Bridging Ceremony – Learn to love

May 21, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

First UU Youth Group
May 18, 2014

The Senior High Youth Group invites you to share in the exploration of the topic of love. The service includes poems, stories, and mini-sermons about love, from the unique perspective of our teens.

Welcome: Audrey Lewis

Reading: Nikola Locar

Homily: “Strange Places” Kate Windsor

Sonnett 18: Maya Runnels

Homily:

“Falling” Mary Emma Gary

The first christmas gift my boyfriend ever gave me was a copy of Alice in Wonderland. I remember reading it during standardized testing, and due to the nature of that sort of testing was left with plenty of time to admire how versatile the rabbit hole metaphor is. Today, I use it to make a narrative of falling in love.

I sit in a garden filled with tulips, bits of grass poke between the red and violet bundles as a reminder that it takes a collection of things to make a picture beautiful. The tree I rest against has bark that is smooth from years of clambering up it with dripping popsicles and wings of laughter. A rabbit passes by, curiously I follow, admiring how his pocket watch doesn’t affect the speed at which he runs in front of me, and how he waits for me as I stop to watch the sudden ambush of butterflies, whose collective wings sound like the laughter of a baby, and how their patterns of innocent eyes flicker with delight at the wind chimes. He waits for me as I bend to pick up a kitten, then a puppy, then we all take off running, joined by more and more bodies until we approach the hole in the ground, dark and shining with promise. One after another the creatures I love jump down, until the rabbit and I are at the top of the hole looking down as everyone one else falls freely. He jumps, then I, into the hole in what I assume is sanity because according to the experts who write love songs the only way to fall in love is to give up the sturdy fabric of sanctity and sanity.

Jump with us.

We fall. We pass cabinets of snow globes, stuffed animals, and candy wrappers. little bottles that say “Horchata” from the time my dad drove to have breakfast with me after a rally, and little cakes that say “for biology, don’t eat” for all the times I’ve made cookies and he’s tried to steal a few. We pass hamster balls, VCR’s, books so worn their pages look like leaves, we pass them and we fall into a tunnel reminiscent of the scene from Willy Wonka that my kindergarden best friend was terrified of. As we fall some of the creatures stop on shelves, for while they are loved the bulk of their affection was spent at a time closer to the top of the tunnel.

Occasionally a door opens from nowhere and another person is cast into my tunnel with me, though sometimes it seems that I have joined theirs or that we have created a new one altogether. Each time a door opens, a few bottles may break, papers may fly, but what would an adventure be without broken glass? Eventually I land with the white rabbit on a floor with a spiral staircase at the center, leading down. There is a velvet rope with a note reading, “enjoy here until further notice.” So we sit. A door, previously unseen, opens. We are joined by a mouse, a cat, and seemingly the entire cast of Winnie The Pooh in the room that now holds a table. As a collective, we are in love, seperate we love each other, and in memories we love the glass table and orange tea cups that adorned our dizzying, spirited, fait.

This is how I see falling in love. We are led on a beautiful chase until the ground opens up under us. Possibly scared and maybe a little grimy we fall until we are actually floating. Floating on kind words, snippets of songs that you can’t remember the rest of the lyrics to, and collections of gorgeous arrays of light. Sunsets, sunrises, nights on the town to nights under stars, we float down until it feels like there isn’t possibly farther to fall. And then, because love is an exhaustive journey, we may choose to find a floor to rest on with the people who rejuvenate us the most, until we are ready to once again descend into a world of beautiful madness.

Our journey is never ending, and perhaps I am too young and naive or already too old and jaded to portray the drug that you cannot OD on, but I invite you to forget the pain of the past, the promise of the future, and take it upon yourselves to feel gravity pulling you down, and the cloud numbered nine lifting you back up. I invite you to listen to what the experts say, then to take it upon yourselves to discredit everything ever said about love, and make your own conclusions. I invite you to find the hole in the ground, the fireworks on display, or the flames that warm your cheeks and join me on the journey to find a home where the heart is a puzzle that requires more than one set of hands.

Sonnett 130: Anna Reynolds

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Poem: “Scattered Leaves” Andy Tittle

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.

A Juicy Slice of UU History – Servetus

May 14, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 11, 2014

Michael Servetus was one of the martyrs of our faith. He lived during the Reformation and wrote a pamphlet called “On the Errors of the Trinity.”

This is a story of the birth pains of free religion. It is a story of dangerous ideas, the clash of politics and passion. It is the story of how hard it is to control people, how impossible it is to control ideas, even when you are trying to control them in yourself.

Michael Servetus was born in Spain to a family of minor nobility. He was a prodigy, speaking French, Greek, and Latin by the time he was 13. (1524)

This was a time of religious evolution on the Continent. In 1517, when Servetus was 8, Martin Luther wrote a protest about the Rome raising funds for war and renovations by selling indulgences. Those were like an investment in your heavenly future — if you bought a small one you would be forgiven for a small sin, a large one forgave a large sin. You could buy relatives out of Purgatory where they were living in torment. It was big business in the Middle Ages. Martin Luther, a monk in Wittenberg, wrote 95 points of disagreement about how sins were forgiven, and nailed them to the door of the church. This wouldn’t have been so effective if another element had not been thrown into the mix: the printing press.

Before the 1500’s, a book had to be hand copied. Only the very rich could afford one or two of them. Most people couldn’t read anyway. After it was invented, print shops were set up all over the place, looking for things to publish. Luther’s theses were copied and they sold out immediately. He began to write more. Erasmus, the famous humanist wit, was being read widely. Universities were springing up everywhere, as every Prince now wanted to set up a center of learning in his province.

The Church was losing control. In Spain, it had become overwhelmed with the number of Jews and Muslims that had poured into the country. When they wouldn’t convert to Christianity, they were exiled or slaughtered. The Spanish Inquisition is famous for its vicious horrors.

It was against this background that Servetus, at fourteen, was sent to the University of Toulouse to be secretary to a famous scholar. Toulouse was a conservative town, so his parents felt safe sending him there, but, unbeknownst to them, the U. was a hotbed of radical thought. Michael essentially was given a private course with his boss, reading Erasmus, reading Luther. Printed Bibles were also to be had, which the students were not supposed to read, so they read them in secret. Somehow Servetus had picked up enough Hebrew to discuss the meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. Hebrew had been a forbidden language because the church wanted people to read the Bible only in its approved translation. There is even speculation that he learned Arabic, as he made several references to the Koran in his writing.

Servetus knew that not long before he was born, 800,000 Jews had been banished from Spain, and thousands of Muslims had been burned at the stake in Spain, because they would not accept the Trinity. He reasoned that if Christianity could correct that doctrine, then great numbers of Jews and Muslims, who already believed in one God, would be more inclined to convert. In reading the Bible, he was struck by the absence pf any mention of this thing that had caused so much strife and pain. When he was 20, he published a piece called “One the Errors of the Trinity.” It was printed to be small, about 3×6, so it could be stashed away fast if it had to be. A thousand copies sold out immediately. In it he said that God had created Jesus and that Jesus had become divine through his actions on earth. He thought you shouldn’t be baptized as an infant, as if the priest’s actions had the power to save your soul. He thought you should have to wait until you were twenty (the age he was then) and had some moral sense. He wrote that the Holy Spirit was the divine part of the human being. The Spanish Inquisition wanted their young man home for trial. He headed up to Switzerland, where the Protestants were establishing power in the towns of Basel and Geneva. Invited to live with a powerful leader, he argued with him about the trinity so rudely, so insistently, insulting and calling names, that after 10 months he was thrown out of that house and that town had to move on

He moved to Lyons to work for a printer, and worked on printing Ptolemy’s Geography. With his great scholarship, he actually improved this book. He couldn’t help adding his own opinions to the book. He wrote, “The English are brave, the Scots fearless, the Italians vulgar, the Irish rude, inhospitable, barbarous and cruel. On the map of Germany, he wrote ‘É all Germany are gluttons and drunkards.” (p.105, Wilbur) He was greatly admired in Lyon but he got into trouble again when he began discussing religion. And so he fled to Paris in 1536, changed his name to Villeneuve, and attended the University to study medicine. What was happening in the world then? Henry the 8th was founding the Church of England because Rome wouldn’t grant him the divorce he wanted. Meanwhile, Michael Servetus, putting himself through school lecturing on geography, astronomy and mathematics, became a respected doctor living as a good son of the Catholic Church (except for the time when he was censured by the Inquisition in France for using astrology with his medicine). He edited a new Latin translation of the Bible, and became the famous Dr. Villeneuve, consulted by nobles and potentates of the Church.

He couldn’t leave theology alone, though, when the reformer John Calvin began publishing his Institutes of the Christian religion (which we had to read in seminary). Dr. Villeneuve began writing to Calvin, arrogantly, with the same style that had gotten him in trouble as Servetus in his twenties. As in the past, he was not so much interested in hearing what Calvin had to say as he was in correcting Calvin’s errors, and he used terribly impolite language. By then, Calvin had gained considerable power as the leader of Geneva. Switzerland. Calvin wrote to a third party in 1547 that if this Servetus came his way, “he would never let him get away alive.” (Wilbur)

People who held different beliefs concerning the Christian religion faced overwhelming dangers. Unitarian scholar Earl Morse Wilbur notes that by the year 1546, 30,000 Anabaptists had been put to death in Holland and Friesland alone, because of their faith. (A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents)

Servetus broke off this correspondence with Calvin for four years, during which he revised and prepared for the press his final work, The Restitution of Christianity, which was printed anonymously in 1552. Within the body of his new book, Servetus made a major contribution to the study of medicine. In illustrating a theological point, he described the pulmonary circulation of the blood from the right chamber of the heart to the lungs. He is given credit as possibly the first to discover, and definitely the first to publish this piece of medical knowledge..

No one noticed the medicine as it was surrounded by shocking and dangerous theological ideas. Then as now, the churches who are all about control worried about his soul and those of the readers he would influence. Then, as now, dangerous ideas get you consigned to the flames. Actual ones in those days, eternal flames of hellfire in these days. Servetus was a wanted man.

Communications between Protestant Geneva and the Catholic Inquisition in France–then deadly enemies– eventually led to the arrest, examination, and incarceration of Servetus/Villeneuve in France. Realizing his great peril, Servetus managed to escape from prison, and to disappear from sight. His French trial went on without him for the next ten weeks. The errors of his work were duly noted, and sentence was pronounced: that he should be burned alive by slow fire. Since he wasn’t available, this sentence was carried out on his effigy.

That summer Michael Servetus was keeping out of sight, moving slowly towards Italy, where he might have been safe. There weren’t many countries where he wasn’t being hunted. He made the choice to pass through Switzerland. Who knows why he stopped in Geneva. On a Sunday, when everyone, including strangers, was required to go to church. Someone reported his presence to Calvin, who had him thrown in jail.

There was a trial, examining Servetus’ heresies, and it appears Servetus thought he might win out or at least receive some minor punishment such as a fine or banishment. Finally, after much debate, Servetus was found guilty. Calvin himself pushed for a more merciful beheading, but his Council insisted on the fire. On Oct 27th, the sentence was carried out, Servetus was burned with his book chained to his ankle.

Widespread repulsion at the way he had died gave more energy to the movement of free religion — free from the control of any church. The man could be killed, but his ideas could not. The books were destroyed, all but three copies, which managed to survive and now exist in translation. Ideas have power, and your truth has power. How can we stay silent when we feel the Spirit call us to speak our free religion?

Three hundred years after his death, Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing could and did speak openly: “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith.” We sometimes forget how much blood was shed before such freedom was possible. Let us not forget. That is our heritage.

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

May the force be with you

May 4, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 4, 2014

Does a concept like George Lucas’ “The Force” represent most Unitarian Universalists’ idea of the Divine?

When film maker George Lucas rediscovered his copy of Joseph Campbell’s book “Hero of a Thousand Faces,” he had already written two drafts of the Star Wars screenplay. He had loved that book when he read it in school, Rereading the story of the Hero’s Journey, he could see the various elements of that journey: the awakening, the resistance to leaving home, supernatural help, leaving home, the training period where the young hero becomes strong, the battle with evil, the temptation to become evil, finding out that evil is part of you, (Luke, I am your father), resisting your new training, losing your patience with the wisdom, choosing to fight rather than use the power of the mystery…. Reading about the archetypes: the father (Darth Vader), the goddess (Leia) the mentor (Obi Wan,) the oracle (Yoda), the trickster (Han Solo) The story almost told itself. And, despite some of the mistakes that sprang from its being created mostly by white people, it spoke to people of many cultures.

People responded to the description of The Force. Obi Wan tells Luke “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” We watched him train his intuition along with his body. We thought “I could do that. I almost can do that now. I’ve felt The Force.”

Most people have felt a power flow through them at some time, and we hear ourselves saying words we did not know were there, doing deeds we did not know we could do, being “in the zone” when we were playing a game or making an athletic effort, where it felt that we could do nothing wrong, that the stars were aligned, that we were in the flow.

Unitarian forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a human being is a stream whose source is hidden, whose being is pouring in from somewhere else. As the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere, every particular person is contained in the (Force) Over-soul, the Unity within which we are all made one with all other. There is a common heart. All sincere conversation is its worship, all right action is submission to it. It is that force that makes us feel enlarged by doing good and diminished by doing wrong.

Within each person is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us. When it breathes through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affection, it is love “

The only word I changed in there is that, instead of saying “The Force,” Emerson said “The Oversoul.”

Emerson and his friends were reading the newly available translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts, and their new theology, called Transcendentalism, was shaped by their relationship with these Eastern Religions.

Conversation among religions is ongoing about whether this deep power is separate from us, but can be in us, whether it is us at our best or something greater than we are, whether it is only good, and evil is only its absence, or whether there is a separate force of evil, or whether both creation and destruction are contained in it, and we need to be careful about calling something either good or evil. Lucas made those choices.

The Force is strong in some and less in others. The Force has a “Dark” side (the culture in which we live uses the word “dark” to denote evil. It might more properly be used to denote the inability to see well, or move about with confidence. The Hebrew scripture says God created light and darkness and they were both good.)

So the Force has an evil side, or a destructive side. Carl Jung, upon whose work Joseph Campbell based his, would have called it The Shadow. Jung said that the archetypal Hero’s Journey mirrors the journey of the soul toward wholeness. In order to find balance, which is what gives one power, the oracle Yoda says, one must meet, fight and come to a resolution with the Shadow.

I invite you to feel as if you are in training, using your intuition to feel the Force, learning when to try and when to let it carry you. When your kids are too much, when your parents make you sad, when you get the bad diagnosis, when your life turns upside down, this is the time to get still and feel that deep power in which we exist. If we practice it in small ways, when life is going pretty well, we’ll be better at it when life takes one of its surprise spins. May the Force be with you.

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

The banality of indifference

April 28, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
April 27, 2014

The phrase “the banality of evil” refers to how evil can often wear a fairly “normal” exterior. On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we’ll explore the concepts of “evil,” “good,” and all of the gray area in between.

Tonight, at sundown, until sundown tomorrow, marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom HaShoah, or day of destruction. The well-known slogans remind us to, “Never forget.” And to, “Never let it happen again.”

Recently, I began studying philosophy professor, Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality of Evil” and the controversy that has surrounded it since its publication. I remembered the phrase, “the banality of evil” one day when I was listening to NPR and heard the account of yet another school shooting. For a split second, I was filled with grief and sympathy, but then was aware of the fact that my mind naturally drifted, quite quickly, to thinking about the song that was in my head. The fact that, a second after hearing of such tragedy, I was cheerfully humming along to whatever annoying pop song was plaguing me was more jarring to me than the shooting, itself. This upset me.

After a brief moment of self-judgment, I began to mourn the fact that things like safety in schools can no longer be taken for granted and that mass-murderers choosing schoolchildren as their targets has become so commonplace that a relatively sensitive and genuinely caring person, such as I like to think of myself, is able to go on, relatively unaffected by such news. I checked and, in the year and some odd months since the tragedy in Newtown, CT, there have been 44 school shootings in the U.S., 13 of them within the first six weeks of 2014, alone.

So, I looked up the phrase and rediscovered Hannah Arendt’s book. I even watched the lackluster 2012 movie, Hannah Arendt, about her life before, during, and after the book’s publication. I’m not sure that I buy her argument that Nazi Adolf Eichmann, the man who was in charge of arranging the transportation of several million Jews to their death in packed train cars, was simply a puny, boring bureaucrat, unable to think for himself; that he was just following orders. She was surprised to find that, as she puts it, “Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,” that his, “lack of imagination” and “sheer thoughtlessness” allowed him to “never realize what he was doing.”

No, I’m not sure that I buy any of that. It seems a weak defense. But of course, I wasn’t there. Still, what’s difficult to wrap one’s brain around is that anyone could ever so abandon their conscience or divorce themselves from empathy so entirely as to compartmentalize in that way. Eichmann’s greatest aspiration, it seems, was to rise in the Nazi ranks and to be somebody, having been a disappointment to his father, his community, and been looked down upon by the middle class of his upbringing. He wanted to please the big man in charge, at all costs, even swearing that he had never held any anti-Semitic beliefs, himself.

In truth, there could never be an adequate motive offered by a mass-murderer. We hope, in many contemporary cases, such as mass public shootings, for a mental illness diagnosis to surface. In our efforts to understand horrendous acts of evil, we prefer to remove as much personal agency and responsibility from the perpetrator as possible. We would rather believe that a glitch in the wiring of the brain would provoke such atrocities, rather than believe that someone could, willingly and without remorse, choose to hurt or kill another. If there is an explanation of mental illness, we think, then we may have hope of preventing future tragedies, of curing the sickness.

In an article in The Guardian, entitled, “From, Adam Lanza: The Medicalication of Evil,” Lindsey Fitzharris, a British medical student, warns us that to over-pathologize examples of evil will remove personal accountability from the equation, “While I do believe it is important to determine what factors may have led Lanza to open fire on Sandy Hook Elementary School- and whether this tragic event could have been prevented- I want to remind the U.S. and the world of one thing: evil is about choice. Sickness is about the absence of choice.”

Not only should be careful about pathologizing mass murderers so as to avoid further stigmatization of mental illness, but in doing so, we not only let the perpetrator off the hook, we also avoid confronting the possibility of seeing ourselves in those who are able to choose evil over good. Sure, some who commit evil acts truly may be beyond rehabilitation, unable to feel a shred of empathy for another. Psychosis is real. But, although we may view ourselves as genuinely compassionate, good-natured people, I would reckon that empathy most often lies somewhere on a spectrum between saintly and intrinsically evil. We can’t all be Mother Theresa just as we (thank goodness) aren’t all Hitler. I am sure that we’d rather think of ourselves as closer to the Mother Theresa end of that spectrum, as I believe we tend to be, but the fact still remains that empathic concern is a fluid characteristic.

Our 1st Principle, as Unitarian Universalists, states that, “we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” The drafters of that principle, delegates gathered from UU congregations throughout out movement, were careful not to state a belief in the inherent goodness of every person. Rather, we are concerned with the possibility of goodness in people and strive to treat them accordingly.

Last year, professor Steve Taylor wrote in Psychology Today, “empathy or lack of empathy aren’t fixed. Although people with a psychopathic personality appear to be unable to develop empathy, for most of us, empathy- or goodness- is a quality that can be cultivated. This is recognized by Buddhism, and most other spiritual traditions… As we become more open and more connected, [we become] more selfless and altruistic.” This is evident in Tibetan Buddhism’s idea of recognizing that every human was, at some point in time, your mother, and treating them as such. We are aware of the Golden Rule. The Platinum Rule goes one step further, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”

It is within human nature to desire to think of ourselves as “the good guys.” As liberals, progressive folk, we like to think of ourselves as standing “on the right side of history.” Hopefully, with dedication, our legacies may prove this to be the case. But, because we believe ourselves to be good, does this prevent us from perpetrating or being complicit in evil? If we can so easily dismiss horrors of the nightly news as ordinary, commonplace occurrences, how far removed are we from the ability to set aside conscience, altogether? What makes otherwise “normal” people commit acts of evil?

This was a major question in the recent television series, Breaking Bad. The lead character could have been a modern day Eichmann- a boring, dweeby high school chemistry teacher who, upon being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, begins to manufacture “crystal meth.” For several seasons, the audience bears witness to Walter White’s moral degradation, as he, little-by-little, goes from dull family man to ruthless, amoral drug lord, by looking past one scruple after another.

It’s amazing how people can transform. We don’t often think about the fact that Hitler was once a giggling baby that someone cherished. I saw a photograph of a young, teenage Osama Bin Laden this week. He and over a dozen siblings and cousins were posing in front of a pink Cadillac while on vacation in Europe in the ’70’s. They were all dressed in the styles of the day, both women and men. No hint of radical Islam. And there he stood, laughing and young, big hair and sideburns, dressed like J.J. from “Good Times.” I couldn’t look away.

These days, most accept that evil is not a metaphysical force. “The Devil made me do it” doesn’t hold much weight anymore. But, I wonder if we have not adopted a seeping, dangerous cultural denial of evil’s existence as a systemic reality. We take cultural ills and reduce them to interpersonal incidents before we then reduce them to background noise on the nightly news. It’s someone else’s loss, someone else’s kid, someone else’s town.

Instead of stepping back to recognize the living system at play, we zoom in so closely that we no longer have to focus at all. Epidemic gun violence becomes to us unrelated cases of mental illness, or neglectful parents, or the product of violent video games. Racism becomes individual prejudice, mere name-calling, men in white sheets, rather than the very foundation that our society was built upon that was never fully reconciled and still affords great privilege to those born with white skin. Genocide becomes an egregious terror that lesser civilized nations carry out, rather than our nation’s own shameful history. Misogyny becomes cat-calls and ditsy blond stereotypes, rather than the worldwide actuality of the continued mistreatment of women and girls. And, anti-Semitism becomes the painful memories of far-away Europe, rather than the continued presence of Neo-Nazi hate groups within our own communities. And so on…

Ignoring our own nation’s atrocities, choosing the privilege of being able to not have to think about evil in terms of systems in which we live our lives, creates of us a chilling similarity to the many nameless, ordinary accomplices to historical events such as the Holocaust. Before the world wars, Germany was widely respected, thought of the world over as a center of culture, science, intellect, and art. Flunkies “following orders,” bystanders, and other banal people helped the evil cause in their action and inaction.

It would be maddening to fully empathize with each and every story of evil, day in, day out. The anger and grief would eventually deaden our ability to experience joy. We can, however, choose not to outright ignore. Together, we can choose not to accept hopelessness, not to choose personal insignificance, but to be part of the collective response. We can choose to work toward repairing the evil present in our world with good. And, we can begin within ourselves. Systems are not always easy to notice, especially because we are busy playing our parts within them.

So, how not to feel like any problem, any evil is too big to care about? How do we battle the urge toward indifference? Where do we find the middle ground between a depressing, bleak outlook and total moral blindness and lack of concern? Longtime Buddhist scholar and activist, Joanna Macy, tells us that we find it in community. She says that, “[this work] needs to be done in groups so we can hear it from each other. Then you realize that it gives a lie to the isolation we have been conditioned to experience in recent centuries… And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart… there comes a time when the little band of heroes feels totally outnumbered and bleak, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings or Pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress. You learn to say, “It looks bleak. Big deal, it looks bleak.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks to this in his book, “No Future Without Forgiveness.” After apartheid, South Africa sought to find a middle ground of moving forward. Somewhere between the Nuremburg Trials after WWII and the national amnesia that continues to take place in the United States’ attitude toward our own history of genocide and slavery. Post-apartheid South Africa was too complex for either option. Both sides were still living side by side, both had committed atrocities, and all wounds were still fresh. The middle way, the extremely difficult path toward forgiveness was chosen and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established.

Tutu said, “It was pointed out that we none of us posses a kind of fiat by which we can say, “Let bygones be bygones” and hey presto, they become bygones. Our common experience is in fact the opposite- that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately.”

On my fridge is a magnetic quote by Gloria Steinem, “The truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off.” I’ll add that it will also make you cry and fill you with grief, but we shall be free.

Never forget. And, never let it happen again.

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

Jesus’ Grandmothers

April 20, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 20, 2014

Who were the women in Rabbi Jesus’ family tree? What did their oddness say about him?

Some people call the genealogies in the Bible “the begats,” and they are hard to read. Why would I want to be reading you one? Well, because there are stories embedded in this one. Every name has a story (same with each of our genealogies) and I thought you might be interested in these. Women are hardly ever mentioned in these. This is the genealogy of Rabbi Jesus. Count on your fingers the women in this as I read it.

Matthew 1 – The Genealogy of Jesus

1 A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham:

2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob,

Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,

Perez the father of Hezron,

Hezron the father of Ram,

4 Ram the father of Amminadab,

Amminadab the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon the father of Salmon,

5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,

Obed the father of Jesse,

6 and Jesse the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

…then 24 generations without the mention of a woman, then…

16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

The usual genealogy in the Bible is a list of fathers. The mothers are rarely mentioned. In this genealogy of Jesus, there are a several items of interest. One is that it’s a list of Joseph’s forbears, which leads you to believe that the Virgin Birth didn’t mean the same thing to Matthew that it does to people today, but that’s another sermon. The second unusual thing is that there are four grandmothers mentioned in Jesus’ list of forbears: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah. Not only are they mentioned, but they are women with interesting stories, stories I would like to tell you today.

Matthew wrote this genealogy in a time when the rules for women were narrow and mean. There wasn’t much women who weren’t married to kings or emperors could do to distinguish themselves in the Greek and Roman cultures. The most you could go for was to be really good, stay under the radar, do what you were supposed to do, and not get yourself in trouble. It was easy to get in trouble. If you got pregnant without being married, if you didn’t get pregnant when you were married, if you got raped, if your husband died, all of those things were bad, and they were your fault.

Were these grandmothers of Jesus exemplary church ladies, following all the rules to the letter and making cautious moves so their lives could be free of turbulence and pleasing to those around them? NO. These women did not do the nice thing, pleasing those around them. What they did would now be called risk-taking. Doing the higher right thing, rather than the nice thing. Good rather than nice.

These women embody the difference between being good and being nice.

TAMAR

Tamar’s story is in the book of Genesis (38:6-30). It was the custom of the day, if a man died leaving no children, his brother would marry the widow as one of his wives and have children with her to be counted as the children of his dead brother. That way the brother’s line would continue. Tamar’s husband was one of the sons of Judah. Judah was the one the whole nation was named after later. Judah was a brother of Joseph, one of the ones who sold Joseph to the Egyptians and then told their father that Joseph had been eaten by a wild animal. They gave their father the coat of many colors, dipped in animal blood, as evidence. It wouldn’t have fooled CSI, but it was enough for Jacob, their father.

Anyway, Judah moved away and married, and had some sons and the eldest son married a woman named Tamar. The story says he was wicked in the Lord’s sight, so the Lord killed him. Judah told his next son, Onan, to have intercourse with her and make some children. He spilled his seed on the ground in front of her, refusing to make children with her. The god in the story gets mad at him for that, so he died too. We still have people whose beliefs about solo sex are shaped by interpreting this story wrong, and “Onanism” should be a term for refusing to do the right thing, instead of a term for having sex by yourself. Whew. This is awkward to talk about, but that’s the scriptures for you. The third son was still too young to fulfill the brotherly obligation, so Judah told Tamar to go back to her father’s house and live there as a widow. He worried that the third son would die too, as it seemed to him that some kind of doom was emanating from Tamar

11 Judah then said to his daughter-in-law Tamar, “Live as a widow in your father’s house until my son Shelah grows up.” For he thought, “He may die too, just like his brothers.” So Tamar went to live in her father’s house.

12 After a long time Judah’s wife, the daughter of Shua, died. When Judah had recovered from his grief, he went up to Timnah, to the men who were shearing his sheep, and his friend Hirah the Adullamite went with him.

13 When Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep,”

14 she took off her widow’s clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelah had now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife.

15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face.

16 Not realizing that she was his daughter-inlaw, he went over to her by the roadside and said, “Come now, let me sleep with you.” “And what will you give me to sleep with you?” she asked.

17 “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he said. “Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?” she asked.

18 He said, “What pledge should I give you?” “Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,” she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him.

19 After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again.

20 Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her.

21 He asked the men who lived there, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?” “There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,” they said.

22 So he went back to Judah and said, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’ “

23 Then Judah said, “Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.”

24 About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.” Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”

25 As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,” she said. And she added, “See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.”

26 Judah recognized them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not sleep with her again.

27 When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb.

28 As she was giving birth, one of them put out his hand; so the midwife took a scarlet thread and tied it on his wrist and said, “This one came out first.”

29 But when he drew back his hand, his brother came out, and she said, “So this is how you have broken out!” And he was named Perez.

30 Then his brother, who had the scarlet thread on his wrist, came out and he was given the name Zerah. She was good, not nice.

According to the Book of Ruth, this Peretz becomes the great great great great grandfather of Boaz, who is the great grandfather of David.

RAHAB

Rahab was a prostitute who lived in Jericho. The Israelites wanted to conquer that town, and their commander, Joshua, sent two spies to look it over.

Joshua 2 Rahab and the Spies

1 Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

2 The king of Jericho was told, “Look! Some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land.”

3 So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab: “Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy out the whole land.”

4 But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. She said, “Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they had come from.

5 At dusk, when it was time to close the city gate, the men left. I don’t know which way they went. Go after them quickly. You may catch up with them.”

6 (But she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them under the stalks of flax she had laid out on the roof.)

7 So the men set out in pursuit of the spies on the road that leads to the fords of the Jordan, and as soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut….

She made a deal with the spies for the life of her family. ” please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign

13 that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death.”

14 “Our lives for your lives!” the men assured her. “If you don’t tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the LORD gives us the land.”

15 So she let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part of the city wall.

16 Now she had said to them, “Go to the hills so the pursuers will not find you. Hide yourselves there three days until they return, and then go on your way

21 “Agreed,” she replied. “Let it be as you say.”

So she sent them away and they departed. And she tied the scarlet cord in the window. She and her family were spared when Joshua and his troops took the city. She was good to her family, compromised herself for them and saved them.

RUTH

Ruth was a foreigner, from Moab. She married the son of Naomi, who was from Judah, Israel. Naomi’s husband died, then her two sons. She told Ruth and her other daughter-in-law Orpah (where Oprah got her name) to go back to their mothers and find other men to marry. But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.

17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.

Isn’t it interesting that the words many people say at their weddings were originally said between a woman and her mother-in-law?

They got to Judah at the time of the barley harvest, and Ruth went to work in the field of a near kinsman Naomi pointed out to her. He wasn’t next in line for her, but second. Ruth reaped in the fields, and he noticed her. He offered her protection and food, and she stayed with his folks in the field. When the harvest was over, Naomi told her to go to the threshing floor where the men slept and lie down with him. He did not reject her. His mom was Rahab, remember from the genealogy? He was thrilled, but wanted to do the honorable thing, so he went and negotiated with the next in line so that he could take her as his wife. They made it happen the way they wanted it to, and she gave birth to Obed, King David’s grandfather.

BATHSHEBA

King David saw her bathing on the roof, and she was beautiful. Uriah, her husband, was off fighting David’s war. He called her to the palace and she slept with him. She found out she was pregnant, and David called her husband home for R and R. Uriah refused to go home while the war was still being fought. He slept at the gate of the city with his some of his men, like an athlete who won’t shave until the championship is won. David got him drunk and tried to send him home, but he slept with his men at the gate again. Then David placed him in the fight so he would get killed. He was killed, and Bathsheba mourned him, but she went to the palace and became David’s wife, and bore a son. The story says God was mad at David, so the son got sick and died. One of Bathsheba’s next sons was one of Jesus’ grandfathers.

What are these women doing in this genealogy? Commentators have worked for years trying to figure out what they had in common. They all made choices that were risky. They gathered up all the dice and rolled them, changing their lives. Life pushed them one way and another. Loved ones were killed, but they chose life. They put themselves in danger of rejection and harm. They chose life.

Especially Ruth and Tamar made a leap, instead of subsiding into resignation and bitterness over their fate. They didn’t shrug and say, well, I got dealt a bad hand, I’m just unlucky, or I’ve been done wrong. They took what power they had and used it to move their lives forward.

The gospel writer is telling the story of Messiah, the Redeemer. In the beginning of his story he embeds five women who chose to do a brave thing, even though it could get them into trouble. Is there something about redemption that takes guts? That takes a willingness to face rejection? Foreigners, a prostitute, a beauty who married King David, but is named in the genealogy as “wife of Uriah,” and Mary, the young woman who was with child before she had been with a man, yet her baby’s lineage is traced through her husband. Mystery comes into the world, redemption comes into the world with its own morality, with its own sense of the good that plays in all shades in between black and white. These are family stories that would not play well in some sweet Pleasantville. They are real families, real choices, real risks, and we learn that you never know how redemption will come to the world.

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

Depression

April 13, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 13, 2014

So many people suffer from bouts of depression. What helps? How does one be a friend to someone who is depressed? What causes it? How is it different from sorrow?

Sermon:
A Few Thoughts About Depression

There are lots of us who have moments of feeling like life is too overwhelming to be handled. Nothing will change for the better, we will never find what we seek, there will be no true sweetness or love for us. Happiness is a thing we cannot grasp or remember. For the fortunate ones among us, this feeling lasts a day or two and then it lifts.

For others, it stays, and it can take lives. The voices inside that watch and criticize multiply and feed on the spirit. There is no spark of hope to light the path. The mind is in a deep pit and there is no way out There is no energy to make choices or even to take care of routine necessities. Some keep functioning in their jobs and families, but inside it feels like a toxic wasteland. It hurts, mentally and physically. The body can ache as the soul twists in pain. Some people sleep all the time, some sleep fitfully. Every morning at three-thirty they wake up for an hour before being able to fall back to sleep Some people eat everything in sight, some stop eating. Sometimes depression looks like a long angry spell, and sometimes it looks like collecting things you don’t need. Hoarding is a kind of depression, including the hoarding of animals.

Depression is not sadness, although feelings of sadness can be present in depression. In sadness, you grieve the loss of someone you loved or a dream you cherished. You cry, you mourn, you feel awful. It’s healthy and appropriate. Some people think that if you are completely well-adjusted and mentally fit, you will be able to go through any situation in full serenity and peace. Not so. In many situations, sadness is the appropriate emotion to feel. If you weren’t feeling it, there would be something wrong.

Depression is not anger, although feelings of anger and resentment can be present in depression. Anger is meant to alert us to a situation that is harmful to us. We look around to see what needs to change, what needs to move. If we have to stay in a situation that is harmful to us, we may develop depression.

Low self-esteem and feelings of inferiority are also part of depression. I would like to say, though, that low self-esteem seems to be part of the human condition. Most people feel like everyone else knows something they don’t know, like there was a life handbook given out and they didn’t get one. Many people feel inferior when they compare themselves to others. The thing we don’t notice is that we are comparing our insides to their outsides. In depression, though, feelings of inferiority and regret grow into deep shame and feelings of worthlessness. You feel there is something wrong with you. There is a deep emptiness inside.

Depression has been around for a long time. King Saul, in the Bible, is described as suffering from periods of deep melancholy. The music David played for him on his harp helped alleviate the King’s pain. For some music is healing, for others it can be the beauty of nature. Many therapies have been tried throughout the ages. Hippocrates recommended a vegetable diet and abstinence from all excesses. Others tried entertaining stories, dirty jokes, exhortation and confrontation, counting your blessings, looking at people were are less fortunate than you, etc.

These days there are lots of cures to try. The biomedical discoveries about depression and its causes are coming thick and fast. Lots of things can mimic depression. Hormone imbalance, food allergies, thyroid mis-function, sensitivity to cyclical changes in the light as seasons change, certain medications, head injuries, diabetes, hypoglycemia, and other things.

If you don’t have any of those things, if you truly have clinical depression, you have an illness like any other illness of the body. There is no shame in it. There is no reason to be embarrassed. It happens to people. Like many illnesses, there are causative factors in the environment and in the mind of the sufferer. When you have a heart attack, the doctors give medicine and now they complement that with talk therapy and changes to your diet and lifestyle. Depression is that way too. The medicine is there, and it is good. If one doesn’t work for you, try another one. Each one works in a different way, and one will be better than another. Changes to diet and lifestyle are important too. Alcohol is a depressant. Nicotine can make depression worse. Some artificial sweeteners crash the level of serotonin in your body. Serotonin in necessary for the feeling of wellbeing that we enjoy. Exercise is an element in the cure of depression. Sometimes depression can be alleviated by walking thirty minutes a day three times a week. The problem is people who are severely depressed can’t make themselves do that.

The various anti-depressant medications are highly effective, unless a person is using alcohol at the same time. The problem is people have a shame reaction to them that we don’t have as much to heart medicine or diabetes medicine. We still feel like it’s a weakness of character. Like if we could just pull ourselves together we could beat this thing. Mind over illness in a powerful thing, and it works as well on depression as it does on arthritis and cancer. Sometimes yes, mostly no.

Talk therapy can do some good. What do we do in talk therapy to help with depression? One approach is called “Cognitive Therapy.” That theory holds that it is mistaken ways of thinking that lead to depression. You work with someone to become aware of some ways you might be thinking that sap your spirit. Another thing therapists do is talk with you about your anger or your sadness in which you may have gotten stuck. They will ask about depression in your family medical history, as it can run in families. There are lots of different therapies, and each of them seems to work with equal effectiveness.

How do you help someone with depression? Cheering them up isn’t the way. You can acknowledge their suffering as you would with someone who is battling any illness. You can’t ask them to snap out of it. They can’t always beat it with their will. Some people seem to feel it’s noble to struggle with it unaided, and it is as noble as struggling, medicine-free, with high blood pressure or multiple sclerosis. How do you help someone? You can encourage them to treat it as a lifethreatening illness and get on some medicine. It might not work, but it might.

If you do try medicine to complement your talk therapy or exercise, be aware that not every medicine works for everyone, and you may have to try several before you get it to the best point. Also, medicines tend to “poop out” after several years, and you need to switch.

If you think about suicide, please consider that it may be a helpful urge to kill off a part of your life. You should try making huge changes before you kill off all of it. Maybe a few relationships need to go, a few expectations. Maybe you will need to accept that you’ve disappointed someone or lost everything. Life comes up through cracks in the pavement, past rocks and on the precarious sides of cliffs. The pain is great and you think there’s no hope anymore, but that’s the depression dementor doing its work, and they lie. Talk about it. Get support. Get sober. Let go of the shame. Hang onto moments of joy.

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

God wants you to be rich!

April 6, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 6, 2014

The Third Commandment forbids taking God’s name in vain. So many people say “God bless you!” to the poor but do not help to change the situation. So many politicians say “God bless America” at the end of their speeches, but what do they mean by that? Might using God’s name for ulterior motives be taking that name in vain?

Sermon:

Hypocrisy and the Third Commandment

In the summers we used to go up to Roaring River, my Uncle David’s farm near Daniel’s Pass, NC. I remember riding in the back seat of his old Jeep and being reprimanded sternly. This was unusual for him – he wasn’t a stern person. He was the second youngest of thirteen children, and he had been always in trouble. What had I done? I had said “Gah ….. ” about something. I have no idea how to spell that. It’s a Southern child’s word. “Golly,” I knew, was forbidden, as it was a way to not say “God,” which was really really forbidden, since it was taking the Lord’s name in vain. Which brings us to the Third Commandment, the next in this year’s series:

“You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

The original Hebrew says, “La Tisah Ess Shaim Adoshem L’shav.” The key word is “Tisah” which does not mean “to take” or “to say” God’s name. Tisah is Hebrew for “to carry,” which means the commandment is telling us, “Do not CARRY God’s name in vain.” This word implies lifting up, carrying like a banner or a flag. “In vain” means uselessly, or in an empty way. It’s the only one of the Commandments that is tagged with this “The Lord will not hold anyone guiltless (literally will not cleanse) someone who does that. Is it possible that the scriptures mean to condemn little kids who say “Golly” or even “My God, that’s an ugly dog” more than murderers? No, it is not possible.

Ancient Jews avoided saying the name of God altogether. They used four letters YOD-HE-VAV-HE without vowels. These four letters are called the Tetragrammaton Instead of making the sounds ‘Yuh” “huh” Wuh” “huh” they say “Adonai,” which is translated “the Lord,” or just “ha-shem,” which means “the name.” This way they will avoid taking God’s name in vain. In English you sometimes see the word “God” written “G-d.”

Later on, Christian scholars added the vowels from the word “Adonai” to the Tetragrammaton, and pronounced it “Jehovah.”

When Moses was talking to God in the burning bush, he asks God’s name. “I am who I am,” is what the translation says. It would better say “I will be who I will be.” I remember one preacher saying that was God saying that he would be the same yesterday, today, and forever. It doesn’t sound like that to me. If a person said to you “I will be who I will be, “would you think that meant they were unchanging? I think that preacher was seeing what he already believed. That happens all the time in life. We see what supports the things we already think. To me, “I will be who I will be” implies that God is changing. I could be reading into the text what I already believe as well, though there is a little more evidence in the rest of the Exodus story. When God leads the people in the wilderness, he forms a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night. Smoke, fire. Those are constantly changing forms. I just think that is interesting. He wasn’t a hawk or a dragonfly. Those are also changeable, but in smoke and in fire you can see shapes, different people see different shapes. You can’t grab hold of either one, no matter how close you get.

Also, when Moses asks to see God, he is allowed to, but he only sees the back of God as God passes by. Some scholars say this means we never see God, we just see where God has been. I like that thought.

The Divine Force is always changing, and we only see where it has been. Even that is open to question and interpretation.

So “God” isn’t really the name of God, it’s just a human word in English to describe the concept of the Divine One. In other languages the concept is called “Deus, Dio, Dios, Zeus, Allah, then there are lots of particular names for particular gods or aspects of the one god: Krishna, Shiva, Yemaya, Oshun, Morrigan, Nana. Thousands of names.

Lao-Tse, the father of Taoism, writes in the Tao te Ching, “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth.

While naming is the origin of the myriad things.” In naming you begin to separate, you begin particularity; you begin to limit the One.

That’s a lot about the name of God. From those who won’t name the Divine at all, to those who hint at a name but refuse to pronounce it. These are folks who want to be very careful not to misuse the name. It’s not crystal clear what the misuse of the name is. If it’s not likely to be cussing that is going to cause God to be more displeased with you than if you had stolen or killed, what is it?

Then there are those who pronounce it all the time. “God bless you,” “God told me to talk to you,” “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” A lot of these people are kind hearted and good folks. They are sincere believers. Then there are those who use it thoughtlessly. Then there are those who use it for power or greed. Pat Robertson said we had hurricane Sandy because God was angry with America and had withdrawn his protection from the country because of the pagans, feminists, abortionists and gay people. There is the Phelps family who pickets the funerals of American soldiers with big posters that read “God hates fags.” There are those, like Ted Haggart, President of the American Association of Evangelicals, representing about 30 million people, who lift high the banner of the name of God to wade into the fray against gay and lesbian American citizens. A few days ago he was accused by a gay escort of hiring him once a month and asking him to buy crystal meth so they could get high together. There are those like Jimmy Swaggart, who raised millions as a televangelist, then was caught, twice, with prostitutes. Once DUI. Of course, those things could happen to anyone, I guess. But not everyone makes money making people feel guilty, then feel like there is hope for them if they send money in to support the television ministry.

Some preachers regularly ask for donations, claiming that those that give will reap the benefit of God’s blessing. People are told if they give enough, even if they are in debt, God will erase their debt. And if God doesn’t ease their financial troubles, then they aren’t giving enough. This principle is known as the “prosperity gospel.”

A person who used to work for Robert Tilton’s ministries said they were given bundles of envelopes and a letter opener. They were to take out the cash and toss the letters. They pulled in nearly $1,000 an hour.

The problem came when the televangelist watchdog group, The Trinity Foundation, founded by a man named Ole Anthony, sent a squad of detectives to Tilton’s office. They went through the dumpster and found piles of letters that were still folded in their envelopes, which had been slit to extract the money. One of the detectives, who earns a salary of $80.00 a week at the Foundation, carries a letter from that dumpster in his wallet. A worried mother was writing for prayers for her son, who was suicidal. “This reminds me why we do this,” he said. They leaked the story to Diane Sawyer and Prime Time, and Tilton went down.

Politicians who cloak their ambition in God talk are breaking the Third Commandment by introducing legislation to keep the Ten Commandments in the courthouses, but not knowing what they are, sponsoring anti-gay legislation when your numbers sink in the polls, hammering at folks about family values while cheating on their spouses, stealing money or beating their children. Those who say God is punishing homosexuals by sending AIDS. Those people are carrying the name of God in an empty way, pretending to know the mind of God.

These commandments are binding for Jews and Muslims as well, and those who break them are those who say God is punishing the US for its foreign policies with hurricanes and floods, those who say “In the name of God” before they blow someone up or cut off someone’s head.

It seems this commandment is about religious hypocrisy and violence, about claiming that you know something about what God thinks, who God would bomb, what God would drive.

Do UUs fall short of our ideals of behavior and right relationship? Yes. All the time. We are short with one another when we should be kind. We male-bash, or we get ugly about our differences of opinion, or we denigrate one another, or ignore the stranger in our midst because it’s uncomfortable to talk to someone new or because we just don’t have energy for a conversation that day. Or we don’t go to the polls and vote our principles. Do we carry the banner or our principles cynically, for power or money? Maybe. I can’t really figure out how to do that, but maybe during the discussion you can help me. There is good religion and bad religion. Most of it is mixed. Only a little religion has to do with God, I think. No one really knows, even though most people speak like they do. Our task is to clean up our own hearts and minds, and to name hypocrisy as breaking the Third Commandment.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

A World of Pure Imagination

March 30, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
March 30, 2014

The way we speak about our beliefs is powerful. Language can either serve to connect or distance us from others, based on our emotional associations with the words chosen by others. We will explore the possibility of religious language as limitless metaphor and poetry.

Yesterday, I learned the happy fact that a group pugs is called a grumble. My soon-to-be in-laws are a pug-owning family, so there is a constant grumble underfoot in the kitchen during every major holiday. Being a lover of words and their multiple meanings, I searched out other nouns to describe congregations of animals. Among the best were: a flamboyance of flamingos, a murder of crows, a memory of elephants, a business of ferrets, an unkindness of ravens, a prickle of hedgehogs, and a piteousness of doves. As cute and hilarious as these are, they all make some sense, don’t they? Each collective noun describes either the behavior or an attribute of the animal. I remembered that a colleague’s wife had once named our meeting of a group of ministers a “cackle of ministers.” That’s pretty accurate.

It delights me to think that each of these spot-on collective nouns originated in someone’s imagination and the terms stuck. Among new terms accepted into the Oxford Dictionary are cyberespionage, selfie, and mochaccino. Last week, I was called out by our high school youth for trying to coin the term, “sing-along-ability” when giving them guidance on hymn selection for their upcoming youth-led service.

As many of us do, I love playing with words and giving them new meaning. I am a fool for a good pun. For example, this past couple of weeks, I’ve been under the weather and when the doctor told me that it was caused by a virus, my fiance declared that I had “gone viral.” I can assure you that I have stretched the mileage considerably on that joke.

But, as much as I enjoy entertaining nuanced definitions of familiar words, I can say with some confidence that I am in good company in admitting that I have had some squeamishness around words such as: God, faith, prayer, salvation and sin. Many in this room, no doubt, have come to Unitarian Universalism from other faith traditions who use these terms in specific ways, and many of the ways that they are commonly used have left still, bleeding, gaping wounds on many. That pain, those memories and the suspicion of those who will wield such words as weapons, are real.

Although, in her attempt to find a happy medium between head and heart, my mother did cart us around occasionally between the Catholic Church and every flavor of Protestant Christianity available in Odessa, TX, I had been exposed to Unitarian Universalism early enough that my family’s “church hopping” did not rock my UU foundation. For the most part, I was sure that we would always return to our tiny UU fellowship, where we didn’t have to turn our brains off. At least that is how I saw it, as an inquisitive child. I would have made a terrible “Handmaiden,” too. At our little fellowship, we talked a ton about the beliefs of others’ religions. We learned that, as UU’s, we drew value and wisdom from each. We even had a beautiful mural on the wall, with portraits of prophetic men and women throughout the ages, including Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi, though we didn’t really talk much about the value of Jesus’ teachings.

In West Texas, I experienced some of the worst expressions of Christianity: a P.E. coach telling me that I worshiped the devil in 5th grade, a 7th grade classmate began her six-year attempt at attempting to persuade me to attend her church with her because she was genuinely worried about my soul not making it to Heaven, and, at age seventeen, the rage-filled screams of a disgusted call-center co-worker when she found out that I am gay and she had been sitting next to me for weeks. And, I have heard stories from others that my own seem like a walk in the park.

I, like the many who find their way to UUism, wanted to distinguish myself as much as possible from the Christianity that I had known, that I found myself often explaining my faith by talking about all that UU’s don’t believe in and lacking a clear vocabulary to explain what it is that we actually do believe. I could speak to shared ideals and point to the Principles and Sources, but failed miserably at sharing descriptions of how this faith moves my spirit.

Blogger, John Halstead, touches on this an article published this week entitled, “The Baby is the Bathwater: Why I haven’t joined the Unitarian Church,” “William Ellery Channing, the father of Unitarianism in America, wrote in 1820 that Unitarians had sacrificed “imagination and poetic enthusiasm” to “the rational and critical power”. Emerson bemoaned the lack of enthusiasm in Unitarianism. Theodore Parker decried the absence of a “deep internal feeling of piety”: “Most powerfully preaching to the Understanding, the Conscience, and the Will, the cry was ever, ‘Duty, Duty! Work, Work!’ They failed to address with equal power the Soul, and did not also shout, ‘Joy, Joy! Delight, Delight!'” Orestes Brownson, a Transcendentalist who converted to Catholicism, wrote of Unitarians, that they “had pronounced the everlasting ‘No.’ Were they never to be able to pronounce the everlasting ‘Yes’?” And Unitarian minister, John Trevor, a generation later, regretted the absence of “enthusiasm and personal abandonment” in Unitarianism: “It is the last word of the Old Gospel, sifted small through the riddle of the Intellect; not the first word of the New Gospel, bursting up irresistibly from the Spirit.” These were all men who had great respect for Unitarianism and its ambition to advance social justice, but who found it lacking in something essential.”

In other words, we are great at walking the talk, but we improve on our ability, as Unitarian Universalists, to talk the walk. We need language adequate enough to express and sustain our experience of our transcendent spiritual experiences. In 2002, the then-President of our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, Rev. Bill Sinkford, preached a controversial sermon, “the Language of Reverence,” in which he pointed out that our Seven Principles does not contain one traditionally religious language, but rather focuses on lifting up our shared ethical ideals. He posed the question if this language, while beautiful in its aspirations, was sufficient; if it was “up to the spiritual task [of nurturing and describing “the reality of our religious experience”] and whether we need to expand our lexicon.” Sinkford says, “We believe that our religious theological pluralism is good- it certainly distinguishes us from most of the religious world. But our religious breadth can work against our religious depth.”

In an effort to strengthen the depth of the way we speak about this faith we love, Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar explores this topic in her book, “Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language.” In it, she acknowledges that, In some congregations, worship and community life may be rich with the lexicon of God, prayer, salvation, and sin. In other congregations, although the hymns and anthems may be replete with words like holy, grace, and soul, it is only in the music that this vocabulary is used. For many, it seems easier to sing these sentiments than to say them. We allow a broader margin for metaphor and poetry in our singing than in our speaking. And, in still other congregations and families, these words may not be merely absent, but shunned.”

Further on, Harrison Nieuwejaar names what I later discovered as I entered St. Edward’s University’s Religious Studies Department and then again when I left Texas to attend a liberal Christian seminary in New York City- there is value in common vocabulary, yes, even in traditionally Judeo-Christian words. If we, as the heady UUs we can be, can relax into our imaginations and consider meanings of such traditional religious words that exist outside of the narrowness of our exposure to fundamentalism, we may avoid our own, flip-side version of fundamentalism and enjoy a greater openness to the spirit.

She says, “even as I urge us to use religious language more broadly, I caution that we must hold these words lightly, using them to point and suggest, not to define. These words will serve us best if we allow them to be elastic, perhaps not meaning precisely to me what they mean to you, or to your Jewish neighbor, or to your Lutheran in-laws, but pointing in the same direction, capturing the essence of a shared experience, a shared longing for a deeper spiritual life. We need to go bravely into the tangle of words, wrestle with them, find which of the traditional words can become useful to us and identify which new words are needed.”

Once, as I was leaving a guest preaching gig at a small lay-led congregation here in Central Texas, a woman from the worship committee ran out after me and said that she was glad that I had spoken about prayer, as she finds that most of the staunchly Secular Humanist congregation has very negative attitudes about such things and she has learned not to bring them up. She asked me for advice on what she could say the next time someone from her church is upset that she adds the language of prayer to the service. I told her to simply introduce the language of prayer to those who dismiss it as nonsense as poetic device. God is a word that can have a concrete understanding, as with the image of a guy in the clouds with a white beard who passes judgment on humanity, but god, with a lower case “g,” can be a metaphorical, nuanced, admittedly limited word that does not correspond to any object, but may correspond to every living thing, or a feeling, or a peace that surpasses all understanding… This word can mean a mountain of layers of meaning and depth that, when we begin to release our defensiveness around it and other religious “trigger” words like it, we may find that we have more in common with members of other faith traditions than we thought.

Muslims, for example, have ninety-nine words in Arabic for Allah. Among them are attributes, such as: The Just, The Awakener, The All-Forgiving, and The Protecting Friend. It is said that there are actually one hundred, but that the last is yet unknown.

Harrison Nieuwejaar asserts that, for UUs, “God has been put in a box and has lost its rich metaphorical meaning. We need to open that box and let an expansive breeze of ideas and images and associations again infuse this language. We need to reclaim textured meanings, but we have a strong cultural tide to row against, a double tide of fundamentalism and atheism. The fundamental views- both theistic and atheistic- are the ones that get the most airtime and thus become accepted as the shared cultural understanding of God.”

When boxed in, words like God, prayer, sin, and salvation can seemingly serve to keep us safe from those whose narrow views of what such words can mean and tuck us away from the memories of such encounters. But, is adopting our own brand of fundamentalism, an “us/them” fervor, helping us to heal and grow and fully enjoy our spirituality to the fullest?

Also, when we restrict the meaning of language of reverence, as Sinkford coined, are we missing the opportunity to build connections with our neighbors through a common vocabulary?

This conversation was all the rage in UU circles in the middle of last decade, but I don’t believe it has yet become passe, as the character of Unitarian Universalism, by and large was to distance ourselves as much as possible from “God language” throughout most of the twentieth century. That just means that we have at least a century’s worth of baggage to now sift through. We have embraced the fallacy that a certain group of people who we love to point fingers at, have sole ownership of this language of reverence, that such language only speaks of the implausible, that we embrace science over myth. We speak as if there exists no awe, mystery, or transcendence in the natural world, as if we never have cause to connect with one another through clumsy, yet movingly authentic attempts at describing the indescribable.

Each of these terms, alone, could be its own sermon. And, indeed, I have spent some time in past sermons teasing out a few of them, but what I would invite us all to do is to fumble around a bit, as awkward and uncomfortable as it might be, with using traditionally religious words to speak of our religious experience. We will try this together. We have before us the expanse of our imaginations’ poetry as well as the infinite possibilities to which the limitations of spoken language restrict us.

I will leave you with the words of the late Rev. Forrest Church, “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Balance/Equinox

March 23, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 23, 2014

How do we keep our balance as life around us swirls? Is balance something to be desired, or should we just enjoy the roller coaster ride?

Sermon:

BALANCE

The Equinox is a time of balance in the earth’s year. The nights and days are of equal length. It is the still point in the great ebb and flow of light into dark and dark into light again. The light and the dark are among the first things created, according to the Hebrew scriptures. They are both good. They continue today, millions of years later, in the same pattern as when they began. Ancient people noticed four special sun events: the two solstices: the first day of summer, when the days are longest and the nights are shortest, and the first day of winter, the winter solstice, when the nights are longest and the days are shortest, and the two equinoxes, when night and day are the same length.

These four sun holidays are symbolized by a four-armed cross within a circle, called a solar cross. It looks like a wheel, and that is no accident. The turning of the seasons is the turning of the wheel. The wheel of the year turns, IIspring to summer, autumn to winter, and from winter round to spring. II The light and dark are in balance for a day. A moment. The turning of the wheel is continuous, and has been so from the beginning of time. The first turn of the wheel WAS the beginning of time. The first day, the first night, and the wheel has been steady ever since.

The equinox is about the balance of light and dark. Things that are not alive can balance in stillness. Things that are alive must balance in the midst of movement. In the midst of the movement of our lives, we look for a moving balance. A living balance.

Many of us are seeking balance in our lives. We try to balance acceptance and action, sternness and sweetness, talking and listening, taking care of ourselves and taking care of others, confronting things that bother us and ignoring them, trusting and worrying. I get frustrated when we have an idea of balance that has to do with stillness or steadiness or equal parts of this and that. Balance does not mean stasis. I learned in martial arts training that you need to spring into action from a place of balance, otherwise you fall over. You need to accept attack from a place of balance, otherwise you fall over. This is true physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes I am good at balance, and other times. I am horrible at it. Hey, maybe that could count as a kind of balance…. No?

We all know that balance is a temporary thing. So many things take our balance away. Being rejected, being chewed out, doing something wrong, losing financial stability, failures, loss, change. Finding ways of regaining a moving balance makes us more able to take what life brings.

STANCE

Your stance in life is how you approach life, how you let life approach you .. Are you going to have an adversarial stance toward life? Are you going to act as if everyone out to get you? That your luck is bad, you don’t believe compliments, people can’t be trusted, things are likely not to work out, you’re going to have to work harder than anyone else for things to work out for you?

Are you going to have a fixed, open stance, where you stand all open and vulnerable, not taking care of yourself, allowing others to decide your fate? What happens, happens… you can’t control anything. You don’t try to make anything happen for yourself…. Your mind is open, but you don’t close it on anything, you say “I have my truth and you have your truth” which kind of makes there be no truth.

Where you are trying to be all things to all people. “I can do that!” “I can be what you want me to be” “I can tolerate any behavior you choose.” This makes you easy to knock over.

Too narrow a stance might mean you have a small range of things that are acceptable to you. You have a picture of how things should be, and you don’t handle it well if they don’t turn out that way. It could be that you cannot let yourself make a mistake, so your perfectionism limits you.

Another factor in being physically and emotionally hard to knock over is to lower your center of gravity. When you have soft knees (assuming your knees can still do that) you can sink the center of your body a little closer to the ground. This is one of the things that makes you grounded and more stable. Emotionally, having your center of gravity low might be this; that you are willing to make a mistake, that you are willing to let other people talk, that you seek to understand others before you seek to have them understand you. That you might start a sentence with the words: “I could be wrong.”

We all only balance momentarily. Since we are alive, we are always losing our balance and coming back to it. No one is perfectly balanced all the time. Some people balance carefully, others more gracefully and freely.

One image of balance within movement I love is that of a pot on a wheel…. As we rest in that stillpoint within, we have a better chance of finding our balance in our shifting and frenzied lives. We can become clear about where to hold on and where to let go. When to feast and when to be frugal,when to speak and when to be quiet. When to come close and when to keep a distance. And we can find our balance. For a while. Until the wheel turns again.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Celtic Christianity/Redemption

March 16, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 16, 2014

What might redemption be? What are some of the views of the world’s religions about it? In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we’ll look at how the Celts saw it differently from the more common Roman Christianity.

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.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

The Second Commandment

March 12, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 9, 2014

The second commandment says humans make a mistake when they make idols, or when they worship something other than the One Spirit. What might be some of the idols of our culture? Physical beauty? Youth? Capitalism?

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.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Heard it through the grapevine

March 7, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 2, 2014

Is gossip always a bad thing, or can it be community-building? What does it indicate about our state of mind? Could it have to do with learning social intelligence?

Sermon: Gossip (Heard it Through the Grapevine)

So did you know that John Mayer’s been dating Katie Perry. He doesn’t have such a good track record in his dating relationships. None of them seems to work very long, and now there are rumors that he and Katy are having troubles. She seems to be doing fine, though. She just helped deliver a baby for a friend of hers in her friend’s apartment, so you can add delivering babies to her resume now.

The Oscars are tonight. I have a friend who is a Buddhist monk in Katmandu who loves to watch the Oscars. He can tell you which movie won Best Picture in 1987, who won best actress in 1995. Do you know that Brad Pitt has never won an Oscar? It looks like the red carpet is going to be soaked, with all this rain they’ve been having. What do you think Julia Roberts is going to wear?

Joan Didion says: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live… we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices, We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
-Joan Didion, The White Album

My whole life I’ve heard that people shouldn’t gossip, that it’s trashy behavior. My father told me that the highest quality people talk about ideas, the middle quality people talk about events, and the lowest talk about other people. Byron Katie, who advocates falling in love with what is, would say “human beings gossip. We just do, that’s who we are. You’re living on earth, sweetheart, make yourself at home.”

Research on gossip is beginning to show that humans are fascinated by one another’s lives for evolutionary reasons.

In a Harvard U Press book called Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar says that gossip within our group, for humans, is a social bonding practice somewhat like grooming is for other primates. In the context of evolution, those who know what is going on make it and those who are oblivious don’t. The current theory is that our ancestors lived in small groups, and the people got to know one another in a face-to-face long-term way. You would want to know who would make fair exchanges with you and who would short-change you, who would give good value to a group and who would try to take a free ride, taking more than giving, who would come through for you in a crunch, who you could trust with your family’s safety? You would need to know about the temperament, past behavior and predictability of those in your group. This kind of social intelligence increased the odds of you and your family doing well.

People who pay close attention to others develop the capacity for determining and understanding the interpersonal connections between people insofar as their emotional intelligence will allow them. Some people are particularly talented at reading emotional cues, anticipating the inner thoughts and feelings of other people, a skill that is sometimes called mind reading… Stephen Johnson, in his bookEverything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, says that watching reality shows is one way kids learn to see a social network as a series of points connected by lines of affiliation. “When we watch most reality shows, we are implicitly building these social network maps in our heads, a map not so much of plotlines as of attitudes: Nick has a thing for Amy, but Amy may just be using Nick; Bill and Kwame have a competitive friendship”. If they can see a social network, they are better suiting to building one for themselves.

Gossip can function as a training tool in the lives of groups. Every group has an unwritten contract: here are the things you do, the things you talk about, the things you let yourself notice. Here are the things we don’t talk about, the things we don’t notice, the things we never do. When someone breaks those unwritten rules, gossip can be a way of socially isolating that person, making them understand that they have broken the norms of the group, and giving them a chance to become better citizens. Sometimes gossip within groups helps to maintain the group’s mythos about itself, the group story. Everyone in this family is successful and sane, goes the myth in one family. Aunt Louise’s kids are messed up and she’s on tranquilizers because she married outside her faith. The last words are italicized, whispered. In this piece of gossip you get taught that it’s expected that we will not be messed up, and that we should marry other Methodists.

One book, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. By Christopher Boehme, suggests that small groups of foragers were like teams in that the individuals did best when their group did best. Having some people who were over-dominant undermined the team, and gossip might have evolved as one way of leveling among the people. People would have a fascination with those who had the most power, and the visceral deliciousness of something bad happening to that person might have been a way of making the team more egalitarian. That guy who won the Nobel? Sleeping with his secretary, who also did all his writing for him. That child raising expert? His kids are in jail.

Gossip has been shown to:

1. Strengthen relationships between friends and work colleagues

2. Reinforce shared values –
We tell stories in order to live. We make sense out of what happens in life by telling stories. We figure out who we are, who we want to be… you have cautionary tales, you have success stories. You find out about the karma fairy. What happens to people when they get divorced? What is the way alcoholism works? What are some good ways to raise kids? What does it mean when you get a twitch that won’t go away? What might that mean?

3. Offer increased feelings of “connectedness” and community spirit.

4. Assist in controlling the poor behavior of others, particularly in an office situation

5. Offers a sense of status by being included in the “gossip circle”
Gossip can even help ward off grumpiness. Half an hour over coffee listening to the dilemmas of a third party can be enough to make you realize that things aren’t quite so bad in your own backyard after all. The feeling of belonging that comes from being in on the gossip circle gives us a feeling of belonging that boosts our self esteem and increases our sense of wellbeing. Gossiping about the lives of people who seem to have it all reinforces the idea that fate can deal a bad hand to anyone, despite beauty, money, and fame. Even Taylor Swift has trouble choosing a man. Even Martin Sheen has a son like Charlie. Turns out gossip can be bonding, it can be a teaching tool, it can be an enforcement tool for group norms. Bad gossip seems to be when a person uses it to undermine the group…when it’s hurting the community. Good gossip helps the community. In that it’s like any life skill. Be a good team player, be good for the community, and it’s positive.

So gossip well, and remember, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson from Twilight? They never did get married. She said he was too controlling.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Toward Becoming

February 23, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
February 23, 2014

Not much happens in February. It’s still pretty cold, but there are signs of spring beginning. This is an ideal time to consider all that is to come in what seems like an in-between time and to notice beauty in unexpected places.

Call to Worship
by Gordon B. McKeeman

We summon ourselves from the demands and delights of the daily round:
from the dirty dishes and unwaxed floors;
from unmowed grass, and untrimmed bushes;
from all incompleteness and not-yet-startedness;
from the unholy and unresolved.

We summon ourselves to attend to our vision of peace and justice;
of cleanliness and health;
of delight and devotion;
of the lovely and the holy;
of who we are and what we can do.

We summon the power oftradition and the exhilaration of newness, the wisdom of the ages and the knowing of the very young.

We summon beauty, eloquence, poetry, and music to be the bearers of our dreams.

We would open our eyes, our ears, our minds, our hearts to the amplest dimensions of life.

We rejoice in manifold promises and possibilities.

Reading: “The God’s in My Closet,”
by Terri Dennehy Pahucki

I find them everywhere – in the sunrise, in my toddler’s giggle, in age-old traditions, in the courageous surrender of a friend on the brink of death. Pieces and particles of gods, even whole gods- examined, collected, and eventually stuffed into the back of my closet. Some of them I’ve had for years, hand-me-down heirlooms I may have outgrown but can’t bear to give away. Others I’ve meticulously stitched by hand from an eclectic assortment of fabrics. In fact, I’ve got a closet full of gods that I try on for size when I need one. Some I save for special occasions: the God that Sustains through Funerals; the God of Family Get-Togethers. Others appear when I least expectthem: God the Savior; God the Jokester. I am in awe of the God of Nature and mystified by the God of Time. I’m struggling with the God of Relationships, and grateful for the God of Second Chances.

Amidst my menagerie, there is one god that appears most often, one who refuses to remain in the closet, hidden among the dusty refuse. This is the God of Questions, the God of Human Longing- a god as familiar as my worn-out jeans and as intimate as my own skin. Inevitably, this god arrives just as I’ve begun to sink back into my easy chair and, with one swift blow, knocks me into the world of the living. For I have done more than wear my gods on the outside; I have also swallowed them like a holy wafer and made them part of myself. And they have begun to echo in the still small miracle of my voice – in my questions, in my searching, and in my longing for the discovery of life and all its gods.

Prayer
by Leaf Seligman

Loving God, We pause in the stillness to rest for a moment, to quiet ourselves so that we can feel what stirs within us. Each breath draws us closer to the pulse of life and with each exhalation we make room for something new. May we find in this gathering the comfort of those who care. May we encounter patience along our growing edges and compassion in our most tender spots. Here may we find the inspiration and encouragement we need to face our challenges and nurture ourselves. And in the presence of suffering across the globe may we redouble our efforts to practice kindness where we are, with the hope that the light of our actions travels like the light of faraway stars. May our gestures of compassion and generosity seed possibility. May we walk humbly with one another, choosing reconciliation over resentment as we try to live right-sized. When life presses in and shifts us off balance, when pain assails us, when frustration mounts, may the rhythm of our breath steady us and bring us back to a place of gratitude.

Sermon “Toward Becoming”

Sermons, like people, have so many ways of coming into this world and living among us. This one had a birth so unusual that I would like to tell you its story.

One of the many reasons that being a Sunday school teacher or youth group advisor is one of the most fun and rewarding ministries to get involved with at this church, is that we have begun holding monthly happy hour gatherings to help grow our friendships and strengthen the bonds between volunteers. It was while chomping on pizza and sipping on wine that I received an urgent text message from Vickie Valadez, our Communication Coordinator. It turns out that she was at home, finalizing the last edits of the February newsletter, when she realized that today’s sermon title and synopsis were not included in this month’s submissions. She needed the information right away.

I said out loud, perplexed, “but I don’t preach in February … “as I checked my calendar, which was then followed by an, “Oh … I don’t preach in March. I am scheduled to preach in February.” Now, I’m not sure how other ministers do it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others for whom coming up with sermon topics is second nature. But, for me, choosing a topic and writing a sermon means a way of being in the world. I must be deliberate in remaining open to inspiration. My eyes, ears, mind, and heart must be poised for the Spirit to glide over and land on one of my outstretched branches. Sometimes I sit like this for weeks before I realize success.

I realized that I would not have such a luxury this time. So, in an effort to force the Muse, I did what any other minister might do in a similar situation- I asked table full of pizza-weighted, beer-soaked Sunday school teachers what I should preach on at the end of February!

Luckily, I was sitting across the table from Conner, whose talent is currently employed in religious exploration with three and four year olds, said, “talk about love.”

“Well, it’ll be the end of February. Valentine’s will be over. Everyone’ll already be all “loved” out.” (Disclaimer: I don’t actually believe that this congregation’s capacity for love is that limited. I just wanted to explore other possible themes.)

“Well, hmmm. What else happens in February?” Conner thought out loud. “I don’t know,” he said. “February is sort of the armpit month of the year. Nobody looks forward to February.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in the fall you have school starting and leaves turning. Pretty soon it’ll be the holidays- Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas. Then in January, there’s the New Year and the excitement that comes with that. Then, the next things people are going to look forward to is Springtime and things warming up, everything in bloom … So, February stinks. It’s the armpit month of the year. Everyone wants to get it done with. Maybe that’s why it’s so short.”

“I can honestly say that I never thought of it like that.”

“Yeah, so you should talk about all that is to come, finding beauty in unexpected places, since this is a time that there’s so much that isn’t so beautiful.”

And sometimes, the Spirit just plops down across from you, drinking craft beer and eating good pizza! These are the people we have teaching our littlest UU’s, folks!

I’m not sure I’m ready to call this month the “armpit month ofthe year” yet, but I understood where Conner was coming from, especially since I, and maybe many of you can relate, have been in a funky mood lately. I have no reason to feel grumpy, but I do. I love my job. It keeps me plenty busy! I love my fiance and I’m loving the process of wedding planning. I have great friends, I adore living in Austin, and I’m in good health. No complaints. No real reason to feel anything but contentment. Deep down I do, but I’ve been unusually grumpy.

So, maybe it’s true. Maybe this time of year is one that we naturally would rather skip through. I am sure that those in the colder regions of our country would be happy to rush into spring, at this point! Perhaps it is easier to expect to see examples of beauty and goodness when there is contentment in the now. Searching for Beauty; holding out our expectant branches, hoping to feel the sudden lightweightiness of its Truth, is hard when we’re grumpy, especially when there is a true heavy burden of another sort of truth weighing our thoughts down.

A couple of years ago, my Erin and I went on a pilgrimage of sorts, to Big Bend. We stopped in the tiny ghost town of Terlingua, at a house whose sign beside the dirt road beckoned us to come in and view its “art gallery.” Inside, we found a few paintings by various local artists along the walls, and bought some candles labeled “tranquility” from the woman inside. I noticed a stack of small bumper stickers that read, “Push me Toward Becoming in Terlingua, TX” and was moved to buy one.

It seemed like a prayer. “Push me Toward Becoming in Terlingua, TX.” Though I have heard many verbs used in prayers (guide, remind, teach, hold), I had never before heard one so bold as “push.” I stopped Erin in her browsing to show her what I’d found. She liked it, too, and wondered aloud about what it would mean to be pushed “toward becoming.” Becoming what, more fully human? A better person? Or, it could just mean “becoming.” We are never fully finished. We are always becoming.

We bought the candles and the bumper sticker, which I had resolved to stick on my new bike helmet back at home, and we set off. As we backed out, Erin noticed a small sign above the door to the house. It read, “Becoming.” The gallery’s name was “Becoming.” We had a great laugh, but somehow the bumper sticker’s prayerful message didn’t seem any less poignant. Maybe we an~ not so unlike the bare tree branches of February. Maybe we are in need of being pushed toward becoming, too, even if we’re a bit grumpy.

I like the idea of always being in formation, of never fully arriving. I can imagine that, for some, this idea would bring discontentment with the present self, as we are future focused in a quest “toward becoming.” But, surprisingly, I think that the notion that we can be hoping, striving, working at becoming would allow for a greater sense of peace with the self in the present moment- a forgiveness of all that we have not been and are not; a release of hypercritical self-judgment because we can let go of the expectation of perfection.

If we pray to be pushed toward becoming, we might be awakened to the understanding that there is beauty in not only having already become, but more so in the becoming. Beauty dwells in the in-betweens, the unfinished, unpolished, imperfect, even in the armpit of our calendar.

I spent some time researching various thoughts on beauty, what it actually is, and how it can be located and perceived. Here are some of the opinions I ran across:

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
– Confucius

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful for beauty is God’s handwriting.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is whatever gives joy.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.
– Jean Anouilh

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth follow only beau~ and obey only love.
– Khalil Gibran

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
– John Muir

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.
– Miss Piggy, The Muppets

Yes, beauty is subjective. But, I do like the idea of waking ourselves up to it and helping our soul point it out to our eyes, or perhaps the other way around, once in a while. Sometimes we do need a push.

While in Africa earlier this year, I noticed that, in Tanzania, it is popular to decorate a car or van’s windows and windshield with American corporate logos and words in English. Other than a connection to the west, these decals have no apparent context. We saw Nike and Apple computer logos, as well as one windshield that read, “iPod,” in enormous letters. By far, though, our favorite was an overcrowded bus that drove past us, with the giant phrase, “Thanks God,” on its windshield. Something may have been lost in translation. It didn’t say, “Thanks be to God,” or “Thanks [comma] God.” Just, “Thanks God.” This was almost as funny as the church sign further down that highway that told us that we were passing the “Church of the End Times Message.”

Even so, “Thanks God” became not only our inside joke for the remainder of the trip, but also our shorthand for describing our awe and gratitude for moments of discovering immense beauty and kindness. Since returning home, there have been many unexpected moments when a noteworthy sunset, a lingering hummingbird, the smile of a stranger, or an extended hug will provoke a “Thanks God.” Thanks, Tanzania.

If moving toward becoming requires creating inviting branches of our eyes, ears, minds and hearts for Beauty to perch upon, how do we successfully extend such an invitation, in order to seek our Beauty? Outside of what TV, movies, and magazines tell us about it, how will we recognize the truly beautiful about this world? How will we know it when we see it, so that we can properly cherish it? And, how can we then embody Beauty, ourselves?

In her essay, “What Shall We Do With All This Beauty?” Rebecca Ann Parker agrees with James Baldwin when she says that, “the greatest challenge in our lives is the challenge presented to us by the beauty of life, by what beauty asks of us, and by what we must do to keep faith with the beauty that has nourished our lives.” We are living in an age in which the best of ourselves is being asked of us by this beautiful, ailing world. What a mighty gift! Parker encourages us to not be daunted in our “becoming” by saying, “I believe that in rising to the occasion of what is asked of us now, we will discover a depth of strength and a richness of love and courage that we did not know we could claim or achieve. I believe that in rising to the challenge of our times we will wade into the mystery of life to a depth we did not know was available to us:’

In her beautiful, “Benediction,” Parker includes words upon which I could probably hang the entirety of my personal theology and hope:

“The choice to bless the world is more than an act of will
a moving forward into the world
with the intention to do good.
It is an act of recognition,
A confession of surprise,
A grateful acknowledgement
That in the midst of a broken world
Unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide.
There is an embrace of kindness,
That encompasses all life,
Even yours.
And while there is injustice,
Anesthetization, or evil
There moves a holy disturbance,
A benevolent rage,
A revolutionary love
Protesting, urging, insisting
That which is sacred will not be defiled.
Those who bless the world live their life
as a gesture of thanks
for this beauty
and this rage.”

Maybe, just maybe, the cure for the February funk isn’t the hope of March or April, after all.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Failure is impossible

February 16, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 16, 2014

Susan B. Anthony’s birthday is February 15 and we reflect on the important work and legacy of this Unitarian and Quaker.

In the 1890’s there were a group of women who conferred together to make a woman’s commentary on the Bible. They felt the Bible was commonly used to undergird all of the laws that were unjust to women. Even though they felt the Bible was an historical document only, and not holy scripture, they knew enough people took it seriously and they wanted to address it passage-by-passage and begin a conversation about it.

Elizabeth Cady Staton and Susan B Anthony and many other Bible scholars saw where Genesis said “and then God created man in God’s own image, male and female created God them.” They felt this could be interpreted as God having both male and female in God’s self, if creating human in God’s image meant that half of humanity was male and half female. They felt this justified anyone who wanted to pray to mother god and father god, but more importantly, declared the equality of male and female. The Woman’s Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton was published in 1898. It is available on-line for free.

Susan B Anthony is surely in the pantheon of Unitarian and Universalist saints. Her father signed the book of the Rochester Unitarian Church, and the family attended there. Susan was persecuted, ridiculed and jailed, and she worked tirelessly for the rights of the powerless. She was intelligent, persistent, tireless, fierce and serene. Everything we admire. In our free faith tradition, one of the sources we draw from is “Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love; ” I want to say we should all be like Susan B, but she had some things going for her that were powerful in her development and in her staying strong throughout her life. Some of us have those things and some don’t.

She worked first for the temperance movement. Drunkenness was an enormous problem in those days. Per capita consumption of alcohol was over seven gal. per capita. You have to keep in mind that most women didn’t drink at all then, most slaves didn’t drink, and no children were drunks, to speak of…. yet they were counted in that statistic. After Prohibition, by the way, that consumption went way down, and it is just now reaching seven gallons again after sixty years, but men and women of all colors drink now. I think most children still do not. Part of the problem with men drinking that much was not that it was immoral or icky to drink, but that the laws made males owners of all property in a marriage. They also owned the children, and always would get custody in a divorce. They also owned their wives and received any money their wives made.

If they were “bad to drink,” as we said in the South, they would drink up their paycheck and their wives paycheck. If they were the kind of drunk that would come home violent, they would hurt their wives and their kids and not much could be done about it at all. Beating your wife was not a crime in those days. All of the issues Anthony worked for flowed from her temperance work, as she campaigned for equal pay for equal work, for the right of women and African Americans to vote, for women to be able to get a divorce if she were abused, for women to have a chance at custody of her children, and for wives to be able to own property and keep their paychecks.

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in 1820. She didn’t like “Brownell” so she just always used “B.” She grew up in New York state in the midst of a Quaker family. One of the elements in her life that allowed her to be a confident crusader was that her father believed in her, loved her, and made sure she was educated at the same level as the males in the family. Having Daniel Anthony as the head of her household, growing up, gave her the experience of how much good a good man could do. Quakers believed that men and women were equal, that they thought and spoke and led equally well. Women helped run the meetings, and women had a say in all decisions.

Daniel Anthony sent his children to the town school until the school teacher refused to teach Susan long division. The thought at the time was that girls should be taught to read well enough to read their Bibles and taught enough arithmetic to count their egg money. Anthony brought the children home, started a school in his house and hired a teacher. When you are told, growing up, that you are smart and capable, when you are loved and admired by those who are in charge of you, it is much easier for you to be able to be smart and strong as an adult. Daniel Anthony believed in the work Susan was doing, and he supported her financially and emotionally. Her family helped her all her life, supplementing the fees she was paid as a lecturer and an organizer. When she was 20, Susan took a job teaching school from a fellow who had done poorly in the job. He had been paid $10.00 a week. She was paid $2.50.

Five years later, when she was 25, the family moved to Rochester, where they joined the Unitarian Church. When you join a Unitarian church you meet people who change your life. Rochester was a hotbed of abolitionist activity. The family befriended anti-slavery activists and former slaves. Susan was horrified to hear stories of the brutality and heartbreaking conditions of the lives of slaves, and she became more and more of an activist. Her family’s farm became more and more a center of anti-slavery activity. She grew more and more radical, along with her father and their friends. She was asked to be a paid abolitionist organizer, renting halls, hiring speakers, and publicizing meetings. She began speaking some herself, and she was good at it. She also liked it. You don’t have to do everything you’re good at, but if you’re good at it and you like it too, it’s pretty clear this is something you should do.

Susan spoke at a teacher’s convention, arguing, as a teacher, that both girls and boys should be taught, and that they should be taught together in the same room, that they could learn equally well, at equal speeds. She said there was not that much difference in their brains. It was thought by some in her day that women only had a certain amount of energy, and if they thought too hard and used their brains too much it would wither their reproductive parts. Clergy preached against the great social evil of educating boys and girls together. They said it would upset the balance of nature. What’s next, teaching our dogs and cats to read? When you study history you see that conservative religious voices, over and over, mouth what sounds from here like the most ridiculous claptrap. Those are the same voices now raised against same-sex marriage, saying “What’s next, we should be able to marry our dogs?” Liberal clergy from that time sound very much like voices from our time.

In the division that always, always happens when working for change, there were people saying “Don’t scare folks off by wanting everything all at once. Be reasonable.”

Susan B said “Shall I tell a man whose house in on fire to give a moderate alarm? Shall he moderately rescue his wife from a ravisher? Shall a mother moderately pull her baby from the fire it has fallen into?

In 1848, when she was 28 years old, the first Women’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, NY. She didn’t go. Local media had called it a hen convention, attended by cranks, hermaphrodites and atheists. Susan was shocked to find out that her father and lots of their friends supported the cause of women’s rights. They talked about that alongside the abolition of slavery Susan heard of the brilliant Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and hoped to meet her one day. When they did meet, they liked each other thoroughly and instantly. They were friends with Amelia Bloomer, who campaigned for more comfortable and sensible clothes for women. She wore an outfit that was called by her name. All three women wore those clothes for a couple of years, but they stopped when they realized it was keeping people from hearing anything they had to say. Clergy called the outfits devilish, and the press mocked them as women dressed like men.

It was not only women who were fighting against the destructive effects of alcoholism and addiction on families, who all went down together if the man of the family went down. The Sons of Temperance was a powerful political organization. Women were not allowed to join. There was a group called the Daughters of Temperance, an auxiliary group. Separate and unequal. Susan was a member of that group, one of their successful organizers and fund raisers. They elected her to represent them at a big conference in Albany NY in 1852. When she rose to make a point during a discussion, a buzz of outrage swept the hall. “The sisters,” shouted the chairman, “were not invited to speak, but to listen and learn!” Susan swept out of the room, followed by a few other women. Some other women stayed behind, disapproving. A few called the women who left “bold, meddlesome disturbers.” That very night Susan rented a hall and called her own meeting where women could speak. The room was cold and badly lit, and the stovepipe broke in the middle of Susan’s speech, but those who attended were energized and inspired. They decided to form a statewide convention. Susan was elected to head up that effort. She wrote hundreds of letters. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote speeches for her, and over five hundred women came to the conference they organized. “You stir up Susan,” Henry Stanton told Elizabeth, “and she stirs up the world.”

Their partnership lasted their whole lives, over fifty more years. Susan had more mobility, since she wasn’t caring for a household and children. Sometimes she would watch Stanton’s children while Stanton wrote her speeches. They always, no matter what they were writing and speaking about, spoke about the right of women to vote. They figured that would take care of both temperance and slavery. The women would vote correctly and abolish all evils. Susan and Elizabeth encouraged one another, kept one another radical. Her friendship with Elizabeth is the second element in her life that enabled her to be who she was. Without that partnership, as without the love and support of her family, Susan’s story would probably have been a very different one.

After organizing this convention where five hundred women attended, Susan and Elizabeth were invited to the next Sons of Temperance convention. When they arrived they found that they would not even now be allowed to speak. Clergy men stood up and protested that they would not sit with these females. Anthony and Amelia Bloomer refused to leave. One delegate shouted that they were not women, but some hybrid species, half woman half man. Another man said that they had no business disrupting temperance meetings with their dreadful doctrines of women’s rights, divorce and atheism. Anthony held a petition with ten thousand signatures she had gathered. Within minutes the two women had been thrown out, bodily.

As she lectured and traveled, some newspapers would attack her personally, calling her repulsive and ugly, saying that she was laboring under strong feelings of hatred towards men. She must have been neglected by men, and she was jealous. The third time Anthony and Stanton were rejected by the main temperance group, they disengaged from that group for the next 20 years. “We have other, bigger fish to fry,” said Stanton serenely. They began working on securing property rights for women. If women could own things, they could be free of abusive marriages. Maybe also if they had money, the legislature would listen to them better. They worked on that for the next eight years, until 1860. Anthony went door to door and town to town, gathering signatures on petitions, enduring snowstorms and ridicule, sleeping in cold farm houses and inns, going before the state legislatures everywhere she went. In 1860 the NY legislature passed the married women’s property act, enabling married women to own property, keep her own wages, not subject to the control or interference of her husband, enter into contracts, and have shared custody of her children. Many other states followed suit, changing the lives of millions of women.

Some of the suffragists, in years to come, were embarrassed by the radical things Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did. ECS wrote “The Women’s Bible,” mercilessly asking questions about the portrayal of women in the Bible, questions that would offend and upset most people even in this day and age. Harriet Beecher Stowe refused to write for Anthony’s newspaper, The Revolution, unless she named it something less aggressive.

Anthony rode stagecoaches, delivered speeches, and endured hardships until late in her 70’s. Until her father’s death, she had his full support. Until Stanton’s death, that partnership and support sustained her. She never married, never had children. Women’s rights, abolition, temperance, these were her passions and her life’s work.

She didn’t live to see women get the vote, in 1920. She did vote, though. In the 1872 election she voted illegally, she and a few other women. She was arrested, tried, and convicted. She was hoping to appeal, as the judge wouldn’t let the jury speak, and he instructed them to find her guilty. Her fine was 100 dollars. She told him, “You have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my political rights, my civil rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. I will not pay a penny of your unjust fine.” As he shouted for her to be quiet and sit down, she kept talking. “I shall urgently and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim that ÔResistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'”

We can learn how to make social change from Susan B: Five easy steps:

1. Trust yourself. What feels wrong to you is probably wrong.

2. Get mad. Anger is a good fuel for action. Try to get mad at the right person or the right institution, as Aristotle said. “It is easy to fly into a passion – anybody can do that. But to be angry with the right person and to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way – that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.”

3. Work to change things. Don’t just complain. Find out how to change things and start trying.

4. Lean on a friend. Have relationships, partnerships in making change.

5. Know how things work. Here is how they work: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you. Then they fight you, then they agree. Later, they say they agreed with you all along. If you know how it works, when they call you a man hater or ugly or repulsive or they say you’re not patriotic or ask what’s next, I’m going to marry my dog? You can know they have been doing it this way forever. Keep fighting.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

What we are worshiping, we are becoming

February 9, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 9, 2014

We begin our series on the Ten Commandments with the first one. From Rumi to Emerson, we’ll talk about a UU understanding of the truth and usefulness of the commandments.

On his pseudo news show “The Colbert Report,” Steven Colbert, who is from SC, interviewed congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia. Remembering that any show can take any piece of an interview, it is still telling.

“You co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Why was that important to you?”

“Well, the Ten Commandments is – is not a bad thing, uh, for people to understand and respect.”

“I’m with you,” Colbert responds as the congressman goes on, “Where better place would you have something like that than a judicial building courthouse?”

“That’s a good question. Can you think of any better building to have the Ten Commandments in than in a public building?”

“No. I think if we were totally without them we may lose a sense of our direction.”

“What are the ten commandments?”

“What are all of them?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to name them?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“let’s see, don’t murder. Don’t lie, don’t steal-uh– I can’t name them all.”

In the faith story of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, the Ten Commandments were given to Moses in the Sinai desert; In the Hebrew they are called Aseret ha-Dvarim, best translated: “the ten statements.”

The story is found in both Deuteronomy (5:6-21) and Exodus (20:3-16) The Hebrew people followed Moses out of Egypt and they traveled through the Sinai Peninsula to the land of Canaan, which was promised to them by God. After about three months they came to Mount Horeb, also called Mount Sinai. Moses went up the mountain to talk to God. Smoke came on the mountain, like the smoke from a furnace, because Adonai (God) descended on the mountain in fire, and there was the sound like a trumpet that grew louder and louder. On the mountain, God gave Moses the commandments, and many more commandments the people were to follow. According to the Talmud, there are 613 laws the Jews must follow. When public reciting of the ten was giving them more weight than the other 593 commandments, the recitation was discontinued.

It took Moses so long to come down from the mountain that the people grew restless, and Aaron, Moses’ brother, was pressured to make some gods who would go with them to the Promised land. He asked for all their gold earrings and bracelets; he melted them down and made a statue of a golden calf. The people celebrated with dancing, shouting and revelry. “Revelry” is Bible translator language for wild partying. Use your imaginations. Moses heard the noise. It sounded like war, the text says. He came down with the tablets, which were carved on both sides (rabbinic tradition holds that they magically had writing that went all the way through, yet read correctly on both sides. The “O” shaped letters still had the circle of stone hanging in the hole, floating there without connection to the surrounding stone.) Moses saw what the people were doing, and became angry and broke the tablets into pieces. He ground up the gold statue, spread it on their water and made the people drink it. Then he got two more tablets inscribed by God.

These are time-honored precepts, and they encapsulate more than one ancient culture’s wisdom about how to live a good life. In fact, they borrow heavily, verbatim in parts, from the code of Hammurabi, whose tablets we have in the British Museum. I remember, in seminary, being taken aback to realize how much of Mosaic law was taken directly from Hammurabi, which argued against it being given directly from God to Moses.

This morning, starting this series on the Ten Commandments, I will talk about the first one. “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Egypt was moving toward monotheism about this same time in history, around 1550 BCE. Maybe it’s an evolution of human understanding. Today when we talk about there being god in everything would say it’s the same sacred energy, Being, or quickening or Oneness, with many names. To most people, giving gods different names made them different gods. I have a family member who wanted a doctor who “worshiped the same God” he did. A Muslim doctor had the skill, unquestionably, but worshiped Allah, who was a god, but a different god, a false god. I was taken aback that there were still people who didn’t think of god as one, with many names. There are still some who think that way, calling “Allah” a “false god,” We watch movies about the Greek myths, thinking Zeus is an old fashioned action figure of a god, not thinking that Zeus is the same word as Deus, which is Latin for God in all Christmas cantatas. It is the understanding of the Divine that changes throughout the ages.

A cynical way to see it might be that the first commandment was a way to control the people – if there were just one god, there was just one group of people who could speak to that god and tell the people what he wanted.

From within the faith, the explanation is that The Hebrews had to become the Jews. If they were absorbed into the surrounding culture, there would be nothing distinctive left of them.

Nature religions had many gods with different roles: death and rebirth, being taken apart and put back together, male and female coming together for the fertility of the land, rain and sun and earth and wind all playing their parts, or not, for the life or the suffering of the people. History, in an earth-based religion, is made of circles and cycles. With one God, who works in the lives of the people, the movement is more in a line. This happened, then this. Telling the stories of God’s interaction with the people became more important than the regularity of the rain and the seasons.

To bring this to a Unitarian Universalist place, let me remind you of the Emerson quote we read together.

Emerson wrote: “The gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And we will worship something – have no doubt of that either. We may think that our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of the heart – but it will out. That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we are worshipping, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted [and slightly adapted] by Chaim Stern in Gates of Understanding, vol. I [New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1977), p. 216)

The word “worship” comes from two old Anglo-Saxon words “weorth” and “scipe” The first means worth, the second is to shape, as in scoop or shovel. So we are shaping what we see to be of worth, here in worship. That’s why atheists can worship next to theists, because, whatever your understanding of god or no god is, you have things you consider to be of worth. Coming here on Sundays shapes what you value. What makes you feel awe, feel like there is something greater than you are present? For some it’s freedom, for some it’s security, for some it’s power, for others it’s not hurting anyone but yourself. All of those values shape your life and your choices.

What I want to say this morning as you considerwhat you organize your life around is that I vote for love to be our highest worth. Truth is good, and I’m an addict, but truth without love can be destructive. Freedom is wonderful, and I need it like air, but freedom without love can be destructive. Destruction is necessary sometimes, but destruction without love is not generative, it doesn’t lead to more life.

Here is your homework, that no one will check or hold you to: What would your Ten Commandments be?

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776