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© Davidson Loehr

April 23, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Help us to love what we cannot understand. Help us stretch the largeness of our hearts to make up for the smallness of our comprehension.

Too often and too eagerly, we restrict our acceptance to the narrow limits of what we can understand, touching only small parts of the bigger world around us. Too often and too eagerly, we also restrict our love to our kind of people, touching only a tiny sliver of the need around us.

When the narrowness of our certainty stifles the certainty of our need for one another, we need help. We need help toward a greater understanding, but even more, we need help toward acting out of a larger heart.

And the good news is that where our heart can lead, our mind can learn to follow.

Let us seek the help we need, within and around us, to let our hearts learn to lead. For even more than the world needs understanding, it needs compassion.

Amen.

SERMON: Denial is Not a River in Egypt

I’m trying to do some very ambitious things with you this morning, so I need you to work with me. I thought that in the next thirty minutes, we might cover the nature of all human knowledge, religious and scientific certainty and denial, discrimination and bigotry, the degradation of the environment, and the nature of the kingdom of God. I’ve tried to cut this down from its original length of nine years.

As far-fetched as that sounds, those really are some of the themes that can be woven together here. So I’m talking about very broad patterns that I see, and think I can get you to see.

Here’s what I think we want in life. We want to believe we know and live out of truth rather than self-deceptions, that we stand foursquare behind justice, goodness and love, and that we, our beliefs and our actions help – in our small way – to make this a better world.

We do it by knowing what’s true and good, and trying our best to serve what is true and good.

However, built in to the very way we are built, and the very way we try to serve truth and goodness, are all of the ignorance, bigotry, discrimination, indifference to the political, social, military and environmental situations, nearly all the evil in the world – as well as all of the good – and the enduring enemy of the Kingdom of God. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound encouraging.

Here’s how it works; see if you agree. I’ll start kind of abstractly, then bring it down to earth.

When we find the truth, in any area, then we become certain. We want, we need, to feel certain about these things. And our attitude of certainty is like a kind of spirit or feeling that guides both our thoughts and actions. I don’t mean just narcissistically. I don’t mean that we each just go into a small room, decide what we like, then lurch out and foist it onto the world. We’re social animals, and we touch many more bases in deciding what is true and gaining our deep feeling of certainty about it all.

When we develop our picture of the world, which defines not only what is true and false but even what counts as reasonable or sane, it is like building a big tub around us, a big wooden barrel, with a lot of staves in it. You could think of it as a fence or as walls that define the boundaries of our world, but I have a poem later that describes it as a tub, so I want to get us imagining our world as a tub around us.

Think of the things involved that give you your most distinctive feelings of certainty. Here’s the list I made for myself; see how many other staves in this tub of reality you”d add. We get our picture of our world from:

Role models and charismatic figures. We”ve all had a few wonderfully life-giving people in our lives, and if you’re like me, you sometimes find yourself guided by what actions you think they would advise.

People we love and admire draw us toward their ideals and beliefs. We want to feel like we’re in their community, and their beliefs have a greater pull on us than the beliefs of people we didn’t really admire.

Parents and family shape the world into which we’re born, and which we take to be normative when we’re growing up – and sometimes for our whole lives. So they influence our picture of ourselves and our world – for better or for worse.

Clergy – also for better or worse – help give us our understanding of who we are and how we should live, or what sorts of “gods” we will feel beholden to.

Respected teachers and elders help shape our world. Some years back, I was talking about this in a sermon, and mentioned one of the really magical teachers I had long ago – a 9th grade English teacher named Mrs. Williamson, and talked a little about what a powerful and affirming presence her memory still was. After the sermon – which I delivered in St. Paul, Minnesota – a woman about my age came up to me and said “Did you go to May Goodrell Jr. High in Des Moines?” She was sure – and she was right – that there could only have been one such Mrs. Williamson, who she’d had a year or two after I did. The best teachers not only inform us; they also help form us.

Friends: we usually feel odd if our beliefs put us outside the circle of the people we like and admire, and will tend to stay near beliefs that leave us within a community we value.

Education forms us: not only what we learned, but also where and how we learned it. Those who learned civics during World War II probably got a very different picture of it than those who learned it during the Vietnam War.

Religious scriptures and guiding stories – even novels, movies and television stories – shape our expectations more than most of us want to realize. That can be a fairly scary thought.

And logic. We all have a sense of how our beliefs relate, and for most of us there needs to be some kind of logic connecting the things we believe. We need to feel that what we take to be true is really connected with the way the world really is.

You may think of other staves in the tub that defines your world of truth and certainty, but I suspect it would contain at least these? And when a new idea presents itself, see if you don’t find yourself almost unconsciously doing a mental checklist to see if the people you most admire would respect this new idea, if you can see a compelling logic in it, if it fits with the other things of which you’re quite certain, and so on. In a way, we try to test each new idea against our community and our world to see if it should be admitted, because each truth we hold forms a part of the tub within which we live.

This idea of a tub isn’t meant to imply that we couldn’t leave it or think thoughts that didn’t fit in it, but why would we want to? There are a lot of crazy ideas out there, after all, and we try to keep our beliefs coherent enough that they have some family resemblances with the people and ideas that ground our notion of reality. You could think of our tub as a form of life, as some philosophers call it (from Ludwig Wittgenstein), or a form of living: the way we and our people have chosen to shape and edit what we include in our world and our awareness. But the point is that the picture of the world we live in – our tub – is always much smaller than the real world is.

Now if all this is too abstract, you can also think of this as the Davy Crockett School of Certainty and Action. In Texas, we know of Davy Crockett as one of the heroes at the Alamo, and don’t much think of him as a philosopher. But he had a very simple motto that applies to nearly all of us. Davy Crockett’s famous motto was “Just be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” You’re right, and you have that necessary feeling of certainty about it. And when you’re sure you’re right, you know it’s safe to go ahead.

Two areas where you could expect to find the most compelling sense of certainty might be among religious mystics and scientists. Mystics, because once they are certain that they are in touch or in tune with God, almost nothing can shake them. And scientists, because they have to ground their beliefs in empirical data and check them with the whole host of other scientists within their discipline. This includes checking the inherent logic of a new idea, whether it fits with what they are already certain about, whether the most admired scientists would be likely to agree, and so on.

This can mean that some bright young scientist may come along with a new idea that simply can’t pass the test, and they get their feelings hurt when their brilliant idea is rejected or even laughed at. But honest science isn’t about bending the truth to fit someone’s feelings. It’s about seeking facts and coherent, persuasive logic that fits the way the real world is put together.

One of my favorite stories from science is this kind of a story, involving one of the most famous scientists in the world, and a bright, assertive young man who tried to get an idea past him that couldn’t pass muster. It’s a story that contains most of what I’m trying to talk about this morning.

It happened back in 1935, in the field of theoretical astrophysics, and involved Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the greatest mathematical minds in history. Eddington, at 52, was generally acknowledged as the world’s finest astronomer, and his book on the structure of stars was the classic in its field. The other character in the story was a very bright 24-year-old student from India named Chandrasekhar, or Chandra. He had been studying the structure of stars for only a few years, since he won Eddington’s book as a prize in a school physics contest – so you get a feel for the great distance between their levels of accomplishment in astronomy. But the young man was not shy, and had been discussing a radical new theory of his with Eddington for several months by mail. Eddington finally invited him to London, to present his paper before the prestigious Royal Astronomical Society at Cambridge. Eddington even told Chandra that he had used his influence to get extra time so the young man could present his work properly.

The day before the presentation, when a copy of the printed program was released, Chandra discovered that Eddington had placed himself on the program, following Chandra, and speaking on the same subject.

Chandra’s paper dealt with a fundamental question: What happens after a star has burned up all of its fuel? According to the prevailing theory of the day, the cooling star would collapse into a dense ball called a white dwarf. A star with the mass of the sun, for instance, would shrink to the size of the earth, at which point it would reach equilibrium. Chandrasekhar concluded, however, that the enormous gravitational forces at work in a large star (any star more than 1.4 times as massive as our sun) would cause the star to go on collapsing beyond the white dwarf stage. The star would simply keep getting smaller and smaller and denser and denser until” well, that was an interesting question, and Chandrasekhar delicately avoided it.

Then it was Eddington’s turn.

The point of his paper was that Chandra’s ideas had simply been absurd, and he proceeded to tear apart Chandrasekhar’s paper. The speech was frequently interrupted by laughter from the other scientists. Eddington couldn’t quarrel with Chandrasekhar’s logic or calculations. But he claimed that the whole theory had to be wrong simply because it led to an inevitable and outlandish conclusion. And one measure of Eddington’s brilliance was that he could see the logical implications of the paper better than Chandra could: “The star,” he said, “has to go on radiating and radiating and contracting and contracting until, I suppose, it gets down to a few kilometers radius, when gravity becomes strong enough to hold in even the radiation, and the star can at last find peace.” And no such object could possibly exist, said Eddington. A logical reduction to absurdity, he called it. And he added, in one of my favorite statements in the history of science, “I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.”

Do you see what Sir Arthur Eddington had done? He tested the new theory against a whole line of staves in his tub, against all he knew to be true, the logic demanded in science as he understood it, the style of reasoning that was necessary, even the reactions of a room full of some of the most distinguished scientists in the world, who joined him in raucously laughing down this odd new idea.

But that’s how science, or any good search for truth, works. It is no respecter of people’s feelings, just the facts as understood by those who have authority and are certain: the Davy Crocketts of their sciences.

The argument with Eddington dragged on for years, ruined any chance of Chandra’s getting a tenured teaching position in England, and finally persuaded him to give up the subject altogether. So, shortly after being hired by the University of Chicago in 1937, he put the theory in a book and stopped worrying about it, and switched his research to other and unrelated fields, where the weight of Eddington’s authority had not poisoned the well. And he had a very distinguished career.

Then, in 1983, Chandrasekhar, still at the University of Chicago, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, for the work he had done back in 1935, 48 years earlier. What he had discovered, that Eddington said couldn’t exist, were black holes. The greatest mind in astronomy had been wrong, and the force of his dogmatic but incorrect opinion set back research on black holes for five decades. He couldn’t quarrel with Chandra’s logic or calculations, remember: he opposed the results simply because, as he said, “I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.”

Eddington, like Casey at the bat, had struck out completely – though it took nearly half a century to find out, and the Nobel Prize wasn’t awarded to Chandra until 39 years after Eddington had died; so Eddington had spent the rest of his life certain that he was right.

The year before he won the Nobel Prize, Chandra looked back and tried to draw some conclusions from the story for an interview in the magazine Science 82. How can scientists of Eddington’s caliber be so wrong, and in such unscientific ways?

“For lack of a better word,” Chandra wrote, “there seems to be a certain arrogance toward nature which people develop. These people have had great insights and made profound discoveries. They imagine afterwards that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science which must therefore be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.

“Take Eddington. He was a great man. He said that there must be a law of nature to prevent a star from becoming a black hole. Why should he say that? Just because he thought it was bad? Why does he assume that he has a way of deciding what the laws of nature should be? Similarly, this often-quoted statement of Einstein disapproving of quantum theory: “God does not play dice.” How does he know? I think one could say that a certain modesty toward understanding nature is a precondition to the continued pursuit of science.”

From inside a worldview or paradigm or set of biases – scientific or otherwise – we see a wall made of our certainties that gives us an island of what passes for reason and sanity in a world too big to comprehend. That’s that small world within which we know who we are and what is most true, and I’m not sure we could live without it.

But from the outside, that same wall is seen as our tub of denial: denial of the fact that the world is far bigger than our little certainties. Our tub closes the world out and shuts us up inside of our certainties. It defines what counts as true and sane for us, and also defines how woefully inadequate our little world is.

Here’s why I’ve wanted to think of our small worldview as a tub: because I have a poem to read you. It was written about twenty years before Eddington’s first disastrous meeting with Chandra, and describes what happened to Eddington, and what happens to so many of us.

It is taken from a 1916 book by Edgar Lee Masters called Spoon River Anthology. It’s a wonderful book, though an odd one. There is no story, no plot. The whole book is a collection of fictional epitaphs from the fictional town of Spoon River, in which the dead speak through their epitaphs about their lives, and life in general. One of my favorites was the epitaph of Griffy the Cooper:

“Griffy the Cooper”

from Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters (1916)

The cooper should know about tubs.

But I learned about life as well,

And you who loiter around these graves

Think you know life!

You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps,

In truth you are only looking around the interior of your tub.

You cannot lift yourself to its rim

And see the outer world of things,

And at the same time see yourself.

You are submerged in the tub of yourself-

Taboos and rules and appearances,

Are the staves of your tub.

Break them and dispel the witchcraft

Of thinking your tub is life!

And that you know life!

This is one way of understanding the human condition, the human dilemma. We live within small pictures of a universe that is sometimes infinitely larger than we can imagine. Still, those world pictures give us our sense of order, of home, of who we are and how we should live and how others should live. From the inside, we call it creating order out of chaos, and the order we impose through our world pictures, our paradigms, our biases, lets us feel at home, feel certain, even feel sane.

But from the outside, our wall of certainties looks like a wall of denial, of willful ignorance, or an unwillingness or inability to be moved enough by the vastness of it all that we can react not only with our minds, but also with our hearts. Griffy the Cooper nailed it when he said that we can’t lift ourselves to the rim of our tub and see the outer world of things, and at the same time see ourselves and feel at home.

I can’t think of any field of human knowledge that isn’t built this way: science, religion, music, art, architecture – everything, I think.

In religion, orthodoxy is the tub, heresy is the voice from one looking over the rim of the tub, trying to make a home in a bigger world. And the very bigness of that world is what threatens the adequacy and the comfort of the small world of orthodoxy.

In society, our world pictures, our tubs, tell us which kind of people and behaviors are acceptable and which are wrong. Our tub tells us what roles men and women may play, what kind of people we can and can not love, what sexes, sexual orientations or races are superior to the others, and all the rest of it. And we’re so sure we’re right, that we’re often dangerous to those who lives go beyond our understanding.

Yesterday was Earth Day, and our understanding of our environment is limited or enhanced in the same way. Is the earth here for us to plunder and have dominion over, or for us to be good stewards of, as though our lives depended on it?

A growing number of scientists are warning us that our greedy and uncaring treatment of our earth may have consequences more devastatung than we can imagine. If the arctic ice caps melt, they say Florida and New Jersey may be buried under twenty feet of water. Can we see over the rim of our complacency about using the lion’s share of the earth’s oil and energy in time to make a positive rather than a negative difference? Before our tub gets flooded? Or maybe we can’t think that far, like Eddington couldn’t.

When we reach the end of our intellectual tether, and our understanding can’t include a world bigger than our mind can fathom, almost every religion in the world agrees that it is time to turn it over to our hearts.

Buddhists say when we are faced with the choice of doing the right thing or the compassionate thing, we should do the compassionate thing. Jesus said What good does it do if you love those who love you? Even the worst of people do that. No, you should love even your enemies. And of course the irony here is that if you love your enemies, they are no longer your enemies, and you may have found, together, the power to transform the world.

No matter what religion you turn to, I think you’ll find this same advice. Poets like Edgar Lee Masters were twenty years ahead of Sir Arthur Eddington; sages and prophets like the Buddha and Jesus were aeons ahead of nearly everyone. Beyond the tub of our certainties lie the much bigger worlds that need our compassion and protection. And the ability to love beyond our understanding is the path – many believe it is the only path – toward that idyllic larger picture of the world known as the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God: the state of affairs where we simply treat all other people as our brothers and sisters, as children of God, and treat the entire earth as the handiwork of God, placed in our trust for loving care.

Even more than understanding the world, we are called on to take care of it, so that our presence might bless it rather than cursing it. That may still be the only path toward what Jesus called the kingdom of God – and a great deal more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

April 16, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Easter of our hearts, speak to us. Tell us once again, when we need the gift of spring, that spring is here. Tell us once more, when we need to feel new life, that new life is moving, and can move into us if we will but open our hearts.

Tell us again the timeless story of Easter, about that magical bunny that lays brightly colored eggs of spring, and offers them to all who can find them as food for the spiritual journey as we begin our own Easters.

For it is Easter in our own hearts and lives that we need. Otherwise all these ancient stories are a bore and a nuisance. We want the good news that life can conquer death here and now, in our lives, in our relationships, in our society, and in our world. Bring us the flowers and the colored eggs that deliver that message, oh Easter spirit.

For it is again Easter. And once more we gather not to hear the same stories, but to bring the same needs, and to hope there will be stories to feed them, or maybe even a gift to take home with us – a gift, like a flower of spring.

It is Easter again, and we need an Easter. So we will open our minds and hearts to the possibility of the gift of renewed life. Then come to us, our Easter friends. Come. Amen.

SERMON: Doing Easter in 2006

I have a friend who is a professor of New Testament, who tells her classes each year in early spring that the way they can tell when Easter is coming is that the media will run some new and strange stories about who Jesus really was, or suggesting a new shocking story showing that the Christian story shouldn’t be trusted, or just run weird stories about religion in general.

So last week, right on schedule, three different stories appeared. There was the verdict in the plagiarism case against Dan Brown which we’ve all been breathlessly awaiting, in which the jury decided that he did not steal illegally from other authors (who stole from an Australian religion religion scholar named Barbara Thiering) the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were married, and had at least two children before Mary moved to southern France.

Then there was the National Geographic story about the newly translated Gospel of Judas, suggesting that Jesus and Judas were good buddies, and Jesus told Judas to turn him over to the authorities, so that the Christian story could play out and God, by God, was in charge of everything. I’ve read it. It’s a boring little gospel, quite late, with a strong dose of homophobia, but nothing at all to offer in understanding Jesus, Judas or anything else that happened in the first century.

Third, an author named James Tabor, in excerpts from his forthcoming book, The Jesus Dynasty, writes in breathless prose about raiding two first-century family tombs enclosed under a Jerusalem apartment complex. He suggests they may be the tombs of Jesus and his family, and wants the authorities to do DNA testing to prove it, however that would work! The authorities have declined.

Here in town, as part of keeping Austin weird, there was a special showing of the 1979 Monty Python movie “The Life of Brian,” the mocking farce about Brian, who happened to be born on Christmas in the stable next door to Jesus and spent his life being mistaken for a messiah. That played Friday night and last night, as run-ups to Easter.

And on the way to church this morning, one of our couples passed a billboard which simply said “Way to go, Jesus. Rock on, Dude!” It’s beginning to look like when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

So. A titillating court cast, a scandalous, goofy gospel, a cemetery raid on the tomb of some hapless first-century Jerusalem family, a farcical movie about baby Jesus’ non-messianic baby neighbor, and a billboard that may have been about Brian rather than Jesus, but which is pretty much off the charts in any case.

That’s how we do Easter in 2006.

But there’s something odd here. Can you think of other holidays that are preceded by media stories mocking them or belittling their importance? I’ve never seen Veterans’ Day preceded by programs and cover stories belittling the sacrifice of veterans or making light of the number of them dying in our current war. You can’t even imagine it. It would offend almost everyone in the country, in the world.

Could you imagine, Mother’s Day being preceded by stories making fun of mothers or motherhood, or making light of the work they do? There are the “Mommy Wars” about the best way to be a mother, but there aren’t any attacks on the idea of motherhood that I know of. If there were, there would be riots demanding the head of the publisher and boycotts of the sponsors. For that matter, can you imagine stories mocking romantic love before Valentine’s Day? Or stories in mid-June ridiculing fathers before Fathers’ Day?

We don’t do this, we don’t allow this, for holidays we really take seriously. There may be some anti-US-policy protests around the 4th of July, but the protestors would say they are doing it because they do believe in all that America can be, but not because they want to make fun of the very idea of America.

When you look at the stories behind some of our holidays, some of them stand out as decidedly different. Almost all are about real things that happen in the real world we’re living in. All but two.

Valentine’s day celebrates romantic love between couples

Mothers’ Day recognizes the work and sacrifice of mothers all over the country.

Fathers’ Day does the same for fathers.

Veterans’ Day expresses appreciation for the sacrifice of our war veterans.

Memorial Day recognizes the ultimate sacrifice of the loss of our soldiers’ lives in our various wars.

The 4th of July celebrates the gaining of independence in 1776 through the bravery and dedication of the soldiers, families and citizens of this country.

Thanksgiving is some people’s favorite holiday, because it’s always appropriate to give thanks for our blessings in life, even for the simple blessing of food – today as much as at the first Thanksgiving.

And we don’t mock those holidays. They’re about real things going on in the real world, and we genuinely value and believe in them.

Now Christmas has two unrelated stories, but only one we seem to care about, judging from our behavior. The religious story says once a baby was born of a woman who had never had sex, whose father was a god up in heaven and who would be what some people in one religion call the savior of everyone, though nobody else believes it. Judging by the advertising and decorations each Christmas, and by the kinds of presents we but and expect, almost nobody believes or cares much about the religious story.

The story we love each December, however, is the story of the real center of Christmas: Santa Claus, who travels all over the world in his sleigh pulled by eight or nine flying reindeer so he can bring presents down everyone’s chimney – even those who don’t have chimneys. He gives a lot of presents to everybody and has children sitting on his lap in every shopping mall. That’s the real story of Christmas; the story of baby Jesus has virtually no effect on the observable behavior of the overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of religion.

Easter is also made up of two unrelated stories. The religious one is the story of a man who died and then three days later came back to life and then went up into heaven. Once again, looking at the advertising, decorations, gifts and cards we buy and send, almost nobody seems to care much about the religious story. But the other story, the real Easter story, is the story about a bunny who lays colored eggs, and about people dressing in spring colors, hunting for colored eggs, buying lots of chocolate, and taking flowers home from church, as we’ll do here today.

The very way we treat the religious stories under Christmas and Easter shows that really, in this world, we don’t believe them. They’re different kinds of holidays about a different and imaginary world. Of course, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny also come from make-believe worlds, and we don’t believe them literally, either. But they’re better stories, and do a better job at communicating with us messages we want and need to hear. The religious story, not so much.

We’re taught that Easter is a Christian holiday, but it isn’t true. It isn’t even close. And the place where you’ll read this in the angriest prose is on a whole host of evangelical and biblical Christian websites. If you go online and consult evangelical and fundamentalist Christian sources, they are clear and unanimous that Easter is a completely pagan holiday with absolutely no relation to Jesus, dating back thousands of years to the Babylonian and Chaldean goddess Ishtar – which, they say, was pronounced “Easter.”

Ishtar was a mythological character of the Babylonian or Sumerian religion which existed thousands of years before Jesus lived. She was the goddess of spring; she had rabbits that laid eggs. The eggs symbolized a new life and the colored eggs signified a wish for a bright new year ahead. Both the rabbit and the egg are pagan symbols of sex and fertility.

Sunrise services go back to these ancient practices of welcoming the spring, too. And some say coloring eggs in bright spring colors is also an ancient practice, and related to wearing bright spring colors today.

Many Christians agree that Easter isn’t Christian, and say people obviously don’t take the Christian story as seriously as stories of spring, life, bunnies, colored eggs and flowers. They say it as though it’s a bad thing.

But it isn’t a bad thing. The story about sunrise, spring, bunnies, colored eggs, flowers and having spring in our hearts – this is the story people prefer to the one about a man who died and came back to life.

What is the Easter message? Ironically, it is very traditional; it just isn’t religious. It’s the natural and psychological story of spring coming back in our world and in our lives, a victory of life over death, spring over winter, tender flowers and colored eggs and magical fertility symbols. It looks like that’s always been the message of Easter.

Why? Because these must have been the symbols of these spring festivals from the first time rabbits and eggs became part of it. And with similar props and symbols, the messages people have heard at this season must have been very similar for thousands of years. Messages of spring, the return of life, symbols of sex and fertility, the gift of life offered free to all of us – these have been the Easter messages since before recorded history. Both preacherly sermons and personal meditations on these symbols must always have run in orbit around these themes, both as natural events outside of us, and as psychological possibilities inside of us. And these are the stories we believe: the real, the original, Easter stories. They’re older than all religions in the world. They’re the stories we’ve always loved, and it looks in 2006 like we still prefer them to the religious stories that have tried to cover them.

Why? Perhaps because the Easter stories are just better stories with more relation to the world we’re living in. We look to religions for good news, life-giving news. We’re not all that fond of getting heavy messages in church, though it’s what all religious prophets have done. But they’re seldom popular until they’re long dead. We come to church, especially on high holy days like Christmas and Easter, to hear good news. And we choose the stories that give it to us, and shrug off stories that don’t, no matter how liturgical or pontifical they pretend to be.

The Easter story has been covered by the stories of a dozen gods and goddesses, maybe more. From Ishtar to Jesus, we have covered the Easter story with all manner of gods and goddesses. But they can’t cover it, can’t match its appeal, and can’t hide it for long, neither Ishtar nor Jesus.

As a society our behavior around this holiday shows that we don’t take the religious story of Jesus very seriously, as so many evangelical websites seem to be screaming too.

And how we do Easter may be a symptom of the fact that our official religions have really lost their power to hold the imaginations of even a majority of our citizens.

After all, only a bit more than 20% of Americans regularly attend religious services of any kind. (See books and essays by Rev. Kirk Hadaway, who has written about a dozen books in this area.) The stories of religion seem to be about such important things: life after death, eternity, a god so powerful he created the whole universe, knows everything we think, and can punish or destroy anything or anybody he chose. If we believed it, these stories would occupy our thoughts nearly all the time. Just think of the amount of time we have spent thinking about AIDS or Bird Flu because we really believe that they might kill us. But perhaps we don’t believe our traditional religious stories in any deep way at all any longer, and the evidence is on display every Christmas and Easter. Perhaps these are just background stories, things we say the way the ancient Romans used to bow to Jupiter and then go about their business like he was just a statue after all.

If a Roman were to just snicker as they passed the statues, or write popular books saying the gods were quite human after all, or put on plays that made the kind of fun of Jupiter that Monty Python’s movie “The Life of Brian” makes fun of the Jesus story, then the pretense would be over, and it would be fair for one Roman to ask another what the heck they were doing pretending to care about those old gods. And eventually, of course, that happened. Now hardly anybody remembers that old Jupiter was the same god the Greeks had earlier called Zeus, because both those gods are pretty much dead, like Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte and a hundred other gods and goddesses that have come and gone. Meanwhile, and throughout all these centuries, our favorite stories, like the Easter story, remain as popular as ever. .

If we were really serious about the stories of our supposedly official religions, I don’t think the media would routinely play off of the holidays with the kind of goofy stories we’ve all become used to, or that movies like “The Life of Brian” would still be played, 27 years after it came out, as Austin’s run-up to yet another Easter.

So I do wonder if the way we treat these two holidays in particular doesn’t really show that the stories have already lost their hold on the vast majority of people in our country, and if we’re watching the very slow-motion decline and death of Christianity as a noble religious – as opposed to merely political – force.

If so, then we should try to reclaim the stories we love and their symbols, from the religions that have been piled on top of them.

And this brings us to the flower communion we celebrate here each Easter. It was created by Unitarian minister Norbert Capek for his church in Czechoslovakia in 1923, when he observed this same antipathy toward traditional religion in his members. They lived in overwhelmingly Catholic surrounding, and most of Capek’s members had no use for the practice or idea of Communion because the idea had been so badly tainted by religions they didn’t respect. Yet at its best, the idea of “communion” is that you are communing, connecting, with the powers of the universe that created us, and bunnies, eggs and flowers and everything else. And that’s a powerful kind of energy to forego communion with. So Capek created the idea of a flower communion. He asked members each to bring a flower to church on a certain day, and the church bought some extras. The children arranged the flowers in baskets during the worship service, just as our children are doing today. Then before people left, they were each given a flower – not the one they brought, but one brought by somebody else. And they knew that there was a link, a communion, between them all, and with the powers of nature that had produced both the fragile flowers, and their own fragile selves.

Capek’s flower communion caught on immediately, and it was brought to this country by his wife in 1940. Our northern churches usually celebrate it in June on the last Sunday before they close their church for the summer – many of the Eastern and northern churches still base their church year on the old academic years. Since we don’t close our church, we do the Flower Communion at Easter, where the flowers can rejoin the other symbols of spring.

Norbert Capek died in a Nazi concentration camp. But the flower communion survives him, and offers us a kind of communion that we need as much as his own church members did.

The good news about Easter is that no religion has ever been able to tame it, claim it or cover it. Because we may not need stories of this or that goddess or god, but we do need to hear that story that life is more powerful than death, that it’s beautiful, and all of nature is offering it to us for free.

The good news about the Easter story is that it seems indestructible. Cover it with stories of Ishtar, Inanna, Eoster or of Jesus and God, but the real Easter story can’t be kept down because it’s true, and because it’s written deep into our own hearts. We need a springtime in our lives, today as much as ever. We need for life to be exuberant with its gifts of new life for old, beauty, spring, sunrises and flowers. We need some of those flowers, for they carry with them the message that life will triumph, in our world and in our hearts, and that if only we can take the spirit of this Easter inside of us, it can grow there, so that we might keep Eastering on our own, so that long after the flowers have faded, their promise of the fragile and beautiful gift of life will still be alive in us, resurrected from the stories into our hearts, where they can live for another year as the good news of the Easter Story.

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© Davidson Loehr

April 9, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Sometimes when we seem to hear too many voices in our lives, we wish they’d all go away except for just the one most comforting voice.

That seldom happens. We might be better off realizing that we aren’t made of just one solo voice. We’re a chorus of voices and wants and preferences, each speaking up at some time, the whole lot of them seldom agreeing.

And we live as part of this sea of voices, trying to find a good path through the clatter. Sometimes we can just decide and do something whether the other voices like it or not. Ideally, we can be creative enough to do it together, bringing the whole choir along. That takes great talent and great patience. But if the Buddhists are right in saying we’re more like choruses than soloists – and I think they are – then we need a home in our soul and in our world for all the voices within us. The brave, clear-thinking ones, the compassionate voices that want to do the caring thing more than the right thing, voices that need to understand, and those wishing they could love even where they can’t understand. And so many more voices within and around us, looking for a welcoming home.

In the meantime – and it seems a long meantime – we stand where we are, silently praying Oh God, Life, the Universe, let us find a home where all of us, all of us, can live together in creative compassion. Just that. Just that.

Amen.

SERMON: Many Voices

This was the first time I’d heard the Chichester Psalms. But when Brent told me about the music, and then when I read the Psalms from which Bernstein took his lyrics, I recognized one of Bernstein’s greatest and most unusual gifts as a composer. He made a space for a huge variety of voices in his greatest works. The voices don’t agree and aren’t squeezed into a forced and phony kind of harmony. Instead, they are presented as a slice of life without a simple and clear solution.

Here’s what I mean. When I read through the six Psalms from which he took the lyrics for this piece (2, 23, 100, 108, 131, 133), I wrote down the different voices and moods I found.

There is the voice of God as conqueror, sounding very triumphal. The voices of his people cover a huge spectrum, from excited, devoted and loved, to fearful, rejected, abandoned by God, and inadequate. In the next lines, they are joyful, praising God, sounding comforted and fearless. Then they are very angry – you heard this in the music, when the men’s voices came in under the calm and peaceful sound of the women’s voices.

There is also a voice of self-righteousness, eager to condemn outsiders. This is a voice speaking for a wrathful, furious, vengeful God, one that is offering dominion of the earth, granting power to break opposing nations with a rod of iron and dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.

And these lines are followed by voices that are thankful for God’s goodness and mercy, which are followed by despondent voices.

Then there’s a withdrawn voice saying it’s just not concerned with high and hard demands, but is satisfied to be calm, self-contained and quiet. Finally, there is the voice of simple happiness, happy to be dwelling in unity with others. You could get whiplash three times, switching moods to keep up with the many voices in just these six psalms, even though you suspect they reflect the real human condition in all times and places.

There’s a normal human tendency to want to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, or at least to harmonize all the voices to our own voice, our own beliefs, our own style. And that’s what most musical settings of the Psalms do.

But one of the characteristics of Leonard Bernstein’s music that’s most appealing – or troubling – was his ability to create a musical space within which many voices could co-exist without being homogenized.

He did this in West Side Story, that marvelous musical of violence, murder, love, and surprising vulgarity in the “Officer Krupke” piece sung by street gang members.

But he did it most dramatically and best in his greatest stage work, the “Mass.” The piece was commissioned by the Kennedy family for the dedication of the Kennedy Center. Rose Kennedy, JFK’s mother, hated what he wrote. Cardinal O’Connor wanted it banned as a heretical work. I saw the touring company production in Detroit around 1976, and could see why they might have hated it.

How many here have seen a stage production of the “Mass”? Here was a mass, but – with music by the 53-year-old Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by 23-year-old Steven Schwartz – it was not a Catholic mass. While it did go through the traditional parts of the mass, it contained scathing critiques of both the Church and the mass, for being irrelevant and incoherent.

Showing a wonderful knowledge of history, Bernstein included “tropes” as solos inserted into the mass, to make his critiques. In medieval times, the tropes inserted into the masses could even be to the tunes of drinking songs, so there was the precedent for bringing very secular elements in, and Bernstein exploited it brilliantly.

One soloist interrupted the “Credo in Unum Deum” to sing “I’ll believe in one God; I’ll believe in three; I’ll believe in thirty if they’ll believe in me.”

Another interrupted the priest during the Gratias Deo, to say that she once thanked God. “But now, somehow, it’s strange,” she sang, “though nothing much has really changed, I don’t sing Gloria, I don’t sing Gratias Deo. I can’t say quite when it happened, but gone is the Thank You.”

In a choral piece called “God Said,” the choir only sings the real lyrics after the priest leaves the stage. These include the chorus “And it was good, brother, and it was good, sister, and it was good, brother, and it was goddam good.” This isn’t your grandmother’s mass, unless she was one heck of an outspoken woman!

Also in that song, the lyricist Stephen Schwartz wrote these words:

“God said take charge of my zoo, I made these creatures for you. So he won’t mind if we wipe out a species or two. God said that sex should repulse unless it leads to results, and so we crowd the world full of consenting adults. God said it’s good to be meek, and so we are once a week. It may not mean a lot but oh, it’s terribly chic. God made us the boss, God gave us the cross. We turned it into a sword to spread the word of the Lord, we use his holy decrees to do whatever we please. And it was good, Yeah! And it was good, Yeah! And it was goddam good.”

Finally, the protestors torment the priest to the point that he flings the chalice down, smashing it, tears his robe off and throws it at them and leaves the stage. Then all the protestors, who have been harassing the priest throughout the Mass, fall to the stage like puppets who have had their strings cut. They really didn’t have a message, just complaints and needs, and needed the priest to play off of. A child takes the guitar and plays the Simple Song with which the Mass began, then the priest returns to the stage, in blue-jeans, takes the guitar and leads them in the song – it seems, after all, that they need to be led. Oh, maybe it will be a happy ending after all – but no. One of the protestors is disgusted by this and won’t join. He goes upstage in his fury. At the end of the Simple Song, the priest says, “The Mass is ended, go in peace.” But the lone protestor gives the priest and the audience the finger and exits. And that’s the end of the Bernstein Mass.

Many voices, given space to coexist: brought into proximity, but not harmony. Just like in real life.

You can understand why Rose Kennedy might have hated it. Leonard Bernstein gave her a masterpiece that was more than she’d bargained for. He gave her not an orthodox mass, but many voices, brought together on the same stage, to sing their very different songs in their very different passionate voices, and to be heard – perhaps even revered – but not resolved.

Cardinal O’Connor thought that was bad. Most churches would think it was bad. But not any real liberal church worth its salt, and not any Unitarian church in touch with its history.

The range of voices we have in Unitarian churches is immense. And like the voices in Bernstein’s works, they are not resolved: they’re in proximity, but not necessarily in harmony, on a huge range of topics.

A couple months ago, we learned what a wide range of opinions we have on 9-11. I believe our government either let it happen on purpose or made it happen on purpose. Some others agreed. Still others thought that was an absolutely crazy idea, that our government could do such a thing. Others were somewhere in between, and others – perhaps the majority – don’t spent time thinking about who did 9-11 or how, because there are just too many other things going on in their lives that demand and deserve more attention.

But the whole range of voices exists here, as it does throughout the country and the world. No matter what you believe about 9-11, you know there are people sitting around you who don’t agree with you. And those different beliefs aren’t going to be harmonized. They exist here in proximity but not in harmony, and that’s one of the frustrating things about liberal churches – or any honest church. We live in a world with people who sometimes disagree violently with us on really important matters, and the challenge of civilization is the challenge to learn to live together creatively.

But the different political beliefs in this room absolutely pale compared with the differing religious beliefs here! We have members for whom Jesus Christ really is the son of God, at least in deep symbolic and poetic ways. We have members for whom religion is and will always be about God, by which they mean the God of the Bible. Others have bad memories of that god, but find inspiration through stories of some of the ancient goddesses.

We have others for whom the whole idea of gods or goddesses is somewhere between useless and repulsive: people who might say we’re called to be decent people and to make the world a better place, but who do it without ever thinking about Jesus or God. We have some for whom the structures of Hinduism are their center – with its rich tapestry of stories, its rich array of so many imaginative figures symbolizing the many aspects of the creative, sustaining and destroying forces in the universe. And others who, if asked, will identify themselves as Buddhists – though not all the same kind of Buddhists. Some here believe in an afterlife, and some don’t. Some believe in reincarnation, and believe that they are not now in either their first or their last incarnation. Others think that’s just crazy, that it all starts, happens, and ends here in this life. And if you haven’t heard your own belief yet, you can add it, then add another fifty or so to cover all the permutations and combinations of beliefs sitting right here in this room, all around you, in proximity but not in harmony.

That’s the world that Leonard Bernstein kept putting in his music: that world of many differing voices in proximity but not in harmony. So I think some of Bernstein’s greatest pieces were practically written for liberal churches.

But this is not only for us. Our whole country would be better off if they had that ability to tolerate profound differences. Like they were to Rose Kennedy and Cardinal O’Connor, too many divergent opinions on important matters like religion are very upsetting to a lot of people. The truth is, most of us would be more comfortable in a world created in the image of our own beliefs. And during the past few years, we have all heard some of these strident voices insisting that America fall in line behind the one set of right beliefs – which always, coincidentally, just happen to be theirs. They want harmony in our country, and think that can only come from getting all voices to sing the same song.

They’re wrong. That would be boring music, as well as a foolish and dangerous society. We need to learn something, and Leonard Bernstein could teach it to us.

He could teach us that the real art, in music and in life, doesn’t come from trying to stamp everyone with the same cookie cutter, to make them as alike as dead interchangeable machine parts. The real art lies in the ability to create an atmosphere in which all God’s children, all the wonderful and crazy variety of Nature, can live in creative proximity.

The kind of harmony we need in life isn’t that of pretending that all opinions or all people can be made to fit the same mold. They can’t. The kind of harmony we need in life comes through the art of creating the atmosphere that lets our many differences exist together in creative proximity. It’s a much higher art than just stomping on people with cookie cutters. It takes grown-up people secure enough in their own beliefs to welcome people who don’t share their beliefs, though they share our humanity, and our need for peace, understanding, justice and compassion. And in this great mix of life, no deep harmony is possible unless we grow past the clamoring for shallow harmony, which can never exist anyway.

That’s the vision needed, and the art – to see past superficial differences of thought and belief, into that deeper and more enduring level where all God’s children got a song to sing, and it’s our collective job to provide the chorus that can cradle all these many voices in its heart and accompany them with the music of the heavens, the rhythm of justice, and the beat of the human heart – all our human hearts – trying to find our way back home together, trying to find our way back home together, and to know the place for the first time.

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© Davidson Loehr

March 19, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors. Let us not fail to be mediocre when we could instead fail to be absolutely brilliant. Let us not fall short of being moderately compassionate. Let us rather fall short of being fully compassionate.

Of all our failures in life, perhaps the saddest are those in which we failed even to try and serve the highest and noblest ideals.

It is a sin to fail at low aims. Not because we failed, but because we aimed too low.

But it is not a sin to fail at very high aims, like aiming for truth, justice, compassion and character. Because even our failure puts us into the company of the saints, the company of those who also believe that rising to our full humanity and rising to our full divinity may be the same rising.

Striving after low and mean ends is a boring sin, not worthy of us. Let us have greater ambition for our failures. Let us vow never to fail at anything that wasn’t noble and proud, never to settle for lower aspirations for ourselves, our lives, our country or our world.

We will all fail at some things. But let it not be a failure of vision, a failure of aspiration. If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors, and then let our failures bless us – for they will.

Amen.

SERMON

Today’s sermon is really prepared as a companion to the program I’ll be doing here in two weeks, “Being Human Religiously,” which is a look at the soul of what the liberal style of religion – as opposed to literal religion – has been about for more than 2500 years.

I’m also continuing to think about the idea of Spirit that I started last week with the sermon about bringing the horse in the house. That story has now been written out for the first time, and posted on our website – along with the photograph.

Last week the treatment was partly in fun. There is a spirit of life that can appear without warning and break through our boundaries like all the trickster figures in all the world’s religions, opening us to some unexpected and life-giving possibilities. And since we can find stories about it everywhere, we can call it transcendent, enduring, maybe even infinite and eternal.

But religion is about deciding to live in relation to that transcendental spirit. Religion is, as one great Hindu mystic put it, “the whole soul becoming what it believes.” (Vivekananda)

This morning, I want to think about what on earth that means, why anyone would want to do it, what we could get out of it, and how we do it. That’s a lot of area to cover; I have tried to cut the sermon down from its original length of nine days.

Many would say that being human religiously is about standing before God, and that’s one way to put it. You could also say that Well, that would depend on what sort of a god you meant; and that’s also true. If you think of the God of Western religions – at least the version that makes the world media most often – this could be a pretty unattractive idea – frightening, even.

That God so often seems to be about judging and punishing, even wiping out whole peoples who displease him. And the thought of being judged by the God who created the whole universe and has these terribly high standards and this fearful punishment – it’s no wonder so many people don’t want to go to church or take religion very seriously. A lot of what passes for religion, and for God, doesn’t deserve to be taken very seriously.

Many people think it would make a lot more sense to reverse it and try to be religious humanly, to take religion down to a human scale, to reduce it to what we understand, even what we like.

And there is a lot of that going on. God and religion are dragged down to echo and endorse what we come up with, including some of the worst of what we come up with. Then religion is used not to expand us, but to strengthen our own biases and dangerous behaviors.

Sadly, you can see this by looking at almost every single instance where religion has become combined with the power of the state, both at home and abroad. Again, it’s enough to turn people completely off on the whole subject of having anything at all to do with religion, and you can’t really blame them.

Think of the Muslim women in Iran who have been shot in the face by men for refusing to cover their faces with a veil. Or what may become several states following South Dakota’s lead, criminalizing women who get abortions, while also cutting social support programs, pre-natal care, post-natal care, and health care. It’s good to be pro-life: I think it’s even a sacred command.

But to be pro-life means to honor and be willing to pay for all the social structures and services that are needed to support, nourish and honor human life. These include sex education, because it is so much easier to take advantage of ignorance than of knowledge. They include pre-natal care, post-natal care, universal health care, day care, and a host of things that are done much better in some European countries who have a much higher notion of serving human life than we do.

The programs are expensive, and have to be provided for all, especially for those who need them the most. But without them, criminalizing abortion is little more than a vindictive policy that turns some of our poorest and most defenseless girls and women into just breeders. And that isn’t pro-life. That’s an anti-life program, wrapped in misleading religious rhetoric, and we should all be ashamed of it.

But in any country where the power of religion is combined with the power of the state, we see people dragging religion down to the lowest level of human greed and bigotry, rather than trying to be human at a level of high and loving ideals.

So let’s put it another way. If religion is about choosing to live in a commanding kind of relationship with very high ideals, why do it? What do we get out of it? Isn’t it like sailors following the North Star, even though they’ll never reach it? Why torment yourself with ideals higher than you’ll ever be able to satisfy?

Once we ask it this way, the answer is kind of surprising. I’m going to say some things this morning that may seem surprising, and you may want to check them out against your own life this week. Here’s the first one. The reason we put our lives in the service of the very highest and most demanding ideals is that it is the only way to become fully human, and we know it. We choose this route over and over, whether we care about religion or not – I’ll convince you of this. For example, let’s take a few secular professions.

Lawyers, I’ve been told, are really supposed to be committed to serve three different levels of responsibilities. First, but lowest, is the responsibility to serve their client’s wishes. Second is the responsibility to serve the law, and the quality of law. They shouldn’t act in ways that will weaken the rule of good laws. And that leads to the third and highest level of allegiance, which is to the good of society. They shouldn’t take cases that can set precedents that are likely to weaken our civil boundaries or make our world a worse place.

The popular conception of lawyers is often that they only care about doing what their client wants. And there are some like that. But I’ve never talked with any of those, and am not sure I’d enjoy it, though it could be interesting to challenge them on this. However, I have found a lot of very high idealism in the lawyers I’ve known. They believe that if they serve the highest of these ideals to the best of their ability, it is a noble profession that will make the world a better place and fulfill them both as professionals and as people. And I think they’re right.

Teachers also hope to serve different levels of ideals, but are the most fulfilled when they feel they have served the highest ideals. At the lowest and perhaps least satisfying level, they teach students to pass the tests that will rank their schools.

But good teachers also have a love, a passion, for education, learning, growing, expanding their own horizons and the horizons of their students. They love the pursuit of truth in one form or another, and give their lives to serving it, one one class at a time, one student at a time. I’ve not met many teachers of whom this wasn’t true.

If there are teachers who don’t care about anything but getting students through the tests, I can’t imagine that teaching is a very deeply fulfilling profession for them. At the highest level, teachers hope and believe that they can be positive influences in forming the character of their students, helping to make them better people, partners and citizens. I’ve had teachers who absolutely did that. So have you. And we will never, ever forget them, will we? So this too can be a noble and fulfilling profession, but only when it is striving to serve very high ideals. Nobody gets much credit for just putting in time – they don’t get much fulfillment from it, either.

Doctors have the same kind of ideals that drew them to give their lives to medicine. Not pushing pills, but serving health, being part of a profession that cares for the quality of the lives of their patients, one patient at a time.

We could go down the list with more, but the most important things in life – things like justice, truth, health and character – must always be served by holding ourselves responsible to these terribly high ideals. The higher the ideals we serve, the more gratifying we can find the act of serving them. See if this isn’t true in your own life.

And all this is true on a more personal level, too, in our personal lives rather than our jobs. All weddings, oaths of office, all professional and personal standards we make a big thing of or dress up to do, are always committing us to serve only the very highest ideals. If they weren’t, it would feel tacky, and we wouldn’t be interested.

I’ve never officiated at a wedding where the couple swore to more or less like one another for awhile till they got bored, then to split. There was a hit song in the 70s that sold millions of records, where the lyrics said “We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day; we’ll sing in the sunshine, then I’ll be on my way.” I never heard it sung at a wedding.

At a wedding, couples make bold and daring promises, amazing promises. These two people who really don’t know anywhere near as much about each other as they think, stand in front of all their best friends and families and all that is holy to them. They stand there and promise to love, honor and cherish, keeping themselves faithful to the other for as long as they both shall live. Without aspiring to a commitment of that quality, it wouldn’t even be worth attending a wedding. If all they aspire to is to sing in the sunshine then be on their way, most of their friends and family would suggest they just get on their way. But nobody does that.

Without the transcendent promises that call us to become more, the whole idea of a wedding loses its magnificence of spirit, its nobility of human aspiration, its magic and its blessing.

Still, why do we do it? These aren’t even religious examples I’ve been using, but any time we do something that feels deeply important to us, we seek out the highest ideals we can find, and swear to put ourselves at their service. If that isn’t a religious commitment, I don’t know what is. But why? What do we get out of it? Why bother?

This isn’t just a rhetorical question; there’s an answer to it. Here’s the reason for being human religiously. It’s because – and see if this doesn’t ring true for you – the highest satisfaction and deepest comfort in life come from being committed to the highest and most compassionate ideals, because it is the act of commitment that transforms and blesses us. This is expressed in so many ways in different religions.

It is seeing ourselves as being beloved of God, knowing Jesus loves us, feeling engulfed in the compassion of Allah, the Buddha or Kuan Yin. Just trying to serve these things blesses us, even if we don’t do it perfectly. Because perfect ideals, and perfect gods, have forgiven us in advance for being merely human, as long as we’re trying to be the best kind of humans. This sounds all poetic and foofy, but it is absolutely true. Compassion, acceptance and forgiveness are key attributes of every god worthy of the name.

You may know Christians, as I do, for whom one of the most profoundly loving facts in their lives is the fact that they can say “Christ has accepted me just as I am.” If they hadn’t felt that, they would probably have just kept looking. It’s ironic. We can fail at trying to serve high ideals and still feel blessed by our aspirations. But if we just try to get by, get away with what we can, drag religion down to our lowest expectations so it will be easy to meet them, then when we look back on it there is no blessing for us at all.

When a Buddhist tries to see all others through the eyes of the Buddha’s or Kuan Yin’s boundless compassion, it rubs off. They also come to see themselves through the eyes of that boundless compassion; it rubs off. They have become what they tried to serve, and it transformed their lives. A Jew, Christian or Muslim who tries to serve the God of Love in honest and earnest ways, lives a far more loving and beloved life than they might otherwise. As the Hindu mystic Vivekananda put it, “Religion is – the whole soul becoming what it believes.” Not what it achieves, what it believes. We become what we most truly believe. If you believe the search for truth trumps lesser concerns, you become a person with more truth about you. The magic of serving high ideals – truth, justice, health, compassion and the rest – is that in part we become what we serve, even when we fail to serve it perfectly.

We say this to ourselves in so many ways. “At least I tried; it was worth trying; Well, I did my best”.” Think about this. There is some deep magic here, in the fact that just choosing to serve high ideals is transformative. We’ll never do it perfectly. I suspect no marriage has ever quite lived up to the poetic vows of the wedding day, and no professional ever really finished a whole career without being able to remember several times, maybe a bunch of times, that they failed, even failed pretty miserably, to live up to what mattered so much to them. But in the long run – and hopefully even in the shorter runs – we don’t condemn ourselves for the inevitable failures that come with being human. We are blessed by the ideals to which we give our lives, the compassion to which we give our hearts, the gods in whose service we enlist our souls. Think about it this week, and see if it isn’t true for you too.

It is one of the greatest miracles in life, really.

It is kind of like that picture of sailors steering their courses by following the North Star. No sailor will ever reach the North Star. It isn’t possible. But just following it changes their course completely. And when we align our hearts with the promise to love till death do us part, it changes our course as far as you can get from just wanting to sing in the sunshine then be on your way.

And it doesn’t take great wisdom; we don’t have to be saints, or like Mother Theresa or Gandhi – almost nobody can do that! We just have to try to be human in the best way we know how, try to follow that path, like steering on the North Star. Just that is transformative. And that is one of the greatest miracles in life.

I’ll tell you about a young couple I met during my first years in the ministry. They weren’t members of the church, didn’t have a church, but asked if I would marry them. They were both eighteen years old. I asked them to write their wedding vows, as I ask all couples. We don’t have to use those vows – many couples prefer more traditional vows, and sometimes what they are promising each other is really too personal to share in a public ceremony. But I want them to know what their vows are, what their promises are.

All couples find this is harder than they thought, but this young couple found it to be nearly impossible. One or the other of them phoned at least three times, asking more questions. Finally, they asked to come back in and talk about it. They were completely frustrated! “We can’t do this!” he said, and she agreed. “We don’t know enough to write anything good enough for a wedding.” In fact, they agreed, they hardly knew anything. “Well,” I said, “this does sounds serious. But you must know something. Tell me, what do you know about yourselves and what you’re bringing to this marriage?”

Between them, it started tumbling out. “We don’t know anything about the future. We don’t know what we’ll be doing for work even in two years, let alone in forty. We don’t know yet if we’ll have children, or even if we want children. We don’t know where we’ll live. We just know we love each other like the other half of our own souls, that we’ll be together for the rest of our lives, that together we can figure out anything we need to, and by God, that has to be enough!”

Yes, that’s what they decided to use for their wedding vows, and I suspect nobody who was there will ever forget it. I don’t know what happened to that young couple. He had just enlisted in the armed forces, and they were leaving in a week for some military post. But I hope they’re still together, and still know those wonderfully profound lessons they had already learned as 18-year-olds in love. High ideals bless and transform us, even if we serve them haltingly.

But when we reverse it, and drag religion down to the level of our most undeveloped parts or our greed, bigotry or the rest of it, then we’re not serving anything big enough to cherish us, or cradle us, or forgive us our sins, since we”ve not tried to forgive the sins of others, or serve them. That’s when God becomes a fearful and capriciously vicious judge and punisher. Because it isn’t God at all, but only our own smallest untutored biases, writ large. As contradictory as it sounds, we rise or shrink to the size of the ideals we serve. Just serving high ideals is transformative.

It’s all about living more wisely and well here and now, not elsewhere and later. As you’ll learn when you come to the program at the end of the month, almost all of the best religious thinkers from all religious traditions for the past 2500 years and more have tried to help us become human religiously, by orienting our lives to ideals as high, as luminous, and as beyond our reach as the North Star. When religion is taken seriously, as I think all the best styles of liberal religion have done, it is never about pie in the sky. It’s about pie here. And love here. And justice, compassion, truth and salvation by character here. It’s what Jesus meant when he said that the kingdom of heaven isn’t coming, isn’t in the future, but is within and among us. It’s here, or it’s nowhere. The magic, the miracle and the transformation are also here, or nowhere. There’s really quite a lot at stake for us.

The attraction of becoming human religiously is simple, and I think it’s powerful. Understood correctly, it is saying, “Here’s the deal. If you will believe in very high ideals, the kind that make high demands on you, and if you use your life to try and serve them, you will be blessed, accepted, and forgiven for your failings. You don’t have to earn salvation. You just have to enlist in the service of the highest ideals of truth, justice, love, health and character, and let them direct you. Even when you fail, you will be blessed for trying, and you will feel it.

The power of faith, and living that faith, can transform you, and your whole soul may become what you believe. And that may be the greatest miracle of all, now or later, here or anywhere.

I can’t guarantee to persuade you. I can only testify, which is what I’m really doing here. The rest can only happen inside of you, as you turn these things over in your heart and mind. If it happens, you might experience it as a kind of miracle. And those kinds of miracles, luckily, do happen: every day.

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© Davidson Loehr

March 12, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: The Horse in the House

It happened in the summer of 1955, and was both logical and necessary. We lived in Colfax, Iowa, a town of about 1800, twenty miles east of Des Moines. Formerly located on Highway 6, the Interstate bypassed it when it went in in the early 1960s, kind of leaving it where it was.

But where it was – at least in 1955 – was a wonderful place, at least for a 13-year-old boy with a horse. My younger brother also had a horse, named Spooky. Spooky was white, and hot-tempered, at least to me, though my brother seemed to get along with him.

My horse was brown, with a big white line running up the back of his left hind leg, around his rump and back down his right leg. He was laid-back and cool, and his name was Louie.

The horses were our freedom. We could come home from school, throw a saddle on, and just ride, ride, anywhere. A couple times on weekends, we left on horseback to make camp for the weekend. I had a Marlin lever-action .22 caliber rifle and a saddle holster, just like I knew all real cowboys had, and would hunt big game for our vittles. OK, squirrels. Whatever. We”d make camp, cut down some saplings, or cut branches, make a corral that straddled the small creek, so the horses wouldn’t wander off. Then I’d shoot a squirrel or two, which we”d cook on a stick over an open fire, then retire to sleep using our saddles as pillows, just like in the movies. I don’t think cowboys really used saddles as pillows. It’s very uncomfortable.

When my brother Peter and I were 13 and 10, our horses were sometimes our best friends. We fed them, cleaned their stable in the barn, and rode them around the fenced pasture next to the house almost every day. I had a paper route that went from downtown straight out Main Street about two miles out past our house. Every day, summer and winter, I’d get to our house, saddle up Louie, and we”d finish the route together. We were close.

My brother Peter and I used to like to give the horses sugar cubes, which they gobbled out of our hands almost too eagerly. That was until the vet said the sugar cubes would rot their teeth and we shouldn’t do it any more. Bummer. They liked carrots and apples fine, but they also had a sweet tooth. We understood.

We were looking for a loophole in the “no sugar cubes” deal. I think we found it by chance one morning, when my brother didn’t want to finish his grape juice because it was too sweet. The words hit like a revelation straight from the gods – or at least the god Poseidon, who was also fond of horses.

After our mother left for the day, we poured some grape juice in the dog bowls on the rickety back porch. The horses loved it! But there was an unexpected bonus that made it all even better. The grape juice made their noses and tongues purple. Now that was cool! Horses with purple tongues and, in Spooky’s case, a purple nose!

The occasion giving rise to the center of this story came on one of those days when both horses were up on the back porch, drinking grape juice out of the dog bowls. When Pete took Spooky back down, he broke the wooden steps – really, it’s amazing that both horses didn’t fall straight through the porch.

Well, now Louie was stuck up there on the back porch. He wouldn’t jump down, there wasn’t any other way off the porch, and our mother would be coming home in an hour or two. This called for quick thinking, which kids mostly know they’re pretty good at. We had two friends over, who would help with the horses in return for getting to ride them. I shared my plan. Joey could take Louie’s halter, I’d go ahead to clear away the furniture, and we would lead the horse through the house and out the front door, over the new porch with its sturdy cement step. Oh yes, and Jimmy would walk behind Louie, carrying a metal bucket, just in case. Jimmy protested, but he was the littlest, so it was only fitting.

No sooner had I announced this grand and eminently logical plan than my brother jumped on Spooky and rode away as fast and as far as he could.

The plan worked beautifully. I cleared the furniture out of the way, Louie was very well-behaved, and Jimmy whined all the way through the kitchen and dining room about the sorry hand that Life had dealt him.

When we got into the living room, the television was on, and Louie stopped. His ears shot forward, his eyes got big, and I could feel him thinking “Hey – we haven’t got this out in the barn! The Big House is a whole other thing!” I saw the family camera sitting on a hall table – a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye with flash bulb attachment – and quickly took a picture of this scene.

But I wasn’t as quick as Jimmy. When he saw me going for the camera, he walked up by the horse’s shoulders, and set the bucket down.

This was not good timing. It was not good timing because when the flash bulb popped, it startled Louie. And Louie pooped on the rug.

I yelled at Jimmy – his duties had been made very clear. But he snapped back – petulantly, I thought – “I am not going down in history holding a bucket behind a horse’s butt!” It was a good point, well taken.

Still, there was the poop.

We took Louie out the front, got him back into the barn, and both Joey and Jimmy disappeared as quickly as my brother had a few minutes earlier.

I scooped the poop, but it wasn’t going to be that simple. There was a stain. Not dramatic, but noticeable. I went into the kitchen and looked under the sink, where wondrous and mysterious Chemicals are kept. And there was a big bottle of Glamorene Rug Cleaner. It was, I’m quite sure, the only time in my life I ever saw or used that product, but its name was stamped in my mind forevermore.

Luckily, I had a bucket. Of course, if it had been used in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to use it in the second place. I filled the bucket with water, dumped in a lot of Glamorene, got a brush, and scrubbed.

Glamorene Rug Cleaner was truly miraculous! Unfortunately, there was now a large wet spot, a couple feet across, which was even more noticeable than the original stain. My mother had never been accused of being a good housekeeper, though this was the first time I saw that as a good thing. I took a throw rug from the other side of the room and covered the wet spot.

She never noticed. Neither did my father. And Peter knew better than to say one single word. During the day, I’d take the rug off, covering it again before my mother came home. In two or three days, the rug was dry, and looked like its scruffy old self again. When I moved the rug back where it belonged, both parents suddenly noticed it had been moved, though I assured them it had always mostly been there.

In short, I pulled off the caper of the century. I got away with bringing Louie through the house, even though he had had that little accident in the living room. In the days to come, both my brother and I would laugh about it while we were out riding. Certain kinds of kids live for moments like that.

It was – I don’t know, maybe two or three weeks later: a long time later. I came home from some serious playing, and no sooner had the screen door shut than I heard this Mother Voice shouting “Howie! Come in here!” Every kid knows that voice, and knows what it means.

I stood a little paralyzed there by the front door, wondering – not what I’d done, but what anyone could possibly have told her about. Nothing. There was nothing. I’d either been quite good, or left no evidence. I was sure of it. I went into the kitchen, and every kid knows just what comes next. With my most innocent look, I said “Yes, Mother?”

She was not a happy woman. “What do you mean, bringing that horse in the house?”

This took really quick thinking. Could she possibly know about that? It didn’t seem likely. Pete wouldn’t dare tell. And Jimmy and Joey knew if they blabbed, they”d lose their ticket for free horse rides. And Louie didn’t talk. That’s it. She couldn’t know.

So again with the innocent kid look, I said “What horse?”

The next line was the Voice of Damnation and Doom: “I just got the pictures back from Walgreen”s!”

Poop. That horse. Louie, the cool, laid-back horse. Ah, yes.

The next moments were a bit awkward. Denial seemed out of the question. But explaining the logic of it – and especially how responsibly we brought the horse into the house, with moving the furniture and Jimmy and the bucket and all – that was a little trickier. And then there was the matter of the poop. I couldn’t really leave that out. And the Glamorene, and the wet spot – which finally cleared up the mystery of the moving throw rug. It was actually quite a complex story. And telling it did sound a bit odd, even though it was all quite logical from beginning to end.

As I stumbled through the story, I suddenly saw a gift from the gods, a shot of pure Grace: the corner of her mouth twitched. She was on the verge of laughing! Oh, Hallelujah!

Again, every kid would know what move to make next. “What’s the matter, Mom? Are you going to laugh? It’s really pretty funny, isn’t it? Huh?”

Her expression was one of those that should have been filmed. She needed to be serious – it was still Serious Parent time – but she could barely keep it in. Finally, she blurted “I have no idea what to say to you. I would feel ridiculous saying “Don’t bring that horse in the house again”!” I look back on that as about the most ideal way a parent could handle this situation – not that more than like one in a billion parents will ever have to face this situation. As for the back steps; they were rebuilt, but I don’t remember anything about it. Maybe Pete and I had our allowances docked to help pay the carpenter, but I don’t think so. I think the family absorbed Louie’s Big Day as one of those Memories we’re always trying to make – or perhaps as the sad sign of a child too far gone to save.

And that’s the story of how the horse was brought into the house, way back in the summer of 1955 when both I and my world were a lot younger and simpler.

But as logical as it is, I have learned through the years how filled with Basic Disbelief many people are. Like you. You don’t quite believe it – at least not all of it – do you?

Oh, come on. This is better than most history. Even if you don’t believe it, can’t you pretend to?

But no. No. And so, for those too cynical to accept the simple truth of a childhood memory from a half-century ago, a gift for you too. I carried that photo in my billfold for over twenty years. Louie was with me through the Army, in Germany, even through the Vietnam War. Then sometime in the mid-70s, while I was spending a weekend with my brother’s family, he picked my pocket as I slept, stole the picture, and sent it off to have it copied. At Christmas, he gave me a 16×20 print of that old photo, complete with its fading and scratches, which I then had mounted and framed. It still hangs on my office wall today.

PRAYER

There are little sparks of life around that we often miss: a special person, a twinkle in the eye of someone who just seems to very real to us.

Little lights are scattered here and there in our lives: people, places, even things that can awaken our own spirit in ways large and small, but in ways we wish for.

So often when life seems dull or we seem to be in a rut, we’ve lost sight of those sparks, or lost touch with them. Spontaneous things, unplanned fun, or contact with those people who have such a young spirit, no matter how old they are.

There is an old mystical story that says all these sparks are parts of God, and that our task is to find them, draw them to our lives, and use them to transform ourselves and our world back into an image of God.

Drawing the world back into an image of God sounds like a task far beyond anything we can do. But we do recognize those moments, people and places that make us feel more alive, that seem to make life offer more options, that open us up.

Let us start there, attending to the sources of inspiration that make us feel more alive, more thankful, more joyful. Let us claim those sources and the little sparks of life they offer, even if they offer them only to us.

The task of reconstituting the world is too big to imagine. Let us bring it down to a level we can see and feel: reconstituting one spirit at a time, one life at a time, one relationship at a time, to make them show forth more light, love, and joy.

It’s a start. A good start.

Amen

SERMON: Oh, Go ahead: Bring the Horse in the House!

There is a wonderful story from medieval Jewish mysticism about how in the beginning, God existed just as undifferentiated infinite light. But God wanted to behold himself, and so he created the world; the world is the image of God. Then God withdrew, and the world was no longer the image of God, but a fractured, separated place. But spread throughout this world, there are billions and billions of sparks from that divine light that can connect us with all that is sacred.

Our task in life is to cherish those sparks that it is our good fortune to encounter in life, and to raise and spiritualize them, so we can reconstitute the world as an image of God. Each of us, they say, encounters those persons, events and things that contain sparks that we are uniquely suited to redeem.

And our sacred task in life is to find those sparks we are lucky enough to come across, to cherish and embody them, to lift them up and spiritualize them, and by doing this to reconstitute the world so that it can once more take on the image of a God of love, justice, happiness and peace.

There are a lot of ways to describe those sparks, but when you’re around one you usually notice it.

Mostly, we seem to notice those sparks when they’re gone.

I think of the final lines from a poem written 150 years ago by Thomas Hood, called “I Remember, I Remember.” It’s looking back to a childhood when the world seemed to be whole and sacred, but looking from a present where it isn’t. The final lines of the poem say,

I remember, I remember,

The fir trees dark and high;

I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky:

It was a childish ignorance,

But now ’tis little joy

To know I’m farther off from heaven

Than when I was a boy.

He’s talking about heaven as though it were above the sky. But the real “heaven” he’s talking about was that state of spirit in which we were close enough to the soul of life nearly to touch it.

And when we miss that – well, missing it has produced a lot of great tragedy and poetry, including some poignant funny poems. One of my favorite of those is a great favorite of women, at least women who think that one day they might become old. You’ve probably all heard it. It was written in 1961 by an English woman named Jenny Joseph, and her original title for it was simply “Warning”:

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

 with a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

 And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

 and satin candles, and say we’ve no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

 and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

 and run my stick along the public railings

 and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

 and pick the flowers in other people’s gardens

 and learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

 and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

 or only bread and pickles for a week

 and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

 and pay our rent and not swear in the street

 and set a good example for the children.

 We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

 But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

 So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Sometimes, it seems that we lose the ability to see and save these sparks just by growing up. Thomas Hood’s poem longs for his first childhood; Jenny Joseph’s poem seems to be looking forward to her second childhood. That’s a big part of why it’s so much fun seeing the children come up for their story each Sunday: they bring that sense of wonder with them. They seem to do so easily what we grownups sometimes have trouble doing at all.

During my first year in the ministry, in 1986, I witnessed such a scene: one I’ll never forget.

It was after the third sermon I had preached there. I had written a series of children’s stories for those three weeks. They were like a serial, and were a simple story, if not a great one. It was a story about a bush that became unhappy just being a bush because all those darned birds kept taking it for granted and it didn’t have a starring role like the big trees did. The more unhappy it got, and the angrier it got at having to be a bush, the more its roots withdrew from the soil, until at last they pulled out, the wind blew, and it became a tumbleweed.

Now it roamed everywhere, but never had a home, and began feeling lonely. When the wind stopped for awhile, it found itself resting not far from a lovely little river, in a beautiful meadow. It was grateful for the rest, and to be in such a beautiful place. And soon, it put down roots and again became a bush. Now when birds came to sit in its branches, it was thankful for the company. It came to love the place, and all the other creatures in its world. And as that happened, it grew and grew, and finally became a very, very big tree. The End.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened after the service. In the foyer, a church member who was a physics professor came up to me, raging mad. He was actually red in the face, as he accused me of having done a ridiculous and shameful thing. My crime was that I had told the children a story that could not be scientifically true.

I could hardly believe it! It was ridiculous, he yelled, to say that a tumbleweed could again put down roots and become a bush. Though he didn’t know the scientific names of the plants involved, he was quite sure it couldn’t happen. And then, as though that weren’t bad enough, I had gone to absolutely stupid extremes by then telling the children that the bush could become a tree!

“It’s ridiculous!” he said, getting pretty worked up. Then he shook his finger at me and said “Do you actually believe that a bush can become a tree?”

I said Yes. Now he turned nearly purple. He was almost shouting, as he said “Well, I would like to know how in hell a bush can become a tree!”

That’s when the six-year-old boy who had been standing behind me waiting for his turn finally had all he could take. He stepped forward, looked up at the physicist, and said “It’s easy, Mister. It just has to learn how to love!”

You hear something like this, and it can be easy to feel like Peter Pan, like you never want to grow up if it means losing the ability to understand even the simplest of stories. The little boy had been waiting to tell me how much he had liked the three stories, and that he would never forget them. The man was in his fifties, with a Ph.D. in physics, yet actually seemed to think the story had been about a bush! If we must lose the ability to see even the simplest magic when we grow up,

But of course we do grow up. We have to grow up. Eventually, our parents want us to move out and get a job. And to do that – well, we have to grow up. You know, it’s one thing to have your kid bring a horse in the house once. But if every role of film you got developed had a picture of your child with another large heavy animal standing in your living room, you”d be looking for a good therapist.

There’s a famous passage from the Christian scriptures, written by St. Paul, where he says, “When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” (I Cor. 13: 11). When you think about it, it’s an odd thing to say, after Jesus had said that you can’t hope to enter the kingdom of heaven unless you’re like a child! Maybe Paul didn’t get it.

I don’t know quite what happens to us when we grow up, but something does seem to change – that change that Peter Pan was so afraid of. I remember stories on the old hippies of the 60s and 70s who had tuned in, turned on and dropped out, then growing into investment bankers and organization men and women, becoming the new incarnation of the very Establishment they had earlier hated, as they raised their own children and suffered through their teen-aged rebellions, wondering why they didn’t grow up.

Sometimes, it seems that part of growing up is losing touch with that spark, the almost magical and transformative insights of even the simplest fairy tales and stories – about a beauty that remains asleep until wakened by a loving kiss, about frogs turning into princes the same way, or tumbleweeds turning into bushes and then trees, just because they’ve learned how to love.

But without seeing the sparks within these stories, and being open to them, we really are farther off from heaven than when we were young. And the “heaven” in this story isn’t a place, you know, but that kind of life where it feels the sacred dimensions, the sparks, are right there near us, close enough to touch. That’s what we seem to lose.

Of course, growing up doesn’t have to mean just growing old, and we all know some people with both plenty of years and plenty of sparks. In fact, they are probably some of our very favorite people in the whole world. They’re some of the vessels carrying those sparks for us to find, and claim, and embody, in our own sacred task of trying to reconstitute the world so it can once again be the image of God, of all that is holy and life-giving.

When I was a graduate student, in a very arid, intellectual and sometimes impersonal graduate school, there were a few of these living sparks around, and they were absolutely magical for me.

My teacher was one of them. He was a man in his 60s who wore beads, had an earring, wore jeans, sometimes sandals, and open collars that somehow survived from the hippie movement, and shoulder-length hair, except on the top where he didn’t have much hair at all.

He looked like a walking refutation of grown-up seriousness. We became close, I had many dinners with his family, and still remember the feeling that one of the greatest living theologians was also an over-sized elf.

I had another professor who was much more sober and quiet, very grown-up. During the week, if he wasn’t teaching an advanced seminar or discussing the footnotes of footnotes, you would find John in the library, meticulously digging up even more footnotes.

Ah, but on Sunday night, after the sun went down, some of the students would gather in the lounge for an evening of playing Dungeons and Dragons. And there was John, playing the Dungeonmaster, dressed in a wonderful brownish medieval robe with hood and rope belt that his wife had made for him, his eyes twinkling like a six-year-old boy, and more excitedly alive than I ever saw him at any other time. On Sunday nights, he was just full of sparks.

And I suspect that if someone were to have asked John whether he actually believed in that ridiculous Dungeons and Dragons stuff, he might have said he actually believed that letting ourselves expand in imaginary escapades we’ll never be able to encounter in grown-up life can open up whole new and wonderful avenues for our souls to take flight.

In religious studies, you often call figures like this Trickster figures. Those are the figures that don’t follow grown-up rules, that bring spontaneity into life whether you want it or not.

Even the more official and restrained parts of the University sometimes welcomed in these Trickster figures, and there would be a quiet explosion of sparks that could just take your breath away.

The most memorable came one Christmas Eve, in the big formal service in Rockefeller Chapel. Built with the money of John D. Rockefeller, this huge stone building was over a hundred feet high inside, seated two thousand people, and seemed modeled on the magnificent cathedrals of medieval Europe. The Sunday services were so dismal it seldom drew more than fifty.

But on Christmas Eve, it was packed. Organ, huge choir, medium-sized orchestra, priests in formal robes, everybody being very sober and pious.

Then, into the middle of this great pomp, they staged a re-enactment of the old Bible story of Joseph and Mary looking for a place to stay. And slowly, from the end of the long stone aisle all the way to the front, came this year’s Joseph, and Mary – and real live donkey! A donkey! The little donkey didn’t know the story, didn’t care for the music or the costumes or much else besides the carrots Joseph would try to slip him unnoticed.

The donkey had no costume, no pretense at all, couldn’t have cared less about Christmas, and completely stole the show! Finally, when the donkey entered, there was something that was simply real. I don’t remember much else from the program that night, but the donkey, at least, was sacred, and everybody there with eyes to see could see it. There was one of those magnificent sparks, clip-clopping down the aisle: just clip-clopping and looking around.

Bringing the donkey into the temple revealed the temple in the donkey. And if even a little donkey could contain a temple, then surely we could, too. And just knowing that helps to accomplish the sacred task of reconstituting the world.

Sometimes just telling these stories is like bringing a donkey into the temple. That’s the role that stories, fairy tales, movies and some imaginative fantasy games can play for us, and it’s a role we need, if we’re going to find any of those sparks at all.

I don’t know if Mardi Gras or Burning Man or the others offer more escape than transformation. But anywhere that spirit is present, it can offer transformation, because it shows that power of life, that power that represents life unchained, that most powerful force anywhere.

How many of you have thought some version of “When I’m older and no longer afraid of what people might think, I’ll wear purple. I’ll do the harmless but outrageous things I don’t dare do now”?

What would those things be, that would let your soul take flight? Do you think perhaps it might be wise to practice them a little now, so that when you get older and have the nerve to do outrageous things that let your soul soar, people won’t be so surprised?

In the beginning, God, the divine and magical dimension of the universe, existed just as infinite light. But God wanted to behold himself, and so he created the world; the world is the image of God. Then God withdrew, and the world was no longer the image of God, but a fractured, separated place. But spread throughout this world, there are billions and billions of sparks from that divine light that can connect us with all that is sacred. And our sacred task in life is to find those sparks we are lucky enough to come across, to cherish and embody them, to lift them up and spiritualize them, and by doing this to reconstitute the world so that it can once more take on the image of a God of love, justice, joy, and peace.

My story about bringing the horse in the house may not be about much more than dealing with a problem you will never, ever have: what to do with a horse that’s stuck on your back porch before your mother comes home. That’s not a spiritual quest at all. Yet there’s something in it that still has some magic about it, a spark to it, even fifty years later, isn’t there?

Let’s not grow up without bringing with us that child’s ability to feel pure joy, to expect magic everywhere, and to find it. These sparks can come through so many different doors. They can arrive like a little donkey. They can be like a spark, or a lightning flash. Sometimes they come announced by that “still, small voice” that prophets have written about. And sometimes – you can trust me on this one – they even whinny.

Virtually the whole story is captured in this photo. At the far right, you can see the edge of the console-style television set. Louie’s alert eyes and ears speak for themselves. That’s Joey on the sofa, and Jimmy, derelict from duty, peeping over the horse’s shoulders. On the floor, you can still see the top of the metal bucket – which, like Jimmy, is about four feet from where it should have been.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 26, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us seek our fullest humanity. We may be about 1/3 beast, 1/3 human and 1/3 divine, but none of the three parts is whole enough, or wise enough, to guide us.

Let us try to become integrated in every way – all our parts, all our people, are the necessary elements of our fullest humanity, and our most complete strength.

The excellence we seek is a fragile, beautiful thing. We seek the ability to live our passing lives, alive with awareness and compassion, excited by the human-scale joys that come from fully participating in the passing but precious splendor of people who have come alive to the challenges of life and the joy of living them.

As the theologian Howard Thurman has said, “Let us find what makes us come most fully alive, and go do it – because what the world most needs is people who have come alive.”

Amen.

SERMON: Gilgamesh, the Oldest Spiritual Hero

One of the ironies of religion is that we go to our faith traditions to seek what we feel are the most important truths – the truths we should guide our lives by – but what we mostly do is tell stories. Those stories can structure our lives, determine how we live, what we take to be sacred. Yet, at bottom, they’re stories. And if we change our stories, it can change our life. That’s what a conversion experience is about: changing your center to live out of a new story.

In Western religion, we’re trained to explore and interpret stories from the Bible for insights into reality, ethics, etc. In Hindu countries, they don’t use the Bible, but use the many stories in their Mahabharata and Ramayana stories, and some of the philosophical writings like the Upanishads, etc.

Like the Hindus, the ancient Greeks used lots of gods, while the Buddhists used stories without any gods at all.

But for most of us, religion is about forming the right kind of relationship with God, much as subjects form a relationship with their master. Not to care about God is seen as not caring about life, goodness, character or ethics – and, of course, our eternal future for most of those in Western religions. For this God controls eternal damnation or reward, though the terms of it are made by the priests and rulers, since this God, like all gods, isn’t really part of our world except through the stories about him.

But long before the Hebrews, long before the Greeks, over 1500 years before the Hindus, there was an earlier high civilization in Sumer, with a very different kind of story about life, the gods and immortality.

It is the epic of Gilgamesh. It was only unearthed and translated in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I don’t think you can overstate just how deeply different and disturbing it is to all Western religious thought. First, it disturbed Western thinkers because it contains the ancient story of a flood, and a couple who made an ark to survive it, told centuries before the Genesis story and generally accepted as the main source of the story of Noah and his ark.

That was in the 1870s. But by the 1890s, some scholars were making far bolder claims. They said this myth is not only older than the Bible, but also better than the Bible, that it was a mythology to which we could relate more naturally in our modern world.

So this morning, I want to introduce you to this story that’s older than all of the world’s religions, older than all their gods, and explore a little of what it’s saying, and why it may well fit our modern world better.

Ironically, even the Gilgamesh story seems to be claiming that their modern world is no longer served by the ancient world of gods and stories of immortality. Their central concern is with the reality of death, and the stories of immortality, which they finally reject as belonging to ancient times, but not their modern age.

Gilgamesh was a historical figure, from the dawn of our recorded human history. He ruled about 4600 years ago in the city of Uruk in what is now southern Iraq. He was an ancient Sumerian. He knew he was a Sumerian, but he did not know that he was ancient. In fact, he saw himself as very modern. He lived about two centuries after the Sumerians had been the first to invent writing, so they rightly felt that they were far more advanced than any people who had ever lived before them.

In the century after his death, the historical memory of this ruler was transformed into myth. At first, his story was recorded in a series of short poems. 1,000 years later, these stories were woven into an epic, and became known throughout the near East.

Thousands of fragments of this epic have been recovered, and we have about 3,000 lines of this story, which achieved its final form around 1300 BC.

The two main characters in the story are Gilgamesh, who is described as 2/3 divine and 1/3 human, and Enkidu, a kind of mirror image, who seems about 1/3 human and 2/3 animal.

Enkidu was created as a kind of wild anti-hero to Gilgamesh, as his opposite. Gilgamesh sent a woman out into the woods to tame him. Enkidu stays with her for just a week, and is transformed into someone human and urban. I know women who hear this and think doing that in a year, let alone a week, would be a miracle, though I don’t know too many men who think so.

Once he becomes more human, Enkidu challenges and fights with Gilgamesh, and it’s a draw: they’ve met their match, their shadow side, their complement. They become companions, and friends. It was through this bond with his complement that Gilgamesh first learned true friendship – and some of the modern psychological readings of that seem pretty obvious.

Together, they go to kill an evil monster that belongs to the gods, to prove themselves more powerful. And they are: together, they can defeat evil.

The great goddess Ishtar wants Gilgamesh to marry her, and promises him love and peace – she is the goddess of love, fruitfulness and war. But he isn’t interested, says her love leads only to war, and recounts many stories of how she has betrayed her lovers. She is furious, and sends the bull of heaven to kill them both. But Enkidu kills the mighty bull of heaven.

Here are men – or one man who has integrated his animal, human and divine natures – with no fear of the ancient supernatural powers. In fact, they can hold their own against them, and defeat most of them. I don’t know of another religious tradition with such a story.

Enkidu, however, dies from wounds suffered in the fights with the supernatural monsters – at least partly as retribution demanded by the gods for their destruction of the Bull of Heaven – and Gilgamesh discovers loss, grief, and death.

Gilgamesh now roams the earth wondering if it’s possible to avoid death. He finds the old Noah-type figure (Utnapishtim) who, with his wife who survived the great flood, were granted immortality.

Utnapishtim says he was warned by the gods of the flood, so he, his wife and artisans built and survived on the ark. But he says this cannot happen again, and the gods’ granting of immortality was a one-time deal, long ago but not in modern times.

Gilgamesh still wants to gain immortality. As he prepares to leave, the old Noah tells him of the plant growing at the bottom of the sea, called “the old one becomes a child,” and says if Gilgamesh uses it, he won’t grow old. Gilgamesh finds the plant and is going to use it. (This is like taking a pill to solve the problem.) But the plant falls into the water, and a snake steals it, which is why snakes can renew their skin.

You might ask, “Well, what would have happened if Gilgamesh had eaten that plant?” The answer is that then he would have to have discovered, either that the plant didn’t work or that he did something wrong, and lost his only chance at it. Because the story, remember, was written by people who knew that we don’t have immortality, and wrote an imaginative story to say that there are irreversible reasons why we don’t and can’t.

So Gilgamesh knows that he can neither get the cure or the pill, and has accepted that the quest for immortality is in vain.

Now Gilgamesh confronts reality anew. This is his conversion experience, and it changes everything. Here was his spiritual journey:

1. First, he seeks the cure for the fact that we must die – having the gods grant immortality. But that doesn’t happen any more; the gods are useless for this. And even Ushnapishtim, the last human to become immortal, is lonely and grieves for his lost son, so immortality can’t be the answer to human yearning anyway.

2. Then he wants a “pill” – a magic way, not involving the gods, to become immortal, to eat of the plant called “he who is old becomes young again.” But that also only worked once, with the snake, and isn’t available in his modern times.

3. Finally, he understands that neither gods nor natural routes can lead us beyond the fact that we’re born, we live, and we die and become part of the world of the irretrievably dead. Even kings die: even the rich, even the talented, even us.

4. What, then, does the human condition offer? What is a reality-based solution to this longing? Many things. Friendship, sex, relationships, families, children who survive us, the fact that we can memorialize friends, heroes, beloved people – and that we can aspire to become a memorable person. We can achieve things that will live on in the memory of others. We can build things. We are part of cities and states that live on and carry our passions and memories and the tales of our deeds forward.

When we integrate our animal, human and divine aspects, we have great power; we can even destroy evil. And that’s a good thing. Even when gods send the evil against us, we can destroy it. Still, we die.

The Gilgamesh story is saying that the gift of immortality, either from the gods or from a “pill,” belonged to the mythic past, not the reality-based present. Whether it once happened in stories, it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t happen now; it isn’t the reality in which we live.

How is this good news? Because it empowers us in the real world. If we enter the fantasy worlds, we’re subject to those who control the stories, but who have no real information that we don’t have: just stories.

Gods have their own rules. We need a world with human-sized rules and dependable friendship and love, not subject to the whims of gods who wouldn’t care about us. And we don’t need the gods – we can simply refuse to deal with them (Ishtar), or make perfunctory bribes to them (Shamash) without caring about them.

We can live a human-scale life. We lose good friends, we lose those we love, but can memorialize them, tell their stories, write poems, build statues. We can create families, cities, and seek to become a memorable person in the lives of others.

Like one of our own modern authors (Borges) has said, we die twice. The first time is when our body gives out. Then the second and final death comes when there is no one left to tell our story. Gilgamesh accepted the first death, but said the human condition offers us chances to postpone the second death through telling our stories, writing poems, epics, memorializing those who have mattered to us, building families, cities, and participating in the joys of this fragile, transient, precious life.

The goal of human life is not absorption into the moment like other animals, and not an immortality that would breed indifference to transient things, like the gods we have sanctioned. What is available to humans is an excellence located between the beasts and the gods, and available to neither of them. It consists of participation in life, joy, creativity and wisdom.

So the gods prove to be useless, and Gilgamesh must learn to deal with life and the world the way they really are in these modern times of 4600 years ago. This isn’t atheism, it’s growing past the time when it was useful to think in terms of gods; it’s outgrowing the gods by coming into our full humanity.

What, then, is the “divine” part of us? We don’t share the gods’ immortality, or their aloofness to human pains. Perhaps it is our imagination, our ability to gain a kind of fragile wisdom available neither to animals nor gods. Gods don’t need wisdom, animals don’t either: they are living too much in the present to need a perspective that can reach beyond the present.

And what is wisdom? Perhaps it’s dealing with the fact that we live, love and will die, in ways that can lead us to that lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul and a more integrated and authentic existence that magnifies our life force rather than dissipating it. The love of gods who don’t live within our human constraints isn’t helpful, precisely because they don’t empathize with our limitations.

What is essential about human excellence is precisely its fragility. We who live and will die nevertheless love, make friendships, build cities, find joy, create children and invest our love and lives in them. We can watch them grow, as we also grow through the stages of life. Gods can’t do that. But like the gods, our imaginations can range far beyond us: that’s the “divine” part of us. We can create things that were not there, that are tender, beautiful, precious and passing, as we also are. Gilgamesh chooses this fully human and participatory life over gods and immortality.

Nearly two thousand years later, in Homer’s Odyssey Odysseus will also choose his wife Penelope over an immortal existence with the goddess Circe. These choices of the human over the immortal are rare in world literature, and among our most courageous and hopeful stories.

After all, as Gilgamesh might have said, he was a modern man, and nostalgia for the ancient ways no longer serves us. It is time to grow up, time to grow beyond the gods and into our full humanity which is, in its way, even better than the gods.

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© Davidson Loehr

February 19, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us be willing to listen to our hearts when we are in pain. Not our anger, not our complaints, not our fear or the litany of life’s failings, but the still, small voices of our hearts.

Sometimes, it is the wishes of our hearts that cause our pain, when we expect the world to grant those wishes.

Let us not go through it alone unless we have to. Let us find a safe place, a safe person, and ask them to listen, as we try to listen, to the cries of our hurts and of our hearts.

Whether things around us can be changed, or we’ll have to change our demands and expectations, it often starts with the painful honesty that can say, “This is not what I expected in my life.”

Some times the wisdom we need is just what we don’t want to hear, but what we need to hear – not from others wagging their self-righteous fingers at us, but from ourselves, in our own voice.

Religious miracles aren’t about changing the world around us. Those are social or political endeavors. Religious miracles are about changing our hearts, our expectations, changing what we are willing to accept.

They are among life’s hardest miracles, and they seldom happen alone. When we are in pain, when we need someone just to listen, let us try to find them.

The heart does have reasons that reason does not know. And sometimes, if we will listen carefully, we can hear them. Let us learn to listen.

Amen.

TESTIMONIALS

This service about “listening to the heart” used our own Listening Ministry as an example of church members who have been through nearly six months of training as listeners, and church members who have used these services. For this posting, I’ve removed the last names of our members, but included their comments.

Mike – A Listening Minister:

1. What was the best thing about the listening ministry program?

One of the best things about the Listening Ministry program for me is the training. In the beginning it’s a frustrating and unnatural process, but it gets you thinking. You think about listening, which is unnatural, because most of us listen in order to respond with answers or anecdotes. As a listening minister you learn to respond with questions, to clarify, or by paraphrasing, to comprehend.

The training by itself is good enough. I’d do it again just for that. But, I joined this church for many reasons. One reason is for community, another is for personal salvation. By salvation I mean that I want to live a healthy life in the moment. For me, the two are joined.

A perfect illustration of this for me started in the New UU Covenant group. Everyone in the group gave a talk that summed up their personal spiritual journey. Well, I grew up fairly un-churched. Our family suited-up for Easter or Christmas Eve services at a mild Presbyterian church. I couldn’t tell you anything about it really-other than feeling awkward and stiff in church clothes. So, for this covenant group, I wrote about my life-the emotional ups and downs, the demons, the struggle to forgive myself and others. Before I spilled all of this out in the covenant group, I confessed that I’d written a rather long piece on my spiritual journey. The leader of the group, Nancy G., said quite seriously something to the effect: Take as long as you need, we’re here for you.

We all start coming to church for one reason or the other, but I personally returned to this church for the gentle inclusiveness found in Nancy’s words and in that group’s willingness to listen to my story. This to me embodies one of the listening ministry principles. Bearing witness. Everyone needs a witness to the ups and downs in their lives. At times, friends, family, and co-workers cannot fulfill this role. Sometimes you just need a neutral person to listen respectfully with compassion to your story. You need a witness. I believe that being heard, no matter what you’re suffering, can help with the healing process.

Dana – who used our Listening Ministry:

1. What was the best thing about your listener or the listening ministry program?

Having someone listen without judgment or “helpful” comments. Simply allowing the words from my pain resonate in the room and echo back to my ears. This echo came back to me with acknowledgement, affirmation and confirmation of my feelings. The listening minister likewise, reiterated my feelings, and somehow my feelings were annotated and enlarged, no longer being fuzzy thoughts are hurts… But a solid that could be seen and managed.

2. What would you tell someone who was hesitant to call for a listening minister?

That managing pain alone is a choice, but not the most effective and beneficial. Sharing pain as in sharing joy, a good meal, a good laugh, brings an expanded dimension and allows space for healing….That being heard by someone who can hear, is sensitive and supportive is the very best to bring about resolution.

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

The ease, simplicity, of someone accommodating my time schedule, being available to me, to be with me, and support me in finding positive resolution to my issues.

Caroline – A Listening Minister

I signed up for the LM training soon after joining the church. The training required introspection, openness and sharing among other trainees. This continues throughout one’s participation in the program. Serving as a LM has helped me understand why I respond to situations as I do, what I’m feeling and why, and how to better put it into words – not a forte of mine. So I have learned both from my listenees and my fellow LM”s. Another benefit, I have also come to know quite well a caring, open, diverse group of church members whom I care about greatly. Six of the trainees from my group still get together on a monthly basis. I cherish these get-togethers.

For someone who is hesitant to request a LM, I would say think of it as your time, a time when you give yourself permission to talk about what is on your mind without worrying about whether you are imposing on the listener. The old saying “get it off your chest” works: talking something through in your head is harder. Situations are clarified, emotions may not have the same grip once they are spoken. New perspectives and insights emerge.

The LM is a real win-win situation as far as I’m concerned. I have gained as much from my listenees and the program as they I hope have.

Rebecca – who used our Listening Ministry:

1. What was the best thing about your listener or the listening ministry program?

I liked that my listener had some experience with my specific issue. It made me feel like she would understand my problems from the start.

2. What would you tell someone who was hesitant to call for a listening minister?

I found it to be very effective one on one counseling for a time that was difficult. My listener gave support that I was not able to find in friends or family.

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

How helpful it was. She just listened to me spew out all of my stuff. She never really gave advice or guidance. She just accepted me in the place I was in. It’s a world full of judgments but it’s a very powerful thing to just be accepted.

SERMON:

When I looked for a training program for a listening ministry program after I arrived here in 2000, I chose the one we’re using for two reasons. First, it was the hardest and demanded the most training, and I thought both our members and our volunteers deserve that kind of first-class treatment.

And second, I liked the philosophy of this training, which saw our role not as curing, not as solving, but as listening, in the faith that the wisdom most of us need is the wisdom of our own best selves, and that can happen – sometimes almost magically – just by being able to tell our story. Listening is work, always, and it’s hard work. But when one person can be honest and the other can be attentive, sometimes miracles occur.

I first saw this magic performed twenty-four years ago, and to the end of my days it will remain one of the most miraculous things I have ever witnessed.

I was taking a ten-week chaplaincy training program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, learning how to be a chaplain, which I finally realized meant learning how to listen. I had signed on for the leukemia ward. As soon as I found the ward and told them I was the new chaplain intern, three nurses jumped on me and said “Wonderful! It’s your turn! Go see the woman in room 19!” I asked what this was about, and they said “We have all had all we can take of her. It’s your turn!”

I went in to meet this woman, and a nurse closed the door behind me. The patient was 29, married with two children, dying of leukemia, and furious. I heard her whole story: very loud, punctuated with furious profanity, along with being told that the fact that I dared to be a chaplain was a cheap abomination, because in case I hadn’t heard, there was no God, there was no justice, and there was no love!

I have never been around anyone as deeply furious, or loud, profane and vulgar as this woman, and I had no idea how to help her. I listened to her story. She and her husband had had a stormy beginning to their marriage, with some painful fights and threats of divorce going both ways. Then one day they decided to begin talking through their angers and their differences. They worked hard at it for a year, she said. They were vulnerable, honest, and serious. They were willing to be heard, and willing to listen.

And finally, as they could hear each other’s pain and anger, they began to understand where the resentments were, how the angers had arisen and how they had each nursed them in the dark, where they gained strength until they had nearly destroyed their relationship.

Slowly, painfully, they found each other again, and they found the love they had lost. They fell in love all over again, with each other, with their marriage and their new baby. They recommitted themselves to one another for the rest of their lives, and soon their second child was on the way.

The past three years, she said, had been the happiest either of them had ever imagined. They had worked for it, they had earned it, they deserved it. There was a justice about it – this was a very important phrase for her.

And now, she said, her voice rising again, she was going to die. She was going to die, leaving behind the husband she loved, the two young children they both loved and had so looked forward to spending the rest of their lives raising and loving and watching grow up.

Within seconds, the profanity and vulgarity were back, screamed almost as loud as she could scream from her desperate, hopeless pain. I had absolutely no idea what to do. After she finished, she told me that I was to return at the same time the next day. I asked why. She screamed that I would hear this story every damned day until she died, that’s why, and if I wasn’t there she would have me paged.

I had failed miserably with the very first patient to whom I’d been assigned. I felt awful, and I was in that room at that time for five full days, feeling worse for her and worse for myself every day.

I was depressed all that weekend, and partly because I knew Monday was coming and I’d have to go back into that room again. So Monday morning, in the group when the ten chaplain students met with our supervisor, I confessed. I told the story, said I had completely failed at this, and didn’t know what to do.

Our supervisor was a Lutheran minister named John Serkland – good people deserve to have their names told with their stories. John listened to my miserable story, and said “Do you want me to save you?” I said “Do you honestly think you can?” He said Yes, he thought he probably could. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even know what that could mean. I said “John, this woman is going to die, she’s furious and I don’t blame her. What on earth can you possibly do?” He said that tomorrow he would go with me to visit her.

So that day, Monday, I spent another painful and miserable fifteen minutes in her room, hearing the same story, with more volume, more profanity, more vulgarity, more hopeless fury, and that night I didn’t sleep well.

The next day, John wore his chaplain costume, with the Lutheran backward collar. I thought, Man, she’s going to throw the bedstand at you in that costume! That afternoon, we walked into her room. She took one quick look at us, and sized the situation up immediately. “Oh I see,” she yelled, “the little moron is stumped, so he brings the big fat moron!” Her actual words were far more colorful,

John sat down in the chair by the head of her bed. He said, “My name is John. May I hear your story?” That’s all he said for the next ten minutes. She laid into him. She called him names, told him what an abomination his costume was, then told him her story, the story I had already heard six times. It seemed even more angry, more desperate, more hopeless. When she finished, John said just three words. He looked at her and simply said, “You expected more.”

She was prepared to throw whatever he said right back in his face, and she formed her mouth for a response, but nothing came out. She mustered more energy, more anger, and again tried to say something, but again nothing came out. Then tears ran down both her cheeks; she looked at John and simply said, “Yes.”

“Yes,” he repeated. She reached her hand out, and he clasped it for a few seconds, then said “I would like to come back tomorrow.” She nodded. We left.

The next day, we returned, and the spell had been broken. She apologized for her behavior, her anger, her language, and John said she had nothing to apologize for. “I expected more,” she said, “I expected more than this. But there isn’t more. There’s just this. Just 29 years. Just this. I was just so angry! I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t seem right. There was no justice in it. I wanted more. But there isn’t more. There is just this.” She thanked John, then said “You don’t have to come back.” She nodded toward me and said, “He’ll do.” We laughed, and left.

John and I went to the hospital cafeteria for some coffee and conversation. I said “How did you know what to do?” He said, “I have a confession to make. About ten years ago, I was assigned to a patient much like her, in the same condition, and she was also furious. Each day she would scream at me, call me names, tell me chaplains were a disgrace, and the rest of it. I had no idea what to do. I kept wanting to help her, to solve her problem, and I couldn’t solve her problem because she was right: she was dying, and it wasn’t fair. She died, angry to the end, and I knew I had failed her. I thought about it for years. A couple years ago, after I’d had a lot more experience, I finally realized that I hadn’t needed to fix her, I’d just needed to hear her. I wondered if I would ever get another chance to do it right. This time, it was your turn. And because you failed as I once had, I got the chance to say those three words I wish I had said ten years ago.”

All John did was listen to her heart. It was all she needed. Most of the time, it’s all any of us need. It’s our own wisdom that we need, but we can’t hear it because our fear, our desperation and our fury keep us from hearing ourselves. Sometimes, it just takes someone else. Not someone to fix us, not someone to give us wise answers like dishing out pills. Not someone to listen to our symptoms and diagnose a medication. Just someone to listen to our heart. Just that.

And what a gift it is. That young woman died a few weeks later. During those weeks, she spent every minute she could loving her husband, her children, expressing her appreciation for all that others had been able to do. She had found a peace I didn’t think possible. It was certainly a peace I couldn’t have led her to. But she didn’t need to be led; she just needed to be heard – and to listen to herself.

Of all the thoughts I’ve had about that experience, two stand out.

The first was realizing that virtually all of our frustrations, angers and disappointments in life result from the fact that we expected more. Our friendships or relationships aren’t as satisfying as we want: we expected more. Our parents, our families, frustrate us with their scripts, their expectations, their badgering. We expected more from our family. Our job drives us nuts: we expected more from that! We’re not attractive enough, not successful enough, not happy enough: we expected more.

Sometimes, of course, there can be more. Every social action, every political action effort in history has been the demand that our society be more. The American colonists expected more representation for their taxes, demanded it, fought for it, and got it. A century ago, women expected more of a voice in elections. They fought for it, and got it. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam era anti-war movement, the movement to remove President Nixon from office, and hundreds of other movements came precisely from the fact that we expected more, worked for more, and got more. So this isn’t about urging a spineless passivity. Some things can be changed.

But not everything can be changed. Some things must finally be accepted. Then it’s time to look for spiritual miracles. Those miracles don’t change the world around us; they change the world within us. That’s what religious miracles are about: not walking on water, but learning to walk on the earth for as long as we”ve been given: awake, aware, and grateful.

The second lesson I learned is that it usually won’t happen unless we can listen and hear. Not only chaplains, ministers and listening ministers need to listen and hear, but those telling their stories need to listen and hear, too. I don’t know how many times that woman shouted her story, but she never heard what her heart was saying, and she put others off so much that they didn’t even want to listen. If both she and John had not been willing to listen to her heart, I think she would have died in that same painful fury.

When we can get our hearts and our heads together and listen, sometimes miracles happen. They really happen every day, all around us, in quiet conversations and quiet reflections going on everywhere. Life can have profound disappointments, but it also has its miracles. Indeed, miracles abound. Sometimes all we have to do is listen.

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© Davidson Loehr

18 December 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us learn how to open our gifts. Christmas is coming, wrapped presents are everywhere, and we still struggle to know how to open our gifts, even to recognize them.

The pure gift of just being here – what’s that worth? And being with people we love, and who love us – what’s that selling for on the Dow or the Nasdaq? And our health – whatever degree of health we have, it’s better than having a lot less health. It makes a big difference. What’s that worth?

So many gifts and so many of us who have not learned how to see them. Let us become aware of those simple gifts of being here, loving and being loved, the gifts of our health. Those gifts are the real treasures of this holiday season, and we don’t have to wait until Christmas to open them. In fact, it’s best that we don’t wait. Let us open our gifts of life, love and spirit, and spread them all around our lives, sitting there right in the middle of them. That will help us prepare for Christmas by reminding ourselves that we already have the really important gifts, while on Christmas morning we can open our gaily-wrapped trinkets and toys.

Amen.

SERMON: Love Stories

Some of you may be thinking “All right, this is a church and it’s Christmas time, so tell me a story, take me in, make me believe things that I know aren’t so, just for a week. Do the Christmas thing – if you pretend it could be true, I’ll pretend I believe you, and we’ll fake it through another holiday season. Just tell me a story and take me in.” Even if you wouldn’t say it that way, you recognize the sentiment, and many of you may identify with it.

But others come to church a week before Christmas and think, “All right now, it’s that season when all preachers lie because they think they can get away with it. But don’t lie to me. Don’t insult my mind or my spirit by feeding me hokum. Now more than at any other time of the year, I need the one thing churches almost never offer: I need truth. So don’t you dare lie to me!”

And others are in between, wondering and hoping that there could be truth that’s still magical, and magic that’s true.

Really, this is the range of expectations people bring to religion all the time, everywhere. We know religions always teach using stories, and a lot of people think you only use stories when you don’t have facts, the way Plato defined myths as lies 2400 years ago – though Plato was one of the great mythmakers of Western history.

But you can’t escape stories. You can just hope to tell the difference between stories that serve us and stories that enslave us. Even sciences give their facts a human meaning by embedding them in stories. We might doze off in a talk about Chlorofluorocarbon emissions, but we understand the story of global warming, and the picture of melting ice caps that can raise the sea level and flood some of the world’s major cities.

We can understand that those species of plants and animals that fit the demands of their surroundings would do well, but it’s easier to remember the phrase “survival of the fittest” because it implies all kinds of stories, including a lot of cowboy Westerns.

But even things presented in the media as facts – are usually parts of stories, whether we realize it or not. Right now, for instance, we are told repeatedly that we are at war with Iraq. Well, that one word “war” calls up all kinds of stories of heroic sacrifice made in the name of high and noble ideals, usually against evil enemies.

But the truth is that we aren’t in a war with Iraq. We invaded their country, illegally and against all international law. Our administration lied to our own people to do it, in order to control Iraq’s money, their oil, and occupy their strategic position. What our media call Iraqi “insurgents” aren’t insurgents; they’re fighting and dying to repel a foreign invader that has stolen their money and murdered over 100,000 of their people. That’s a very different story. If the media called it an illegal invasion, called the theft of their money and oil robbery or piracy, and called the deaths of Iraqi citizens murders, then we would have a very different story, and one the country would not support for long. It matters what you call it, because what you call it calls up images and stories that either sanction or condemn what we are doing.

All stories are trying to take us in. But with good stories, we want to be taken in. We love fiction that feeds our spirits, and don’t care a bit whether it’s true. In fact, we prefer stories to facts. This is a religious lesson, but I first learned it from a diaper commercial.

Some years ago, when Pampers came on the market, they were the first good disposable diaper. The advertisers could truthfully say they were the best in the world, because – well, they were the only disposable diaper in the world. So they decided to try an advertising campaign grounded in truth rather than the kinds of images and stories that advertisers prefer. They chose Texas as the test market for this campaign, and just told people the facts, and that Pampers were the best diapers you could buy. Nobody bought them. Apparently that wasn’t what parents were looking for.

So the ad agency decided, Well, we’ll just do it the old way. And they came up with the second ad. This ad said that a Pampers baby is a happy baby. And the rest is history. A happy baby – there’s a whole story tucked in those two words. A happy baby means a happy marriage, a happy family, and young parents who must be doing a good job of parenting. And those are things parents do want to hear: it’s worth the price of a box of diapers any day. And if the diapers are good – well, that’s a bonus.

We prefer stories to facts. We don’t like to admit it, but it’s true.

If you doubt it, just remember the last time you watched “The Nutcracker,” and were perfectly happy seeing dancing mice and a wooden nutcracker who came to life. Not a bit of it actually, historically, happened, you know. But you don’t care a bit, because it’s such a wonderful story.

If you haven’t seen “The Nutcracker,” and still think we prefer truth to fiction, I have one word for you: movies. The documentaries seldom move us. But show us a story that we can imagine ourselves in or connected to, and the tears will flow, our hearts will be touched, and our spirits will be opened and fed.

The best religious stories can do this, too. Some are educational, like the Good Samaritan, or a lot of Buddhist stories. Some are challenging stories, like the stories of the prophets saying God doesn’t care what we believe, only how we behave toward the weakest among us.

And the best of them, those that come from a deep love of life that makes us fall in love with some of the deeper parts of life – those are love stories.

This is the kind of love story that’s the best thing about religions: stories that can make us fall in love with life at deeper levels. They’re everywhere, and I’ve brought you three short ones, from three different religions today.

The first story has a story of its own attending it. A couple years ago, we had an Indian woman who often attended here. She always came late and left early. But one Sunday she came a little early and I saw her, so I went up to her, welcomed her, and asked why she usually came late and left early.

She explained that she had to drive her teen-aged son to Barsana Dahm, the wonderful Hindu temple south of town, then had to drive here, and then had to drive the 30 minutes south again to pick her son up. I said that was two hours of driving, and asked why she didn’t just bring her son here.

“Ah no,” she said, “because you have no good stories!” She said her son needed stories that stirred his mind and his heart, stories he would want to discuss at home during the week. Hinduism, she informed me, had many good stories. “Tell me one,” I asked. “Ah!” she said, “I could tell you a hundred!” “Just one.” “Very well, I’ll tell you the story he learned last week, and which our family has discussed over dinner all this week.”

It was a story about Krishna, probably Hinduism’s favorite picture of God. Krishna was a wonderful god, but as a boy he misbehaved – you could even call him a brat at times. So naturally, kids love him.

Krishna was chewing something in school, and the teacher saw him. He knew he was not supposed to chew gum. “Krishna,” she said, “What are you chewing?” “Nothing,” he replied, still chewing. “Krishna!” she said louder, “that is not true! You are chewing gum, aren’t you?” “No,” he said. She walked over to his desk, told him to stand up, and said “Now open your mouth. I want to look inside!”

So Krishna opened his mouth. The teacher bent down, looked inside his mouth, and saw – a hundred million galaxies. Inside that child were eternity and infinity, just as they are inside all children. That’s a love story! And this woman’s son spent a whole week discussing this story with his parents, and what it might mean to have an infinite and eternal identity inside of him: what it might mean for who he was and how he should live.

A second story isn’t so much a story as it is one sentence that, like Krishna’s mouth, contains a wonderful infinity of possibilities. It comes from Judaism, and is the simple statement where the writer has God say to the Hebrew people “I will be your father, and you will be my people.” God’s people: children of God: everyone! That’s pretty close to containing something infinite and eternal, like the Krishna story, isn’t it? It’s another love story.

And then there is the Christian story, the birth of the baby Jesus. The story is good, both for what it says and for what it does not say. Jesus wasn’t born in a castle, not even in a Holiday Inn, or the story would be saying that only the wealthy have that capacity for bearing the sacred. He wasn’t born to royalty, or it would be saying that only the powerful are really significant. No, in this story, the incarnation of God was born to common people, not rich ones. When God walked among us, he walked as one of us. In fact, it’s the only way he ever walks among us. And we could be incarnations of that spirit rightfully called Holy. For we are children of God and the hope of the world, if only we will be.

Told as history, it isn’t true. It didn’t happen. Told as science, it isn’t true. Humans aren’t conceived without chromosomes from two parents, and that’s done by actual sex, not just an idea. But as a love story, it’s wonderful. If you think about it, it is the Christian version of the story the Hindus tell in that wonderful story of Krishna containing the whole universe in him, or the Jews tell simply by having their God say “I will be your father and you will be my people.” If you’re looking for a story that comes from the depths – not of gods but of humans – then this season has some wonderful love stories for you.

And these love stories aren’t just about giving us a cradle, a manger to make us feel loved, though they can do that. They’re also about nurturing us, empowering us, to grow into our highest selves. They’re stories saying “You, you there: you have within you infinite possibilities. You’re a child of God. You are even, if you will be, an incarnation of God. Now. Go act like it!”

The best love stories give us a love that doesn’t stop until it overflows us, and we reach out to feed a hungry world with the overflow. That’s part of the meaning of reminding ourselves during this season that ” it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Because when we give, we are becoming the incarnation of those forces in the world, in the universe, that are only happy when they are giving unto others: giving life, love, hope, a healing touch, a caring presence. Presence. Spelled with a “c” rather than a “t” – a healing presence, a loving presence. Those are the greatest presents we can give one another, at Christmas or any other time.

It gives a whole new meaning to the words “Christmas presence.” The Christmas story has become mostly a merchants’ story about buying yourself into debt to impress your family and friends with gadgets and toys that will be forgotten in weeks or months. The emphasis is on how many presents you can get, or what they’re worth, or whether they’re cool or impressive enough. And that’s all wrong. There’s nothing there but greed, envy, and a one-upmanship that never ends until you have maxed out your credit cards.

But from the treasuries of the human imagination kept alive for us in the great love stories of religion, another possibility emerges. It is the possibility not of Christmas presents, but of a presence. A presence of love, of awareness, of knowing that within us are infinite possibilities. Within us is the spirit of a son or daughter of God, children of Life’s longing for itself. For we, if only we would realize it, are incarnations of God, needing to claim our sacred heritage, and live it.

These, of course, are stories. Are they true? Yes, these are true, even more true than mere facts. For these are love stories. And it doesn’t get much more true than that!