Who or what is God?

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Rev. Nathan Ryan
July 7, 2013

How do we understand the most holy in a church where there is no creedal test and not everyone is a theist? Guest minister Rev. Nathan Ryan leads us through this three letter journey. He is assistant minister at the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge. He has also served as director of lay ministry for the First Unitarian Church of Dallas and director of lifespan religious education at Live Oak UU Church in Cedar Park.

 

I remember feeling very angry and I didn’t know why. It was the first year I was in high school. It was red ribbon week. This is the week when the school decks out in red ribbons in an attempt to dissuade students from using drugs. Each student group was responsible for putting up signs with an anti-drug message. Most groups didn’t do it, but the one that really got to me put up signs all over the school saying things like “Jesus loves you” and “Your body is a temple, don’t poison it with drugs.”

I remember feeling very angry, almost violated when I saw these signs. I turned to my friend in exasperation about it. I lashed out at the signs and said something like “They can’t do this. What if I put up a sign that said “don’t do drugs because there is no god.” ” My friend didn’t really understand my anger and just continued on with what he was doing.

If I wanted to find the easy explanation of my emotion, the intellectual part of me could say that I was offended because these groups violated the separation of church and state or that I was upset because these messages were exclusive to atheists, Jews, Muslims, agnostics and anyone else who wasn’t a believer in this specific brand of Christianity. And those thoughts and justifications aren’t wrong.

But didn’t explain why I had such an emotional reaction, a reaction out of anger and sadness, and it doesn’t explain why I still hold this story in my consciousness to this day.

I think deep down I was upset because I didn’t have the cultural or spiritual understanding I needed to fully comprehend God as a concept or as an experience. I didn’t grow up with an understanding of God, not one that was real and meaningful to me. I knew about the God described in popular culture, a god that had no resonance with me. But I never in a religious context had the opportunity to explore my own understandings of God.

I knew of “their God” – the old white man with the beard who orchestrates and judges. Because I didn’t believe in him, I knew that I must not believe in God. As I got older my understanding of and relationship with God has grown and adapted and shifted.

The experiences of God came first and it was only later did I come to identify those experiences as God. Let me say that another way. I had experiences and feelings but I didn’t have the words to describe them. It was only later, as an adult, when I started learning about an expansive description of God, not the constricted God of my childhood, did I start identifying these feelings and experiences as divine in nature.

Some of those experiences: My time as a Unitarian Universalist youth – a time when I felt fully embraced by a community of caring and loving peers who encouraged me to discover and embrace my true self. This was at a time that it didn’t feel safe in my day to day life to figure out who I truly was. There were there friends and family who grew up in awful circumstances, friends who were surrounded by neglect and mental illness and addiction, and yet they were able to explore and know themselves and thrive.

There was the incredible dedication of a chaplain and nurse when I worked in the hospital who gave up hours to sit with a patient whose family had already left him in his last hours declaring to me that no one deserves to die alone. There are those tectonic shifts, towards a more just world, like the one we are experiencing now with LGBT rights. There are people who work for greater dialogue, who work for justice, who love those who seem unworthy of love. All of these experiences I would have described as divine, but it took a shift in my understanding to ever see them as the work of God.

I wanted to explore this topic with you today for two reasons. First, God and our interpretations of God permeate our culture so much that we, as a religious institution are called to explore it. Second, I think a lot of religious insight can be opened up by further exploration.

The aha moment for me about understanding God came when I switched the agency. That is to say, I stopped looking at God as the initiator of events, the person who pulls the switch to make it rain, or make us love, or who allows people to live and to die. I flipped it and saw god as the descriptor of these larger things.

The words of poet Annie Dillard describe this what God looks like after this shift. I don’t like her dismissive attitude or one gendered description of god, but the imagery is so useful that I wanted to share it with you.

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things- unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

This helped me greatly. Instead of seeing God as the cause of love, when I see love, I call it god. Just as when I see water fall from the sky I call it rain instead of saying that rain caused water to fall from the sky. Because God is such a powerfully deep and complicated metaphor, I think its ok to see God in many different ways (or not at all) and that strengthens the concept for me. Here are a few and I’ll ask you to try some on.

The early 20th century Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams says God is “that which ultimately concerns humanity” or god is “that in which we should place our confidence.” Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church from the reading earlier says that god is “that which is greater than all and yet present in each.” I see god I as the culmination of all of our understandings of something larger.

Take the lesson from earlier. How many of you found the words of people inadequate to describe art? Our best means of communication can pale in comparison to the fullness of experiencing art. And art is just an abstraction of something larger. Art is an attempt to communicate a feeling, an experience, a way of being that is indescribable. That is why often the artistic depiction of real life fail to fully embrace life’s the majesty and mystery. So here is the trajectory: Words are inadequate to describe art. Art is inadequate to describe life. Life is inadequate to describe our own musings and worries and ways of making meaning. If you carry this continuum all the way through to its conclusion, to the infinite most point, that is where I would call God.

Another way I see God, came out of our earlier reading by Emerson. What was so revolutionary about Emerson’s sermon to the Divinity School students at Harvard was that it took God out of the scriptures, out of the past and the books, and it located God squarely within each person. He put the obligation of knowing the divine and understanding revelation into our very existence.

I see God as the culmination of all of our understandings of the world, our understandings of good and evil and fun and suffering. But it is larger than that. It is all of the understandings of everyone and everything that has ever existed – including those who can’t make meaning.

So one conception of God, lets put on the horizontal axis, is the grandness and majesty of life. The culminated God concepts of everyone who has ever existed could go on the vertical axis, and you could continue adding dimensions to this. It is easy to poke holes in someone else’s conception of God and their beliefs. Beliefs are just our attempts to make sense of our experiences. To argue with someone’s beliefs is to argue with someone’s experiences.

We are all making two-dimensional representations of a concept that is three dimensional. When you do that, like when making a map, you aren’t going to get all the proportions right. If you are mapping on a piece of paper a round world either South America or Greenland is going to be the wrong size.

If we were to view God as the culmination of all of our experiences and beliefs, what is implied by that? First it implies that God is not out there. God is not some foreign substance or entity. We are a part of the great makeup of all existence. It also implies that revelation and the ability to change the world is no farther than right inside of us. It implies to borrow the concept from Howard Thurman in our invocation that each of us has an altar deep in our souls, guarded by an angel with a flaming sword and that is our link to the eternal. Second it implies that what we say and do matters. This is where I depart from Forrest Church in our first reading. I don’t know how many of you know Reverend Church’s story. He did some great things, he grew a Unitarian Universalist Church in New York from a small church into one of the largest congregations in the country. He spoke words, and wrote many books that gave hope to countless people. His book Love and Death may have helped me understand death better than anything else I’ve read.

In his reading, though, he dismissed his critics by saying “To think that I, who will never be guilty of committing a best-seller, could strike anyone as being sufficiently powerful to set back liberal religion even a decade.” Well, the shadow side of Rev. Church’s ministry was that because of his alcoholism and an affair, he hurt a lot of people. He hurt a lot of people partially because he didn’t understand the power of his own words and actions. If we are part of a larger conception of God, then our thoughts are significant. Our experiences, our insights are holy plasma.

I make paper cranes. This practice for me lies somewhere in between a deep spiritual and meditative practice and a way to manage my fidgety hands. I take a sheet of paper, a two dimensional sheet of paper. I fold it over and over until it turns into a crane, into something with depth.

This is a great practice for me, but with one unforeseen side effect. I have hundreds of these cranes all over my house. Because I am so used to them I forget that other people can treasure these.

The spiritual challenge of a god that is the culmination of everyone’s meaning and present in each is similar to the challenge of folding cranes. Your life is a life worthy of study a life worthy of hanging in a museum. Your years of experiences and insights and attempts to make meaning is each a fold in the paper. All of your work trying to learn to walk, and talk, and love, and experience life give this life depth and dimension and complexity.

Eventually you might reach a point where your gifts, your insights, your way of being in the world are so plentiful that they might stop feeling like gifts that other appreciate, and they just seem to you like hundreds of cranes all over your house.

If I had a better understanding of God when I was in high school, I may not have been so angry when I saw those signs at red ribbon week. I’m still not sure I’d be happy they were up, but I could process them with a better understanding. That sign that said “Your body is a temple, don’t poison it,” I wonder how that idea would have changed my life if I could receive it. I mean that idea is basically what I’m espousing, that our bodies hold great and meaningful pieces of God, that we are made up of star dust, particles that have existed since the beginning of time.

If I was more at peace with God, I might have opened me up to more people I knew in high school. And then they might have found the life changing and healing message of our faith – I know of at least three who are now Unitarian Universalist.

I wonder how many people who walked past those signs wished they could hear that their doubts and their questions made their faith stronger not weaker? I wonder how many would have been eased to know that they were worthy of love and kindness and that they were a blessing to the world. In the most concrete of senses, I wonder how many of my peers in high school could have had their lives transformed if I were able to share this church with them.

I’ll close this sermon with maybe one of my favorite definitions of God. It comes straight out of the Christian scriptures. It’s from 1 John Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God….No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and love is made complete. Let us go out and live a more loving more caring life. Amen.

 

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Like Slow-Growing Trees in a Ruined Place

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 30, 2013

Another sermon in the series on the Buddhist Eightfold Path. Right livelihood means doing something with your life that helps the world, “enriching it, if we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of earth or heaven, then a long time after we are dead, the lives our lives prepare will live here…,” – Wendell Berry.

 

Reading:

A VISION
by Wendell Berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it, if we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of earth or heaven, then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides, fields and gardens rich in the windows. The river will run clear, as we will never know it, and over it, birdsong like a canopy …. Families will be singing in the fields. In their voices they will hear a music risen out of the ground. They will take nothing from the ground they will not return, whatever the grief at parting. Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament. The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility.

Sermon:

I heard a man in the hospital say “I had a wasted life.” There was such sorrow and resignation in his voice. What would make a person say that, as he lay, old and running out of road, in a hospital bed? It’s an essential part of a spirited life to do some work that feels meaningful, that engages who you are.

Many people, if they had the choice, would not do most of the work they do. We do it to feed our families, to pay our rent or the mortgage, take care of our children, change the diapers, fix meals, buy socks and medicine and gasoline. Working is a sacrifice. You spend the coin of your life’s time and energy to receive the things you and your family need.

Work for pay is only a part of a balanced work life. We work at home raising our children or caring for elderly parents. We work on volunteer projects, to make our community a better place to live. Our lives are slowly paid out, traded, sacrificed. If we do it right, we will feel that we got good things in trade for our time and energy. If we see our work as the trade of our energy for security, for freedom, for family life, pleasure, rich experiences, the betterment of others, then at the end of our lives we will look back on life well spent. Our sacrifice will have been a meaningful one -what the Buddhists call “right livelihood,” the slow, necessary paying out of our lives’ coin for a good life, and that in itself can become a spiritual path.

Many among us spend more time in work than in any other aspect of our lives, except for sleeping. We pour a lot of our vital energy into it, and so it is important what work we choose. It is important to be clear about why we do it, what values and principles guide us as we work. It becomes important to explore how to be there at work in a way that can be a spiritual path.

If we practice, we can see how our stance within our work can transform us and others. This is a story that Buddhist teacher Eric Kolvig tells: “I was late for a meeting, and I was quite stressed. I got off the turnpike and drove up to the toll booth feeling quite stressed, and the woman in the toll booth took my money and gave me the most extraordinary smile — it was just amazing. It was like having the Dalai Lama take your money at the toll booth. It was an extraordinary experience. It was the highest quality contact that I had that day, or that week, with someone who was obviously a bodhisattva — someone who basically took their work and, because they transformed it, there was a very deep, human connection, even though it only lasted for seconds.”

Most of us have to work for the money. An important question to ask ourselves is “How much money do we need?” What is enough? Maybe we work from a sense of responsibility – is there ever “enough” responsibility? If you grew up in a Presbyterian family like mine, even the question doesn’t make sense. There is no end to your responsibility! My grandfather, a hard working radio evangelist, a traveling preacher and writer, asked, on his death bed, with his last words, “Have I done enough?” I do not want to end up like that. So I work on relaxing. Yes, you heard me. Presbyterianborn, firstborn UUs have to WORK on RELAXING. Right Livelihood means making time for our families, our bodies, our community. How can we be there in a way that gives us a sense of meaning in our day, that makes the workplace a better place?

Many workplaces are toxic with disharmony, with all kinds of politics and struggles over power, and sometimes we can make a difference in that by refraining from participating in the toxicity, by being a centered and compassionate presence there. Most jobs encourage overwork, which is one of the main harms that our jobs do.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk and a writer, says: The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything, is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes her work for peace. It destroys his inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of her own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Over-activity is a form of violence that actually does harm our beings and to our families, and we live in the most hyperactive society in the history of the world. I think most of us are challenged by that. How do we find balance in our activities?

If I’m too busy, then there might be no time for the children, for a partner or spouse. It’s really important to ask, “How much do I need? How much activity do I need to do to stay balanced? How much income do I need in order to live a balanced life? Can I live with less, and work less?” Thoreau says, “How much of my life willi give to possess this thing?” It’s good to be able to understand, if you look at a car that you1re about to buy, and you divide that by what you make per hour, and you can figure out how many hours of your life you will actually spend paying for that car.

Right Livelihood asks us to love our world through our work, to be “slowgrowing trees in a ruined place,” to quote our reading from Wendell Berry, “asking not too much of earth or heaven” (or ourselves and our families) to think of the lives our lives prepare. Work provides a daily opportunity to put our beliefs into action, to bring an intention to work together in a friendly way, treat people fairly and pleasantly, bring out the best in our coworkers, rein in our egos, and see what freedom and harmony can come our way. It’s a worthy experiment.

 

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

 

Joseph Priestley: The most hated man in Britain

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Luther Elmore, Sermons

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Luther Elmore
June 23, 2012

Joseph Priestley was a scientist, philosopher, educator, and Unitarian minister. His positions forced him to flee his homeland for America. We will look at his life and contributions to our Unitarian history.

 

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Amazing Grace

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 16, 2013

The sermon topic is “salvation.” What does the word mean? Is it something we want? How do we get it? We have yielded the ground on words like this to the more traditionally religious communities, but we really can go there. It will be okay.

 

Last fall this church held an auction, and one of my contributions was that people could bid to request a certain topic for a sermon. One person won the bid, and then another person paid that as well for his request. “God the Huntress” was one “auction sermon,” and I preached that last February. This one is “Salvation.” What would a UU view of salvation be?

Most sermons start with questions. What does “salvation” mean? What are the views of the religions in which Unitarian Universalism has its roots? Are we being saved from something? Saved for something? Are we broken, in need of some kind of fixing or are we good the way we are?

I’ll start with the word. When it is translated from the Hebrew, the language of the Jewish scriptures, it has the connotation “to keep alive,” “to redeem,” “to deliver.” In Greek, the language of the Christian scriptures, its root is “sozo” which means to save, to rescue, to deliver, to protect. “Sozo” is also translated in the New Testament with the words to heal, preserve, save, do well, and to make whole.

There is a range of meanings in the word “salvation,” from being delivered from something, kept safe, rescued, or healed. It has to do with the endpoint of the soul, with a state of being that is clean and free and peaceful.

Even though the word from the auction question comes out of the Jewish and Christian traditions, I would like to range farther afield into a more ancient religion to see what it was its adherents were trying for. I suppose the most ancient religions are the earth-based ones that Christian scholars call “fertility cults.” You find yourself in this great world and you have to feed your children, which are formed somewhat miraculously inside your bodies. Well, the female ones, anyway. Of course, matters of how to stay alive will be at the forefront of your thinking. Sometimes the berries are thick and sometimes they don’t grow. Sometimes your children are healthy and other times they are in trouble. Is it something you did? Can you do the things that will make everything good? Are there spirits or gods involved who want certain things? Do they need to be reminded to make things grow? Do they need to be appeased to make your childbirth go well, to give the hunters luck with the hunt? In this system, keeping the gods awake and appeased so that things happen well would be what was most desired. Salvation would have to do with being in favor with the earth and the sky so that your life is sweet and your children live.

In the middle east, Judaism was stirring between two and three thousand years BCE. Its main teaching was that there was one God, and that the best way to look at things was not as an endless cycle, the view of earth-based religion, but as a timeline with a beginning, a middle and an end. The primary relationship was not between the people and the Earth, it was between the people and the God. A person was called to be righteous, doing what the God said to do, but as the religion developed though the time of slaver, through the Exodus from Egypt, and the time as the people of Israel, Salvation was seen, not as an individual matter as much as it was that the people of Israel were to be redeemed as a whole. What redemption meant in that context was that they were free from oppressive rule, that they were keeping the Torah, the commandments, living righteously and pleasing to God. In the Jewish Scriptures, you are righteous even when you fall. The righteous person can sin, can fall, can disobey, but the righteous get up again and keep their faces turned toward God. Hope continues for the salvation of the people, and for the healing of the world.

In the earliest Hindu Scriptures, the Vedas, which come from about the time of the Exodus, the beginning of the Jews as a people, the main concern is for doing things in the right ways that would appease the gods so life would be good. Later on, in the Upanishads, the concern becomes more about how to attain eternal peace, how to get enlightenment. The earliest Upanishads were being written around the time that Buddhism was beginning, around 500 BCE. Both Hinduism at that time, and the new offshoot, Buddhism, were concerned less with how to make sacrifices to the gods and more about how to understand reality and the self in order to let go of the rollercoaster of happiness and suffering. How to come into peace. That peace would be the understanding of salvation from the Hindu and Buddhist point of view (and I want you to know I am painting with a very broad brush). Salvation is getting to the point where you are no longer weighed down by either good karma or bad karma. Karma is the energy generated by actions. You are born the last time and then escape from the endless wheel of rebirth. Some sects of Buddhism believe that you can be helped along the way by borrowing some of the good karma of the saints, or bodhisattvas. Others teach that you are on your own, doing good deeds to build merit for a better reincarnation each lifetime until you achieve release from the endless round of rebirth is salvation.

For most segments of Christianity, salvation means being rescued from the punishment due you for your individual sins. This is the system of thought I know the most about, having spent my childhood in a Christian family and studying for the ministry for three years at Princeton Seminary. Some Christianities teach that humans are born in sin. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians believe this. The action of God is necessary to lift you into salvation, which basically means you get to go to a place called Heaven when you die. Methodists believe that humans are born good, and that they can choose to do good or bad things. Even if you aren’t born in sin, you still choose to do bad things, and you need forgiveness. The teaching of most Christianities is that salvation comes from understanding that the death of Jesus the savior atones for your sins, as he took our punishment on himself to save us. So your sins are paid for. Forgiven. Paid for?

My father is a Presbyterian minister who has studied the Bible long enough to come to believe in Universal salvation. That God doesn’t send anyone to hell. That makes him a Universalist. He says “look, your sins can’t be both forgiven and paid for. If I owe you ten thousand dollars, and she pays you on my behalf, then my debt is paid for. If you say that you will forgive my debt and it no longer has to be paid, then it’s forgiven. Either one or the other, but not both.” He preaches that Jesus died, not , our sins, but he died because some people killed him. God forgives us with or without that, and also forgives those people for killing him. In that view, salvation comes from God’s forgiveness. You aren’t rescued from the consequences of your actions, no one teaches that. You are rescued from any kind of eternal separation from God because of your actions.

For Islam, the most recent religion we’re looking at (if we count Unitarian Universalism as starting back in the third century with the Arians “heresy) salvation has to do with going to heaven. You get to heaven if you believe in God (Allah) and in his message, Islam. If you just believe in God and not in Islam, your fate is in God’s hands. There is no heaven for people who don’t believe in God.

For Unitarian Universalists there is no danger of hell. People can create hellish lives for themselves and for one another, but it’s here in this life that hell is felt. If there is no hell, there is nothing from which to be delivered, except for our own guilt and regret over promises broken and damage done. Grace consists in forgiving one another, and in forgiving ourselves. Grace can be a realization, an insight that frees our thinking and feeling. It can be another person allowing us a fresh start, not holding our actions against us. Grace can be a touch from a book, a piece of music, a view on the hiking trail, a line from a movie that puts something into a new perspective. It can happen when someone else cleans up a mess you made. It can happen when someone decides that you are more than the mistake you made. Sin is, in Buddhist language “out-of-joint-ness,” in Christian language “missing the mark.” Both concepts have to do with something not fitting, not in harmony, not working the way it should. Unitarian Universalists have a sense of sin when we break promises, when we do not act out of our better selves, when we drink bottled water, or, worse, toss our empty water bottles in the trash. We have a sense of sin when we drive gas-guzzling cars or judge someone for something we’re supposed to tolerate. Sometimes we do things that are worse — – when we are abusing substances, being cruel to family, willfully turning our thoughts away from things we know we should be paying attention to. How do we get made whole from those things? How do we forgive ourselves, which is often the hardest step? Salvation, for us, means being made whole. It’s a process having to do with getting better and better at doing what we say we’re going to do. With our chosen spiritual practice, we get more stable, more emotionally disciplined, more sturdily rooted. With practice in compassionate and loving relationships, we get better at both giving and receiving love and compassion. We ask forgiveness for what we do wrong, and we make amends the best we can. What is salvation, wholeness after death? No one knows. Read “the Green After.”

Today I have too many friends who are dying. Sometimes at a Unitarian Universalist memorial service I feel dissatisfied-and I’m the preacher in charge. I think: What is going on that I can’t figure out how to preach my view of resurrection?

I know that people would want to hear it; I’m not worried about offending or confusing anyone; and I treasure the ability to speak the plain truth as I see it. The plain truth is no one knows for sure what happens when we die. That’s not a very stirring thing to proclaim at a funeral, though, honest as it is. We all have some kind of belief about it, even if that belief is that there is nothing after we die.

The reason I haven’t preached it yet is because when I call to mind my belief about the afterlife, it comes to me as a color.

At a camping weekend with friends, we were nestled in a clearing on a mountainside. Most of the folks were around the campfire, talking or dozing. Our chef was in the cooking tent, grilling and gossiping with his fiancŽe and a couple of others. I love those people, and they love me. Being surrounded by love is one fine way to spend your time. I wandered off to the hammock, and lay there looking up at the sky through early April leaves.

I was soaked with light, the blue of the sky, the green of young leaves, the sun shining through them like stained glass. I thought, “When I die, I want to have my ashes buried under this tree, so that for one spring after another my body can be part of this particular green.” I could feel my life flowing through the cells of a leaf, feel the leaf opening to the warmth and the light, feel myself part of that green, and I was happy.

If that is my afterlife, I will be deeply happy.

The hope of that afterlife doesn’t take any leap of faith. I know it can happen. The minerals and the water in my body can be soaked up through the roots of that tree. A part of my body will be unfurling, green in the sun.

My soul may be somewhere else. Sometimes I think my soul will float in an ocean of love. Will I recognize old friends, family, who have gone on ahead? I don’t know. I think I will know they are there. I will know this: there is not now nor was there ever any separation between us. I will know that they were with me as strongly when I was alive as when I’m part of the leaves.

The green of a new leaf, lit from behind with the spring sun-that color stays inside me, a glowing place of peace, the certainty of remaining part of life. During a memorial service I see that green, I feel that peace. It’s hard to preach a color, but I’m going to think of a way.

 

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

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

The Rose

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 9, 2013

We hear in songs that love is a rose. We read the poets, who say life is a rose. From Rumi to Emerson to the Grateful Dead, the rose is used to evoke beauty, pain, the ephemeral nature of life. It’s summer, and the roses are blooming.

 

Reading: The Greening Breath

The new house we moved into has roses blooming all along its sunny southern side. Mama told me roses were hard to grow, so I never tried before, but here they are, and I like watching them. A medieval Christian mystic named Hildegarde of Bingen wrote: ” ……the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it.” Watching my roses, I see that greening breath moving up slowly through the stem, sending energy through the tips of the leaves as they uncurl, gathering in what they need from the summer sun. Hildegarde said: “The soul is a breath of living spirit, that ……permeates the entire body to give it life.”

I find myself wishing for that greening spirit in my soul this summer. The heat drains the life out of me. Some days I just drag around, crabby and overwhelmed. I see people on TV having cookouts, rafting down refreshing rivers, enjoying places I can’t afford this year. I know that comparing my life to life on TV is a no-win practice. When I’m hot, it feels like everyone else is graceful, loving, patient, financially savvy, organized, with animals who do what they are supposed to do. They do things a little at a time rather than letting them pile up. When it’s hot, everything is too hard. Or maybe I’m too soft. I can’t tell. The greening is hard to feel in summer, for me, but I see my roses feeling it.

Sometimes I wonder if it hurts to bloom. I know scientifically, that doesn’t make sense, but suspend disbelief for a moment and picture this: if you were a rose, and this were your first time out, would you be having fun being a bud, all curled around yourself, feeling hugged and tight, knowing what’s what? You are soaking up the sun, being gently tossed in warm wind, and suddenly everything starts to loosen up. Your petals are letting go! They are moving apart from one another! Do you try to hold on, try to grab for the edges and keep the changes from happening? Maybe you think to yourself, “I don’t understand this, but maybe it’s what’s supposed to happen.” You allow the once tight petals to move apart. Does it hurt? Does it cause anxiety? Do the buds think they are falling apart or do they know they are blossoming ? The roses seem to accept each stage with grace, but how do we really know that? Maybe we just can’t hear them screaming.

Are you evergreen, stable, cruising through the seasons, level and confident? Are you dry as a stick, all thorns, wondering whether any life is left in you at all? Are you uncurling in high anxiety, wondering if you are falling apart? Are you letting go, surrendering, hoping that this falling apart will lead to blossoming? I’m going to try to trust, imagining that whatever is happening is what is supposed to happen. Maybe that is true or maybe it’s not, but it is a stance I’m going to try out for a while. The shoot, the stem, the flower, then the seed, all in their own time.

I love that image of a rose bud, tightly curled, beginning to loosen and just going into a panic. “Help! What’s happening? My petals – they’re coming apart!” What the rose blossoms into is so lovely that it has delighted humans and ants and aphids and many other creatures for millions of years. The oldest fossils of roses, 32,000,000 years old, found in Colorado and Oregon, resemble more the East Asian roses than the American ones of the present day. The first record of the kind of roses we know best is a highly stylized one in a fresco at Knossos in Greece; it dates from the sixteenth century B.C. E. Maybe they come from East Asia. The Goddess Lakshmi was said to have been born from a rose that had 108 large petals and 1008 small ones.

From ancient days, the rose has been a symbol. A symbol is a thing that stands for something else, often something abstract and multi-layered, hard to understand. With its thorns and its beauty it makes an excellent stand in for many abstractions.

What is both beautiful and painful? What lifts the heart and pleases the senses but also can hurt you? What, in life, is welcoming and forbidding at the same time? Some would say “Life.” Khalil Gibran says: The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose – Kahlil Gibran.

You could say “creativity.” It certainly has its joys, but there is self-doubt, the mystery of when the muses are with you and when they’re not, and there is often lack of appreciation or criticism of what you produce. Progress would be some people’s guess. You try to change things and make them better, and there is always resistance, there is always conflict and failure that you have to get through. Progress has its beauty and its thorns. When most people think about what is beautiful that can also make you bleed, they say “love, of course!” The rose has been a symbol of love from ancient days. Sacred to the goddess Venus, whose Greek name is Aphrodite, the rose naturally became a symbol of the female face of God that the Christians brought to history: Mary, the mother of God. They say the rosary was called that because the beads were first made of the pressed-together petals of roses, in her honor. Lots of baby girls are named Rose Mary, Rosemarie…. After Mary, the rose of heaven.

The rose is love, all right. Pure love: white roses. First love: pink roses. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old Time is still a-flying – Robert Herrick, urges young women in To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time True love: red roses. O, my love’s like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June – Robert Burns , A Red, Red Rose

Cheating? Yellow roses. When I learned that it made me sad; the split rail fence at my grandfather’s farm was covered in yellow roses, and I have thought since then that they were the most beautiful.

One friend saw my sermon topic and told me about a poem by Walter de la Mare that ends: “Oh, no man knows, through what wild centuries, roves back the rose.”

Many wild centuries ago the rose was a sign of silence and secrecy. The word sub rosa “under the rose” referring to the demand for discretion whenever a rose was hung from the ceiling at a meeting or fastened to the door of the room where the meeting took place.

The number 5 is associated with the rose, as it has five petals in each layer. In mystery traditions, five represents the four elements plus Spirit. Also, a human being when standing with arms outstretched has five “points.” Geometrically, the rose corresponds with the pentagram and pentagon

The rose has linked them with the 5 senses. In an absolute sense the rose has represented the expanding awareness of being through the development of the senses. Many people touch smell and even taste roses. I don’t know what they sound like, but there could be people who hear them….

Politics and the struggle for justice is a prickly business. A red rose held in a hand is a symbol of socialism or social democracy: it is used as a symbol by the socialist or social democratic parties of many countries. This began when the red rose was used as a badge by the marchers in the May 1968 street protests in Paris. In the early 1900’s James Oppenheim had written a poem that was used in a textile strike in MA. “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.”

You Grateful Dead fans know that one of their best-known albums is titled “American Beauty.”

In an essay for the book Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. David Dodd Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs talks about how often the rose shows up in their songs. “The rose is a metaphor waiting to happen, and peoples have always ascribed to it some aspect of the mystery of life.” In the words of Robert Hunter: ” ‘ I’ve got this one spirit that’s laying roses on me. Roses, roses, can’t get enough of those bloody roses. The rose is the most prominent image in the human brain, as to delicacy, beauty, short-livedness, thorniness. It’s a whole. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life, than roses.” Jackson, Grateful Dead: The Music Never Stopped, (p. 152-153)

Dante uses the rose as a symbol of the whole universe, with its swirl of many petals a representation of the expanding cosmos.

The rose is such a rich symbol that it can hold many meanings. One woman I know imagines, when she is going into a difficult situation, that she is covered in roses. You are welcome to try it if you like. I do when I remember, and it’s quite pleasant. The rose has been working on the human brain for untold ages. It helps us. “I know this rose will open,” we sing. Rumi says:

“In the driest whitest stretch of pain’s infinite desert, I lost my sanity and found this rose.”

Are you evergreen, stable, cruising through the seasons, level and confident? Are you dry as a stick, all thorns, wondering whether any life is left in you at all? Are you uncurling in high anxiety, wondering if you are falling apart? Are you letting go, surrendering, hoping that this falling apart will lead to blossoming? I’m going to try to trust, imagining that whatever is happening is what is supposed to happen. Maybe that is true or maybe it’s not, but it is a stance I’m going to try out for a while. The shoot, the stem, the flower, then the seed, all in their own time.

“Slowly blooms the rose within……….”

 

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

Tales of the tribe

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 2, 2013

Our stories tell us who we are, where we’ve been. They let us know what is expected of us and what we can expect. Sondhaim says “Beware the tales you tell, the children are listening. Your tale is your spell. The children are listening.”

 

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

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Flower Communion

by Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
May 26, 2013

We celebrate our annual Flower Communion with stories of hope. We remember Rev. Norbert Capek who began this annual festival in the 1920’s and died at the hands of the Nazi’s.

 

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

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Youth Service

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The Youth of First UU Austin
Audrey Lewis, Max Wethington
May 19, 2013

The Sr. High Youth Group holds its annual youth service and holds a bridging ceremony. Bridging is a rite of passage celebrating the movement of our high school seniors into adulthood.

 

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

 

Mother of all services

by Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
May 12, 2013

We celebrate mothers and their willingness to speak truth to power for the sake of children worldwide.

 

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

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The right thing to do

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 5, 2013

“Right Action” is the next element in our series on Buddhism’s Eightfold Path. We avoid suffering by doing the right things:
1. not harming anyone or anything,
2. not taking what is not given, and
3. not using our sexuality in a destructive way.
Doing these things doesn’t make you “bad,” Buddhism just asks you to notice what brings happiness and what brings suffering.

 

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

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Fiery and Fearless: Olympia Brown

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April, 28, 2013

Fiery and Fearless: Olympia Brown. Rev. Olympia Brown, a suffragist, is seen as the first woman to graduate from theological seminary, and the first woman ordained to full-time professional ministry in the U.S.

 

I have preached a few sermons on Unitarian history. Here is a little slice of Universalist history for you. The Universalists are a Christian denomination of people who believe in the divinity of Jesus (which makes them Trinitarian as opposed to Unitarian) and the love of a God who would not send anyone to hell. This is the story of a woman Olympia Brown, born without a lot of patience, who had lost it all by the end of her life. This is the story of a woman who got a lot done, the story of a person who, like all of us, had good times and hard times. This is a story of a person living her soul. This is the story of one way social justice happens.

The first of four children, Olympia Brown was born in 1835 to Universalist pioneers in Michigan. After beginning her education in a schoolhouse her dad built on the farm, Olympia went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In first year English, the instructor assigned in-class orations and readings, stating “all of the young men will be required to give speeches before the class. “The young women must bring manuscripts to class and read from them.” Many believed women inferior public speakers to men, and unable to recite from memory. Olympia did not argue, but when her turn came the next day, she delivered a rousing oration with her manuscript rolled up in her hand. Olympia and other independent young women caused Antioch continuing consternation. In the mid-1850s the Amelia Bloomer dress came into fashion, a sort of pants-skirt combination, comfortable, practical, and scandalous, as it only reached halfway down the calf. Apparently a woman’s ankles had the power to cause great excitement! Bloomers let the young women move freely, so they could run and climb stairs quickly. Olympia always wore her Bloomer dresses as a student, and ignored the ridicule she received from the many outraged Yellow Springs students.

Physical education was not available for Antioch women in Olympia’s day, and she and her friends took long walks for exercise. When the college president found out that young Antioch women were seen in nearby towns laughing, running, and talking noisily, he sent to Boston for a professional chaperone. No such person had been hired to watch the men, so Olympia and her friends expressed their displeasure by teasing the poor woman relentlessly — in German. The chaperone lasted a week.

She and other students invited Antoinette Brown to come speak. Antoinette Brown was a Congregational minister who had gone to Oberlin. “It was the first time I had heard a woman preach,” Olympia said in her autobiography, “and the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as though the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand.” She decided she wanted to be a minister, and finally found one seminary that would admit her. It was a hugely radical thing to do on the part of the seminary.

It was not the Meadville Theological School in Pennsylvania, which on June 16, 1861, sent this response to her application: After apologizing for having kept her waiting for a reply, a Mr. Stearns wrote: “were it my private concern, I should say at once ‘come!’ I have no prejudice against a woman’s studying anything she can or against a woman’s speaking in public. From what I’ve heard of you, I’d be glad to have you for a pupil and more like you. But I have no right to commit the Institution to a new course of action.” I heard that a lot too, as a young seminary graduate, interviewing with search committees. “We have no personal sense that women shouldn’t be ministers,” they would say, “it’s just that my congregation would have difficulties. They’re not quite ready…”

Finally Olympia received a letter from Ebenezer Fisher, president of the Canton Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University advising her to study Greek there and board with a private family. He confirms September 25, 1861 as the beginning of her study. This was one of only three theological seminaries in the Unites States that would admit women students. At the end of the letter he adds: ” It is perhaps proper that I should say you may have some prejudices to encounter in the institution from students and also in the community here. Nothing very mighty or serious, I trust…The faculty will receive and treat you precisely as they would any other student. My own judgment is that it is not expedient for women to become preachers, but I consider it purely a question of experience and not at all of right–the right I cannot question. The other matter of expedience or duty I cannot decide for you. I am willing to leave it between you and the Great Head of the Church. (For the few of you who may be confused by that, he was talking about God, not the President of their denomination!) If you feel He has called you to preach the everlasting Gospel, you shall receive from me no hindrance but rather every aid in my power.” (June 21, 1861) Quite amazing, actually, for a man of that day. I head much the same thing from fellow students at Princeton Seminary. They would say “I’m so concerned about your feeling that you have a call to the ministry. Can you tell me what the story of that is? Can you tell me why you feel you would be a good minister?” In other words, “justify yourself.” Women students were asked to justify their presence daily. Some of the male students were there (and this is no fault of theirs) because they weren’t sure what else to do, or because someone had said “You have such a nice voice, you should apply to seminary. Here, let me help you fill out the application.” I’m sure there are places where men have to justify their existence every day too. It makes you tough. You have to be determined. Olympia Brown was determined.

No woman at the time, most books say, was ordained by more than one local church. No woman was ordained with the full authority of a whole denomination, which is what Olympia Brown wanted. She thought this would be a step in women’s access to authority and roles in decision making. When the Northern Association of Universalists were in session, she successfully presented her case for ordination.

When she was ordained in June 1863, Dr. Fisher, who had had such doubts about her coming to St. Lawrence, participated in the ceremony. He participated in the ceremony. That makes him a hero in my book. Rev. Olympia Brown later paid tribute to Dr. Fisher, saying: “This was the first time that the Universalists or indeed any denomination had formally ordained any woman as a preacher. They took that stand, a remarkable one for the day, which shows the courage of these men.”

The way it works is that the ones without power have to push and push and be told they are rude. They have to put up with folks acting like they are crazy or thoughtless or disloyal for pushing for change. Again, this isn’t the fault of individuals as much as it’s the way culture is. When you are Ôout of line,” when you are calling for justice, you all know that first they ignore you. When that doesn’t work and you become a little more powerful, they begin to ridicule you. Next, when you have more people gathered to your side, they begin to fight you. When you prevail, they say they were with you the whole time. In fact, it was their idea. Someone on the inside has to have the courage to stand up, to stand with those asking for justice if justice is to be done. You have to have help from the inside.

The Presbyterians did not ordain women untill 1955, the Episcopalians in 1973. The Roman Catholics, not yet. The denomination I grew up in, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church? Not yet.

1864 she was called to her first full-time parish ministry in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts. At this time Olympia Brown became active in the women’s rights movement, working with Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and other leaders. She and the people in that first church loved one another. It was not so with her next parish, a Universalist congregation in Bridgeport, CT. More about that in a moment, but first, her husband.

While still in Weymouth, she’d met John Henry Willis, a member of her congregation’s Board of Trustees, and they married in 1873. She “thought that with a husband so entirely in sympathy with my work, marriage could not interfere, but rather assist. And so it proved, for I could have married no better man. He shared in all my undertakings.” As did Lucy Stone, Olympia Brown kept her maiden name, with Willis’s agreement. It was a most felicitous marriage. When her husband died, unexpectedly in 1893, she wrote: “Endless sorrow has fallen upon my heart. He was one of the truest and best men that ever lived, firm in his religious convictions, loyal to every right principle, strictly honest and upright in his life,….with an absolute sincerity of character such as I have never seen in any other person.”

Her ministry at the Bridgeport church seemed to have been one fraught with peril from the start. It was a struggling church, the only kind then open to having a woman minister. There is a letter written to her that first year begging her not to leave, as this parishioner felt the church is just starting to prosper under her guidance. He regretted the difficulties she had encountered in the past year, but was optimistic about a brighter future and noted that, “with one exception, all are satisfied with your course.”

That one was a Mr. James Staples, “a bitter agitator,” who stepped up his pecking away at her ministry “like a raucous crow.” When she took a leave of absence for the birth of her first child, ministers were brought in to preach who would say to anyone who would listen, “What you need here is a good man.” Despite the efforts of her many supporters in the church, including PT Barnum, she was able to stay there only six or seven years, before he ran her off and split the church. Churches suffer when the raucous crow doesn’t get shut down by members craving the health of the church. She had lots of support, even powerful help, but apparently James Staples was allowed to continue pecking away at her. I wonder if anyone in that church said to him “You are not just hurting our minister and her family, you are hurting the church when you do that.” Perhaps they did and he kept on. Perhaps this was the reason it was a struggling church when she got there. It was split and weakened when she left. She was strong and mighty, and she endured for seven years.

She and her husband moved to Racine, WI, where he published a newspaper and ran his own printing business. Olympia was pastor of the Good Shepherd Universalist Church in Racine, WI. It was a disheartened church, apathetic and broke. She was asked to come turn it around. Under her leadership they perked up somewhat, and it was a happy time for the family. Both of their children became teachers: Henry Parker Willis was professor of banking at Columbia University and key in writing the Federal Reserve Act, and Gwendolyn Willis taught classics at Bryn Mawr.

At the age of 52, immersed in the fight to enfranchise women in WI, she left the full time ministry Women could vote there on matters pertaining to the schools. Olympia and her fellow suffragists were of the opinion that every vote eventually had something to do with the schools. They won the fight, but two months later the new law was overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Gwendolyn Willis describes her mother as “indomitable and uncompromising, traits that do not lend themselves well to politics and leadership. She cared little for society, paid no deference to wealth, represented an unfashionable church, and promoted a cause (woman suffrage) regarded as certain to be unsuccessful. She was troublesome because she asked people to do things, to work, contribute money, go to meetings, think and declare themselves openly as favoring a principle or public measure.” (Olympia Brown: The Battle for Equality, Charlotte Cote, Mother Courage Press, 1988, p. 171) Thank goodness we have some folks like that here too!

No longer having the patience for a state-by-state campaign, Olympia joined the militant “Woman’s Party.” I belonged to this party before I was born,” she declared. At the age of 82, in 1917, she was one of 1,000 women who marched in freezing rain and strong winds, picketing the White House to make known to President Woodrow Wilson their demands for a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. Many of the marchers chained themselves to the fence in front of the White House when the police came to break up the demonstration. June 1920, when she was 85, she marched to demonstrate at the Republican Convention in Chicago.

Later that year women were granted the right to vote. Of all the pioneers, Susan B Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Olympia Brown was the only one who lived long enough to cast a vote in a Presidential election.

Asked to preach, near the end of her life, at her former church in Racine, she testified to the importance in her life of Universalism, “the faith in which we have lived, for which we have worked, and which has bound us together as a church. . . . Dear Friends, stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideal, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for the noble duty and made the world beautiful for you.”

After the suffrage victory, Brown dedicated herself to promoting world peace and became one of the original members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She died in 1926 at the age of 91. In the Universalist Church of Washington DC, a plaque honoring her reads:

Olympia Brown
Preacher of Universalism
Pioneer and Champion of Women’s Citizenship Rights
Forerunner of the New Era
THE FLAME OF HER SPIRIT STILL BURNS TODAY.

May it burn within each of us, when we feel a call, when something needs to be done. May our sense of a loving God sustain us, or our faith in the strength of justice and truth uphold us, may we honor those among us who have the fire. We need them.

 

Watch the streaming video of this sermon on First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin’s Facebook page.

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 Gaia Psalms

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 21, 2013

Earth Day Service / The Gaia Psalms. A meditative celebration of the creatures of the earth and our relationship with one another.

 

The Gaia Psalms are nine pieces written as part of a special Unitarian Universalist Earth Day Service. The concept of this work is to create an interactive multimedia worship experience that is both moving and simple. This work is in the Gebrauchsmusik (Utility Music) tradition. All the music is written with the beginning or amateur musician in mind. Visual artists have created four altars to the four directions and elements. The children and some youth and adults have made masks of different birds, fish and animals, and there are responsive readings in which the congregation participates. A tree planting on the grounds of the church completes the experience. The pieces were also meant to be spoken over. The minimalist, meditative quality is intended to create a spiritual connection in the listener and move the listener to both celebrate and reconnect as a member of the Earth’s community.

“Gaia” (Guy-ah) or “Gaea” most commonly refers to Gaia (of Greek mythology), the primal Greek goddess of the earth. We chose the title, “The Gaia Psalms,” because psalms are songs of praise and engaged lamentation. This work comes out of NASA scientist James Lovelock’s “Gaia Hypothesis,” which states that the Earth can be thought of as a self-preserving, living organism. The work also strives to remove the duality between science and spirituality. Christian monk Thomas Berry said, “You scientists have this stupendous story of the universe. It breaks outside all previous cosmologies. But so long as you persist in understanding it solely from a quantitative mode you fail to appreciate its significance. You fail to hear its music. That’s what the spiritual traditions can provide. Tell the story, but tell it with a feel for its music.”

Electronic music by Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse.

Gaia Psalm: Prelude (Water) – This piece retells the creation story and celebrates the Gospel Of Change.
Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse

Gaia Psalm: You know and I Know
Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse

Gaia Psalm: (Fire) The force of life courses through all beings. It is one of the many myseries how we can be so diverse and yet have so much in common.
Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse

Gaia Psalm: One (many) – The psalm speaks to the individual’s struggle to feel connected and the overshelming mystery of the human experience.
Words and music by Kiya Heartwood

Choir (Many, Many, Many, One)

Gaia Psalm: Flight – Our relationships help us rise and they carry us through our lives.
Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Kiya Heartwood and Meg Barnhouse

Gaia Psalm: Seeds – We are all connected and no one can say how much is contained in one seed or one child.
Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse

 

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

Lies, gossip and fighting words

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 14, 2013

The third element of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism is “Right Speech.” What does “right speech” entail?

 

Right Speech

Today is the third part of the series I started last spring on the 8-fold path of Buddhism. Every week before I preach about something, the whole week of my life previous to the sermon feels like a lesson about that thing. “Right Speech” is the topic for this week, and for the past four days I haven’t been able to talk at all. Enforced silence is hard on me, but at least I didn’t do anything in the past four days that the Buddha said not to do.

Right Speech entails: “Abstaining from lying, abstaining from divisive speech, abstaining from abusive speech, abstaining from idle chatter.”

Usually I tell the truth. Except when I’m being nice to someone about the kind of music they like. Then I have been known to tell a truth that was a lie. One time when I used to work with Pat Jobe for our friend Charlie, I was on the phone with a nice fellow who was going on and on about bluegrass music. I can sing about four bluegrass songs, but if it’s on the radio I can listen to maybe one song before I have to change the station. Pat overheard me saying to the guy, “yeah, I have a special feeling in my heart for bluegrass music.” He started slapping his desk, laughing. He knew what that meant.

When we lie, we damage the bond between people. If you lie people don’t know who you are. If they don’t know who you are they can’t relate to you truly, openly. Lying makes us all sick, the one who lies, and the one who is lied to. We live in a culture of speech. All around us is talking. We read emails and ads and we watch TV and we talk to one another. Almost all ads are lies; almost all TV is lies of one sort or another. To say you will do something and then not follow through is a lie. I’m guilty of that one. Doing what you say you will do makes more happiness and less suffering. To find someone who speaks the truth to us is a treasure. To be a person who speaks the truth will make you a treasure.

Let me say something here. Buddhist teacher Eric Kolvig points out that the Buddha didn’t say “if you lie, you’re a bad person.” Buddhism is not a path of morality, of good and bad. It is a path of noticing, becoming aware. Instead of “good” and “bad,” there is “harmful, increasing the suffering in the world,” and “not harmful,” increasing peace in the world.”

Everyone wants to be happy. Almost everyone. The eight-fold path: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration, is the way to freedom from suffering, to peace of mind and happiness. If you notice yourself lying, don’t beat yourself up, don’t wallow in the delicious drama of being a bad person, just notice and gently wonder “What would this situation be like if I were to speak more truthfully?” Wondering is so much more effective than trying.

Abstaining from “divisive speech” is the next element of right speech. What is that? It’s anything that drives a wedge between us. If I gossip about her (over there) to you (over there) even if it’s true, then you know something about her that she doesn’t know you know, and you have to not let her know that you know it. If the connection between the two of you is like a road, it becomes difficult to travel a road with that big a boulder sitting in the middle of it. In one of the books I read this week, Rabbi Stephen Wylen says we shouldn’t say things that lower another in the estimation of one with whom you are speaking, unless you are giving a factual warning about someone to prevent harm or loss, and you do that with doubt, like “I don’t know if this person has changed, but he was abusive to his last wife, so you may want to keep your guard up for a while if you go out with him.”

It could be that just talking about someone who isn’t there can be divisive. The Buddhist teachers I read all talked about becoming mindful of talking about an absent third party. Not that it’s always harmful, but it often is, so it’s an interesting exercise to become aware of doing it.

The Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein tells of his experience with this practice: “For several months I decided not to speak about any third person; I would not speak to somebody about somebody else. No gossip. Ninety percent of my speech was eliminated. Before I did that, I had no idea that I had spent so much time and energy engaged in that kind of talking. It is not that my speech had been particularly malicious, but for the most part it had been useless.

“I found it tremendously interesting to watch the impact this experiment had on my mind. As I stopped speaking in this way I found that one way or another a lot of my speech had been a judgment about somebody else. By stopping such speech for a while, my mind became less judgmental, not only of others, but also of myself, and it was a great relief.” building.

The third element in the Buddha’s teaching about right speech is that we refrain from abusive speech. Even when driving? It makes us sick to heap abuse on other people, and it’s likely that we talk to ourselves that same way. That makes us sick for sure. So many hear abusive speech as children, and it sticks in your heart and begins to shout at you in your own voice. When people speak to you abusively, it tells you much more about them than it does about you. They are hurting, they are poisoned, and they can’t even see you clearly, much less speak to you in a way that is about you.

Sometimes we are tempted to tell the truth in a way that is abusive – just to let someone have it. Even when what we’re saying is true, if we using the truth as a weapon against someone, it can do harm. Hard truths should be said in love. Gently. With respect. With the willingness for the hard truths about yourself to be told as well.

In this congregation’s Relational Covenant, we agree to “speak with honesty, respect and compassion.” It’s an important balancing act to have compassion both for the person about whom you are talking and also the person to whom you are talking. In the South, the rule is that you can say nearly any mean thing you want to about someone as long as you say “bless her heart” afterward. I don’t know if you all know this rule or not, but it can be helpful. “He is so homely, bless his heart.”

“That whole family has trouble with the truth, bless their hearts. And they’re bad to drink.” I’m not sure the Buddha would recognize that as mitigating something tawdry you just said, though.

The last element of Right Speech, according to the Buddha’s teaching is abstaining from “Idle chatter.” I read a story about a man who decided he wouldn’t speak if it weren’t necessary, and he was silent for the next thirteen years. That made me mad. How do you decide what’s necessary? Telling your partner you love them every day at least once is necessary, in my opinion. It’s not a situation where you can say “Honey, I told you I love you when we got together and I’ll let you know if anything changes.” Asking someone how their day was is relationship strengthening. Is it necessary? Maybe that silent man wasn’t in any relationship. Maybe he didn’t even have a dog, or a friend. The wiccan teacher Starhawk, however, writes that talking about third parties is community. It’s okay in her book to tell stories about other people, as long as they are true and not harmful. It’s not useless speech to hear interesting stories about mountains someone else has climbed, solutions they have found to parenting dilemas, colorful ways they met partners, decorated homes, started businesses, got jobs, etc. How do you decide what’s “idle chatter?” Humph. Well, I know it when I hear it.

The Talmud says God spoke to the tongue and said “all the other parts of the body I have made standing up, but you I have made lying down, and I have built walls around you.” The word is powerful. It can create and it can destroy. Choose to create. Your inner wisdom will guide you.

 

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Will you harbor me?

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 7, 2013

Immigration is an issue that is getting a lot of attention in the public arena. What are some of the elements to consider? How does our stance relate to First UU’s goal of being an intentionally hospitable church?

 

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Only life and death

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 31, 2013

There are dying and rising gods all over human history. What might the resurrection be about?

This morning Christians in this congregation and around the world are celebrating Easter, the day of the resurrection of Jesus, when in the Christian faith story, he became not only Rabbi Jesus the teacher, but Christ, the savior of humanity. Often, joining with our Christian brothers and sisters, I preach from a Christian perspective on Easter. This year we are going to look together at the story of Ishtar. The holiday was probably named, not after her, but after a Germanic version of her named Eostra, goddess of the dawn and new beginnings. Her name is similar in many cultures. Astarte, Ashtaroth… these were traveling and trading cultures, and it is likely their stories would have traveled with them. There is even a moon goddess in pre-Columbian culture around what is now Guatemala named Ix Chel, whose consort is a rabbit. They share a similar story: a voluntary descent into death and darkness, of having everything stripped from you, then emerging transformed.

This faith story comes from the ancient lands of Sumer and Babylon, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, modern day Iraq. This five thousand year old story begins as Ishtar is born from the full moon as it touched the river. The first full moon after the spring equinox, that moon we saw in the sky this week, became known as “Ishtar’s egg.” As the poem about her descent into death begins, she bends her ear toward the underworld. The word in Sumerian for “ear” and for “wisdom” is the same, so you could say she was puzzling about the underworld where her sister, Ereshkigal lived. There was a funeral going on there she wanted to attend. Getting ready, she puts on seven things: a dress, earrings, a breastplate, a necklace, a belt, or girdle around her waist, bracelets on her wrists and ankles, and a crown. She leaves her consort, the shepherd king Dumuzi, or Tamuz, and their two sons. She leaves her temples where people worship her, and she arrives at the outer gates of the Underworld. There she announces herself as “Queen of Heaven, on my way to the East.” The chief gatekeeper of the underworld is skeptical and questions her. She replies that she wishes to descend because of her older sister, Ereshkigal, and to witness the funeral rites of Ereshkigal’s husband.

The gate is opened a crack, and the attendant asks her to take off her crown. When she asks why, he answers: “Quiet, Ishtar, the ways of the Underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.” At the second gate the earrings are removed from her ears, at the third gate the necklace from her neck, at the fourth gate the ornaments from her breast, at the fifth gate the girdle from her waist, at the sixth gate the bracelets from her hands and feet, and at the seventh gate the covering cloak of her body. Ishtar protests as each symbol of her power is taken from her, but the guardian says this is the experience of all who enter the domain of death. When her sister sees her she is enraged, and she turns on Ishtar the “eyes of death,” inflicting on her diseases, judging her harshly, insulting her and accusing her. On a meat hook in her sister’s chambers, her corpse hangs like rotten meat. Three days she is down there. Her faithful hand servant, a warrior woman and advisor, charges two small animals with going after her disguised as flies, the lowest form of life. “You will hear the bitter queen of the underworld lamenting, moaning in pain as if she were giving birth. Moan with her and she will favor you. She will want to give you a gift – ask for Ishtar’s corpse. Sprinkle the body with this food and water of life, and she will come alive again and return with you.” They did as she asked, and Ishtar, alive again, was allowed to return with them to the land of the living. Attached to her, though, were two demons, who demanded that she send back a replacement for herself in the underworld. Returning to her palace she found Dumuzi /Tammuz the shepherd ruling, not having missed her. Suddenly she sees the perfect one to give to the demons. His sister, desperate to help him, offers herself, and they each end up spending six months in turn in the world of the dead.

Ishtar and Tammuz are among the many another dying and rising gods, along with Osiris, Dyonisius, Krishna, many of whom were conceived by a virgin, born in a cave, threatened with death when they were babies, and adored as having saved the world with their suffering. Ishtar’s worshippers in the land between the rivers would rise early on the day of the full moon after the equinox and greet the sunrise. Then the families would go hunt eggs, Ishtar’s eggs. They told the children these eggs came from the rabbit in the moon.

I’m not giving you this information to say “Oh, those silly people who believe this literally….” I’m telling you that the archetype, the pattern of dying and rising is engraved deeply in the human psyche. We don’t only see it in nature, in the lives of our bodies. We see it over and over in the course of our living. This story is of hitting bottom, of having the things that matter to you stripped away one by one. Many people in this room have had times like that in their lives, where everything was taken, where they were attacked by their dark inner sister, accused, destroyed, immobilized. There are heroes and sheroes among us: the people who have done the descent. They have hit bottom. They are not afraid of losing everything, because it has already happened. Maybe they have lost all their money, had their children taken from them, maybe they have lost their sanity. Marianne Williamson, renowned spiritual teacher, says a nervous breakdown is a highly underrated way to achieve enlightenment.

The Easter story is the story of losing everything. You are sick in your body or your spirit. Hope seems absurd. Part of you has died. You’re in the dark. Suddenly someone sends a tiny thing down there to help. Does it help by cheerleading and telling you everything’s going to be okay? No. It helps by joining in the moaning of your bitter and angry side. Then a little food and water sprinkled on the dead meat might make it begin to stir. You have been in the tomb and now you emerge. Is it just a human dynamic? Is it just about grass and corn? Is it about the earth or about the earth and more? A liberal Christian humor magazine called The Door offers a liberal Easter hymn. The words say “Jesus Christ is risen today, alleluiah…” in the title they have crossed out Easter and written ‘pretty yellow flower day.” In the verse, they cross out is, and write “may or may not have,” so it reads “Jesus Christ may or may not have risen today.”

I suddenly wanted to title this sermon “Your mama’s a pretty yellow flower.” How can they scorn a flower when it goes through the same things Ishtar did. The same things any dying and rising god does. It has to abandon its beauty, first losing its petals one by one, then its stem turning to slime, it seeds buried in the cold cold ground for a time, the water there tormenting it until it bursts open, then struggling back to the surface, through the dark, being tiny and vulnerable until it grows into its beauty again. That’s a rough journey. Our babies today have had a journey through darkness as well, closed up inside, then going on a harrowing journey to break in to the light. And we will all go back to the earth when our time has run.

As faith stories these proclaim that the Divine One is willing to descend, to empty herself of her power and suffer with us, that as she emerges she conquers the power of death, teaching us that there are pathways from here to there, and the great round continues to be danced. Behold the mystery: All that dies shall be reborn. May it be so in our lives.

 

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