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Davidson Loehr

April 1, 2001 

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PUPPET SHOW

Written by Davidson Loehr and the No Strings Attached Puppet Players

This Performance : Ryan Hill, Julie Irwin, David Smith, and Eric Kay

Parrot, two raccoons and Mother Parrot.

Parrot and raccoons appear, raccoons on one side, parrot on the other.

Parrot

Hey, see my new hat?

Beavis Raccoon

Hey, where’d you get that hat, bird?

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah. That’s a cool hat. How’d a goofy-looking bird get such a cool hat, huh?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh, heh, how’d that happen?

Parrot

Well, I got it volunteering for “Wings on Housing”, that’s how.

Butthead Raccoon

Uh….don’t you mean “Paws on Housing”?

Parrot

No, Wings on Housing. That’s where we rebuild the nests for birds in the forest who need help.

Butthead Raccoon

(To Beavis Raccoon)

Hey, I like, want that hat!

Beavis Raccoon

Hey, yeah, I want it too, heh heh.

Parrot

Well you can get one if you volunteer, too. The next one is on April 28th and 29th.

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, right. Well, how about we just take it!

Beavis Raccoon

Take it! Yeh, that’s good, let’s just take it! Heh heh.

(The raccoons go over and take the parrot’s hat.)

Parrot

Say, what are you doing? You took my hat!

Butthead Raccoon

Took your hat?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, took your hat?

Butthead Raccoon

Why are you saying we took your hat?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, why?

Parrot

YOU TOOK MY HAT! YOU TOOK IT RIGHT OFF MY HEAD, AND NOW YOU HAVE IT ON YOUR HEAD! THAT’S WHY!! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!

Beavis Raccoon

Heh, can’t do it?

Butthead Raccoon

Can’t do it? You mean you haven’t heard about the law?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, I’ll bet the dumb bird has never heard the law!

Parrot

Law? What law? You stole my hat!

Butthead Raccoon

The law – well, it’s the law that says raccoons have the right to take the hats off of parrots, that’s what!

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh, heh, because we’re bigger-

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, and there are two of us.

Beavis Raccoon

It’s the law, heh heh.

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, it’s the law, you dumb parrot.

Parrot

I don’t believe you! What a dumb law!

Parrot Exits Below

Beavis Raccoon

Well, um, it’s the law.

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, bird, it’s the law.

Beavis Raccoon

Um- like, where’d the bird go?

Parrot enters with a scarf on.

Parrot

All right, keep my hat you dumb raccoons!

Beavis Raccoon

Hey, cool scarf!

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, cool scarf, bird!

(The raccoons mutter between themselves, agree, laugh, then one goes over and takes the scarf away from the parrot.)

Parrot

Now stop that! You stole my hat! You can’t steal my scarf too!

Beavis Raccoon

Boy, you really don’t know the law!

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, what a dumb bird.

Parrot

Now what law is this?

Butthead Raccoon

Um- it’s like, the law that says- .uh-

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, the law, the law that says that-

Butthead Raccoon

Heh- It says that once we have your hat, we can have your scarf too!

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, because like the hat and scarf like go together, and if we have one then we need the other.

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh. Dumb bird.

Parrot

(Pulls out a candy bar or some sweet treat.)

Oh, I’m so unhappy, this just isn’t fair!

Beavis Raccoon

Hey, hey, uh, what’s that?

Parrot

When I feel sad, I have a candy bar. It makes me feel better.

The raccoons mutter quickly to each other, then one takes the candy bar.

Parrot

Hey!

Butthead Raccoon

Sorry, bird, but it’s the law.

Parrot

What law? You’re making these laws up!

Butthead Raccoon

Well bird, that’s the law.

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, it’s the law.

Parrot

What law?

Butthead Raccoon

Well, um- the law that says when we have more stuff than you do-

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, like hats, scarves, things like that-

Butthead Raccoon

That we can take anything else we want from you too!

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, like you know if you don’t have any stuff, then you don’t have any rights to have other stuff!

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah right, we have your stuff, so we get the rest of your stuff.

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, yeah, it’s like in the bible, or something-

Parrot

The Bible?

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, it’s like religious and everything. It says “To them who have, even more shall be given”

Beavis Racoon

“and to them that don’t have, even what they have will be taken away.”

Butthead Raccoon

So like it’s the law, and it’s religious.

(The raccoons start laughing, mocking the parrot, making fun, waving the hat, scarf, candy bar, etc.)

(Mother Parrot enters and quickly takes the hat, scarf and candy bar away from the raccoons.)

Butthead Raccoon

Hey, like, what are you doing?

Mother Parrot

April Fool! April Fool! (Laughs.)

Beavis Raccoon

April Fool? What’s April Fool?

Mother Parrot

It’s April Fool’s Day! You didn’t really think I’d like you steal everything from the parrot, did you?

(Gives everything back to the parrot.)

After all, that wouldn’t be fair. And the real rules are fair, not set up so you can just steal from each other!

Beavis Raccoon

Aw man “that”

Butthead Raccoon

Aww, come on, you’re spoiling our game.

Parrot

It was just awful! I thought they were going to take everything I had! I was so scared!

Mother Parrot

No, nobody can do that. Only on April Fools’ Day would they think they could do that! Here, have another candy bar, it’ll make you feel better

(Gives another candy bar to the parrot).

Parrot

Oh, thank you,

(Parrot exits)

(Raccoons look at each other.)

Butthead Raccoon

Candy bar? You have more candy bars?

Mother Parrot

Oh yes, I have lots of candy bars.

Butthead Raccoon

So, like, can we have some more?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, like you know we would like a whole bunch of candy!

Mother Parrot

(Laughs and laughs and laughs)

No!

Butthead Raccoon

No? This is like another April Fool thing, isn’t it?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, we really get a bunch of candy bars, don’t we?

Mother Parrot

(Laughing)

Nope. April Fools is all over now. Say goodbye!

Raccoons mutter grip and yell as they all disappear.

(Somebody holds up a “THE END” sign)

CENTERING:

From Healing and the Mind by Bill Moyers:

A Story by Rachel Naomi Remen

I bought a little, falling-down cabin on the top of a mountain. It was so bad that when a friend came to see it, he said, ‘Oh, Rachel, you bought this?’ But with two carpenters, an electrician, and a plumber, in three years we have remodeled the whole thing. We started by just throwing things away–bathtubs, light fixtures, windows. I kept hearing my father’s voice saying, ‘That’s a perfectly good light fixture, why are you throwing it away?’ We kept throwing away more and more things, and with everything we threw away, the building became more whole. It had more integrity. Finally, we had thrown away everything that didn’t belong. You know, we may think we need to be more in order to be whole. But in some ways, we need to be less. We need to let go, to throw away everything that isn’t us in order to be more whole.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you–all the expectations, all of the beliefs–and becoming who you are. Not a better you, but a more real you.

SERMON: “It Ain’t Necessarily So”

(It ain’t necessarily so, it ain’t necessarily so; the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so, etc.)

April Fools’ Day demands some foolishness and some seriousness, and I think they should be mixed in unpredictable ways.

As a student of religion, I agree with almost every word in that Gershwin song from 1935. But the orthodoxy I want to challenge today isn’t from the Bible.

Most of the time, people expect their religions to keep them content and happy rather than awake and concerned. Nobody comes to church hoping they will feel worse for the trip. But like the little poem on the cover of your order of service by Danish poet Piet Hein, I want to mix fun and earnestness today. (“The Eternal Twins”: “Taking fun as simply fun/ and earnestness in earnest; shows how thoroughly thou/ none of the two discernest.”)

I want to think about one of the oldest pronouncements of religion, which is that the love of money is the root of all evil. I think that’s far too simple: evil has a whole lot of roots, though the love of money is certainly one of them. This isn’t saying that money is bad, or that it isn’t good to have it. It just says that it’s seductive, that we’re easily seduced, and that if we make the mistake of falling in love with money rather than people, the effect on us and on our world may be deadly.

Take the trillion-dollar drug business. Whether you are in favor of legalizing all drugs or not, it is clear that the business wouldn’t be so big if it weren’t so profitable.

Or take pornography, which is now a $10 billion-a-year business in this country. It’s routinely attacked by conservatives as though it were a liberal demon. But when there’s that much money to be made, you should expect big businesses to be getting in on it, and they are. The New York Times recently revealed that General Motors now makes $200 million a year from pay-per-view sex films aired through its DirectTV subsidiary. That’s more money than Hustler magazine’s Larry Flynt makes on graphic sex movies. (Hightower Lowdown, 2-2-2001)

Another big profitable company, AT&T, outsells Playboy in the sex business, offering a hardcore sex channel called Hot Network that reaches 16 million homes on cable TV, plus selling pay-per-view sex in a million hotel rooms. “Revenue-wise,” says an official with AT&T’s cable channel, “it’s one of our biggest moneymakers.”

That’s an astonishing statement: “Revenue-wise, it’s one of our biggest moneymakers.” And the unspoken ending to the sentence is “Therefore, it’s a defensible activity for a reputable business.”

Please understand that I’m not bashing the rich. I don’t think poor people are any more or less moral than rich people. Given the same temptations the majority of us would act the same.

But if the love of money really is one of the roots of evil, then nobody who falls in love with it is likely to be immune.

Those stories of General Motors and AT&T embracing pornography as good business raises the question of just how far we will go. How many people are we willing to sacrifice, given the temptation of enough power, profit and privilege? It’s a sobering question. And it is a huge area. Originally, I had intended just to talk about economics, in a kind of sequel to the sermon I gave here last fall on “The Dark God of Capitalism.”

But I got sidetracked by Bill Moyers’ two-hour PBS television program this past Monday (March 26, 2001). It was called “Trade Secrets,” and was about the rules that have governed some significant areas of the chemical industries for a long time. I want to use some of that material to sketch a broad picture. Then I’ll go into much more detail on just one story that he didn’t mention, one tragic story that has been unfolding for decades, and which has probably touched almost everyone in this room. And then, as in any good sermon, I’ll relate everything back to this morning’s puppet show.

The documentation for Moyers’ program was several million pages of private letters and inter-company memos obtained from the major chemical manufacturing corporations. Some documents go back over forty years. While there is room for differences of opinion on some parts, other parts seem unambiguous.

I hope many of you saw the program. While I took a lot of notes, it was much too detailed to repeat here, and would take too long. It was a story, documented by the actual confidential memos of some giant chemical corporations like B.F. Goodrich, Dow Chemical, Union Carbide and Esso, of the wholesale betrayal of both employees and citizens. It showed that the companies have known, as far back as the 1950s, that some of their most profitable chemicals were toxic, caused cancer, dissolved bones, sterilized and killed people. They acknowledged this in private letters to each other, as they also insisted that they must all agree to keep this secret from their employees, the government and the general public. 1

One of the chemicals was vinyl chloride, the key ingredient in PVCs, which you may remember from the news stories about them not too many years ago. B.F. Goodrich knew as far back as 1959 that they were toxic and posed serious health risks to their employees, which they did. In 1966, they wrote to Monsanto, Union Carbide and others that exposure to vinyl chlorides could cause bones to dissolve. Their advisors suggested reducing it to less than 50 parts per million – though concentrations in their factories were five to ten times that high. But they never published the warnings, and continued to tell their own employees that vinyl chloride was harmless.

In 1973 Union Carbide acknowledged in private memos to the others that the companies’ secret actions in these areas could be seen as criminal conspiracy. Nevertheless, they continued to cover up and lie to employees about the deadly concentrations of vinyl chlorides in which their employees were working.

Another infamous chemical was benzene. As early as 1958, it was identified as toxic by Esso and other companies. It was linked to leukemia, and they wrote that it was so toxic that only a level of zero was safe. Also in 1958, Dow Chemical knew that Benzene’s active ingredient could cause sterility in men, and concealed this from their workers, who experienced exceptionally high rates of sterility – and which the company insisted were not work-related.

As the threat of government regulation gained force in the 1970s, the chemical companies wrote more secret memos to each other trying to find or invent a way to get more money, so they could have more political influence – or, to put it less romantically, so they could buy more politicians. Finally, before the 1980 election PACs were created as a way of pooling money to buy greater access and influence in politics. They have been spectacularly successful. In his first month in office, Ronald Reagan delayed all EPA regulations of the chemical industry until the EPA could prove their claims conclusively. The rest, you could say, is history. Many of the toxic chemicals are still unregulated.

As part of the program, Bill Moyers had samples of his own blood taken and tested. The tests showed that he had 84 foreign chemicals in his blood, including more than 15 in the dioxin family, and more than thirty in the vinyl chloride group. It’s a good bet that we do too.

These chemicals have been known to be toxic for decades, during which time the company memos show they have conspired to keep this secret from their own workers and the country as a whole. For the record, these are also the companies who own the patents and are doing the work on genetically engineered foods, introducing mutant genes and invented chemical combinations into us at every meal. These artificial products haven’t been well tested because they can’t be well tested. The slow processes of evolution have not prepared any life form on earth to deal with these new chemical inventions. So there is no way – and probably can be no way — to predict what their medium or long-term effects will be. They are, however, profitable.

What will the costs be? We don’t know. But already, brain cancer in children is up by 26%, and there is over a 60% increase in testicular cancer in young men from the profitable chemicals that are already in us.

At the end of Bill Moyers’ program, an executive representing the Chemical Manufacturers’ Association, while evading almost all questions, kept saying, “We’re a science-based industry.” No, that’s not right. Chemical companies use science as an essential part of their business. But science doesn’t drive the business or tell them to mislead their employees and the general public. They’re a profit-based industry. It’s not clear that they could survive if they weren’t. Their history shows that it is profits, not science, that steer their decisions.

I have a personal story about this difference and the difference it can make. Sixteen years ago, while I was writing my dissertation, I was offered a job as a staff chaplain at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, a huge hospital in downtown Chicago. The hospital had just been restructured to respond to what the insurance industry called DRGs, or Diagnostically-Related Groupings. The length of time the insurance companies would now reimburse the hospital for any patient’s stay was now determined not by the attending physician, but by a chart allocating a certain number of days for almost every imaginable sickness or surgery. Coincidentally, very few patients stayed longer than their insurance would cover. (To add some balance, the DRG system was the idea of Medicaid, an effort to curb excessive spending by hospitals, and patient stays that were longer than proper medical care warranted.)

My boss, who had been the head of the chaplaincy program there for about fifteen years, was struggling to understand what this change meant. The hospital’s board had been changed from doctors to MBAs and accountants, and each time he returned from a board meeting he seemed more confused. “Something fundamental has changed here,” he would say, “and I can’t see what it is.” After two or three months, he did see it, and he taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten.

Both the quality and the cost of patient care had always been central concerns of the hospital, and the same language was still being used, about quality and cost of care. But formerly, they used to say “We try to make medical care as cheap as possible, considering our primary commitment to the quality of patient care.” Now, while using the same words, the formula had been reversed. Now they were trying to provide the best medical care they could, considering their primary commitment to profitability.

That’s what the chemical companies were saying in the memos exposed in Bill Moyers’ television program. They cared about public safety, and about profits. But they cared more about profits than about public safety, and quietly sanctioned the disease and death of tens or hundreds of thousands of their employees and their fellow citizens over several decades because, revenue-wise, it was a big money-maker.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

This may be hard to believe. It is certainly disheartening to believe. But to see both the horror and the cynicism that are represented by letting concerns for profits rather than people govern a country, as I think they are in fact governing our country now, I want to tell you in some detail about something that has become an annual national tradition. You’ve all heard of it, it is called Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Last October was the fifteenth, the sixteenth annual BCAM is coming up in six more months.

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’s core message is the importance of early detection, with a special emphasis on regular mammography exams. It also carries the subtle implication that breast cancer is just something that’s somehow just “out there,” without any specific cause, and that if women get it, it’s partly because they didn’t take adequate care of themselves. How on earth can we go through sixteen years of concern about a killer like breast cancer without ever once raising the question of its possible or likely causes?

Imagine how different this story would sound if we learned, instead, that breast cancer had been linked to some chemicals commonly found in pesticides and other chemicals produced and marketed by a giant international chemical conglomerate by the name of Imperial Chemical Industries. It’s true, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month was invented by AstraZeneka, one of the subsidiary companies in the conglomerate that produced the cancer-causing chemical.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month was not devised as a public service but as the kind of “misdirection” that magicians do to distract you from the real trickery. AstraZeneka has always been the primary sponsor of this program, and has final control over all promotional and informational copy published in connection with Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As a result, no mention has ever been made of some of the known causes of this murderous disease. AstraZeneka is no longer under the giant ICI firm. But it now produces and distributes another controversial chemical called tamofixin, which has been approved to reduce the risk of contracting cancer in women with a high risk of breast cancer. So it still wants to be associated in the public eye with efforts to address breast cancer, though not with discussing the causes of the cancer.

The official story, celebrated every October, is that we are all blessed by better living through chemistry, and the chemical companies are our life-saving friends in a naturally hostile world.

But there is another way of seeing it. That is that the world is not naturally hostile. It was made hostile and deadly by the very chemicals that this and other companies are polluting us with, knowing full well their murderous effects, knowing they also make a good profit. And, as General Motors and AT&T have done with pornography, when these companies come to a fork in the road where profits go one way and concern for people go the other way, they seem to follow the profits, and create a cynical and intentionally misleading Breast Cancer Awareness Month to hide the evidence that all these women are being killed not by nature, but – at least in part — by them.

In this country, about 40,000 women will die of breast cancer this year. The disease has skyrocketed over the past 40 years. In that time, more American women have died of breast cancer than the total of all American soldiers killed in all the wars of the 20th century combined. If there is a more cynical story around, a story continually showing brutally how greed kills when profits are elevated over people, I don’t know what it is.

Now we have a new president in our country, and every member of his cabinet comes with longstanding and powerful ties to the biggest and most powerful corporations in America. I won’t read you the whole list here, though I’ll put it in the version of this sermon that is posted on the church website and printed in hard copies. But twelve of President Bush’s cabinet members came from, have strong ties to, or will return to, virtually every major corporation in the country. And both the President and Vice President come from and represent the oil industry.

Some people who claim to be knowledgeable claim that the corporate control of our national government has never been this complete. I don’t know. But if programs like Bill Moyers’ expose of the chemical industry and the sad, cynical story of the real origin and purpose of Breast Cancer Awareness Month are fair indications of what lies ahead, we may be entering a chapter in this country’s history that we will look back on in shame. Many European countries already see it that way.

The most fundamental power that rulers can have is the power to write the story within which we agree to live. Those who control a society’s story are its invisible puppeteers.

The mother in this morning’s puppet show was an April Fools’ joke. There is no mother to keep the rules fair. There’s just us. I think that enough rules are out of control that we are on the verge of losing our health, our safety, perhaps our country.

I think that at least some of what I’ve said here has been persuasive for some of you. You are the brightest and most creative group of people with whom I’ve ever had the privilege of working. I wonder if there isn’t something that we can do in this area to make a positive difference in the lives of ourselves, our children and the larger community? I can’t organize anything, but if there are those here who feel drawn to these issues and have some organizational skills, I will do what I can to help you. There must be many ways in which we can begin to make a positive difference. I don’t know what they are. But I keep thinking of that puppet show. Those raccoons and the parrot – they were just puppets. We’re not.

—————

Addenda:

Here is a partial list of President Bush’s Cabinet members and their corporate connections, taken from Jim Hightower’s newsletter The Hightower Lowdown. I’m repeating most of this from a column by Molly Ivins where she quoted Hightower:

Elaine Chao – Bank of America, Dole Foods, Northwest Airlines, Columbia/HCA Health Care

Norman Mineta – was a top Washington lobbyist for Lockheed Martin before joining the corporate cabinet as Transportation secretary.

Gale Norton – Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, Ford, and Phillips 66, all funders of the Mountain States Legal Foundation from whence she came. She also chaired the Republican Environmental Advocates, funded by American Forest & Paper Association, Amoco, ARCO, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and Ford.

Paul O’Neill – Alcoa, International Paper Company, Eastman Kodak, and Lucent Technologies.

Anthony Principi – QTC Medical Services, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems, and Federal Network.

Donald Rumsfeld – General Instrument Corporation, G.D. Searle & Co., Asea Brown Bavari, the Tribune Company, Gilead Sciences, Ind., RAND Corporation, Salomon Smith Barney.

Colin Powell – America Online and General Dynamics, plus a very long list of corporations that paid $100,000 per speech.

G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, & Commerce Secretary Donald Evans – all Texas oilmen representing the oil industry.

John Ashcroft – Particularly close to the Schering-Plough pharmaceutical company and was heavily funded by BP Amoco, Exxon, Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, Union Carbide, and Weyerhauser.

Spencer Abraham – Energy Secretary, sponsored a bill to abolish the Energy Department and led the fight in the Senate to defeat greater fuel efficiency for SUVs, a cause dear to both auto and energy industries.

Ron Paige – Education Secretary, is an enthusiastic corporatizer of the public schools. While he was superintendent in Houston, he privatized food services, payrool, and accounting, signed a contract with Coca-Cola to put Coke bottles in the halls, and with Primedia Corporation to broadcast Channel One in the public schools.

Ann Veneman – Agriculture Secretary, was on the board of Calgene, Inc., which produces genetically altered food, and was connected with an agribusiness front group funded by Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Kraft, and Nestle.

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Davidson Loehr

March 25, 2001

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This is the fifth in a series that I have been doing on different approaches to belief. Even though it would be easy to do a hundred sermons on the different approaches to religious experience this will do it for this year. So far I talked about religious experience talked about through “God Language”, expressed through rational or scientific language, or in mystical styles. Last week I talked about reclaiming some the the feminine symbols and life. These are four different directions and I know people who think they are mutually incompatible….

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Davidson Loehr

February 18, 2001

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STORY: “What you need to grow”

There was a boy with an unusual problem. He was only two feet tall, and all of his school classmates made terrible fun of him, calling him all the names you might imagine, and more. One day he heard that there was an old Wise Woman living on a hill outside of town, who had been known to be able to solve problems like this.

So he went outside of town and climbed the hill to find the old woman. She was there, and welcomed him in. “Old Wise Woman,” he said, I have a terrible problem!” “Well,” she replied, “have a seat, and tell me your story.” So he did, pointing out that he was only two feet tall, and nobody else he knew was only two feet tall.

The old woman smiled, studied him for a bit, and then announced, “Well, I know what your problem is, for I have seen it before. Your problem is that you don’t have enough stories in you.”

“What?” said the boy, very surprised by such a silly answer. “I don’t have enough what?”

“Stories,” she repeated. “You don’t have enough good stories in you. Without good stories, you will probably never grow any bigger at all. So go back home, and during the next year start listening to stories, and collecting them. Come back to see me in a year, and we’ll see how you’re doing.”

He hardly knew what to do! He’d never really thought of collecting stories before! The idea! He didn’t even know what to listen to, so he just listened to everything that came easily along. He heard a lot of very bad jokes, and a lot of very nasty gossip about his own friends, always spoken behind their backs.

The next year, he returned to the cabin of the old Wise Woman. “Stand up,” she said, “and we’ll measure you.” She did, and the news was very bad: he had actually shrunk! “Goodness!” she said as though she were surprised, “What kind of stories have you been listening to?” He told her, and she just shook her head. “Well, no wonder you’re shrinking! You can’t grow by taking in bad stories! They can only make you smaller! Now go back home, and this next year I want you to listen to stories of what people love. Just that. Now go!”

Another frustrating year! Though the second year wasn’t as bad as the first, for he heard much nicer stories. He learned that his friend had a gerbil named Max that she loved like crazy. She invited him over to her house, showed him her pet, and even took Max out so the boy could hold and pet him. “Oh, wow!” he said, and he felt like he had just grown an inch.

Another friend loved riding his bicycle, because he rode it, he said, to the most beautiful place in the whole world, a place he loved more than anyplace. So the boy rode out with him one day, to the top of a very high hill, and saw the most beautiful view he had ever seen. “Oh, wow!” he said.

There were other stories he heard that year, about pets places and people that were loved by his family and friends. He had never known these things about them before, and each time he learned what someone else loved, and shared that love with them, his world got a little bigger, and he felt like he was getting bigger too. He could hardly wait to see the Old Wise Woman again!

And, sure enough, he had grown, and grown a lot! “You see?” she said, shaking her finger at him, “You need good stories in order to grow! Now go back home and collect more stories. This time, learn what it is that makes people bigger. Now go!”

Well, this year was more fun. He began learning about all his friends’ religions, the things they believed that made them bigger, and he learned all sorts of things! One friend told him about Jesus. She told him all kinds of stories about Jesus, and about how having Jesus in her life made her feel better and more safe. She even showed him her blue bracelet that said “WWJD?” on it, and explained that it meant “What Would Jesus Do?” and was the question she asked herself whenever she had a hard decision to make.

“Oh, wow!” he said: “Jesus!”

Another friend had just moved to this country with his family from Iran during the last year. He said he was a Muslim, and told the boy about Allah, who was the God of his religion. He spoke of how he kept Allah in mind during the day, how Allah was like an invisible friend and parent, and how he never felt alone because of his faith in Allah.

“Oh, wow!” said the boy: “Allah!”

Still another friend was Buddhist, another religion the boy had never heard of. The friend told him the famous story of how the Buddha had once held up a Lotus blossom in his hand, to teach that the Lotus blossom is like the whole world: it seems so small, so easy to hold, but when it unfolds it contains all kinds of wonderful and unsuspected things.

“Oh, wow!” said the boy: “Buddha!”

These stories were so interesting, he collected them for a long time, and forgot about the Old Wise Woman. Years later, when the boy had grown, he decided to go see her once more. “Let’s measure you!” she said when she saw him, and she stood up to face him. He was now taller than she was! “Yes!” she exclaimed, “This is the day I’ve been waiting for! Come sit here,” she motioned toward her own chair, “there is someone who wants to meet you.”

The boy sat in the chair, the Old Wise Woman seemed to disappear, and suddenly a young girl entered the room. “Old Wise Man,” she said, “I have a terrible problem!”

He looked at the girl, who was only two feet tall. He smiled at her, and said “Please sit, and tell me your story.”

SERMON: “Oh, God!”

 “There is no race so wild and untamed as to be ignorant of the existence of God.” That’s an old quotation. The god he was talking about was Jupiter, for those words were written by the Roman Cicero, 2045 years ago (44 BCE). Well, today perhaps we are that race “wild and untamed,” for few of us spend three thoughts a year on Jupiter or his Greek version, Zeus (though we spend some time on them, as we will see).

If you read in some religions like Buddhism or Taoism, you won’t encounter the word “god” much, because those faiths don’t use god-talk to think about life. But in all Western religions based on the Hebrew scriptures, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you read about God on nearly every page. So since almost all of us were raised in this Western culture, it may sound odd when I say that religion isn’t about God. But it isn’t. Religion isn’t about God. It’s about something else. Still, when you read the great writers of (especially) Western religions, It looks like God is what they are going on about, especially if you read literalistic, rather than liberal, theologians.

It’s an odd fact, but in their own time, almost every famous theologian of history was quite liberal, and most of them took great pains to distance themselves from the literalists of their day, and they seldom did it politely, either! When they used the word “God” they meant something with it that sounds pretty modern, no matter when they lived. I’ve chosen some quotations from some ancient and some modern people talking about the meaning of the word “God.” I’ve picked only a few, because of the well-established scientific fact that if you listen to more than six theologians in a row you are almost certain, right on the spot, to drop dead from boredom.

First was one of my favorites, the 3rd century Christian theologian Origen. It is said that when he died, he left behind over one thousand theological writings. He was born in 185 and died, after imprisonment and extended torture, in 253.

“God must not be thought of as a physical being, or as having any kind of body,” he wrote. “He is pure mind. He moves and acts without needing any corporeal space, or size, or form, or color, or any other property of matter.”

The other ancient theologian is St. Augustine. He lived in North Africa, from 354 to 430, and could be considered the inventor of Roman Catholicism. Augustine had some complex and strange ideas about sex and sin, but when he talked about the meaning of the word “God” he was quite liberal:

“Some people imagine God as a kind of man or as a vast bodily substance endowed with power, who by some new and sudden decision created heaven and earth. When these people hear that God said “Let such and such be made”, and accordingly it was made, they think that once the words had been pronounced, whatever was ordered to come into existence immediately did so. Any other thoughts which occur to them are limited in the same way by their attachment to the familiar material world around them. These people are still like children. But the very simplicity of the language of Scripture sustains them in their weakness as a mother cradles an infant in her lap. But there are others for whom the words of Scripture are no longer a nest but a leafy orchard, where they see the hidden fruit. They fly about it in joy, breaking into song as they gaze at the fruit and feed upon it.” (Confessions, p. 304 in Penguin Classics edition).

I’m not sure that many newspapers would even print quotations from liberal ministers today who described fundamentalists as being “still like children”! You get the idea that God, at least in the hands of the best theologians, is a bit of a mystery. It sounds like a Fellow, but it isn’t a Fellow, isn’t a being, doesn’t live in the sky, doesn’t have a body at all. It’s something else. I hope for us to get a glimpse of what that something else is today.

Let’s jump from the fifth to the nineteenth century, to one of the first Unitarian preachers in the United States. His name was William Ellery Channing. These two sentences come from the 1830s, but see how similar they sound to the two ancient ones, and to things you might say today:

“God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth. The only God whom our thoughts can rest on, our hearts cling to, and our conscience can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls.”

I’ll add two more thinkers from the 20th century, a historian and a novelist. First, the historian:

“I find in the universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law, and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order, and law of the world.” Will Durant, This I Believe, 1954

And the novelist Upton Sinclair wrote “I am sustained by a sense of the worthwhileness of what I am doing: a trust in the good faith of the process which created and sustains me. That process I call God.” (What God Means to Me, 1935)

It looks like Voltaire may have been right when he wrote that “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him”!

Still, the best theologians have been clear that the word “God” isn’t the name of a Being somewhere. It’s a symbol, our most powerful symbol, being used to allude to something that is beyond our ability to express.

The Buddhists have a metaphor for this. They call it the finger pointing at the moon. They say we usually mistake the finger for the moon. We do that with symbols. We mistake them for what they’re point to, and worship the symbol instead of that unnameable thing to which the symbol is pointing. You could almost say that we worship God rather than that to which the symbol of God is pointing.

For many people today, perhaps for many of you, the word “God” is associated with so much hypocrisy and deception you don’t even want to hear it. I don’t have such strong reactions against it, but I’ll admit that for me too, God-language isn’t the most interesting or useful way to talk about life’s most enduring questions and yearnings.

On the other hand, I don’t think illiteracy should be defended, and that includes religious illiteracy. I think God-language is one of the languages we need to understand, especially if we want to communicate with most other people.

So what is it like, this business of using powerful words like God? Here is an analogy that might be useful. I pick up a Stradivarius violin, perhaps the best violin ever made. I put a bow to it, saw back and forth, and make horrible squawking noises that scare the cats. I put it down and say “What an ugly instrument is the violin!” But the fault wasn’t with the violin. I just didn’t know how to play it.

I may not want to play the violin. Most of us don’t. I’d prefer the clarinet, which I can’t play very well either. But our lives can be enriched if we are open to hearing the music that can be created by those who can play the violin well.

The music analogy is helpful for religion, though it isn’t exact. Those who love the violin have never declared war on clarinet players, tried to convert them to violin, or burned them at the stake for persisting in the heretical love of clarinet sounds. A symbol like the word “God” is just far more powerful. If we get it right, it can be sublime. If we get it wrong, it can be vulgar, vicious, deadly. Some of the meanest hatreds I have ever seen were defended as God’s will.

But that’s where god-talk is like a violin again. It measures the character, imagination and heart of those who use it. Or maybe its double-edged quality makes it more like a bow and arrow. If you are an archer, you can use a bow and arrow to get food, to attack an enemy, or — if you’re really good at is, as Cupid was as a vehicle for expressing love.

At its best, God-language is a language of power and glory. We know that’s true, but it’s odd. How would a word have that kind of power? Nationalism has a similar potential for power and glory. It is not a mystery why these two vocabularies of God-talk and patriotism have that deep kind of power and glory, but it’s worth mentioning it.

It goes far deeper than religion. It goes far, far back into our evolutionary past, and is studied in the field of etholgy, or comparative animal behavior. Both the worship of God and the allegiance to a country are behaviors that look a lot like behaviors in a million other species. So let me back off from religion for a minute, to look at it from outside.

We are deeply territorial animals. That means that our sense of who we are is deeply connected to our place, our people, and our way of life. We build fences around our yards, defend our borders, and make battle-cries out of territorial boundaries like “Fifty-four forty or fight!” When we do these things, we are doing with weapons, flags and rationalizing speeches what a million other territorial animals do with teeth, threats and squawks or roars. Remember that a dog barks at strangers from inside your fence for the same reason you built the fence. So “nationalism” and “patriotism” are the words we have invented to describe and call forth our territorial instincts.

Besides being territorial animals, we are also hierarchical animals. We defer to presidents and kings, we fear the boss’s wrath. The ancient Greeks used to talk about how their god Zeus would throw lightning bolts down from above when he was angry. And even today, when somebody speaks out against authority figures, we still talk about “waiting for the lightning to strike.” In short, as students of animal behavior have noticed, God looks a lot like an Alpha Male. Alpha Males are the dominant males that rule the troop or herd. They are the top dog, the silverback gorilla, the male lion who rules the pride of lions. In a million different species, including ours, the acknowledged role of Alpha Males is to set the behavioral boundaries, reward the obedient and threaten or discipline the disobedient. They protect and punish and bomb Bagdhad and those under them fear their wrath and seek their approval. Their job is to draw the boundaries of their tribe’s permissible world. They keep the natives in and the aliens out.

A lot of scholars have said that the god of the ancient Hebrews looks like a super-sized tribal chief. And the God of the Bible was probably first formed as a projection of a tribal chief from somewhere in Canaan, the source of the ancient Hebrews’ religion. But even more anciently, it looks like the Alpha Males of a million other hierarchical species.

So God is an Alpha Male that embodies and claims ultimacy for our sense of place, normative behaviors, our amity toward those who are like us and our enmity toward outsiders. Religious wars show this on a large scale. Creeds, heresy trials and shaming sinners are close-up examples.

There’s something in us that needs to know who we are, whose we are and where our place is in life, the world, everything. And judging by our history, it looks like we need to believe that we’ve heard the answer from On High.

So God, at least in the three religions based on the Bible, is a symbolic vehicle for our highest hopes, our deepest fears, our assurance that the world is safe, we have a meaningful place in it. We make him our father, our father who art in heaven. We crave his love and fear his wrath and seek our peace in an obedient relationship with Him, usually mediated by priests, creeds, rituals and sacraments.

You see that what we’re exploring here is not gods but some of our own deepest levels. Our most powerful symbols measure us as a Stradivarius violin measures us if we try to play it.

Once you frame your quest in god-language, you can go either shallow or deep, the language permits both literalism and liberalism, as theologians have been noting for a couple thousand years or more.

Origen, that 3rd century Christian theologian I quoted earlier, taught that religious scriptures had three levels, which he called the body, soul and spirit. The “body” was the lowest level, the literal level, and he had nothing good to say for it. He thought nothing religious could happen at that level. To understand the “soul” of scripture meant you could raise it a level, and understand the key words, including the word “God” as symbols and metaphors for a deeper kind of awareness and wisdom. And at the highest level, those who understood the “spirit” of religious writings finally see that religion isn’t finally intellectual. It isn’t finally about holy words, but about living a holy life. He wrote that the cardinal rule of understanding religious scriptures is to seek out those things “which are useful to us and worthy of God.” That was the 3rd century, and it’s about as liberal as you can get!

So what is god-talk? It isn’t the name of a Being. It’s a language, an idiom of expression, a certain stylized way of thinking and talking about the human situation understood profoundly.

For me, part of what it means to become human religiously lies in learning how to hear spiritual music played in different keys, on different instruments, in different idioms of expression. It’s being able to hear the violins, the clarinets, the trumpet, drums, the oboe and the rest of it. In religion, it is the learned ability to allow the many different religious languages easy access to our minds and our hearts. The whole human sound, and the full divine sound, goes up only from the full orchestra and chorus.

I work every week, struggling to find words to wrap around who we are, what we seek, and how we might find it and let it find us. Expressing it with power and glory is an art. I seldom achieve it, and always admire it when I hear someone else do it. There are things we know, and things for which we yearn, and I don’t think they have changed much throughout our history.

We know that whatever the forces of life are, they’ve been a part of us forever. These incomprehensible dynamics gave rise to the world and all life on it, including ours. In the span of our planet’s billions of years, we’re hardly here for an eyeblink, then we fly away, and return to the dust from which we came. Our lives are swept away by these infinite forces, as though we didn’t even matter.

Who can begin to measure this power? The sustaining parts of life may feel like love, but the destructive aspects, accident, disease, war, the death of those we love, if we take it personally, and we almost always do, those things can feel like anger, even wrath. If we could get a little humility by seeing ourselves and our vanities against this immense background, we would probably be wiser than we are. In the face of this immensity, we yearn for a sense of peace, a sense that we are, somehow a beloved, a cherished, part of it all. And we wish the things we work for during our lives could somehow become established, and outlive us. Most people can die in peace if they know that the things they have loved, the things they have worked to create, will outlive them. I think, though my language wasn’t very poetic, that everyone who has ever lived has had these feelings and hopes.

Now let me play you the same song I just gave you in the last two paragraphs. But this time, I’ll play it on a borrowed Stradivarius. Listen to those same basic human concerns, as they were expressed by an anonymous poet of perhaps 2500 years ago, in the 90th Psalm of the Hebrew Scriptures, or “Old Testament.” Here is that old tribal god, that ancient Alpha Male, raised to the level of timeless beauty.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.

Thou turnest us back to dust, saying “Turn back, O Children of Adam!” For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.

Thou dost sweep us away; we are like a dream, like grass which is renewed in the morning: in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.

For we are consumed by thy anger; by thy wrath we are overwhelmed. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For all our days pass away under thy wrath, our years come to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of thy anger, and thy wrath according to the fear of thee? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on thy servants! Satisfy us in the morning with thy steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad as many days as thou has afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil.

Let thy work be manifest to thy servants, and thy glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

Oh, God!

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

February 11, 2001

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PUPPET SHOW:

INTRO. (Lisa): Now is the time for children to come down for the Story for All Ages. Children please come sit in front of the curtain and bring your gifts for Caritas so you can put them in the wagon after the puppet show. And now The First UU No Strings Attached Puppet Players present”The Lesson”.

GRUMP: I am so bored, nothing ever happens at this church.

BIG RACCOON: We’re looking for sticks!

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

BIG RACCOON: You can do lots of tricks with sticks. Can you help us?

LITTLE RACCOON: Were in a fix. We need some sticks!

GRUMP: Uh, no. (sarcastically)

WOLF: I need some bricks to go with their sticks ’cause we’ve got a lot of fun things to fix. Would you like to join us and show off your tricks?

GRUMP: You people. I mean puppets, are nuts!

CATERPILLAR: I was wondering whether, you might have a feather? If you join me, we could make things together.

GRUMP: What do I look like, Big Bird?

CATERPILLAR: Could I assume, you don’t have a plume?

GRUMP: No, but you need a padded room.

BIG RACCOON: (appears with sticks) Would you help us with our sticks?

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

WOLF: (with brick) Would you help me lay some bricks?

CATERPILLAR: (appears with feathers) Would you help me glue some feathers?

ALL PUPPETS: We can all have fun together!

GRUMP: No, I will not help you with your sticks! I will not help you lay some bricks! I will not help you glue your feathers! Why don’t you all get lost together!

BIG RACCOON: Okay.

LITTLE RACCOON: Have it your way.

WOLF: You don’t have to huff and puff about it.

CATEPILLAR: What a bird brain!

(Puppets disappear and make all kinds of construction noises.)

(Raccoons and Wolf appear with house)

WOLF: All you do is gripe and grouse.

BIG RACCOON: But look at us.

LITTLE RACCOON: We made a house!

GRUMP: That’s not fair! I don’t have a house!

WOLF: Stop your complaining.

BIG RACCOON: Stop your grousing! You had your chance.

(Turn house to logo)

LITTLE RACCOON: at Paws-on-Housing!

GRUMP: DOH! (Buries head in hands)

BIRD: Look at me up in the sky. With these wings, I can fly!

GRUMP: I want to fly. I want a house. I wish I hadn’t been such a louse. You’re right, you’re right. I’ve learned, I’ve learned. I have no right to what I’ve spurned. I’ve learned my lesson. Okay. Okay. Now what can I help you make today? (Walks over to side of puppets.)

BIG RACCOON: I ‘ve got some string.

LITTLE RACCOON: String!

WOLF: I’ve got some glue!

BIRD: Let’s go figure out what to do!

ALL: Yea!

END

SERMON: Choosing the Feathered Things

As many of you have read in the latest church newsletter, your governing board and I have been busy during the last month, on two very exciting projects. The first was the remarkable offer of 142 acres of land in the Hill Country, complete with four buildings, a new barn and an outdoor pool. Some of you have visited the land; I hope others will make the trip to see it before you vote on whether to recommend that your board accept this gift in the congregational meeting two weeks from today. There are some legal and financial details we are still investigating, and some good sober questions we need to resolve, but it’s an amazing gift, filled with exciting possibilities.

For me, though, the other project was even more exciting. Your board and I developed an ambitious model for serving the church that we have modestly called The Austin Model. While it will evolve and change over time, as a living thing would do, its essence is really very simple. We know that organizations, including churches, exist to make a difference in the world, that they are supposed to be doing something. It is like sailing a boat rather than minding the store, and like standing on the bridge to see where we’re actually going rather than being in the engine room check oil levels. We’re not just trying to stay afloat, we need to ask where are we going, and are we making any progress?

Here’s another way of understanding it. We are taking nearly a half million dollars a year from this community, and the time and talents of over five hundred adults. What are we doing that’s worth that amount of time, energy and money? The money could be used instead to open a bookstore, a little coffee house, maybe a donut shop. In what ways is what we are doing more worthwhile than that? I think we need to be able to answer, both to ourselves and to the community, just what differences we are making that are worth that kind of time and money. And I think you need to be able to give a satisfactory answer to your Baptist or Catholic friends who wonder what in hell (or at least the preparation for hell) you are doing here.

We want to begin consciously planning the actions of myself and the other staff to make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and the community. And as far as possible, we want to take a rough measurement of the differences we are making, and keep you informed of them so that you will feel some of the excitement as we move in this new style.

This may all sound very obvious, you might expect that of course all churches and all organizations would think this way. But they don’t. And to be honest, it is an intimidating prospect, this business of actually taking who we are and what we’re doing with your money and your trust seriously enough to measure our actions by the differences they are making.

It is exciting and frankly, a little scary. It changes, or at least sharpens, my focus in planning sermons.

I wonder what I should do to be more intentional and effective in addressing issues that might make a positive difference in your life, the lives of your children and the community? How do we choose the things in life that might make a positive difference? Or in terms of this morning’s puppet show, how do we choose those things we need to make a home, or those feathered things that can help our spirit take flight? It was Emily Dickinson who said that hope is the thing with feathers, and I’ve always liked her definition. Hope is the thing with feathers, the thing that lifts us up. How do we choose that thing?

There is plenty to gripe about if we’d rather do that, you know. Our lives aren’t as perfect as we fantasize they should be. Not everybody loves us, or even understands us. Our jobs are like most jobs, filled with ups and downs, but not ideal. And as of this week with Motorola’s layoffs, there are over 4,000 fewer jobs in Austin, a number that may soon increase. Besides our jobs, our relationships are seldom perfect. And our kids will almost all grow up to be just regular old adults, not the envy of the civilized world. They’ll probably make about as many dumb mistakes as we did, as will their kids and their kids’ kids. It’s easy to just sit it out, gripe that Nuts, I don’t like this place, or this place, or this place. And we do it too often and too easily, don’t we?

It’s as though we come to believe that the world owes us something. As though we were born with this long list of entitlements. I don’t think we are. I think there is only one gift offered to us, and that is the gift of life itself. I think we’re paid in full the day we’re born. After that, it’s up to us to learn how to negotiate for the other things we wish we had. I don’t think the world owes us love. It doesn’t even owe us fairness or justice. Those are conditions we have to create if we really want them. We were given life, and the chance to make something of it, or just sit and be disappointed. It matters what we believe. It also matters what we choose.

And given the choice, we have to work to discover who we are and make a home for ourselves in life. We need to choose the things with feathers. And I think we must wish the same for others, and try to make our interactions with them positive rather than negative, creative rather than destructive. If our beliefs can’t help us do that, we probably have the wrong beliefs. If they can help us do that, they’re probably working fairly well for us and those in our greater community. That’s a pretty pragmatic approach to religion, but I think it’s the right one.

But the only real miracle is the gift of life. It wasn’t supposed to be perfect, it was only supposed to present itself to us, to let us see what we would and could do with it. If we sit back like couch potatoes waiting for life to please us, it will probably be a very long wait. This is true in churches, too, including this one.

Several years ago I was talking about things like this with two colleagues, and we discovered that the same visitor had been to each of our churches a few times, and then went away. So she had visited a Unitarian church, an American Baptist church, and a liberal Disciples of Christ church.

They were all good churches with good people. In each one, the visitor could have found ways to ask her questions, to meet wonderful friends, to struggle with personal and spiritual issues on several levels. None of the churches was any more perfect than the visitor, but they were all good enough. Maybe she finally found a church where she decided to take root, make friends and become a participant rather than an onlooker. If so, she was the exception.

It’s easy to read this as a failure of the church to integrate visitors, and it’s fair. We could do more to integrate visitors into the body of the church, and we should. But it isn’t only a failure of the churches. It’s also the habit of people to see themselves only as shoppers who keep moving on until something finds a way of keeping them there.

If you are a visitor here, or have just been coming for a few months, here’s something to think about: less than half of you will still be here a year from now. In this or any other church, most who come never join, never make a commitment, and never become a part of the church. Liberal churches, conservative churches, big churches, little churches, it’s the same: most visitors don’t last a year.

I think people visit churches sort of thinking, “Well, I’ll just sit here quietly and see if they swarm around me to make me feel welcome.’ The truth is, it isn’t likely to happen very often. So while I want to welcome all visitors, I want to challenge you. Don’t be passive here. Don’t expect these people to try harder to keep you than you try to stay. We’re not any better at it than you are, and creating a meaningful relationship is a two-way street.

And the way you stay ‘ here or anywhere ‘ is to seek for and choose those things, those relationships, that you can build on and grow from. Seek the things you need to make a home for yourself here, and seek the hopeful things, the bits that nourish you.

This isn’t something I have always known. It is something I learned in a memorable moment. And while I can’t give you the experience I had, I can tell you the story.

It was about twenty years ago, in a preaching class in graduate school. David, our professor was a very gifted preacher who was deeply serious about the ministry, and equally serious about professionalism. In those minutes before class begins, several of the students were whining about the church they all attended, complaining that the preacher was horrible, the service was amateurish, and they didn’t get a single thing out of it. David glared at these future ministers and said ‘How hard did you try?’

That was the first time I really understood that attending a worship service, like attending to living, is meant to be an activity, not a passivity. It changed a lot for me. The church I attended during graduate school also had a very poor preacher, and I could fall into whining about not getting anything out of the worship service as quickly as the next person.

But after that day in class, the question ‘How hard did you try?’ stayed with me. And, while I seldom heard a sermon worth remembering in the next five years, I was always glad I had attended church, but each week I saw it as a personal challenge to find something moving, something memorable in the service. Sometimes, it was the organist, sometimes the sound or feel of a hymn. Sometimes, it was just sitting there as the candles were extinguished, watching the wispy smoke rise up into the dark at the top of the big old church, thinking of the smoke as a spirit set free. But every Sunday, I went to church to try and find something, and it made all the difference.

So if you are a visitor, or have been coming here less than a year, I want to offer you a challenge. Don’t sit passively with us. Come try with us. Or if this church doesn’t suit you and you need to find another, try hard there.

Most churches are pretty good, and this one is pretty good too. We can raise spiritual questions here without any regard for whether they cross over the boundaries of an orthodoxy. You can find some interesting and engaging people here whose spiritual searches are similar to your own, once you get to know one another. We have a strong and active social conscience, we are important parts of our community, and during the coming years we will learn to make even bigger positive differences in the community.

So I challenge you to try hard here, and to come up to me next February and tell me you are still here. We’re not unfriendly. In fact I think many of us are quite friendly. But acceptance and community here require some effort on your part. If you want meaningful relationships and associations here, you have to try. If you want to feel chosen, you have to choose. If you want to live in a friendly community, you need to make friends. I challenge you to come see me and tell me you have done it.

Now some of you are sitting there thinking “Yeah, right!” It’s a lot easier said than done. We sit passively; we hesitate to reach out, to meet new people, partly because most of us just aren’t very good at it, but also because it is very risky. You could fail, feel rebuffed, and be embarrassed. It is so easy to stand back, mind the shop, wait cautiously to see if maybe the world will take the first step, come to you, and make it easy.

It’s like sailing a boat again. Much of life is kind of like sailing a boat. On shore, the boat looks good, and you can have all these great fantasies about how cool it would be to be sailing. But once you actually put the boat in the water, it’s bound to get messier. The wind comes up, the balance shifts, you have to learn what you’re doing, and not all lessons keep you dry.

I like this sailing metaphor even though my experience with sailboats has not been impressive. I was about sixteen the first time I went sailing. My friend Tom took me out in his family’s small sailboat. He steered, I sat on one side feeling the breeze and thinking how cool this was, this sailing business. Within a few minutes, he uttered the strangest sentence I had ever heard in my life. “Prepare to come about,” he said. “Prepare to come about,” I thought: hey, that must be sailing talk. Now I really know I’m a sailor, because we’re talking sailing talk. This is so cool!

Then, with absolutely no warning, I learned what that four-word bit of sailing talk meant. For the land-lubbers here, those words are a kind of shorthand that mean “In about three seconds, the sail is going to swing across the boat, hit you in the chest, knock you overboard, and tip the whole boat over!” Tom explained that to me while we were swimming around in the middle of the lake. And I decided, right there bobbing up and down like fish bait, that I didn’t much like sailing. I still liked the idea of sailing, and the fantasies about it, as long as no boat containing me ever touched the water.

So I understand the fear of failure, and the fact that wishing something were so doesn’t accomplish a single thing, though it’s not as intimidating as putting the boat into the water. I suspect that’s why, in so many areas of life, we are controlled by our fears rather than our hopes, and keep our boats on the shore. We don’t want to fail, we don’t want to be embarrassed, and we don’t want to feel like an idiot.

Sometimes, it helps to hear stories about others who have failed, so we don’t feel so alone when it happens to us. So I have another story for you about someone who was so good at failure he made a career out of it. If you’ve ever felt foolish or inadequate because you made a fool of yourself, this might make you feel better.

It was a while ago; he was a man without any apparent gifts or any apparent luck. I have never personally known such a failure, and I doubt that you have either.

First, he failed as a businessman. Maybe he thought politics would be easier, so the next year he ran for the state legislature, and lost. He went back into business and two years later, he failed in business again.

Besides his habit of failure, life wasn’t very kind to him and he wasn’t very lucky, because the following year his sweetheart died and the next year, not surprisingly, he had a nervous breakdown. Two years later, incredibly, he tried politics for a third time, and for a third time he lost. Then perhaps thinking that his problem was that he had set his sights too low, he ran for Congress. He lost.

About this time in reading his story, I thought this is a guy who just didn’t get it. There are people like that, and he was one of them. Life was giving him all the clues he needed, and he wasn’t listening. If he had any gifts, it seemed pretty clear they didn’t lie in running a business or in winning elections. How many times do you tip the boat over before you decide you weren’t meant to be a sailor?

Still, three years later he ran for Congress again, and was defeated again, and two years later he tried again and again he lost. This man had never won an election. He had run five times and lost five times. When do you get tired of bobbing up and down in the middle of the lake like fish bait? But he wasn’t through. He decided to aim still higher.

So his sixth defeat was for the Senate, his seventh defeat was for the Vice Presidency, and his eighth consecutive defeat, with no victories, was for the Senate again.

Finally, finally! Two years later, he was elected President. Then he won the second and last election of his life when he was re-elected as President in 1864. If you look on your calendars or your daily planners, they’ll tell you that tomorrow is his birthday. We Americans tell a lot of stories about Abraham Lincoln. But we almost never remember that in his whole life, he won only two elections and one war and his victory in that war is still not universally acclaimed in some parts of the South.

But how, after so many successive defeats, was he able to keep choosing the feathered thing? How did he keep putting the boat in the water, when it had turned over on him eight times in a row? I honestly don’t know. I wouldn’t have done it. I would have given up, or found another career, some time before the eighth consecutive failure. I suspect most of you would have, too. That’s just one of the reasons that we won’t have our birthdays written into the next century’s calendars. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time looking for sticks and bricks, looking to stop and make a home. But Abraham Lincoln had an amazing ability to keep looking for and finding hope over, and over, and over again.

If this were a competition, we could feel pretty inadequate next to Lincoln. But this is church. This is the time and the place when we gather together to seek inspiration from higher visions and strivings of more nobility and character. Sometimes we do it by looking to the lives of great religious figures. Today, I used the life of a great American for whom official religion was not a very important category. It is remarkable, I think, how many similarities we find in the lives of great religious figures and great civic figures.

They all show the powerful presence of an invisible kind of force, a kind of dynamism that helped them steer the course of their lives. It isn’t a “force” in the sense of some scientifically demonstrable energy field; it is the force of a powerful and life-affirming kind of attitude. The power of that hopeful, trusting attitude beckons to me through these stories, and I hope it beckons to you as well.

Because life wants to be an active word, not a passive one. And there is a source for that activity that seems to dwell within and around us. Call it the will of God, the inner and outer moving of the Holy Spirit, the Tao, the dynamic presence of the Life Force, or call it something else. As long as you can call it forth, it doesn’t much matter what you

call it. But it has feathers, this indescribable thing. And if we can keep seeking and choosing that feathered thing, it will absolutely make all the difference: all the difference in the world.

Endnotes

The puppet show script was a collaborative effort. I gave the puppeteers a script that gave the general direction and made the points I had incorporated into the sermon. They modified and adapted it, adding their own creative twists. They also turned it into Dr. Seuss-like rhyming. The puppeteers were Lisa Sutton, Eric Kay, David Smith and Melissa Smith.

The Story of a Life

Failed in business – 1831

Lost election for legislature – 1832

Failed again in business – 1834

Sweetheart died – 1835

Nervous breakdown – 1836

Lost second political race – 1838

Defeated for Congress – 1843

Defeated for Congress – 1846

Defeated for Congress – 1848

Defeated for US Senate – 1855

Defeated for Vice President – 1856

Defeated for US Senate – 1858

Elected President – 1860

(Abraham Lincoln)

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Davidson Loehr

December 24, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

There are so many stories about these days at the end of December, and this morning I would like to tell you just a few of them. Each of the three main stories I’ll tell you seems to embody a certain central word, and for each of those three words I will light a candle. Then later in the service, I’ll use the candles to light something else, as you’ll see.

1. The oldest Christmas story is thousands and thousands of years old. That long ago, people noticed that every year at this time, when the days have been getting shorter and the nights longer, the cycle reverses, the sun starts coming back, and the days start getting brighter and longer again. Today, we call this the winter solstice. It’s December 21st on our modern calendars. But in the ancient calendars it came four days later. So in the world of several thousand years ago, long before the man Jesus lived, December 25th was already a symbolic and famous date, the date of the winter solstice.

People didn’t call it the winter solstice, though. They spoke of things in terms of their gods and goddesses. And December 25th was the birthday of their sun-god. When you think about it, the winter solstice is the day the sun starts being born again, so by definition it is the birthday of all sun gods. There were many sun-gods; each culture had its own. For the Greeks, tomorrow was Apollo’s birthday, and they carved pictures of Apollo driving his chariot pulled by flying horses across the sky, and pulling the sun behind him.

Another religion, which was much more important for our own history, even though most people have now forgotten its name, was the religion of Mithraism. Mithra was also a sun god, and tomorrow would be his birthday. Mithra was called the Son of God. Shepherds followed a special star in the sky to find the place of his birth, and they brought gifts to him on his birthday, and taught that he was the Son of God, sent to save the world. Since he was a sun-god, the sacred day for this religion was Sunday. They also carved bas-reliefs of Mithra in a chariot, pulled across the sky by flying horses.

If this story sounds familiar it’s because back in the year 336, the Christian church adopted Mithra’s birthday, December 25th, as the official birthday of Jesus, and also adopted Sunday as the holy day of Christianity. Until then, Jesus didn’t have an official birthday, and Christians didn’t celebrate Sunday. In fact, Christian writers of the first three centuries used to brag about the fact that they had no holy days, which they regarded as purely pagan practices. All that changed in the early fourth century.

And as a footnote to complete a theme I’ve mentioned twice, around 1865, the Civil War cartoonist Thomas Nast created an important image that brought an ancient theme full circle. Nast was the man who first gave us the Republicans’ elephant and the Democrats’ donkey. He was also the man who drew the picture showing us that Santa Claus rode in a flying chariot pulled through the sky by flying animals on the eve of the ancient winter solstice.

The story of Christmas on December 25th really goes back many centuries before either the Christians or the Jews existed. It was a religion of great faith: a faith that nature is trustworthy, faith that life and light will always begin returning at this time of the year, and a faith that their God was there and that he cared for them. They used evergreens, holly, ivy, mistletoe, and lights as symbols of their faith. And we still use all of their ancient symbols, as signs of our own faith.

So the first candle we’ll light for this season is the candle of Faith.

(LIGHT CANDLE OF “FAITH” AND TURN IT AROUND SO THE NAME “FAITH” SHOWS.)

2. If you are Jewish, or if you have Jewish friends, they tell a different story about this time of the year, though it is similar, too. It is the story of Hanukah, which begins on the 25th day of the Jewish month Chislev, which corresponds to what we call the 25th day of our month December.

(Tell Hanukah story)

It is a story of faith, and it is also a story of hope: hope that these forces that make the world so predictable and comfortable for us will continue to be friendly to us. They called these forces Lord, or God. For the Jews, it was and is a story of faith and hope in their God.

And so on Hanukah, Jews light not one but eight candles to stand for the faith and hope they felt when their oil light, which had only enough oil to burn for one night, burned for eight days, until more oil arrived. It was the hope that the God who had cared for them would continue to do so, and the hope that they would continue to serve that God with their hearts, minds and souls. And so the second candle we light for this season is the candle of HOPE.

(LIGHT CANDLE OF “HOPE” AND TURN IT AROUND)

3. The third Christmas candle will come from the third Christmas story. It may be the one you know the best, it’s the Christian story about December 25th. It was written about fifty years after Jesus had died, more than eighty years after he had been born. But those who put the story together put it together from parts of much older stories.

– Like the god Mithra and the Greek god Dionysus, Jesus was also a son of God, with the power to save his followers.

– As in the older story of Mithra’s birth, men followed a special star to find the place of Jesus’ birth, and they brought gifts fit for a savior or a king.

– Like Dionysus, Jesus’ father was the most high god and his mother was a young woman.

– Later in life, Jesus would have twelve followers, as Mithras had. He would heal the sick and raise the dead as Asclepius had, and turn water into wine like Dionysus.

– Jesus and his twelve followers would have a Last Supper at Easter time, at which they would eat bread and drink wine that had been associated with his body and blood – just as the followers of Dionysus and Mithra had done for a long time.

Religion scholars who study the stories of Jesus and other ancient religions love to point out the similarities and borrowings, and there were a lot of them.

But there was a difference, too, that brings in our third Christmas candle. Jesus had faith, he trusted his God and he was not afraid of the world, like the believers in the religion of Mithraism. And Jesus taught hope, too. He hoped and believed that his God would keep being there and keep caring for everyone.

But for Jesus, the answer to the world’s real problems didn’t rest with the return of the sun, or waiting for a God to make things better. He said that the Kingdom of God – which meant the kind of world God wants us to have — was up to us to bring about. It was within us and among us, he said. And it would be here as soon as we learned how to love one another. When we could treat everybody else as our sister or brother, as a child of God, he said, this whole world will become like a kingdom of God. Because of all the powers on earth, the most powerful is the power of Love. Love can forgive us when we make mistakes, can embrace us as we struggle, sometimes fail. Love can love even the unloveable. And if you love your enemies, as he also taught, they’re not your enemies any longer. That’s a great power.

And so the third Christmas candle we light is the candle of Love.

(LIGHT “LOVE” CANDLE AND TURN IT AROUND).

Religious people have celebrated faith, hope and love forever, and they are important parts of this winter solstice or Christmas season. But they aren’t the whole story; they’re only part of what is going on inside of you this season. Because you know as well as I do that not all of the feelings you have are feelings of faith, hope or love. Part of living is that sometimes we are afraid, or sad, or we are filled with regret, which means that we are sorry we did some of the things we did, or we wish we had done some other things instead. And those feelings can make it harder for you to enjoy Christmas, or even to enjoy yourself, you know?

So besides faith, hope and love, you have some Fears at Christmas. (PICK UP “FEAR” PAPER AND SHOW IT). What are you afraid of at Christmas? Well, you’re afraid that the people you’ve given presents to might not like them. Think of all the times that you’ve said or thought to yourself “Oh, I hope he likes it!” or “Oh, I hope she likes it!” And this doesn’t stop when you grow up, either. You are always giving people things you hope they’ll like, and are always a little afraid that they might not like them.

Or you’re afraid you won’t get the presents you want. Or you’re afraid they won’t be “cool” presents so you can impress your classmates. Or maybe you’re afraid that if Santa Claus is making a list and checking it twice, and is gonna find out who’s been naughty and nice, that maybe he will find out that you haven’t been as nice as you might have been.

These fears are awful things, even though everybody has them, and even though you will have fears of one kind of another for the rest of your life. And they can make Christmas a lot less happy for you.

And so for this Christmas, I’m going to tell you a secret about how to get rid of your fears. You think of the things that you can count on, the things that give you hope. Spring will come again; the days will begin getting longer and warmer. You can count on your family, your friends. You can count on your church community. Your parents love you; your friends love you. God loves you – all the gods love you. There are a lot of things you really have faith in, and faith cuts fear like scissors cut paper. So think about the things you can count on, the faith you have. Then take your fears (LIFT THE PAPER WITH “FEARS” ON IT) and you just take them over to your FAITH, say “Begone, fears, and let Christmas come!” and touch them to it (TOUCH THE FLASH PAPER TO THE CANDLE FLAME)

Besides fears, you might have some sadness this Christmas. (PICK UP THE “SADNESS” PAPER AND SHOW IT). Someone you love or someone who loved you may have died this year, and you may be sad about that. Or you may have lost a pet, whether it was a cat, or a dog, or a hamster or a goldfish, and that’s sad, too. Or someone you love may be sick or hurt or far away. It is hard to enjoy Christmas when you’re sad.

And so for this Christmas, I’m going to tell you how to get rid of some of your sadness. Think of all the things that you are glad for, all the things that give you hope. The presents, the toys and clothes and cool games, the fun of swapping Christmas stories with the other kids in your classes. Think of all the things you have to look forward to, and see how that makes you feel less awful. Just gather together all of your sadness and take it over to your Hope, and you just let your hopes touch your Sadness and say “Begone, sadness, and let Christmas come!” (TOUCH THE FLASH PAPER TO THE “SADNESS” CANDLE)

Besides some fears and some sadness, you might also have some Regrets. (PICK UP THE “REGRETS” PAPER AND SHOW IT). In other words, you might wish you hadn’t done some of the things you did this past year, or you wish you had done some things that you should have done but didn’t. You could have been nicer to your parents — or to your kids. You could have worked harder in school, or in sports, you could have done more around the house, you could have played more and had more fun than you did. You could have done a lot of things that you didn’t do, and you wish you had.

Don’t think these feelings only come to kids. You’ll have them for the rest of your lives. Older people also look back and wish they had done a better job in their jobs, or with you, or a hundred other things. These regrets can get you down, and make it hard to feel like celebrating Christmas, if you let them.

But this year, you don’t have to let them. Because for this Christmas, I’m going to tell you how to get rid of some of your regrets. Instead of getting all sad about the things you wish you hadn’t done, or the things you wish you had done that you didn’t do, think of somebody you love. You know, they did some things wrong this year too, and you still love them. That’s a pretty good clue that they still love you, too. So this Christmas, gather up all of your regrets (PICK UP THE “REGRETS” PAPER) and you take them over to thoughts of people you love or people who love you. Then you say “Begone regrets, and let Christmas come!” (TOUCH THE FLASH PAPER TO THE ‘LOVE” CANDLE.)

These are tricks that work on Christmas or on any other day. But don’t just think about it, do it. Oh, it’s easy to make excuses and put it off. “I’d love to get back in touch with my faith, hope and love,” you may think, “but there’s just too much to do. Maybe next year.” So you put it off, this Christmas season comes and goes, and you’ll never be blessed by its magic at all.

There’s only one time to try all these things, to let your faith, your hope and your love burn away your fears, sadness and regrets. And that time is now! (HOLD UP THE “NOW” PIECE OF FLASH PAPER.)

So have a good Christmas now. Because if you wait too long, this moment, and this Christmas, will quickly disappear. (HOLD “NOW!” FLASH PAPER OVER A CANDLE.)

Merry Christmas!