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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 24, 2013
This is a service with special music, drama and a sermon speaking about our common ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve. The First UU Adult Choir performs music by Kiya Heartwood.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 17, 2013
Sometimes you are halfway to a good answer when you finally formulate your question in a helpful way. What are some ways to come up with better questions?
SERMON: GOOD QUESTION
Great teachers are always asking questions. They know that if you give people the answer before they even ask the question, it’s a waste of breath. Socrates is famous for asking questions, so were the Jewish rabbis, so were Jesus and Buddha. This morning, picture me giving you a brightly wrapped box. As you open the box, out spill a pile of smaller presents. Those are my gifts to you this morning: some of the best questions I know. A good question can open your mind; a good question can make you think things you never thought before.
In my work as a therapist for the last twenty years, I can say therapy is certainly a question-driven process, from “How can I feel better?” to “What should I do now?” to “Why does watching movies with monkeys in them make me nuts?”
Sermon writing, much of the time, is a question-driven process. Often the sermon explores a question one of us has. Also, one of the ways I write a story or a sermon is to picture myself in the congregation or in the audience and ask “what would I want to hear about this subject if I were you?”
I had a religion professor at Duke who was in love with questions when my friends and I in the campus Christian organization were in love with answers. He had his work cut out for him. We kept trying to give answers to the ethical dilemmas he posed. He would shake his head impatiently and say we were going to the answer part too fast. I wasn’t used to getting C’s. That’s what I got on his midterm when I answered his question, which was something like “Talk about the meaning of life” by talking about my understanding of the meaning of life. I was frustrated, angry, confused. I thought “Fine, I’ll show him!” The final exam was, I think, “what is the meaning of death?” I answered with all questions. I mean, every sentence was a question. I got an A. I also learned something: I learned how much fun it was to ask question after question, and how one question led to another, and another.
If you have the right question, you are more than halfway to a good answer. If you are asking the wrong question, then you will get stuck. Lots of people come to couples counseling at first asking the wrong question. “How am I being controlled?” “What can I do to change you?” “What is wrong with you?” “What are my rights here?”
Better questions for couples are: “What part of my anger is anger at myself?” “How can I understand you better? How can I help you feel heard and understood? How can we both feel safer with one another?” Other good therapeutic questions can be: “What is your problem doing for you?” “What scary changes might occur if things got better?
When we do a child dedication in my church, I ask the parents “What is your job description for this child? So many of us grow up not knowing what is required of us. The default setting for this is “we just have to be perfect, then we will get our parent’s blessing.’ When you ask parents what they want for their kids, most of the time they will say “I just want them to be happy — you know — have a happy life.” It’s strange, then, that their kids have this sense that they have to be perfect. Anyway, it’s good for both sides for the parents to ask themselves that question. “What do we really want from this child?”
Asking questions is the thing to do when you are in disagreement with someone. Not like “What’s WRONG with you?” But “Tell me more about what you think about this. ” ” What led to you feeling like this?” Try to understand what they are saying before you try to make yourself understood.
If you are feeling attacked or misunderstood, a good thing to do is be quiet for a minute, breathe, and ask this question: “What are you doing?”
I was a chaplain in training at Walter Reed Army Hospital. My trainer was a wild man who asked great questions. If you answered him with “I don’t know,” he would look at you for a second or two and ask “Okay. And if you DID know, what would it be?”
Sometimes the gift of a good question can trick that inner mule you’ve got. Of course, you may not have one. it might just be me….
Another teacher, years later, asked me if I could figure out a system for doing laundry or something. “Oh, I don’t figure out routines very well,” I said. She looked at me somewhat sharply and said,” So — if someone paid you 1,000 dollars to figure that out, how might you do it?” WOW, that made it clear immediately!
What question are you dying for someone to ask you? Is there one? I would like to close with of my favorite questions: Think about a problem with which you are struggling in your life.
THE MIRACLE QUESTION
If you woke up and your problem had disappeared, how would you know a miracle had happened?
How would you behave differently? (be as precise as possible)
How would your family and friends behave differently?
How would they know a miracle had happened?
How would they see the differences in your behavior?
Are there parts of the miracle that are already happening in your life?
How did these things happen?
Can you get more of them to happen ?
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
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Marisol Caballero
March 10, 2013
We are living in an extraordinary time and many of us will see significant social progress within our own lifetime… struggles for justice have not been easily won. Join us as we look back in order to move forward.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 3, 2013
The second element in Buddhism’s Eightfold Path is “Right Intention.” Your intention is the lodestar by which you steer your life. What is that, given your understanding of life, you intend to do and be?
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Rev. Stefan Jonasson
February 24, 2013
Rev. Jonasson is a Unitarian Universalist minister, historian, and the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Director for Large Congregations.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 17, 2013
What is fundamentalism? Why is its world view compelling? What is destructive about it? How do you let go, not only of the content of its thinking, but of the structure of its thinking?
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 10, 2013
“A Juicy Slice of UU History: Theodore Parker,” “The arc of the Universe bends toward justice,” he said. Parker was a Unitarian minister, a tireless and militant abolitionist, and a proponent of women’s rights.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 3, 2013
When you think of God as female, how does that change thoughts and feelings about God? When you think of God as a huntress, what kind of stories does that evoke? How would people, animals and the planet be affected by this picture of God?
The highest wisdom of the world tells us that there is no accurate or complete way to talk about God, however you define or think about the concept of God. “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao,” says Lao Tse. If you can describe the Mystery, you know you haven’t grasped it. This does not prevent there being many things to say about the One, the Mystery, the Force. In many cultures, even though the wise mystics at the top of the mountain of most faith traditions assure everyone that It is One, people describe Its facets as if they were separate gods. There is the king of all gods, but then again there is the king’s mother. There is the thunder god, the goddess who dwells by the sacred springs of water that come up through the earth to green the land and sustain the creatures. There is the god of creation and destruction, the goddess of love, the god of the rivers, the goddess of the crossroads, in whose cauldron all eventually go to die and emerge transformed. Some would call these spirits, others still call them gods, you might call them archetypes.
What I want to ask you to consider this morning is how a culture’s way of speaking about the Divine might shape its behavior, its sense of itself, its governance and the paradigms within which it understands humans and animals relationship with one another and with the Divinity, what is important, what is expected.
The view of God most people in the US have grown up with is a male god. He is spoken about in many metaphors in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: God of the mountains, El Shaddai, which might also mean “the breasted one.” He is the whirlwind, the warrior, the mother hen (I have heard preachers on the radio say “God is like a hen taking his chicks under his wings. I’m guessing that guy didn’t grow up on a farm.) The images most often used in our culture, though, are God the king, God the judge, and Jesus (God) the kind shepherd.
If your god is a king of everything, and he exists outside of you, your relationship to him is as a subject or as a rebel. Those are your main choices. Your concern is for what might please him. To displease the king brings bad luck and trouble. You must keep the king happy with you and yours. I’ve noticed, though, that the god who lives outside you also lives inside you. This seems to occur whether your relationship with this God you picture is as a believer, or if you are a faithful non-believer in this image of God. If this god lives in you as a part of you, you feel called always to be in control, and if people and events don’t go your way, you rain down consequences . Your question is “Am I pleased? Is everyone doing what I want them to do? If not, am I grieved? What am I going to do about it?”
If your god is a judge, and he exists outside of you, your primary relationship is as the one being judged. Your concern must be for the laws, and how to keep them in a way that makes the judgment come out in your favor. You can argue and you can appeal, you can have reasons and excuses, but you are always being evaluated. If this god is part of you, then you might always be evaluating, always judging “is this good or bad, right or wrong.”
If you think about god as a shepherd, your primary relationship to him is as part of his flock. You follow him. You don’t go off on your own or he comes to gently bring you back to the herd. His job is to fight off the bad things, and your job is to stay close by. You’re either a good lamb or a lost lamb. Those are your choices. He doesn’t need your help.
Our poet with the yellow beret bought one of the auction items in the fall, the one that enabled him to invite me to preach about a particular topic of his choosing. He chose “God the Huntress.”
I remember in seminary being introduced to feminist theology. The feminine face of God. I was steeped in Protestant culture, so my first thoughts were along the lines of : How do you imagine the king and the judge as female? Would she rule more compassionately? No one who knows history would say yes to that. Would she understand women better? Probably. My classmates and I spent time re-imagining God, having discussions about how different it felt to have the king and judge more womanly, even motherly. Thoughts about God the Mother varied with our individual experiences of our own mothers. She seemed more understanding to some, less powerful to others. Then thealogian (spelled this way to indicate the femaleness of god) Mary Daly, a wild and brilliant woman from Boston University, challenged us all. “A female god is not just Yahweh in drag,” she wrote. She was far ahead of us in lifting ourselves out of the paradigms in which we had been raised.
What if your god is a huntress? In order to be a good hunter you have to be comfortable in the wild. You have to be able to be quiet, alone, you are able to immerse yourself in the mind of the thing you are hunting. You have to be able to lose yourself, to wait, to be quick. You must be peaceful with taking life, with getting bloody.
The huntress we know the best is Diana, also called Artemis. She was one of the most important goddesses in the Mediterranean world. The Christian scriptures describe a riot in the city of Ephesus when a crowd gathered around the Apostle Paul as he was preaching and shouted him down for two hours “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”
Her mother Leto was a consort of Zeus, so Zeus’s wife hated her. When it came time for her to deliver her twins, Hera hounded her across the globe, and there was no place on the land or sea for her to rest from her labor pains. Finally, a swampy and unstable mix of land and sea firmed up in order to allow her to give birth. Swans surrounded her. Artemis was born first, painlessly, it is said. She helped her mother deliver her twin brother Apollo, whose birth, by contrast, took nine days and nights. She was the moon, and Apollo the sun. Artemis/Diana is portrayed as a young woman, a virgin. What that meant in the ancient world was that she belonged to herself. The woods were sacred to her, and you disturbed her trees at your peril. In some places, in ancient times, it was in her woods that the contest between the current king and his challenger was held. Her voice, her power decided who would rule. The animals were sacred to her, especially the deer. Some stories have her traveling with a pack of dogs, and some with a pack of maidens. Diana does not say yes when she means no. She is not sweet. She is not accommodating. She is fierce about her body’s unassailability. When she caught a young man watching her bathe one afternoon, the faith story says that she turned him into a stag and confused his pack of dogs so that they tore him to pieces before he could go brag to his mates about having seen her naked.
If your god is a huntress, and she is outside of you, you are her helper or her prey, or she is your protector. What is she hunting? If it’s food, she’s showing you a way to feed your family, a way to take a life without displeasing her. If she is hunting you, she’s waiting for you patiently, she knows your mind, she sees you clearly, and she will take you completely. If she is hunting truth, she will track it inexorably. She glimpses it in all its forms, and she draws in its scent until that is all she is aware of. If she is within you, as I imagine all the gods you attend to are, she is that part of you that belongs to yourself, that is inviolate, the part of you that protects you, the part that can hide and wait and listen to the leaves rustle as what you seek moves ahead of you. She is a still point inside you, saying yes when she means yes and no when she means no.
We are in the Unitarian Universalist tradition here, and our forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a person will worship something.” Whatever it is that guides you, whatever it is you steer by, that shapes you. To some degree you have a choice in the way you picture God, or the Divine, or the spirits or the Mystery. You choose what to believe and how, and it’s okay to try on different ideas. If Diana is the one you choose to explore, happy hunting!
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 27, 2013
The Eightfold Path. Buddhism teaches that there is a way to overcome suffering by coming to an understanding of the way the world is, and by living in a certain way. There is no requirement that you believe in it, they say, you just try it to see if it works.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the classic Buddhist movie “The Matrix.” In it, Keanu Reeves plays a young computer hacker who wakes up to the reality of the Matrix, a vast virtual reality grid that feeds off of human energy. Humans are kept asleep in embryonic eggs while a virtual life is played in their brain. The first message he gets from the deeper reality is: “Wake up Neo!” In the movie, once Neo woke up to the fact that the reality of the Matrix was an illusion, he grew capable of grasping that the bullets coming at him weren’t real, and he was able to move around among them. He was able to move around in the pseudo reality of the Matrix, aware of it as an illusion, more and more aware of the deeper reality.
This is the first of eight sermons, over the upcoming months, on the eightfold path of Buddhism. The Eightfold Path is not like eight steps, or little boxes you check off one by one as you accomplish them. It is a path of eight elements interwoven, braided together, having to do with understanding, practice and behavior that Buddhism says will take you on a journey away from suffering and toward freedom. The first component of the path is “Right Understanding.” “Getting it” is the first and continuing job of the person on this path. You get “wake up, Neo” messages. You catch a glimpse of the truth of how things work. You have a glimmer of a sense that many people create their own suffering, that disquietude lurks at the corners of most lives, that grief, hope, fear, hunger for security or pleasure or acceptance drive people to do what they do and that satisfaction is elusive. A deeper reality crooks its finger at you and whispers in Laurence Fishburn’s voice: “Wake up. There must be satisfaction somewhere, let’s go look for it. ”
One of the things I find most relaxing about Buddhism is that it doesn’t ask you to take any of this on faith. It asks you to try it out and see if it works for you. Buddhism asks you to start with your experience. Most people’s attention is squandered on the anxiety, all the worry, and the fear in their lives. What will happen to us? Am I doing this right? Will people have a good time at my party? Will I get well again? Will I end up a bag lady? I have one friend who is haunted by the picture of people milling around at his funeral shaking their heads and saying “It’s a shame he never made much of himself.” Moment after moment, for most people, is filled with hope that things will go well and fear that things won’t. That life is a rollercoaster. In the words of the poet John Prine “Some times you’re up, some times you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown.”
Things happen to you, then you make stories about the things that happen: that they shouldn’t be happening, that they are a punishment for something you did, that your life is unfair, that you are unlucky and unblessed. Buddhism says all of these thoughts about what happens, all of the rollercoaster emotion caused by hoping and fearing makes you suffer. There is a way to end the suffering. In your life, you will have pain, but you don’t have to make yourself extra suffering over the pain. The eightfold path, with its eight elements, is the way to train yourself morally, mentally and emotionally, to be free from suffering from the thoughts you have about what happens. Here are the eight elements: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
Right understanding, the first strand of the Eightfold Path, “getting it, ” involves seeing how things are. You understand that you suffer because you have attachments to how things should go. You crave, you cling, you hope, you fear. You have hopes that an interview will go well. You are anxious about it. You worry afterward about whether they liked you. If you get the job you worry about doing it well. If you don’t get the job you wonder why they didn’t like you. You have ideas about how it should go. You have interpretations of how it went, ideas from your interpretations, and you suffer over those.
Someone you love is drinking or using again. You worry about how bad it’s going to get. You feel the feelings from when it was at its worst. You interpret your friend’s using as his not loving you, because if he loved you he would want things to be good for you, and things aren’t good for you when he is using. It feels as though he is doing it to you.
In your thoughts is a way you wish things would go. You have fears about how things could be. All of these things, hopes and fears, cause you suffering. When you are anxious about these things you miss a lot of your life: seeing your other friends, you can barely hear what people are saying to you, you don’t enjoy your food, sleep, sex, beauty, things seem garbled and dim. You are suffering. How could that stop?
Wake up. “Get it” that if you calm and focus your mind you can see reality more clearly. “Get it” that what happens happens. There are certain things you can do to make the interview go well, and you do them. Or not. Then it happens. You get the job. Or not. You can interpret it any way you want to. They didn’t like you? Maybe. Maybe they had someone else who was a better fit. Maybe this is not your job, maybe yours is coming. If the job wouldn’t have been a good fit for you, you would have been miserable in it. Is that what you wanted? At times I tell people they need to be unattached to outcomes. You need to do what you do and leave what happens then to the Spirit or the Universe. Usually they respond with “So you want me not to care?” What do you say to that? If caring means you suffer and your suffering adds no good to the situation, do you want to keep doing that? Can you care in a way that holds the outcome lightly? Can you care in a way that understands that your loved ones have to find their own way, make their mistakes, feel your support but not your direction.
Buddhist practice is the foundation of this possibility. Meditation, spending time in quiet with your breathing allows you to see more clearly, gives you spaces between your moments in which to understand what part of this is pain that exists and what part is suffering you are bringing on yourself and can stop if you practice. Some spiritual paths attempt to give meaning to suffering – this one says it can be avoided, eventually, with practice and understanding. Wisdom will be cultivated and ignorance will be shed like an outgrown snake skin.
In meditation we have the chance of seeing the story we are telling ourselves about our life. You can notice the thoughts you are having about what is happening in your life. There are a hundred different stories, and seeing your story is part of getting it. Another part of Right Understanding, of waking up, is understanding the law of Karma. Its literal name is “right view of the ownership of action” The Buddhist teachers say: “Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs.” The Buddhist scriptures, like the Christian scriptures, talk about results of actions as “fruits.” “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If our lives are like a river, it’s as if we are all living downstream from our actions, and the dirty or clean water that runs because of those actions catches us later. Good actions are morally commendable, helpful to the growth of the spirit, and productive of benefits for yourself and others. Unwholesome actions, to use a more Buddhist word than “bad,” ripen into suffering.
Getting it means that you see that suffering occurs from craving, desire and attachment, that the way to end suffering is to end craving and attachment, that the way to end craving is to attend to the eightfold path of right wisdom and right behavior. To own your actions, your part in any situation, to let go of blaming and clean up what you are putting into the water upstream from where you live.
I have a friend who tells the story of her mother-in-law, Carolyn, at the drive-through window at the bank. The teller had sent out a pen for her to use in filling out her deposit slip. She had dropped the pen, which had fallen underneath the seat of the car. Carolyn could reach the pen, she could get her fingers around it, but she couldn’t pull her hand out with the pen in it. Finally they made a present to her of the pen so she would go on. We are caught like that with our grasping, unable to be free. What is the pen under your seat? What is keeping you from moving? Do you need to let it go? Do you need to drive to a safe place in the parking lot of the bank, get out of the car, move the seat, and get the pen? Either way, you get unstuck, and unstuck is where we want to be.
Podcasts of sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
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Marisol Caballero
January 20, 2013
Evangelical minister Rob Bell, in his book, “Love Wins,” articulates the concept of God’s unconditional love, and he has been widely condemned for it by the evangelical community. Join us as we explore Universalism’s history and delve into why this idea still causes such an uproar.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 13, 2013
What does forgiveness entail? Does one have to “forgive and forget?” How do we forgive ourselves? Another sermon having to do with our Covenant of Healthy Relations.
Forgiveness makes you strong. A spiritual practice is something you do over and over whether you feel like it or not, in order to have access to your inner wisdom when you need it, in order to be able to keep a heart of compassion, in order to keep your perspective when the going gets rough, in order to be unshakeable. Well, at least, if not unshakeable, a bit sturdier. Bitterness makes us brittle. Cynicism takes our hope. Ruminating on the wrongs done to us, or on the wrongs we have done, steals away our joy in life. A spiritual practice can help us let go of that kind of ruminating. The meditation we just said together is one such practice, and it can help with forgiveness.
Forgiveness is related to both emotional and physical healing. This week I read a study by Alex H. S. Harris and Carl E. Thoresen called: “Forgiveness, Unforgiveness,Health, and Disease” done in 2005 at the Center for Health Care Evaluation, which is part of the US Dept of Veteran’s Affairs. They concluded that hostile rumination was a chronic stressor with negative effects on health. It led to chronic hyperaroused stress response, which, to put it unscientifically, just wears a person out.
Feeling that you have been wronged is not good for you. You need either to talk about it until you can do something about it or let it go and move on. Holding on to impotent anger makes us cramped and closed. “Impotent anger ” is anger that is not doing anything for you, anger that has no fruitful power. Anger’s purpose is to move you out of hurtful situations, protect you from hurtful people, energize you to do what you can to make things better for yourself. Almost any time you are angry, one question that can move you forward is this one: “How much of this anger is anger at myself?”
Forgiveness is difficult because when we are wronged, we stiffen into righteousness. Righteousness is the root of much wicked behavior. We feel that, because we have been hurt, we have carte blanche to hurt other people. We can speak in destructive ways, we can lay waste about us with the sword of our tongue. We feel that, because we are right, we can be brutal.
Forgiveness is also difficult because, as I’ve said before, being righteously wronged can be a semi enjoyable state. We have a picture in our mind of how the one who wronged us should apologize. We imagine conversations where we articulately explain our P.O.V. and the ones who wronged us slap their heads in enlightenment, in realization. We exercise our arguments toward that imagined conversation. We polish our grudges, we repeat them to ourselves; we can drop into the groove of recrimination and resentment at a moments notice, we can do it in our sleep. We lull ourselves with the recitation. The resentment can become part of who we are. Part of our personality’s clothing, our identity. Forgiveness is especially difficult when it is ourselves we need to forgive. We can get addicted to the guilt and pain of going over and over our transgression or our mistake. We hold ourselves to a higher standard than the one we use for others. Other people can forget things, be hurtful, lie or cheat or make a terrible mistake, but not us. It’s hard to accept that we are human and prone to error. If we’re just regular human beings, then how will we be in control of the world? We might rather think of ourselves as bad and still in control than to acknowledge that we’re just regular folks.
Forgiving requires a willingness to look at the harm being done to you by not beginning to forgive. If you don’t forgive yourself, you may not allow yourself to have a good life, which affects the people who love you. And it makes you insufferable when you’re in the “I’m a terrible person” place, because they have to live their lives and spend time reassuring you that you are all right, which equates to dragging you along like a heavy suitcase with a broken wheel. Being a righteous victim does you harm because you have a stiffening righteousness. It does you harm in that you are stuck. You are also stuck to the person at whom you are angry, or to the bad mistake you made. You cannot go anywhere without dragging them along with you. It does you harm in that you feel that other people might hurt you the same way. You become braced. Ready to be hurt, to be left, to be abandoned, to be betrayed. You don’t have to look at yourself, if you are a victim of mean parents or two timing lovers, or if you are just a tragically bad person. You get to be the right about them, about yourself.. Being right is a big part of not wanting to forgive. You can be right, absolutely, and still be hurt by harboring anger against yourself or the person who hurt you.
Jungian analyst, author and teacher Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes: “Forgiveness seems unrealistic because we think of it as a one-time act that had to be completed in one sitting. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. It is not all or nothing, if you can do a 95% forgiveness, you are a saint. 75% is wonderful. 60% is fine. Keep working./playing with it. The important things are to BEGIN and to CONTINUE. There is a healer inside who will help you if you get out of the way. For some, temperamentally, this is easy. For some it is harder. You are not a saint if it’s easy, not a bad person if it’s not. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.” Forgiveness also does NOT mean to overlook something, to pretend the thing didn’t happen. Estes talks about the stages of forgiveness.
1. TO FOREGO: to leave it alone. Take a break from thinking about it for awhile Get your strength back.
2. TO FORBEAR: Containment. Don’t act Keep your self-protective vigilance. Have patience. Practice generosity. Ask what would happen if there were grace in this situation?
3. TO FORGET: Refuse to dwell on it, Consciously release it. Some people are wary of this step, and make definitions of forgetting for themselves that include bearing the wrong in mind. At the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, they say forgive, but never forget, because if you forget it could happen again. Only you can be the judge of whether the wrong that was done to you is something you can afford to forget. If not, ask yourself how you can bear it in mind without it continually poisoning you.
4. TO FORGIVE: Regard the other individual indulgently. Give compassionate aid to that person. You don’t think about the incident any more. You have nothing to say about it.
The metta meditation we use is directly related to this. The first step in forgiving is to direct compassion and love toward yourself. Say: May I be free from danger. May I be physically happy May I be mentally happy May I have ease of well-being. Do that for three weeks, then say it about someone you like, about a neutral person, THEN about the one who wronged you. If you can’t, go back to sending lovingkindness to yourself. You don’t have to forgive all at once. Today, maybe, just think about being ready to begin.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 6, 2013
It is good to begin the new year by clearing out old regrets and resentments. We toss those things into the fire and get a fresh start.
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Andrew Young
December 30, 2012
Welcome to First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. Whether this is your first time or you’ve been coming all your life, we welcome you.
My name is Andrew Young. I have been a member of this church for five and a half years and for two and a half of those years I have been the Youth Programming Coordinator, which means that I am in charge of our middle school and high school youth programs. Although I am still in this role, I am entering into a new role as well. This Sunday marks the end of my first semester at Starr King School for the Ministry where I am pursuing a Master of Divinity degree in preparation for ordination as Unitarian Universalist minister.
Today’s service is a part of my final project for a class aptly named “History of UU Religious Practices” in which we’ve studied how our liturgy has evolved since the Puritans arrived in North America. The word liturgy refers to the rituals of the church, especially the structure and format of the Sunday service since that is the primary ritual of our church. As such, this service diverges somewhat from our normal Sunday service in both format and content and I apologize in advance for any confusion this might cause.
The elements of today’s service and the selection of its hymns are rooted in our Unitarian and Universalist traditions. The hymns are from a hymnal published in 1955 that was used by both the Unitarians and the Universalists before the two denominations merged. Our responsive reading is taken from a Unitarian hymnal published in 1907.
It is sometimes said that the work of religion is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. Today’s service is sure to do both. We will deal with topics that may be uncomfortable for some of you due to your past experiences, and my intent is not to make light of or invalidate your feelings on these topics. We each bring our own experiences to the conversation and all I ask is that you keep an open mind and reflect on how each element of the service today affects you. Pay special attention to the words and phrases which trigger strong emotions for you, either positive or negative.
Now, as we begin our sacred time together, please join me in reading the words for lighting our chalice which are printed in your order of service.
Love is the doctrine of this church,
The quest of truth is its sacrament,
And service is its prayer
To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve human need,
To the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine —
Thus do we covenant with each other and with God.
Invocation / Prayer
Please join me in an attitude of prayer.
La Eternulo estas mia paŝtisto; mi mankon ne havos.
Sur verdaj herbejoj Li ripozigas min, Apud trankvilaj akvoj Li kondukas min.
Li kvietigas mian animon; Li kondukas min laŭ vojo de la vero, pro Sia nomo.
Eĉ kiam mi iros tra valo de densa mallumo, Mi ne timos malbonon, ĉar Vi estas kun mi; Via bastono kaj apogiĝilo trankviligos min.
Vi kovras por mi tablon antaŭ miaj malamikoj; Vi ŝmiris per oleo mian kapon, mia pokalo estas plenigita.
Nur bono kaj favoro sekvos min en la daŭro de mia tuta vivo; Kaj mi restos en la domo de la Eternulo eterne.
Language is powerful. And yet, language is arbitrary. The words we use have no inherent meaning, only the meaning that we give to them. And yet, the words we use are still powerful because of that meaning. Dr. Zamenhof knew this well. In the 1880s he invented a language now called Esperanto, which you have just heard a sample of. Dr. Zamenhof grew up in a community that spoke four different languages, each with its own cultural heritage, and he saw how the differences in language created walls between members of the community. This was why he invented a language that didn’t belong to any single country or culture. He hoped that this language, with its lack of cultural and linguistic baggage, could help bring people together by lifting up their commonalities and rejoicing in their differences.
How does language affect the way you see the world? This is what I would like you to meditate on for the next few minutes whether you sit quietly or come to the window to light a candle. Take a moment to reflect on how you react differently to the Esperanto verse and its English equivalent.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Amen
Sermon
Like many members of our faith, I am a relatively recent convert to Unitarian Universalism. I was raised in a non-religious home, the son of freethinking parents who were the product of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. As a child I attended Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Mormon, Pagan, and Jewish services with friends and extended family, but I was always only an observer and never a believer because I couldn’t subscribe to the central ideas of these groups. I didn’t believe in magic or in a God that would condemn so many of my friends to eternal damnation despite how much good they did in the world. After high school I discovered Buddhism and I embraced its teachings because they didn’t require me to believe in a deity or in superstition. By the time I found the UU church I considered myself a staunch atheist and skeptic. When I say that I was an atheist, I mean literally an a-theist, that is one who does not believe in God. This is subtly but importantly different from one who believes there is not a God. I had no proof one way or the other, and I knew for sure that I didn’t believe in the God of the Christian fundamentalists.
When I began attending here I didn’t realize was how much negative baggage I had attached over the years to many of the words associated with the church. Words like God, divinity, ministry, faith, spirituality, salvation, and grace made me bristle, and in the UU church I found a place where I could be in ethical and moral community with others without the need to use such terms. I remember that soon after joining the church a friend of mine was explaining his Pagan religious beliefs to me. He told me that he used to be an atheist, but he had realized that there was more to life than that. He felt that there was something that connected all of us together, and he had found an expression of this belief in Paganism. I remember that at the time I thought his beliefs were silly and superstitious and I was glad that I had found a church that was more enlightened. His use of divine language, such as god, goddess, and even ritual, had built up a wall between us. If you asked me then if I believed in God, my immediate answer without hesitation would have been “no”. Not only that, I thought that discussing the idea of a god or goddess was silly superstition. What I didn’t know was that my own journey of faith was only just beginning and I was yet to learn the underlying theology and history of Unitarian Universalism.
You see, Unitarian Universalism is a faith with deep theological roots. We can trace our direct lineage to the colonial era when English dissenters journeyed to America in search of religious freedom. The church of England considered them heretics because they believed in ideas such as universal salvation – the belief that all people will be saved – and unitarianism – the idea that Jesus was not God, only a man. And even though the dissenters were a product of the enlightenment, the ideas they supported were much older, almost as old as the Christian church itself. For the majority of our history the members of our denomination have considered themselves Christians and have been at home with the language of divinity. However, for the last hundred years our vocabulary has shifted to the language of philosophy and morality. This shift began, to some degree, in the early 19th century with the transcendentalists and their focus on the inherent goodness of both people and nature. It continued in the late 19th century with the translation of the great religious texts of the world into English. But it didn’t really pick up speed until the late 1940s with the introduction of the Unitarian fellowship movement.
At the time the American Unitarian Association was trying to find ways to increase growth. They found that there were some people who were interested in Unitarianism who weren’t comfortable in a traditional church, so they began to sponsor Unitarian fellowships as alternatives to churches. Fellowships could be started with as few as 10 members and without any ordained clergy. They could also meet in people’s homes or in rented space. To increase the likelihood of their success, the American Unitarian Association targeted largely white communities which also had universities in them. Add to this the popularity of humanism among this particular demographic sparked in part by the release of the Humanist Manifesto in the 1930s and the result was a boom in small groups which were lay led, often highly educated, and largely humanist in nature. Hymnals written at the time began to include readings and hymns which lacked the traditional language of divinity. Over time these fellowships became larger and either merged with existing churches or became churches themselves. This led to a large increase in humanism in the Unitarian church as a whole as well as a steady decline in the use of religious language. So complete was the removal of religious language from the denomination that our statement of principles and purposes, often pointed to when someone asks what we believe in as Unitarian Universalists, contains no divine language at all, except for the word “covenant”.
This is why, when I joined the church, I felt so at home, so comfortable with the language used here. However, things changed as I began to apply what I was learning in church to the rest of my life. As I attempted to truly live my UU principles each day I noticed two interesting side effects. The first one was that I was less and less defensive when other people used divine language in my presence. My understanding of words such as “God”, “ministry”, and “faith” began to change and take on new meanings, thanks in part to a large number of younger UUs who were adopting this language as their own. I came to think of God as the best hopes and dreams in all of us and when others would speak about God, I realized they were speaking about the same basic ideas. This led directly to the second side effect: Other people began to comment on what a good Christian I was. The first time this happened it took me completely by surprise. For a split second I was insulted, but very quickly I recognized the comment for what it was: not a slur, but a compliment on how I lived my life. I came to realize that there was an entire group of Christians, really the silent majority, who cared more about doing good in the world and following the teachings of Jesus than about commandments, sin, and hell. I also realized that many devoutly religious people were speaking of God not as a literal man in the sky – like the one on the order of service today – but as a metaphor for that something greater that connects us all. My ability to tolerate the use of God language had changed my entire outlook not only on Christianity, but also on religion as a whole. The walls which I had built up began to be broken down.
What I came to realize is that I had been doing the same thing that the religious fundamentalists had been doing. I had been taking words such as “God” and “faith” and putting them into little boxes of meaning instead of letting their meanings expand to meet me where I was in my personal journey. I thought that “God” had to mean a physical being, and that “prayer” meant talking directly to that physical being. I thought that “faith” meant blind trust of what you’ve been taught and that “salvation” meant that you would go to heaven after you die. I’m sure that if I asked a group of UUs about these words, many of them would have similar reactions. Many of us have attached the baggage of our previous religious experiences to these words. We hear the word “sin” and we think of angry signs at a protest. We hear the word “ministry” and we think of groups giving bibles to villagers in other countries. But to many these words mean much more.
As a religious educator and a parent I have seen another side of this issue as well. Many UUs want to spare our children from the negative effects that words such as “sin” had on us when we were their age. We want to shield our children from closed minded zealots who spew hate and intolerance in the name of religion. But in doing so, we often rob our children of the power that comes from having a language to describe that which is so difficult to describe in our lives. If we taught our children that “God” refers to the great mystery of life or if we taught them that “grace” refers to those gifts that we receive simply by being alive, then they would be equipped with those words when events in their lives moved them to use language which embodied the awe and wonder of life more directly than our everyday speech does. Instead we have given that power to the fundamentalists by making sure that their definitions of these words are the only ones that our children will ever learn.
I’m not trying to influence you one way or the other about your personal belief in God. Instead, my goal is to make you think about why the word itself is so problematic for Unitarian Universalists. I think that one of the reasons is that many times when we are asked “Do you believe in God?” we are expected to give a yes-or-no answer to a very complicated question. I think another reason is that many of the popular concepts of God are so simplistic and confined that we resist forcing the indescribable spiritual intuitions of our minds and hearts into such a simple and narrow description. The real question is not “what do you believe?” but “In what do you have faith?” When all seems lost and darkness is everywhere, to what do you pray for salvation from the darkness? If you put your hopes out to the universe, then perhaps the universe is God. If you rely on the inherent goodness of all people, then perhaps that is God.
I knew that my understanding of God, and especially of the word God, had changed significantly when I was asked by a high school youth if I believed in God and I was able to honestly answer “yes”. Although I don’t believe in a personal God whom I am able to interact with, I do believe in a wonderfully complex universe and in the spark of the divine in every living thing. To me, this is God. My belief in God hasn’t really changed since I became a UU, but my participation in this church has helped me define it as something more than “I don’t believe in the God they believe in.” I still consider myself a rational skeptic who doesn’t believe in superstition, but what has changed is my relationship with the word God. Instead of shrinking away from it I embrace it as my own. And I am beginning to see the fruits of my labor.
This year my 9 year old daughter began attending Redeemer Lutheran School, a local private school that is a part of Redeemer Lutheran Church. When we first started looking at private schools for my daughter I was concerned because many of them are very conservative. We chose Redeemer because of its rigorous academic program, but it came with some possible drawbacks. Two of these are the weekly chapels and bible verse memorizations, but the more serious one is that the church which runs the school is a member of the Missouri Synod. For those of you who have never heard of them, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is the fundamentalist branch of Lutheranism in the US. It is balanced out by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Whereas the ELCA ordains gay clergy, the Missouri Synod doesn’t even ordain women. They hold to the fundamentalist stance of strict biblical inerrancy. I’m sure you can imagine why this concerned me.
When we interviewed the principal we were assured that they taught evolution and that they were tolerant of other faiths at the school. The principal told us that a Muslim girl had even been student body president a few years ago. When we spoke to my daughter’s teacher he told us that they had an atheist student the year before and enjoyed having conversations with him about religion, so we signed my daughter up and hoped for the best. All of my fears were swept away on the very first day of school. The kids all put together bags with objects in them which represented who they were. The idea was for the kids to try and guess which bag belonged to which child based solely on the things in the bag. Among the things my daughter placed in her bag was a chalice. When they made posters that told other students about their interests and hobbies, my daughter wrote “I’m a Unitarian Universalist” as the very first thing on the poster.
So far our experiences have been very positive. Even though I’ve attended every chapel service to make sure I can explain to my daughter any theological bits that I disagree with, so far I haven’t needed to. She is so completely grounded in her faith and so at home with words like God and prayer and salvation that she has instead often come to me to tell me how she disagreed with the sermon topic before I even had a chance to bring it up on my own. We often discuss how we as Unitarian Universalists can apply the teachings of Jesus to our daily lives while maintaining our own beliefs about God and the spark of the divine within all people. She even asked her prayer leader at school to pray for me when I was traveling on a business trip, not because she believes in a personal God who answers our prayers, but because she wanted to express her desire that I come home safely.
So what is the point of all of this? My sermon is titled “Is There a Place for God in Unitarian Universalism?” I believe that the answer to this question is yes, there is a place for God. There is at least a place for the word “God” regardless of what your personal beliefs are regarding the existence or non-existence of one or more particular deities. We need to bring the religious language of our predecessors back into our daily experiences and embrace that language. It isn’t the words themselves that we have a problem with, it is the meaning that others have assigned to them. If we take back these words we will regain a descriptive vocabulary which we desperately need in these trying times. My challenge to you today is to reevaluate your relationship with the language of divinity. I realize that many of you have been hurt by religious zealots using these words to spew hate, but I ask that you try your best to embrace these words and to make them meaningful in your daily lives. Doing so will rob those same zealots of the power that these words have given them.
Benediction
I will leave you today with a quote from the book, Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language.
“God is the voice or impulse calling us toward goodness, beauty, creativity, love, justice, growth. God is a mysterious impulse available to us, a too-often unheeded voice within me and you and all of life. This god calls and invites, prompts and lures, but it is up to us whether to respond. We are a part of an interconnected web of life in which each affects all. There is a sacred spark, a spiritual energy and power, in each of us. It matters what we do with our lives. The great, ultimately unnameable mystery of life is a call to goodness and love. As we choose love, decide for love, stand on the side of love, we are part of the growing god in the universe.”
I implore you to find ways to embrace religious language in your daily lives and to teach your families and others about your faith by using the language of divinity. Words only have meaning because we give them meaning. If we don’t give these words a deeper and broader meaning, if we aren’t comfortable using them to describe our faith, then they will always be used to rail against us and the walls between us and those of other faiths will continue to stand.
Go now in peace until we meet again. Amen.
Podcasts of sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 23, 2012
We will have merry holiday celebrations this year. We had a wonderful pageant last Sunday, and afterwards we had a feast. Tomorrow night we will have our traditional Lessons and Carols service with candlelight and Silent Night. This morning we are going to talk about another reality of this season: the blues. This is a hard time for some among us. Maybe you are one of those. The whole world is celebrating, and you are terrified because you can’t make the house payment, or you have had to let your insurance lapse. People are glowing in green and gold and you have lost someone close to you this year. This is the first Christmas without them. You are feeling the loss keenly.
Maybe you are alone in the world. Your family is gone, or they are toxic to you, and the world is papered in snapshots of families eating together, laughing and watching movies and going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house. You feel like a motherless child.
You might look around you and see people who look like they have plenty of money, lots of friends, a good love life, radiant health and all their thoughts in order. You are comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, and that is a no-win situation. It’s hard to keep that in mind, though, as you feel tendrils of shame invading your spirit.
We are having a Blue Christmas service this morning to give ourselves a place to recognize this element of the holidays together. The shadow side of all the good cheer can get to us, and it can make confusion and heartbreak more keenly felt. If your marriage is in trouble, or if you or your parents or kids are going through a divorce, the “empty chair syndrome” can make everyone miserable. Everything is different this year. It’s harder, it’s easier, but it’s different. If you are in any of these hard situations, you’re probably having a hard year this year. Your feelings are reasonable and appropriate. You can’t stick the grief and confusion into a little closet for the duration of the season. It’s good to have a time when you can feel its weight and sorrow. Perhaps that will make room for some of the more joyous feelings too. It’s not all or nothing. How do we take care of ourselves and those we love when the season is a hard one?
They say “lower your expectations,” but I don’t like that. It sounds like we’re going to have something that’s not as good. I would say “lighten your expectations.” Having a house that’s decorated to the nines, saddling your family with debt so everyone can have what they think they want, cooking until you are grumpy, snapping at your family members because you are so stressed by giving them the Christmas they want — well, it’s not a “higher” realm in my book.
This is the celebration of the return of the light. Light means love and truth. Those things make room for sorrow.
Look for little things to enjoy. Before the house is decorated, before the presents are bought and wrapped and sent, it’s okay to breathe in the air of a day like today. Just breathe in and breathe out. Wear brown if you want to. Yellow. Watch people do the good cheer rituals as if you were an anthropologist studying the customs of a strange tribe. Look how they totter on ladders to put the icicle lights on their houses. Look how they run from one store to the next buying plastic things. Look how they make mountains of food to eat with people they ordinarily don’t get along with that well. Before you get too smugly above it all, though, remember that you may be doing exactly what they are doing in another year and that it will feel just right.
Instead of carols, listen to the music that speaks to your soul. Hang out with friends. Let yourself be sad that you are going through a hard time this year. Let your friends be happy. It takes a spiritual discipline sometimes, a maturity, to be glad for other people’s good lives. You can smile at them and in the spirit of truth, say “I’m so glad things are going well for you and your family.” Or you could take a sarcastic tone and say “I’m glad things are going well for you and your family,” and then they would have to take care of you for a few minutes, but that’s not quite as mature.
Notice your habits of attention. Are you making yourself worse by focusing on the contrast between your inner state and the one everyone else looks to be in? Are you like someone who has a sore tooth and keeps moving it with their tongue just to make sure it still is hurting? Gently shift your focus to something else. I’m not saying cover up your blues. I’m just reminding you they are not all there is to you.
Sometimes just acknowledging that this is a hard time of year can help. When you make room for the truth of what you are dealing with, the clamps come off of your heart and movement can occur.
More practically, or maybe I should say more biologically, if you are feeling depressed and sad you should lay off alcohol and recreational drugs. They cause depression to get worse. Exercise and eat well. Nutrasweet has been shown to lower your serotonin levels. That is a body chemical that helps with a feeling of well-being. Try to surround yourself with people who are good for you. Don’t force yourself to be around the awful people this year.
Usually your instincts will kick in and your spirit will try to make itself well again.
One friend, the year her husband died, was so mad about Christmas and all the expected good cheer that she painted the front door of her house yellow. Then she went shopping for the worst looking tree she could find. Finally she found one – a scrawny white number flocked with diseased-looking fake snow. She found some khaki colored balls to hang on it and stuck it on a table in the living room. Her intention had been to sneer at it every time she walked past, but she found herself feeling kind of sorry for it. Then affectionate toward it. They bonded, my friend and that ugly tree. It looked like she felt, and they were companions in sorrow.
If you are not the sad one, but if it is someone you love, here are some things to do. Keep in mind that this is a hard time for them. Listen with compassion if they want to talk. YOU DON”T HAVE TO FIX IT. Don’t try to cheer them up, to change their inner weather. You don’t have to be sad just because they are sad. It’s fair to be happy next to someone who is not. It’s not fair to demand that they be happy too. That’s all. Let’s be easy with one another at this time of year. Let’s be grateful that we have hearts that are big enough to feel loss, to feel complicated combinations of happy and sad, cheery and mad. A friend of mine was telling his mentor that he was getting a divorce. The old man is very hard of hearing, so my friend had to shout several times “I’m — getting – a – divorce!” Finally his mentor, a man with ninety years of living behind him, held his hands up in the air, and with a gentle smile and merry eyes, said “Life.”
Thank you for coming here this morning as we all move through life together. Merry Christmas, or —whatever.
Podcasts of sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse and Marisol Caballero
December 16, 2012
The Christmas Story. Costumes are laid out for our children to choose what role to play in the pageant.
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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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