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

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

Call to Worship

“People Have The Power”
Patti Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 14, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What kinds of love are there? What makes love good? How do you know if you love someone? How can we get better at love?

Years ago I worked in an office with Pat, a friend and co-author. Pat talked about love all the time. He preached in a country church and got complaints from the members about how all he talked about was love. “Love, love, love,” one of the elders would say, frustrated and derisive. “That’s all you talk about.” The mailman, Perry, would come every afternoon. A tall bald man with a mustache and skin the color of coffee, Perry would wave as he came in with the mail. “Hey, Perry!” we’d say. On his way out, he’d give a little salute. Pat would call out, “WE LOVE YOU, PERRY!” I’d see Perry through the glass door, smiling and shaking his head a little.

Whenever Pat would tell me he loved me, I would say “Yeah, yeah. You love everybody. What does that even mean?” He’d say it meant that he felt positive feelings about someone, that he wished the best for them, that he wanted the light to shine on that person, that he’d keep their secrets, unless telling them would get a laugh in public.

I thought love was something to be handed out with care. Somewhere I’d gotten the idea that love meant putting someone else’s needs above your own. I had two small boys I’d have given my life for, some animals I’d loved wholeheartedly, a few best friends. I loved Pat, but if it were him or me, it’d have to be him. You know what I mean?

Thinking about this again has been one of the ripples made by a little book called The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The Japanese author talks about her things as if they were alive. You don’t want to tie your socks in a knot in the drawer, she says. They have worked hard for you, bearing your weight, living between your feet and your shoes. After you wash them, put them tenderly in the drawer to rest, in a way that’s not stressful for them. I was charmed by this, although I thought it would be exhausting to go around thanking things as if they were alive. Then I realized I didn’t know why this would be exhausting, so I thought I’d experiment for a few days. The first thing I bowed to and thanked was the coffee pot after pouring my mug of espresso. Next was the pink tulips on the kitchen table. I thanked my socks, but I decided they liked being knotted up in the drawer all cozy and undemanding.

As it turns out, thanking things was not a zero-sum activity. The more thankful I was the more thankfulness I felt. I thought about Pat, and about the people who say the more love you give, the more you have to give. That works unless you believe love means you have to put other people ahead of yourself if you love them. I realized I don’t believe that any more. I don’t even know where that belief came from. Not from the Bible, which is poetic and very sensible about love. The most famous passage about love is I Corinthians 13. “Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.” Loving like that would take toughness and commitment, and I can’t go to “enduring whatever comes,” having worked with battered women for years in South Carolina. The rest of it is something you can really work with when trying to figure out what love is, and if you love someone right, and if they love you right.

I think that idea of putting others ahead of yourself comes from a medieval idea of “courtly love,” which is an idealized love, a noble love that has very little to do with having a relationship with the object of your love so much as it has to do with performing services for the beloved. You love them in a romantic and idealized way, you shine your love on them like a beam, and they consent to receive it.

Real love has to do with a day to day negotiation of whose needs take precedence at which time. Your well being is affected by theirs, so it is mutually beneficial for both people to be doing as well as possible.

Is this true just for partners or is it true between parents and children, friends and other beloveds? We only use the one word, “love,” to describe how we feel about a spouse, a house, a cereal, West Texas, and all kinds of things. As most of you know, the Greeks had four separate words for love. There is unconditional love, agape. This is used in the Christian Scriptures for the love of humans for God, and the love of God for humanity.

Eros is passion, being engulfed by beauty, stunned and lit up by desire. It is mostly, but not only, for lovers. You can feel that way about nature at times, too, art and music, dance. Lit up and carried away. It’s a powerful energy. Philia is affection between equals. Family and friends, the way you love going to the movies or hiking. Storge is also used for family love, but it’s a love out of duty, loving them because what are you going to do, they’re family. It has a strong whiff of just putting up with it.

If I no longer believe that I have a limited amount of love to give, maybe the more I love, the more love I’ll have to give.

And if I were a sweet and earnest minister, I’d end there with a comment about loving the people and things that come my way, and we’d be in a pink hearts and candy mood because this is Valentine’s day, but I can’t do that. Because that’s depressing. You know why? Because it’s not true. And lack of truth is depressing.

Love is hard. I don’t care whether you are loving a friend or a child, a brother or a lover, love is hard. You worry if your love is enough for them. You worry whether you are lovable enough, and are they just fooled into thinking you are? You worry about messing up the relationship or being drained by it. You worry because your loving them doesn’t seem to be enough to make them stop taking the pills or drinking, it’s not enough to keep them always safe.

Having real relationships is about talking in an openhearted way with someone who could break you. Letting go of being mad, or well defended with sarcasm and an ironic remove. It means struggling to understand them before being understood by them. It means doing what you say you’ll do and trusting them to do the same. It means making decisions to leave if a heart connection isn’t possible or if they love drinking more than they love you.

Children are scary. You don’t know what can happen to them. You worry that you’ll break them. What will you do if one of the tigers: addiction, violence, derision, mental illness, physical illness, accident leap out of the forest as they are walking innocently by and snatch them into a place where you can’t reach them?

Some among us feel loved, and some feel unlovable. If our parents or care givers were unwilling or unable to give us love in a way that we could feel it as love, we tell ourselves the story that it must be because we are unlovable. None of us is unlovable.

Love won’t fix everything. You will find that UUs sometimes declare that love will fix people, situations, behaviors. Love is a power and it can do a lot but it can’t fix everything. Some things can’t be fixed. Sometimes we love broken people. It is heartbreaking. Still, we must not protect ourselves from heartbreak by holding ourselves aloof from love. Our hearts, by the end of our lives, should be scarred and full, broken over and over, tenderized.

The Painted Drum
– Louise Erdrich,

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 7, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We all feel anger from time to time. What good does it do? Is it always harmful? How do we handle it when it burns through us?

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Forgiveness

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 24,2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our covenant says when we fall short of that to which we aspire, we should forgive ourselves and each other and move on. What is involved in that? How do we begin to forgive ourselves?

I knew a man who had worked for an asphalt paving company. The owner, he said, would drive any new work truck he’d just bought into the work yard, gather the workers around, take an iron pipe, and hit the side of the truck hard enough to make a dent. “This is a work truck, boys,” he’d say. “Don’t worry about a few dings.”

We want to keep things nice. You make a new friend, you start out in a marriage, you build a new church, and you want it to stay nice. Your new friend tells a secret to someone else. You have a fight with your new spouse. You spill grape juice on the rug in the new sanctuary. Everything is ruined. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Forgiveness is the way into the good part of the relationship, the useful part of the building, the working partnership with the truck. Our relationships are working relationships. Our church is going to be a working church, a useful church. Your marriage is a working truck with dings that remind you of where you might have been more careful, or where you worked out something important.

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen Anthem

Every heart to love will come but like a refugee. We seem to try everything else first. We are driven out of the land of perfection with the people we love, because we can’t be perfect and neither can they. Sometimes we tighten down and attempt to live in the land of control. We are driven from the land of control and we let go and live in the land of despair and cynicism. When finally we flee that land, because it’s dry and inhospitable, we come to love. Or maybe our path is tracked through different lands, the land of need, the land of dependence, the land of rescue, but we finally come to love. Then we leave again, or forget, but we come back, if we’re lucky and wise, over and over to our spirit’s home, which is love. How do we live with the cracks? How do we live with the cracks in our own expectations of ourselves? One of the ways is by the practice of forgiveness.

Forgiveness helps us move forward. You have a piece of ribbon in your hand. Thing of something you need to forgive. Maybe someone wronged you. Maybe you have to forgive yourself for something. Tie a knot in the ribbon to represent this knotty thing which needs forgiving.

How do you do it?

You don’t have to wait for the person who wronged you to apologize. You allow yourself to look at the damage your resentment or hatred is doing or will do to you. Nelson Mandela famously said “Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die.” You forgive because it’s better for you, better for those around you, and better for the planet. What does forgiving mean? It means not dwelling on the wrong that was done to you. It means to tell the story that hurts the least. If the story you are telling yourself about what happened was that this person must despise you, or that they don’t love you, or that they think you’re stupid, tell a less hurtful story, like that they were hurting, or they were careless, or that they were blinded by anger or pain. Tell the story that helps you let go. When you let go of what they did to you, does that mean you forget about it? No. You don’t necessarily forget about it, because that would leave you vulnerable to being hurt and damaged again. You forgive, but you may need to remain aware that they can’t be trusted with a secret, or you can’t let your kids be around them, or you may need to make a boundary with them, for example, you might say you will no longer talk to them about a certain topic, or you won’t talk to them if they have been drinking. You tell the least hurtful, most understanding story, and you draw boundaries. This doesn’t mean what they did was fine. It was hurtful. You are forgiving for you and those you love, so you can move on and not drag this thing along with you.

One of the most striking examples of forgiveness happened last June in Charleston, SC. Families of the nine shooting victims told their stories, expressed their pain to the racist white boy who had pulled the trigger, and then told him they forgave him. At first it made me mad. I pondered why they would choose to forgive? Was it that they were radically following their Christian faith? Was it because Black folk have been so terrorized in the American South that they know if they rose up and poured into the streets, violence would continue to rain down? Who am I to say? They named it as faith and they prevented further violence. Out of respect for them, I take them at their word. The horror followed by such a shining show of grace got the confederate flag taken down. I think they were right to forgive. I would like to think I could do that. They certainly are inspirations and teachers for me.

Jungian teacher Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “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 easy. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.”

What about when you can’t forgive yourself? The story of what you did or didn’t do, the movie of the damage done runs through your mind on a loop. You may start to feel that you don’t deserve to have a good life, people who love you, that you have nothing good to give. One way to get started is to realize that if you can’t be understanding with yourself, you can’t be understanding with others. If you can’t treat yourself fairly and with love, you can’t do that for others.

Acknowledge the wrong you did. Ask forgiveness from the person or people you hurt. Make amends if you can. Then let it go as much as you can. Using the same techniques as with forgiving someone else, when you find yourself dwelling on it, gently put your thoughts on something else. Tell the least hurtful story about it you can, as long as it’s true. Come to the wisdom that there is good and bad in everyone, and just because you did something hurtful doesn’t mean you are a bad person. You are a human person. Getting stuck in something you did wrong is useless and harms you. Ask yourself if your best friend told you they had done that thing, what would you say to them? Be as understanding and loving with yourself as you would be with your best friend. Try to do better.

Resentment prayer. Start to untie the ribbon if you want to. Begin. And continue.

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 10, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“What’s the Difference?” This is the first in a sermon series on differences between one historical, political, or spiritual perspective and another. In this installment, we’ll look at the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam.

This text was created by talk to text, so any spelling incongruities, any sentences which contain ridiculous content are due to the fact that my telephone misunderstood the words I used. In addition to that, these are simply the notes for the sermon, not the sermon itself. Click the play button above to listen.

The sermon itself can be seen on the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin Facebook page. The podcast is also available on iTunes.

Sermon

Muhammad was born in what is now Saudi Arabia, in the town of Mecca, in 570 ce. His father died 6 months before he was born, and then his mother died when he was 6 years old. He lived with family, with an uncle, learning to be a merchant, and grew up as a member of that powerful merchant family. He married, had children, and used to go to the mountains to a cave on a solo retreat once a year. The angel Gabriel began talking to him on those retreats and the things Gabriel said, Mohamed memorized and told to a few people who started following him. The main thing that Gabriel had to say was that there was only one God. This was quite different from the culture surrounding Mohammad, where every rock, tree, and River has a spirit. Animism is the name of that religion. Sometimes people call it polytheism.

The first visit from Gabriel came in the year 610. Muhammad was 40. His followers began writing down the things he would tell them, and that is what became the Quran. After 3 years of quietly speaking to his followers, Muhammad began to preach in the town of Mecca in the year 613. He did not only preach that there was one God. That would have been fine with everyone, I guess. He preached that all the other gods and images of the gods were idols and should be destroyed. People did not receive this sweetly, and his followers began being killed. Muhammad would have been killed too, but he belonged to that prominent family and had privilege that kept him alive. In the year 622, Muhammad took his wife and children and fled to the town of Medina. This is known as the Hegira, and it is celebrated with rituals at the the first day of the Muslim year.

In Medina, Muhammad continued to preach and gained more of a following. Threats against the Muslims continued, but the new religion spread. Its is unclear how much of its spread was due to good ideas and how much was due to the followers of Muhammad behaving somewhat like an army, threatening and the lives of those who did not convert. All of the perspectives, I imagine, describe this process somewhat differently. The people of Mecca, losing prestige as Islam began to grow, launched an attack on Medina in 625, defeating the Muslims. 5 years later, Muhammad returned with an army of 10,000 followers conquering Mecca for good. By the time Muhammad died in 632, Islam had spread through the entire Arabian Peninsula.

Muhammad’s death created a terrible problem, he had not appointed a successor as leader of the Muslim world, which now numbered in tens of thousands of followers. Who was to teach the true meaning of the religion? Who was to hold the authority for the faith? He had been the father of many children, but only one, Fatima, had lived to adulthood.

The largest group of followers thought that the elite of the faith should choose the next leader, or caliph. This is the way the Pope is chosen and Roman Catholicism: the elite vote. This is what the majority envisioned, and they thought the best successor would be the father of one of Muhammad’s wives. This man’s name was Abu Bakr.

The second, smaller group thought that authority should be handed down through the family. They wanted Ali, Fatima’s husband, who was also a cousin of Muhammad’s. The bigger group won, so Abu became the caliph. Ali watched from the sidelines, and his supporters simmered. Abu got sick and died, and before he died he appointed another successor, who was the second caliph. The second one, also conquering more territory, including Persia, ruled for 10 years before he was assassinated by the Persians he had just conquered. Abu has not only appointed his successor, he had appointed his successor’s successor, who then took over as the third caliph, and ruled for 12 years before he was assassinated. So the first three caliphs, Abu and the two successors that he appointed, ruled for the first 25 or so years after the death of Muhammad.

After the assassination of the third caliph everybody agreed that Ali, the original choice of the people who thought it should stay in the family, should be caliph. . He ruled for five years, and everybody was reunited and it felt so good. Ali, the choice of the people who voted to stay in the family, appointed his son Hassan to be the fifth caliph. Unfortunately, he was soon overthrown by another person from the group that saw the elite should decide who ran the place. This split the group for good, and while the majority followed the rebel who had overthrown Hassan, the group that felt that the divine line should run through the family followed Hassan’s son, Hussein. Since they had wanted Ali from the beginning, they counted Ali as their first leader, and they called him an imam, Hassan was their second and hussein was their 3rd imam. The first three choices of the majority group had just been a delay.

The 7th Caliph of the majority group beheaded Hussein, and the minority group started following the son of Hussain. All of this happened in the seventh century, and this is at the root of the split today. The majority group are the Sunnis and the minority group are the Shiites. Both sides of this division are all over the world. The Shiites are running iran, In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was in the Bath party, which is a branch of the Sunni. The people who run Saudi Arabia are a fundamentalist sect of the Sunnis called Wahabi. ISIS is a Sunni group.

It seems to me that the main point of the split is the question of where authority resides Is authority conferred by the vote of the group or is it conferred by God through making the next leader be born to the current leader? This may seem petty but when you are searching for answers to questions like how to pray, how to eat, how to die, what to forgive, but not to forgive, how to keep your society in line, it becomes very important that your answers have the weight of authority. If you don’t believe that your leaders have been chosen the correct way, their decisions do not have that weight and society disintegrates.

This whole story is a lot longer, but I’m going to stop here for a moment and bring the focus to us. The Sunnis and the Shiites are living in a polarized world. Is there any polarisation in our world? The latest studies show that 33% of Democrats would be horrified if their children were to marry Republicans. It is 49% on the Republican side. What is that all about? Why does it sound odd when someone stands in the middle between the Republicans and the Democrats sees sensible policies on both sides? What does it sound strange when are Democratic politicians say that some of their dear friends at work are Republicans, and they are trying to work together? We are used to mocking one another, washing our hands of one another, imagining one another as misguided and foolish, and describing one another that way. We are not beheading each other though, which is good.

Most of us do like a simple framework from which to see the world and understand it. We grab on to one that works for us and we use it as a lens through which to interpret things that happen to us and other people. The lens tells us how the world should be, and how to get from here to there. For some people the way to get from here to there is to stamp out everybody who disagrees with our plan. This is seen by that group of people as a strong stance, unambiguous and pure. Other people think the way to get from here to there is to discuss, to compromise, to explore, maybe two use several different lenses through which to view things. Both ways can be helpful and both ways can be useless.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin has a very famous essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox. He divides human beings into two groups. ( By the way I like people who say there are two kinds of people in the world, this is he divided people that have two kinds of people and those who don’t.) Anyway, Berlin says that there are hedgehogs, who stay in one place, and know one thing very well, and look at the world through that one decision they made, or that one over arching article of faith. For example, everything is about love. Or everything is about sex. Or everything is about power. That is a hedgehog view.. And there’s the Fox who knows many things and draws from many sources. It is not a bad thing to have one overarching truth. It is mainly limiting in that it can make you feel that other people need to get out of your way and let the truth be universally accepted. There are hedgehog people who go through the world understanding that the earth is the most important thing, and working on green issues is the most important thing. Everyone else should drop what they’re doing and work on that. If they don’t they are misguided. Other people say that welcoming the stranger is the most important thing and everything should be about that, or everything should be about getting rid of the racist structures of our society or everything should be about the class struggle. Mother Jones famously was against suffrage for women because she thought it detracted from the class struggle. Many of the women during times of the abolitionists were asked to let go of their work on suffrage because the work on abolition was more urgent.

There are hedgehog people and Fox people in all religions. Even within the Sunni and Shia groups, there are multiple varieties from fundamentalists to mystics to fairly secular folks. The problem is that the people with the guns, the people who are using their knives to behead other people are hedgehog people who think everybody who is not like them should be destroyed. Isis is a Suuni group. Sometimes when they stop a bus full of people they have questions that they ask to tell whether someone is Shiite or Sunni. You can sometimes tell by the names. If someone is named after Hassan or Hussein, it is likely that they are Shiite. Not always, though. Mohammed could be either. You ask them how they pray. Sunnis cross their arms over their bodies and the Shiites keep their arms more extended as they rest their hands on their thighs. You can ask where someone comes from, as there are Shiite regions and Sunni regions, Shiite towns and Sunni towns.

The reason Saudi Arabia supports Isis is that both are Sunni. This is why Iran, which is Shiite in its power structure, is helping the US, its enemy, fight Isis, because isis is Sunni. It’s really a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia that we are naively floundering around in the middle of. Because beheadings. And now our ally, our buddy, Saudi Arabia has just done a bunch of the beheadings of its own, horrifying us, but because they are our ally, we don’t say anything.

This is the start of a sermon series called what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Sunnis and Shiites? Now you know. Where does authority lie for us? Within the individual. It is the ring of truth that tells us what we follow and what we don’t. For Christians of most stripes, it is the Bible. For Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Anglicans and Episcopalians, it is both the Bible and the church. Where the authority lies is not a trivial matter. Getting rid of the impurities, waging war against disagreement, this is not a trivial matter either, and we have trouble with it the same way everyone else does. We liberals have the same lust for certainty, the same intolerance of ambiguity, the same tendency to disrespect those with whom we disagree. Stay humble my friends. As I say often to you, that flush of self righteousness is the precursor to bad behavior. Start many sentences with the words “I could be wrong.”

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

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