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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 20, 2015
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Yule is a holiday that shimmers with elements of different cultures. There has been more interaction among peoples, cultures and religions than we sometimes know.

Call to Worship
From Rainer Maria Rilke

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fire, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!
powers and people,
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.

Meditation reading:
Star Hawk

Hear the words of the Star Goddess,
the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven,
whose body encircles the universe:
“I who am the beauty of the green earth
and the white moon among stars
and the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise
and come unto me.
For I am the soul of nature
that gives life to the universe.
From Me all things proceed
and unto Me they must return.
Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices,
for behold-
all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.
Let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion,
honor and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know Me,
know that your seeking and yearning
will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.
For behold,
I have been with you from the beginning,
and I am that which is attained
at the end of desire.”

Sermon

Good Yule to you all, and Merry Christmas! Along with our sisters, brothers and cousins in all Christian churches around the world, we are getting ready to celebrate the birth of the Baby, the Divine Child, the light of the world. We have all heard the story of this birth. This morning I want to talk about that story as the story of the divine seed in us, the wise baby spoken of in many cultures throughout the world.

In our Unitarian Universalist tradition we try to approach all scripture with respect, and with a broad sense of its possible meanings. One way we can do that is to approach the stories as if they were true in a transcendent way if not necessarily in an historical way. In other words, they tell truths, not about the world of history, but about the world of the soul.

Listen to the story of the birth of the Divine Child Yeshua in Bethlehem. His mother Mary had a visit from an angel who announced that she would give birth to a savior child. When it came time for the birth, the family was visiting Joseph’s home town of Bethlehem so they could pay their taxes. Born before Mary had been with a man, the baby was laid in a manger. Angels and shepherds attended his birth, and some time later three magi came from far off lands to pay tribute to the new king born in Israel. The magi had stopped in at the palace, asking King Herod where the new king was. The wicked King Herod quickly ordered all the males under the age of two in the town killed, so this royal child would not grow up to threaten his power. Warned by an angel to flee the slaughter, Joseph and Mary and their baby went for a time to Egypt, where they were safe.

The story of the Divine Child is repeated in many cultures throughout history. This information should let you know how important this birth story is, what the writers were saying about the baby by including these elements. They were saying he was a god-king, in a code the people of that time would hear and understand.

The Egyptian God Horus was born of the virgin Isis; as an infant, he was visited by three kings.

In Phrygia, Attis was born of the virgin Nama.

A Roman savior Quirinus was born of a virgin.

In Tibet, Indra was born of a virgin. He ascended into heaven after death.

The Greek deity Adonis was born of the virgin Myrrha, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. The Buddha is said to have been born of the virgin Maya, who was impregnated by a white elephant putting its tusk into her side. Those stories are from 500 BCE.

The most striking parallels are between Krishna and Christ (I say Christ because I want you to hear how like “krishna” it sounds, and also because that is how Christians talk about the divine aspect of Jesus, reserving the name “Jesus” for his human aspect.

Yeshua and Krishna were called both a God and the Son of God.

Both were sent from heaven to earth in the form of a man. Both were called Savior, and the second person of the Trinity.

Their mothers were holy virgins, who had similar names: Miriam (Mary) and Maia. His adoptive human father was a carpenter.

A spirit or ghost was their actual father.

Krishna and Jesus were of royal descent.

“Krishna was born while his foster father Nanda was in the city to pay his tax to the king.”

Both were visited at birth by wise men and shepherds, guided by a star.

An angel issued a warning that the local dictator planned to kill the baby and had issued a decree for his assassination.

Both were identified as “the seed of the woman bruising the serpent’s head.”

Jesus was called “the lion of the tribe of Judah.” Krishna was called “the lion of the tribe of Saki.”

Both were considered both human and divine.

I don’t tell you these things to shake anyone’s faith, in fact, many scholars are now cautioning us about making comparisons between religious stories that are too facile. I’m telling you that there are some similarities to lift up that this is a nearly universal human story that tells a truth about the life of the soul. The story of the Jesus, the Divine Child, has all the elements of every divine/human being’s story: Born in a miraculous way, threatened after birth but saved, visited by those who could see his light, a precocious child… the temptation, death and resurrection are part of all the stories too, but that is not what we are talking about here. In fact, what I want to talk about is the Divine Child in each of us. I want to say that maybe we are all divine and human at the same time.

The image of the Divine as a baby is so rich. I invite you to let go of your hold on the Judeo-Christian God you believe in or don’t believe in. Open up to an understanding of the Divine as Love, as Light, as Spirit. When God is a baby, no one has to fear Him. No one has to tremble before His wrath. No one has to wonder what they have done wrong, how they have disappointed Him. The thought of a baby lets you start new, before anyone got a picture of what you are like. Before you got defined and diagnosed. Before you made any mistakes, before there were any misunderstandings.

A baby love, a baby light, a baby spirit carries within itself all that it will become, like an oak within the acorn, like a mighty river that starts as a spring welling out of the earth in a high and quiet place. The light starts as a tiny sliver, something you care for, something you nurture, you are careful with it. You delight in it.

What if this is a story about the soul entering the world of our body? The light of spirit and wisdom, the Divine Seed (to use a traditional Unitarian phrase) being planted in a human being? Most of the founders of our free religion believed that the seed of God, a tiny sliver of the light, was in each of us. Maybe it enters into us when we are in the dark of our mother’s womb.

Do you sometimes have the experience of the Divine seed glowing within you? Does it sometimes come in a midwinter time of life, when it is dark, when it is difficult to see in front of you? When you are in a time of not knowing, uncertainty? In the dark, even the tiniest light is visible.

The Divine seed, the wise baby, is within all of us, containing the whole of divinity in itself, yet needing to grow.

Antoine St. Exupery says: “the seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground.” (“Flight to Arras”) We have the experience of being able to feel the light, however faint, as it shows us the next step to take. When our souls are seeds “haunted by the sun,” we can grow. Is our soul the seed, or is it the light? Both. Do we long for the Divine, or are we Divine ourselves? Both. Do we search for God or is God within us? Both. That is my belief. You, as always, are free to believe about this what makes sense to you.

In times of confusion and doubt, see us able to visit our soul like the magi, the wise magicians, kneel before it with gifts of quiet, respect and love. We can nurture the light, the seed of God within us. We can protect it from the forces of power over, the forces of fear and control. The Herod power, the light-killing, love-killing power of the outer world (and of our inner world as well.) I wish for you all at this time of the rebirth of the light that the light be reborn in you, that love be cradled in your heart, that your spirit be tenderly cherished.

Here is a poem by the 17th century Muslim Sufi poet Hafiz that says what I want to leave you with:

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender even more deeply
To freedom and joy.
We have not come into this exquisite world
To hole ourselves hostage from love.
Run, my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.
Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

Hafiz

1. William Harwood, “Mythology’s last gods: Yahweh and Jesus,” Prometheus Books (1992), Page 257.

2. Rev. Phil Greetham, “3: Where did our Magi come from?”

3. “Mithra,” Barbara G. Walker, “The Woman’s encyclopedia of myths and secrets,” Harper & Row, (1996), Pages 663 to 665.

4. Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, “The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?,” Thorsons, (1999).

Author Kersey Graves wrote a book in 1875 titled “The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors.” It lists 346 “striking analogies between Christ and Chrishna.”

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 15 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
December 6, 2015

As the choir is singing Bach’s beautiful Magnificat, the sermon will give background on Mary, her words, and the radical social, political and personal layers of this most ancient of Christian hymns.

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 22, 2015

Can we gain more understanding of our place within our family? Why are we the way we are? How can we love those around us more capably?

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 8, 2015

Another in the fairy tale sermon series, why do we sometimes feel that we don’t belong, that we don’t fit? What are the blessings and curses of being different from those around us?

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 1, 2015

What is it like being at the end of one’s life? What do people think and write about? On this All Saints Day, we’ll say the names of loved ones we have lost.

Call To Worship

Our call to worship today is an adaptation of a poem by Birago Ismael Diop, a Senegalese veterinarian, diplomat, poet, and storyteller whose work revived interest in African folktales. He died in 1989, and many of you will recognize his words in the song “Breaths” by the African American women’s singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Listen more often to things than to beings,
Listen more closely to things than to beings.
‘Tis the Ancestor’s breath when the fire’s voice is heard,
‘Tis the Ancestor’s breath in the voice of the waters.
Those who have died have never, never left.
The dead are not under the earth.
They are in the rustling trees, they are in the groaning woods,
They are in the crying grass, they are in the moaning rocks.
The dead are not under the earth.
Those who have died have never, never left.
The dead have a pact with the living.
They are in the woman’s breast, they are in the wailing child.
They are with us in our homes, they are with us in this crowd.
The dead have a pact with the living.
The dead are not under the earth.

Reading

A Parable of Immortality by Henry Van Dyke

This is a poem by Henry Van Dyke, an American author, statesman, Presbyterian clergyman, and professor of English literature at Princeton University until his death in 1933.

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
“There she goes!”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight … that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
” There she goes! ”
there are other eyes watching her coming …
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout …

“Here she comes!”

Sermon

I was at the bedside of a man in my congregation. He was dying. “I don’t know how to do this,” he said. He had been a professor, a scientist. He’d been mean to his wife, mean to his grown kids, mean to the people in the congregation. I was surprised at the openness of this moment.

“I don’t either,” I said. “I’ve sat by a lot of people while they were dying. It looks like you just go farther and farther away, and your body shuts itself down. Maybe it’s like falling asleep. You’ve done that plenty of times, right?” He was fighting, kicking at death like he had kicked at life. One thing I’ve noticed over my thirty-five years of being a minister is that people seem to die the way they live. Some want to be no trouble, they slip away when no one’s looking. Some want to be surrounded by family and friends, some want to be sung to, read to. One man who was well loved in the congregation died in the hospital, and his nurse that night happened also to be a member, and his wife was there. She held one hand, Greg, the nurse, held the other, and I held onto his feet as he breathed his last.

My mother died at home. She’d been sick for five years, and she’d asked to come home to die. We made a pallet by the couch where she lay. I slept there that night. Sometimes when she’d called out, I’d said “I’m here.” Once, she said, “Just a second, I’ll be right there,” as if she had a long way to come back to where we were watching with her. One gardener said he just hoped he wouldn’t outlast his legs. When his legs went, he was ready to go. He was 92, and he said he’d thought he would like to get to 95, but now that he was looking at it from a wheelchair, he didn’t care to get there so much any more. My great-grandfather, the preacher who had been at his church fifty-four years, who retired when he was 80 by saying, after the sermon, “no one should preach past their 80th birthday, so today I retire.” As the buzz in the congregation died down, he asked Brother Matthew to pray, and while everyone’s head was bowed for the prayer, he walked down the aisle of the church and out the front door. That was his last day of work. When he lay dying, his family kept watch on the porch. Through the open windows they heard him saying “Isaiah, I’m James Hearst Pressly, from Statesville, North Carolina. I’m pleased to meet you. Jeremiah, James Hearst Pressly, Statesville, North Carolina. Pleased to meet you.” Then he died.

The end of life is a threshold time, meaning that it is a time when things come up for review, when changes are made more easily. Families can reconcile or break apart. Often, emotionally wrenching decisions have been made. Atul Gawande, in his book “Being Mortal,” talks about people weighing treatment options. How much pain are you willing to endure to add two months more of life? Medicine can prolong technical life for so long – what measures do you want them to take? How do you decide? How much does being at home matter to you? Who do you want to talk to? Do you have any regrets you want to take care of, if you can?

Some people’s thoughts have been mostly of the people they were leaving behind. They worried about how they’d get along. Some people get right to the point of dying and they haven’t made any plans, any arrangements. Everyone’s been talking to them about “fighting,” and no one has just gone on and asked what they would like to have happen at the end. That’s sometimes the minister’s job. “What do you want for your memorial service?” You might ask. It’s good to give it some thought, that way you get to pick readings that say something about you, songs you like. No one who is crazed with grief has to figure all of that out.

I’m asking you to think about these things. Talk about them with your family before you get sick. Take care of your relationships so you won’t have any regrets that could have been fixed. Practice accepting help so you will be graceful to your caregivers, rather than surly. When you’re angry at having to be helped, your helpers have a double job of helping you and reassuring you, or helping you and enduring your surliness. What questions do you want to ask your medical team? How can you communicate to them what things are important to you? Think about that now. They will want to extend your life. What do you enjoy in your life? What do you want to hold on to? Write them down and stick them in your freezer, or email them to me. I have a file I’m keeping of people’s wants and wishes for their memorial services. I have a form you can fill out if you’d like, that I can send to you. Me, I want the song Skylark at the beginning of my service. It’s a sad song, and it’s going to be a sad time. At the end, “Blue Skies.” And I want people to cry. Dying is scary, but we are brave, and we can talk about it together.

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 15 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
October 18, 2015

It has become more and more difficult to have fruitful conversations with people who are different from us in their view of the world. How do we talk to one another?

One of the winners of the auction item inviting a suggestion of a sermon topic suggested that I preach on how she could better talk to her conservative relatives. We all have family members who think very differently from the ways we do. This sermon is a series of suggestions and some crucial bits of information about how liberals can talk to conservatives. This is as much a roadmap of how Republicans should argue with Democrats too.

Hard Wired

The news from science about changing a person’s mind through rational discourse is this: When someone feels something strongly, you can talk yourself blue in the face and not make a dent. You can post the wittiest and most cogent memes on Facebook, you can email jokes and facts and charts and not make a dent. You won’t make a dent in you and their memes won’t make a dent in you. We almost can’t help it. Study after study is showing that the very brains of liberals, conservatives and moderates are wired differently. In a study at University of Nebraska, the scientists follow people’s involuntary responses, including eye movements, when they are shown scary, neutral, pleasant or disgusting photos. It turns out that conservatives react more strongly to the pictures which might create fear or disgust. John Hibbing, of the University of Nebraska, says conservatives are more attuned to fearful or negative stimuli. So the conservative focus on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, and wanting the widespread availability of guns may go with an underlying threat-oriented biology. John Jost from NYU drew a lot of backlash from conservatives when his studies seemed to show in 2003 that conservatives have a greater need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Their funding was looked into, but so many peers were finding the same results that it makes everyone safer. The correlations between the body’s reactivity and political ideology are so striking that they can predict a person’s political views from simply watching the eye movements they make when seeing the aversive photographs. There is a common sense evolutionary imperative for threat-oriented wiring. Conservatives also tend to be happier, more emotionally stable. Liberals a bit more neurotic. Being sure of things, having strong ideas of what’s familiar and an aversion to what’s strange or icky keeps you happier, apparently, than being open to new experiences, being bothered by inequality and fretting about the suffering of others. I’m not saying conservatives don’t fret about the suffering of others. They just have a more certain, rule oriented plan for what should be done. I think, since there seem to be almost even numbers of those on the right and left, that nature decided we need people with their foot on the gas and people with their foot on the brake, in terms of social change.

Moral Code

It’s hardwired. The only way to change someone’s mind is to show them that their behavior or practice is counter to their own moral code. Not counter to your moral code, their own. But other studies show that the moral codes used are different. In a study by Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek University of Virginia, liberals cared more about fairness and compassion. Conservatives cared about those two sets of moral imperatives too, but also measured things in terms of respect for authority, the purity and sanctity of ideas and institutions and in-group loyalty. Those last three were less important to liberal’s thinking.

Steps to Change

Talk about the FBI hostage negotiators about this. What they know is that arguments are emotional. It is rare that someone you’re arguing with will change their mind due to a rational argument. Negotiators have diagramed what they call the Path to Behavioral Change. The first step is active listening. When a Republican is talking to a crazy liberal, or a liberal is talking to your wacky uncle who listens to Rush, the first step in changing someone’s mind is active listening. So you would say “tell me more.” You would say “How did you come to this view?” As they talk, you don’t evaluate: “hm, that’s a good point,” or “I’m not sure your facts are straight….” You just say small encouraging things. “hm.” Or “I hear you.” You might ask open ended questions, like I mentioned before “How did you come to that view?” “What do you think about the front runners?” “What policies really feel important to you?” You can also just, without being weird about it, repeat the last phrase they said. If they say “I just think this is the stupidest group of leaders we’ve ever had.” You could say “the stupidest we’ve ever had?” Using pauses can be extremely effective. When the Moonies and I were talking about their beliefs, sometimes all I would need to do was stay quiet after they had said something and let their words hang in the air. “You say Mr. Moon takes away your sins before he marries you? How does he do that, exactly? By dabbing some wine on your photographs Hm.” It also can help to name the emotions you hear. “That sounds like it was upsetting.” “That makes you mad.” “It doesn’t seem fair to you.”

It’s hard for even the most passionate and committed person to carry on a one-sided argument. You are listening, and not only that, you are showing them that you are listening. This is a rare enough experience for anyone to being to open things up between you. Empathy is the second step of the ladder to change. This doesn’t mean making understanding noises or saying an understanding phrase. This means really having empathy, emotionally relating, to the other person’s perspective. This is what the active listening is for, partially. To actually ask the questions which will help you get to a place of understanding. Rapport, when the other person feels in their body, their mind and their spirit, that you understand, when they begin to actually feel you with them, is the next step. See, this is hard. I rebel at this point. I don’t want to look at the places in me that actually relate to their fears, phobias, suspicion of the stranger, “disasterizing” about the future, cruelty to the suffering, what I see as lack of communitarian spirit. Without getting in touch with those places in you, conversation is not going to be fruitful. If you are a conservative talking to a crazy liberal, you may need to get in touch with the places in you that feel for other people, that want to help, that can face suffering and the reality that it isn’t always the person’s fault who is suffering, the idea that the world is big and overwhelming and our country might not be the greatest country there ever was, that we might have bad decisions, greed and cruelty in our history, that some of us are victimized by others, that security is an illusion, etc.

After rapport is established, then comes influence. It is at this point that you might be able to influence the thinking and feeling of another person. Since empathy, though, you are open to their influence as well. Our mistake is that we try to jump right into influencing other people. Things seem so clear to us. The facts seem to make our conclusion so obvious. One problem is that it seems everyone has different facts.

It used to be that people thought facts were supposed to be – you know, factual. When JFK debated Nixon, though, he later confessed that he just made up the statistics he cited. Made them up. They sounded great. Now it seems that people will say things with great authority whether they are true or not. It used to be that media outlets had to give both sides of an argument. They had to seek out viewpoints on all sides, facts which supported all sides, present them to people so they could decide. During the Reagan administration, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. I think that was 1987. In 1988 Rush Limbaugh started his radio show. These days, most people watch Fox news or MSNBC. They get red facts and blue facts. They hear about red issues and blue issues. You have to really work to hear both sides. Reasoned and civil discussions are not the style. It is easier and more fun for people to mock one another, to imagine that the people on the other side are ridiculous, crazy, clowns! All this does is to make you feel energized and good in a nasty way about your own side. I’m not asking us to stop that, but you have to understand that we can’t ask those who feel differently to stop their emails, jokes and memes either. It sounds like a lot of listening is recommended. And love even though they may not be able to see how right you are.

“In terms of their personalities, liberals and conservatives have long been said to differ in ways that correspond to their conflicting visions. Liberals on average are more open to experience, more inclined to seek out change and novelty both personally and politically (McCrae, 1996). Conservatives, in contrast, have a stronger preference for things that are familiar, stable, and predictable (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008; McCrae, 1996). Conservatives – at least, the subset prone to authoritarianism – also show a stronger emotional sensitivity to threats to the social order, which motivates them to limit liberties in defense of that order (Altemeyer, 1996; McCann, 2008; Stenner, 2005). Jost, Glaser, Sulloway, and Kruglanski (2003) concluded from a meta-analysis of this literature that the two core aspects of conservative ideology are resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. How can these various but complementary depictions of ideological and personality differences be translated into specific predictions about moral differences? First, we must examine and revise the definition of the moral domain.”

“Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek University of Virginia How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people’s use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally.”

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 15 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
October 11, 2015

For Coming Out Weekend, we’ll talk about the cultural and political statement of drag: men dressing as women to perform as entertainers. How is it subversive to the powers that be?

At first I was afraid
I was petrified
Kept thinking I could never live
without you by my side
But then I spent so many nights
thinking how you did me wrong
And I grew strong
And I learned how to get along

Every social movement has its songs, its gestures, its slang, its assumptions, infighting, and its sense of what’s wrong in the world. This morning, in honor of National Coming Out Weekend, we’re going to look together about the culture of drag and give it a salute for being one of the big-haired, heavily made up mothers of the new freedom, the growing normalcy of the LGBT movement. Drag is cis-men (that means men who were born male) dressing up as women for the purposes of entertainment. Well, sometimes they dress up as parodies of femininity, with exaggerated eye makeup, wigs that reach to the ceiling fans, and six inch heels. Sometimes they dress in torn punk clothes, with just a couple of items of female-identified clothing. Sometimes they are in a satin dress and pearls, sporting a full beard. Sometimes drag can be cis-women (women who were born female) dressed as men, expressing themselves in ways that our culture has identified as male. Sometimes they will have on makeup, eye shadow, a beard, girl jeans and a boy shirt, smoking a pipe…. Oh well. It’s complicated. RuPaul, the most famous drag queen in the world, says “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.

A sociology PhD thesis by Elizabeth Kaminski analyses drag culture as a community. An oppositional culture, organized both to imitate and mock the dominant culture. In the had old days, which, in many places ended – um – last month, you could get thrown out of your family for being gay. In the early seventies, when some of you came out, you could still get thrown into a mental institution for being gay. About 40% of street kids are gay or transgender. You are three times more likely to commit suicide as a gay teen. A chosen family becomes the structure which holds you together. Sometimes drag queens will take in younger men, give them a place to stay and a start as a drag performer. They can be the “drag mother,” and you can be a performer at the drag balls from their “house.” You belong. There is love and drama and betrayal and cattiness, like there is in a lot of families. A created community has its own language. Your work may have its own language. Your family may have it’s own language. Some of you know a little drag language. What happens if I say “You – better – WERK!”

Not all gay people know about drag. Drag and trans are two separate things, with some overlap, of course. Trans is being born biologically one gender and feeling inside like the other. Of course, that’s oversimplified, because some babies are born with some characteristics of one gender and some of the other, but our culture doesn’t have space for a third gender, like some other cultures do, so parents have to choose for the child. All of this is over simplified, because gender is a continuum, but not as linear as that – you have how you like to express your gender, who you’re attracted to, And trans women aren’t performing, aren’t exaggerated, they just want to express the femaleness they feel at their core. Trans men are just being regular men, not performing. There is a little overlap, but the two things shouldn’t be confused. Drag culture expresses community. It makes a free space for an oppressed minority to express and experiment without apology or approbation, where the music evokes sympathy, humor, solidarity. Outrage, then agency/empowerment. Through songs, jokes, language. Drag shows are for gay folks, but they are also to expose heterosexuals to the culture, to give them a sense of being outsiders let inside.

Drag queens have had to be tough and funny. When you get beat up as a child, you learn to fight, or to take the beating. The GLBT revolution started in a bar where there were men dressed as women and women dressed as men. It was a free space, but not really, since the police raided it regularly. It was 1969, where being gay was still considered pathology. The patrons of the Stonewall Inn were gay men and lesbians, drag queens, transgender folks, and homeless teens. They were used to being raided by the police. Arrests were violent, gay bashing was the rule of the day, and that doesn’t mean verbal bashing. This one night, though, something snapped. The police raided, but the patrons wouldn’t run. Accounts vary, but many say it was the drag queens and butch lesbians who started throwing punches. Then bricks. People poured out on the street to protest police violence that had run unchecked for decades. Things began to change.

Social change happens when collective identity can be developed, and social action frames can shape understanding of what is wrong and what can be done to make it right. Then political protest can be energized. There must be a strong sense of “us” and an anger at what it wrong. Language and music helps with the sense of “us.” We are the ones who understand certain words. We are the ones who get it. We get strong among ourselves and then we act. Some will be drawn to our cause.

One thing sociologists haven’t talked about in the reading I’ve done is that, for social change to happen, there have to be the people who are respectable and the other scarier people. In the often-violent suffrage movement, Alice Paul and her followers chained themselves to the White House fence, were arrested, beaten, went on hunger strikes, and were force fed in jail. Carrie Chapman Catt was respectable and reasonable, and the legislators only dealt with her because on the other hand were the riot women. It looks like President Johnson dealt with MLK because Malcom X was on the other hand, looking scary. Gay organizations which had been working respectably in the culture were suddenly easier to deal with when images of foul mouthed drag queens with bricks in their hands were there for you to deal with if you didn’t deal with the respectable gays.

One song performed in drag shows is called “What Makes a Man a Man.” The performer presents as a woman, but, during the song, takes off the wigs, takes out the pads, and reveals himself as a man as the verses go on. The persona of femaleness is not just for performance – it’s an expression of soul. Some drag queens would dress up whether or not they were performing. Some say they wouldn’t. What they do for the culture is to make it clear to everyone that there are powerful biological drivers which determine gender, there are also certain agreed-upon elements of gender performance we all learn. What woman doesn’t remember someone teaching her to run like a girl, laugh in a lady like way, cross your legs when you sit. I remember my mother telling me to turn the steering wheel delicately, with a pretty bend in my wrist. She also told me not to beat a boy in ping pong or chess, that men had to be taken care of in that way. She was my gender performance coach. My dad too. Drag queens, in the ways they exaggerate femininity, pay tribute to the beauty of that gender performance, but mock it as well, putting the idea in the mind of the culture that they see the performance. They see the social construct. They play out the pathos of longing for love and losing it, gathering up the shards of a broken heart and willing yourself to survive.

A drag show is a place where a free space for an oppositional culture is created. Gender constructs are parodied, injustice is mourned, rage is sung, and spirits are empowered. The queens deserve our respect and our gratitude.
THE BEAUTY IN YOU

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Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 4, 2015

What is the historical context of the story of Samson and Delilah? Samson is the man whose strength was in his hair, and Delilah is the one he let cut that hair off.

Children’s time:

Long ago the Jewish people were living in a land where their enemies were ruling over them. Whenever people you don’t like are telling you what to do, you long for a superhero who can rescue all of the people out of that situation. In that time of oppression, a superhero was born to the Jewish people. His name was Samson. He was amazingly strong, but no one knew why. It was a secret. He fought a mean lion with his bare hands, and won! Some bad guys were waiting for him out on the street when he was visiting a lady friend, and when they tried to attack him, he just pulled up the whole doorway of the town up out of the ground and walked away with it, just to show how strong he was.

When he was grown, he fell in love with a woman named Delilah. He loved her, but she didn’t love him. The rulers of the bad guys asked her to find out what the secret of his strength was. She asked him and he said “I’m not going to tell you that, I haven’t even told my mother and father that secret.” But she kept asking. She nagged him. Do you ever do that? 3 fake stories. 3 times she betrayed him. Why did he keep going back? Finally after lots of tears and nagging, he told her the truth. His strength was in his hair. She waited until he was fast asleep and shaved his hair all off. The bad guys came in and captured him. They did all kinds of mean and hurtful things to him, and made him do work for them. Then — his hair began to grow back! He was getting strong again, but he didn’t let anybody know that. The bad guys, called Philistines, had him working in the jail, but they wanted to celebrate having captured him. They brought him to their temple and made fun of him. He said he was tired and leaned against one pillar holding up the temple roof, where about 3000 Philistines were sitting, laughing at him. He pushed on them, summoning all his strength, and the pillars cracked and everyone fell down and hurt themselves. He got hurt too, though. He got in trouble by letting someone nag him into doing something he knew wasn’t right.

Sermon notes:

You heard the main part of the story, but let me tell you some background. The area of the world where Israel is now was divided into Judah in the south and Israel in the north. The Philistines, who, along with the Canaanites, were long time enemies of the Jews, were in the ascendancy and ruled the land from their five main cities, one of which was Gaza, which is still there with the same name. The Philistines were a sea faring people, probably from Greece by way of Crete. They worshiped a god named Dagon, and built temples with big flat roofs held up by columns. The Jews were governed by women and men called by a word that’s translated “Judges” in the Hebrew Scriptures. Some of them did actually judge the people in the way we would think of it, but most ruled like kings or advisors. Samson had been born to a woman who couldn’t have any children. She was visited by an angel several times who talked to her and then to her husband about the child. She was to drink no wine or strong drink while she was pregnant, and the boy was to be a Nazirite. That was a person who kept extra pure, no drinking, no grapes or raisins, nothing from the vine, and never never cutting his hair. It was a miraculous birth, and the boy was miraculously strong.

He fell in love with a Philistine woman. He asked his parents to go do the negotiations. They told him they’d a lot rather him marry within his own people, not among the enemy. He was in love, and he wouldn’t be swayed. On the way down to the negotiations, Samson was attacked by a lion. He tore it apart with his bare hands. Later, on the way to the seven day wedding feast, he detoured to check out the lion’s carcass, and saw that some bees had made a hive in there and there was honey. He scooped out some with his hands and ate it, and gave some to his parents too without telling them where it came from. As a Nazirite he wasn’t supposed to have any contact with corpses, and he wasn’t supposed to eat anything unclean. He broke the vow by doing this.

Now comes the first time nagging worked on him. At the feast, there were thirty men from the town who were his groomsmen. He told them a riddle. “Out of the eater comes something to eat: out of the strong comes something sweet.” He told them if they could guess it within the seven days of the wedding feast, he’d give them thirty linen garments. If not, they would give him thirty. From their backs. They couldn’t guess. They said to the wife, “You’ve got to get Samson to tell you the answer to this so we don’t have to give him our clothes. Also, if you don’t, we’ll kill you and your family. She asked him, wept, nagged, said “you hate me, you won’t tell me the answer to the riddle” for seven days until he broke down and told her. She told the men, who guessed the answer. Samson was mad, and went to another town, beat up thirty guys, took their clothes, gave them to the men, and went back home without his bride. Her father gave her to one of the wedding groomsmen. So now she was married to a guy who had threatened to kill her and her family.

Samson came down there one day, came in the house, and said “I’m going into my wife’s room.” Her dad said “I thought you hated her, so I gave her to someone else.” Samson was mad. I’m really going to hurt you people, he said, and he tied the tails of 300 foxes together and sent them out, crazed, into the fields, where all the crops burned up. The Philistines were so mad and that family that they killed them and burned down their house. Samson was so mad about that, that he made war on those guys and killed a lot of them. He ran down to take shelter in a canyon. Three thousand men from Judah came to him and said What are you doing? Those guys rule over us, and now they are going to make a war with us. I was just doing to them what they did to me.

We have to take you to them.

Promise you won’t kill me yourselves?

We promise.

So they bound him with ropes and took him to the Philistines. They came at him shouting, and he broke out of the ropes, picked up the jawbone of a donkey and killed a thousand Philistines. When he was through, he called out to God and said he was thirsty. God made water gush out of the rock for him there. He led the Israelites there for 20 years.

Then he fell in love with Delilah.

It doesn’t say whether she loved him. You decide. The Philistines asked her to find out the secret of his strength. He didn’t want to tell, but she nagged. He told her, finally, that if he were tied with seven fresh bowstrings, he would be like any other man. When he was asleep, she tied him with the bowstrings. “Samson! The Philistines are upon you!” He snapped them like threads and fought off the men. She pouted that he hadn’t told her the truth. “You don’t love me. If you did, you would tell me.” He told her if they bound him with new ropes he would be weak. When he was sleeping, she bound him with two new ropes. “Samson! The Philistines are upon you!” He woke up, burst the ropes like thread in a fire, and fought the guys off. She pouted and cried, nagged until he told her “You have to weave the seven braids of my hair into that piece of cloth you’re making on the loom. While he was asleep, she wove his braids into the loom. “Samson! The Philistines are upon you!” He woke up and broke out of the weaving. She wept for days. Finally he told her. “No one has taken a razor to my hair since I was born. That’s the secret. If someone shaved my head, I’d be weak.” When he was asleep, she shaved off his hair. “Samson! The Philistines are upon you!” He couldn’t fight. They blinded him and dragged him off to prison. They shacked him and made him walk around moving the grindstone, like a donkey, grinding the grain. After a few weeks they decided to have an enormous celebration, make a sacrifice to Dagon. Samson was brought to the temple to entertain the crowd. They had their fill, laughing at him, the great superhero of the Jews. Not so strong now, are you? What they didn’t know was that his hair had started growing back. He didn’t say anything about it.

He told the boy who was leading him around that he was tired, that he wanted to lean against one of the pillars of the temple. He put one hand on one and the other hand on the other. He prayed for strength, and asked God to let him die with his enemies. Pushing, he collapsed the temple roof, killing the three thousand people on top. He went with them. His parents took his body home to bury him.

Why would he go back over and over? Sometimes people love like that. We make excuses for that lover, spouse, partner or friend. We make excuses for that church or that boss or that parent. We want to believe they love us. We want to believe so badly that we don’t let contrary information in. We just don’t believe it. Some people demand that you betray yourself in order to prove your love. Some churches demand that you betray your own good sense, your own heart or intellect in order to prove your loyalty. Some jobs demand that you betray yourself in order to keep the paycheck coming in.

Love has mutuality in it. You give and you receive. No one who loves you would ask you to give them your strength. No relationship should ask that you betray yourself.

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 27, 2015

What are some of the ways people experience and express grief? What causes grief? How can we support those we love when they are grieving?

We have had a lot of loss in the congregation this year. Let’s talk about the grief that comes with loss. Grief is a reflection of the loss of a connection. We feel connection to our work, our homes, our animal companions, our senses, our possessions, so we feel grief when we lose a job which was part of our identity, a job we’d had high hopes for. We feel grief when our homes are torn or damaged, when we have to leave a place we loved. We have experienced the loss of a beloved animal who was a member of the family. Some studies have shown that people love some pets almost as much as they love their partners and spouses. In a book I read, one social scientist asked her husband whether he would choose her or his dog that he called his soul mate. He said “please don’t make me think about that.” We feel grief as age or accident take away parts of our physicality – we can’t run any more or use our hands, we can’t see or hear the way we used to, we can’t trust that our muscles will do what we ask of them. The griefs that are most supported by our culture are those at the loss of connection with loved people.

In most cultures there are ways to make mourning visible. Mourning is what you see on the outside, the expression of a grief inside. In some cultures you wear black so people will know what situation you’re in. In Victorian times the people who could afford it wore black for a time, then purple or gray to signify “half-mourning,” before dressing in bright colors again. Our culture is a “move on” culture, a “get over it” culture. We don’t have permission to let ourselves be sad, to isolate ourselves to heal. We are encouraged to “get out there” and be around people. Sometimes folks will talk about the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They’ll check to see whether you are moving through them competently. No one tells you that you move through them in a wild curlicue. Some you will visit three or fourteen times, others will make combinations like anger and denial, so you’re mad, but you insist it’s got nothing to do with your grief. One of the effects of grief I don’t see many people talk about is the grief ADD I’ve noticed. When you’re going through a divorce or another terrible loss, you have more accidents – you have to drive carefully. It’s hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time, and you tend to grind your teeth. You might worry that you’re not grieving right. People might mutter that you haven’t cried enough, that you’re crying too much, that you were laughing at the funeral reception, that you shouldn’t get married so close to the death of your father, that you made too much of a display of sorrow – it was unseemly, that you don’t seem sad enough or you seem too sad. Mourning is what people see on the outside. There is no way to know what someone’s grief is, because it’s on the inside. Folks might say “how can you still be down about the loss of your dog, just get another one and move on,” but they don’t know this is the companion who loved you unconditionally through your fight with cancer or the death of your parents, or through the awful divorce and they were your soul friend. We even tend to compare our griefs to others’ , we say we’re sad, but look at the family down the street who lost their toddler, and your mom was in her eighties and had a full rich life…. There is no point in comparing griefs. Your grief is your grief. Your pain is your pain. It visits when it wants to. When my mother died I was 23, getting ready to get married. I left from the funeral to go meet Mark’s parents. I couldn’t really feel anything but hungry. And mad. I didn’t cry much. My mom had been sick for five years, and I wondered if I had grieved already. Years later my best friend in SC moved to FL, and I fell apart. I cried every day, grieved like my heart was breaking. My life seemed to crumble. I think that was my mother-grief, triggered by this new loss. Grief doesn’t pay attention to time limits. It comes down when it wants to.

“There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass – if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it’s okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.”
– Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time – the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes – when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever – there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
– John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

There is pain and there is suffering. People say “Pain is inevitable, and suffering is optional,” but that sounds cruel to me. I know what they mean. Pain comes from the event and suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. Someone we love dies in the hospital, and there is pain, but suffering afterward comes from the story that there was more we should have done, that we weren’t there the moment they drew their last breath, that the last words we had with them before the accident were angry words, that we did all the patient care and our siblings didn’t do their share, so they didn’t care as much as we did. Suffering comes from telling the stories that our anger at the person for the way they died is unwarranted, that it makes us a bad person. We tell awful stories sometimes, and create a lot of unnecessary suffering for ourselves and the people around us. We just don’t know any better, and it’s hard to just sit with the pain and not make stories around it. There is a lot of guilt in grief: things we said or didn’t say, things we wish had happened, chances for reconciliation that weren’t taken. Sometimes the loss of a connection with someone with whom we had issues is hard because we lose the chance to fix the relationship. We also lose the dream of the ideal mother or father we were still somehow holding on to in our secret heart. There is fear in grief too. Who will we be without this person? Without this job? Without our good hearing? Who will we be with this illness which is taking our body? What will happen? What did we do to make it happen? Other people’s fears get all over us too as they struggle to figure out how not to lose their partner or their child in this same way. We feel blamed and shamed and evaluated and found wanting.

“Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here’s what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it’s still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it’s been too long since you missed them last.”
– Kristin O’Donnell Tubb, The 13th Sign

Our culture has so much puritanism in its roots. The puritans thought that some of us were blessed. That the way you could tell who was blessed was by seeing who had health, beauty and money. If the rich were blessed, then by corollary the poor were unblessed. The sick were unblessed. That must mean they had done something wrong, they were shamed by their lack of blessing. So there is shame in loss, shame in illness, shame in grief at times. How do we get over it? We don’t. The more things you’ve gone through, the more gnarled and scarred you are. That is nature. We are like trees that have endured many storms, had branches break off, been stripped of leaves and bark and had to regrow until we each have our own shape and texture. The searing pain of loss lets up, and we begin to remember with more love and less hurt. The scars are always there, though. We wouldn’t really want them not to be.

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
– Anne Lamott

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”
– John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses.”
– Colette

“It sucks that we miss people like that. You think you’ve accepted that someone is out of your life, that you’ve grieved and it’s over, and then bam. One little thing, and you feel like you’ve lost that person all over again.”
– Rachel Hawkins, Demonglass

“Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love.”
– Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.”
– Maria V. Snyder, Storm Glass

“Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here’s what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it’s still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it’s been too long since you missed them last.”
– Kristin O’Donnell Tubb, The 13th Sign

“You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.”
– Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections

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 15 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.