Goldilocks and Elijah

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 24, 2015

Next in our sermon series on fairy tales, Rev. Meg explores the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” What does this story say about sharing? Manners? Entitlement? Home invasion? How welcoming are we called to be? Are we Goldilocks or are we the bears? And what does all of this have to do with Elijah of the Old Testament?

I was raised by a father who trusted the government. I was a teenager when Watergate happened, and I remember him saying “The President would not do something like this without a good reason. You can bet he knows more than we do about secret things, and I’m sure his reason for doing this was related to something we’re just not in a position to know.” My mother did not trust the government. She had grown up in India, and told us that you had to leave gifts for the mail man or he would “lose” your mail. Talking to the police one afternoon, she asked them “how late are you open?”

“Lady, this is the police station,” they said. “We’re always open.” She loved studying the American Revolution, though. In ninth grade had a history teacher from Great Britain who told us the Boston Massacre was when scared 17 year old British boys got hurt by angry Colonials who put big rocks into snowballs and were lobbing them at the British boys. Who opened fire. My mother was hopping mad about that one. I think she called the school, even though she was a teacher and generally disapproved of parents complaining to the school about teachers.

My father’s three other siblings were politically more radical. My Aunt Ruth, the Episcopal priest who taught in Dallas at Perkins Seminary, refused to put her social security number on anything. Not at a doctor’s office, not on a loan application, never. She gave me dire warnings about doing it. The other sister, Aunt Dorothy, lived in Nicaragua for a while after the Sandinistas took power, working as a Spanish-German translator. My dad shook his head over both of them and said they had been duped by the Communists.

I had college professors who’d been duped by the Communists as well, and they taught us about how the US government had supported certain corporations playing Goldilocks in South and Central America. Once they started lining it out for us, it was hard not to see corruption everywhere. We were taught about the origin of the term “Banana Republic.” It’s a contemptuous term for a country where the government is a puppet dictatorship set up for the enrichment of the dictator and the companies for whom he works. The United Fruit Company was frequently accused of bribing government officials in Central and South America in exchange for their support of the giant banana plantations. They were accused of exploiting their workers, paying negligible taxes to the governments of those countries, and working ruthlessly to suppress land rights for the people who farmed the land of those countries.

Latin American journalists sometimes referred to the company as el pulpo (“the octopus”), and its exploitation of workers was used by the communist activists to illustrate the concept of capitalist imperialism. Senator, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in the Eisenhower administration, was a stern anti-Communist. The more you learn, though, the more his motives seem cloudy/complex/corrupt. His law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, negotiated the land giveaways to the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and Honduras. His brother, Allen Dulles also did legal work for UF and sat on its board of directors. Allen Dulles became the head of the CIA under Eisenhower. Both Dulles brothers were on the UF payroll for 38 years. Conflict of interest? Henry Cabot Lodge, who was US Ambassador to the UN, owned a big chunk of UF stock; Ed Whitman, the UF public relations man, was married to Ann Whitman, Eisenhower’s personal secretary.

Cohen, Rich (2012). The Fish that Ate the Whale. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. p. 186.

The company claimed that they needed large tracts of extra land that they didn’t plan bananas on just in case of hurricanes or blight. Through close involvement with the government, they managed to keep the government from distributing land to farmers who wanted a share of the banana business. This creation or augmentation of government corruption, encouraging service to US interests, led to writer O. Henry coining the term “Banana Republic.” The United Fruit Company dominated regional transportation networks through its International Railways of Central America. UFCO branched out in 1913 by creating the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. They improved ports, built schools for people who worked for them. They discouraged the building of highways in order to support the railroads.

In 1954, the democratically elected Guatemalan government was toppled by U.S.-backed forces armed, trained and organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. (see Operation PBSUCCESS).

UFCO (the only corporation at the time to have a CIA code name, was the largest Guatemalan landowner and employer, and the newly overthrown government’s land reform included the expropriation of 40% of UFCO land.

We don’t have time this morning to go over all of the instances in which our government has destabilized other countries, whether trying to do something good or making those places safe for US business interests.

The US has been Goldilocks in many bears’ homes, grabbing what we want, breaking things here and there, then bribing the bear governments to make it legal for Goldilocks to keep coming in and taking whatever she wants. We have not been very good guests. In looking after the interests of the shareholders of some corporations, we have destabilized the homes and homelands of many people around the world.

Goldilocks is the story of a bad guest, who takes and breaks and doesn’t observe boundaries.

Here is the story I’d like to pair with Goldilocks, the story of a great guest.

From The Folk Literature of the Kurdistani Jews: An Anthology. Yona Sabar. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ©1982), 153-54.
http://www.yale.edu/yup

Once upon a time there lived a husband and wife who were very poor and had nothing at all in their house. The wife, who was pregnant, gave birth to a son at ten o’clock at night, but she had nothing with which to wrap the tender babe. The poor father groaned and cried, “We have no clothes, not even some wool, to cover the babe, and he may die by morning.”

Suddenly a man appeared, stood at the entrance to the room, and said, “Peace be upon you! Do you have some straw to lend me? My wife has just given birth, and we have nothing to lay the child on. He may die of the cold.” The couple replied, “We are very poor, but we do have some straw. If you want it, please take it.”

The man took his cloak, (the Hebrew word is tallit, “prayer shawl” or “cloak”) filled it with straw, thanked the couple, and went off. As he stepped outside he threw the straw down next to the door, but the couple did not notice. After the stranger had left, the husband said to his wife, “Look how rich we are! There are people who do not have even straw, and we are rich compared with them.”

In the morning the husband got up, went outside, and found there many silver and gold dinars. He called his wife and said to her, “Look how much silver and gold we have behind the door!” They realized then that the man who came at night to ask for straw was none other than the prophet Elijah, of blessed memory, and that the straw had turned into silver and gold.

The husband went to the marketplace and bought the necessities for his home, and the rest of the money he hid away in a vessel, saying to his wife, “Let us flee from this town, for its people are wicked and jealous. If they learn that we have become rich, they will slay us.”

So they fled to a town where no one knew them, and there they asked, “Is it possible to build here a fine, good house?” A man replied, “I have such a fine, good house. If you like it, well and good; if not, do not buy it.”

The couple decided to buy the house. In the evening they went to look at it. As they walked through the rooms, they noticed a bulge in one of the walls. The wife touched it with her finger, and behold, the stone moved from its place and revealed an opening in the wall full of silver and gold. The husband said to his wife, “Look, God has granted us even more than before.”

The next day the couple were about to talk to the landlord, but he said to them, “I am the same man to whom you gave straw, and I changed it into gold. That gold was the good luck of your son. This house is your own good luck, and the bulge in the wall is your wife’s good luck. May you live in happiness and good fortune. please know that I, the prophet Elijah, am blessing you.” Having finished his statement, the prophet Elijah ascended in flight to heaven. We have been asked to provide sanctuary for a guest.

There is nothing like a genuine call to ministry to snap things back into focus. By now you will have heard that we have been offered the opportunity to take a Guatemalan LGGBT activist in and provide her with sanctuary until her deportation order is lifted. She is eligible for a U-Visa, since she has been helpful to police here in prosecuting a crime. Her lawyer missed a paperwork deadline, so she spent seven months in detention before her partner (also undocumented, and a trans-person) could raise the money for the required 15,000.00 bond.

She must appear for deportation by June 11. The police must document her help in order for her deportation order to be rescinded, but that might take as much as 90 days, after the Juke 11 deadline. I’m giving you my best interpretation of the story as I currently understand it, as of this writing.

The request for sanctuary was brought to us suddenly. The Board of Trustees had a rich and soul-searching discussion, the sense of which, at the end can be summed up quoting one Board member. “If we don’t do this, then what DO we do?”

As Presbyterian colleague, Jim Rigby said to me as we talked about this situation, it is hard to be prepared fully when the “prophetic moment” presents itself, the moment when you are asked to walk your talk. “Your church said ‘yes,’ and then figured out how to do it. That makes you a prophetic church. Other churches say ‘Let’s figure out how to do this’ before they say ‘yes.’ That makes them traditional churches.

Much more will be communicated, and a conversation will begin among us about whether we want to just do this once or become a Sanctuary Church like so many UU, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic and Quaker congregations did during the ’80’s. Please research “The Sanctuary Movement,” if you’d like to know more. This is a well-educated, smart and delightful civil rights activist we have a chance to support. Although we surely are not of one mind about immigration issues, we can step up and protect this one new friend.

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.

 

Youth Service – Expressions of the Soul

by Posted in Audio available, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Youth of First UU Austin
May 17, 2015

We honor our graduating seniors and incoming freshman with our annual Bridging Ceremony. Join Rev. Mari Caballero and our talented and insightful youth group for “Expressions of the Soul.” They’ll lead us in pondering the various ways by which we convey our soul’s deepest aspects in our lives.

Text of this sermon is not available. You may listen to the homilies of three of our graduating seniors; Ana Runnels, Mary Emma Gary, and Kate Windsor by clicking the play button.

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.

 

Inhospitality to Strangers

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 10, 2015

On this Mother’s Day, not far from here, hundreds of immigrant mothers are being held in a detention facility, separated from their children and loved ones. Just a little farther away, immigrant women and their children — some as young as three — are also being held in detention, many of them for months at a time. How do we view this ethically and religiously, especially through the lens of our religious values and our mission? Join Rev. Chris Jimmerson as we examine “Inhospitality to Strangers.”

Sermon

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Hebrews Chapter 13, Verse 2.

This morning, I want to recall a story some of you may have heard me tell before – a story from several years ago when I was working for a non-profit that provides immigration legal services called American Gateways. It’s the story of an asylum seeker who I will call Mykel, though that is not his real name. Mykel fled his home country with a family member because they were being persecuted, even receiving death threats, due to their religious beliefs.

When they arrived in the US, they immediately contacted immigration officials and asked for asylum.

Immigration officials immediately locked them up in an immigrant detention center.

That’s where we first Mykel, at the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas.

He was two years old at the time. He turned three during the 7 months he and his mother were held in this facility, which at the time was used to imprison entire immigrant families.

Just after Mykel turned three, we represented them before the San Antonio immigration court, and the judge granted them asylum.

We did not get to celebrate though. The attorney for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) promptly appealed the judge’s decision.

They locked shackles on Mykel’s mother’s wrists and ankles, as he sobbed in terror, not understanding what they were doing to his mom, and took them back to the prison for immigrants.

Mykel’s mom refused to give up and accept being deported, so we decided to try something different.

A few days later, we had a conference call with that ICE attorney, and all of the sudden, he decided to withdraw the appeal and admitted that their request for asylum was likely valid.

We think part of his change of heart might have had something to do with the call he had gotten from a national reporter earlier that day.

How that reporter found about Mykel’s story, and how she got that attorney’s direct office phone number remains shrouded in mystery.

Several years later, Mykel was living in a large city on the east coast, where his mother had gotten a good job. He had become very proficient with English and was doing well in school.

We know this, because Mykel’ s mom sent American Gateways a letter with an update on how they were doing. “

Enclosed with the letter was a photograph of a bright, smiling Mykel. Paper clipped to the photograph was a check for a thousand dollars, a contribution to, as Mykel’ s mom put it, help the organization help others like her Mykel.

“Thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

Today is Mother’s Day. And while we celebrate the many terrific moms in this congregation and beyond it, as the reading you heard earlier describes, there are folks who are also hurting for a variety of reasons on this Mother’s Day.

I am painfully aware of my own mom and how she must be hurting because it is the first Mother’s Day since we lost my step dad, Ty.

I wanted to start with Mykel’ s story today, because it was one that was a part of a public relations and legal battle that a broad coalition of human rights advocates fought several years ago to force ICE to discontinue family detention at T. Don Hutto.

And they did. We won that one.

On this Mother’s Day though, the victory has turned out to be short lived. We have not only come full circle, it has gotten much worse now.

Today, hundreds of immigrant women and their children, some of them infants, are spending Mother’s Day imprisoned in a detention facility in Karnes City, about an hour southeast of San Antonio. Many of these women and children have been held there for eight months or more. Many of them, like Mykel and his mom, fled persecution and death threats in their home country, only to be re-traumatized when they came to the U.S. seeking asylum, asking for our help.

As if that’s not enough, a little over an hour to the southwest of San Antonio in Dilley, Texas, ICE has just opened another detention facility, which will eventually imprison up to 2,400 immigrants, most of whom will also be women and children. Just last Saturday, several members of this church participated in a rally to protest this facility and call for and end to all immigrant family detention.

The T. Don Hutto Center now houses up to 400 immigrant women, again many of them asylum seekers, who will be spending this Mother’s Day separated from their children and families. It’s hard for me to even imagine which would be worse – being separated from your children or knowing that they will be locked up with you for some unknown period of time.

People who come to the U.S. and ask for asylum have done nothing illegal- in fact, what is illegal according to U.S. law and international human rights treaties is this prolonged detention of asylum seekers while their cases are processed.

And even in the vast majority of instances where immigrants have come for other reasons, such as harsh economic conditions in their countries of origin, they have at most committed an immigration law misdemeanor, the equivalent of getting a traffic ticket. I wonder what would happen if they started holding white people in prison for eight months while their speeding ticket cases got processed.

Excellent research shows that supervised, community-based alternatives to immigrant detention work extremely well. Immigrants comply with the law, showing up for their immigration court and other appointments. These alternatives are also far less expensive than the over 2 billion in U.S. tax dollars we are spending each year on immigration detention.

Yet, for-profit prison companies, like the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, who run Karnes City and Dilley respectively, have discovered that the millions they spend on lobbying at the local, state and federal level to make sure the United States remains the prison capital of the world has been a great investlnent in light of the billions in our tax dollars they rake in every year. Their efforts have resulted in a U.S. incarceration rate nearly 5 times greater than most other countries. They have successfully lobbied, for instance, for congress to require that over 34,000 immigrants Inust be imprisoned at any given time. They were also involved in ICE declaring that the women and children in Karnes and Dilley are national security threats.

Strange how often the people we label as dangerous felons and national security threats happen to have brown and black skin, isn’t it?

Felicia Kongable, one of several of our church members who visit immigrant women and children in local detention facilities, described the following to me about the Karnes City Facility:

– Women who have risked everything to follow their maternal instincts and get their children out of life-threatening situations only to find themselves locked up with up to three other women and all of their children in a room about the size of my office here at the church.

– Infants not being allowed to crawl past the doorway of such rooms.

– Water that tastes like salt and chlorine

– Food that the children do not like and that does not provide proper nutrition for them at this important developmental stage.

– Mothers having to spend the tiny amount they earn doing work for the prison to buy their kids other food from the commissary and bottled water at $1.75 per bottle.

– When many of the women went on a hunger strike to protest their prolonged confinement, they made sure their children still ate. Still, the guards told them, if you don’t eat, we’ll say that it proves you are an unfit mother and we’ll take your children away from you.

– Children depressed. Children distraught over seeing their mothers treated like criminals, subjected to numerous cell counts throughout the day.

– An interior courtyard surround on all four sides by two story building walls as the only outside area for children, where they cannot even see trees or the horizon.

– Children talking about committing suicide by jumping off the second story balcony.

And in fact, Felicia and the others I talked with for this sermon told me of so many horrors that these women and their children had experienced, first in their home countries and then at the hands of our government and these private prison contractors, that I cannot possibly fit them all in one sermon. Even worse, immigration official are denying most asylum cases and issuing deportation orders for entire families, despite the fact that these families are clearly facing severe threats and possible murder if returned to their home countries.

I wish I could let these immigrants speak for themselves today also. They have shown such great courage. I can share with you, with their permission, the words of one of them wrote down.

“My name is Bobbie (not his real name-I changed it) and I am eleven years old. I have been threatened and taunted because I have a language problem. Children at school have teased me, bullied me, hit me and taken my money.

At times I would come home from school with my clothes torn and dirty and I would be so depressed that I didn’t want to leave the house and never wanted to go back to school.

These schoolmates are part of a gang who were also extorting money from my mother. Even the neighbors (believed to be members of the same gang) threatened to harm me and my family. They have said they would kill me because they think I am a homosexual. When my sister tried to defend me, she too became the target of mistreatment and threats.

As children with a woman alone, there is no one to protect us. If I have to go back, we believe that the gangs will follow through on their threats and harm us – because they can. The police are either unwilling or unable to assist us and so we are defenseless in our country.”

When Bobbie’s mother brought him and his sister here to ask for asylum, we locked them up in the Karnes City detention center, despite the fact that they had been issued an initial finding of a credible fear of being harmed or killed if they return to their home country.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

And yet we do the opposite. We bind the angels, and we clip their wings and far too often we toss them back into a torturous hell on earth.

When I was a kid in school, we were taught about episodes in U.S. history that had come to be thought of as stains on the soul of the nation.

– The slaughter and subjugation of natives.
– Slavery, of course.
– Jim Crowe.
– Lynching.
– Imperialism
– McCarthyism
– The Japanese internment camps.

And in our time, I fear that the polluting of our national soul is escalating, a cancer spreading through our very core. The disproportionate execution of black lives by law enforcement, a criminal justice and corrections system gone wild and these modern day internment camps imposed upon immigrant women and their children, these are all just different manifestations of that same cancer – a cancer rooted in racist and classist systems that in turn support an excessively unequal distribution of wealth and power.

But on this Mother’s Day, in this, our time, I think we have a choice. After all, we are still living in our time.

And we can rise up together, a chorus of voices crying out in harmony, “This is not the history we will allow to be written. This is not the story we will allow to be told about our time.”

This will not continue in our name. This will not be done with our taxes.

This makes a mockery of the values we were taught are at the core of our nation.

This violates the principals that we affirm and promote as Unitarian Universalists.

We have a different vision – a vision of beloved community wherein all people are enabled to live lives of dignity, where we act from a spirit that there is enough for each of us rather than out of a culture of scarcity.

We have a vision of offering hospitality to strangers, treating them as if they might well be angels among us.

Now, I know that challenges like these can seem so huge and overwhelming. It is easy to loose hope. It easy to feel that one person cannot possibly make a difference.

I will tell you there is hope. We have won against family detention before. A federal district judge has recently issued a preliminary ruling that immigrant family detention must stop. The final ruling is in less than 30 days, and no doubt the private prison contractors and the forces that fear the stranger will be working hard to appeal or find other ways around this ruling. So now is the time to make our voices heard.

At the social action table today after the service, you can meet a representative of Grassroots Leadership, one of our partners fighting against family detention, and get information about how you can get involved in their efforts, as well as those of many of our other partners. While you’re there, be sure to find out about the immigration action group “Inside Amigos” we are forming right here at the church.

From participating in campaigns to call for an end to family detention, to visiting these women and children, to supporting their legal costs, to providing backpacks with supplies for the kids if they do get released, our many al1d varying efforts all added together really can make a difference.

On this Mother’s Day, in this, our time, in the history that is yet to be written, we have never had a greater opportunity, never been called more to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice. May this be so. May this be the story that we write together. See you at the social action table.

Benediction

Now, as we go out into our world;
May the covenant that binds us together dwell in your heart and nourish your days,
May the mission that we share inspire your thoughts and light your way,
May the spirit of this beloved community go with you until next we are gathered again.

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.

 

Choosing to Bless the World

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Meg Barnhouse
May 5, 2015

The poem “Choosing to Bless the World” by Rebecca Parker is the subject of this Sunday’s sermon. “Your gifts – whatever you discover them to be – can be used to bless or curse the world… What will you do with your life’s gifts?”

Sermon:

Rebecca Parker, who recently retired as President of the UU seminary in Berkeley wrote a beautiful poem that is the text of my sermon this morning. It’s titled “Choosing to Bless the World.” Just the title would have set my people off, the people of my childhood religion. “Hate the world,” is what their Scripture says in one place, and they take that seriously. “Worldly” is a word used for someone who likes this place too much, who knows fine wines or good clothes.

In a newsletter I just got from a spiritual teacher I’ve learned from in the past, she’s now saying that you need to realize everything is an illusion. I just don’t know how that helps. How is it good to live in this live with the people on this planet and spend that life trying to rise above, trying to believe that none of it’s real?

 

CHOOSING TO BLESS THE WORLD
by Rebecca Parker

PART ONE

Your gifts-whatever you discover them to be-
can be used to bless or curse the world.

The mind’s power,
The strength of the hands,
The reaches of the heart,
The gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting

Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
Bind up wounds,
Welcome the stranger,
Praise what is sacred,
Do the work of justice
Or offer love.

Any of these can draw down the prison door,
Hoard bread,
Abandon the poor,
Obscure what is holy,
Comply with injustice
Or withhold love.

You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?

Choose to bless the world.

 

Many of us have spent the last week thinking and feeling about Baltimore, about more evidence of the brutality of some law enforcement officers toward people of color. We’ve heard the voices asking why it took destruction of property to bring the nation’s attention to the protests, when the peaceful protests have been ongoing but ignored. We’ve wondered why it took a video from South Carolina of an officer shooting an unarmed man in the back as he was running away, then planting evidence at the scene to make us white folks acknowledge that sometimes the police officer will lie about what happened. My heart is broken over and over as another unarmed black man is given an unofficial death sentence for a petty crime, or for no crime at all. I feel rage.

What are we to do? Do we despise people and hate this world? Do we sneer at our neighbors who dance and have drinks on the patio in this beautiful weather as if nothing bad were happening? They have forgotten about the girls living in captivity with Boko Haram. They aren’t thinking about the filth pouring into our ground water. They aren’t aware of the helpless victims of the earthquake in Nepal.

No, we don’t sneer at our neighbors. In fact, we join them on the patio for drinks and we dance under the trees in our Texas spring. There is ugliness in the world, and beauty too. It has always been this way.

 

PART TWO

The choice to bless the world can take you into solitude
To search for the sources of power and grace;
Native wisdom, healing, and liberation.

More, the choice will draw you into community,
The endeavor shared,
The heritage passed on,
The companionship of struggle,
The importance of keeping faith,
The life of ritual and praise,
The comfort of human friendship,
The company of earth
The chorus of life welcoming you.

None of us alone can save the world.
Together-that is another possibility waiting.

 

We choose to bless the world here at First UU with an endeavor shared. Our mission is our endeavor. We ask as a community how to bless the world. We choose to bless the world with “a heritage passed on.” We teach our history, the wisdom and bravery of our forbearers, the justice they accomplished. We live ritual and praise. Those rituals help us save the world. We light candles, we sing together, we teach the children or support those who do. We bid one another goodbye when the time comes.

We have had a lot of loss in this congregation this year. We’ve lost people who are very dear to us. We gather in community so that our grief can be shared, so that our memories can be shared as well, so that we can tell stories together.

We remind one another that love does not die with death. We keep loving the people we loved, even though they are physically gone. We sit out in the spring evenings and enjoy the life of our town, our friends, enjoy the parts of our bodies that work well, because it would be wrong to give up enjoyment to grief, to give up living to fight the powers. Yet we do gather to fight the powers of injustice. We share that struggle as well. It’s a good thing, too, since one voice raised for gun safety, one voice raised for fairness for immigrants? one voice raised for more accountability in policing is not heard the way a gathered voice is heard.

When we become “the yellow shirts,” as some people call us, when we go talk to legislators or stand witness at detention centers or repair someone’s home or shelter homeless men in the winter, our presence is felt. And we can have joy in doing those things when we do them together. We can have fun.

 

PART THREE

The choice to bless the world is more than an act of will,
A moving forward into the world
With the Intention to do good.
It is an act of recognition, a confession of surprise, a grateful acknowledgment
That in the midst of a broken world
Unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide.

There is an embrace of kindness that encompasses all life, even yours.

 

We have all had experiences of the embrace of kindness. I am hoping that we can practice kindness as energetically as we practice being right: about grammar, history and politics. We are so right. It’s fun to be right. Let’s see if we can feel the embrace of kindness encompass all life. Even ours. But that kindness is for all beings, and it demands a guardian attitude sometimes, sometimes a witnessing to what is right, a standing with those who are wronged, a “benevolent rage.”

 

PART FOUR

And while there is injustice, anesthetization, or evil
There moves
A holy disturbance,
A benevolent rage,
A revolutionary love,
Protesting, urging, insisting
That which is sacred will not be defiled.
Those who bless the world live their life as a gesture of thanks
For this beauty
And this rage.

 

We are grateful for the beauty and the rage.

My faith (and I may be wrong) leads me to live here in the world, to turn my attention to loving it, to living in the body, not transcending it, not wandering through as if it were all an illusion. Wanting to make it better while we are here. I think we UUs are called to bless the world. Ours is not an other worldly faith, it is a this-worldly faith. Most people use the word “bless” to mean send good wishes. The I Ching says to bless means to help. The Hebrew for blessing “bareich” means to draw God down into a thing, a person or a situation, to expand it with the Holy, to saturate it with the Divine.

This world can break your heart. Time will break your body. We can choose to bless and not to curse with all the powers left to us.

We can bless the world by praying, by saying blessings, by loving, by working to make things better, by writing checks, depending on our time of life, and on our temperament, and on the calling of our soul. We will take a little time to bless the person to our right, then our left. Think good thoughts, wish good things, pray for them by holding them in light or wrapping them in sacred dark or however you do it.

Let me close with part of a poem by Marge Piercy:

 

THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY (excerpt)
by Marge Piercy

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.

 

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.

 

The impossible Task

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 26, 2015

Second in our fairy tale sermon series, “Rumpelstiltskin” tells the story of a girl asked to spin straw into gold. She meets a trickster who solves her problem, but at what price? Rev. Meg recalls the tale of “The Impossible Task.”

Rumpelstiltskin

Once there was a miller who was poor, but who had a beautiful daughter. Now it happened that he had to go and speak to the king, and in order to make himself appear important he said to him, “I have a daughter who can spin straw into gold.”

The king said to the miller, “That is an art which pleases me well, if your daughter is as clever as you say, bring her tomorrow to my palace, and I will put her to the test.”

And when the girl was brought to him he took her into a room which was quite full of straw, gave her a spinning-wheel and a reel, and said, “Now set to work, and if by tomorrow morning early you have not spun this straw into gold during the night, you must die.”

Thereupon he himself locked up the room, and left her in it alone. So there sat the poor miller’s daughter, and for the life of her could not tell what to do, she had no idea how straw could be spun into gold, and she grew more and more frightened, until at last she began to weep.

But all at once the door opened, and in came a little man, and said, “Good evening, mistress miller, why are you crying so?”

“Alas,” answered the girl, “I have to spin straw into gold, and I do not know how to do it.”

“What will you give me,” said the manikin, “if I do it for you?”

“My necklace,” said the girl.

The little man took the necklace, seated himself in front of the wheel, and whirr, whirr, whirr, three turns, and the reel was full, then he put another on, and whirr, whirr, whirr, three times round, and the second was full too. And so it went on until the morning, when all the straw was spun, and all the reels were full of gold.

By daybreak the king was already there, and when he saw the gold he was astonished and delighted, but his heart became only more greedy. He had the miller’s daughter taken into another room full of straw, which was much larger, and commanded her to spin that also in one night if she valued her life. The girl knew not how to help herself, and was crying, when the door opened again, and the little man appeared, and said, “What will you give me if I spin that straw into gold for you?”

“The ring on my finger,” answered the girl.

The little man took the ring, again began to turn the wheel, and by morning had spun all the straw into glittering gold.

The king rejoiced beyond measure at the sight, but still he had not gold enough, and he had the miller’s daughter taken into a still larger room full of straw, and said, “You must spin this, too, in the course of this night, but if you succeed, you shall be my wife.”

Even if she be a miller’s daughter, thought he, I could not find a richer wife in the whole world.

When the girl was alone the manikin came again for the third time, and said, “What will you give me if I spin the straw for you this time also?”

“I have nothing left that I could give,” answered the girl.

“Then promise me, if you should become queen, to give me your first child.”

Who knows whether that will ever happen, thought the miller’s daughter, and, not knowing how else to help herself in this strait, she promised the manikin what he wanted, and for that he once more spun the straw into gold.

And when the king came in the morning, and found all as he had wished, he took her in marriage, and the pretty miller’s daughter became a queen.

A year after, she brought a beautiful child into the world, and she never gave a thought to the manikin. But suddenly he came into her room, and said, “Now give me what you promised.”

The queen was horror-struck, and offered the manikin all the riches of the kingdom if he would leave her the child. But the manikin said, “No, something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world.”

Then the queen began to lament and cry, so that the manikin pitied her.

“I will give you three days, time,” said he, “if by that time you find out my name, then shall you keep your child.”

So the queen thought the whole night of all the names that she had ever heard, and she sent a messenger over the country to inquire, far and wide, for any other names that there might be. When the manikin came the next day, she began with Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar, and said all the names she knew, one after another, but to every one the little man said, “That is not my name.”

On the second day she had inquiries made in the neighborhood as to the names of the people there, and she repeated to the manikin the most uncommon and curious. Perhaps your name is Shortribs, or Sheepshanks, or Laceleg, but he always answered, “That is not my name.”

On the third day the messenger came back again, and said, “I have not been able to find a single new name, but as I came to a high mountain at the end of the forest, where the fox and the hare bid each other good night, there I saw a little house, and before the house a fire was burning, and round about the fire quite a ridiculous little man was jumping, he hopped upon one leg, and shouted –

‘Today I bake, tomorrow brew, the next I’ll have the young queen’s child. Ha, glad am I that no one knew that Rumpelstiltskin I am styled.'”

You may imagine how glad the queen was when she heard the name. And when soon afterwards the little man came in, and asked, “Now, mistress queen, what is my name?”

At first she said, “Is your name Conrad?”

“No.”

“Is your name Harry?”

“No.”

“Perhaps your name is Rumpelstiltskin?”

“The devil has told you that! The devil has told you that,” cried the little man, and in his anger he plunged his right foot so deep into the earth that his whole leg went in, and then in rage he pulled at his left leg so hard with both hands that he tore himself in two.

Sermon

When I was in my twenties I studied dream interpretation with a Jungian analyst who had retired from CT to the mountains near Asheville, NC. She had an enormous Bernese Mountain dog named Rigi who would lean against your knee while you talked. I would bring my dreams to her and she would teach me using my own material. We were discussing the meaning of a dream, and I’d come up with two or three things it could have meant to my life. She was nodding. “Well, is it this one or this other one, do you think?” I asked her. Meg, it’s not usually either/or, she said. It’s often both/and. Or, yes, all.

Here is a young woman who finds herself in trouble because her father bragged – lied – about how gifted she was. “She can spin straw into gold,” he told the king, and she said nothing. Not a peep. Was she intimidated? Scared of her father? Didn’t want to embarrass him? Did she hope that somehow she could figure it out? Did she like that description of herself? The king puts her in the room, not with a sweet “See what you can do, missy,” but “If you don’t make this happen, you’ll die.” Shut into the room full of straw, and tried a couple of spins and realized she couldn’t figure it out.

Sandra Cisneros writes about being in the south of France as a penniless grad student, being invited for dinner by another Latino couple who were going to serve Mexican food. Her hosts assumed she could make tortillas because she was Mexican. Her mother was born in Chicago, and her mother’s people were country folk who made flour tortillas. Her father’s people were middle class from Mexico City, and they went to the corner store for corn tortillas. She had never made one in her life. They tossed corn flour at her and told her to go for it. She thought of that poor girl in the roomful of straw. Then she figured it out. They weren’t pretty, but they tasted ok, her first tortillas.

The Impossible Task is a trope that appears in tales of every culture. The labors of Hercules, Cinderella having to separate spilled peas and lentils before she can go to the ball, Lucy and Ethel at the candy factory.

Our girl broke straw and wept, more and more desperate. No little birds came fluttering in, like they did with Cinderella. She hadn’t helped some ants who came to save the day. She had no kindly fairy godmother who would help her for free.

Her desperation calls out to a little gremlin who appears at her side and offers to help. He asks what she’ll give him to do the job. She gives him her necklace. He spins all of the straw in to lustrous, gleaming gold. The king is pleased. Her father is pleased. How delicious! She gets to keep her life. Does she come clean? No. She lets herself get locked into a larger room with more straw. Straw is good, and it has its uses, but it’s not gold, surely, and the king wanted more gold. Daddy wasn’t willing to rescue his special child, and so she found herself in tears again, faced with an impossible task. The little man comes back, takes her ring this time, and spins the straw into gold. The king and the girl’s dad are so happy! She’s so miserable!

This is a familiar situation to so many of us, especially when we’re young. Over our heads, expectations seeming to force us into taking on more than we can do. We accomplish seemly impossible things, pull them out somehow, with the help of some inspiration, some little bit of magic, some superhuman leap. We write the paper, we pull the all-nighter, we take care of our parent’s emotional needs even though we are only a kid, we close the deal.

It’s a triumph. But it costs. I’m not saying that calling upon that little bit of magic, that superhuman effort, is bad. I’m not saying it’s good. As my teaching analyst would have said, “Meg, it’s a just-so story.” It’s just so. She keeps going. With the final impossible task she is offered the life of her dreams. The stakes have been raised. You will be queen. If there is a child from this marriage, you will give it to me.

She doesn’t know whether the king will marry her, or if she’ll have a child, so she finds herself making a promise. She makes a vow, but doesn’t have all the information. He accomplishes this last impossible task, and the king marries her. He’s so happy about all that gold. She has a child, and loves that child with the power of a parent to love a child. Did she ever think about the little magic man? Who knows? One day, though, he appeared. He said he was there to claim his prize. She offers him necklaces and rings beyond measure, but he wants this love of her life, heart of her heart.

How do you get out of such a bargain? It’s like all the Appalachian Jack tales where Jack has made a deal with the devil to sell his soul. Desperate people do desperate things. When you’re backed into a corner you might marry someone you shouldn’t marry, you might do a crime if you think it will get you out of your mess, you might borrow money from a payday lender, or sell your soul to the devil. Robert Johnson, the blues man, was supposed to have done that. I found an article in a Fantasy magazine about how to cheat the devil if you’d sold your soul and you wanted it back. This little man was a kindly magic man, I think. He gave the queen three days to do the research and find out his name. If she could tell him his name in three days, she could keep her child. I don’t know why he gave her three days. He was within his rights to claim the child right away, but this is how the story goes. The queen is part of us, and the little magic man is part of us. So is the king, and the straw, and the gold. This is a story about naming, about finding your power. She sends her researchers throughout the kingdom to find her answer. As you heard in the story for all ages, for the next two nights the little magic man comes to her to find out if she’s learned his name. She cannot guess it. The third day, though, she’s gotten her answer from one of her hunters, who heard the little man gloating while dancing around his house. She pretends not to know it, but then she nails it!

He gets so mad that he stamps his foot so hard the earth swallows him up and he is never seen again.

Some scholars say this is a story that arose out of the anxiety created by the Industrial Revolution. Girls were leaving their families and working for the first time. They were making gold for the factory owners and they had their own money for the first time. Maybe folks were worried that it would hurt the children. Maybe that it would give the girls too much power. In a Patriarchal culture, independence in females has always caused anxiety.

Or it could be a story about growing up, figuring something out. I think this is a story of the beginning of a journey of the soul. The beginning of a journey from the desperate need to please, the willingness to submit to the expectations of others, at great cost to oneself. The queen has made the journey from scared young woman trying to please everyone to claiming her woman hood, and using all the resources as her command to protect her child and save her own life. She did it by tackling a task that was too much for her: transforming everyday ordinary material into something of value. She needed help doing it, and that help cost her. Lots of us face this. We throw ourselves at a goal, dig deep and make it happen. We get through school, we write books while we take care of our young children. We start businesses, we navigate relationships while working while raising families, we create art which doesn’t bring in any money to speak of, yet in stubbornness we continue and somehow, with help, we make it happen. Much is stripped away from us. We owe people. We get addicted to work or to adrenaline, we constantly balance pleasing others and finding our own authentic work. Our task is to name the beings we owe. Once we name them, they lose much of their power over us. The power of naming is strong in world tales. “The Tao which can be named is not the Tao,” says the Scripture of Taoism. Knowing the name of God is so powerful, the Jewish faith asks that one says “The Lord,” even when the letters of the name of God are there in the Scripture. Salespeople say your name over and over to try to influence you.

I was doing impossible things and realized that the name of the magic helping me was adrenaline. I was an adrenaline junkie and it was costing me. Pride is another little gremlin. I resisted the thought that I was just a human woman. I don’t know why that felt embarrassing to me. When I was a therapist, a young therapist, people would come to me saying “We’ve been through six therapists already. You are our last hope.” That used to hook me. I would work harder on people’s marriages than they did. I’d work harder on a teenager’s health than anyone else in the family would. Finally I realized what it was costing me. Then I became wiser. When people would say “We’ve been through six therapists, and you’re our last hope,” I would say “If six therapists haven’t been able to help you, I probably wont be able to either.” “Just try, ok?” “Ok, I’ll just try.” That was much better.

What is the name of the little bit of magic you use to do impossible things? It’s not bad, it’s not good, but it’s good to know what it’s costing you.

And this whole story takes an ordinary experience and gives it shine and value, it teaches us. If it sticks with you, wrestle with it for a while. If not, let it go and wait for the next 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 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.

 

Building the world we dream about

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Marisol Caballero, Ann Edwards, Rob Feeney, Barbara Abbate
April 19, 2015

Rev. Marisol Caballero and members of the “Building the World We Dream About” Class have been participating in an anti-racism course for the past two years. The worship service is delivered by its participants.

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.

 

How many plagues will it take?

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 12, 2015

The Plagues of Egypt were ten calamities that Israel’s God inflicted upon Egypt to persuade the Pharaoh to release the ill-treated Israelites from slavery. In our culture’s story, who or what is the pharaoh who won’t let the people go? Who is enslaved by this pharaoh? What can be done? How Many Plagues Will It Take?

Our Jewish neighbors and cousins just got through celebrating Passover.

We have a Seder meal here every year, where we tell the story of Passover, and where we have to sit in front of food for a long time without eating it, which is hard. Some of you weren’t there, so I’m going to tell you the story again this morning here at the beginning.

The Hebrew people were enslaved in Egypt. How did they get there? Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob had twelve sons (and some daughters). They sold one of their brothers to traveling salespeople in a caravan and he was taken to Egypt. They soaked his coat of many colors in the blood of an animal and told their father he was dead. Joseph had many adventures in Egypt, and ended up being an advisor to the Pharaoh. He brought his brothers and their families down to live in Egypt when there was famine in the land where they had been living. They lived well there and multiplied. Then, it says, “There arose a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.”

Gradually the Hebrew people were enslaved. Moses kills the overseer. Finds out people know. Helps the seven daughters water their flocks, marries one of them. Tends flocks. Sees burning bush. God calls him to lead but he is dubious. God performs a series of miracles to convince him. Staff to snake, hand leprous then healed. Hesitant. Aaron will speak for you.

A series of plagues – Blood, frogs, gnats, flies, dead animals, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, first born were killed and finally the exodus.

This month our Green Sanctuary committee has put together a slew of activities for our Spring Into Action project. With these activities we are combatting some modern day plagues.

Our dependence on fossil fuels, world wide, is poisoning the air. NASA photographs show dirty air from China swirling over the Saudi peninsula, over Africa, to the US and onward around. We trust ourselves too much and attempt to do things to get more fuel that have unforeseen consequences. We try to modify grains to feed the world better, and we do, but then we get arrogant. World bank, seed copyrighting, etc… farmer suicides.

We rely on control to keep the elite on top. Violence pervades our human race. The rich have become apathetic or merciless.

Now, some will say this is different because in the text God sent the plagues to curse an elite who were stealing the lives and labor of an oppressed people. These mostly are plagues we bring on ourselves. We are violent because of fear. We are greedy because of fear. Some of the plagues have come because we have trusted our knowledge too much, We wanted to cure famine, and we have, except for those caused by war, but we’ve created problems. The insecticide in our corn has killed butterflies.

Maybe fear is the Pharaoh. Maybe arrogance is the Pharaoh. Inside us is the one holding on and the one who must let go. This is not just a sermon for middle class comfortable people who have the option now of dealing with our own inner well being. We must let our inner Moses rise against the greed that controls politics, where corporations who aren’t interested in the public good buy a climate that lets them do whatever they want to. This is the planet we live on. There is no promised land to which we can go. We must see the oppression all around us and continue to work to see how we benefit from it and to call it out degrade and dismantle it. Our promised land is the Beloved Community, and we are making our way toward it.

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.

 

The Cellist of Sarajevo

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 5, 2015

Vedran Smailovic played his cello as mortars were falling on his street. His courage shone a light on the insanity of war. The service features a choir piece inspired by his story composed by Kiya Heartwood and featuring cellist Anna Park & guitarist Klondike Steadman.

This is Easter, which is about life and death.

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.
Deuteronomy 30:19 New International Version (NIV)

Every day the choice between life and death is set before us. Some situations write it large, our choice, in flaming letters. Today’s story is about Vedran Smailovic, the Principle cellist in the Sarajevo Opera. Sarajevo was the capital city of a section of Yugoslavia called Bosnia-Hertigovina. It was a modern city of about half a million people. Yugoslavia was breaking up, with complicated factions you don’t need to hear all the details of for this story. Troops laid siege to the city in what was to be the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. It lasted nearly four years. Life, for the people there, became a daily search for food and water. Nearly 14 thousand people died in the siege, 5 thousand of those civilians.

There was a bakery which was still open down the street from Vedran Smailovic’s apartment. People lined up every day to buy bread, despite mortar shelling and sniper fire that claimed innocent lives every day. On May 27th, 1992, a mortar shell hit right where the people were standing in line for bread. It was total carnage, with 22 people dead and many wounded. Helping the wounded, Smailovic wanted to do something. He wasn’t a politician or a soldier. He had his cello. The next day he dressed in his tux and tails and, sitting on a chair scorched by flames, he sat in the hole left by the mortar shell’s explosion and played his cello. The piece he chose to play was Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor, written from a fragment of manuscript found in the ruins of Dresden, Germany, after the firebombing of that city during WW II. He was taking the chance of being fired on by snipers or killed by more shelling, but this was his way of answering the war. People gathered to listen.

“Then he went to other sites where shells had taken the lives of Sarajevo’s citizens. He played there, and he played in graveyards. He played at funerals at no charge, even though the Serbian gunners would target such gatherings. His music was a gift to all hiding in their basements with rubble above their heads, a voice for peace for those daily dodging the bullets of the snipers. As the reports of Smajlovic’s performances on the shattered streets spread, he became a symbol for peace. A reporter questioned whether he was crazy to play his cello outside in the midst of a war zone. He countered, “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?” Daniel Buttry

We are not being shelled here, but we still face the choice between life and death every day.

I want to tell you about my friend Marsha, who is dying. She has so many things wrong with her she doesn’t even bother listing them. Hospice came a couple of years ago, but six months later they left. She drives a big Oldsmobile 25 mph so if she has a heart attack on the way to the grocery store she won’t hurt anyone. Marsha is a poet. We met when I used this poem of hers in a church newsletter. It’s called

Fearing Paris

Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side,
you decided to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”

Marsha Truman Cooper

About a month after the newsletter was put on the internet, I got a package from California. It was a book of this woman’s poems with a letter. She was “ego-surfing the Net;” she was happy that I had used her poem, and here were some more

I sent her a thank you note, along with one of my books. I didn’t hear from her for a long time, and I had a little worry that sending my book may have seemed like a smart-aleck thing to do. Maybe I should have just appreciated her work and not said “here, I’m a writer too!” I decided I would call her.

I got the answering machine. I was in the middle of saying “Marsha, hi, this is Meg Barnhouse calling,” when I heard the receiver lifted and someone going “wheeeeeeeeeee.” We started talking, and I told her how much I was enjoying her poems.

“I can send you everything, for free,” she said. It’s just that -“

“What?”

“Some of them are – spicy.”

“Yahoo,” I said.

“Whew, well, that’s out of the way, then,” she said. She had just experienced a conversion a few years ago that had really heated up her marriage, she said. “Conversion to what?”

“Oh, I hesitate to say, because you might think it’s so weird, but I’m not like that, I mean, it’s Roman Catholicism, but … you know…. Some religious people are just awful.”

I said that didn’t sound weird to me. I knew Catholics who were very nice, not awful at all.”

How did that heat up her marriage? “Well, since I got this new dimension to my life my husband seems to like me even better.” Her laugh started low and ended high, like a waterfall running backwards.

She said she and her husband had been married 37 years, and last night she had a dream about him, that they were making out in a parking lot, scandalizing the passers-by. She was thoughtful and bawdy and she was having fun. She mentioned in passing that she was sick. “I’m sorry you’re sick,” I said. “I hope you feel better soon.” She said, “Well, I may as well lay it all out for you. My heart is shutting down. My kidneys stopped working a few years ago, and then my heart, and I just got the news that my liver is going. So, I’m dying.”

She said she is praying all the time now, not to be healed, not to die, usually, except when the pain gets too bad. When she is appreciating, she says, the pain almost goes away. “I’m not feeling pain at all right now while we’re talking, so I must be appreciating a lot.” She said she just prays to feel love for Jesus and to feel his love for her. “It’s pleasure,” she said. “Love is pleasure, and if people say they love someone who never gives them pleasure of any kind, it’s a lie.”

I said, “That’s like some people saying they love a God they’re really scared of. I tell people don’t believing God who doesn’t believe in you,”

She said “YES, or even LIKE you.”

She said for her, that is what her religion is about, loving Jesus and being loved by him. I said that was it for me too, only I would call it The Spirit. “Same thing.”

“Yeah.”

“I asked to be shown heaven every day,” she said, “and I’ve seen it a lot. It’s different every day. Yesterday heaven was a white Rolls Royce, and I was sitting inside. You know, I’ve never been inside a Rolls, but I could smell the leather.”

Our Unitarian forefather, Henry David Thoreau wrote,

“When it is time to die, let us not discover that we never lived.”

My friend the poet is very sick, but alive.

You don’t even have to be actively dying to see this choice between death and life presented to you on a daily basis. Where are you going to put your focus? One the things that are wrong or the things that are going well? How are you going to let your words out into the world? To hurt or to help? Are you going to have a life of grumbling and fear or an open life where you make room for joy and creativity? Are you going to be stagnant or move forward?

We become soulful people here, religious people, to learn to be kind when it’s not convenient, to learn to forgive, to accept help. We are practicing to live more peaceful and joyous lives, but we are also practicing to live well and, eventually, to die well.

Mary Oliver captures that sentiment in her poem,
When Death Comes.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

So, you lions of courage, precious to the earth, don’t be just visiting here. Live deep and love generously. Everything is a brotherhood and a sisterhood. Life is unstoppable, and it will go on. And we are all part of it, now and forever.

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.

 

Palm Sunday

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 29, 2015

Falling on the Sunday before Easter, the story of Palm Sunday is about Rabbi Jesus traveling into Jerusalem, even though he knew he was likely to be killed there. He refused to be treated as a hero or a king, even though that’s what the people wanted.

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.

 

Our UUnique Gifts

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Jonalu Johnstone
March 22, 2015

It may be trite to say that each of us has unique gifts, but what are the implications of that? Our individual differences mean that we never see the world exactly the same way. What a challenge for living together in the world! But Unitarian Universalism gives us a head start. What a resource, if we can bring ourselves to offer it.

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.

 

Sacred Vulnerability

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 15, 2015

We live in a culture that often values a kind of hyper-individualism and self-reliance, which can lead us to project an air of invincibility. Yet research by Brene Brown and others in the social sciences indicates that the opposite may be the key to living wholeheartedly. Being willing to embrace and express our vulnerability may be the source of authenticity, human connection, and empathy, as well as the ability to both love and accept being loved.

Call to Worship

Put Away the Pressures of the World
By Erika A. Hewitt

As we enter into worship, put away the pressures of the world
that ask us to perform, to take up masks, to put on brave fronts.

Silence the voices that ask you to be perfect.

This is a community of compassion and welcoming.
You do not have to do anything to earn the love contained within these walls.

You do not have to be braver, smarter, stronger, better
than you are in this moment to belong here, with us.

You only have to bring the gift of your body,
no matter how able;
your seeking mind, no matter how busy;
your animal heart, no matter how broken.

Bring all that you are, and all that you love, to this hour together.
Let us worship together.

Reading
From Brené Brown

No vulnerability, No empathy.

In a culture where people are afraid to vulnerable, you can’t have empathy.

If you share something with me something that’s difficult, in order for me to be truly empathetic, I have to step into what you’re feeling, and that’s vulnerable. So there can be no empathy without vulnerability…

You can’t access empathy if you’re not willing to be vulnerable…

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

Sermon

Here’s a quote that I really love, “Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.”

That’s from a series of online lectures by Dr. Brené Brown, a well know researcher, author and speaker from the University of Houston School of Social Work. She defines vulnerability as “exposure, uncertainty, and emotional risk”. I watched her lectures as a part of preparing for this sermon.

Dr. Brown says something else that I SO wish I had seen before I submitted the short description and title of this sermon for our newsletter.

While discussing people she has identified through her research that she calls the “wholehearted”, by which she means people who have embraced and can express their own vulnerability, and thereby are living more authentic, loving and connected lives, Dr. Brown says that embracing vulnerability doesn’t mean never complaining about the bad things that happen in life – the things that hurt. In fact, the wholehearted can complain as much as anyone else. They just do it in a specific and more life fulfilling way.

She says that they “piss and moan with perspective.” “Dang,” I thought, when I heard her say that, “Now that would have made a great sermon title”.

“Pissing and Moaning with Perspective” “A Unitarian Universalist take on the Problem of Suffering and Evil.” Actually, I think she’s Methodist or something.

Anyway, Dr. Brown goes on to say that while embracing our vulnerability is not weakness, neither does it mean we will never have problems, make mistakes or suffer. It is recognizing that we will, and loving ourselves and other people, not in spite of these things, but because of them.

To be alive is to be vulnerable. And yet our cultural norms favor extreme individualism and self-reliance that can strongly encourage us to attempt to a false sense of invincibility.

Paradoxically, cultivating this false sense of invincibility and certainty can drain our courage for loving and accepting being loved. It can lead to shaming and rob of us of the belonging and connection that are at the center of what it means to be fully human.

Now, I still struggle with all of this sometimes. A couple of Sundays ago, I had the pleasure of teaching one of our Sunday morning religious education classes for kindergarten and first grade children. After the lesson, it was too cold and rainy to let them go outside and play, so we had to come up with activities that they could do inside.

A few of them got bored and decided they would turn me into an indoor jungle gym. Soon, I found myself under siege by a group of five and six year olds demanding that I play with them by being their climbing, swinging and seesaw apparatus. I was outnumbered, out maneuvered and outlandishly on the verge of experiencing pure joy – if only I would let myself give in to it. And I resisted it.

Dr. Brown calls this resistance, “foreboding joy” – when we won’t let ourselves fully experience joyful moments because we start to project what can go wrong. We fear the joy because we know it will end. We start imagining all the sorrow that may come. It’s like we try to ward off the sorrow in our lives by stifling the joy. Yeah, that’ll work.

So, here’s all the foreboding and shaming thoughts I was having: “Oh my God, I have to keep them on the carpeted area or one of them will get hurt and it’ll all be my fault and the church will get sued and I’ll never get to work within Unitarian Universalism ever again.”

– and –

“What will their parents think if they come to pick them up and find that they’ve tackled their Sunday school teacher and taken over the classroom?”

– and –

“Good golly man, you have Reverend in front of your name now, you can’t be seen acting the fool with a bunch of first graders.”

Sometimes my shaming thoughts have a British accent. Luckily for me, the more I resisted, the more they upped the ante. Five and six year olds have a lot more energy and determination than me. So, I discovered that if I gave in and joined in the fun, they would actually more easily accept some parameters like staying on the carpeted area.

And it was pure joy.

Why do we adults so often experience shame around playfulness?

Here’s another Brené Brown quote, “Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it is also the birthplace of joy and creativity, of belonging, and of love.”

I went through all of that in a matter of just a few minutes. Plus, luckily, my back had healed enough by the following weekend that I was able to attend the 50th anniversary commemorative march in Selma.

Research conducted after the 1966 mass shooting from the U.T. tower here in Austin, as well as other such research, has found that one of the things people who commit such crimes tend to have in common is that they were not allowed to engage in play as children.

Some of the other research I looked at said that for adults to engage in playful activity is one of the most vulnerable things we can do, because in our culture we are often taught a very strong work ethic that shames such activities. To play, we also give up a sense of control and propriety and allow ourselves to lose our sense of time and place.

And yet, the research also shows that play is one of the ways we get in touch with our deeper and more authentic selves and risk allowing others to see us more deeply. One of the many wise things I think our senior minister, Meg Barnhouse, has done for First UU Austin has been to infuse our spirituality and religious practice with a sense of fun and playfulness.

In addition to the foreboding joy I mentioned earlier, Dr. Brown outlines a number of other ways that we avoid vulnerability and that ultimately rob of us of living fully. I don’t have time to go through all of them today but here are a few of the major ones that I think you’ll probably recognize.

“Perpetual disappointment” – you know folks who do this – these are the Eeyores of our world. “Oh well, best not get too excited because something’s gonna go wrong eventually.” Always the life of the party.

“Numbing” – These are the ways that we avoid feeling at all or at least dull our emotions to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Numbing include the things we normally think of as addictions such as alcohol and drugs, but also includes things like excessive television, eating, video games, smart phone use; working too much; buying too much, etc. After 911, we were told to all go shopping, right? Brown notes that “we are the most obese, in debt, addicted and medicated adult cohort in known human history. We numb.”

“Perfectionism” – She calls this the “20-Ton shield” when it comes to avoiding vulnerability, and of course, it is a trap because we can never be perfect, and perfectionism can stifle our internal drive to strive for excellence because even excellent will not be perfect, so why take any real risks at all? For me, it has some times been a way of sort of super-numbing.

I was the oldest child in my family growing up. Now, you may have heard about the oldest sibling syndrome wherein under stress, we can become over-functioning, something very closely related to perfectionism. Especially in anxious situations, over-functioners tend to try take care of everyone else – and maybe even micromanage a little: know what best for everyone, which is usually some level of perfection that’s impossible. My parents divorced when I was twelve and so I got an especially strong case of oldest child syndrome. It is something I still have to watch out for.

The other thing that happened after the divorce is that my grandparents on my mother’s side became like a second set of parents to me. They helped raise us. We spent as much time at their house as at our own. My Grandfather became my father figure, and I pretty much idolized them both. They became role models for me.

So when I got the call one day, about 17 years ago now, that my grandfather was in the hospital and it did not look good, I went into sort of an overfunctioner’s perfect storm. I didn’t stop to cry or grieve or feel anything. I called Wayne and started making plans to make the drive over to take care of my family. I was going to do this grieving thing perfectly!

And when we got to the hospital, and he was no longer conscious so that I did not even get to say goodbye, I didn’t cry or grieve. I took care of everyone else.

And when I got the call the next morning that he had died, I didn’t cry. I got up, got dressed and started planning and taking care of things. And even when I gave the eulogy at his funeral, I still didn’t cry, nor at the reception afterwards, nor on the drive back home when it was all done, nor after we got back home. I was too busy “functioning”.

And then, I think it was maybe a day later, I couldn’t find my glasses, and so I went out to our car, thinking maybe they had fallen under a seat or something and started searching for them. I didn’t find them, but I did find a map my grandfather had given me – he was a traveler and big on maps – and he had written his name on it. My grandfather had this habit of writing his name on all his belongings. Someone gave him one of those noisy, obnoxious, electronic engraving pens one time. Big mistake.

And suddenly, sitting there alone on the floorboard of the car, with no one left to take care of anymore but me, I ran out of ways to avoid it.

I started crying. And for a while it felt as if I might never stop.

A friend of mine who’s a playwright once had one of his characters, after having just lost her family in a car wreck, say, “I don’t have to cry now. I can cry tomorrow, or next week or next month or next year, because it’s never going to stop. It’s never going to stop hurting.”

I guess that was kind of what I had been doing – trying to put off feeling the hurt. It doesn’t work eventually, but his character was right about one thing. It never really does completely stop hurting. We just learn to carry it with us. And I think maybe that’s as it should be because for me it is also carrying them with us.

My grandparents are the people who taught me to have a love of nature. To this day, even though they have both been gone over 15 years now, I will be on a nature hike and see something so beautiful that it fills me with joy, and I will think that I have to call them and tell them about it and their old phone number, 409-962-2010 will still come into my head, and then I will remember that I can’t and it stings.

The thing is, somehow because of this, the joy of the experience is also deeper, greater, more complex. I call it a joy so full that it is an aching joy, rather than that foreboding joy we talked about earlier.

Writer and poet Kahlil Gibran said it like this, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

And that’s why numbing robs us of living fully. That’s the reason to seek lives of vulnerability and authenticity. If we refuse to allow sorrow to carve into our being, we will also never experience the fullness of that aching joy. The thing is, living vulnerably is hard, especially when we live in culture that often values the opposite, so if you work for a high-powered law firm or in a cutthroat corporate office, I don’t recommend starting there with practicing vulnerability.

But I do think we can start in our personal lives – with our families and friends. And I think that we can create in this church a space where we can bring our vulnerabilities and our whole selves, and eventually maybe it does spread to those more tougher, more difficult environments.

To do this, I think we have to understand not only what expressing vulnerability is, as I’ve been discussing, but we also have to also know what it is not.

It is not sympathy seeking or sharing every thought that comes into our heads. It is not expressing our feelings in a way that is harmful or shaming to others. It is not monitoring every conversation or lurking on email lists, online groups or at the back of meetings just looking for something to be hurt or offended by. That’s not practicing vulnerability, it’s just drama trolling.

I think maybe we start by being willing to ask for the space to be vulnerable and by being willing risk it – to reach out and say, “My son is in the hospital and I could use some help”, or “I just got that promotion I have been wanting at work, and I am thrilled and at the same time terrified over whether I am really capable of it, and I don’t have any where else to share it.” Too often in our culture of self-reliance, we do not ask for help even from our church.

I think, though, that we are creating in this congregation, a place where we can practice living authentically.

A place where we are allowed to be vulnerable and imperfect and to make mistakes and be forgiven for them rather than shamed for them.

A place where we are courageous enough for empathy to thrive. A place where we sometimes play with the spontaneity and abandon of young children. A place where we love and accept love and radiate that love out into our larger world.

I think we can create a space where life’s hallowed sorrows and aching joys can be sung into the rafters and held by beloved community.

What if we make that church?

In our increasingly individualistic, disengaged and power-centered world, wouldn’t creating “the church of sacred vulnerability” be subversive?

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.

 

Question box sermon

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 8, 2015

The Question Box sermon is a tradition in many UU congregations. Today Rev. Meg answers questions submitted by members of the congregation.

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.

 

The Red Shoes

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 1, 2015

First in a new fairy tale sermon series, this Sunday we’ll talk about the things that take over our lives and compel us to do things we would rather not do, go places we meant not to go. How do we retrieve our spirits?

Starting a fairy tale series, once a month or so, we’ll use a fairy tale as the text of a sermon. Fairy tales are like the dreams of a culture. In a dream, every part of the plot is part of the dreamer. Fairy tales tell a truth about the human journey.

I’m often invited to do workshops for my colleagues on humor and truth-telling. We use commonly told folk tales in the workshop as sermon texts, and I wish you could hear some of the masterful riffs on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Three Little Pigs. We have kinder, gentler versions of these tales than the Grimm ones. Lots of people since those two lawyers took down the stories from Huguenot maids have scurried to take the sex and gore out of them. The Greek myths, too, evolved over the centuries. Once in a while in these workshops, though, I’m surprised when, at the end of a sermon, the three little pigs sit down with the wolf to a delicious vegetable stew. What is up with that? Again, a lie, or just editing? The story has never presented itself as history, yet it still shocks me when the “real” story is altered.

The Red Shoes is a strange little story with a terrible ending. It may be only a fragment of a story, or it may be part of a series. These tales were told to the brothers Grimm, two lawyers, by Hugenot maids. There are many versions of this one, as of all of them, and this is the one told by Hans Christian Andersen.

The story.

A peasant girl named Karen is adopted by a rich old lady after her mother’s death and grows up vain and spoiled. Before her adoption, Karen had a rough pair of red shoes; now she has her adoptive mother buy her a pair of red shoes fit for a princess. After Karen repeatedly wears them to church, they begin to move by themselves, but she is able to get them off. One day, when her adoptive mother becomes ill, Karen goes to attend a party in her red shoes. A mysterious soldier appears and makes strange remarks about what beautiful dancing shoes Karen has. Soon after, Karen’s shoes begin to move by themselves again, but this time they can’t come off. The shoes continue to dance, night and day, rain or shine, through fields and meadows, and through brambles and briers that tear at Karen’s limbs. She can’t even attend her adoptive mother’s funeral. An angel appears to her, bearing a sword, and condemns her to dance even after she dies, as a warning to vain children everywhere. Karen begs for mercy but the red shoes take her away before she hears the angel’s reply. Karen finds an executioner and asks him to chop off her feet. He does so but the shoes continue to dance, even with Karen’s amputated feet inside them. The executioner gives her a pair of wooden feet and she works as a servant.

Hans Christian Andersen interpretation:

The girl is vain. Vanity keeps you from spirituality, it is never satisfied, and so must be cut out.

Jungian interpretation:

We have our hand made life. It fits us, it feels rich and colorful. We get tempted by something snazzy that comes along, and offers us shinier, more accessible pleasures.

The old lady is this offer of a better life, but she takes away the girl’s way of being in the world. Her value system, where she stands. They were thrown in the fire, and the girl’s nature was restricted.

She fed her hunger with a too-shiny version of her own nature, her own dance. It took off with her, because its connection to her was not reciprocal. They danced her. She could not take them off and then put them on again.

We fill the hunger with work, a relationship, substances. They run away with us. We find ourselves going right when we wanted to go left.

You have to go to your inner executioner when the dance gets too horrible. You can try to kill off just the addiction, but many times you have to change everything. All new friends. Sometimes a new place. New patterns. Ninety meetings in ninety days. Lose the old values, the old places you stood, lose your old dance entirely. Suffer. Work as a servant.

Other interpretations:

Your interpretation of the story has to do with your culture, your values. Is this a parable against vanity? Is she really punished with the loss of part of her body for that?

Is it about addictions? Things that take you where you didn’t want to go, trying to get to the place you remember?

Is it about your gifts. People like us might think red shoes are good, and if you want to wear red shoes, even to church, you are more than welcome to. We’ll celebrate them with you. Could it be your individuality? Your gifts? Your gifts will keep you dancing until you die. It will be a good dance sometimes, but every artists knows it can be a terrible dance too. Many artists cut out their art, many people sever themselves from their dreams and then live miserably, broken, like the soldier who activated the curse of the girl’s shoes.

What does it mean? People can feel their take on a story is the correct one, and everyone else is an idiot. Is the dress white and gold or black and blue? Fundamentalist militants allow their interpretation of religion to wipe away all of the principles they may once have had. The people who don’t agree with you are against you, and they must be rubbed out.

Someone else’s shoes indicate someone else’s dance, and if you find yourself doing someone else’s dance and that you’ve lost your smile and path and heart, then you are leading an inauthentic life. There’s no “sin” here for which Kate is being punished, nor for you when you find you’ve adopted someone else’s notion of how to think, how to worship, what’s a practical major in school, what’s the right kind of job.

Help comes from mentors, who may even be gone now. But whatever remains of them, perhaps only the spiritual presence or the vestiges inside you, they are there for a reason when you need them. Call on memories of “moments of pleasure” — these are meditations but with healing personal content. Lose yourself, or shed your old self in a dionysian ecstasy which in one sense is being torn apart by Maenads but in another is a dismantling in order for rejuvenation or rebirth. (as Marianne Williamson wrote: a nervous breakdown is a highly underrated path to enlightenment)

Your soul is whole. It is a constant pulse, a tidal force that pulls you to do what you need to do to be authentic.

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.

 

Expect the unexpected

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Kristian Schmidt
February 22, 2014

This Sunday we welcome the unexpected and celebrate that which is special among us. Guest ministers Kristian Schmidt and Christian Schmidt from churches in easter Massachucetts deliver the message.

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.

 

The book of Love

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 15, 2015

Let’s talk about love on this Valentine’s weekend. How can we learn to love one another and this planet on which we live? How can we get better at receiving love? We take a lesson from “The Book of Love”.

Sermon

This weekend is all about love. We’ve been sending greetings of love to friends and family, special ones to partners, spouses and lovers. There are ironic greetings, romantic ones, sexy and sweet and grumpy ones. Love comes in all the shimmering, sparkling shades of the rainbow, including shades of gray. About which the UU group Leather and Grace has come out with a statement, you can look it up online.

You may have heard me say that the purpose of life is to learn to love and be loved. Just my opinion, with no bearing on what you believe about its purpose, but there it is.

It is important to me to be honest about love, but I can only be honest from my perspective, my studies, my experience. When I was in seminary we learned that love was an act of will. You choose every day to love the people you love, the way you love them. I was married to a man I met in seminary for seventeen years. I often heard him say this to other people, that love was an act of will. After many years, this was embarrassing, unsatisfying. I wanted to be loved passionately, because I was fabulous, I wanted to feel it. When, for many many reasons I decided to end the marriage, I wondered if he might be able just to will not to love me any more. Easier for everyone. It turned out to be awful, harder, crazier than that, as most of you who have gone through a divorce already know.

Some people say love is complicated. In the Christian Scriptures there is a description of love in the letter to the Corinthians.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

One thing I love about the Christian Scriptures is that they proclaim that God is love. That is a basic foundational proclamation in that major religion, and I appreciate its followers who hold fast to that and stand on it with both feet. I find it interesting that some people whose whole religion says “God is Love” also sometimes seem to imagine a God who is not patient and kind, who is envious and boastful, easily angered, and who DEFINITELY keeps a record of wrongs. Do they not read their own Scriptures?

Human love relationships aren’t always patient and kind, even though we want to be. It’s hard for us not to keep a record of wrongs. They say that the happiest relationships are the ones where people have bad memories. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were many different loves, but never the same love twice.

Some of us are in love and others are between loves. Some are in long term relationships, and others are in ones that have just been born.

The text for this morning is a song sung by The Magnetic Fields

The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing

But I, I love it when you read to me
And you, you can read me anything

The book of love has music in it
In fact, that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

But I, I love it when you sing to me
And you, you can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know

But I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings
I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings

Songwriters: Warren Davis, George Malone, Charles Patrick
Published by: Lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC

You can sing me anything. You can read me anything. That’s courage. That’s vulnerability. Open to hearing about dumb things, transcendental things, instructions for dancing, opening heart shaped boxes. So many of us have rules about love. You open it, you close it. You dropped it, you pick it up. You hurt me, I hurt you. Don’t talk to me any more about former lovers, about money, about my drinking or using. For me, it’s nutrition or music theory. I don’t want to hear about bee pollen or 251 substitution in jazz or solfege. I’m wrong about that, though.

Is it courageous to be open to being read to, sung to from any page? There is plenty that masquerades as love, but is accusing and needy, tit-for-tat, abusive, eye-rolling, ignoring, withholding, or toxic. These are for sermons to come. The bad love series?

Real love is what we’re talking about today. It can still hurt. It can still be difficult, but in the midst of the struggle you have, at your core, the knowledge that this is what you want. The voice saying “GO! Save yourself!” Is not there. I think good love is medicine, whether it’s romantic, friendly, family, animal companion love, or watching videos of elephants who are friends with dogs. Love is powerful.

What about receiving it? Some of us are better at it than others I work on my own capacity to believe and feel that I’m loved. Every other day. Let me read you what I wrote about it.

I didn’t even make a New Year’s resolution this winter. I’m not sure why. For the last ten years or so my resolutions have been very short, and they have come to mind, one by one, in late December. The first one was “Tell the truth.” I never thought I didn’t tell the truth, but as I tried to keep the resolution on a moment-to-moment basis, I realized how much a sweet small lie lubricates social interactions. I found a way around those and counted down the months till I could indulge in them once again.

About some things, you just have to lie. Clogging, for example. I had someone ask me once how I liked clogging. (We are in the Appalachian region here, and there is a right good bit of it going on at fairs and festivals.) I answered that clog dancing held a special place in my heart. It does: the place where I imagine hell, if there were one, and what it would be like. For me it would be filling out paperwork while a flatbed truck full of white people clogged in the background to a speeded-up track of “Give Me That Old-Time Rock and RoiL” But I digress.

Telling the truth was what I paid attention to that whole year, discovering that my untruths mainly consisted of lies I told to myself.

“Be quiet” was the next year’s resolution. It floated into my head during prayer and meditation. I did an inner double take. “What? I make my living speaking. How can I be quiet?” The Universe responded with-well, with quiet. I had to figure it out. It turned out that I needed to pay attention to being quiet inside, to not having to have an answer for every question I was asked, to being content to let others dominate a group discussion, to not voicing every opinion that was in my head.

Over the years there have been some easy resolutions and some hard ones. Who could have known that the year I resolved to “enjoy life” would turn into one big challenge? There you go. The Universe/God/Spirit/Wisdom is like that sometimes.

This year no resolution came to mind. I’ve been working on a question, though: “What would it be like if you felt really loved?”

Maybe the resolution is to wonder about this question. When I feel loved, my mind breathes better. My body relaxes. My behavior steadies. Something in my spirit opens like a rose. I want to feel it if I can, from the people around me or from the Spirit of Love that flows like an ancient river through the universe.

On my first CD I printed a quotation from a letter Martha Graham sent to Agnes de Mille. According to Agnes de Mille: “I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy…. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly, “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

When I feel loved, it’s easy to keep the channel open, and that’s really what I want.

Maybe I could get really good at loving the world just every other day. Maybe on that day I could love myself as well. Just every other day, let go of self-improvement and challenging other people’s mistakes. I invite you to think about doing this, too. Every other day, maybe we could let go of wondering if we are good enough, of wondering if we are doing it right. Every other day rest, if we can, in the warm animal pleasures of wind, water, food, earth, friends, love, and beauty. Every other day put in abeyance the drive to feel that we are smart enough, thin enough, cool enough, doing enough.

The reason I wonder about doing it every other day is that, having read Kant, I have to ask what the world would be like if all of us did this every day. I’m not sure how well it would work. Maybe we would melt into self-satisfied goo. One the other hand, the world would be sour and clammy if we didn’t do it at all. So, on alternate days we can all agree that this is New Age pap, and we can sharpen our intellectual claws in ourselves and one another with edgy glee.

It’s February. Surrounded by talk of love, I’m growing aware that I do have a resolution for the year: I get to wonder about love. Maybe being grounded in love makes change easier, rather than lulling us into staying the same. Maybe if we felt safer we would grow more freely. What if we felt really loved? This year, I aim to find out.

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.