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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 21, 2014

Garlands, red, gold and green, carols, presents and celebration… when did Christmas become what it is today? We learn a bit of “Christmas History”.

Here we are, surrounded by the whirlwind of a 21st Century Christmas! It wasn’t always this way. First of all, most of us are sober, which would never have happened during the early centuries of its celebration. In the early days of Christmas celebrations in Europe, bands of beggars roamed the streets, pounding on the proper middle class front doors of the business people, even rapping on the fancy front doors of the rich, demanding treats, alcohol, and even money. The wise men brought gifts to the baby, so gift-giving was part of the tradition. Nothing fancy, some nuts and fruit to the children, some wassail (alcohol) to the beggars, and you were in the spirit of things.

Christmas is coming,
the geese are getting fat
(also, … the goose is getting fat)
Please do put a penny in the old man’s hat
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you!

Where did they get the nerve to do that? Had they no sense of the social order? Yes they did, and it was part of the social order that it be upended at Christmas. This upending of normal social roles has its roots in the celebration of Saturnalia in Rome, a celebration in late December presided over by the agricultural god of seed and harvest, and rejoicing in the return of Sol Invictus, the Unconquerable Sun. There wasn’t much to do agriculturally during this time – the hard work was over. There was plenty of food and fresh beer and cider, so it was a time to overindulge. Tradition held that, during Saturnalia, a feast was held where masters and slaves ate together, In some households, the masters waited on the slaves. Gambling, normally frowned upon, was acceptable, and masters and slaves gambled together. The sober toga was taken off and dress clothes could be worn during the day on the street. Rowdy behavior was acceptable during the few days of Saturnalia, as it is today on New Year’s Eve. Mostly everyone just stayed drunk for three or four days.

When the Emperor Constantine declared that Rome would be Christian, the bishops decided to take over this big celebration and brand it as the birthday of Christ. Not that anyone thought he was really born on December 25. The shepherds would not have been out in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night in December. Even though Israel is the Middle East, where people think of it as hot all the time, it gets cool and rainy in the winter. The sheep would have been sheltering inside with their shepherds. Maybe it was spring, or maybe September. But say you want your new religion to catch on, you don’t want to try to get a whole new celebration going when there is already a perfectly good and well-loved celebration already happening. You just say, “you know what? The Unconquerable Sun is the Unconquerable Son… Of God… ” And let the people keep drinking. They won’t care.

This topsy-turvy-ness was still part of the celebration centuries later. The Puritans, having escaped the revels of Popish celebrations, and finding no mention of Christmas in the Bible, outlawed the celebration of Christmas. It smelled Pagan to them, which it was. Non-Puritans in the Colonies might attempt to make merry, but they were fined. It stopped being illegal in the 1700s, but it was frowned upon. Culturally taboo until it became accepted when the Federal Government declared it a national holiday in 1870. Many businesses didn’t even close for Christmas Day until then.

It was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who made many of our Christmas traditions. He was from Germany, and some families in Germany brought evergreen trees inside during the dark time of the year. In 1848, a picture of them by their decorated tree was published in the Illustrated London News, and then it became the fashion for British families to decorate an evergreen tree at Christmas. One business man commissioned an artist to draw a Christmas card, but it was too expensive for most people, so many families, including Victoria’s, encouraged their children to make cards to give to friends.

All of this helped to bring Christmas from the streets into the home. Decorating tips were in all the women’s magazines, coaching women to make this season a favorite of their families. Gifts were given, instead of to roving bands of beggars, to the children of the household. Continuing with the topsy-turvy nature of Christmas, in many families the children are allowed to wake up the parents and demand their presents and their entertainment. What a relief, though, not to have to worry about beggars coming to your door! Some people did remember the poor on Christmas, and went instead to where they were to serve them food (not alcohol, though, normally) and give money.

Giving to the poor was encouraged also by St. Nicholas, a Greek Orthodox saint from what is now Turkey who was kind and charitable and had so many miracles attributed to him he was called Nicholas the wonderworker. The Dutch called him Sinterklaas is an elderly, stately and serious man with white hair and a long, full beard. He wears a long red cape or chasuble over a traditional white bishop’s alb and sometimes red stoia, dons a red mitre and ruby ring, and holds a gold coloured crosier, a long ceremonial shepherd’s staff with a fancy curled top. Sinterklaas is a name evolved from St. Nicholas.

He traditionally rides a white horse. This is probably from the Nordic Viking traditions, where Odin rides a white horse through the air, along with the evergreen trees, mistletoe, the yule log and green wreaths. The Vikings conquered Britain, and Odin became Father Christmas.

Sometimes Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, was portrayed as a thin serious man, sometimes as an elf, sometimes like a Celtic Green Man in green, or red or blue. It wasn’t until

A Visit from St. Nicholas
by Clement Clark Moore

It was the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St. Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.
His eyes-how they twinkled, his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful’ of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle,
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

That St. Nick was defrocked, not a Bishop any more, not a saintly church man. He became much more accessible and friendly.

The way he is pictured, always now in red, has a lot to do with an ad campaign by Coke in the 30’s, where they commissioned an artist to draw the real santa clause, and he pictured him using the model of a retired salesman who lived nearby, in a suit the red color of the Coke logo.

The presents and drinking, the merriment and caring for the poor are always in tension at Christmas time. I don’t really know why there should be tension but, there is. Food Bank billboard and FB sweet mother photo that show that this is clearly true. The billboard on Burnet and 49th says “Tis the season to be jolly” and the word “jolly” is crossed out and “feed the hungry” is written underneath. Why cross it out? Why not a plus sign, letting it read ’tis the season to be jolly AND feed the hungry?” On Face Book there is a picture of a note lots of sweet people are putting up with a Christmas list on it. “wrap gifts” has “Gifts” crossed out and replaced with “wrap your arms around your loved ones.” I’m all for wrapping arms around loved ones, but why must it be either or? Use the plus sign, you people?

Doing good should not be a once a year spasm of guilt toward “those less fortunate.” And it should not necessitate being a somber humorless puritan. I like the way the people in this church do it, all year long and having a pretty good time. In fact, if I were in charge of ending hunger in the world I would like to have a whole cadre of jolly, merry hearted people around me. Suffering is there, and we must address it, but if your life is going well right now it’s part of your job to add to the joy in the world. So let’s be jolly and feed the hungry and have a good time smelling the spicy mixture of Druids, Vikings, Romans and Christians that is this season of the year.

Merry Yule, Happy Christmas, and blessings on all celebrations of the return of the light celebrated by ourselves and our neighbors.

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 14 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
November 23, 2014

The sermon is on gratitude as we recognize the one hundred year legacy of founding member and longtime music director Janet McGaughey.

Call to Worship

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Centering

“And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:
Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart, And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”
– Khalil Gibran

Sermon

It’s Thanksgiving and that means family. My family will be getting together this week in NC. Here is what it was like a couple of years ago.

Coming into the front room, I saw knives gleaming on bookcases and coffee tables. Uncle Lindsey had recently returned from Pakistan, where he and my mother had grown up as missionary kids, and he’d brought back a collection of Gurkha weapons. There were kukris of every length, dangerous curved blades whispering of battles long past. My cousin Rebecca’s twelve year old son Thatcher was running out the door to the screen porch brandishing a long Talwar sword, chasing his little sister Park into the back yard. No one seemed overly concerned. Since half the adults there were doctors and the other half were lawyers, I figured that if anything happened we could sort it out, so I set my casserole down on the side board and drifted over to where Lindsey was holding forth on his trip, on the bravery of the Gurkhas, and on the beauty of the Himalayas.

Listening to Uncle Lindsey is like surfing the web with no pop-up control. You will be talking along about the Himalayas, and suddenly he will start talking about Roger Bannister’s four minute mile, or he’ll say something like “Presbyterians are the only denomination that requires their ministers to be educated in Hebrew and Greek,” or “Santa Gertrudis bulls are too large to be pastured in North Carolina.” Still listening, but letting my eyes wander, I looked out the back windows into the yard and saw an enormous Brahma bull being led around the yard by a woman dressed like a rodeo cowgirl. Her blue vest with the silver stars sure was sparkly, but I could not be dazzled by sparkles when right behind her was this two thousand pound animal, speckled gray and white, with a hump on his shoulders and a dewlap flapping from side to side under his neck as he plodded behind her with the expression of a being praying for world peace. I was glad somebody was, with all the knives around. Most of us rode the bull that day, except the very elderly generation. They watched and clapped, though. Even cousin Pooh was tenderly coaxed out of her wheelchair and onto his broad and placid back.

Uncle Henry used to pray before dinner every year, a long prayer that reminded us about the Puritans and the Native Americans, a prayer that named one by one the blessings of this land and this family. Since we were at Rebecca’s house, I had been invited to say the prayer. No one else recognizes that I’m a minister, because they don’t approve of women ministers. My prayer was of gratitude for the land too, for the family, for the love that surrounded us. I invited those present to call the names of those we missed, those who weren’t able to be there or who had died. One person said “Margaret Annie, that was real nice.”

The food and the company were a great pleasure. We told stories of long-ago mischief and the planned some new mischief. One cousin and his wife told about entertaining the devout and extremely dull President of a southern Christian college. They had made the mistake of inviting a couple of the other cousins, and one of those had attempted to liven up the conversation by slipping Amaretto liqueur into his own wife’s after-dinner coffee. Through an unfortunate mix-up, the devout President’s wife was the one who was served the doctored coffee, and throughout the rest of the evening she pestered my cousin’s wife for her recipe. As the two who were in the know shook the sofa with their suppressed giggles, she said, “I finally turned to the woman and held her gaze.” Her hands were on either side of her face, like a horse’s blinders. “I held her gaze so she wouldn’t see them over there on the sofa laughing, and I told her, ‘Well, my secret is: I grind my own beans.'” They bet the lady ran right out to get a coffee grinder, but the taste of that coffee would continue to elude her.

After dinner we all lined up, as always, for flu shots. One of the doctor cousins brings a cooler full of medicine and doses everyone in a back bedroom with the help of his ten-year-old daughter. She’s an expert with the alcohol and cotton swabs. It’s good to get a chance to be brave together after dinner.

Thanksgiving for me is the family. I took my sons to this gathering every year since they were born. I am grateful for the tradition, the talent, the wildness, the faith, character and kindness of these people

Most families can be fun for a couple of hours. For many of us there are moments of being judged, moments of being misunderstood, pressured, evaluated. Maybe there are moments when we want to put out faces down into the sweet potato casserole and just give up. Maybe there are moments when we cross our fingers and pray that Aunt Elise won’t drink so many glasses of sherry that she ends up face down in our potatoes. We wish Uncle Haim would quit joking about our hair and that Aunt Nancy would leave our love life alone.

There are also moments of companionship, of feeling surrounded by love, moments when you share stories, take a nap, receive or give nurturing care, have good conversation. If it is just god-awful every year, then I question why you go. Usually it’s just a matter of building habits of attention that direct your receptors to the good things. Part of how you develop better habits of attention is through spiritual practice.

I am no good at spiritual practice. Even the one I use is easy for me to forget. I think I’m busy with important things, and I can’t be bothered with something so simple a child could do it. Even though studies show it’s good for your physical and mental health. Even though the Jewish scriptures say it will make your heart strong and merry. Even though mystics and psychologists alike praise it. What is my spiritual practice? Gratitude. It’s cheap too, and doesn’t take a lot of equipment or training.

A practice of gratitude starts with habits of attention, which shape your experience of your life. Gratitude begins with a habit of noticing the good things in your life and being grateful for them. You might say “thank you, God, or Higher Power, H.P. or Spirit, or Force, or Universe, or Soul Of All Things. Many of us have a sense of the Divine that is different from the traditional Judeo-Christian descriptions, and for some people, the name “God” is too much attached to the sense of the Divine they are trying to get away from. I read about one person who called her Higher Power “Donna.” It’s okay to explore different ways of thinking about the Higher Power you DO believe in. The Force has many names. Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart says if you only ever said “thank you” as a prayer, it would be a good prayer life.

Cicero, born about a century before Rabbi Jesus, wrote : “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others,” he said. By the 18th century, the free-market thinker Adam Smith, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” supposed that people who did not feel gratitude were only cheating themselves out of happiness in life. And in the 19th century, Immanuel Kant described ingratitude with “the essence of vileness.”

Br. David Steindl-Rast, an author of many books and articles about gratitude says: “All gratitude expresses trust. Suspicion will not even recognize a gift as gift: who can prove that it isn’t a lure, a bribe, a trap? Gratefulness has the courage to trust and so overcomes fear. ” It takes trust in the bending arc of the Universe to be grateful. Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, in the mid-1800s, said “The arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Can we trust the universe? Is everything going to be okay in some way? Gratitude seems easier if you are willing to believe that. If we are just all headed to the slaughterhouse, gratitude seems stupid. All belief is a choice, and I choose to go with Parker on the arc of the Universe, and with Julian of Norwich, who said “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Believing a thing just means choosing to act as if it is true. In an experimental way. To see what happens.

In the Jewish scriptures, in the book of Proverbs (17:22) it says “A merry heart does good like a medicine: but a broken spirit dries the bones.” Psychologists are beginning to take gratitude seriously as a field of research. Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, says: “Psychology has generally ignored the positive emotions. We tend to study the things that can go wrong in people’s minds but not the things that can go right. Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness have tremendous positive value in helping people cope with daily problems, especially stress, and to achieve a positive sense of the self.” Studies are beginning to indicate that people who describe themselves as feeling grateful to others and either to God or to life in general tend to have higher vitality, more optimism, suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical depression than the population as a whole. These results hold even when researchers factor out such things as age, health, and income, equalizing for the fact that the young, the well-to-do, or the hale and hearty might have “more to be grateful for.”

In an experiment with college students, those who kept a “gratitude journal,” a weekly record of things they should feel grateful for, achieved better physical health, were more optimistic, exercised more regularly, and described themselves as happier than a control group of students who kept no journals but had the same overall measures of health, optimism, and exercise when the experiment began. (Researchers use frequency of exercise as a barometer for general well-being because it is an objective measure that links to subjective qualities; people who exercise three or more times per week tend to have better indicators of well-being). Psychologist Dan McAdams of Northwestern University, whose specialty is well-being research, says he recently became interested in gratitude when he saw studies suggesting that increasing a person’s sense of thankfulness could lead to lower stress and better life “outcomes,” meaning success in career and relationships. Gratitude isn’t even listed in the 1999 addition of the presumably encyclopedic “Encyclopedia of Human Emotions,” a standard psychology text. “But if a sense of thankfulness can turn someone’s life from bitter to positive,” McAdams notes, “that makes gratitude an important aspect of psychology.”

Gratitude keeps you in the present moment — it clears your mind of the wishing, wanting, worrying, regretting and story telling about why we are this way or why someone else did what they did. You are freer to move, to change, to be guided as to what your next step might be. I do think that trying to change things you cannot change is a sure way to lose your mind. It’s a textbook way to stay exhausted. It is a textbook way to stay dissatisfied. Exhaustion and dissatisfaction are two indicators of soul sickness. Sometimes, around the Holidays, your soul just gets tired. You feel irritable and tense, nothing looks fun, you can’t think. When your soul is getting sick, it’s time to dust off your spiritual practice. Not that you dust it off only when you are sliding into a sink full of the dirty mop water of despair, but that’s as good a time as any.

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 14 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
November 16, 2014

Why bad things happen to good people is a basic question for humanity, no matter what your view of the world.

My first angry questions about the bad things in the world were related to my parents’ marriage. I remember at 10 or 11 being angry at God because they were not getting along. I walked ahead of them down a sidewalk in Mexico City, my teeth gritted, crying, and asking “Why, WHY can’t they be happy together?”

The most recent sorrows have been the suffering of people in Syria, Israel Africa. Closer to home, there is cancer in a child, cancer in grown-ups, and car accidents, The question of why bad things happen has occupied my mind for about fifty years then, and I’m not even close to the answer. I hope you weren’t thinking we might have it.

We talked a lot in my family about war and starvation, we talked about the cruelty of people around the world. My father was in the news business; he heard it all. He says he used to stand by the AP ticker and cry.

I’m not alone in not having the answer. This question has been debated for at least 20,000 years. We know this from excavations in the Indus Valley which uncovered fragments of Hindu scriptures. The Hindus among us say that evil is a part of God. Shiva is the creator and the destroyer. Kali-Ma creates by destroying. There are demons, but they roar and devour on assignment from the gods. All destruction isn’t had, after all. Any gardener pulling up leggy, spent plants will tell you that. Destruction makes room for the new.

The Buddhists say evil is illusion. If you can see through the illusion, becoming enlightened, you will be free. Bad things happen because people are attached to their picture of how things should be, to the outcomes of certain actions. We desire security, health, good relationships, admiration, long and happy lives for ourselves and our children. Since we are attached to those things through desire, we make ourselves unhappy when they don’t happen the way we want them to. If we could let go of desire we would suffer no longer. If only we could just enjoy our health, our families, our eyesight, our money, our minds as long as they last and let them go with peace in our hearts we would be fine.

One of the oldest books in the Hebrew Scriptures is the book of Job, and the question of why bad things happen to people is what the whole book is about. In that story, Satan is at God’s side, and they are talking like colleagues. “I bet Job wouldn’t be such a fine upstanding servant of yours if he weren’t so healthy and wealthy,” Satan says.

“You go ahead and test that theory,” God says, and Job’s sufferings begin. After he has lost all of his children, all of his possessions and his health, and is sitting on top of an ash heap letting the dogs lick his sores, his three friends come to him and deliver their best religious opinions of why he is suffering.

“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” one says.

“God corrects and disciplines his people ….. God wounds but he also bind up. You have to trust. You are not more righteous than God.”

The second friend is shocked at Job’s questioning God.

“God is always just. Your children must have sinned against God. Even now, if you become pure and upright, he will restore you. “

Job says “I have done nothing wrong … but how can a mortal be blameless before God? His is powerful and mighty. How can I argue with him? Then he goes on to argue some more …

The third friend reiterates the argument that Job must have done something wrong. Even if he didn’t before now, these rude questions and arguments are bad enough to deserve all the punishment in the world. “

Job still stubbornly says. “God is wise and powerful, and he is God. I want to talk to God himself about this.” So God comes down.

Jung says it’s because God knew that God had done wrong. (In fact Jung talks about the death of Christ as God’s answer to Job.)

Here is the answer God gives in the book of Job. I am God. Who are you? I don’t owe you anything. Then Job repents. God tells the friends that they have not spoken correctly about him as Job has, he makes them repent too. Then he restores all Jobs property and gives him more children. Seven sons and three daughters, to whom he grants and inheritance along with their brothers. We find beauty and sophistication in the arguments of this ancient text. But not an answer.

Is God responsible for evil? Did he create it? Those who say “yes” to that are the ones who believe, if God is Omnipotent, that He is in control of everything. He must therefore be “allowing” evil. The question, for those who want to believe that God is both all-loving and all powerful is best put by Archibald McLeish in his play about Job called “J.B.” He writes “If God is good, he is not God. If God is God, he is not good.”

There are those in the three religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, who say evil is a result of the Fall, which is what they call the story of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden, choosing consciousness, choosing the knowledge of good and evil. All pain, all cruelty, all war and pestilence came into being after the Garden.

There are those who believe that all evil is a result of free will. We suffer because we decided to marry the wrong person or didn’t have the skills or the knowledge to work a relationship out, or we were too stubborn or too prideful, etc. People die in floods and earthquakes because greedy or lazy developers continue to build along fault lines or on flood plains. We get cancer because we eat food that’s processed with chemicals or have to breathe air that companies have polluted or because we live too stressful a life. Children are molested because their molesters were molested.

People make bad choices with their free will. Progressives are rooted in the Romantic Era’s philosophy that children are born a blank slate, and that if they have the right nurture they will grow into good people. People would make better choices if they had peace in their homes and neighborhoods, if they had good schools and consistent parenting. So we work to make those things better in order to decrease the suffering in the world. The UU thinking is that we are good in our nature, but capable of doing evil. The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, which was extremely influential in Unitarian thought, asserts that our living conditions and training have a big effect on our ability and tendency to choose good. If we can make these conditions better for people we will see more people choosing to do good.

There are those who say a lot of evil comes from “Natural Law.” Nature doesn’t take our hearts into account at all. If you are a living organism and you stay outside in sub-zero temperatures, you will freeze. Natural Law. If a woman decides to hit someone over the head with a two-by-four, it’s not the wood’s fault. It is, in fact, the wood’s job to be hard and unyielding. Natural law says if one hard unyielding object hits another one, the softer one will get a dent in it. We count on that law on a day to day basis, as we mash potatoes and cut paper. Our world would be chaos if wood were hard when you want to build with it and soft when you try to hit with it. If cars were strong when you load them down with your family and their luggage, but soft when they run into someone on a bicycle.

Nature makes a lot of organisms that are not viable. Other organisms break down and die. Nature doesn’t discriminate. Some of these organisms are microscopic. Others are us or our children. We use our free will to deal with what comes with as much grace, love, and compassion as we can muster. For some people this makes sense, but they feel the loss of a God who can protect and defend us and our children against the heartlessness of Nature.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooken rose, my youth is bent by that same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas.

Is most of what we call evil simply an interaction between human free will used badly and natural law, or are there people (or dogs and cats, for that matter) who are just born bad?

Is there a force of evil that exists outside of us, beyond us? For people who believe in a personification of evil, in a devil, explanations are simpler, and the big picture has a drama and a story line that satisfy. Even if you just believe in some kind of an energy or force of evil, it helps explain a lot. As in most matters of belief, you end up choosing what you believe and acting as if it’s true. Those among us less comfortable with belief in the spiritual realms would say what choices made in the context of cultural and societal influences. Those among us comfortable with beliefs in spiritual unseen forces believe that there is an energy that wants to tear life down.

For us, the decision to be on the side of that which builds up, that which heals, to be on the side of love is our spiritual path. When terrible things happen, we lean on one another for strength and comfort. It is my belief that loving actions leave an energy behind that never fades. Loving actions since the beginning of life on earth are added to this stream of energy, and that is what I mean if I say the word “God,” By loving, by standing with one another in suffering, we actually build God. This is the Spirit of Love that flows in and through us if we allow it, urging us in good times and in terrible times, to choose love.

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 14 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
November 9, 2014

This year marks the 100th anniversary of World War I. How did it change our world? How might we hold in our hearts some of its lessons?

In the early 1900’s, technology was changing the world in Europe and Russia. People became more ready to think about doing things other than what they’d been “born” to do. Electricity was more widespread. The automobile enabled more travel. The strictures began to lift.

One peasant was able to travel from the countryside to St. Petersburg to see the Tsar. He wrote about his disappointment after coming face to face with the man. The Tsar in my mind was the container of wisdom, the glory and the history of Russia. What I saw, he said, was an ordinary little fellow on ordinary legs. It was as if he suddenly realized that ordinary people were running things.

All of the heads of state were cousins, related to Queen Victoria. Nickolas, the Tsar of Russia was related, as was his wife Alexandra. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was her grandson. He used to visit her in the summers, admiring the ships that ruled the seas and vowing to himself to have a navy as grand as his grandmother’s when he grew up. He was ashamed of his left arm, which did not work, and which he was shamed for as a child. The German culture prized physical perfection, and he had been injured by the forceps at his birth.

Germany was newly a nation, wanting to be part of the colonizer group like France, Great Britain and Holland.

Germans were convinced of the superiority of their culture. Socialists wanted change. The Kaiser was riding around in cars. wearing a cavalry uniform. Everyone was reading Nietzsche. The cities were the great melting pot, and in order for revolution to come, they reasoned, the cities had to explode.

The people of Europe were doing better than they had been. It is not when the people are at their lowest that revolution happens. It is when things start to get a little better that revolution happens. The structures of class had seemed set in stone. The way things had always been were in a terrible tension with what was coming into being. Artists had visions of a looming storm. Something felt clogged that had to be freed. If that meant war, some said, so be it.

“A war with Austria would be a splendid little thing for the revolution.” Lenin

Anarchists were people who wanted change, but did not believe that working within the systems that existed would be possible. They had no power in those systems. When people feel powerless is when they start breaking things. Emma Goldman, in the US, was advocating civil disobedience and planning an assassination to send a message to the way things were. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Serbia, a man named Gavrilo Principe had been rejected by the Serbian army for being to small.

“Wherever I go people think I’m a weakling. Even though I’m not.” In the Serbian Army some officers who believed they needed regime change. The old ruler was on his way out and the Archduke Ferdinand was going to take the throne. He had already had his portrait painted wearing the Emperor’s medals. These officers, who called themselves The black Hand, stirred up a few of the Anarchists. Told them the route the procession would take, supplied them with pistols. Security got wind of something threatening changed the route. The driver took a wrong turn and drove the Arch Duke and his wife to face the assassin.

“By far the cleverest thing I ever did in my life was to marry my Sophie. She is everything for me: my wife, my doctor, my advisor – in a word my whole happiness… And then our children! They are my whole pride and joy. I sit with them all day long in amazement that I can love them so much. And then the evenings at home when I smoke my cigar and read my papers. Sophie knits and the children tumble about, knocking everything of! the tables. It’s all so cozy and precious…”

Smashing Serbia became the manly thing to do. Appearing strong in the moment of crisis. It’s a test of character rather than of national interest.

Instead of a small war with Serbia they got all the allies.

When he realized that he was now going to be at war with Great Britain, France and Russia he tried to back away. The general head of the military said we’re going to war.

A well loved leader named Jean Jaures tried to stop it. “What will the future be like, when the billions now thrown away in preparation for war are spent on useful things to increase the well-being of people, on the construction of decent houses for workers, on improving transportation, on reclaiming the land? The fever of imperialism has become a sickness. It is the disease of a badly run society which does not know how to use its energies at home.”
— Jean Jaures

This eloquent antiwar orator was assassinated before the war started.

Honor had to be satisfied. Serbia must be punished. People demanded it. It was embarrassing to do nothing. It looked weak. Unmanly. Diplomacy was for sissies and weaklings. Kaiser William would Strike, helping the Austrians punish the Serbs, and get it over with.

“We’ll have Paris for lunch, St Petersburg for dinner” However. alliances had been formed. Treaties had been signed. Too late they all realized that, if they struck Serbia, the Russians would come defend them. And the French. And the British. Kaiser Wilhelm tried to walk it back, along with his cousin Nicholis, Tsar of Russia, but the military folks were dead set on war. He couldn’t stop them without looking foolish.

No one could fathom the gruesome brutality of this war. The Irish and Russian boys thought their bravery and panache would see them through. Apparently their commanders did too, as some soldiers were sent into battle without rifles. The helmets, for the first two years of the war, were leather covered in cloth to protect the leather from mud splatter. It’s two years later when, horrified by all the head injuries, they started issuing soldiers steel helmets.

Both sides dug trenches, some dug whole underground complexes, to protect the soldiers. Both sides lobbed bombs over. Flamethrowers. Poisoned gas. Sometimes there were raiding parties sent over the walls, and boys were slaughtered this way. You can think of giving your life for your country, but a boy’s war hero dreams don’t usually include giving up a leg or an arm, the nose on your face or your eyes and lungs.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
N a mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Dulce et Decorum est(1)
by Wilfred Owen

Bent double. like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed. coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. many had lost their boots,
But limped on. blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Nine million people died. It was good for the economy. For some, the war was the best part of their lives. Companionship. Bonding.

People grieved their loved ones. Began being interested in spiritualism. Communicating with the dead. Arthur Conan Doyle one of the leaders of Spiritualism. Lost his son Kingsley in the war. People searching for answers to why. “It is almost incomprehensible to me’, Kathe Kollwitz wrote, ‘what degrees of endurance people can manifest. In days to come people will hardly understand this age. What a difference between now and 1914… People have been transformed so that they have this capacity for endurance…

Worst of all is that every war already carries within the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.’

It is nothing but the inevitable, logical center of the whole system of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and I stand for it absolutely. If it should ever in any important respect be impaired, I would feel like asking the Secretary of War to get the boys who went across the water to fight,… and I would stand up before them and say, Boys, I told you before you went across the seas that this was a war against wars, and I did my best to fulfill the promise, but I am obliged to come to you in mortification and shame and say I have not been able to fulfill the promise. You are betrayed. You have fought for something that you did not get.

Woodrow Wilson

Does It Matter?
by Siegfried Sassoon

Does it matter?-losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter?-losing your sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

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 14 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
November 2, 2014

How do we honor those who came before us? How do we keep the stories as true as we can, cherishing the things they did that were right and acknowledging, then forgiving the things they did that were wrong? How do we claim where we came from and still understand our power to choose who we are now?

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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 14 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
October 19, 2014

What does it mean to trust someone? What are the depths of being hospitable? How far do you go with people who take you places you didn’t want to go? These are life-balance questions that we must address on the road to emotional and spiritual maturity, both as individuals and as a congregation. We get a chance to practice here.

I meet in my office with the Healthy Relations Team every month, and we talk about the covenant. A while ago, we were reviewing the covenant, not because there was a thing wrong with it, but just to keep it fresh, to remind ourselves that it’s a living document which changes as our understanding changes. In the original, it said that we were going to interact with one another in an atmosphere of trust.

What do you think that means?” we asked one another. I said that it felt almost dangerous to me. When someone who doesn’t know me well says they trust me, I start to worry. What do they mean? I worry that they might mean they trust me to be who they would be if they were me. Do they trust me to be a friend the way they would be a friend? Do they trust me to keep secrets I should not keep? Do they trust me to have the same values they do, to look at things the way they do? To be cool the way they are?

People will disappoint you, and you can’t imagine that they will be like you. I’ve heard people say “I thought she was my friend!” their voices distressed and sad. “A friend wouldn’t do that.”

Perhaps that is not how that person thinks about friendship. Maybe a friend would do that, in their system of friendship. Someone wrote that trust meant she could be know that the other person would never hurt her physically or emotionally. It’s trust like that that scares me, because when you’re in a large community, trying to get things done, talking together about deep things, and we don’t know the issues about which each person is sensitive, it’s possible that someone’s feelings will get hurt. Then they’ll think “Oh no! I trusted you!”

People expect confidentiality when it’s not necessarily assumed. Anne Lamott is a writer who writes about the people in her life. All writers struggle with how much they can write about friends and family. If you’ve heard a story but you weren’t there, can you write that? If there is a family secret, what price will you pay for writing about it? Once, at a family reunion near Charlotte, NC, I told a cousin I was thinking about writing the story of my upbringing, about this family that sets off fireworks at weddings, that has eighty people every Thanksgiving, where there are sometimes bull rides in the back yard after dinner, where we all line up for flu shots while the turkey is being wrapped up in the kitchen. Word spread around the reunion, apparently. Uncle Norman, a retired orthopedic surgeon in his eighties, crooked a finger at me to come with him. We went around the back of the house and he started shaking that finger at me. Normally when someone shakes a finger at me, I feel like reaching out and grabbing it, to attain some control of the situation. I was taught to revere my elders, though, so I just stood there while he lectured me with his finger in my face. “You will not write anything embarrassing about this family, do you hear me?” He went on to talk about Presbyterianism and Unitarianism and missionaries and lots of other things that I just let wash over me because Uncle Norman doesn’t have the same kinds of connective tissue in his conversation most people expect. One cousin said that talking to Uncle Norman is like surfing the internet without a pop-up blocker. You’ll be cruising along, talking about Gurkha fighters in Nepal, and suddenly he’ll say something about when Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. Anyway he lectured me about not writing embarrassing things about the family, which confused me because I don’t really know anything embarrassing about the family. I feel a lot of affection for that family, and I admire them greatly. If someone said they were writing about the family, I would respond by telling them I was very much looking forward to what they would write, and could I help in any way…. Anyway, writers struggle with this, and Anne Lamott said she finally figured out that if people wanted you not to write them into your books and makes them look bad, they should behave better. Some people trust you to keep their bad behavior confidential. If they did it in public, they obviously don’t care about keeping it confidential, so why do we feel we must protect them?

One person’s idea of trust is different from another’s. I asked some friends what they would think a covenant would mean when it said something about “an atmosphere of trust.” Some people said that it meant they assumed good will. Others said they needed that in their covenant because people had squared off, not believing that they were being told the truth in meetings, believing that there was some kind of cabal running things. Many of you remember my friend from a church far away who….CORE COMMITTEE STORY. When a church goes through a period like that, it needs to address the distrust directly, so people will look at it and know something isn’t right if they think there are secret machinations going on. It makes all kinds of sense that you would put it in your covenant if that is your situation. I think it’s just all my questions about trust that make me want to talk about it with you.

In books about trust, people write about public trust and private trust. They speak of different levels of trust granted to different people. Some people you would trust to drive well enough with you as a passenger, but you wouldn’t tell them something you didn’t want everyone to know. Some people you would trust enough to tell them a guilty secret, like that you enjoy Stephen Segal movies, even when they are really bad. I have no idea where that example came from. It’s about …. A friend. Public trust has to do with trusting people to stop at red lights, to stay in their lane of traffic, not to walk up to you in an airport and hit you, not to get on a plane if they have an Ebola fever. Can you trust people like that? Mostly. So we drive defensively. Because you never know. That driver in the truck ahead of you might have just gotten out of the hospital. She might be addled from some good news or bad news or a six-pack. You need not to cast yourself into the social net unprotected.

Some people you would trust with your life. They can know everything about you. They’ve seen you at your worst and they continue to love you. They’ve seen you make bad decisions, they’ve seen you be grumpy. You’ve forgiven one another for things because you’d rather go into the future with them in your life than go without them.

I like to know what someone is trusting me to do. Do they know that I’m trying my hardest, even if I fail? Do they know I want to be the person they want me to be, even though, over and over, I’m just able to be the person I am?

Mostly I think you can trust people to be who they are. Over and over. That’s a pretty safe bet. You cast yourself into the social net, or into a beloved community, trusting people to be who they are. They’re trying.

We say in the goals of this church that we welcome all people of good will, and assuming good will is something we ask of everyone. We tell all of our incoming members that one of the expectations of membership is that they bring their good will to the church and that they assume good will on the part of others. I think this is probably the same thing as operating in an atmosphere of trust. Even if someone is doing something you think is wrong, you can be pretty sure they are doing it because they think it’s best. That doesn’t stop you from being able to say “I disagree with you on this one. Can you help me understand your decision to do things this way?” We covenant with one another to disagree from a position of curiosity and respect. We don’t covenant never to disagree. That would make for an unhealthy community. We have to be able to trust one another to talk about things.

We want to make this a welcoming community, which means several things to me. It has to feel safe enough. It has to have hope and joy and challenge. Trust isn’t in the covenant any more, but respect is there, kindness, curiosity. The bones of trust are still there, in other words. We do have an atmosphere of trust here right now, in that we trust people to have the best interests of this community in mind, and we trust that people are aspiring to treat one another the way we said we wanted to do so.

This is a church which aspires to be hospitable. Part of creating a hospitable environment is being friendly, and part of it is making a place where people can feel reasonably safe. Not that someone won’t hurt their feelings by mistake, but that you won’t get assaulted or emotionally brutalized. We have only banned one person from the community since I got here. That was my first year, a man who had shoved someone in the gallery, a man who sent me emails full of lies and accusations about the people in the church, who finally, after months of conversation, wrote me that he sure understood why that fellow went into the UU congregation in Knoxville and shot it up on a Sunday morning. Usually it’s the President who does the talking to people in a serious breach of covenant, but this time I wrote him that he couldn’t come back. Knoxville was the one word that did it.

Our job is to be hospitable to all people of good will. Our job is to be welcoming in an intelligent way. You don’t have to welcome being treated badly, being stolen from, being deceived, being scared. The Buddhists have a concept called “idiot compassion.” It’s not good for someone who is stealing to be allowed to keep stealing from you. Whether they are stealing things, your sense of safety, your trust, or taking liberties you did not invite. It is respectful and compassionate to set a boundary and say “we don’t do that here.” We are co-creating a church here, one that has been through storms and sunny days, and we will do what we can to make it strong far into the future.

Podcasts of sermons are available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 14 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, Rev. Marisol Caballero, Chris Jimmerson
October 12, 2014

Now THIS is Church! I have that feeling pretty often, and I wonder when you have it. Is it music? The candles? The faces of the people?

Text of this sermon is not yet available. Click the play button to listen.

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 14 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
October 5, 2014

As the Jews celebrate the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we reflect on when we’re not the people we know we are capable of being.

The music this morning was a Kol Nidre, which, in Hebrew, means: “All vows.” In the Jewish tradition, many of you know, it is a part of the ritual of the high holy days (which end this evening) to ask God to release us from all vows we were unable to keep. We acknowledge that, although we strive to be good people, smart people, nearly perfect people, we fall short. We fall down. Many of us have even sat at a healthy relations workshop and been tempted to get snappish with the other participants. The “All Vows” prayer says that we are people who fall down and get up, knowing we will fall again.

I was amazed the first time I heard about this tradition. To be released from vows I made in the past that I was unable to keep, vows that were unadvised, vows I made while still too young to have all the information. I was grateful to a people who had a different understanding of God from the one with which I’d been raised. The God of my childhood would have understood that you couldn’t keep your promise, of course. He never thought you could keep it in the first place. He would love you — in spite of your weakness and sin. But release you from your vows? No. You would have to carry them wrapped around your heart like barbed wire, just to remind you who and what you really were. A dumb sheep. A wretch. To include a prayer in worship in which you were released from your vows felt like mercy to me.

One of the traditional stories of the High Holy Days is about the half-brothers Isaac and Ishmael. Those of you who grew up in church or synagogue know the story. Abraham and Sarah had been promised that they would have many descendants, but the years were passing and they hadn’t had a child. Sara gave her Egyptian handmaiden Hagar to Abraham and she got pregnant. The book says then she began to despise Sara because she had a son and Sara didn’t. Sara complained to her husband and he told her to take care of it. She treated Hagar so badly that she ran away and nearly died, lost in the desert. Finally she found a spring of water. God spoke to her there, telling her to go back to living with Sara and Abraham, and telling her about her child, who was to be a father of nations. Hagar named that place “The Well of the Living One Who Sees Me.” When she was desperate, afraid and alone, God saw her and met her there. Tradition holds that Ishmael was the father of the Arab nations. Sara did have a son, Isaac, whom tradition holds to be the father of the Jewish people. To make a lengthy and confusing story simple, they never got along. When Abraham died, though, the scripture says they buried him together in the place with the well. Tradition has it that this was a reconciliation between the brothers. It is this theme of reconciliation that defines these holy days which we celebrate as the year enters into its season of gathering darkness.

Yom Kippur translated as “the day of judgment” with its rituals of repentance and reconciliation, takes place in the season of darkening time. Mystics of the northern hemisphere call us to reflection, to self-examination as the days grow shorter. In the natural world, when the nights grow longer, plants turn their energy to growing their root systems so they can be hardier and more stable when the time comes for all that greening and blossoming. For us, reflection, looking at our good deeds and our destructive ones, doing what the 12 step program calls “Taking your own inventory” is a way to become hardier and more stable, to get ready for whatever greening and blossoming we’re going to do. After the reflection, we take responsibility for who we are. We see ourselves clearly. We have qualitiesÉ. I won’t say “good” qualities or “bad” qualities, because most of the elements that go into who we are can go both ways. Seeing ourselves clearly means we don’t skitter around on the surface of our decisions yelping about what made us do it and why we didn’t have any choice. We stand our ground, take a deep breath and say “yes I did that.” “Yes, I’m like that. We make amends, show our understanding of the hurt we’ve caused and present our intention to do better.

The Holy Days are a time to begin again clean. the start of a new year. In these days we celebrate the beginning of the world. We remember the faith-story of the creation, where God made light and dark and called them both good. In the story, light is sacred, and the dark is too. At the celebration of the birthday of the world, can we say we are grateful for the light, and may we speak of the sacred dark? It’s hard, in our culture, to think about “sacred dark.” This culture is in the habit of using the image of darkness to speak of ignorance, wickedness, poverty and cruelty.

In the language of psychology, we talk about bringing unconscious contents into the light of consciousness. Dream symbols are analyzed, feelings are analyzed, behavior is analyzed. We place great faith in analyzing, in explaining things. In the Christian traditions, God is Light, and somehow, even though, in the book of Genesis God creates the day and the night and calls both good, the church has almost always talked about darkness as a way of speaking of evil and destruction. In the New Age traditions there is a lot of talk of the Light and surrounding people and things with light. There are beings of light and beings of darkness. I’m not saying I want everyone to let all of those ways of speaking go. I just want to wonder today. I want to wonder about the sacred dark. Can we reclaim the sacred darkness as an image for a time of reflection, going deep, for the nurture of our hearts and the return of our souls to health?

Most religions have a description of the sacred dark. In ancient traditions the dark is the womb of the Great Mother. You enter the darkness, the womb, when you die, and you come out reborn, reformed. In ancient temples and in some Cathedrals, mazes and labyrinths, spirals and tunnels take you into the center, and back out again. Celtic traditions talk about Cerridwen’s Cauldron. There is cooking that happens in the sacred dark. There are chemical changes in a soul, in a life, in a way of thinking when times of darkness arrive.

We enter a time of sacred dark when we lose part of our identity – we are no longer a day-to-day parent when our children grow up, or we are no longer able to be athletic when our bodies change, or we are no longer able to be the devil-may-care bad to the bone kid when we realize that the substances that have been our best friend are killing our lives. We enter a time of sacred dark when we, who are used to knowing things, don’t know anything that will help us in this situation In the Zen Buddhist tradition this place of sacred dark is encouraged. It is call “don’t know mind,” and it is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is one thing and wisdom is another, and the sacred darkness comes to help us make the transition. During the Days of Awe we are asked to see our lives. Not as we wish they were, but as they are. At first we see ourselves harshly. We wander in a panic in a desert of criticism and despair. Then the Mystery shows us a spring of water. Then we remember that we are loved. We remember that we are surrounded by people who can witness our lives. We are surrounded by the Spirit of Love that flows through us and through the world. We can be truly seen by the eyes of love, and they see us clearly, but with compassion and mercy. The eyes of love say “You can get up again. I will believe in you no matter how many times you fall.” Then we can begin to forgive those who have wronged us, knowing they also are people who fall short of what they would like to be. Then we can begin to forgive ourselves, and see even ourselves with the eyes of love.

Closing words

Because we spill not only milk
knocking it over with an elbow
when we reach to wipe a small face
but also spill seed on soil we
thought was fertile but isn’t
and also spill whole lives and only
later see in fading light how
much is gone and we hadn’t
intended it
Because we tear not only cloth
thinking to find a true edge and
instead making only a hole but
also tear friendships when we grow
and whole mountainsides
because we are so many and
we want to live right where black oaks
lived, once very quietly and still
Because we forget not only what
we are doing in the kitchen
and have to go back to the room we were in
before, remember why it was we left
but also forget entire lexicons of joy and
how we lost ourselves for hours
yet all that time were clearly
found and held and also forget
the hungry not at our table
Because we weep not only at jade
plants caught in a freeze and
precious papers left in the rain but
also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside
they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as
though they might be rearranged but
which, once loose, refused to return
and we are helpless
Because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days
we need to gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
–Nancy Schaffer

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 14 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
September 28, 2014

What does sexual integrity look like? What is the history of our sexual mores?

This morning I’m going to talk about the next Commandment in the sermon series, and I have to say I’ve gotten a lot of comments along the lines of “I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say about this one!” I found myself saying “I can’t wait to see what I’m going to say too,” since it is one of those commandments that feels to me to be based on something we say we don’t believe any more, yet it also seems sensible. What am I saying? Here is the part that makes me mad about it, the part we say we don’t believe any more.

In those ancient times, a woman was the property of her father until she was married, then she became the property of her husband. It was important to the laws of inheritance that a man pass his property on to his own sons. Knowing whose children your wife was bearing was a matter of knowing whose blood lines were being perpetuated, knowing your family wealth was going to blood family. Punishments for sex outside of marriage were severe. In the laws set down in the first five books of the Bible, if a new bride were found not to be a virgin, she was dragged back to her father’s house and stoned to death by the men of the village. If she were raped, the man who raped her was forced to marry her. Having intercourse with your neighbor’s wife was an offense against your neighbor, a violation of his property rights. Married men could have sex with prostitutes; that was not considered adultery. The purpose of marriage was for rearing children. A man could marry more than one woman. King David had several wives. His son Solomon had thousands of wives and more concubines. Romantic love was not what it was about for most people. I’m sure there were many couples who loved one another, but that wasn’t the center around which the relationship turned.

From Jesus’ day we have the story of the woman taken in adultery.

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If anyone of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Was Jesus soft on adultery? He said

Matthew 5:28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. and Matthew 5:32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

Mostly what he seemed to try to do was to get people to look at themselves and their self-righteousness, to try to get the sinners to do better and the righteous folks to be kinder.

What might this Commandment have to say to people who don’t believe a wife is property?

In relatively recent history, romantic love became a reason for marriage. The ideal (at least here in the States) is that you will find someone with whom to be in love, and that you will love that person forever. People are expected to be faithful to their partners, and according to the studies about half of us are.

Most Americans, and most UUs, expect faithfulness of themselves and their partners as well. For some, there are other arrangements people make for marriage and partnership. Some have “open marriages” where both are allowed to have relationships outside the marriage, with the promise that there will be no deceit or lying about it. They say it’s the lying that adulterates, changes or destroys the relationship. The folks who name themselves polyamorists make committed relationships with more than one person at the same time. What is most important is that couples agree on what the situation is, and that it be fair to both parties.

It is not the Commandment that keeps most religious liberals faithful. It’s a sense that, if you have promised to be faithful you should keep that promise in order to honor and strengthen the trust you have with your partner. That trust is the surround within which vulnerability, intimacy and growth can take place. Also, having more than one sexual relationship at a time seems to most people to be spreading your energy too thin. One relationship of intimacy and engagement is demanding of time and energy.

An old Yiddish proverb says “You can’t ride two horses with one butt.” What makes sense in terms of ethical sexuality is what we talk about to our kids in the “Our Whole Lives (OWL) curriculum, and to ourselves.

Here is what I think:

I think there are many promises in a relationship that can be broken, and many things that, added to the chemical mix of an intimacy, can adulterate it, change it, or ruin it. For some couples, work is the adultery. Your partner’s energy, charm and good will are being spent elsewhere. You are not getting enough attention and all the work issues seem to take your partner farther away from you. For some couples, porn is the adultery. If one of you is spending more energy having sex solo with porn than you’re your primary person, something is wrong. Energy they could reasonably expect to be flowing toward them is flowing in another direction. You may find yourself comparing the real partner you have with an unreal dream, and reality may suffer. For some people, it feels like their partner is spending all their energy on their family of origin, or on an addiction that takes them away from the relationship. There are emotional ties outside of the relationship that hurt the relationship, there is emotional abandonment, when the person is there in body but not in other ways. There is sexual abandonment. Some people seem to believe that they can stop having sex with their partner and expect their partner not to look for sexual intimacy elsewhere. When I worked as a couples counselor, now and then I would run into people who had decided they didn’t want to have sex with their partner. Then they would be outraged and betrayed when s/he found sex elsewhere. The old rabbis had strict rules about what breaks the marriage covenant, and no sex was high on the list of things that killed the covenant. There are lots of ways to avoid showing up for your relationship. There are lots of ways to shred a covenant that has been made between two people.

I think couples should talk about their expectations of one another, about what arrangement they want for the relationship and not assume that there is only one way to go about things. If you make a covenant with a partner, try to keep it. If the covenant is broken, try to be engaged in renegotiating it so it is authentic again. In my opinion, if you are in a relationship where you would rather be alone than be with that person, then you should go on an end it. If you are in a relationship you wouldn’t want your children to be in as adults, YOU could change it. That’s a sermon about divorce, though, and that’s for another day. What matters is being loving to those you are with, as well as to yourself.

The UU stance toward sex is that it is healthy, healing, sacred, to be celebrated, but that its destructive side is equally powerful. The abuses of sexuality are hurtful. Several of my clergy colleagues have been removed from ministerial fellowship because of unethical sexual behavior within their congregations. One thing to know is that, in Texas, if a minister behaves sexually with a congregant, it is rape. Period.

I am one of the signers of an interfaith Religious Declaration on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. Part of it says: Our culture needs a sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts. All persons have the right and responsibility to lead sexual lives that express love, justice, mutuality, commitment, consent, and pleasure. Grounded in respect for the body and for the vulnerability that intimacy brings, this ethic fosters physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It accepts no double standards and applies to all persons, without regard to sex, gender, color, age, bodily condition, marital status, or sexual orientation.

We are fragile beings, my friends. Sometimes adultery is carelessness, sometimes it’s communication. Let’s love one another the best way we can.

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 14 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
September 21, 2014

John Murray’s rowing ashore in New Jersey in September of 1770 was the beginning of Universalism on this continent. What is the Universalist element in our faith? Our good news is that no one goes to hell.

Sermon: A UU faith story: John Murray

This morning I’m going to tell you about John Murray, who came to the New World in 1770, a defeated man, trying to start over again in a land where he could disappear. He was 29 years old, a widower. His wife Eliza and their one-year-old baby died in England, and medical bills had crushed him, landing him in debtor’s prison.

John Murray lost everything because he was converted to Universalism in England. He had been a lay preacher and Bible scholar with the Irish Methodists, and he loved good preaching. He visited every church in London, which is how he heard James Relly, a Universalist preacher. The idea that God was loving and that everyone would be saved in the end appealed to him and to his wife Eliza. Their friends begged them to come back to normal church. Their families cried. His business dried up. When he ended up bereaved, in prison, bailed out by Eliza’s brother, he just wanted to disappear, never preach again, never talk theology again, start all over with no history where no one knew him and he didn’t have to face either looks or words of loving concern or a self-righteous “I told you so.” He booked passage on the Hand In Hand, which was sailing for New York. The captain landed in Philadelphia instead, due to a miscalculation. Lots of the passengers got off. They sailed again for New York, but ran aground on a sand spit off the coast of New Jersey, at Good Luck Point.

Asked by the Captain to row ashore to look for food and water, came to a clearing in the pines and saw a large house and a trim looking church made of rough sawed lumber. A tall farmer stood in front of the house cleaning fish.

The following dialogue is imagined in the collected stories for UU children called “UU and Me.”

“Welcome” called out the farmer. “My name is Thomas Potter.”

“And I am John Murray, from the ship Hand in Hand.”

“Yes,” said Thomas, “I saw your ship in the bay, stuck on the sand bar, she is.”

“May I buy your fish to take back to the ship’s crew?” asked John.

“You can have them for the taking, and gladly:” answered Thomas, “and please come back to spend the night with my wife and me. I will tell you all about this little church and why it is here.”

John gratefully carried the fish to the sailors, and then returned to Thomas’ home for the night.

“Come, my friend, sit in front of our fire, this chilly fall evening,” said Thomas. “I’m so glad you have come. You may be the very person I’ve been waiting for.”

Potter told Murray that he had often heard the Bible read, and had thought a lot about God, coming up with ideas that made sense to him. He built the little church hoping for a preacher who would teach about things that made sense to him.

“Today, when I saw your ship in the bay,” he said to Murray, “a voice inside me seemed to say, “There, Potter, in that ship may be the preacher you have been so long expecting.”

John said quickly,” I am not a preacher.”

“But,” said Thomas Potter, leaning forward, “can you say that you have never preached?”

“I have preached,” answered John slowly,” and I believe, as you do, in a loving God.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” shouted Thomas.” You are the preacher for whom I have waited for so long! You’ve got to preach in my church on Sunday!”

“No,” replied John firmly. “I never want to preach again. Tomorrow, as soon as the wind changes, I will be on my way!”

After John went to bed, he couldn’t sleep. He wrote later that he thought to himself as he tossed and turned,” I just want to get away from everything…if I preach I know there will be trouble. Why start all of that over again? “By Saturday night the wind had still not changed, and John finally agreed to preach the next morning. Thomas Potter was happy. And so, on Sunday morning September 30, 1770, the first Universalist sermon was delivered in America. Thomas Potter, a Universalist before he even heard John Murray, heard a preacher talking about love instead of an angry God and a fiery hell.

I would say that John Murray is the patron saint of people who are stuck. Our life runs aground, and the way we get it going again is by doing what we were born to do. Circumstances may conspire like border collies nipping at your heels, driving you to the place where you realize what you need to do. May we all find a guide like Thomas Potter, who will give us the push we need in the right direction.

The Revolutionary War came, and John Murray worked as a chaplain to the troops, under the orders of General George Washington. When the war was over, and the new US was founded, in 1779, John Murray organized the first Universalist church in America in Gloucester, Mass.

(Owen-Towle, The Gospel of Universalism, Introduction, p.v). (Scott, These Live Tomorrow, pp.25-26)

Unfortunately, you still can hear a good many sermons preached by people who believe in hell. We are surrounded by people steeped in that belief, preachers who will use a funeral service to warn the grieving family and friends that they won’t see their loved one again if they don’t repent and believe in just the right way, so they will end up in heaven. Our UU children, along with the Presbyterian, Methodist and other more progressive denominations’ kids, hear from classmates at school about how they are doomed to eternal torment for not being the right kind of Christian. We call our movement Unitarian Universalism because we believe in Universal salvation. That means we believe a loving God would not send anyone to hell.

I think a belief in hell makes people dissociated – holding two deeply rooted opposite thoughts in their minds at the same time, not really able to look at either of them, not able to be a whole and integrated person because of that. I heard a songwriter from Lubbock on NPR years ago. He said “We learned two things in Sunday School. One, God loves you and he’ll send you straight to hell. Two, sex is dirty and dangerous and you should save it for the one you love.”

We prosecute parents who burn their children even once for disobeying. Do we believe we are more moral than God? Would anyone you know send one of their children to hell for eternity for any kind of misbehavior, much less for having the wrong thoughts or beliefs? No! Are we better parents than God is? To hold in your mind that God is love and that he will send you to hell requires a twisting of good sense and a good heart. To believe that we should be one way as humans, but worship a God who behaves in a less moral way doesn’t make sense. It would build your understanding on a deep fear and mistrust, and it would make you abandon trust in your own sense.

What about now? We are surrounded by people whose belief in Hell has death-dealing consequences.

Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless American youth, up to 42 percent identify as lesbian or gay, and a disproportionate number identify as bisexual or transgender. Why do LGBT youth become homeless? In one study, 26 percent of gay teens who came out to their parents/guardians were told they must leave home. LGBT youth also leave home due to physical, sexual and emotional abuse LGBT youth report they are threatened, belittled and abused at shelters by staff as well as other residents.Http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/reports/HomelessYouth.pdf

LGBT youth are 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Even teens who are questioning their sexuality are 3 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers.

One prominent minister in California says if a member of his listening group finds their kid is gay and won’t repent of their “sin,” they need to shun them completely and “turn them over to Satan.”

Parents are desperate to show their kids that they have to change, and throwing them out of the house is seen as tough love. These kids are on our streets. They are suffering in our town. One of the reasons we participate in the pride parade is so that the kids can see that there is a church, an actual church that does not teach that they are sinners because of their sexual orientation.

“Hell” is a mistranslation of the Bible. Current views draw on Dante’s Inferno and Miltons “Paradise Lost.” There are levels of eternal torment supervised by the demonic lackeys. In Milton, Satan and his rebel angels are chained in a lake of fire. Dante has you descend through all the levels of hell, until you reach Satan, who is stuck waist-deep in ice.

Three words in the Jewish and Christian scriptures are translated “hell.”

Sheol: from the Hebrew, meaning the place for the dead.

Tartasus: a Greek word for a place where the dead were, now separated by a river, the good on one side and the bad on the other. Able to see one another. Rabbi Jesus cited this view in his re-telling of the Babylonian parable about Lazarus and the rich man.

Gehenna: The valley where the trash was burned. Outside, destruction. Sometimes in the Christian scripture, the writer wrote “sheol,” and translators wrote “hell.”

In the Jewish scriptures, the dead go to Sheol. It’s not a place of torment at all. You are there, watching your descendants live their lives. Then, the Greek idea of Hades began to be known in the area because it was all part of the Roman empire. Rabbi Jesus was referencing this idea now and then. In other passages, the reference is to the smoldering trash heap outside the city walls.

My friends, this knowledge is there for anyone to find if they study. No one has to believe in hell. Our forbear William Ellery Channing preached that.

We have good news. This is a hell-haunted society. It’s not just theoretical. People make hell for one another, sometimes because they believe in a literal hell. We are called to speak to the root cause of some of this wickedness.

Theodore Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Where does the Universalist part of our faith lead us to stand? One, we believe that all will be well, in the end.

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 14 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.