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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 22, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“What’s the Difference?” This week we’ll look at the difference between venting vs. lamenting.

Today is the last of our “What’s the Difference?” sermons for this church year. We’re talking about the difference between lamentation and venting. In the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a book of Lamentations. The book consists of five separate poems. In the first (chapter 1), the city sits as a desolate weeping widow overcome with miseries. In Chapter 2 wonders whether the destruction of the city by the Babylonians is because of the sins of the nation. Chapter 3 has in it hope that the chastisement will be for the good of the people. The next chapters go back to wondering about the sins of the people, being sad and distressed that God seemed to have deserted them, questioning whether the punishment was too great for the sin, and hope for the recovery of the people. This exile of the people happened in 586 BCE. Many Jews stayed in Babylon, but others longed for Jerusalem. “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept for thee, Zion. We remember thee, Zion.”

Each chapter is a poem, the first four are acrostics. They have groups of 22 lines, each starting with the next letter of the alphabet.

Lamentations are a form of prayer used in many ancient cultures. They are a crying out on behalf of a community, a cry from the heart and the spirit. There is anguish, self-examination, questioning of the way things work. “Did I cause this? What is my responsibility? Did I do something wrong? Am I supposed to learn a lesson here? What might the lesson be? How did this happen? What are the causes? What could we have done differently?”

Lamentation is rooted theologically: in your relationship to the Universe, to Wisdom, to God. Venting is just letting off steam, right?

Most of us have been taught that Venting is a good way to let off steam, to lance the blister of your anger. If you don’t express it, it turns inward. I was taught that as I was learning to be a therapist. Back in the 80’s, 30 years ago. Turns out, it’s not so true. Venting, with words or with physical punching, can make some people more angry, more aggressive. College students at Ohio State University, in a study directed by Dr. Brad Bushman were asked to write an essay, which they were told would be graded by another student. After they turned in the essay, they waited for it to be graded. It was returned to them with a big red F, and the comment “This is the worst essay I’ve ever read.” They were mad. One group of students was told to vent their anger by punching a big pillow. The other group just sat for a time. Then the researchers came in with cups and hot sauce. They told the angry students they could put any amount of hot sauce in the cup and their grader would have to drink it. The students who had just sat quietly with their thoughts poured a small amount into the cup. Those who had punched the pillows poured much more hot sauce, some filling the cups! That you need to vent your anger is being shown to be one of those “sticky” stories, to use a word from Malcom Gladwell. All evidence to the contrary, the story still persists.

Complaining is actually bad for you. Neuroscience (and if you are interested in this part, there is a class in the science of religion offered by two scientists in the congregation – look in the announcements in your oos) “synapses that fire together wire together.” Once you have a particular thought, it becomes easier and easier to have that thought again. You can complain, but if you become repetitive with it, it can cause a trend toward that kind of thought, and pretty soon you’re that whiny person who is hard to hang out with. Venting releases stress chemicals into your body, which is bad for BP, weight and blood sugar.

What can you do instead, that is different?

The ancient practice of lamentation differs from venting. It’s more often about a situation the community is in. It’s rooted in your theological view of the world. What is the world supposed to be like? Who is taking care of things? What is our part in what is happening? You are calling out in lamentation. To God, or to the Spirit of Life. Your heart is in a lament in the way that it’s not in a vent. Your attention is turned to your responsibility in the mess as well as wrongs done by another.

The first word of the book is “how,” which is central to the dynamic of lamentation. How did this terrible situation come about? What did I do? What was supposed to happen? What did I think would happen?

I wrote a lamentation in Biblical style, starting one line with each letter of the alphabet:

All the people on both sides seem to have lost their civility
Both Democrats are saying things which seem to me to be unwise
Civil discourse seems to be becoming a lost skill
Donald Trump
Education is so important to democracy.
Frustration and anger make better news than civil discourse.
Great? I think he means “Make America White Again.”
History is a great teacher.
I must admit I used to be riveted by the horrible things said and done.
Jefferson and Adams had a campaign nastier than this one.
Knowledge of the past gives us perspective
Laughing at it is not working for me any longer
My heart is seized with sorrow for my country
Nausea grips me as I watch the news
Oh, how did we get into this fix?
Please tell me everything is going to be all right
Quivering with dread, we listen for the next awful thing he’ll say
Remind me that nothing too terrible has happened yet
Sweet dreams of a just society fuel our actions.
Teaching civics in the school would help people understand how things work
Understanding others is what we should work on before trying to be understood by others
Variations in views are a quality of every free society
We’re all in this together
Xenophobia is a human failing we must always work against.
Yelling is a sign that no communication is happening.
Zero is the number of ideas on how to fix it.

Maybe next time you want to vent, hold it, deepen it, and write a lament in Biblical style. You might learn something, and rather than just going round and round in welle worn circles, you might. grant your pain some forward motion.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 8, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Make New Mistakes” If you can’t be the good witch, can you be the good-enough witch?

Meditation
Rev. Dr. Maureen Killoran

Let us tell the stories of mothers … stories that could be true.

Let us tell of warm mothers, soft and round, likely to be found with flour on their nose, and always ready to pour you a glass of milk to go with the cookies on your plate. These mothers are increasingly rare.

Let us tell of mothers who are like bubbles of champagne: they surprise your senses, leave you giggly, but when you least expect it they erupt with an unexpected ‘pop.’

Stories that could be true.

Then there are grouchy mothers, stressed mothers, exhausted mothers, faces lined with worry and spirits tired and grey.

Other mothers are wise and reliable; not prone to many words or to a lot of noise – but you know that when you need them, they’ll be there.

Let us tell of fierce mothers, the ones who’ll love you even when you’re wrong.

Let us tell also of absent mothers, whose memory shimmers at the edges of your heart.

Let us tell of distant mothers … cruel mothers … loving mothers … giving mothers. There are walk-away mothers … save-the-world mothers too-busy mothers … mothers you cry because you lost them, and mothers who make you cry because you can’t …

Stories that could be true.

May we hold in our hearts the mothers we have known; those who loved us-and those who tried.

May we forgive the mothers who didn’t get it right, and try to release the knots of disappointment … anger … grief … pain.

May we hold in our hearts the truth that mothering-nurturing-is a task that belongs to us all.

However old or young you are, whatever your gender, may you make extra room for nurturing in your life this week.

May you say something real to a harried store clerk, give a co-worker a genuine compliment, take time to listen deeply to a friend.

In our shared silence may we remember, and reflect, and create anew, the stories of love and nurture, from this point forward, stories that can be true.

Sermon

I worked for around 15 years as a therapist, and I heard a lot of people talk about feeling like a failure. When we explored that feeling, it seemed that anything less than perfection felt like failure to some people. They felt they had disappointed their parents. “What did your parents expect from you?” I asked “They wanted me to be perfect.”

Many of us are more critical of ourselves than anyone else could be. Our mistakes glare at us when we survey our lives. Things we’ve said, things we hadn’t thought of that we should have thought of. Damage we’ve done. Businesses we’ve attempted that didn’t make it. Relationships that didn’t last. Times when you yelled at your children when you had resolved not to yell.

Speaking of that, happy Mother’s Day. Parenting is a minefield of mistakes. Mother-guilt is the worst, as you look around and imagine that every other woman is a better mother than you are. You try to teach good values, manners, conversational skills. You wonder sometimes if your kids are already damaged by something you did while you were still building them in your body, or by something you forgot to protect them from, or by something they are doing that you should have known about even though they were trying with all their skill and might to keep it from you. For your own protection and peace of mind.

I’ll tell you how to be a good mother (and father.) Understand that they are watching what you do, along with listening to what you say. Be the person you would want them to be. Don’t only talk about your values, live them. Heal yourself. Ask what you would want them to do in the situations in which you find yourself, and then model that.

Back to my therapy office. I had a cartoon on the wall (and I’m not a big cartoon person) that showed Glinda in her psychiatrist’s office. She’s saying “Everyone wants something. This one wants a heart, that one wants courage …. It’s too much.” The caption underneath reads “Glinda learns just to be the good-enough witch.”

Some of us will go to great lengths to avoid making a mistake. It can keep you from trying new things. Mostly it’s the first borns and only children. Some of us grew up with people who would joke “I’m never wrong, except for this one time in 1993, when I thought I was wrong, but it turns out I wasn’t. … ” The family joked that the headstone on my grandfather’s grave should be engraved with “Often in error, never in doubt.” Sometimes people do the same things over and over, even though they’re not working, just because to try something new would be scary and odd, and these, at least, are familiar mistakes.

The world’s best wisdom says mistakes, even failures, are generative, they are necessary for growth. Mistakes are how you get to new knowledge. Thomas Edison said “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Danish Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr, says, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field”.

The drive to avoid mistakes can lead to a certain kind of success. There is nothing wrong with this. Out of the 23 first NASA astronauts, 21 were first borns. This is not the case for inventors, though, many of whom are people who are more sanguine about trying things. They are more ok with making mistakes, doing things that turn out not to work. My older son and I were playing around with a puzzle. Nine dots in rows of three, making a square. The challenge was to draw a line, without picking your pencil up, connecting all nine dots. We had worked on it for about ten minutes, trying this or that, and my younger son came over to see what we were doing. He picked up the pencil, drew a line that ran, shockingly, out of the square, and then back down to connect the rest of the dots. They hadn’t said not to move out of the box, but we had imagined that rule for ourselves.

This congregation is vigorously living our mission, trying to figure out whether we want to be a Sanctuary Church, or just be a church that does sanctuary when it’s called for, and works with several refugees at a time trying to keep them from being in a situation where they have to leave their homes and families and go into sanctuary. We might make a mistake. We might have to say “Hmm. This isn’t working. We made a mistake. Let’s do something different.” You’re not irresponsible if you make a mistake doing things no one else is doing nor knows how to do. You’re not an idiot. You’re just trying a new thing.

We are moving forward on a building expansion and renovation project. We are using the best expertise we know how to use. We raised money at the top of the range of what churches can raise, 5 times our annual giving. You all are a tremendous success. Will we spend it all perfectly? We’re going to try. Might we make a mistake? What if we do?

What do you do when you make a mistake? You see what part of it was yours. You take responsibility and let go of the self-defense.

Then you say you’re sorry.

Then you try to learn and heal that part of yourself that led to the mistake. And you try to make amends.

“I’m sorry. I love you.” Repeat. To the universe. As you heal yourself, you heal others.

I made a mistake this week. I know better. I said things that hurt someone I like and respect a good deal. I realized I’d caused hurt, and I apologized. I was laughing about something just because it made me uncomfortable, I said, which was the truth. I was understood and forgiven on the spot. I didn’t forgive myself, though. That takes longer. Looking at what happened, I made a plan to get more comfortable with that issue. In order to say fewer hurtful things, some people try to watch what they say. That never works.

The beauty of working on yourself, on the thoughts and love level, is that you don’t have to watch what you say if you see more clearly, if you judge less and understand more.

“I don’t know what to say to these people,” I heard someone say.

Well, first of all, there is no “these people.” There are just people. There are those of us who are Democrat and those of us who are Republican. There are those of us who are comfortable financially and those of us who are struggling. There are those of us who are straight and those of us who are gay, and a lot of people on the continuum in between. There are those of us who are male and those of us who are female and there are those who move in-between on the continuum. The wider we draw the circle the less we have to wonder what to say to “those people.” They are us.

Go ahead and mix with folks you don’t know what to say around. You will make mistakes. Look forward to it. It’s the way we learn, and we love learning.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 1, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How might UUs use prayer beads? What is prayer for UUs? How does having something tangible in in our hand help our mind and spirit?

Call to Worship

from “Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers”
by Anne Lamott

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, “Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,” you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. […] Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

Meditation

by Annie Dillard

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Sermon

You were given three beads as you came in this morning. What we are going to do is talk about prayer beads. The reason for beads is that people want to pray. We want to meditate. We want to slow down and take ten deep breaths for our blood pressure, but we don’t. We want to remember to say kind things to our partner or spouse, we want to say the lovingkindness meditation during the week, but we don’t. Beads are there as a tangible reminder, something to hold, to help us keep track, to catch our attention, to ground us with their texture in our hand, to connect our meditation with our senses.

Beads have been used from time immemorial to help people pray. Of course they don’t know for sure when people began using beads to pray. There are beads that look like prayer beads from Egypt as early as 3200 B.C.E. In a museum in central Europe, there is a fossil of a necklace of shell and bone. We don’t know if it was used just for decoration or for prayer. These days, most of the world’s inhabitants — nearly two-thirds of the planet’s population — pray with beads. Maybe they relate to the abacus. Maybe ancient people did what the Christian third century Desert Mothers and Fathers did, carrying a particular number of pebbles in their pockets, which they dropped one by one on the ground as they said each of their prayers.

INDIA
In India, sandstone carvings dating from 185 B.C.E. show people holding prayer beads. The same strand of prayer beads, called a japa mala, is still used, designed for wear around the neck. It has 108 beads for repeating mantras or counting one’s breaths. Japa means saying the name of God, and mala means “rose” or “garland” in Sanskrit.

BUDDHISM
Buddhists inherited the mala from Hinduism, since Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. They use 108 beads or a number of beads that goes into 108, so you would go around the circle of beads twice or three times to make the 108. In Tibet, malas of inlaid bone originally included the skeleton parts of holy men, to remind their users to live lives worthy of the next level of enlightenment. Today’s bone malas are made of yak bone, which is sometimes inlaid with turquoise and coral.

The 108 beads represent the number of worldly desires or negative emotions that must be overcome before attaining nirvana. Buddhists believe that saying a prayer for each fleshly failing will purify a person.

CHRISTIAN
It’s interesting that the word mala means “rose,” or “garland.” Roman Catholics and Anglicans use a Rosary as prayer beads. It’s name comes from the Latin “rosarium,” meaning “rose garden.” The beads were also sometimes made of crushed and cooked rose petals. Praying the rosary is a traditional devotion of the Roman Catholic Church, combining prayer and meditation in sequences (called “decades”) of one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be to the Father, as well as a number of other prayers (such as the Apostle’s Creed and the Hail Holy Queen) at the beginning and end. The Desert Fathers (third to fifth century) switched from using stones to using knotted ropes or a piece of leather to count prayers, typically the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”) The rosary is given ceremonially to a Greek Orthodox monk as the second step in the monastic life. It is called his ‘spiritual sword’.”

ISLAM
In Islam, prayer beads are referred to as Misbaha, and contain 99 beads, corresponding to the 99 Names of Allah.

NATIVE AMERICAN
Beads have always had a spiritual significance to Native Americans; neck medallions as early as A.D. 800 served as talismans. Certain items of jewelry and other ornamentation using beads were often central in healing ceremonies.

AFRICAN
The Yoruba believe that using beads enhances the power of ritual objects. The Masai find beads so meaningful to their culture that their language includes more than 40 words for different kinds of beadwork.

PRAYER
We’re Unitarian Universalists. How do we pray? From not at all through all types of meditation to traditional asking God for help. People think and talk about prayer in such different ways. For most religious people of every faith, prayer is asking God to do something. You beseech the Lord, you beg, you plead. Some people teach that God is a good parent, that God knows what you need without being asked, but that the asking is for your benefit. That is how I was taught. Other people act like God is an arrogant and forgetful king, who could do anything he wanted to do for you, but, unless you beg pretty, unless you do everything exactly right and say just the right thing, with just the right tone, just the right level of faith, having sent seed money to the right religious enterprise, God will not do what you need for him to do.

I think prayer is putting our focus, our energy toward something, or being grateful for something or just holding something in our heart and mind. I think there is something important about paying attention, and that is a big part of praying. Paying attention to the thing. Anne Lamott says there are only three prayers you need: Thanks. Wow. And Help! Do you need to have traditional beliefs to be in a position to say “Help!” No. I like to believe that there is a river of love running through the world that I call God, and that I can call out to love for help. Does it come from outside me? Inside? From other people, from the animals, the rocks, the trees and the stars? From spirits of people who have died? From particles smaller than the bosun that respond to desperation with some kind of release of energy? Or is it just good for me to acknowledge that I need help? Does any of that really matter, when you’re desperate for help and some help arrives? But maybe it doesn’t arrive, and then you are left telling yourself stories about why it didn’t…. Choosing your beliefs is fraught with joy and heartbreak.

REPEATING PRAYERS
Maybe prayer, like ritual, is one way to change your consciousness at will. Medieval monks wrote that after several weeks of repeating a prayer for many hours a day, they entered an altered state. They said they could see a powerful light around them. One mystic described the condition as a “most pleasant heat,” a “joyful boiling.”

In the early 1970’s, Dr. Herbert Benson, president and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School, documented a phenomenon he dubbed “the relaxation response”.

Benson experimented using Sanskrit mantras. He told his subjects to sit quietly and repeat the mantra either silently or aloud for ten to twenty minutes, to breathe regularly and to let all thoughts pass by, inviting the mind to be blank.

Benson found that those who repeated the Sanskrit mantras, for as little as ten minutes a day, experienced physiological changes-reduced heart rate, lower stress levels and slower metabolism. Repeating the mantras also lowered the blood pressure of those who had high blood pressure and generally decreased the subjects’ oxygen consumption (indicating that the body was in a restful state). Benson and his colleagues also tested other prayers, including “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, and found that they had the same effect. Even words like “one,” “ocean,” “love” and “peace” produced the response. It appears that Benson and his colleagues had uncovered a universal principle: repetitive prayer allows human beings to enter a relaxed state. More recently, researchers at U Mass and other institutions have discovered that meditation can lead to the thickening of certain regions of the brain. Gray matter is actually produced. There is a benefit to prayer that has little to do with belief at all.

We could use the three beads to: do the Buddhist prayer
1. yourself,
2. one you love
3. one you have trouble with

OR Do one thing you’re grateful for, one thing you are asking for, one thing you will give

OR Sets of ten deep breaths

I want you to think about the mission of this congregation. You could use the first bead to think about how your soul has been nourished, what nourishment it needs, how you have nourished the souls of others, and how you could do that today. The second bead is all about transformation. How has your life been transformed today, if it has? What kind of transformation would you like to experience? Could you help transform someone else’s life today? The third is the justice bead. How have you done justice today? What kind of justice do you need? Can you support someone else who is doing justice? We are not all activists every day: sometimes we are called to be in support. This is something you practice. I invite you to try it.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 17, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In this ongoing sermon series about differences between one historical, political, or spiritual perspective and another, this Sunday we’ll look at the differences between Trinitarians and Unitarians.

I’d like to start with a seminar question: What is the opposite of “Divine?”

In order to go more deeply into the history of Unitarianism, we’re going to go all the way back to the early days of Christianity. Rabbi Jesus had just died. Confusion reigned. What had just happened? What did it mean? Was anyone writing anything down? We think yes, possibly. What about the gospels, you might ask? There were many gospels being written. (Gospel means “good news.”) There was the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Gospel of Judas, , and nearly forty others. By the year 140, the four we have now were being used, along with the Shepherd of Hermas, and the letters of Clement, Bishop of Rome.

The final canon, or list, of the writings to be called The Bible was decided once in the year 397, and then again, a final decision at the Council of Trent in the fifteen hundreds. Even now, Roman Catholic Bibles have in them books that Protestant Bibles don’t have.

Mark was written first, around 70. Matthew next, late 70’s, early 80’s. Luke was around that same time, and then the Gospel of John was last, around 90, sixty years after Jesus died. The pictures of Jesus emerging from the four are somewhat different. The first three, called the “Synoptic Gospels,” (ie “seen from the same eye”) tell similar stories, even using some of the same words to tell the stories. Scholars think they used an early source we just call “Q.” John didn’t seem to use Q, and his vision of who Jesus is, or was, is elevated to someone who existed before history, from the very beginning, who is one with God. This is called your “Christology,” how divine you think he was, and John’s is the highest. Mark’s is seen as the lowest. In that gospel, Jesus is portrayed as mostly human, the Son of God, the Messiah. Equal to God? Not really, until John.

Christology, the amount of human v the amount of divine in Jesus Christ (Christ being the word for the divine part) was the thing early Christianity fought about most. People said he was God, and human at the same time. He was God so his death ( and resurrection) would be strong enough to save people. He was human so God would really have joined us here on this planet. That is the crux of the story, the heart of the difference between Trinitarian and Unitarian.

Teachers arose to address this conundrum and others. Our roots are with one of those teachers, Arius of Alexandria, Egypt. One teacher would say, “Jesus was both divine and human, and the way that worked was that his body was human, but his spirit was divine.”

“That’s wrong!” another would say, “Jesus was both divine and human, and the way that worked was that his body and spirit were human, but his will was divine, the same will as God’s will.”

“That’s wrong!” another would say, “Jesus was both divine and human, and the way that worked was that everything about him was divine, he just appeared to be human.”

Arius solved the problem of this dual nature by teaching that Jesus was not God, but was created by God, kind of a junior partner with God. Arianism is the name for that heresy, our heresy. “Heresy,” just means a belief that the mainstream calls an error. “Orthodoxy” is the word for what the main stream believes. At the council of Nicea, and again at church councils after that, the dogma was that God was a Trinity, One God in Three Persons. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They declared Arius a heretic and all of his followers heretics. You were in danger of being thrown in prison for disagreeing, as Arius had, with the idea of the Trinity.

Many conventions, councils, were held over the next thousand years, and this issue was one of the most contentious. Was Jesus “of the same substance” (homoousion) with the Father? Or was he, as some of the the followers of Arius were willing to compromise: “of similar substance” (homoiousion) with God. The difference between homoousion (the same substance) and homoiousion (similar substance, but not the same) one iota. See what one iota of difference can be. I hope you will bear with me for a moment when I draw a superhero parallel. When you think of Jesus as God, he is a superhero who can do anything. He is a being from another place, like Superman. He can fly, he can circle the earth so fast that time starts to run backward. When you think of him as human, he’s a superhero like Batman. Just a man with some amazing skills and equipment. One of the most frequently asked questions of UUism is “What do you think of Jesus, is he divine?” One UU way to answer is “yes, he was divine, and so are you.”

What is the opposite of divine? Remember our seminar question? For the Christians, the answer was “human.” If you have another perspective, if you believe that everything is connected, that the Earth is alive, that we are all part of one another, that there is one soul of all things, then human and “divine” are not opposites. If there is just Being, and Love, then those are part of what we might think of as “divine.” They are part of us. This is a part of Transcendentalism that derives from the wisdom of Hinduism and Buddhism. This is well within the theological tradition of Unitarianism. Hear it?

“Unitarian,” means One. God is one. No, Jesus isn’t a divine savior. We are all part of God. Trinitarianism splits God into three, with humans as the fourth, the broken piece. For some people, that way of seeing things has the most power. If you feel the need of a savior, you feel you need to be saved from something (hell? God?) or saved for something (heaven?) That savior should be powerful and loving. Why can’t God just save you, though?

You end up with a story that has God split off part of himself, give birth to a son and then kill him to satisfy some rule that was made by — God? Couldn’t God just forgive people without killing his child, or killing part of himself? Did God set up a system God can’t fix without death?

If Jesus is not divine, or is divine in the same way we are, and in the same way things are, at their heart, then it is the one-ness that we have to deal with. Lovely as long as you have a kind of dolphins-and-sunsets theology, where you sigh in awe of the beauty of it all. As you widen your view, though, you have to deal with the question of pain, cancer cells, flesh-eating bacteria, mosquitos and entropy. So if there is one soul of all things, it has to be the soul of all of the painful things as well as the lovely things. A more powerful story, but not as sweet. I don’t want you to be among the shallow thinkers who say “Oh, we believe in the oneness of everything” blithely, without thinking about that word: Everything.

We are from the Unitarians, the children of Arius and the brave dissenters against the doctrine of the Trinity, of people who wanted things to make sense. Heretics no longer, because we have formed a house of our own faith, where we are the main stream and we create our theology as we learn and grow.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 3, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Is there an element in UU theology that parallels the punk movement’s do-it-yourself flair, its rejection of hippy-ness, its anarchist tendencies, iconoclasm, and attitude?

Call to Worship

“People Have The Power”
Patti Smith

I was dreamin’ in my dreamin’
Of an aspect bright and fair
And my sleepin’ it was broken
But my dream it lingered near

In the form of shinin’ valleys
Where the pure air recognized
Oh, and my senses newly opened
And I awakened to the cry

And the people have the power
To redeem the work of fools
From the meek the graces shower
It’s decreed the people rule

People have the power
People have the power
People have the power
People have the power

Vengeful aspects became suspect
And bending low as if to hear
Well, and the armies ceased advancin’
Because the people had their ear

And the shepherds [?] the soldiers
And they laid among the stars
Exchanging visions, layin’ arms
To waste in the dust

In the form of shinin’ valleys
Where the pure air recognized
And my senses newly opened
And I awakened to the cry

People have the power
People have the power
People have the power
People have the power

Where there were deserts, I saw fountains
Like cream the waters rise
And we strolled there together
With none to laugh or criticize

There is no leopard and the lamb
And lay together truly bound
Well I was hopin’ in my hopin’
To recall what I had found

Well I was dreamin’ in my dreamin’
God knows a pure view
As I lay down into my sleepin’
And I commit my dream with you

People have the power
People have the power
People have the power
People have the power

The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the earth from fools
But it’s decreed the people rule
But it’s decreed the people rule

Listen, I believe everythin’ we dream
Can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth’s revolution

We have the power
People have the power
People have the power
People have the power

The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the earth from fools
But it’s decreed the people rule
But it’s decreed the people rule

We have the power
We have the power
People have the power
We have the power

Sermon

My sons have always loved cussing. I have no idea where they got that. When they were becoming teenagers, I let them have a new cusssword for each birthday. “Crap” was the first one, on their twelfth birthday. My older son must have used it in conversation at least 300 times that first day. Mostly with the ending “tastic” added, or “ton.” You hear that in your mind? OK. So, the word for their 18th birthday was the mother of all cuss words, and they were allowed to say it, only not in front of their mother, who never ever used that word herself, you understand.

Why am I telling you this? Because today we are talking about Punk Theology, so we’re talking about the Punk movement, and there is no way to talk about Punk without using the mother of all cuss words. A dilemma for the preacher. So, since the preacher grew up in Philadelphia, where (hand gesture flipping fingers out from under the chin) expressed a similar sentiment, we’ll use that gesture instead, with whatever combination word “You,” “this,” or “that” added for clarity. This way we will all survive this discussion with our dignity intact.

England in the 70’s. Margaret Thatcher the Iron Lady, closing down the coal mines, everyone on the dole, the kings of the music scene were Led Zeppelin. Overblown, guitar solos turned up to 11, satin pants and flowing curls, references to English folklore and the bustle in your hedgerow.

You have kids who had no hope of work. They had plenty to say, anger at the establishment, little chance of having the money for musical training, the long slog of unpaid effort it takes to get a record contract, no money for satin pants.

All of this is tremendously oversimplified – I’m just giving you an impression of what happened. “(Hand gesture) them!” We are going to express ourselves. Being authentic is the main thing, show our rage. Look cool. Make it clear that you are as far from satin pants as a person can get. Here, take some safety pins and stick them through your clothes. Clothes made all out of safety pins? Go for it. Stick some through your ear? Cool. Life is pain. We can take it. If you can shout, you can sing. Who needs long croony stairway to heaven songs? Make them short. Scream what you feel. Shout what you see about the world the way it is. Give it a hard edged melody and sing it in a hard voice. Can’t play an instrument? Here. This is a chord. Here are two more. Now, go write a song because all you need are these three chords. Loud. Fast. Aggressive. They think we’re angry, but loud and fast can be ecstatic too, and sexy too.

So many bands were trying to be Led Zeppelin without their genius. Pale imitations, then imitations of the imitations.

Let me read you something from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address:

Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s.

When you do things that are from your soul, that are natural to you, they have a charm. If you are imitating others, you doom yourself to hopeless mediocrity. The Punk movement was a do-it-yourself movement. You can learn without being taken under the wing of a great teacher. You can figure it out for yourself. Are you an outcast from the mainstream? Be out cast, then, and enjoy the freedom of saying (hand gesture) you! I didn’t want to be like you anyway.

In the US, the punks did not have the economic despair of the UK punks, but they had seen Watergate, their older brothers had gone to Vietnam, they didn’t trust the government. AIDS was beginning to kill gay men, and the government was humming with its fingers in its ears for years before doing anything. The black kids, gay kids, kids with gender questions could be punks and find a common ground. (hand gesture) you, we didn’t want to be accepted by your pale imitative group anyway. We’re going to make our own.

The punk bands came out of the garage bands who make their own music in the garage, not in a fancy studio, in a simple but energetic style, valuing expression over polish or skill. “Passion, not fashion,” as drag queen Bradley Picklesheimer of the Thrusters, used to say.

We’ll make our own recordings, we’ll just sell them to our friends. We don’t need big money, big studios, big distribution. Developing technology helped the bands make their own tapes, then CDs, starting in the early 80’s. Then came the internet, and now you can share music, publish music, put up your art, write poems and have people read them, watch people doing recording and learn by watching, write graphic novels. On the internet you can learn almost anything. They say girls don’t play guitar? Girls don’t scream? Show them how girls rock, show them Black punks, show them drag queen bouncers, show them modified bodies. Don’t like the way it is? Change it. You can make your own world.

Overlapping here with punk, carrying on the punk ethos, are the geeks and nerds, who, if they feel rejected by the culture’s beauty standards, if they feel repulsed by the culture’s values, they are making their own worlds with science fiction and Anime. Science fiction is not new, but geeks and nerds dressing up and acting out different worlds is fairly common in these past few decades. You can make a medieval life, somewhat tweaked to reflect a modern sensibility, you can make a star trek life or a manga life, you can dress as superheroes, a movie character, or a character from a video game. That’s called Cosplay. You don’t fit well in this world? Make your own. Become a member of the Gender Bent Justice League, with Superma’m and Batma’am, and scantily clad Wonder Man and Power Guy. You want a world where females get to be heroes and still be clothed? Make your own. The way they say things have to be female or male? (hand gesture) that.

What about our theology is punk? We have a class called “Build Your Own Theology.” Emerson said (and I quote) “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” He said “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

Ê There are great philosophers, then many pale imitations. There are great beatniks, then the pale imitations, great hippies, then many pale imitations, great punks, then many imitations. Do what is you. Be an authentic voice. Tell the truth as you see it. Make your own. Don’t let the fire on the altar burn out. The remedy for it is “first, soul,” Waldo says. “and second, soul, and evermore, soul.”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 20, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Using the lyrics to Johnny Cash’s gripping song, we’ll talk about images of Armageddon and the end times.

This is Palm Sunday, and I’m going to remind you what happened in this story from the Christian tradition. There are two interpretations of the story that are making an enormous difference in the world, two disparate narratives which lead to different political stances The story of Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, the beginning of the end of the story, is this: Rabbi Jesus was in trouble with the authorities. If he stayed out of Jerusalem the troubles might have blown over. Instead He went to Jerusalem, riding into town on a donkey. The people met him and covered the road with their cloaks and with palm branches, singing hosanna and saluting him as a king. Maybe. Maybe the large Passover crowds knew the prophecy in Zechariah 9 about Israel’s king coming in to Jerusalem riding on a donkey. Or, he rode in on a donkey because the horse was the mount of kings and the donkey was an animal for peacetime. Palm branches were used for victory processions, but also for funeral processions. Maybe the people were acknowledging him as the prince of peace, and worrying about his impending doom. Either way, this is called the “triumphal entry into Jerusalem.”

Was it triumph because he was about to sacrifice his life out of love for the people? That is traditional Christian teaching. The people thought he was going to act like a king, but his kingliness was in his surrender and sacrifice. That is the part of Christianity that is hard for strong people to grasp. Like the people back then, some elements in the broad spectrum of Christianity want a strong triumphal, conquering Christ who takes names, makes everything right again, and enforces all of our favorite rules. The paradox is that this never happens. People don’t stop wishing for it, or trying to make it happen.

So on the one hand there is the strength-in-surrender Jesus, the sacrificial love Jesus, and then there is “Ride On, King Jesus,” The man who comes around taking names, deciding who to free and who to blame. There is terror and whirlwind. Very satisfying. And there are hints of that in Christian Scriptures, that he is both the sacrificial lamb and the king.

You should care about this because of Ted Cruz and his father. First, I’m going to tell you what I have in common with Ted Cruz. I, like Ted, grew up among people who talked about what was going to happen when Jesus came back. When I was anxious about a test, my dad would say, “Cheer up, Meggie, maybe Jesus will come back before you have to take the test.” The return of the lord was framed as a welcome, cheerful destruction of this world. It was ok if the world went up in flames, because all of the believers would be taken up to heaven before the bad tribulations began. When I lived in Jerusalem for six months to study Hebrew in a school for immigrants, I met a lot of Christians who were intense about the book of Revelation. They would chew on the allegories in the book, wondering if the number 153 referred to the United Nations, whether the four horsemen were Catholicism, Communism, Capitalism, and Islam. “It’s right there in the Bible!” Fevered prophecy translation was a common hobby. “Are you pre-trib or post-trib?” They would ask. In other words, did you believe the Christians would be taken before the seven years of tribulation, famine, war, pestilence and death, or would we be taken after, having to suffer here on earth among the unbelievers? Would Jesus come back to reign for a thousand years of the kingdom of God or would Christians reign for a thousand years and then Jesus would return and call off the whole thing? My Uncle Toby had charts and arrows, boxes and numbers on newsprint to illustrate the way he’d worked it all out.

The allegories are like this: In Daniel 7: Daniel dreams of four great beasts from the sea. First was like a lion, with eagle’s wings. Then its wings were plucked off and it stood like a man, and was given the mind of a man. The second beast was like a bear, and it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. The third was like a leopard, with four wings and a bird on its back, with four heads, and dominion was given to it. The fourth had iron teeth and devoured and stamped things to pieces. It had ten horns, and among them was a little horn. The ancient of days took his seat on a throne and the books were opened. The son of man came and the ancient of days gave him dominion and glory.

This is the flavor of the scriptures people try to interpret to tell them what is going to happen at the end of time. The writings are obviously allegorical, which means each image corresponds with something in the writer’s external world. The interpreter of the allegory has to decide what the images mean and how they fit together. Is the bear the USSR? The iron teeth, the empire of Alexander the Great. Or China. Or the UN again. They hate the UN.

Interpreters in every age have found things in their world that correspond with these images since they were first written, and declaring that the end was at hand. Many Jews in the time of the Romans thought they were living in the end-times. Certainly the writers of the New Testament, having just witnessed the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE thought they were going to see the end soon. The book of the Revelation of John, the book that ends the New Testament, seems obviously to be talking allegorically about the Roman Empire, where the Caesars claimed Divinity, and where the persecution of Christians was beginning as he was writing. Many of Johnny Cash’s references are to this book, or to the parable of the smart girls who were ready with their lamps when the bridegroom showed up and the silly girls who were taken by surprise. Also to his dream where Queen Elizabeth said to him “Johnny, you’re a thorn tree in a whirlwind.” We don’t know if the Apostle John was altered by some substance when he wrote, but we’re pretty sure about Johnny.

The world did not end during the Roman Empire, and there was no more country called Israel about which so many of the prophecies spoke. That didn’t stop people who wanted to believe they were living in the last days, though. Martin Luther, in the 1500’s, interpreted all the scriptures to support his belief that he was in the last generation on earth. Sir Isaac Newton, after he discovered gravity, spent most of the rest of his career puzzling out the dates and sequences of the events at the end of time, poring over Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel, and writing reams about what the nations could expect. Some critics commented dryly that as a Bible scholar, he was a pretty good scientist.

When the Europeans discovered North America, they called it the “New World”; it fired their imaginations and many crossed the ocean to start their world over again. Some came because they were convinced that they could make a perfect Christian society if they could just start everything from scratch. Believing that God was on their side, they braved tremendous hardships. Believing God was on their side, they eventually killed a lot of the First Nations people and forced the rest onto reservations. America became the New Israel, the land of people who believed they were God’s new chosen nation. That belief has remained at the core of American self-image. That is just one of the ways in which prophecy belief has had a tremendous impact on US domestic and foreign policy. I want to mention just two areas: our relationship with Israel and our nuclear policy. Once you get past killing off everyone who gets in the way of having a perfect Christian nation.

Prophecy belief gained momentum with the re-founding of the state of Israel. Finally one piece of the puzzle did not have to be interpreted allegorically any more! Also, seeing America as the shining New Israel was getting harder by 1948, so it was good to have the real Israel back.

The founding of Israel was helped in powerful ways by the prophecy beliefs of policy makers. In Great Britain, Lord Anthony Copper, Earl of Shaftesbury, argued in 1839 that the Jews must be returned to Palestine before the Second Coming. Through his influence, the British opened a consulate in Jerusalem. The consul, a devout evangelical, was instructed to look out for the interests of the 10,000 Jews living there under Ottoman rule. Many Christians are taught that the Jews are God’s Chosen people, and that whoever helps the Jews will be looked on by God with favor, and whoever hurts the Jews will be punished.

When the nation of Israel was established in 1948, one Bible teacher out of LA said this was the most significant event since the birth of Christ. Many were disappointed by the secularism and even Marxism of the Zionists, but managed to be happy for them anyway.

Evangelical tour groups come through filled with folks who believe Israel is the only nation to have its history written in advance…. When I was living in Jerusalem I used to travel sometimes alone and attach myself to tour groups, where I would hear preachers say things like “if we need our return tickets… ” This is why our Evangelical candidates are always so pro Israel.

It is in our nuclear policy, though that the prophecy beliefs have exerted a frightening influence. (read 2 Peter 3:10 2 Peter 3: 1 0-13 King James Version (KJV)

10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

11 Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,

12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?

Until the creation of the atomic bomb, the “burning day” of II Peter 3: 10 and the terrifying astronomical events woven through the three short chapters of Joel (O Lord, to thee will I cry; for the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field… the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.) Also evocative is Zechariah’s description of the people’s flesh consuming away while they stand on their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth…. typically were interpreted in terms of natural disaster: The earth’s core exploding or earthquakes, fires, etc. Since 1945 technology has caught up with scripture in that now there is something that actually could catch the heavens on fire.

A country music hit in 1945 “Atomic Power” by Fred Kirby talked about brimstone falling from heaven, and atomic energy as given by the mighty hand of God.

Even Truman, in his diary, mused that the A-bomb may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates valley era after Noah and his ark.

My fundamentalist grandfather Donald Grey Barnhouse suggested in one of his books that when Zechariah asked “Who has despised the day of small things?” that he was alluding to nuclear fission. He felt that NYC was Babylon, whose obliteration “in one hour” was foretold in Revelation. Not to worry, because believers will be in heaven the next second after the bombs fall. Still, I was not allowed to go on the sixth grade trip to NYC because it was Babylon.

Prophecy writers dismissed efforts to ban nuclear weapons, or to improve relations between countries. The unity of governments was a sign of the coming of the anti-Christ. World government increases the potential for world tyranny.

People who think they are going to heaven the very second after the bombs fall aren’t interested in preventing such a thing from happening. They say things about the state of the world like: “The only way out is up.” Jerry Falwell taught that nuclear war would make room for the new heaven and the new earth. Pat Robertson said, “I guarantee you that by 1982 there will be a judgment on the world.” He predicted the ultimate holocaust, the world in flames.

If preachers believe nuclear war is prophesied in the Bible, that’s one thing, but we have government officials who believe that too. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, in 1982, when asked about the end of time replied “I have read the book of Revelation and yes, I believe the world is going to end–by an act of God I hope–but every day I think that time is running out.”

Reagan’s Interior secretary James Watt, when asked about preserving the environment for future generations said “I do not know how many generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

In the 80s, Reagan’s interest in prophecy alarmed some. In 1983 Reagan told a lobbyist for Israel: You know, I am turning back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of those prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.”

George W Bush shared these Evangelical beliefs, as did people in his administration. War in the middle east had to happen before Jesus comes back, so bring it.

Isn’t this just an oddity, and exotic offshoot of Christianity? Aren’t these quaint quibbles among fringe fanatics? They could be, except the belief in the signs of the end times is fairly commonly held among our evangelical neighbors, and they have voted men into power who are true believers in the theologies around what Christians are supposed to do to usher in the kingdom of God on this earth.

The theological narrative of Evangelicals like the ones I grew up with was that things would get bad, then Jesus comes back. Either he takes the Christians up to heaven for a time and the rest of the people and animals are left behind (that’s where the title of the best sellng “Left Behind” series comes in). After that there is tribulation for seven years, then he comes back to earth and rules for a thousand years with the believers or he takes the Christians and then he comes back after the seven years and rules everyone who was left behind.

That’s where most Evangelicals were, until a teacher named R.J. Rushdoony arose in the fifties and sixties and said that the thousand years of the kingdom of God were to be ushered in by Christians. The tribulation was now, and Jesus would come back, but after the Christians took dominion over the world and applied the laws of the Old Testament, of the Hebrew scriptures, to believers and non-believers alike. As this Reconstruction of the world is accomplished, the damage done by sin will be reversed, and a New Eden will be ushered in.

Most Evangelicals would call themselves “New Testament Christians.” The laws of Leviticus, where children were to be beaten and could even be killed by their parents, where the penalty for homosexuality was death, well, the penalty for many many infractions was death, those laws were not for modern culture. Rushdoony thought that was craven submission to a worldly culture. Christians were to take “dominion” over the world. The seven mountains they were to conquer were: government, media, education, family, business, arts and entertainment and religion. Reconstructionist Christianity gave birth to elements of the Christian homeschooling movement, to the takeover of the school boards, to the closing down of women’s reproductive freedoms. Rushdoony founded the Chalcedon Foundation, which the Southern Povertry Law Center calls a racist and anti-gay hate group. If you listen to Rafael Cruz, he talks about Christians “taking dominion” over the country. Part of that is an enormous transfer of wealth and property to the Christians.

Ted Cruz’s dad, Rafael Cruz, is a follower of Rushdoony. Ted Cruz says this election is about religious freedom. The freedom to make this a Christian nation. The freedom to apply Old Testament law to US culture. This is why you see them hanging out with people who call for the execution of homosexuals. I wouldn’t hold anyone to their father’s views, unless they sent their father as a surrogate to campaign for him, unless he had been anointed by Dominionist preachers as one of the kings who would bring Christian rule to the US. Is Trump scary to me? You bet. I don’t like the things he says and I don’t like the company he keeps. But Cruz, with a conviction that he is a king held in the hand of God, empowered to bring about the kingdom of his view of God here on earth? It makes me long for the man to come around, deciding who to free and who to blame. Because, and I see the irony in this, I think God is on my side on this one.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 6, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In The Secret Life of Bees, August says to Lily: “Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting.” How does this translate from bee yard to congregational life?

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Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 21, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In this ongoing sermon series about differences, this Sunday we’ll look at the difference between Protestants and Catholics. When did the Protestants split from the Catholics and why?

The history of the Christian religion goes back to the days after the death of Rabbi Jesus. He had been a teacher in the Jewish religion, showing the people how to be righteous, what love looked like, redirecting their attention to what was important: loving God and loving your neighbor. His followers were confused and disheartened. 49 days after the first day of Passover, 49 days after the events leading to Jesus’s execution had begun, the disciples grew inspired and encouraged to go spread the word. Accounts of this event, called Pentecost, say tongues of flame rested upon their heads and they began to speak in tongues. One kind of literal mind might say that there were actual flames on their heads, and another kind of literal mind would say it was probably just that someone said “hey, I have an idea!” and since there were no light bulbs back then to “appear” over someone’s head at the arrival of a bright idea, they spoke of flames. “Let’s go speak to other people in other countries about this!”

So the story began to spread. The authorities tried to stamp it out. One of the first persecuters was Saul. He traveled far and wide to execute Christians until he had a dramatic conversion experience and started to spread the word with more dedication, skill and privilege (being a citizen of Rome) than anyone else had done before. The disciples had been preaching a reformation of Judaism, so if people wanted to become followers of Jesus, they had to become Jews first, which meant circumcision. This made recruitment more difficult than it needed to be. Saul, who had changed his name to Paul, said no one needed to become Jewish first, that you could go straight from being a worshipper of Diana and Zeus to being a follower of Jesus. This is what made it a new religion, which, in the Roman world, had little to do with its roots in Judaism. Because Paul worked all over the Roman Empire, whose center was Rome, Rome became the center of the new religion. After 300 years of persecution by the emperors, the Emperor Constantine made it the official religion of the empire.

Lots of Gospels had been written, stories of the origins and teachings of Jesus. There was a Gospel of Thomas, a Gospel of Mary, a Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Many teachers were interpreting the story and making rules about how people should think, act, and believe from a combination of Jesus teachings, found in all of those gospels (the earliest of which was written about thirty years after the rabbi’s death), and their own thoughts. Arguments among the followers of the various teachers grew so virulent that the empire itself was losing its peace. “Get yourselves figured out!” Constantine demanded. “Decide what you believe and teach that and make everybody stick to it. No more fighting!”

The first Church Council, to decide these matters, was held in the year 325. They chose four gospels, and wrote the Nicene Creed, which is recited in Roman Catholic churches as a statement of belief. Many councils were held after that, continuing to the present day. The councils determine what is orthodoxy (the teachings the mainstream churches agree on) and what is heresy (the answers declared to be wrong by the councils.) The church evolved, absorbing local pagan holidays, continuing to develop dogma and traditions. With the fall of the empire, the barbarians came in. People didn’t learn to read. There was war and pestilence. Some of the priests learned to read, and so the knowledge of what was in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures was spotty. Whatever the priests said was what the religion taught. All authority was with the Pope. Many of them were fine people but some were corrupt and power hungry. Fighting for authority and power with the kings and queens of various countries caused turmoil. Crusades were expensive. In 1054 the Eastern Orthodox Church split from the Roman Catholic church. That’s a story for another sermon. By the fifteen hundreds, one of the fund raising techniques was the sale of “indulgences.” This was a corruption of what indulgences were, originally, when they were not sold, but given in recognition of good works or a pilgrimage. By the middle ages, the process had been corrupted. Instead of doing the penance for your sin you could pay a priest to do it for you. He would say the prayers and you’d be in the clear. That devolved eventually to some folks being able to buy indulgences before they even committed the sin, just to have the penance in the bank. This practice was one of the targets of protest.

The protest began in 1517. A priest named Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet disputing the efficacy and power of indulgences, called the 95 theses. Legend says that he nailed it to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. The Reformation of the Church had begun. The growing number of protesters were called Protestants. Just as the Arab Spring could not have happened without the Internet, the Protestant Reformation could not have happened without the printing press. Books began being printed in Europe (although the technology was invented in Korea in the 1300’s) in the mid 1400’s. A goldsmith name Gutenberg invented a printing press which could turn out 3600 pages a day. He printed a Bible in Latin. Educated people began reading it for themselves, and discussing what they found. It was no longer enough for the priest to say it was so, people wanted what the priest said to agree with what the Bible said. The Protestants had many differences with the Catholic Church. They liked plain sanctuaries, without stained glass or statues to detract from focus on God and the Bible. They would rampage through Catholic Churches and smash statues with the righteousness of the Taliban.

In the early days, you could say Protestants had three main points where they diverged from Catholics.

1. Sola Scriptura: it is only by the scripture that we learn about God. Ministers teach that word, and the sermon is the center of the worship service. How churches have done things throughout history has very little weight. / in the RC, Orthodox and Episcopal churches, church tradition and teachings is given equal weight.

2. Sola Fide: It is only by our faith that we are saved from hell. All you have to do is believe correctly and you will go to heaven. You are supposed to do good works and be righteous, but your actions and works are not what get you to heaven. It’s Jesus’s righteousness which is laid around you like a cloak. In gratitude for being saved you are a good person./ non Protestants need to do good works in addition to being believers in order to be saved. You have to go to Mass, give a tithe, not sin badly.

3. Sola Gratia “By grace alone.” You can’t decide to have a saving faith, it is given to you by God’s grace. Your righteous deeds are nothing, you are good as a gift of God’s grace. No priest can bless you, only God blesses with any authority. Denominations differ on how much you participate in your salvation. If it’s none at all, you have baptism of infants, because even adults don’t have any partnership with god in their salvation, so why not baptize you when you’re a baby? If it’s a partnership, if you have choices, they wait until the age of reason to baptize you. You can walk up to the rail for communion. In denominations where they want to remind you that you have no part in your salvation, the communion comes to you as you sit in the pew. We’ll talk more about that if we talk about the differences among the Protestant denominations.

Unitarian Universalism is closer to Protestantism. We have roots there, as we do in the early Christian heresy of Arianism (which we will talk about in another sermon in the “what’s the difference?” series: Trinitarian and Unitarian). Like the Protestants, we don’t have priests. We believe in the priesthood of all believers. That shows up, even in something as simple as the animal blessing, where the blessing doesn’t come from the minister, but rather from each of us, all of us reading the blessing together. We center the worship service on the word and music rather than on a litany recited by a priest. Our sanctuaries are usually plain. Sometimes we light candles, which feels too Catholic to some and feels good to others. Sometimes there is a committee that decorates the sanctuary with art, although that feels too fussy for some and delightful to others.

Unlike Catholics or Protestants, we center authority in the individual in relationship to community. Not in the Pope, not in the Bible.

Light of ages and of nations
“Singing the Living Tradition” – Hymn 190

Light of ages and of nations,
every race and every time
has received thine inspirations,
glimpses of thy truth sublime.
Always spirits in rapt visions
passed the heavenly veil within,
always hearts bowed in contrition
found salvation from their sin.

Reason’s noble aspirations
truth in growing clearness saw;
conscience spoke its condemnation,
or proclaimed eternal law.
While thine inward revelations
told thy saint their prayers were heard,
prophets to the guilty nations
spoke thine everlasting word.

Lo, that word abideth ever,
revelation is not sealed,
answering now to or endeavor,
truth and right are still revealed.
That which came to ancient sages,
Greek, Barbarian, Roman, Jew,
written in the soul’s deep pages,
shines today, forever new.

Unlike Catholics and Protestants, we do not say that revelation of truth about God and humanity is “sealed,” set. We believe it is ongoing. We can always learn more. Our theology evolves as our understanding evolves. As science, art, morality, law and culture evolve, so does our understanding of what is important, what is required to be a good person. No one book or person has the answers.

We bless one another. We call religious professionals to teach, preach and administrate, but they are not more holy than anyone else. Our minds can change. There is no eternal punishment for being wrong in your beliefs. We think through our beliefs and check them with the community. Our actions don’t save us, but we hope they go some way toward healing the world. Our hope is in love, in action, in justice, in one another, and in that mystery which shows up, bidden and unbidden, to surprise us with insight, connection, joy and grace.

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Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.