowers are brought forward, I want to tell you a little about the story of the flowers. This ceremony was created by a Czechoslovakian Unitarian minister named Dr. Norbert Capek in 1923. His church in Prague had 3200 members, and was the largest Unitarian church there has ever been. Today, Unitarians hardly even know how to dream of such numbers and such influence.

Capek had felt the need for some symbolic ritual that could recognize people’s unique gifts, but also bind them more closely together – the idea of diversity within unity with which we still struggle today. The traditional Christian communion service with bread and wine was unacceptable to the members of his congregation, so he turned to the native beauty of the Czech countryside for the elements of a new kind of communion that might speak to them. The Flower Communion we will celebrate today was the result. It was an immediate success, and was held annually. His wife brought it to this country in 1940, and it is now celebrated annually in most Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist churches here.

Dr. Capek was arrested by the Nazis in 1941 because of his liberal religious beliefs, and taken to Dachau. He died in a concentration camp in 1942, so he is also seen as a martyr for the cause of more honest and open religion.

In his service, as in this one, he asked each member to bring a flower to church. This signified that it was by their own free will they joined with the others. And, as we also do here, his church provided a lot of extra flowers, to make sure that everybody would get one. The flowers were arranged in a vase, as we have arranged them in baskets. The baskets represent the united fellowship of the whole church. After the service, as people left the church, they each took a flower other than the one they had brought. The significance of the flower communion is that as no two flowers are alike, so no two people are alike, yet each has a contribution to make. Together the flowers form a beautiful bouquet. Our common bouquet would not be the same without the unique addition of each individual flower, just as our growing church community would not be the same without each of us.

By exchanging flowers, we show our willingness to walk together in our search for truth, rising above all that might divide us. Each person takes home a flower brought by someone else – thus symbolizing our shared celebration in community. This communion of voluntary sharing is essential to a free people in a free religion.

CENTERING: (Adapted from “Prayer Before Birth” by Louis MacNeice)

I am not yet born; O hear me. I am your tomorrows, but I am not yet born.

I am not yet born, console me. Protect me from the doubts that strangle, the fears that stifle, the friends who drain and demean.

I am not yet born; give me dreams of what we may yet become, and nourish me, that I do not starve before I gain the strength to walk, and to fly, and perhaps even to soar with the eagles.

I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the woman who is a beast or the man who thinks he is God come near me. And those who can remain big only by keeping those around them small – guard me from them, for I am yet a fragile thing.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity, who would make me into a thing, a mere thing, who would dissuade and dissipate me until I lose my spirit, and then my soul, and then my hope, and your hope as well.

For I am the greater you who is not yet born, And together we must strive, must strive with the gods if necessary, for so much is at stake, there is so much to be gained. I am the you who is yet to become, and I am not yet born. Help me.

SERMON: New Life for Old

This morning I want to take this sermon title in two directions. The first is to talk a little about the very ancient Easter tradition. It’s message, both in pre-Christian and in Christian cultures, was the message of “new life for old.” Literal religions took it literally, liberal religions took it symbolically, and it always takes some work to relate the old Easter stories to the world as we know it today, and to life as we are living it today.

I have a confession to make that will sound very un-Unitarian to nearly everybody who has been here for a few years or more: this is the first time I have ever been involved in a Flower Communion. I didn’t even know the story, except in the barest outline. It is almost always celebrated in Unitarian churches on the second Sunday in June, which is when Dr. Capek celebrated it, as the last regular church service until fall. We are a full-service church that meets every Sunday of the year, so we don’t have a “last regular church service until fall,” and in this church, the Flower Communion has been celebrated on Easter Sunday.

So the second thing we’ll be doing this morning is becoming acquainted with Dr. Norbert Capek’s invention of the Flower Communion as another kind of “new life for old” – inventing new stories and rituals that may communicate a little more easily with us today, while still connecting us with what Dr. Capek called the “Infinite Spirit of Life.”

But first, let’s begin with Easter. There are several things about our culture’s two favorite holidays – Christmas and Easter – that are very ironic.

One is that both of them are ancient pagan celebrations, with no necessary connection to Christianity or any other modern religion whatever. The symbols for the winter solstice festival, which most of us have learned to call Christmas, are all from the ancient days of nature religions: evergreens, the holly and ivy, mistletoe, and of course light. Whether a Yule log is burned, or Christmas bonfires are lit, or just candles, there is always light. This is also clear in the festival the Jews created for the same time, Chanuka, which is also called the festival of lights.

And the symbols for the vernal equinox, or Easter, are also completely pagan, from nature religions and ancient agricultural societies. Easter is about new life. The two prime symbols of Easter are that timeless symbol of fecundity, the rabbit, and those numberless symbols of fertility, eggs – this isn’t subtle. The other symbols of Easter are signs of spring: bright colors and Easter bonnets.

The name “Easter” probably came from an ancient goddess of spring named Eostre, who also had a special rabbit [hare] who laid eggs for good children to eat. And “Easter lilies” probably began as Eostre’s flower. It was said they were “lily white” because they grew from Eostre’s milk. Later, the Romans said the lilies were Juno’s and were white because they grew from her milk. And still later, the Christians identified “Easter lilies” with the Virgin Mary, and said they were white because they grew from her milk. It’s a story people liked, and told in many cultures.

Another ironic thing about these two holidays is that they are really celebrating the same thing, the power of life over death, or of new life for old. They are our two most optimistic holidays. Many thousands of years ago, people noticed several examples of this. They used the cycles of the moon as a symbol of death and rebirth. Each month there is about a three-day period between the shrinking moon and the expanding moon when it is almost gone. They saw this as a three-day period of death followed by the rebirth of the new moon. Then the moon grows larger into a full moon, then grows smaller again, “dies” again, and is reborn again. This plot of dying for three days then returning to life was woven into many religious stories, including the Christian Easter story, where the man Jesus is said to have died, then three days later risen as God. There is a similar cycle in plants. Seeds look dead, we bury them in the ground, and then new life springs forth through the ground – like all these flowers. So when people were buried in the ground, many hoped they too would rise again into a new kind of life. These are ancient hopes, myths arising from deep in our souls and our past.

I like these stories, but they are so fantastic that it’s hard for us to know just what to do with them. We live in an age of science, but these ancient stories aren’t written in the language of science. They are written in the language of hope, the language of faith.

A friend of mine, a colleague from the Jesus Seminar, retired about six years ago after a forty-year career as a minister in the United Church of Christ. He founded the Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix, Arizona in 1955 with about fifty people, and when he retired in 1995, it had 2500 members. He made a point of telling people who attended the Jesus Seminar — and wondered how you could ever preach the truth from a pulpit — that he had never lied from his pulpit. He began every Easter sermon, he said, by saying that Easter isn’t about corpses walking, it’s about the chance for our lives to be reborn, rejuvenated, here and now, in ways that might seem magical, but were not supernatural. This man, Culver Nelson, had a lot of charisma, and I think he could get away with saying that where thousands of other Christian ministers could not get away with it. Usually, it’s hard work to relate these old stories of death and resurrection to the world as we know it and life as we actually live it. I’ve done an Easter sermon every year of my career, and a lot of times I’ve wished we could just use different stories, stories and symbols that communicated more directly.

Now I want to make a transition to the second part of this short sermon. I couldn’t find a smooth and classy way to do it, because the two halves aren’t very closely related. So I decided to do it in a light-hearted way, maybe even a silly way. This week an e-mail made the rounds of some ministers’ groups where we exchange some ideas and materials. It was a list called “All I need to know about life I learned from the Easter Bunny.” It’s a play on the book title All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Unitarian Minister Robert Fulghum. It’s kind of like some Easter sermons you may have heard, taking an old story and loading it with some funny modern messages. I don’t know who wrote it, but here are some of the life lessons you can learn from the Easter Bunny:

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket

Walk softly and carry a big carrot

Everyone needs a friend who is all ears

There’s no such thing as too much candy

All work and no play can make you a basket case

Everyone is entitled to a bad hare day

Let happy thoughts multiply like rabbits

Keep your paws off other people’s jellybeans

Good things sometimes come in small sugarcoated packages

The grass is always greener in someone else’s basket

An Easter bonnet can tame even the wildest hare

To show your true colors you have to come out of your shell

And – The best things in life are still sweet and gooey

The Flower Communion

That’s one way to give new life to old symbols. But there is another way that is distinctly liberal. And that is to introduce new stories that open us up to some of life’s gifts in more direct ways, so we don’t have to keep working so hard to translate ancient symbols like the symbols of rabbits, eggs, death and resurrection so they don’t mislead people into confusing religion with superstition.

It’s a pretty bold move, inventing a new ritual. Most of the time it will probably bomb, because it’s hard to find new rituals that speak to people easily. But that’s what Dr. Capek (Chah-Peck) did with his Flower Communion when he invented it in 1923. I already told you the story earlier, but it’s worth going into a little more detail about some of Capek’s religious beliefs, which were inspiring both then and now.

He thought that all people were inherently religious, and inherently good, and he taught that religion should, above all, provide that “inner harmony which is the precondition of strong character, good health, joyful moods and victorious creative life. It is my ideal,” he wrote, “that unitarian religion in our country should mean a higher culture – new attitudes toward life. In short, unitarian religion should mean the next advanced cultural level of our people.” The church’s task “must be to place truth above any tradition, spirit above any scripture, freedom above authority, and progress above all reaction.”

He defined religious education as “an endeavor to awaken the inner forces of children and teach them how to organize, harmonize and adapt them to the ever-changing influences which come to them from outside.” He identified a list of feelings and abilities which a modern religious education should elicit from a child. They included, in his terms, the ability to have faith and confidence, the ability to hope, the feeling of worship (like Albert Schweitzer’s reverence for life), charity or selfless love, and conscientiousness. In the 1920s and 1930s, he thought that a person with these qualities was a truly religious person. In 2001, I think so too. You could say it was a very optimistic faith that Capek had, just before the dark days of the Nazi occupation of Czeckoslovakia from 1939 – 1945.

When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Dr. Capek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human being to be – in the words of the Nazi court records – “too dangerous to the Reich [for him] to be allowed to live.” Think about that: believing that people were good made him too dangerous to be allowed to live; what a complete failure of the human spirit that was! Dr. Capek was arrested in 1941 and sent to Dachau. He died in a concentration camp the next year. This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his Flower Communion, which is celebrated in many of our churches today.

Before his life was taken from him, he gave new life for old by creating this beautiful ritual celebrating the interweaving of diversity and community. You will each judge for yourselves this morning where you found more new life for old – in revisiting the Easter stories, or in visiting the Unitarian Flower Communion. But as we prepare for our celebration of Dr. Capek’s Flower Communion, I want to suggest that the Nazi court records, as they often did, had it completely backwards. Because people who believe in, and who teach, the inherent worth and beauty of all people are the only ones whose beliefs equip them to live, and to share in the gifts of life that others bring.

BENEDICTION:

For our benediction this morning, I have adapted some words which Dr. Capek used in his Flower Communions:

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these fragile flowers, which are thy messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and devotion to our most sacred callings. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing with each other. May we cherish friendship as one of the most sacred and precious manifestations of the Infinite Spirit of Life. May we realize that, [as these flowers each contribute their different styles of beauty, every one of us is an embodiment of the gods, and in every one of us the gods struggle for higher expression.

FLOWER COMMUNION:

It is time now for us to share in the Flower Communion. I ask that as you each in turn approach the communion baskets you do so quietly – reverently – with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and one another with gentleness, justice, and love. I ask that you select a flower – different from the one you brought – that particularly appeals to you. If you didn’t bring a flower, don’t worry about it, we have provided plenty of extras for you so that everybody can have one. As you take your chosen flower – noting its particular shape and beauty – please remember to handle it carefully. It is a gift that someone else has brought to you. It represents that person’s unique humanity, and therefore deserves your kindest touch. Let us share quietly in this beautiful ritual of unity, diversity, and love.

As you come up to get your flower, please start with the back row and move row by row from the side aisles to the front. After taking a flower, please exit by the center aisles. We will then leave to recreate this bouquet of harmonized gifts in the world outside these walls, where our diverse gifts are as desperately needed as our ability to blend them into a bouquet. Accompanied by our flowers, let us leave this place of worship with peace, with hope, and with beauty.

© Davidson Loehr

March 18, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

SERMON: The Return of Lilith

In the musical “My Fair Lady,” Professor Henry Higgins asks his famous question “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” In Western religions of the past 40 years, a lot of male priests and theologians have been asking the same question.

I want to review some of the reasons with you this morning, because they aren’t hard to find, and they’re too important to forget.

In the Hebrew scriptures, there are more cases than you want to count where Moses or another commander tells his soldiers, after another battle, to kill all the enemy men and children, but that they can keep all the virgins for themselves, as spoils of war. (Numbers 31:15-18, e.g.)

In the book of Leviticus (27:2-4) the worth of women was 3/5 that of a man. Two hundred years ago in the Constitution of our own country, slaves were also valued at 3/5 of a free man – using, I assume, the same biblical proof-text. And I don’t know the current figures, but a few years ago I read that a woman in this country was still being paid about 60%, or 3/5, of what a man was paid in our country for doing comparable work.

In the Bible, the penalty for adultery was death for both the woman and her lover, because of their insult to the husband and defilement of his property. The notion of adultery by men, however, does not appear, unless the woman involved is married (and the man wasn’t a king – remember that King David sent his field General Uriah into the front of a dangerous battle to be killed, because David lusted after Uriah’s wife Bathsheba). Women may not commit adultery because they are the property of men; men, as the property owners, can do pretty much as they like.

It didn’t get much better in Christianity where men, but not women, were still considered the spitting image of God. For example – in a writer almost no feminist ever quotes – Saint Paul wrote, “A man shouldn’t cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man was not born of the woman; but the woman born of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” (I Corinthians 11:3-8, emphasis added) You may wonder where Paul learned about human birth. He learned it in the book of Genesis in the Bible.

Paul also wrote, “Women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they want to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” (I Corinthians 14:34-36)

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

-Biblical women appear only when they enter men’s perception – as mothers, wives, or harlots. . . The birth and childhood of daughters [in the Bible] goes unrecorded.- (Lacks, 89)

Or, for some trivia you might not have known, compare the vows taken by Catholic nuns and priests. Did you know that they take different vows? The nuns take vows of chastity; the priests take vows of celibacy. You may think those words mean the same thing, but they do not. Vows of chastity mean the nuns will not have sex; vows of celibacy mean the priests will not marry.

This isn’t just about Judaism and Christianity, unfortunately. About a decade ago I attended annual three-day reports from a sexier study called The Fundamentalism Project, undertaken by the University of Chicago Divinity School through a huge Mac Arthur grant. Over 150 scholars wrote papers on fundamentalisms from all over the world, and presented abstracts of their work in these annual public reports. The sobering, depressing, revelatory (pick your adjective) news was that the social, political and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalists are almost identical, regardless of religion or culture. It is fundamentally about patriarchal rule, and the place of women.

Sometimes the bias comes out more brutally than others. In Islam, for example, the woman sells the unlimited right to her sexual services to her husband as part of the wedding ceremony. As an Islamic anthropologist from Harvard (Shahla Haeri) put it, the moment the woman agrees to a marriage she relinquishes all autonomy within the marriage. He gets her for sex, any time and any way he wishes. Technically, she may not even leave the house without her husband’s permission. An autonomous woman is seen as a threat to both religion and society, and a blasphemy against Allah; and there are, of course, many passages from scripture to support this.

At their most literal and militaristic level in the religions that grew out of the Bible – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – it is always about the rule of men, no matter how disingenuously it may be worded. Women’s rights to work and to be educated are eroded in all Western fundamentalist cultures. As a social anthropologist from Harvard (Andrea Rugh) put it, -religious piety can replace education for women, as a cheaper form of hope.- (Personal notes.)

This isn’t just about Western religions, either. The Buddha fought against allowing women into the religion. And when he was finally convinced to allow orders of nuns to begin, he made it clear that the most senior nun would always be inferior to the most junior monk. And some Hindu men still burn their wives alive because their dowry wasn’t big enough. You never hear of these things happening the other way around, do you?

Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Because most religions are primarily men’s clubs in which women are second-class humans. (Think about it. When you read a story in any religious scripture about a male God ordering women to be obedient, who do you think wrote that story?)

There are many sad corollaries to this. I’ve been using the old Hindu picture of the human condition as a bunch of blind people around an elephant, where each one can only know what they can touch. From women’s perspectives, this has made much of history seem like the elephant was mostly sharp tusks and stomping feet.

This is why a feminist theologian writes that the character of Vito Corleone in “The Godfather” is a vivid illustration of the marriage of tenderness and violence woven together in the Biblical picture of God. (Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 16) And “if God is male,- as Catholic theologian Mary Daly put it, – then the male is God.” (Daly, p. 19) It may be the biggest single reason that few major feminists have much interest in institutional religion. (Daly, p. 18)

Some of the other sad corollaries to the political and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalisms open into the subject of women as scapegoats, the long history of the persecution of women as witches, which arose directly from the bible and with direct support from the churches, both Catholic and Protestant.

I won’t go into all of these bloody chapters this morning, except to remind us that in eight of the 13 original colonies witchcraft was a capital offense, and that poor or helpless women are still vulnerable to the charge. In 1976, for example, a woman named Elizabeth Hahn was assaulted in Germany. She was described as “a poor old spinster” who was suspected of being a witch and keeping familiars in the form of dogs. Her neighbors shunned her, threw rocks at her, threatened to beat her to death, and eventually set fire to her house, badly burning her and killing all of her pets because they thought she was casting hexes on them. And in 1981 a Mexican mob stoned a woman to death after her husband accused her of using witchcraft to incite the attack that took place on the life of Pope John Paul II. (Brian P. Levack, The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe, [London: Longman Group UK Limited, 1987], p. 229) These are isolated examples of a deadly kind of scapegoating that has been present in Christianity for over 500 years.

I keep asking, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” because in Western religions the question is so obviously ridiculous. If the churches, synagogues and mosques had singled out men for the kind of mindless hatred it has vented on women, there would not be a single church, synagogue or mosque left standing today. The men would have destroyed them.

One of the most revealing ironies in the history of religions is that almost all of the great sages of our history have taught what are easy to recognize as feminine values:

— Confucius taught that social harmony comes through learning the art of living graciously and generously with others.

— Lao Tzu said The Way was one of an interlocking balance of the masculine and feminine forces of the universe.

— The Buddha taught people not to seek their comfort in the illusion of supernatural beliefs, but to wake up, trust life and relax into it.

— Socrates taught that honest ignorance is nobler than arrogant ignorance.

— Jesus said the kingdom of God doesn’t come with swords, but through loving your neighbor.

In any chart of masculine and feminine values, the values of the great sages of religion and philosophy have been decidedly on the “feminine” side. They are where we look when we need wisdom. They are the perspectives on life that define wisdom.

I can’t think of a government or an army that has ever taught these values. But most women have, from ancient Greeks like Sappho; medieval Christian nuns like Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa of Avila to the symbols and rituals of inclusion in modern Wiccan ceremonies. They are also the values of virtually every peace movement and every environmental movement.

Of the different styles of women’s spirituality that have grown up in the past few decades, the Wiccan movement is probably the best known. The Wiccan group in Texas, known as the Tejas Web, is the second largest in the country, with over three thousand people involved. It is mostly women, though not only women.

The first Wiccan service I attended, nearly twenty years ago, reminded me of a Roman Catholic service, with the robes, candles and heavy use of rituals. And in the few Wiccan groups I’ve known or known of, the overwhelming majority of the women come from Roman Catholic backgrounds. In one small Unitarian church in Indiana, there were 31 women in the Wiccan group, and all 31 had been raised Roman Catholic, leaving the church because they couldn’t find a place for themselves in it.

Some have compared the women of the past century who have protested against the deep holes in Christianity as the “canaries in the coal mines” – the birds that reacted to poison in the air before the miners could sense it. I’m sure some women identify with that.

I think of the women who broke away from Christian, Jewish or Islamic orthodoxy more like the sailors of the 15th and 16th centuries who sailed off the maps of the known world because they thought there had to be more to the world than that. The women I’ve read or known who are actively involved in spiritual quests are searching for what Joseph Campbell once called “The Lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.” And orthodox Western religions have left out too many parts of life, too many of the dynamic and sacred forces, for us to find coordinated souls within the narrow boundaries of prescribed beliefs.

Imagine being a woman! Well ok, most of you don’t have to imagine being a woman! But some of us do. So men, imagine being a woman growing up in the dominant religions of Western civilization.

You grow up in a religion whose scriptures teach that women were born from the side of men, rather than everyone being born from, and only from, women, and you have to wonder what kind of world they are describing, and where on earth they learned their biology. You hear a pope say that women can’t be priests because Jesus had no women disciples, and you think, “Well, Jesus didn’t have any Polish disciples either!” Nor did he have any Italian disciples. For that matter, Jesus didn’t have any Christian disciples. He was a Jew, and so were all those who followed him around. But so far, we’ve never had a Jewish pope! What Jesus might have wanted is obviously irrelevant. Eventually you say to yourself that both life and religion have to make more sense than that, or it’s not worth your time.

So if you’re brave, or perhaps just terribly hungry for spiritual food, you set sail, in search of that Lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.

What the different women’s spirituality movements have found have a lot of family resemblances. They looked for sacred images that honored rather than dishonored women, and found them in the study of ancient nature religions, where the giver of all life was Mother Earth. They looked for a natural reality with cycles, and they found it all around us. I suspect that women are more aware of and sensitive to the cycles of the seasons than men are because they have lived the rhythm of monthly cycles most of their adult lives.

But it’s clear to me that a woman can’t be more like a man because most women I know see both life and religion differently than most men I know do. As women have been entering the ministry during the past thirty years, they have brought very different metaphors than men do. I think men tend to see things logically or functionally, where women tend to see them organically and in relationship.

I have attended a few Wiccan services. They acknowledge the four directions, cast an invisible circle to mark our sacred space. They notice and rejoice in the rhythms of the seasons. The equinoxes and the solstices are celebrated. And when I am there, I know I am at a worship service that came from a different kind of consciousness than mine. It came from a spiritual awareness far more sensitive to nature and our place in it, to the rhythms of nature and the corresponding rhythms of our own lives, and to the never-ending cycles of birth and death of which we are all parts. In many ways, the styles of women’s spirituality are the mirror images, or shadow sides, of most of Western religion. Women theologians, Wiccan leaders like Margot Adler or Starhawk look for and find images of inclusion rather than exclusion. They teach inclusive rituals rather than exclusive creeds, and feature dancing rather than orthodoxies. And when they use arms, they don’t mean weapons. It’s hard for a lot of guys to relate to.

A few months ago I attended a Winter Solstice celebration at this church. It’s an annual event, very popular; it felt like there were 150 people sitting in a great circle in our social hall. People of all ages were there. I saw some very old women dressed up with lights in their hair, evergreens dangling from them. You never see that in church on Sunday. It was fun, but it didn’t feel like a show. It felt like what it was: people participating in a sacred rite of passage, as people have done it for uncounted thousands of years, to move to the slow rhythm of the earth’s changing seasons. We were gathered on the longest night of the year by some women, who led us through the gentle and power filled cycle of death and rebirth. We were mirroring Nature’s death and rebirth at the winter solstice, knowing the sun will return again as it has always returned.

It was one of the loveliest and most genuine religious services I have attended. And as I sat with others in the darkness and silence, dwelling in the death before the gradual return of the light, one of the things I realized was that I could not have led that service. It wouldn’t have worked; I couldn’t have done it. It took a different kind of sensitivity than I have, a different kind of rhythm.

Young girls who were coming of age were recognized and honored. Old women were honored as “Crones” – an old term of respect for the wisdom of the aged – something we have virtually forgotten today. There wasn’t any theology. Just a gentle bringing us all together as children of life, children of the earth, gathered as though we were around an ancient campfire to hear the old story told again, then to stand together, hold hands, and move together – in circles, around and through each other, into the center then back out again, then through another ritual of rebirth, in which we took turns being born and giving birth, being born and giving birth.

This isn’t wisdom that comes from a man’s way of understanding the world. It’s a different, and a feminine, style of spirituality. It’s something both women and men have been missing for a very long time.

Long ago there was a Jewish myth that Eve wasn’t really the first woman. The first woman created for Adam, this story said, was Lilith. She was created as Adam’s equal, and she took it seriously. She wouldn’t defer to him, wouldn’t let him be on top, and when God tried to play marriage counselor, Lilith wouldn’t listen to him either. So she was banished to the footnotes of mythic history, and a slightly more obedient mythic wife was created.

Now Lilith is back. This time, she and Adam have the chance to write the story together, both their parts and the part assigned to God. May we pray that this time we will have both love and luck on our side, so that we may wholeheartedly finish what was once halfheartedly begun.

—————

Endnotes

First and most importantly, they agree that there must be only one law for all life, both public and private, and that individual rights or the separation of church and state cannot be used to let people stray from the one true religion which, coincidentally, happens to be theirs.

Second, all fundamentalisms are ruled by men, and the roles of women are narrowly defined and strictly controlled. The basic structure of patriarchal authority is paramount, and the dissolution of traditional patriarchal structures is the most important factor in mobilizing fundamentalist movements.

Third, there is a strong family resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism. As one scholar pointed out, the phrase “the overcoming of the modern” was a popular fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941, and which is now resurfacing in most of the fundamentalist movements.

Fourth, history is denied in a radical way. While they are all aware that the modern world, its writings, and its ideals, are strongly influenced by the biases of our culture, they deny that the same was true when their own sacred scriptures were written, and deny any deep historical conditioning of those scriptures at all. Their scriptures are the word of God, pure and uncompromised.

Fifth, fundamentalists want to control the education of children and adults, to insure that the next generation grows up with their view of the world, of religion, and of what is expected of them. They are doing this through setting up their own schools, through influencing textbook publishers and state legislatures to mirror their own agendas, and through some other methods of influencing not only their own educational programs but the general public educational platforms of the general culture.

For copious detail and over a hundred essays on fundamentalisms from all over the world, see The Fundamentalism Project published in five or six large volumes by the University of Chicago Press in the mid-1990s.

© Davidson Loehr

11 March 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Each part of this series on beliefs could, should, and has given birth to a million sermons, and deserves that kind of coverage. That’s even more true of mysticism. It’s the most intuitive and deeply persuasive of all spiritual paths. It isn’t about “knowing” as much as it is about being. It sloughs off all orthodoxies, and makes the boldest of claims – as when the great medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) wrote about the Incarnation of God in Christ (the center of Christian theology) by saying “God became man so that man might become God.” In traditional Christianity, that’s Heresy 666. In traditional mysticism, it’s Religion 101.

Puppet Show – for a parrot and two raccoons

“You’re so already there, dude.”

Davidson Loehr, Ryan Hill, Toby Heidel, David Smith

Parrot/David (Nervous, Self-Pity)

Oh oh oh oh woe is me!

Raccoon/Ryan

Hey! Hey! Hey bird, what’s with you huh?

Parrot/David

Oh oh oh oh woe is me!

Raccoon/Toby

Hey, bird, bird, you’re making me nuts!

Raccoon/Ryan

Heh, he said nevermind.

Raccoon/Toby 

Stop yer whining. What the heck is the matter with you anyway?

Parrot/David 

(Notices the Raccoons who have rudely interrupted the self-pity party.) Well if you have to know, and in case you couldn’t tell. I’m NOT HAPPY!

Raccoon/Toby 

Of course you’re not happy. You’re a miserable green parrot!

Raccoons/Toby and Ryan (Laugh)

Heh heh heh heh!

Parrot/David (Taken by surprise by this comment)

Oh that’s cruel, that’s so cruel! If only I could be a parrot! If only I were a parrot, my troubles would be over, and I would be so happy!!

Raccoon/Ryan (To Toby) 

What a birdbrain!

Raccoon/Toby 

Yeah, heh heh, yeah, a birdbrain, that’s good.

Raccoon/Ryan 

Heh heh, yeah, that’s good.

Raccoon/Toby (To parrot) 

OK bird, we’ll play your stupid game. Even if you could be a parrot, how would that do you any good?

Raccoon/Ryan 

Yeah, and why would anybody want to be a parrot anyway?

Raccoon/Toby 

Whatever that is!

Raccoons/Toby and Ryan (Laugh) 

Heh heh heh heh!

Parrot/David 

IDIOTS! IDIOTS! (Looking back and forth at them, shaking its head incredulously.) All right, I’ll tell you, though I don’t know what good it can do since you’re just a couple of’well never mind, I’ll tell you.

I have been unhappy for a long time. I’ve just never felt like I was who I was supposed to be. It’s a very deep feeling, one you two couldn’t understand. But you know that wise old owl who sits in the tree at the center of town?

Raccoons/Toby and Ryan 

(They quickly look at each other a little nervously. They DO know, because they’ve talked to the owl too, but would never admit that to the parrot.)

Raccoon/Toby 

The owl?

Raccoon/Ryan 

The owl?

Raccoon/Toby 

Oh, yeah, that bird in the tree at the center of town.

Raccoon/Ryan 

So what?

Parrot/David 

Well I took my troubles to the wise old owl and the owl just made it worse!

Raccoon/Ryan 

Worse?

Raccoon/Toby 

Yeah, worse? How?

Parrot 

The owl said the answer was right under my beak and I wouldn’t see it! She said that to be truly happy I would have to become a parrot! A parrot, for goodness’ sake! How on earth can I become a parrot? I don’t even know what a parrot is!!! Oh, why am I wasting my time telling a couple of stupid raccoons? Oh, I am so unhappy! (Parrot flies away squawking.)

Raccoons/Toby and Ryan 

(Look at each other nervously. This has upset them.)

Raccoon/Ryan 

Dude, that was messed up right there.

Raccoon/Toby 

Yeah, weird. That owl told the birdbrain parrot about our visit.

Raccoon/Ryan 

Yeah, but why wouldn’t the owl help us?

Raccoon/Toby 

Yeah, that’s not right. That birdbrain went to the owl, and the owl told it the truth. And the bird’s too dumb to realize that it’s already a parrot!

Raccoon/Ryan 

That’s pretty funny.

Raccoons/Toby and Ryan (Laugh) 

Heh heh heh heh!

Raccoon/Ryan 

But we went to see the old owl too.

Raccoon/Toby 

Yeah, we said “Hey owl, how come we never feel so good about ourselves, huh?”

Raccoon/Ryan 

“How come we keep lookin’ and never findin’, huh?”

Raccoon/Toby 

There’s like this empty feelin’ inside. I mean, I know we’re cool and everything.

Raccoon/Ryan 

Yeah, we’re really cool, no doubt about that.

Raccoons/Toby and Ryan (Strut around acting cool.)

Raccoon/Toby 

But something’s missing. There’s gotta be more, ya know?

Raccoon/Ryan 

Yeah, yeah, what did the owl tell us anyway?

Raccoon/Toby 

She said we would never become truly happy until we had become raccoons! Raccoons!!

Raccoon/Ryan 

Right! How does that help?

Raccoon/Toby 

How should I know? What the heck is a raccoon?

Raccoon/Ryan 

I dunno, I dunno, I dunno! Oh, just thinking about it makes me all mad again!

Raccoon/Toby 

Me too! Darn that owl! How on earth are we ever gonna become raccoons?

Raccoon/Ryan 

Don’t ask me. I think we’re history. Doomed! There is no such thing as a raccoon!

Raccoons/Toby and Ryan 

Oh! Oh! Oh! Woe is us! Woe is us!

Exit

SERMON: “That Art Thou”

This series on religious beliefs is really a kind of survey of some of the ways we make sense of ourselves and our world. The German poet Goethe once said that the person who doesn’t know two languages doesn’t really even know one. Because if we only know one language we think it’s the way to think and speak, rather than just a way.

This is even more true in religion. When I was a boy, religion was a pretty simple thing. I’d never heard of a Muslim; Hindus and Buddhists were people in the World Book Encyclopedia who dressed funny. As a kid from Tulsa, I don’t think I knew any Jews, and while I’d probably heard of Catholics, I had no idea what they were. As far as I knew, everyone in the world who really mattered was Presbyterian, and I wasn’t even too sure about some of them.

A few years later, one of my ministers explained to me, in his soft and kindly voice, that everybody but Presbyterians was probably going to hell anyway. Later, I had some Catholic friends who said I was going to hell. It was a funny world I grew up in; hell seemed to be everywhere.

Perhaps the worlds you were raised in weren’t much bigger than mine was. But this kind of provincialism just won’t do any more. The world’s a lot larger now. We look at the people we live and work with, the people we see in classes, on the streets, in our neighborhoods, and there is diversity we couldn’t have imagined a generation or two ago. The races are beginning to blend together in the workplace, through friendships and marriages.

Tiger Woods may be the most famous illustration of why the old “race” categories have just become incoherent. If I remember the math, he is half Thai, three eighths black, and one eighth Native American. It may be that the only category into which he really fits is “the world’s greatest golfer.”

And the whole spectrum of sexual identities and orientations is becoming apparent. It’s always been here, of course, though we were as blind to it as I was to the existence of Muslims when I was a child. But now, as almost all of us know from our own families, friends, colleagues and church members, we’re all here together, and we’re not always sure what to do with it. The world is a lot bigger than our pictures of it.

I think it’s easy to understand why our pictures of the world are too small, and why we have such trouble dealing with differences. And when we remind ourselves of how we are put together, and how we put together our pictures of the world, we will – this is the “magic” in the sermon today – suddenly be in a position to understand what religious mysticism is, and why it is so powerful. I don’t expect you to believe that. But it’s what I hope to persuade you of this morning. You know that only a fool would try to do this in thirty minutes, so I’ve already forgiven myself for failing. Now let’s begin.

Think about it: How did you come by your understanding of who you are and what the world is like? We can at least sketch an answer that is pretty close:

Some of it is biology, heredity. Babies seem to come into the world with their own distinct styles. Some are happy, some are fearful, some are calm, some whiney. Even the studies of identical twins raised in different families show that as adults the twins have some amazing similarities in style and taste – even to preferring the same brands of beer or cigarettes, the same make and color of car, and the same hobbies. So our unique hereditary package is part of the answer.

But most of it is nurture rather than nature. We were raised in our family with its weird little idiosyncrasies, rather than among the weird idiosyncrasies of the family across the street. That makes our worlds and us a little different. Religion plays a role, too. Our childhood religion trained us to think of important questions in terms of God, or several gods, or no gods at all. While I knew all regular people were Presbyterians, there were people on the other side of the world who thought all regular people were Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or a thousand other flavors. So our religions help create our picture of ourselves and our world.

And our culture makes us different. If you were raised in the United States, you were soaked in a very different set of cultural expectations than you would have been if you had been raised in China, Vietnam, central Africa, Denmark or Greece. Last fall, I read a book on The Gods of Greece by political commentator Arianna Huffington, who grew up in Greece. The ancient Greek polytheism is still deeply embedded in the culture, and she was raised to see psychological dynamics like rage, lust, industriousness or independence as the presence within her of a whole pantheon of gods. She was taught that all of these powerful urges are sacred, but they’re not all wise, and that the wise person must find ways to blend the influence of all the thirteen gods and goddesses into an integrated personality. Imagine how differently she must see the world than someone raised in the fundamentalism of west Texas!

This list could be extended, but it’s already clear that who we think we are and what we think the world is like are largely shaped by our differences from other people raised in other places and ways. We each see the world in slightly different ways. And even when we begin meeting people who differ from us in significant ways, it’s hard not to think of them as abnormal. Our most obvious worlds are determined by our differences from one another in belief, race, sexual identity and orientation, culture, heredity and a dozen other variables.

This also means that people who are very different are a threat. Because if our beliefs are true, how can others live well without them? And if they can live happily without believing what we believe, then how could our beliefs be true? Can we really say that our deepest beliefs might be “true but irrelevant”? It’s not likely. The need to exalt and protect our little pictures of the world lie behind almost every family feud, war, and religious persecution in history. Unless we can force the world into our small understanding of it, we’re no longer sure what’s right, who we are, or how we fit into things. So we blithely condemn the others to hell. But that glib condemnation is accompanied by the unspoken fear that if we are wrong and they are right, then maybe we’re the ones going to hell. Frankly, it’s a hell of a way to live.

So far, I don’t think any of this is news. This isn’t one you want to write home about and say “Boy, I’m glad I went to church this morning! I learned something that will just amaze you: we each see things differently!”

The point is that the reason for it is because we’ve each seen, experienced, and understood only a tiny piece of the world. We can’t see the whole thing. We can’t experience the whole of life. We can’t understand it all. Not now, not ever. And this isn’t a problem to be solved by tomorrow’s sciences; it’s an abiding part of the human condition.

This is the human situation pictured so well in the ancient Hindu story of the blind men and the elephant. The “elephant” is a symbol for Life, the Universe, the biggest possible picture. We will never see the whole elephant. We can only see little pieces of the whole, and we think the whole is like the little pieces we’ve seen or touched. If one blind person has got hold of a leg, she thinks the elephant is like a leg. If another has the trunk, he thinks the beast is like a big rubbery snake. Religious wars are between people who think the elephant is a leg and those who think it’s a trunk.

And now we can understand religion, and we’re almost ready to understand mysticism.

When you begin studying almost any religion, you learn that the first word spoken in religion is usually “No.” The first lesson is to pry you loose from the certainties you entered with, because they are too small to capture life or to sustain you. It’s as though the greatest sages and religious writers think of us all as a bunch of two-year-olds. And in many ways – few of them flattering – we do act like two-year-olds in our beliefs.

In Christian theology, Paul Tillich taught this. I think that Tillich was the best Christian theologian of the 20th century, because the 20th century was the century of psychology, and Tillich defined theology as depth psychology. (I think theology is depth psychology.) Tillich said the first word in religion must always be “No!” because we can’t grow bigger until we let go of the provincial understandings that keep us small.

This notion that you have to begin religion with a “No” isn’t just modern liberal hogwash. It isn’t modern at all. In Hinduism, the first teaching, the first lesson taught to religious seekers, is a simple lesson that translates into English as “Not this, not that.” Whatever you begin clinging to, whatever you want to identify as the nature of the gods, the sacred truth, you will be told “No.” It’s not this; it’s not that. It’s not what you’re grabbing at or clinging to, because we have almost all grabbed something too small. So it’s “Not this, not that” – it’s bigger.

This is also like Jesus’ saying that the Kingdom of God is not something you can point to, not something that’s coming, not there, not there. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said the kingdom is already spread out on the earth, and people don’t see it. In another gospel, he said the Kingdom of God is within you. Jesus was very clear about this, though Christianity has often forgotten it: the Kingdom of God is not something that’s coming in the future. It’s already here, if only we would see it. So, in order to snap us out of our trance, the first word spoken in religion must always be “No.”

The Buddha also taught that human suffering comes from our tiny pictures, our delusions, which are grounded in our ignorance of the way things really are.

We can’t see the bigger picture until we can let go of the little ones. Most of the lessons in most religions are trying to lead us toward a bigger picture of the world, the gods, reality, and ourselves. The goal of these religions is to try and tell us that it is safe to let go of our smaller understandings, because the larger picture is both more true and more comforting, as well as being our best hope toward a world of understanding rather than prejudice, peace rather than war.

Mysticism – the mystical experience – is the sudden, enveloping, realization that the world is far bigger than we had thought, and that our true home lies only within that bigger picture.

Here are a few statements from mystics of three different traditions. See if they don’t sound like the same message:

An 11th century Islamic mystic wrote “If men wish to draw near to God, they must seek Him in the hearts of men.”

A 17th century Sikh said “God is in your heart, yet you seek Him in the wilderness.”

Fifty years ago a man named Sri Aurobindo wrote, “The divine Nature, free and perfect and blissful, must be manifested in the individual in order that it may manifest in the world.” That’s not very poetic, but it’s the same message.

When we read religious writings like these, we need to remember that these statements are not eyewitness accounts from reporters. They are all created to try and describe a way of seeing that these people have found, or that has found them, and which felt so important they needed to tell others about it. These writers came from a whole array of religions, yet what they experienced sounds much the same.

You don’t have to come to this view through religion, either. Many have found this transcendent view through science. Some years ago, Carl Sagan said in his television series Cosmos that every atom of every one of us is stardust, because everything in the universe was once united before the Big Bang. He made quite a passionate point that our essence is one with the heart of the universe. That’s very close to a mystical vision, even though it came from the late High Priest of Science.

For instance, see how close it sounds to this statement from Hinduism’s Chandogya Upanishad, written more than 2400 years ago: “Brahman is supreme; he is self luminous, he is beyond all thought. Subtler than the subtlest is he, farther than the farthest, nearer than the nearest. He resides in the heart of every being.” Like a universe made of stardust: farther than the farthest, nearer than the nearest, residing in the heart of every being.

Carl Sagan nearly glowed when he spoke this way, and he was trying to spread his “good news” to others, that they might feel the glow as well – he was not only a mystic, he was also an evangelical! This certainly isn’t a modern yearning. Two thousand years ago the Roman poet Ovid wrote “There is a God within us, and we glow when He stirs us.” What a lovely line! Ovid saw his vision by looking within. Sagan found it by looking through telescopes to galaxies formed billions and billions of years ago, from the creative explosion that gave birth to the universe.

But what these pictures have in common is a kind of cosmic wholeness, a lovely picture of everything that ever was or ever will be, with us right there in the very heart of it, and it right there in the very heart of us. There is no Hell in these pictures. There is no vicious judgment day that damns those who are different from us. It is a picture of wholeness, and the message is always the same: that it is our true identity, our true home, our true destiny, to recognize ourselves as a part of everything and everything as a part of us. To know that we are indeed made of stardust, as is everyone else, and our true home is here with each other, on this amazing blue-green planet floating in the infinite space of a universe containing all that ever was or ever will be. And then the boundary, the illusory boundary between you and me and them and the world and the universe vanishes, and we become at home in, and at one with, everything that is or will be. The great Hindu Mohandas Gandhi said, “I know God is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone.” Stardust!

Two and a half millennia ago, another Hindu mystic wrote, “A knower of Brahman becomes Brahman.” This sounds like the “salvation through understanding” of modern liberalism (or classic Buddhism).

Mysticism may sound like it’s just letting yourself be drowned in powerful feelings – a kind of emotional epistemology. And a lot of pop mysticism and New Age hoopla is that flimsy. But the best mysticism is not just about feelings. It is seeing yourself as an essential part of an immense creation that is whole and good – and then, of course, acting out of that vision.

It’s no wonder that mystical experiences are described in such dramatic terms:

“There is a God within us, and we glow when He stirs us.”

“A knower of Brahman becomes Brahman.”

Or in the lines of the Danish Poet Piet Hein that accompany his drawing on the cover of your order of service, “Who am I to deny that maybe God is me?”

It’s ironic, but in both Christianity and Hinduism, the introductory religious lessons are the opposite of the “advanced” lessons. Christians learn to worship and perhaps fear God as the creator of the universe, infinitely greater than anything that we can imagine. After all, He created us out of dirt! He’s God, we’re dirt – you hardly get further apart than that! — And then Jesus says the kingdom of God is within you!

Likewise, the Hindus begin by slapping your hands and saying “No, No! Not this, not that!” But the ultimate teaching of Hinduism is the opposite. Once you can let go of little pictures, stop believing the elephant is a leg or a trunk, you can see the bigger picture. Now the teacher points out in a grand sweeping motion that includes everything, everything in the universe, then looks at you and says “That art Thou.” Brahman – the lord of the universe – is atman, the soul of each individual. God is hiding in the human heart. Carl Sagan looks out through a telescope at a universe so vast it can’t even be imagined, and concludes that everything is made of stardust.

Then suddenly – and this is the truly magical gift of the mystical experience – it’s almost impossible to think of other people as being different from us. It’s hard to think that any of our beliefs are worth declaring war over. It’s suddenly hard to find any excuse, or any place in our heart, for prejudice or hatred. Who are we to deny that maybe God is us? For that matter, who are we to deny that maybe God is a raccoon? – and that all raccoons have to do is to become really good raccoons, and know that it is sufficient?

Thinking this way can be revolutionary. It is a kind of conversion experience, and it’s shocking. The good news is that it can scare the hell out of you. The better news is that after the hell has been scared out of you, what’s left is heavenly. The best news – as every mystic of history has said – is that it’s true. And it really is the truth that can absolutely set us free.

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Endnotes

1 Abu Said ibn Abi Khayr (d. 1049) 

2 Arjan (d. 1606) 

3 Sri Aurobindo, Synthesis of Yoga, 1950 

4 Mohandas K. Gandi (1869-1948), The Essential Ghandi. 

5 Mundaka Upanishad, prior to 400 BC 

6 Though Piet Hein is not well known, he’s one of my favorite quirky and wise poets. He drew, wrote, sculpted and invented, and was the author of five volumes of Grooks – the word he coined for his witty little poems.

© Davidson Loehr

February 25, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Sermon: The Religion of Science

There are a lot of ironies in the topics of science and religion. Among them is the fact that many of the ideals prescribed by religions have actually been accomplished by our sciences. You could argue that while religious wars keep breaking out all over the world, our sciences have made us healthier, let us live longer, given us hope, life and good news, begun to establish a world community, even given us the only universal language we have. Think about some of the things that our sciences have brought to all of us, regardless of whether we believe in them or not:

– Diseases once considered death sentences have been cured. Even AIDS, which was pronounced an unsolvable killer fifteen years ago, is beginning to be understood, and may well be cured or arrested.

– Surgeries that were unthinkable 100 years ago now routinely save thousands of lives every day.

– The only really universal language we have is mathematics. While Western religions teach the story of the Tower of Babel, and how we are cursed with never being able to communicate with people of other languages and cultures, Chinese mathematicians communicate with mathematicians from Africa, Europe and every other continent routinely.

– The impact of computers is still growing. But already e-mail connects people from all over the world, trading the same stories, jokes, and creating a kind of culture of commonality which religions have preached but never created. I was forwarded an e-mail this week that originated as a middle school project (in Virginia, I think). The class sent a note to friends, asking them to forward it to their friends, etc., to see how many people they could reach in how many locations in two months. The automated reply I received said that in the first six weeks, they received over 300,000 responses from about 100 countries. Never before in history have we been able to communicate with that many people and cultures.

– The laws of physics, chemistry, the principles of mathematics and the languages of computer science are universal. They structure our world and arrange our thoughts whether we believe in them or not. That too is something religions have never been able to achieve, even with their history of bloody wars.

The sciences have done this by strictly limiting the kinds of questions they consider proper scientific questions. They deal with questions of fact, not questions of meaning. They deal with objective questions that can be answered the same by scientists all over the world, not subjective questions. If you want to know the height, weight or behavioral characteristics of another person, scientists can answer your questions. If you want to know whether you really love them, whether they make you happy and vice versa, you’re not asking the kind of questions with which sciences were designed to deal.

These questions about what science is, what religion is and the clear differences between them are huge vast questions. I have an eight-hour program I’ve done on this for adult education classes, so it’s a little frustrating to fly over this in just these few minutes. I’ll be trying to find some patterns that are clear enough that it won’t be frustrating for you. It’s a fascinating story, how Science became the dominant religion of our culture. I want to tell this story in just a few parts, which I’ll try to bring full circle.

The pre-scientific world view

First, I want to sketch a picture of the world of intellectual and religious belief of 200 years ago. It is always a little shocking to realize what intelligent people believed in Thomas Jefferson’s time, as it will probably be shocking for people 200 years from now to realize what we believed. But here are some of the things that most educated people believed when our country was being born, just a few decades before the dramatic change:

The whole universe was about 6,000 years old, a date arrived at by adding up all the time periods listed in the Bible.

Everything in the universe was created by God, who was our loving heavenly father. And we were still pretty near the center of God’s creation, and of his concern.

All forms of life on earth were created at about the same time, and no species could ever become extinct. I have a story about this. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson inspected a huge fossilized bone, a bone too large to belong to any known animal. Jefferson wrote that such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct. And one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark out west to explore was to find the animals from which that huge bone came, for Jefferson was sure they must still exist somewhere.

Reality, in other words, was a static picture rather than a moving one. The species were fixed, everything was created by God according to a plan of his, and would remain so until the end of time.

Most people believed that the only major geological upheaval there had ever been happened about 4,000 years ago, during the Flood.

Most importantly, we humans were at the very center of God’s concern, and his whole plan for the universe gave us a special and cherished place in it. This was our home, made to serve all of our needs by our heavenly father. We were loved: loved by the maker of heaven and earth, loved by the God who created the whole shebang. And as a television beer commercial puts it, “It doesn’t get any better than that”!

That is a quick sketch of a world which is, for most of us, long gone except, perhaps, as a kind of romantic nostalgia. The biggest differences from our modern world were the deep sense of unity, the static nature of it, and the unquestioned belief that the glories of the earth were the glories of God’s handiwork and the evidence of his love for us. Those ideas are so foreign to many of us today that it is hard to remember that they were simply assumed, and by even the best minds.

The scientific revolution

Now let’s go to the second stage in this drama, and look at a more exciting part of the story, the scientific advances of the nineteenth century, where we can see the birth and rise of what I think I can persuade you is the religion of Science.

The advances made by the sciences during the 19th century were absolutely explosive. They changed our way of thinking of ourselves and our world. Beginning in the 1790’s, geologists began to show that the earth had to be very, very old. Not 6,000 years, but millions and millions of years, maybe even more. James Hutton, the father of modern geology, wrote in 1795 that he had studied the facts of geology for fifty years, and was led to a shocking conclusion: The result of this physical inquiry, he wrote, is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. The world was bigger, and different, than the Bible said it was.

The next shock came almost immediately. By 1801, sixteen years after Thomas Jefferson had said no species could ever become extinct, a French paleontologist named Cuvier had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct animals from prehistoric times, which were placed on public exhibit, and later toured this country in both museums and carnivals.

In 1830 another geologist, Charles Lyell, published a book called Principles of Geology, which delivered a crushing blow to Biblical literalism. Lyell convincingly demonstrated that millions of years of slow workings of natural forces had shaped the present face of the earth. Geology suddenly obsessed American theologians, and they began to backpedal on the issue of biblical literalism. It’s hard to believe this today, but by 1860 rigid literalism was largely left to the uneducated or the arrogantly obstinate, as most preachers and teachers of religion were willing to admit that the bible was not, after all, completely factual.

Lyell’s book went through many editions, and helped to educate a whole new generation of scientists. One of those young scientists who read Lyell’s book in 1830 was a naturalist named Charles Darwin. Two years later, Darwin had the second volume of Lyell’s work sent to him while he was on his historic voyage aboard the ship The Beagle.

Biblical criticism arose from within religion, presenting itself as a scientific study of the Bible. It began in Germany in the 1820’s and 1830s, and by 1840 students at Harvard were learning that the Bible had been written by many people over many centuries, rather than falling from the hand of God in a black leather binding and the King James translation. The conspiracy of silence among both preachers and teachers of religion still angers me; scholars have known for 160 years basic facts about the bible that people in the pews and the streets still aren’t being told! This is somewhere between an outrage and a sin, and shows that preachers and teachers of religion seem to have a terribly low opinion of ordinary people. I digress.

And then came the year 1859. In that year, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, and what was left of the old world picture came crashing to the ground. While there are many reasons that Darwin’s discoveries were so destructive to the old religious picture which in some ways is still the religious picture for millions of people the most famous is that Darwin’s discoveries destroyed what had been called the Design Argument for the existence of God. The Design Argument was kind of a last-gasp effort of theologians to hold on to the picture of a personal God who had created everything according to a divine plan. They could point to little birds and say “Look: these little birds have little beaks, and guess what they like to eat? Little seeds. They don’t want to eat watermelons, they want to eat little seeds that fit into their cute little beaks. That proves that an intelligent God designed all of this.” After Darwin, there was an even simpler explanation: “Heck, maybe there once were little birds that only wanted to eat watermelons. If so, they all starved to death.” There is no need for a “design” argument; natural selection keeps the animals that fit their environment, and the rest die out. Darwin, along with the other natural scientists, painted us a picture of our world that no longer needed a God to make it run.

After all the advances made by the sciences, the church began losing its hold on colleges. You may not know that it ever had such a hold, but it did. Harvard had always had a minister as its president, and one had to have the church’s endorsement to get a college degree at both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as many American universities. But by about 1870 religious tests were no longer required at British universities, and the president of Harvard was a chemist. Harvard has never again been led by a minister.

During this time, Science slowly but surely became a religion, even the most influential religion in our culture. I know you’re not convinced of this yet, but I think you will be in a few minutes. It happened the way a hermit crab makes its home in the shell of another animal. I’ve identified at least ten dimensions of religion that were taken over, or at least copied, by Science in the 19th century. It’s hard to think of a list of ten things any more without being reminded of the “Top Ten” lists we see everywhere. So here is my list of the Top Ten things that Science took over from religion in the 19th century:

10. Salvation was replaced by Progress. Christians work on earth to reach a future ideal state in heaven. Scientists work here to contribute to Progress which, they believe, will lead toward an ideal state here on earth in the future.

9. Revelation was replaced by Discovery. For centuries, the churches had been where you went to find revelations of God’s word, the ultimate Truth. Now revelation began losing intellectual respect, as we trusted the discoveries of sciences more than the revelations of priests. We still do. Yet if you look up those two words, revelation and discovery, you’ll discover that they mean the same thing. To reveal is to remove a veil. To discover is to remove a cover. About 150 years ago, the job of removing that veil or cover was transferred from religion to science, where it remains today.

8. The priest’s black robe was replaced by the scientist’s white lab coat. Both are costumes, but for over a century we have regarded the people in the white costumes as more authoritative than those in the black costumes. Even if preachers dress up in wild maroon gowns with hoods and stripes, we’re not likely to convince you that we know more about facts than a scientist. (And, of course, as the costumes were changed, so were the characters in them, as priests were replaced by scientists as sources of truth.)

7. Reverence for the past was replaced by reverence for the future. To every traditional culture in the world, the phrase “the new improved model” is simply insane. Cultures are grounded in the wisdom of their elders and their sacred past. With the myth of Progress, ancient truths (and the wisdom of old people) were and are shrugged off in the faith that “newer” means “better” and the future will be superior to the past. It has robbed us of much wisdom of the ages and the aged, making our superficiality especially poignant.

6. Religious rituals were replaced by scientific rituals. For centuries, churches and synagogues here had gone through the same motions in the same ways in their worship services, and those in the tradition saw the rituals as the path toward a kind of truth or peace. Now it seems more important that scientists go through the same procedures when conducting the experiments that will, we believe, lead us toward the discovery of facts.

5. Churches were replaces by laboratories. At least as the places where one expects to find out what’s really true.

4. Symbols and metaphors were replaced by literalisms and facts. This one is especially devastating, I think. Last week I read to you from some ancient Christian theologians who explained that religious writings don’t really mean what they say, but must be interpreted by methods apparently available to a few. If scientists had nothing more exact than symbols and metaphors, they could never build a bridge, a rocket, or make reliable diagnoses and prescriptions for diseases.

An unfortunate but probably unavoidable side-effect of the scientific culture is that it has made us all much more literalistic, more concerned with cold hard facts than with warm rich meanings.

3. Beliefs became intellectual. This may sound odd, because all our lives we have been taught to think of beliefs as things we assert to be true. But it isn’t what the word used to mean. The word “belief” comes from the German word “belieben,” which means “beloved.” Religious beliefs were, and I think still should be, understood as things we trusted our hearts to. But since knowledge has been replaced by science and facts replaced symbols and metaphors, the “beliefs” now mean a set of intellectual assertions rather than a set of existential allegiances. Once spiritual seekers might have said “I believe this because it warms my hears, because it is profoundly revelatory of the human condition.” Now we have now been taught to say “I believe this because it is factually true.”

2. Wisdom was replaced by Knowledge. Even in the Middle Ages, theologians knew the difference. They wrote often of the categorical distinction between sapientia and scientia. “Sapientia” is the Latin word for wisdom, as in our self-flattering species name, homo sapiens. “Scientia” is the Latin word for knowledge, which has come to mean a web of facts. Seven centuries ago, theologians taught that the only knowledge that really mattered was the kind of knowledge that leads to wisdom, that tells us who we most deeply are and how we should live, the demands of love and the nature of allegiance and responsibility. These aren’t scientific statements.

1. God was replaced by Science. People have always ascribed human qualities to God. We say things like “God says” and “God tells us” as though God were a humanoid who could speak. But now, in our newspapers and on television every day, we hear people saying “Science says” and “Science tells us.” Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as “Science” spelled with a capital “S.” There are many sciences, and many scientists. Scientists say things, but they don’t always agree. But when we construct a sentence that begins with the words “Science says” we have created a humanoid fiction, named it Science, and begun looking to it for advice and guidance the way we used to look to God for.

Let’s put these words together into sentences so you can hear how similar they are. Preachers and lay people say “In a church, through rituals and traditions, black-robed priests proclaim the traditions and the revelations of God, helping us to learn the beliefs and wisdom that can lead to our salvation.” Scientists and many lay-people say “In a laboratory, through following the rituals of the scientific method, white-robed scientists proclaim the new theories and discoveries of Science, helping us to gain the understanding and the knowledge that can lead us toward Progress.”

The achievements of our sciences have been spectacular. Religions couldn’t have put a man on the moon, done a kidney transplant or solved complex engineering problems through the interpretation of scriptures. I think the primary reason our sciences have been so successful is because they have, from the start, limited their focus to matters of fact rather than matters of meaning. (Though getting trillions of dollars in federal and corporate funding didn’t hurt.)

Sciences have intentionally ignored the existential and subjective questions. They may be essential to us, but they are not scientific questions. No one can make a scientific pronouncement on what we should love, how we should treat our neighbors, whether it is more moral to have an abortion or to bring an unwanted child into an uncaring environment, or a thousand other moral, ethical, subjective questions. And any scientist who tried to make such a pronouncement would quickly be denounced by other scientists for being unscientific. These questions are the questions we take up in religion, ethics, philosophy and the humanities, not the hard sciences. And the answers to these questions are, as any scientist can tell you, not precise, not the same in all contexts, not objective. Pascal once famously wrote “The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.” It’s pretty, but I think no one would claim that it’s scientific.

Pascal’s sentiments, however, remind me of some other very dark words penned by Charles Darwin late in his life. Darwin wrote in his private correspondence about what he called the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature. He believed in progress, but even his faith in progress was of little comfort to him, for progress, he noted, was painfully slow. Worse yet, even the hope of progress came up against an awful dead-end. This is how Charles Darwin described it: The certainty of the sun some day cooling and we all freezing. To think of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi, with a vengeanceÉ.

Sic transit gloria mundi means thus pass the glories of the earth. Thus pass the glories of the earth, with a vengeance, Darwin said. Imagine that! A scientist who spent his life collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the glories of the earth, concludes at the end that the system of nature is clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel, and that its glories pass quickly, and with a vengeance. Darwin found, and helped establish, a new world but he couldn’t find a comforting home in it. And his problem is with us still.

When a God falls and crashes, that’s the kind of sound it makes. The curiosity of our minds was divorced from the needs of our hearts, and the one killed the other. And so God died. You can call it natural selection.

To live in the 21st century, we need to have a faith which is consistent both with science and with the demands of our hearts: a religion which can satisfy both our minds and our spiritual longings. We define ourselves and our world through the knowledge we have gained from our sciences. Our religious beliefs must evolve and grow in order to keep helping us make profound sense of who we are and what we are called to do. Preachers have to have one eye on the sciences, and I think that’s a good thing. If I can only preach messages that make you check your brains at the door, I have insulted you, and disgraced my own profession. It makes liberal religion harder, but if we do it right it can lead us to a kind of intellectual and emotional authenticity which may not be quite as available in any other way.

There is a great spiritual hunger today, and Pascal was right: the heart does have its reasons that reason doesn’t know. And also its needs and yearnings. Answering those needs, filling those holes, is not a science, it is an art. Without learning some of that art, no matter how intelligent we are, no matter how much knowledge, scientia, we have, we cannot feel fulfilled or satisfied. Indeed, we can hardly live at all. Now that, for the record, is a fact. And it’s a fact to which we will keep trying to do justice here, week after week after week.

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Endnotes

1 John C. Greene, The Death of Adam (Iowa State Univ. Press, 1959), p. 88

2 Greene, p. 78

3 Turner, p. 205

4 Greene, p. 336

5 Ibid.