Spiritual Growth

June 29, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 29, 2014

Spiritual growth: this is more important for First UU than numerical growth. What might that look like for UUs? How do we know if it’s happening?

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Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 14 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.

What does it all mean?

June 22, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
June 22, 2014

A recent article in the UU World magazine by Doug Muder, entitled, “I Don’t ‘Believe in’ the Seven Principles,” brought up the difference between a belief and a vision. This assertion has the potential to change the way we as UUs respond to the often-asked question, “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” What about some of the other terms that we use casually to talk about our faith? What might they truly mean to us?

Call to Worship
By Amy Bowden Freedman

Once more, the earth has turned toward the light of the sun.
As we are bathed in the light of a new day,
So may we greet the dawning of fresh possibility.

Once more, we awaken from our slumber.
As our bodies rise
To meet the challenges and pleasures of living,
So may our hearts and minds open with promise.

Once more, we gather for worship.
As we join our voices in word and song,
So may this assembly bring forth wholeness.

Come, let us worship.

Reading
“You Get Used to It” by Barbara Merritt

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb in our congregation? Answer: none. We don’t change light bulbs. It is easy enough for us to sit in the darkness and remember the light of the past. As we honor the memory of a former brilliance, our task is to live within the confines and limitations of today.

True story. When I arrived in 1983, I was told that the lights under the sanctuary balcony didn’t work, never had worked, and couldn’t be fixed. It was not a big deal.

We have few services in the evenings, and there are plenty of lights in that sacred space that do work.

Only our new sexton, Ron Lundin, did not believe that they were forever broken. He decided to investigate. He took off the glass plate and found a thick, dark coating of dust and dirt.

He thought, “There’s no way it could just be the light bulbs, but I’ll put in a fresh one, just to see what happens.” And then the miracle occurred, “and there was light and it was good.”

Incredulous, he changed the bulbs in the other six fixtures, and light poured forth.

Apparently, the bulbs had burned out in 1939, and no one ever changed them. The dust he removed from the recesses was in place when Hitler invaded Poland and John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. We don’t know whether the seven bulbs burned out all at once or flickered off one at a time. In either case, someone decided the fixtures didn’t function, and that transmitted wisdom left us in the dark.

Many years ago I faced a similar situation at the parsonage where I lived in Illinois.

For five years, as I had washed dishes, I had stared out of a smudged, streaked, grimy kitchen window. ecause the window had been painted shut for decades, I accustomed myself to looking through the gray film. Then along came a professional painter, and not knowing the limitations of my world, he hit the window rim with a hammer. He “unstuck it” and took out the storm windows. The panes were washed and put back. The task required a total of twenty minutes.

For five years, I resigned myself to the inevitability of blurred vision. Sometimes we settle too quickly for “seeing through a glass darkly.” Sometimes the clarity and illumination we seek is close at hand. Conditions can change. Windows can open.

We just need to stop believing that we already have enough light.

Sermon “What Does it All Mean?”

“A lifelong unchurched man suddenly develops a vague religious urge and decides to join a church – any church. So he sets out to find one.

His first stop is a Roman Catholic church where he asks what he has to do to join.

The priest mentions diligent study and the affirmation of the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, then – just to see how much the man knows – asks him where Jesus was born.

“Pittsburgh,” he answers. “Get out!” cries the shocked priest.

Next stop is Southern Baptist where the seeker is told he would have to learn Bible verses, swear belief in the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds, swear off booze, and be baptized (“By immersion, not just some sissy sprinklin”). The Baptist preacher then, to see how much this man knows, asks him where Jesus was born. “Philadelphia?” he asks tentatively (once bitten, twice shy). “Get out, you heathen!” yells the preacher.

Our perplexed protagonist finally walks into a Unitarian church where he is told all he has to do is sign a membership card. “You mean I don’t have to renounce anything, swear to anything, or be dunked in anything?” “That’s right. We have no special tests for membership, no dogma. We support total individual freedom of belief.” “Then I’ll join! But tell me – where was Jesus born?” “Why, Bethlehem, of course.” The man’s face lights up. “I knew it was some place in Pennsylvania!”(http://stoney.sb.org/uujokes)

The biggest fallacy in explaining Unitarian Universalism is to say that, as UU’s, we can “believe whatever we want” because we don’t require a creedal test for membership in our churches. While we don’t have a set doctrine or a singular holy book, this is far from true. I remember a colleague telling me years ago about her time spent organizing a campus ministry program at an east coast university. The Campus Crusaders for Christ group had plastered the campus with posters about their meetings that read, “You’ve got questions? We’ve got answers.” So, the fledgling UU student group made posters, too. “You’ve got answers? We’ve got questions!” Certainty of theological belief is not the greatest gift of the religious liberal.

But, we have all found ourselves in this same position: someone who cannot pronounce the name of our church cocks their head to the side and asks with a skeptical tone, “If you don’t all believe in God or Jesus or the Bible, what do you believe in?” Well, here at First UU Church of Austin, we often lean against our mission statement as an explanation, which does say a good deal about what we come here to do, but it doesn’t talk about belief.

I remember explaining UUism to the mother of a teen patient when I was a hospital chaplain in San Francisco, years ago. From our previous conversation, I could tell she had very little experience of the world outside of the small town they had been transported from, and so, to answer her questions, I remember using a less eloquent, less concise version of what we stand for and believe, but with a similar gist of our mission statement we use here. She smiled and nodded and then informed me enthusiastically that the kind of church I am describing is called “born again” and that she had attended one before.

It’s true. I had described to her any other church that endeavors to create loving community and effect positive change in the world, as they see it.

More often, my “UU elevator speech,” or nutshell description of our faith, will include a vague summary of some of our Seven Principles, such as “we believe that everyone is worthy of respect and dignity and should be supported in their search for truth, wherever that journey takes them.”

Of course, this is much too oversimplified and I often leave those sorts of conversations with feelings of inadequacy. I imagine the frustration newbies, who didn’t grow up UU or spend a decade preparing for ministry or who don’t own shelves of books on the subject might feel in a similar situation.

In the most recent issue of the UU World magazine, Doug Muder writes an article entitled, “I Don’t ‘Believe in’ the Seven Principles,” in which he talks about this experience:

” …If you’ve ever tried to present the Principles to creed-seeking newcomers} you’ve probably seen their disappointment. “And?” their expressions seem to ask.

The Principles fail as a creed because they’re too easy. Billions of people who literally would not want to be caught dead in a UU church can nod along with them. Take the Second Principle: ‘Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.” Does some other religion take a bold stand,for injustice in human relations? People may argue what ‘Justice” means, but everybody is for it.

The Principles are littered with feel-good terms like that: “spiritual growth,” “democratic process,” “search for truth and meaning,” “world community,” “peace, “liberty. If all Unitarian Universalism wants you to do is approve of such concepts, it’s not very demanding, is it?

So, taken as a creed, the Principles define a religion just one step up from “Believe whatever you want.” Believe a few really easy things, and beyond that, believe whatever you want.

Now, I love our Principles. Though they lack the ability to comfort me in trying times, I have returned to their poetic language time and time again to draw inspiration. I am proud to be UU every time a read them, and I adore the debate-rich process by which they were lovingly authored over the years.

I had no idea what to expect from Muder’s article, but it acted on me and my difficulty in articulating our core beliefs as the light bulb-changing sexton and the window-cleaning painter did in today’s reading. The missing puzzle piece had been right in front of me the whole time.

Margaret Fuller once said, “Cherish your best hopes as a faith, and abide by them in action.” Muder asserts that in thinking of the Principles as beliefs, we have been getting it all wrong. Instead, we should understand and explain them as visions that can guide our actions. “That’s how the Seven Principles turn into a challenging spiritual path,” he says.

To believe something is to accept it as fact and so, in his admittedly blunt tone, Muder points out that none of what is listed in the Principles actually exists. You can’t take a photo or measure the interdependent web and the inherent worth and dignity of every person is surely not always observable, even within these walls.

Now, where the light shone through was in noticing the huge distinction between “belief” and “vision.” I may not believe that the “right of conscience” already exists everywhere, but I can do my part to envision and act its reality into existence.

I have heard this critique from some whom, though belonging to other faith traditions, are familiar with our faith, “Unitarian Universalism is mainly for folks who like to name drop all of the famous people who were Unitarian or Universalist who did great things, but not really have to engage in doing great things, themselves.” Though I did quote Margaret Filler earlier, this is not a completely fair criticism, considering that, for our relative small numbers, UUs are generally loud and proud when it comes to many social issues. But, I can see how attention paid to our haughtiness over the giants of our past can distract us from a deeper engagement and exploration of such terms as “belief” and “vision.”

This may seem like a bit of nit-picky semantics, but don’t UUs live for this sort of thing? It took over twenty years of drafts and debates before the current version of our Principles and Sources were agreed upon in 1984. But, what we know to be true is that words matter. When the Girl’s School of Austin was renting the church, I noticed that one classroom had a reminder posted, “Before you speak: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it helpful?”

The truth is, as Muder says, “truths can take care of themselves.” If something simply is, no further work is required of us. “On a Sunday morning, I can believe just as well in my pajamas… as I can at a Unitarian Universalist worship service.” This is where the once dim and dingy Principles become illuminated. The UUA bylaws require us to reexamine the language of the Principles every fifteen years, yet they have remained largely unchanged for thirty years. This is because the current language of this sacred, living document already has so much to work with, if we change the way we think and talk about them. Imagine if we were known for envisioning the world we hope for into reality instead of wishy-washy “beliefs.” Imagine if “affirming and promoting” meant to us a charge for our daily lives, rather than (if we’re honest) a self-righteous manifesto that we can nod our heads to.

To change the way we think and speak of our Principles as visions, rather than beliefs, is to shift our reliance from ourselves and our heads- where we can often get stuck – into a more demanding reliance on each other’s hearts and hands, to work toward the world the Principles envision in community. Here at First UU Austin, our Values, Mission, and Ends document (available online and in hard-copy in the mailroom) together with our Covenant of Healthy Relations is practically a how-to manual for envisioning our Principles into reality. Our Covenant is as much a means of keeping ourselves accountable to each other, as it is a means of keeping others accountable to us. In this way, this faith of ours requires more commitment of us than the recitation of any creed could. We don’t have to search long to find more “there there.”

In 1979, then president of the Unitarian Universalist Association said, “The old watchwords of liberalism – freedom, reason, tolerance – worthy though they may be, are simply not catching the imagination of the contemporary world. They describe a process for approaching the religious depths, but they testify to no intimate acquaintance with the depths themselves. If we are ever to speak to a new age, we must supplement our seeking with some profound religious finds.” Personally, I think we may be onto something good.

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

Honor Your Father

June 15, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 15, 2014

The Fifth Commandment talks about honoring our parents. What does that mean? We reflect on the things we were taught that we should hold fast, and the things we were taught that we should let go.

TEN COMMANDMENTS “Honor Your Father and Mother”

We’ve been studying the Ten Commandments together for six months now, and today we are looking at number five: Honor your mother and father, so your days may be long in the land.”

Everyone has parents. Some grow up with the parents they were born with, and some grow up with people who chose them to love. Some in this room had parents that fit the picture we have when we hear that word: people who stay by our side as we grow, who give us the benefit of their resources, their advice, their experience so we can become useful in the world, joyful and brave and compassionate and good at relationships. Some in this room had parents who were somewhat like that, with some rough spots. Some had nothing but rough spots.

Some parents can stay for your whole growing up process, and some leave, or are taken from you. Lots of folks are raised by other family members, who act more like parents. Some parents do a good job, some do badly. Some do real harm. Some of our parents are still living; some have gone on into the mystery.

How might we think about honoring all of our parents? The Hebrew word used in the Exodus passage is kabed. It has to do with giving weight to something, knowing it’s heavy, that it matters.

Honoring means helping someone, to bring them joy, improve their lives, to respect someone, esteem them, have concern for them, affection for them, consideration, appreciation for them, nurturing, forgiveness.

The way most of us were taught about this commandment, it sounded like “honor your mother and father” had mostly to do with obeying what they said to do, living up to who they wanted you to be, making them happy at the expense of your independence and your individuality. It set you up for either keeping this commandment or growing into your own adult with your own sense of truth and place and who you should be in the world. The Westminster Larger Catechism (the list of answers Presbyterians point to, written in the 1648) expands this this commandment enormously to include all older people, people who are “superiors in gifts,” supervisors, managers, clergy, legislators, police, etc. It seems as if you were a really good person, according to that system, you would be over obedient.

Most of us learned in college about the psychological experiment conducted in the 60’s by Stanley Milgram. A researcher in a white coat asked participants to press a button to shock a person in the booth in front of them. They would administer a mild shock, then a stronger one. The white coat would say, “again,” and look like he was turning up the strength of the shock. As the experiment proceeded, the person in the booth would act more and more distressed, then in agony. Finally he was begging for mercy. It surprised researchers how long most students would keep pressing the button, believing it was shocking this person in front of them, if the white coat said to. It was this kind of experiment, certain orders being obeyed in Nazi Germany and in Vietnam, that turned the spotlight on the dangers of teaching people to obey in this religiously connected, unquestioning way. We began to use bumper stickers that said “Question Authority” and started to raise our children to learn to negotiate and to trust their inner voice.

In our free faith, we can know that we will not be asked to do something that doesn’t make sense, something that is bad for us or others. Honoring our parents has to do with making their lives better, respecting them, allowing them to be who they are, as we would want them to allow us to be who we are. Sometimes there are specific things we can honor and some things we can’t. I think this Commandment has to do with honoring those who have raised and taught us, who have sacrificed for us and loved us. Maybe that is your biological parents, and maybe it includes other people too. Maybe there are some teachers or preachers or friends who need to be honored in that role as well. Maybe they need a note to be sent to them, or at least to be written – if they are dead or if you can’t find them for some other reason. The thanks is something that will be good for you to do, their role will be something good to acknowledge. It is good to acknowledge those who have given you gifts. Your parents are where you come from. It does a person no good to be ashamed of where they come from. Raise your head and find a way to honor it. It is part of you. You have some of each parent in you, whether in your biology or in your raising, and it would be good to know that’s there. You may have some of their good qualities and some that weren’t’ so good. Even if it’s not one of their best qualities that you have, maybe you can turn it to better use. If you got your dad’s comfort with risk-taking, maybe he was a compulsive gambler, but maybe you can use that quality to a better purpose. If you got your mom’s picky negativity, maybe you can use it to become a systems analyst who finds the flaws in a system in order to make it better for everyone.

Honoring who they are, who they were. Knowing that doesn’t mean obeying them, knowing that, in fact, the best way to honor them is to become a fully functioning, sane and joyful human individual in right relationship with a community, whether that is what they seem to want for you or not. Forgiving them, and forgiving ourselves as parents. Horrifyingly, we make mistakes as parents. Sometimes our children will talk to us about that and sometimes they won’t. My mother, as she was in the last part of her life, said “We told you ‘no’ too much….” I think that was adorable, that this was her biggest regret. She was a wonderful mom. Parenting is hard, and there has to be a lot of forgiveness about it.

“I seek your forgiveness for all the times I talked when I should have listened; got angry when I should have been patient; acted when I should have waited; feared when I should have been delighted; scolded when I should have encouraged; criticized when I should have complimented; said no when I should have said yes and said yes when I should have said no… I often tried too hard and wanted and demanded so much, and mistakenly sometimes tried to mold you into my image of what I wanted you to be rather than discovering and nourishing you as you emerged and grew.”

Honor them in who they are and honor them as they are in you. We get so afraid that we will turn into our parents. Our free faith encourages us to seek our own truth. To become an independent sane useful person IS a way of honoring your parents.

Part of this mutuality is implicit in the notion of honoring: ” ‘Honor’ is a more delicate, transitive maneuver, whereby both parties grow in dignity through the process” (Brueggemann)

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

The Cherokee Removal

June 8, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 8, 2014

Did you know that the man who was chief of the Cherokee during the Trail of Tears was a Harvard graduate? Did you know there were missionaries living in Georgia amongst the Cherokee who vigorously protested their removal? Did you know what natural resource was at the root of the removal? This week we learn about justice and politics in the nineteenth century.

The early 1800’s were when Beethoven was writing music, when Napoleon was being triumphant, when the telegraph was being used for communication over distances. In the early 1800’s, the Cherokee were living in a swath of land that went from north Georgia through Tennessee and western South Carolina and western North Carolina, with hunting lands in Kentucky. 100,000 sq miles.

The Cherokee were divided about how to best survive the encroachment of white settlers. Some wanted to continue to live in a more traditional way, with the traditional form of government they’d had for hundreds of years. This group signed a treaty with the US giving up title to the lands they held in the southeast in exchange for lands they chose in Arkansas and Oklahoma. They called themselves the Old Settlers, and established a traditional life with traditional governance in the west. They are known also as the Ketoowah tribe of the Cherokee.

Most of the rest of the Cherokee in the east wanted to survive by becoming as European as possible. Their houses looked like the white settler’s houses. They wore more European style dress. Some were country folks and others were more sophisticated and progressive. Some were in business, some in farming, some lawyers, doctors and ministers. Most converted to Christianity. Their Principle chief, John Ross, who was part Scottish and part Cherokee, was a graduate of Harvard, and he drew up a constitution for the tribe and made the governance more like that of the US. It was actually more like the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, which Thomas Jefferson had modeled the US Constitution. Many families were of mixed blood, as the Irish (who were not seen by the settlers as quite “white,” even though that term didn’t really exist at the time) intermarried with the Cherokee, as did the Scots-Irish. Many Cherokee were wealthy, and some owned large plantations in Georgia. Native tribes had enslaved one another for centuries, so the idea of owning enslaved Africans was comfortable. The labor of these enslaved men and women added to the wealth of many Cherokee families, who are said to have had around 25 slaves each. A Cherokee named George Gist, also called Sequoyah, developed a way to write the language that was also fairly simple to print. Between 1809 and 1820, most Cherokee learned to read and write, and their newspaper, “The Phoenix” was established.

There had been talk of removal since the beginning of the 1800’s. The communal way in which the tribe held land didn’t match with the way the Europeans saw land ownership. Then gold was discovered in the hills of North Georgia, and outsiders moved in in droves, trampling Cherokee land, trespassing, resenting the Cherokee sovereignty over the creeks and hills where the gold was. Pressure for removal increased.

Missionaries who lived amongst the Cherokee were expected by the state of GA to be on the side of voluntary removal, or at the very least hold a neutral attitude. Some of the missionaries agreed to that, but not the Methodist missionary Samuel Worcester. He noisily protested that “establishment of the jurisdiction of the State of Georgia over the Cherokee people against their will would be an immense and irreparable injury.” The publisher of The Phoenix took up the anti-removal cause, and the case went to court. Was the Cherokee nation a sovereign nation, or was it like a ward of the State of Georgia? A case on this matter had gone to the Supreme Court two years earlier, but the court declined to hear the case, saying in that instance that the Cherokee nation was not a separate nation, so it couldn’t sue Georgia. Worcester’s lawsuit went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled for Cherokee sovereignty. President Andrew Jackson said he would not enforce that ruling, so it was ignored. The debate within the Cherokee tribe was whether they should remove themselves voluntarily to Indian Territory, or should they hold out to see if there would be a reprieve. A small group of Cherokee met with US officials and signed a treaty at New Echota agreeing to exchange their land for tools, money, equipment, land, livestock and other valuables in Indian Territory. Chief Ross and his people and their lawyers objected that these folks did not have the power to sign any treaty. In fact, the Cherokee governing council had passed a law a few years earlier that said no one could sign away Cherokee land upon pain of death.

Georgia passed laws that no missionaries could live amongst the Cherokee without special permits, none of which were given. When Worcester refused to leave, he and one other missionary were sent to prison. Others in opposition to the removal were Senators Daniel Webster (a Unitarian) and Henry Clay. The signers of the New Echota Treaty left to join the other Cherokee who had settled in Indian Territory. The rest continued to fight removal in the courts, the newspapers, by sending delegations to Washington to speak with President Jackson.

In May of 1838, the terror began. Soldiers came to every village and rousted the Cherokee, rich and poor, sophisticated, educated, farmers, landowners, doctors, business people, mothers with young children, grandmothers from their homes at bayonet point. They were walked, just with the clothes on their backs, to stockades, internment camps. 16,000 Cherokee, 1500 enslaved Africans, penned up that summer. Many died of dysentery. Soldiers took about 4,000 in steamships down the drought-stricken rivers. The slaves had to work at clearing obstacles from the path of the boats. So many people deserted along the way, so many died, that the government signed a contract with Chief Ross to arrange for the transport of the rest of the tribe when the weather got cooler. With government money he hired wagons, and organized the people into cohorts, each with a doctor, some grave diggers, and a seaso was madened leader. The weather quickly grew freakishly cold, and the thousand-mile journey killed the old and the very young. The people slept on the ground or in the wagons without a warming fire, still in the clothes they’d left home in. There wasn’t enough food. People along the route would come out of their homes and stand while the people trudged by, weeping and begging the soldiers not to keep them marching this way. No one was allowed to stop during the day to bury the dead, so they had to be carried until night fall, when the sounds of shovels in the dirt and wailing would haunt people’s dreams.

Even though John Ross and his wife Quatie were on a steamship having a more comfortable trip, she died of pneumonia near Little Rock and is buried there. Our own forbear, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote a letter to the President when word reached MA of the removal.

“We only state the fact that a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, -a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country, for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.”

When the Cherokee got to Indian Territory, there were the Ketoowah tribe, living traditionally, matrilinealy, where the clan mothers chose the chiefs, and there were the hated group who had signed the treaty at New Echota. The leaders of that group were soon assassinated, as the penalty for what they had done was death.

About a thousand Cherokee stayed in the Southeast. They had melted into the hills, living on squirrels and acorns, or they had passed for white. A few hundred were living on the private land of a farmer in NC who had been adopted into the tribe as a boy, and if you were living on private land you didn’t have to be removed. This is now called the Eastern Band of the Cherokees, and the Cherokee in OK are called the Western Band. The divisions amongst the groups still gives rise to tensions. Appalachian culture, with its tradition of feuding, is rooted in Cherokee culture, so the feuds persist and it’s easy to step on toes. The Cherokee were not the only people who had to walk the Trail of Tears. Choctaw, Muskogee/Creek and Seminole were also stripped of their land and shoved out to Indian Territory. Then, when the European settlers wanted that land, the reservations were set up. Greed always pushes for more. We have to stand up to it, first in our own hearts, then out in the world.

Whenever I tell you stories from history, one of my purposes is to remind you that things are always as complicated in the past as they are in the present. Injustice has a similar shape wherever it moves. The laws are ignored. Differences are demonized. Horrors are minimized, dismissed. The oppressed turn on one another. infighting and self-hatred does the job of the oppressor for them. The people who do the very worst things are just following orders. Good people speak up. Sometimes we succeed in making a change. Imagine how different our US would be had we been able to envision a future including the First Nations people as neighbors and friends.

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

Rilke’s Swan

June 1, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 1, 2014

The Fourth Commandment is to rest. What do you do to rest? What might a “sabbath” be in your life?

I have been tired lately. It’s been May, when we all have all of our end of school year festivities, field days, picnics, lots of weddings, papers to write, exams to take or grade. Lots of us have been tired. You know it’s bad when the doves in the tree outside sound like they’re saying “File folder. File folder.” Last week I was what I call “stretcher tired.” I wrote a piece about it. Here’s how it goes:

The Stretcher and the Swan

I came up on an accident the other day. Emergency Services people were putting a woman on a stretcher. They were tender, attentive, capable. She was being taken care of. Traffic was being directed competently around the wreck. It would be cleaned up, hauled away. Taken care of. A fire truck was pulled up beside the ambulance, its chunky lights flashing. Standing by, just in case a fire happened. So they could take care of it. That was one well-taken-car-of situation. I wanted to be on that stretcher. I wanted calm and capable people to be taking care of everything. It looked restful. I was tired. I was the kind of tired you get at the end of a month-long project. I had pushed through to the finish and I’d make seven mistakes along the way but the thing was done. I was the kind of tired you get when you have ten different people feeling in their heart that you should have done it differently. Their way. I was the kind of tired you get when your house is messy, your grass is too long, your car is cluttered and there is a dent in the door and your gas tank is empty, along with your bank account. A tiny piece of me thought it would be restful to be lying down on clean sheets, fussed over in a clean hospital room, brought jello and chicken broth and straws that bend, have people worry about me.

Usually I think it’s a good day when you don’t have to take a ride in an ambulance, and I got back to that state of mind pretty fast. Anyway, I talked to a friend of mine who used to work in an emergency room and she said what happens when you come in is that fast moving people with big scissors cut off all your clothes. That didn’t sound restful at all. She suggested I pay for a day at a spa where helpful, calm people fuss over you all day long, and you get to rest, but no one cuts off your clothes with scissors. It’s cheaper than a hospital stay, when everything is all added up, and you can drive your car home afterward.

I know now that when I have a “stretcher day,” when being helpless looks good to me, that I just need to rest. How did I get to be a grown up and not know that I need to rest sometimes? I think I used to eat instead of resting. That doesn’t work any more. Resting used to sound weak to me. I used to work sick. Well, I still do that. I used to have two speeds, a hundred miles an hour and full stop. Crash. I thought you were supposed to go and go at full speed until you couldn’t go any longer, then you sleep. Then you wake up and start again. As I get older I’m adding more gears. I have “slow” now. Some days.

The poet Rilke wrote about a swan, how awkwardly he moves on the ground, but, lowering himself into the water, allowing himself to be carried, “wave after wave,” he writes, while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm, is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown, more like a king, further and further on.”

The wisdom of one of my holy books, the I Ching, talks about the wisdom of not doing. I get tired when I forget and start to act like I’m the source of my energy, my love, my creativity, like I’m the one who works things out, who sustains my friends, who gets things done. I’m learning to begin to experiment with letting go, with allowing wave after wave to hold me up and move me along. May I be granted the wisdom to know when to paddle my feet now and then.

Connecting with the deep power in which we live in the way to rest. It’s a way to let go of trying to fix things that are not our business. It’s a way to let go of trying to control things that cannot be controlled. We, like the swan, have to move into our element, stop doing the things we’re not built to do.

Finding our element, finding what we were designed to do, moving in the deep power that our forbears the Transcendentalists called “The Oversoul,” is one way to rest from the frantic and awkward efforts we make to do and be what we think is necessary. Another way to rest is, as my therapist/trainer would say: “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

This is where the fourth commandment leads, I think. This is the commandment that tells us to rest, to keep the Sabbath Day holy. We were tortured with this as children. On Sabbath, we were only allowed to go to church, read the Bible, memorize the Bible, eat or nap. When we would watch other families headed to the lake on Sunday, we’d say “They’re going to the lake!” and mama would say “Honey, they’re Catholics.” I always wanted to be Catholic. Mama would let us play sometimes on Sunday, but she kept it between the lines. Instead of playing “Battleship,” where you divide a paper into a grid of squares, within some of which your battleships lurk, we’d play “Going to Jerusalem.” We had donkeys in the grid, and your opponents were the thieves trying to set upon your donkeys as you made the treacherous climb up through the gorges to Jerusalem.

The Ten Commandments were given to a group of people who had been enslaved, and whose ancestors had been enslaved, back through 400 years of generations. It’s easy to imagine that they could have used some instructions relative to work. Rest was demanded. There were lists, eventually, about what constitutes work on the Sabbath. No planting, no gathering, no threshing, no grinding, no sorting. None of these is simple, as thousands of years of thought has gone into their meanings.

Take sorting, for example, which is defined as separating the desirable from the undesirable. Sorting or selecting is permitted when three conditions are fulfilled simultaneously. It is absolutely imperative that all three conditions be present at the time of the sorting.

1. B’yad (By hand): The selection must be done by hand and not a utensil that aids in the selection.

2. Ochel Mitoch Psolet (Good from the bad): The desired objects must be selected from the undesired, and not the reverse.

3. Miyad (Immediate use): The selection must be done immediately before the time of use and not for later use. There is no precise amount of time indicated by the concept of “immediate use” (“miyad”). The criteria used to define “immediate use” relate to the circumstances. For instance if a particular individual prepares food for a meal rather slowly, that individual may allow a more liberal amount of time in which to do so without having transgressed “borer.”

Examples of Permissible and Prohibited Types of Borer:

1. Peeling fruits: Peeling fruits is permissible with the understanding that the fruit will be eaten right away.

2. Sorting silverware: Sorting silverware is permitted when the sorter intends to eat the Shabbat meal immediately. Alternatively, if the sorter intends to set up the meal for a later point, it is prohibited.

3. Removing items from a mixture: If the desired item is being removed from the mix then this is permissible. If the non-desired item is being removed, the person removing is committing a serious transgression according to the laws of Shabbat.

So if you are making beans, you may sort the beans from the small stones that are in there

Trust human beings to take a rule which says you must rest one day out of seven, as God did when creating the earth, and make it so complicated that you need to call your lawyer before you do something on Sabbath to make sure you’re not breaking the law.

We need to rest. What’s so hard about that? It’s hard for us. “I work hard and I play hard,” our TV heroes say. We answer “how’ve you been?” With “Oh, busy. Crazy busy.” It’s true too. Crazy busy.

“Work is not always required… there is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”

– George MacDonald

A study by neuroscientists at the University of California says that there are complimentary brain networks that toggle back and forth. One is used for times in which we are paying attention, focused, trying to get things done. The other, which they call the Default Mode, is activated during times of rest, daydreaming, and other non attentive but awake times.” DM brain systems activated during rest are also important for active, internally focused psychosocial mental processing, for example, when recalling personal memories, imagining the future, and feeling social emotions with moral connotations.”

Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Joanna A. Christodoulou, and Vanessa Singh

Educational theorists are now trying to figure out how to balance attention demanding situations with time for internal reflection, daydreaming and doing nothing.

It’s okay to rest. In fact, the neuroscientists say that activating the DM network is good for recalling our past, processing our present, planning our future. Writers know it’s good for creativity. Artists of all kinds know if they don’t spend enough “do nothing” time, the brain lies down in the road like a tired mule and no amount of shouting and jumping up and down will make it move. Rest instead. Take a Sabbath. The DM network is activated when one is not focusing on external stimuli. It doesn’t toggle over when you’re paying attention to video games, a book, TV, although all of those are restful activities. Meandering. Sitting in the back yard staring at nothing. Ruminating. These are ways we connect with the part of us that balances our sometimes frantic activity. When we are rested we think and remember, plan and process better. Imagine someone was going to pay you a thousand dollars to figure out how to create a Sabbath in your day, or in your week. See what solutions occur.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.

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

The lessons of flowers

May 25, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

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Marisol Caballero
May 25, 2014

We join in this much-loved tradition of Flower Communion that celebrates beauty, diversity, and uniqueness in community.

Call to Worship
By Thomas Rhodes

We come in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes.
Some of us grow in bunches.
Some of us grow alone.
Some of us are cupped inward,
And some of us spread ourselves out wide.
Some of us are old and dried and tougher than we appear.
Some of us are still in bud.
Some of us grow low to the ground, And some of us stretch toward the sun.
Some of us feel like weeds, sometimes.
Some of us carry seeds, sometimes.
Some of us are prickly, sometimes.
Some of us smell.
And all of us are beautiful.
What a bouquet of people we are!

Reading: “For the Flowers Have the Gift of Language”
Reginald Zottoli

Speak, flowers, speak!
Why do you say nothing?
The flowers have the gift of language. In the meadow they speak of freedom,
Creating patterns wild and free as no gardener could match.
In the forest they nestle, snug carpets under the roof of
Leaf and branch, making a rug of such softness.
At end tip of branches they cling briefly
Before bursting into fruit sweet to taste.

Flowers, can you not speak joy to our sadness?
And hope to our fear?
Can you not say how it is with you
That you color the darkest corner?

The flowers have the gift of language.
At the occasion of birth they are buds before bursting.
At the ceremony of love they unite two lovers in beauty.
At the occasion of death, they remind us how lovely is life.

Oh, would that you had voice,
Silent messengers of hope.
Would that you could tell us how you feel,
Arrayed in such beauty.

The flowers have the gift of language.
In the dark depths of a death camp
They speak the light of life.
In the face of cruelty
They speak of courage.
In the experience of ugliness
They bespeak the persistence of beauty.

Speak, messengers, speak!
For we would hear your message.
Speak, messengers, speak!
For we need to hear what you would say.

For the flowers have the gift oflanguage:
They transport the human voice on winds of beauty;
They lift the melody of song to our ears;
They paint through the eye and hand of the artist;
Their fragrance binds us to sweet-smelling earth.

May the blessing of the flowers be upon you.
May their beauty beckon to you each morning
And their loveliness lure you each day,
And their tenderness caress you each night.
May their delicate petals make you gentle,
And their eyes make you aware.
May their stems make you sturdy,
And their reaching make you care.

Introduction to Flower Communion

The Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion service which we are about to celebrate was originated in 1923 by Rev. Dr. Norbert Capek founder of the modern Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia. On the last Sunday before the summer recess of the Unitarian church in Prague, all the children and adults participated in this colorful ritual, which gives concrete expression to the humanity-affIrming principles of our liberal faith. When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Capek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human person to be – as Nazi court records show– ” …too dangerous to the Reich [for him] to be allowed to live.” Capek was sent to Dachau, where he was killed the next year during a Nazi “medical experiment.” This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his Flower Communion, which is widely celebrated today. It is a noble and meaning-fIlled ritual we are about to recreate. This service includes the original prayers of Capek to help us remember the principles and dreams for which he died.

Consecration of Flowers
by Norbert Capek

InfInite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these, thy messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and devotion to thy holy will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of thy most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do thy work in this world.

Prayer

Spirit of all Life and of Love,
God of many names,
We pray that we can be more like flowers,
Whose delicate beauty and soft petals
Remind us that we are sensitive, permeable beings.

We pray that we can be more like flowers,
whose strength can sometimes endure
nuclear devastation and deep arctic freezes.

We pray that we can be more like flowers,
On this Memorial Day weekend
Who mourn death by celebrating beauty
And comfort survivors
With the hope of new life.

We do pray that we can be more like flowers,
Whose too-soon fading beauty
Remind us that life is too short
to choose anything but joy and love.

May we bless creation in these same ways.
Amen.

Sermon “The Lessons of Flowers”

Today we are celebrating all that flowers can teach us. Every year, we know that warmer days are ahead when we begin to see fIelds of bluebonnets on the side of the freeways. They remind us that we live in a beautiful place and that, just like we like to do the same things every year, such as today’s ritual of Flower Communion, Nature has its own rituals to celebrate when spring arrives.

We often celebrate all of the things we can learn indoors. We go to school and read big books, or we sit at our computers and spend the day bookmarking and reposting any article that we fInd particularly interesting. And, while most of us will readily confess our love for the outdoors, especially when we have had weather as beautiful as we’ve had lately, we don’t often realize all of the lessons that Nature has taught us. So today, on the day that we enjoy our beloved Flower Communion, let’s think about some of the ways that flowers teach us the important things about life. Afterall, William Wordsworth, himself, said in his poem, The Tables Turned,

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless-
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

In a moment, you’ll all be invited to come up and select a flower that is not the one you brought with you. When you hold it gently in your hand, I hope you’ll do so “with a heart that watches and receives” the lessons it has to teach you.

There are some things we already know about flowers. Let’s hear you shout out some of the things you know about flowers….

I often say that every age has wisdom in it. Babies have a way of learning that is inaccessible to adults, except for the most genius of geniuses. Kids have imaginations that can help solve problems in ways that grown-ups might never imagine. Teens often have ways of changing the world that take older generations many years to catch up to or even notice that change has happened around them. Adults do a great job, most of the time, in teaching pragmatism and common sense. And our elders teach us patience and a new way of enjoying life and rolling with the punches.

It’s interesting to me that, if we look hard enough, if we really pay attention, we can learn all ofthese same lessons and more from flowers, too! Here are a few of them:

Keep pushing until you break through.
All flowers were once seeds. Although it is probably beyond their wildest dreams that someday they would be tall, and beautiful, and fragrant, they persevere through what sometimes seems like impossible odds, they just keep on pushing through the dirt Ulltil they see the light of day. They teach us that we have to get through the dirty parts of life and work hard in order to realize our full potential.

Face in the direction of the sun.
No matter where the sun is in the sky, flowers will tum their faces in the sun’s direction. In this way, they teach us that we always have a choice – we could either look at the gloomy side of things, or we could spend our days looking on the bright side. Sometimes, this is hard to do. Bad things do happen. People get sick and sometimes die. Natural disasters and poverty leave people homeless. I’m sure you can think of bad things that have happened to you and your loved ones.

Sometimes it’s not only ok, but extremely appropriate to be angry or sad, but what flowers teach us about this is that we should not get stuck there. Even if it takes some time, we should seek joy in our lives.

If you need help, ask a bee.
Many types of flowers could not survive without a little help from their friends. In order to make new buds, flowers must ask bees and other insects or birds to help them pollinate. They do this in many ways. Some of them decorate their petals with bright stripes so that the bees will know exactly where to land. Some of them will even disguise themselves to look and smell like rotting meat to attract flies over. Others will pretend to be a female bee so that the male bee will want to come over and get a closer look. They have all kinds of clever ways of asking for help.

Sometimes it’s hard for us to ask for help. Sometimes we’d rather do things ourselves. Independence is ok, just as long as our stubborn independence doesn’t make us forget that we are actually all interdependent. We rely on each other more than we realize. There will be times for all of us that we’ll need to ask for help. There will be friends of ours, during those times, that will get a great deal of joy out of being able to be there to assist us, too.

Smelling good doesn’t hurt.
First impressions do matter. Flowers understand this better than most. They spend time becoming beautiful as they bloom, but many of them also smell great. For thousands of years, people have been adorning themselves with wreathes of flowers and with perfumes made from their oils to emulate their sweet presentation. It is a lesson that flowers continue to teach us- the way others experience us, our appearance our cleanliness, our manners, has a lasting effect. Taking the time to put our best foot forward does payoff in our personal and professional lives. We don’t want to give a stinking impression.

Rain has its bonuses.
Rainy days can spoil our fun. We usually have to cancel or change our plans. We might feel a bit drowsy as the day goes along. We may not remember how it feels here in Austin, but when we have many, many days in a row of rainy weather, our bodies begin to crave sUllshine. We may begin to feel down in the dumps because of it. Many sad songs and poems talk about rain. Rain imagery is easily recognizable as a common symbol for depression.

But, rain is not all gloom. Flowers couldn’t bloom without it. The same goes with our tough days. Some of the best lessons I’ve learned, that have made me a much better person, have happened because of my most diffIcult days. Sometimes, the worst of times can also be, in ways that cannot be imagined when we are in the thick of it, the best of times, too. Next time you fInd yourself in the midst of a struggle, just think, “Here comes another bloomin’ growth opportunity.”

Grow roots where the soil is nourishing.
Flowers know how to play the hand they were dealt. If conditions aren’t exactly right, the seed will not make a go of it. They like to make their homes in a welcoming, nourishing environment, which sometimes happens to be in a crack in the sidewalk. I think I know some people like that, myself!

This is a great lesson for people. We should care enough about ourselves, our health, and our longevity to surround ourselves with people and conditions that will nourish our growth. We should stop trying to thrive in unhealthy environments. This may be the toughest lesson to learn. It’s so hard to recognize when the ways in which we relate to friends or family members is unhealthy. It’s agony to decide when a relationship has run its course. It’s hard to know exactly when to leave a job that is unfulfIlling or move across the country to a city that is a better fit. The good news it, for every flower, there is a happy spot that can suit them perfectly, sometimes it just takes some caring gardeners.

If you find yourself in winter, hang in there. Spring is awesome.
As I mentioned earlier, sometimes nasty weather in our lives lasts longer than we would like. Most flowers die out in winter, but something to always keep in mind is the promise of spring. Life is filled with cycles. The dips usually swing back up, with a good attitude, perseverance, and a strong support network. Come spring, there will be flowers a-plenty!

Flowers can teach us all these lessons, and many more, if we simply slow down and take the time to… You know what they say!

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

Bridging Ceremony – Learn to love

May 21, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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First UU Youth Group
May 18, 2014

The Senior High Youth Group invites you to share in the exploration of the topic of love. The service includes poems, stories, and mini-sermons about love, from the unique perspective of our teens.

Welcome: Audrey Lewis

Reading: Nikola Locar

Homily: “Strange Places” Kate Windsor

Sonnett 18: Maya Runnels

Homily:

“Falling” Mary Emma Gary

The first christmas gift my boyfriend ever gave me was a copy of Alice in Wonderland. I remember reading it during standardized testing, and due to the nature of that sort of testing was left with plenty of time to admire how versatile the rabbit hole metaphor is. Today, I use it to make a narrative of falling in love.

I sit in a garden filled with tulips, bits of grass poke between the red and violet bundles as a reminder that it takes a collection of things to make a picture beautiful. The tree I rest against has bark that is smooth from years of clambering up it with dripping popsicles and wings of laughter. A rabbit passes by, curiously I follow, admiring how his pocket watch doesn’t affect the speed at which he runs in front of me, and how he waits for me as I stop to watch the sudden ambush of butterflies, whose collective wings sound like the laughter of a baby, and how their patterns of innocent eyes flicker with delight at the wind chimes. He waits for me as I bend to pick up a kitten, then a puppy, then we all take off running, joined by more and more bodies until we approach the hole in the ground, dark and shining with promise. One after another the creatures I love jump down, until the rabbit and I are at the top of the hole looking down as everyone one else falls freely. He jumps, then I, into the hole in what I assume is sanity because according to the experts who write love songs the only way to fall in love is to give up the sturdy fabric of sanctity and sanity.

Jump with us.

We fall. We pass cabinets of snow globes, stuffed animals, and candy wrappers. little bottles that say “Horchata” from the time my dad drove to have breakfast with me after a rally, and little cakes that say “for biology, don’t eat” for all the times I’ve made cookies and he’s tried to steal a few. We pass hamster balls, VCR’s, books so worn their pages look like leaves, we pass them and we fall into a tunnel reminiscent of the scene from Willy Wonka that my kindergarden best friend was terrified of. As we fall some of the creatures stop on shelves, for while they are loved the bulk of their affection was spent at a time closer to the top of the tunnel.

Occasionally a door opens from nowhere and another person is cast into my tunnel with me, though sometimes it seems that I have joined theirs or that we have created a new one altogether. Each time a door opens, a few bottles may break, papers may fly, but what would an adventure be without broken glass? Eventually I land with the white rabbit on a floor with a spiral staircase at the center, leading down. There is a velvet rope with a note reading, “enjoy here until further notice.” So we sit. A door, previously unseen, opens. We are joined by a mouse, a cat, and seemingly the entire cast of Winnie The Pooh in the room that now holds a table. As a collective, we are in love, seperate we love each other, and in memories we love the glass table and orange tea cups that adorned our dizzying, spirited, fait.

This is how I see falling in love. We are led on a beautiful chase until the ground opens up under us. Possibly scared and maybe a little grimy we fall until we are actually floating. Floating on kind words, snippets of songs that you can’t remember the rest of the lyrics to, and collections of gorgeous arrays of light. Sunsets, sunrises, nights on the town to nights under stars, we float down until it feels like there isn’t possibly farther to fall. And then, because love is an exhaustive journey, we may choose to find a floor to rest on with the people who rejuvenate us the most, until we are ready to once again descend into a world of beautiful madness.

Our journey is never ending, and perhaps I am too young and naive or already too old and jaded to portray the drug that you cannot OD on, but I invite you to forget the pain of the past, the promise of the future, and take it upon yourselves to feel gravity pulling you down, and the cloud numbered nine lifting you back up. I invite you to listen to what the experts say, then to take it upon yourselves to discredit everything ever said about love, and make your own conclusions. I invite you to find the hole in the ground, the fireworks on display, or the flames that warm your cheeks and join me on the journey to find a home where the heart is a puzzle that requires more than one set of hands.

Sonnett 130: Anna Reynolds

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Poem: “Scattered Leaves” Andy Tittle

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

A Juicy Slice of UU History – Servetus

May 14, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 11, 2014

Michael Servetus was one of the martyrs of our faith. He lived during the Reformation and wrote a pamphlet called “On the Errors of the Trinity.”

This is a story of the birth pains of free religion. It is a story of dangerous ideas, the clash of politics and passion. It is the story of how hard it is to control people, how impossible it is to control ideas, even when you are trying to control them in yourself.

Michael Servetus was born in Spain to a family of minor nobility. He was a prodigy, speaking French, Greek, and Latin by the time he was 13. (1524)

This was a time of religious evolution on the Continent. In 1517, when Servetus was 8, Martin Luther wrote a protest about the Rome raising funds for war and renovations by selling indulgences. Those were like an investment in your heavenly future — if you bought a small one you would be forgiven for a small sin, a large one forgave a large sin. You could buy relatives out of Purgatory where they were living in torment. It was big business in the Middle Ages. Martin Luther, a monk in Wittenberg, wrote 95 points of disagreement about how sins were forgiven, and nailed them to the door of the church. This wouldn’t have been so effective if another element had not been thrown into the mix: the printing press.

Before the 1500’s, a book had to be hand copied. Only the very rich could afford one or two of them. Most people couldn’t read anyway. After it was invented, print shops were set up all over the place, looking for things to publish. Luther’s theses were copied and they sold out immediately. He began to write more. Erasmus, the famous humanist wit, was being read widely. Universities were springing up everywhere, as every Prince now wanted to set up a center of learning in his province.

The Church was losing control. In Spain, it had become overwhelmed with the number of Jews and Muslims that had poured into the country. When they wouldn’t convert to Christianity, they were exiled or slaughtered. The Spanish Inquisition is famous for its vicious horrors.

It was against this background that Servetus, at fourteen, was sent to the University of Toulouse to be secretary to a famous scholar. Toulouse was a conservative town, so his parents felt safe sending him there, but, unbeknownst to them, the U. was a hotbed of radical thought. Michael essentially was given a private course with his boss, reading Erasmus, reading Luther. Printed Bibles were also to be had, which the students were not supposed to read, so they read them in secret. Somehow Servetus had picked up enough Hebrew to discuss the meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. Hebrew had been a forbidden language because the church wanted people to read the Bible only in its approved translation. There is even speculation that he learned Arabic, as he made several references to the Koran in his writing.

Servetus knew that not long before he was born, 800,000 Jews had been banished from Spain, and thousands of Muslims had been burned at the stake in Spain, because they would not accept the Trinity. He reasoned that if Christianity could correct that doctrine, then great numbers of Jews and Muslims, who already believed in one God, would be more inclined to convert. In reading the Bible, he was struck by the absence pf any mention of this thing that had caused so much strife and pain. When he was 20, he published a piece called “One the Errors of the Trinity.” It was printed to be small, about 3×6, so it could be stashed away fast if it had to be. A thousand copies sold out immediately. In it he said that God had created Jesus and that Jesus had become divine through his actions on earth. He thought you shouldn’t be baptized as an infant, as if the priest’s actions had the power to save your soul. He thought you should have to wait until you were twenty (the age he was then) and had some moral sense. He wrote that the Holy Spirit was the divine part of the human being. The Spanish Inquisition wanted their young man home for trial. He headed up to Switzerland, where the Protestants were establishing power in the towns of Basel and Geneva. Invited to live with a powerful leader, he argued with him about the trinity so rudely, so insistently, insulting and calling names, that after 10 months he was thrown out of that house and that town had to move on

He moved to Lyons to work for a printer, and worked on printing Ptolemy’s Geography. With his great scholarship, he actually improved this book. He couldn’t help adding his own opinions to the book. He wrote, “The English are brave, the Scots fearless, the Italians vulgar, the Irish rude, inhospitable, barbarous and cruel. On the map of Germany, he wrote ‘É all Germany are gluttons and drunkards.” (p.105, Wilbur) He was greatly admired in Lyon but he got into trouble again when he began discussing religion. And so he fled to Paris in 1536, changed his name to Villeneuve, and attended the University to study medicine. What was happening in the world then? Henry the 8th was founding the Church of England because Rome wouldn’t grant him the divorce he wanted. Meanwhile, Michael Servetus, putting himself through school lecturing on geography, astronomy and mathematics, became a respected doctor living as a good son of the Catholic Church (except for the time when he was censured by the Inquisition in France for using astrology with his medicine). He edited a new Latin translation of the Bible, and became the famous Dr. Villeneuve, consulted by nobles and potentates of the Church.

He couldn’t leave theology alone, though, when the reformer John Calvin began publishing his Institutes of the Christian religion (which we had to read in seminary). Dr. Villeneuve began writing to Calvin, arrogantly, with the same style that had gotten him in trouble as Servetus in his twenties. As in the past, he was not so much interested in hearing what Calvin had to say as he was in correcting Calvin’s errors, and he used terribly impolite language. By then, Calvin had gained considerable power as the leader of Geneva. Switzerland. Calvin wrote to a third party in 1547 that if this Servetus came his way, “he would never let him get away alive.” (Wilbur)

People who held different beliefs concerning the Christian religion faced overwhelming dangers. Unitarian scholar Earl Morse Wilbur notes that by the year 1546, 30,000 Anabaptists had been put to death in Holland and Friesland alone, because of their faith. (A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents)

Servetus broke off this correspondence with Calvin for four years, during which he revised and prepared for the press his final work, The Restitution of Christianity, which was printed anonymously in 1552. Within the body of his new book, Servetus made a major contribution to the study of medicine. In illustrating a theological point, he described the pulmonary circulation of the blood from the right chamber of the heart to the lungs. He is given credit as possibly the first to discover, and definitely the first to publish this piece of medical knowledge..

No one noticed the medicine as it was surrounded by shocking and dangerous theological ideas. Then as now, the churches who are all about control worried about his soul and those of the readers he would influence. Then, as now, dangerous ideas get you consigned to the flames. Actual ones in those days, eternal flames of hellfire in these days. Servetus was a wanted man.

Communications between Protestant Geneva and the Catholic Inquisition in France–then deadly enemies– eventually led to the arrest, examination, and incarceration of Servetus/Villeneuve in France. Realizing his great peril, Servetus managed to escape from prison, and to disappear from sight. His French trial went on without him for the next ten weeks. The errors of his work were duly noted, and sentence was pronounced: that he should be burned alive by slow fire. Since he wasn’t available, this sentence was carried out on his effigy.

That summer Michael Servetus was keeping out of sight, moving slowly towards Italy, where he might have been safe. There weren’t many countries where he wasn’t being hunted. He made the choice to pass through Switzerland. Who knows why he stopped in Geneva. On a Sunday, when everyone, including strangers, was required to go to church. Someone reported his presence to Calvin, who had him thrown in jail.

There was a trial, examining Servetus’ heresies, and it appears Servetus thought he might win out or at least receive some minor punishment such as a fine or banishment. Finally, after much debate, Servetus was found guilty. Calvin himself pushed for a more merciful beheading, but his Council insisted on the fire. On Oct 27th, the sentence was carried out, Servetus was burned with his book chained to his ankle.

Widespread repulsion at the way he had died gave more energy to the movement of free religion — free from the control of any church. The man could be killed, but his ideas could not. The books were destroyed, all but three copies, which managed to survive and now exist in translation. Ideas have power, and your truth has power. How can we stay silent when we feel the Spirit call us to speak our free religion?

Three hundred years after his death, Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing could and did speak openly: “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith.” We sometimes forget how much blood was shed before such freedom was possible. Let us not forget. That is our heritage.

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

May the force be with you

May 4, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 4, 2014

Does a concept like George Lucas’ “The Force” represent most Unitarian Universalists’ idea of the Divine?

When film maker George Lucas rediscovered his copy of Joseph Campbell’s book “Hero of a Thousand Faces,” he had already written two drafts of the Star Wars screenplay. He had loved that book when he read it in school, Rereading the story of the Hero’s Journey, he could see the various elements of that journey: the awakening, the resistance to leaving home, supernatural help, leaving home, the training period where the young hero becomes strong, the battle with evil, the temptation to become evil, finding out that evil is part of you, (Luke, I am your father), resisting your new training, losing your patience with the wisdom, choosing to fight rather than use the power of the mystery…. Reading about the archetypes: the father (Darth Vader), the goddess (Leia) the mentor (Obi Wan,) the oracle (Yoda), the trickster (Han Solo) The story almost told itself. And, despite some of the mistakes that sprang from its being created mostly by white people, it spoke to people of many cultures.

People responded to the description of The Force. Obi Wan tells Luke “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” We watched him train his intuition along with his body. We thought “I could do that. I almost can do that now. I’ve felt The Force.”

Most people have felt a power flow through them at some time, and we hear ourselves saying words we did not know were there, doing deeds we did not know we could do, being “in the zone” when we were playing a game or making an athletic effort, where it felt that we could do nothing wrong, that the stars were aligned, that we were in the flow.

Unitarian forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a human being is a stream whose source is hidden, whose being is pouring in from somewhere else. As the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere, every particular person is contained in the (Force) Over-soul, the Unity within which we are all made one with all other. There is a common heart. All sincere conversation is its worship, all right action is submission to it. It is that force that makes us feel enlarged by doing good and diminished by doing wrong.

Within each person is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us. When it breathes through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affection, it is love “

The only word I changed in there is that, instead of saying “The Force,” Emerson said “The Oversoul.”

Emerson and his friends were reading the newly available translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts, and their new theology, called Transcendentalism, was shaped by their relationship with these Eastern Religions.

Conversation among religions is ongoing about whether this deep power is separate from us, but can be in us, whether it is us at our best or something greater than we are, whether it is only good, and evil is only its absence, or whether there is a separate force of evil, or whether both creation and destruction are contained in it, and we need to be careful about calling something either good or evil. Lucas made those choices.

The Force is strong in some and less in others. The Force has a “Dark” side (the culture in which we live uses the word “dark” to denote evil. It might more properly be used to denote the inability to see well, or move about with confidence. The Hebrew scripture says God created light and darkness and they were both good.)

So the Force has an evil side, or a destructive side. Carl Jung, upon whose work Joseph Campbell based his, would have called it The Shadow. Jung said that the archetypal Hero’s Journey mirrors the journey of the soul toward wholeness. In order to find balance, which is what gives one power, the oracle Yoda says, one must meet, fight and come to a resolution with the Shadow.

I invite you to feel as if you are in training, using your intuition to feel the Force, learning when to try and when to let it carry you. When your kids are too much, when your parents make you sad, when you get the bad diagnosis, when your life turns upside down, this is the time to get still and feel that deep power in which we exist. If we practice it in small ways, when life is going pretty well, we’ll be better at it when life takes one of its surprise spins. May the Force be with you.

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

The banality of indifference

April 28, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
April 27, 2014

The phrase “the banality of evil” refers to how evil can often wear a fairly “normal” exterior. On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we’ll explore the concepts of “evil,” “good,” and all of the gray area in between.

Tonight, at sundown, until sundown tomorrow, marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom HaShoah, or day of destruction. The well-known slogans remind us to, “Never forget.” And to, “Never let it happen again.”

Recently, I began studying philosophy professor, Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality of Evil” and the controversy that has surrounded it since its publication. I remembered the phrase, “the banality of evil” one day when I was listening to NPR and heard the account of yet another school shooting. For a split second, I was filled with grief and sympathy, but then was aware of the fact that my mind naturally drifted, quite quickly, to thinking about the song that was in my head. The fact that, a second after hearing of such tragedy, I was cheerfully humming along to whatever annoying pop song was plaguing me was more jarring to me than the shooting, itself. This upset me.

After a brief moment of self-judgment, I began to mourn the fact that things like safety in schools can no longer be taken for granted and that mass-murderers choosing schoolchildren as their targets has become so commonplace that a relatively sensitive and genuinely caring person, such as I like to think of myself, is able to go on, relatively unaffected by such news. I checked and, in the year and some odd months since the tragedy in Newtown, CT, there have been 44 school shootings in the U.S., 13 of them within the first six weeks of 2014, alone.

So, I looked up the phrase and rediscovered Hannah Arendt’s book. I even watched the lackluster 2012 movie, Hannah Arendt, about her life before, during, and after the book’s publication. I’m not sure that I buy her argument that Nazi Adolf Eichmann, the man who was in charge of arranging the transportation of several million Jews to their death in packed train cars, was simply a puny, boring bureaucrat, unable to think for himself; that he was just following orders. She was surprised to find that, as she puts it, “Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,” that his, “lack of imagination” and “sheer thoughtlessness” allowed him to “never realize what he was doing.”

No, I’m not sure that I buy any of that. It seems a weak defense. But of course, I wasn’t there. Still, what’s difficult to wrap one’s brain around is that anyone could ever so abandon their conscience or divorce themselves from empathy so entirely as to compartmentalize in that way. Eichmann’s greatest aspiration, it seems, was to rise in the Nazi ranks and to be somebody, having been a disappointment to his father, his community, and been looked down upon by the middle class of his upbringing. He wanted to please the big man in charge, at all costs, even swearing that he had never held any anti-Semitic beliefs, himself.

In truth, there could never be an adequate motive offered by a mass-murderer. We hope, in many contemporary cases, such as mass public shootings, for a mental illness diagnosis to surface. In our efforts to understand horrendous acts of evil, we prefer to remove as much personal agency and responsibility from the perpetrator as possible. We would rather believe that a glitch in the wiring of the brain would provoke such atrocities, rather than believe that someone could, willingly and without remorse, choose to hurt or kill another. If there is an explanation of mental illness, we think, then we may have hope of preventing future tragedies, of curing the sickness.

In an article in The Guardian, entitled, “From, Adam Lanza: The Medicalication of Evil,” Lindsey Fitzharris, a British medical student, warns us that to over-pathologize examples of evil will remove personal accountability from the equation, “While I do believe it is important to determine what factors may have led Lanza to open fire on Sandy Hook Elementary School- and whether this tragic event could have been prevented- I want to remind the U.S. and the world of one thing: evil is about choice. Sickness is about the absence of choice.”

Not only should be careful about pathologizing mass murderers so as to avoid further stigmatization of mental illness, but in doing so, we not only let the perpetrator off the hook, we also avoid confronting the possibility of seeing ourselves in those who are able to choose evil over good. Sure, some who commit evil acts truly may be beyond rehabilitation, unable to feel a shred of empathy for another. Psychosis is real. But, although we may view ourselves as genuinely compassionate, good-natured people, I would reckon that empathy most often lies somewhere on a spectrum between saintly and intrinsically evil. We can’t all be Mother Theresa just as we (thank goodness) aren’t all Hitler. I am sure that we’d rather think of ourselves as closer to the Mother Theresa end of that spectrum, as I believe we tend to be, but the fact still remains that empathic concern is a fluid characteristic.

Our 1st Principle, as Unitarian Universalists, states that, “we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” The drafters of that principle, delegates gathered from UU congregations throughout out movement, were careful not to state a belief in the inherent goodness of every person. Rather, we are concerned with the possibility of goodness in people and strive to treat them accordingly.

Last year, professor Steve Taylor wrote in Psychology Today, “empathy or lack of empathy aren’t fixed. Although people with a psychopathic personality appear to be unable to develop empathy, for most of us, empathy- or goodness- is a quality that can be cultivated. This is recognized by Buddhism, and most other spiritual traditions… As we become more open and more connected, [we become] more selfless and altruistic.” This is evident in Tibetan Buddhism’s idea of recognizing that every human was, at some point in time, your mother, and treating them as such. We are aware of the Golden Rule. The Platinum Rule goes one step further, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”

It is within human nature to desire to think of ourselves as “the good guys.” As liberals, progressive folk, we like to think of ourselves as standing “on the right side of history.” Hopefully, with dedication, our legacies may prove this to be the case. But, because we believe ourselves to be good, does this prevent us from perpetrating or being complicit in evil? If we can so easily dismiss horrors of the nightly news as ordinary, commonplace occurrences, how far removed are we from the ability to set aside conscience, altogether? What makes otherwise “normal” people commit acts of evil?

This was a major question in the recent television series, Breaking Bad. The lead character could have been a modern day Eichmann- a boring, dweeby high school chemistry teacher who, upon being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, begins to manufacture “crystal meth.” For several seasons, the audience bears witness to Walter White’s moral degradation, as he, little-by-little, goes from dull family man to ruthless, amoral drug lord, by looking past one scruple after another.

It’s amazing how people can transform. We don’t often think about the fact that Hitler was once a giggling baby that someone cherished. I saw a photograph of a young, teenage Osama Bin Laden this week. He and over a dozen siblings and cousins were posing in front of a pink Cadillac while on vacation in Europe in the ’70’s. They were all dressed in the styles of the day, both women and men. No hint of radical Islam. And there he stood, laughing and young, big hair and sideburns, dressed like J.J. from “Good Times.” I couldn’t look away.

These days, most accept that evil is not a metaphysical force. “The Devil made me do it” doesn’t hold much weight anymore. But, I wonder if we have not adopted a seeping, dangerous cultural denial of evil’s existence as a systemic reality. We take cultural ills and reduce them to interpersonal incidents before we then reduce them to background noise on the nightly news. It’s someone else’s loss, someone else’s kid, someone else’s town.

Instead of stepping back to recognize the living system at play, we zoom in so closely that we no longer have to focus at all. Epidemic gun violence becomes to us unrelated cases of mental illness, or neglectful parents, or the product of violent video games. Racism becomes individual prejudice, mere name-calling, men in white sheets, rather than the very foundation that our society was built upon that was never fully reconciled and still affords great privilege to those born with white skin. Genocide becomes an egregious terror that lesser civilized nations carry out, rather than our nation’s own shameful history. Misogyny becomes cat-calls and ditsy blond stereotypes, rather than the worldwide actuality of the continued mistreatment of women and girls. And, anti-Semitism becomes the painful memories of far-away Europe, rather than the continued presence of Neo-Nazi hate groups within our own communities. And so on…

Ignoring our own nation’s atrocities, choosing the privilege of being able to not have to think about evil in terms of systems in which we live our lives, creates of us a chilling similarity to the many nameless, ordinary accomplices to historical events such as the Holocaust. Before the world wars, Germany was widely respected, thought of the world over as a center of culture, science, intellect, and art. Flunkies “following orders,” bystanders, and other banal people helped the evil cause in their action and inaction.

It would be maddening to fully empathize with each and every story of evil, day in, day out. The anger and grief would eventually deaden our ability to experience joy. We can, however, choose not to outright ignore. Together, we can choose not to accept hopelessness, not to choose personal insignificance, but to be part of the collective response. We can choose to work toward repairing the evil present in our world with good. And, we can begin within ourselves. Systems are not always easy to notice, especially because we are busy playing our parts within them.

So, how not to feel like any problem, any evil is too big to care about? How do we battle the urge toward indifference? Where do we find the middle ground between a depressing, bleak outlook and total moral blindness and lack of concern? Longtime Buddhist scholar and activist, Joanna Macy, tells us that we find it in community. She says that, “[this work] needs to be done in groups so we can hear it from each other. Then you realize that it gives a lie to the isolation we have been conditioned to experience in recent centuries… And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart… there comes a time when the little band of heroes feels totally outnumbered and bleak, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings or Pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress. You learn to say, “It looks bleak. Big deal, it looks bleak.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks to this in his book, “No Future Without Forgiveness.” After apartheid, South Africa sought to find a middle ground of moving forward. Somewhere between the Nuremburg Trials after WWII and the national amnesia that continues to take place in the United States’ attitude toward our own history of genocide and slavery. Post-apartheid South Africa was too complex for either option. Both sides were still living side by side, both had committed atrocities, and all wounds were still fresh. The middle way, the extremely difficult path toward forgiveness was chosen and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established.

Tutu said, “It was pointed out that we none of us posses a kind of fiat by which we can say, “Let bygones be bygones” and hey presto, they become bygones. Our common experience is in fact the opposite- that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately.”

On my fridge is a magnetic quote by Gloria Steinem, “The truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off.” I’ll add that it will also make you cry and fill you with grief, but we shall be free.

Never forget. And, never let it happen again.

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

Jesus’ Grandmothers

April 20, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 20, 2014

Who were the women in Rabbi Jesus’ family tree? What did their oddness say about him?

Some people call the genealogies in the Bible “the begats,” and they are hard to read. Why would I want to be reading you one? Well, because there are stories embedded in this one. Every name has a story (same with each of our genealogies) and I thought you might be interested in these. Women are hardly ever mentioned in these. This is the genealogy of Rabbi Jesus. Count on your fingers the women in this as I read it.

Matthew 1 – The Genealogy of Jesus

1 A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham:

2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob,

Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,

Perez the father of Hezron,

Hezron the father of Ram,

4 Ram the father of Amminadab,

Amminadab the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon the father of Salmon,

5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,

Obed the father of Jesse,

6 and Jesse the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

…then 24 generations without the mention of a woman, then…

16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

The usual genealogy in the Bible is a list of fathers. The mothers are rarely mentioned. In this genealogy of Jesus, there are a several items of interest. One is that it’s a list of Joseph’s forbears, which leads you to believe that the Virgin Birth didn’t mean the same thing to Matthew that it does to people today, but that’s another sermon. The second unusual thing is that there are four grandmothers mentioned in Jesus’ list of forbears: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah. Not only are they mentioned, but they are women with interesting stories, stories I would like to tell you today.

Matthew wrote this genealogy in a time when the rules for women were narrow and mean. There wasn’t much women who weren’t married to kings or emperors could do to distinguish themselves in the Greek and Roman cultures. The most you could go for was to be really good, stay under the radar, do what you were supposed to do, and not get yourself in trouble. It was easy to get in trouble. If you got pregnant without being married, if you didn’t get pregnant when you were married, if you got raped, if your husband died, all of those things were bad, and they were your fault.

Were these grandmothers of Jesus exemplary church ladies, following all the rules to the letter and making cautious moves so their lives could be free of turbulence and pleasing to those around them? NO. These women did not do the nice thing, pleasing those around them. What they did would now be called risk-taking. Doing the higher right thing, rather than the nice thing. Good rather than nice.

These women embody the difference between being good and being nice.

TAMAR

Tamar’s story is in the book of Genesis (38:6-30). It was the custom of the day, if a man died leaving no children, his brother would marry the widow as one of his wives and have children with her to be counted as the children of his dead brother. That way the brother’s line would continue. Tamar’s husband was one of the sons of Judah. Judah was the one the whole nation was named after later. Judah was a brother of Joseph, one of the ones who sold Joseph to the Egyptians and then told their father that Joseph had been eaten by a wild animal. They gave their father the coat of many colors, dipped in animal blood, as evidence. It wouldn’t have fooled CSI, but it was enough for Jacob, their father.

Anyway, Judah moved away and married, and had some sons and the eldest son married a woman named Tamar. The story says he was wicked in the Lord’s sight, so the Lord killed him. Judah told his next son, Onan, to have intercourse with her and make some children. He spilled his seed on the ground in front of her, refusing to make children with her. The god in the story gets mad at him for that, so he died too. We still have people whose beliefs about solo sex are shaped by interpreting this story wrong, and “Onanism” should be a term for refusing to do the right thing, instead of a term for having sex by yourself. Whew. This is awkward to talk about, but that’s the scriptures for you. The third son was still too young to fulfill the brotherly obligation, so Judah told Tamar to go back to her father’s house and live there as a widow. He worried that the third son would die too, as it seemed to him that some kind of doom was emanating from Tamar

11 Judah then said to his daughter-in-law Tamar, “Live as a widow in your father’s house until my son Shelah grows up.” For he thought, “He may die too, just like his brothers.” So Tamar went to live in her father’s house.

12 After a long time Judah’s wife, the daughter of Shua, died. When Judah had recovered from his grief, he went up to Timnah, to the men who were shearing his sheep, and his friend Hirah the Adullamite went with him.

13 When Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep,”

14 she took off her widow’s clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelah had now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife.

15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face.

16 Not realizing that she was his daughter-inlaw, he went over to her by the roadside and said, “Come now, let me sleep with you.” “And what will you give me to sleep with you?” she asked.

17 “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he said. “Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?” she asked.

18 He said, “What pledge should I give you?” “Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,” she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him.

19 After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again.

20 Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her.

21 He asked the men who lived there, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?” “There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,” they said.

22 So he went back to Judah and said, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’ “

23 Then Judah said, “Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.”

24 About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.” Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”

25 As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,” she said. And she added, “See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.”

26 Judah recognized them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not sleep with her again.

27 When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb.

28 As she was giving birth, one of them put out his hand; so the midwife took a scarlet thread and tied it on his wrist and said, “This one came out first.”

29 But when he drew back his hand, his brother came out, and she said, “So this is how you have broken out!” And he was named Perez.

30 Then his brother, who had the scarlet thread on his wrist, came out and he was given the name Zerah. She was good, not nice.

According to the Book of Ruth, this Peretz becomes the great great great great grandfather of Boaz, who is the great grandfather of David.

RAHAB

Rahab was a prostitute who lived in Jericho. The Israelites wanted to conquer that town, and their commander, Joshua, sent two spies to look it over.

Joshua 2 Rahab and the Spies

1 Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

2 The king of Jericho was told, “Look! Some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land.”

3 So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab: “Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy out the whole land.”

4 But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. She said, “Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they had come from.

5 At dusk, when it was time to close the city gate, the men left. I don’t know which way they went. Go after them quickly. You may catch up with them.”

6 (But she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them under the stalks of flax she had laid out on the roof.)

7 So the men set out in pursuit of the spies on the road that leads to the fords of the Jordan, and as soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut….

She made a deal with the spies for the life of her family. ” please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign

13 that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death.”

14 “Our lives for your lives!” the men assured her. “If you don’t tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the LORD gives us the land.”

15 So she let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part of the city wall.

16 Now she had said to them, “Go to the hills so the pursuers will not find you. Hide yourselves there three days until they return, and then go on your way

21 “Agreed,” she replied. “Let it be as you say.”

So she sent them away and they departed. And she tied the scarlet cord in the window. She and her family were spared when Joshua and his troops took the city. She was good to her family, compromised herself for them and saved them.

RUTH

Ruth was a foreigner, from Moab. She married the son of Naomi, who was from Judah, Israel. Naomi’s husband died, then her two sons. She told Ruth and her other daughter-in-law Orpah (where Oprah got her name) to go back to their mothers and find other men to marry. But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.

17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.

Isn’t it interesting that the words many people say at their weddings were originally said between a woman and her mother-in-law?

They got to Judah at the time of the barley harvest, and Ruth went to work in the field of a near kinsman Naomi pointed out to her. He wasn’t next in line for her, but second. Ruth reaped in the fields, and he noticed her. He offered her protection and food, and she stayed with his folks in the field. When the harvest was over, Naomi told her to go to the threshing floor where the men slept and lie down with him. He did not reject her. His mom was Rahab, remember from the genealogy? He was thrilled, but wanted to do the honorable thing, so he went and negotiated with the next in line so that he could take her as his wife. They made it happen the way they wanted it to, and she gave birth to Obed, King David’s grandfather.

BATHSHEBA

King David saw her bathing on the roof, and she was beautiful. Uriah, her husband, was off fighting David’s war. He called her to the palace and she slept with him. She found out she was pregnant, and David called her husband home for R and R. Uriah refused to go home while the war was still being fought. He slept at the gate of the city with his some of his men, like an athlete who won’t shave until the championship is won. David got him drunk and tried to send him home, but he slept with his men at the gate again. Then David placed him in the fight so he would get killed. He was killed, and Bathsheba mourned him, but she went to the palace and became David’s wife, and bore a son. The story says God was mad at David, so the son got sick and died. One of Bathsheba’s next sons was one of Jesus’ grandfathers.

What are these women doing in this genealogy? Commentators have worked for years trying to figure out what they had in common. They all made choices that were risky. They gathered up all the dice and rolled them, changing their lives. Life pushed them one way and another. Loved ones were killed, but they chose life. They put themselves in danger of rejection and harm. They chose life.

Especially Ruth and Tamar made a leap, instead of subsiding into resignation and bitterness over their fate. They didn’t shrug and say, well, I got dealt a bad hand, I’m just unlucky, or I’ve been done wrong. They took what power they had and used it to move their lives forward.

The gospel writer is telling the story of Messiah, the Redeemer. In the beginning of his story he embeds five women who chose to do a brave thing, even though it could get them into trouble. Is there something about redemption that takes guts? That takes a willingness to face rejection? Foreigners, a prostitute, a beauty who married King David, but is named in the genealogy as “wife of Uriah,” and Mary, the young woman who was with child before she had been with a man, yet her baby’s lineage is traced through her husband. Mystery comes into the world, redemption comes into the world with its own morality, with its own sense of the good that plays in all shades in between black and white. These are family stories that would not play well in some sweet Pleasantville. They are real families, real choices, real risks, and we learn that you never know how redemption will come to the world.

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

Depression

April 13, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 13, 2014

So many people suffer from bouts of depression. What helps? How does one be a friend to someone who is depressed? What causes it? How is it different from sorrow?

Sermon:
A Few Thoughts About Depression

There are lots of us who have moments of feeling like life is too overwhelming to be handled. Nothing will change for the better, we will never find what we seek, there will be no true sweetness or love for us. Happiness is a thing we cannot grasp or remember. For the fortunate ones among us, this feeling lasts a day or two and then it lifts.

For others, it stays, and it can take lives. The voices inside that watch and criticize multiply and feed on the spirit. There is no spark of hope to light the path. The mind is in a deep pit and there is no way out There is no energy to make choices or even to take care of routine necessities. Some keep functioning in their jobs and families, but inside it feels like a toxic wasteland. It hurts, mentally and physically. The body can ache as the soul twists in pain. Some people sleep all the time, some sleep fitfully. Every morning at three-thirty they wake up for an hour before being able to fall back to sleep Some people eat everything in sight, some stop eating. Sometimes depression looks like a long angry spell, and sometimes it looks like collecting things you don’t need. Hoarding is a kind of depression, including the hoarding of animals.

Depression is not sadness, although feelings of sadness can be present in depression. In sadness, you grieve the loss of someone you loved or a dream you cherished. You cry, you mourn, you feel awful. It’s healthy and appropriate. Some people think that if you are completely well-adjusted and mentally fit, you will be able to go through any situation in full serenity and peace. Not so. In many situations, sadness is the appropriate emotion to feel. If you weren’t feeling it, there would be something wrong.

Depression is not anger, although feelings of anger and resentment can be present in depression. Anger is meant to alert us to a situation that is harmful to us. We look around to see what needs to change, what needs to move. If we have to stay in a situation that is harmful to us, we may develop depression.

Low self-esteem and feelings of inferiority are also part of depression. I would like to say, though, that low self-esteem seems to be part of the human condition. Most people feel like everyone else knows something they don’t know, like there was a life handbook given out and they didn’t get one. Many people feel inferior when they compare themselves to others. The thing we don’t notice is that we are comparing our insides to their outsides. In depression, though, feelings of inferiority and regret grow into deep shame and feelings of worthlessness. You feel there is something wrong with you. There is a deep emptiness inside.

Depression has been around for a long time. King Saul, in the Bible, is described as suffering from periods of deep melancholy. The music David played for him on his harp helped alleviate the King’s pain. For some music is healing, for others it can be the beauty of nature. Many therapies have been tried throughout the ages. Hippocrates recommended a vegetable diet and abstinence from all excesses. Others tried entertaining stories, dirty jokes, exhortation and confrontation, counting your blessings, looking at people were are less fortunate than you, etc.

These days there are lots of cures to try. The biomedical discoveries about depression and its causes are coming thick and fast. Lots of things can mimic depression. Hormone imbalance, food allergies, thyroid mis-function, sensitivity to cyclical changes in the light as seasons change, certain medications, head injuries, diabetes, hypoglycemia, and other things.

If you don’t have any of those things, if you truly have clinical depression, you have an illness like any other illness of the body. There is no shame in it. There is no reason to be embarrassed. It happens to people. Like many illnesses, there are causative factors in the environment and in the mind of the sufferer. When you have a heart attack, the doctors give medicine and now they complement that with talk therapy and changes to your diet and lifestyle. Depression is that way too. The medicine is there, and it is good. If one doesn’t work for you, try another one. Each one works in a different way, and one will be better than another. Changes to diet and lifestyle are important too. Alcohol is a depressant. Nicotine can make depression worse. Some artificial sweeteners crash the level of serotonin in your body. Serotonin in necessary for the feeling of wellbeing that we enjoy. Exercise is an element in the cure of depression. Sometimes depression can be alleviated by walking thirty minutes a day three times a week. The problem is people who are severely depressed can’t make themselves do that.

The various anti-depressant medications are highly effective, unless a person is using alcohol at the same time. The problem is people have a shame reaction to them that we don’t have as much to heart medicine or diabetes medicine. We still feel like it’s a weakness of character. Like if we could just pull ourselves together we could beat this thing. Mind over illness in a powerful thing, and it works as well on depression as it does on arthritis and cancer. Sometimes yes, mostly no.

Talk therapy can do some good. What do we do in talk therapy to help with depression? One approach is called “Cognitive Therapy.” That theory holds that it is mistaken ways of thinking that lead to depression. You work with someone to become aware of some ways you might be thinking that sap your spirit. Another thing therapists do is talk with you about your anger or your sadness in which you may have gotten stuck. They will ask about depression in your family medical history, as it can run in families. There are lots of different therapies, and each of them seems to work with equal effectiveness.

How do you help someone with depression? Cheering them up isn’t the way. You can acknowledge their suffering as you would with someone who is battling any illness. You can’t ask them to snap out of it. They can’t always beat it with their will. Some people seem to feel it’s noble to struggle with it unaided, and it is as noble as struggling, medicine-free, with high blood pressure or multiple sclerosis. How do you help someone? You can encourage them to treat it as a lifethreatening illness and get on some medicine. It might not work, but it might.

If you do try medicine to complement your talk therapy or exercise, be aware that not every medicine works for everyone, and you may have to try several before you get it to the best point. Also, medicines tend to “poop out” after several years, and you need to switch.

If you think about suicide, please consider that it may be a helpful urge to kill off a part of your life. You should try making huge changes before you kill off all of it. Maybe a few relationships need to go, a few expectations. Maybe you will need to accept that you’ve disappointed someone or lost everything. Life comes up through cracks in the pavement, past rocks and on the precarious sides of cliffs. The pain is great and you think there’s no hope anymore, but that’s the depression dementor doing its work, and they lie. Talk about it. Get support. Get sober. Let go of the shame. Hang onto moments of joy.

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

God wants you to be rich!

April 6, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 6, 2014

The Third Commandment forbids taking God’s name in vain. So many people say “God bless you!” to the poor but do not help to change the situation. So many politicians say “God bless America” at the end of their speeches, but what do they mean by that? Might using God’s name for ulterior motives be taking that name in vain?

Sermon:

Hypocrisy and the Third Commandment

In the summers we used to go up to Roaring River, my Uncle David’s farm near Daniel’s Pass, NC. I remember riding in the back seat of his old Jeep and being reprimanded sternly. This was unusual for him – he wasn’t a stern person. He was the second youngest of thirteen children, and he had been always in trouble. What had I done? I had said “Gah ….. ” about something. I have no idea how to spell that. It’s a Southern child’s word. “Golly,” I knew, was forbidden, as it was a way to not say “God,” which was really really forbidden, since it was taking the Lord’s name in vain. Which brings us to the Third Commandment, the next in this year’s series:

“You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

The original Hebrew says, “La Tisah Ess Shaim Adoshem L’shav.” The key word is “Tisah” which does not mean “to take” or “to say” God’s name. Tisah is Hebrew for “to carry,” which means the commandment is telling us, “Do not CARRY God’s name in vain.” This word implies lifting up, carrying like a banner or a flag. “In vain” means uselessly, or in an empty way. It’s the only one of the Commandments that is tagged with this “The Lord will not hold anyone guiltless (literally will not cleanse) someone who does that. Is it possible that the scriptures mean to condemn little kids who say “Golly” or even “My God, that’s an ugly dog” more than murderers? No, it is not possible.

Ancient Jews avoided saying the name of God altogether. They used four letters YOD-HE-VAV-HE without vowels. These four letters are called the Tetragrammaton Instead of making the sounds ‘Yuh” “huh” Wuh” “huh” they say “Adonai,” which is translated “the Lord,” or just “ha-shem,” which means “the name.” This way they will avoid taking God’s name in vain. In English you sometimes see the word “God” written “G-d.”

Later on, Christian scholars added the vowels from the word “Adonai” to the Tetragrammaton, and pronounced it “Jehovah.”

When Moses was talking to God in the burning bush, he asks God’s name. “I am who I am,” is what the translation says. It would better say “I will be who I will be.” I remember one preacher saying that was God saying that he would be the same yesterday, today, and forever. It doesn’t sound like that to me. If a person said to you “I will be who I will be, “would you think that meant they were unchanging? I think that preacher was seeing what he already believed. That happens all the time in life. We see what supports the things we already think. To me, “I will be who I will be” implies that God is changing. I could be reading into the text what I already believe as well, though there is a little more evidence in the rest of the Exodus story. When God leads the people in the wilderness, he forms a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night. Smoke, fire. Those are constantly changing forms. I just think that is interesting. He wasn’t a hawk or a dragonfly. Those are also changeable, but in smoke and in fire you can see shapes, different people see different shapes. You can’t grab hold of either one, no matter how close you get.

Also, when Moses asks to see God, he is allowed to, but he only sees the back of God as God passes by. Some scholars say this means we never see God, we just see where God has been. I like that thought.

The Divine Force is always changing, and we only see where it has been. Even that is open to question and interpretation.

So “God” isn’t really the name of God, it’s just a human word in English to describe the concept of the Divine One. In other languages the concept is called “Deus, Dio, Dios, Zeus, Allah, then there are lots of particular names for particular gods or aspects of the one god: Krishna, Shiva, Yemaya, Oshun, Morrigan, Nana. Thousands of names.

Lao-Tse, the father of Taoism, writes in the Tao te Ching, “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth.

While naming is the origin of the myriad things.” In naming you begin to separate, you begin particularity; you begin to limit the One.

That’s a lot about the name of God. From those who won’t name the Divine at all, to those who hint at a name but refuse to pronounce it. These are folks who want to be very careful not to misuse the name. It’s not crystal clear what the misuse of the name is. If it’s not likely to be cussing that is going to cause God to be more displeased with you than if you had stolen or killed, what is it?

Then there are those who pronounce it all the time. “God bless you,” “God told me to talk to you,” “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” A lot of these people are kind hearted and good folks. They are sincere believers. Then there are those who use it thoughtlessly. Then there are those who use it for power or greed. Pat Robertson said we had hurricane Sandy because God was angry with America and had withdrawn his protection from the country because of the pagans, feminists, abortionists and gay people. There is the Phelps family who pickets the funerals of American soldiers with big posters that read “God hates fags.” There are those, like Ted Haggart, President of the American Association of Evangelicals, representing about 30 million people, who lift high the banner of the name of God to wade into the fray against gay and lesbian American citizens. A few days ago he was accused by a gay escort of hiring him once a month and asking him to buy crystal meth so they could get high together. There are those like Jimmy Swaggart, who raised millions as a televangelist, then was caught, twice, with prostitutes. Once DUI. Of course, those things could happen to anyone, I guess. But not everyone makes money making people feel guilty, then feel like there is hope for them if they send money in to support the television ministry.

Some preachers regularly ask for donations, claiming that those that give will reap the benefit of God’s blessing. People are told if they give enough, even if they are in debt, God will erase their debt. And if God doesn’t ease their financial troubles, then they aren’t giving enough. This principle is known as the “prosperity gospel.”

A person who used to work for Robert Tilton’s ministries said they were given bundles of envelopes and a letter opener. They were to take out the cash and toss the letters. They pulled in nearly $1,000 an hour.

The problem came when the televangelist watchdog group, The Trinity Foundation, founded by a man named Ole Anthony, sent a squad of detectives to Tilton’s office. They went through the dumpster and found piles of letters that were still folded in their envelopes, which had been slit to extract the money. One of the detectives, who earns a salary of $80.00 a week at the Foundation, carries a letter from that dumpster in his wallet. A worried mother was writing for prayers for her son, who was suicidal. “This reminds me why we do this,” he said. They leaked the story to Diane Sawyer and Prime Time, and Tilton went down.

Politicians who cloak their ambition in God talk are breaking the Third Commandment by introducing legislation to keep the Ten Commandments in the courthouses, but not knowing what they are, sponsoring anti-gay legislation when your numbers sink in the polls, hammering at folks about family values while cheating on their spouses, stealing money or beating their children. Those who say God is punishing homosexuals by sending AIDS. Those people are carrying the name of God in an empty way, pretending to know the mind of God.

These commandments are binding for Jews and Muslims as well, and those who break them are those who say God is punishing the US for its foreign policies with hurricanes and floods, those who say “In the name of God” before they blow someone up or cut off someone’s head.

It seems this commandment is about religious hypocrisy and violence, about claiming that you know something about what God thinks, who God would bomb, what God would drive.

Do UUs fall short of our ideals of behavior and right relationship? Yes. All the time. We are short with one another when we should be kind. We male-bash, or we get ugly about our differences of opinion, or we denigrate one another, or ignore the stranger in our midst because it’s uncomfortable to talk to someone new or because we just don’t have energy for a conversation that day. Or we don’t go to the polls and vote our principles. Do we carry the banner or our principles cynically, for power or money? Maybe. I can’t really figure out how to do that, but maybe during the discussion you can help me. There is good religion and bad religion. Most of it is mixed. Only a little religion has to do with God, I think. No one really knows, even though most people speak like they do. Our task is to clean up our own hearts and minds, and to name hypocrisy as breaking the Third Commandment.

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

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

A World of Pure Imagination

March 30, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
March 30, 2014

The way we speak about our beliefs is powerful. Language can either serve to connect or distance us from others, based on our emotional associations with the words chosen by others. We will explore the possibility of religious language as limitless metaphor and poetry.

Yesterday, I learned the happy fact that a group pugs is called a grumble. My soon-to-be in-laws are a pug-owning family, so there is a constant grumble underfoot in the kitchen during every major holiday. Being a lover of words and their multiple meanings, I searched out other nouns to describe congregations of animals. Among the best were: a flamboyance of flamingos, a murder of crows, a memory of elephants, a business of ferrets, an unkindness of ravens, a prickle of hedgehogs, and a piteousness of doves. As cute and hilarious as these are, they all make some sense, don’t they? Each collective noun describes either the behavior or an attribute of the animal. I remembered that a colleague’s wife had once named our meeting of a group of ministers a “cackle of ministers.” That’s pretty accurate.

It delights me to think that each of these spot-on collective nouns originated in someone’s imagination and the terms stuck. Among new terms accepted into the Oxford Dictionary are cyberespionage, selfie, and mochaccino. Last week, I was called out by our high school youth for trying to coin the term, “sing-along-ability” when giving them guidance on hymn selection for their upcoming youth-led service.

As many of us do, I love playing with words and giving them new meaning. I am a fool for a good pun. For example, this past couple of weeks, I’ve been under the weather and when the doctor told me that it was caused by a virus, my fiance declared that I had “gone viral.” I can assure you that I have stretched the mileage considerably on that joke.

But, as much as I enjoy entertaining nuanced definitions of familiar words, I can say with some confidence that I am in good company in admitting that I have had some squeamishness around words such as: God, faith, prayer, salvation and sin. Many in this room, no doubt, have come to Unitarian Universalism from other faith traditions who use these terms in specific ways, and many of the ways that they are commonly used have left still, bleeding, gaping wounds on many. That pain, those memories and the suspicion of those who will wield such words as weapons, are real.

Although, in her attempt to find a happy medium between head and heart, my mother did cart us around occasionally between the Catholic Church and every flavor of Protestant Christianity available in Odessa, TX, I had been exposed to Unitarian Universalism early enough that my family’s “church hopping” did not rock my UU foundation. For the most part, I was sure that we would always return to our tiny UU fellowship, where we didn’t have to turn our brains off. At least that is how I saw it, as an inquisitive child. I would have made a terrible “Handmaiden,” too. At our little fellowship, we talked a ton about the beliefs of others’ religions. We learned that, as UU’s, we drew value and wisdom from each. We even had a beautiful mural on the wall, with portraits of prophetic men and women throughout the ages, including Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi, though we didn’t really talk much about the value of Jesus’ teachings.

In West Texas, I experienced some of the worst expressions of Christianity: a P.E. coach telling me that I worshiped the devil in 5th grade, a 7th grade classmate began her six-year attempt at attempting to persuade me to attend her church with her because she was genuinely worried about my soul not making it to Heaven, and, at age seventeen, the rage-filled screams of a disgusted call-center co-worker when she found out that I am gay and she had been sitting next to me for weeks. And, I have heard stories from others that my own seem like a walk in the park.

I, like the many who find their way to UUism, wanted to distinguish myself as much as possible from the Christianity that I had known, that I found myself often explaining my faith by talking about all that UU’s don’t believe in and lacking a clear vocabulary to explain what it is that we actually do believe. I could speak to shared ideals and point to the Principles and Sources, but failed miserably at sharing descriptions of how this faith moves my spirit.

Blogger, John Halstead, touches on this an article published this week entitled, “The Baby is the Bathwater: Why I haven’t joined the Unitarian Church,” “William Ellery Channing, the father of Unitarianism in America, wrote in 1820 that Unitarians had sacrificed “imagination and poetic enthusiasm” to “the rational and critical power”. Emerson bemoaned the lack of enthusiasm in Unitarianism. Theodore Parker decried the absence of a “deep internal feeling of piety”: “Most powerfully preaching to the Understanding, the Conscience, and the Will, the cry was ever, ‘Duty, Duty! Work, Work!’ They failed to address with equal power the Soul, and did not also shout, ‘Joy, Joy! Delight, Delight!'” Orestes Brownson, a Transcendentalist who converted to Catholicism, wrote of Unitarians, that they “had pronounced the everlasting ‘No.’ Were they never to be able to pronounce the everlasting ‘Yes’?” And Unitarian minister, John Trevor, a generation later, regretted the absence of “enthusiasm and personal abandonment” in Unitarianism: “It is the last word of the Old Gospel, sifted small through the riddle of the Intellect; not the first word of the New Gospel, bursting up irresistibly from the Spirit.” These were all men who had great respect for Unitarianism and its ambition to advance social justice, but who found it lacking in something essential.”

In other words, we are great at walking the talk, but we improve on our ability, as Unitarian Universalists, to talk the walk. We need language adequate enough to express and sustain our experience of our transcendent spiritual experiences. In 2002, the then-President of our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, Rev. Bill Sinkford, preached a controversial sermon, “the Language of Reverence,” in which he pointed out that our Seven Principles does not contain one traditionally religious language, but rather focuses on lifting up our shared ethical ideals. He posed the question if this language, while beautiful in its aspirations, was sufficient; if it was “up to the spiritual task [of nurturing and describing “the reality of our religious experience”] and whether we need to expand our lexicon.” Sinkford says, “We believe that our religious theological pluralism is good- it certainly distinguishes us from most of the religious world. But our religious breadth can work against our religious depth.”

In an effort to strengthen the depth of the way we speak about this faith we love, Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar explores this topic in her book, “Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language.” In it, she acknowledges that, In some congregations, worship and community life may be rich with the lexicon of God, prayer, salvation, and sin. In other congregations, although the hymns and anthems may be replete with words like holy, grace, and soul, it is only in the music that this vocabulary is used. For many, it seems easier to sing these sentiments than to say them. We allow a broader margin for metaphor and poetry in our singing than in our speaking. And, in still other congregations and families, these words may not be merely absent, but shunned.”

Further on, Harrison Nieuwejaar names what I later discovered as I entered St. Edward’s University’s Religious Studies Department and then again when I left Texas to attend a liberal Christian seminary in New York City- there is value in common vocabulary, yes, even in traditionally Judeo-Christian words. If we, as the heady UUs we can be, can relax into our imaginations and consider meanings of such traditional religious words that exist outside of the narrowness of our exposure to fundamentalism, we may avoid our own, flip-side version of fundamentalism and enjoy a greater openness to the spirit.

She says, “even as I urge us to use religious language more broadly, I caution that we must hold these words lightly, using them to point and suggest, not to define. These words will serve us best if we allow them to be elastic, perhaps not meaning precisely to me what they mean to you, or to your Jewish neighbor, or to your Lutheran in-laws, but pointing in the same direction, capturing the essence of a shared experience, a shared longing for a deeper spiritual life. We need to go bravely into the tangle of words, wrestle with them, find which of the traditional words can become useful to us and identify which new words are needed.”

Once, as I was leaving a guest preaching gig at a small lay-led congregation here in Central Texas, a woman from the worship committee ran out after me and said that she was glad that I had spoken about prayer, as she finds that most of the staunchly Secular Humanist congregation has very negative attitudes about such things and she has learned not to bring them up. She asked me for advice on what she could say the next time someone from her church is upset that she adds the language of prayer to the service. I told her to simply introduce the language of prayer to those who dismiss it as nonsense as poetic device. God is a word that can have a concrete understanding, as with the image of a guy in the clouds with a white beard who passes judgment on humanity, but god, with a lower case “g,” can be a metaphorical, nuanced, admittedly limited word that does not correspond to any object, but may correspond to every living thing, or a feeling, or a peace that surpasses all understanding… This word can mean a mountain of layers of meaning and depth that, when we begin to release our defensiveness around it and other religious “trigger” words like it, we may find that we have more in common with members of other faith traditions than we thought.

Muslims, for example, have ninety-nine words in Arabic for Allah. Among them are attributes, such as: The Just, The Awakener, The All-Forgiving, and The Protecting Friend. It is said that there are actually one hundred, but that the last is yet unknown.

Harrison Nieuwejaar asserts that, for UUs, “God has been put in a box and has lost its rich metaphorical meaning. We need to open that box and let an expansive breeze of ideas and images and associations again infuse this language. We need to reclaim textured meanings, but we have a strong cultural tide to row against, a double tide of fundamentalism and atheism. The fundamental views- both theistic and atheistic- are the ones that get the most airtime and thus become accepted as the shared cultural understanding of God.”

When boxed in, words like God, prayer, sin, and salvation can seemingly serve to keep us safe from those whose narrow views of what such words can mean and tuck us away from the memories of such encounters. But, is adopting our own brand of fundamentalism, an “us/them” fervor, helping us to heal and grow and fully enjoy our spirituality to the fullest?

Also, when we restrict the meaning of language of reverence, as Sinkford coined, are we missing the opportunity to build connections with our neighbors through a common vocabulary?

This conversation was all the rage in UU circles in the middle of last decade, but I don’t believe it has yet become passe, as the character of Unitarian Universalism, by and large was to distance ourselves as much as possible from “God language” throughout most of the twentieth century. That just means that we have at least a century’s worth of baggage to now sift through. We have embraced the fallacy that a certain group of people who we love to point fingers at, have sole ownership of this language of reverence, that such language only speaks of the implausible, that we embrace science over myth. We speak as if there exists no awe, mystery, or transcendence in the natural world, as if we never have cause to connect with one another through clumsy, yet movingly authentic attempts at describing the indescribable.

Each of these terms, alone, could be its own sermon. And, indeed, I have spent some time in past sermons teasing out a few of them, but what I would invite us all to do is to fumble around a bit, as awkward and uncomfortable as it might be, with using traditionally religious words to speak of our religious experience. We will try this together. We have before us the expanse of our imaginations’ poetry as well as the infinite possibilities to which the limitations of spoken language restrict us.

I will leave you with the words of the late Rev. Forrest Church, “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”

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

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

Balance/Equinox

March 23, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 23, 2014

How do we keep our balance as life around us swirls? Is balance something to be desired, or should we just enjoy the roller coaster ride?

Sermon:

BALANCE

The Equinox is a time of balance in the earth’s year. The nights and days are of equal length. It is the still point in the great ebb and flow of light into dark and dark into light again. The light and the dark are among the first things created, according to the Hebrew scriptures. They are both good. They continue today, millions of years later, in the same pattern as when they began. Ancient people noticed four special sun events: the two solstices: the first day of summer, when the days are longest and the nights are shortest, and the first day of winter, the winter solstice, when the nights are longest and the days are shortest, and the two equinoxes, when night and day are the same length.

These four sun holidays are symbolized by a four-armed cross within a circle, called a solar cross. It looks like a wheel, and that is no accident. The turning of the seasons is the turning of the wheel. The wheel of the year turns, IIspring to summer, autumn to winter, and from winter round to spring. II The light and dark are in balance for a day. A moment. The turning of the wheel is continuous, and has been so from the beginning of time. The first turn of the wheel WAS the beginning of time. The first day, the first night, and the wheel has been steady ever since.

The equinox is about the balance of light and dark. Things that are not alive can balance in stillness. Things that are alive must balance in the midst of movement. In the midst of the movement of our lives, we look for a moving balance. A living balance.

Many of us are seeking balance in our lives. We try to balance acceptance and action, sternness and sweetness, talking and listening, taking care of ourselves and taking care of others, confronting things that bother us and ignoring them, trusting and worrying. I get frustrated when we have an idea of balance that has to do with stillness or steadiness or equal parts of this and that. Balance does not mean stasis. I learned in martial arts training that you need to spring into action from a place of balance, otherwise you fall over. You need to accept attack from a place of balance, otherwise you fall over. This is true physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes I am good at balance, and other times. I am horrible at it. Hey, maybe that could count as a kind of balance…. No?

We all know that balance is a temporary thing. So many things take our balance away. Being rejected, being chewed out, doing something wrong, losing financial stability, failures, loss, change. Finding ways of regaining a moving balance makes us more able to take what life brings.

STANCE

Your stance in life is how you approach life, how you let life approach you .. Are you going to have an adversarial stance toward life? Are you going to act as if everyone out to get you? That your luck is bad, you don’t believe compliments, people can’t be trusted, things are likely not to work out, you’re going to have to work harder than anyone else for things to work out for you?

Are you going to have a fixed, open stance, where you stand all open and vulnerable, not taking care of yourself, allowing others to decide your fate? What happens, happens… you can’t control anything. You don’t try to make anything happen for yourself…. Your mind is open, but you don’t close it on anything, you say “I have my truth and you have your truth” which kind of makes there be no truth.

Where you are trying to be all things to all people. “I can do that!” “I can be what you want me to be” “I can tolerate any behavior you choose.” This makes you easy to knock over.

Too narrow a stance might mean you have a small range of things that are acceptable to you. You have a picture of how things should be, and you don’t handle it well if they don’t turn out that way. It could be that you cannot let yourself make a mistake, so your perfectionism limits you.

Another factor in being physically and emotionally hard to knock over is to lower your center of gravity. When you have soft knees (assuming your knees can still do that) you can sink the center of your body a little closer to the ground. This is one of the things that makes you grounded and more stable. Emotionally, having your center of gravity low might be this; that you are willing to make a mistake, that you are willing to let other people talk, that you seek to understand others before you seek to have them understand you. That you might start a sentence with the words: “I could be wrong.”

We all only balance momentarily. Since we are alive, we are always losing our balance and coming back to it. No one is perfectly balanced all the time. Some people balance carefully, others more gracefully and freely.

One image of balance within movement I love is that of a pot on a wheel…. As we rest in that stillpoint within, we have a better chance of finding our balance in our shifting and frenzied lives. We can become clear about where to hold on and where to let go. When to feast and when to be frugal,when to speak and when to be quiet. When to come close and when to keep a distance. And we can find our balance. For a while. Until the wheel turns again.

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

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