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© Davidson Loehr

September 16, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Introduction

For the past five days, we have been bewildered because we have the world’s mightiest army, yet the Pentagon was bombed. America is the world’s richest nation, yet its greatest twin symbols of capitalism are smoking rubble. The president says terrorism will not stand, yet he does not know where the enemy stands, and we do not know how to stop random terrorist attacks by suicide bombers. The destruction and death dwarf loss of 2400 military and 49 civilians at Pearl Harbor sixty years ago, but then we knew who the enemy was and where to find them.

We have been watching “reality TV” this week, and have discovered that it is not about small groups of self-absorbed people playing contrived games in remote places. Real reality is about people who know in the depths of their heart that no one is an island, and that the deaths of others diminish and frighten us all.

This is the bloody, almost paralyzing background against which we gather here to grieve, to nurse our fury, to weep, and to be with one another.

CENTERING: 

It was so much worse when it came

It was so much worse than they said.

So much more violent than we could imagine.

Whoever tried to guard us from suicide and mass murder,

Why couldn’t you have been stronger?

Why must we see, hear and feel this?

Even when we spoke of “the horror,”

We didn’t expect this horror.

The attack was more dramatic, the dead more numerous,

Than we wanted to know.

In so many ways, we would give up almost anything

For the return of our innocence.

We pray we may be protected from the demons

That made those few throw their lives away,

Throwing away so many others with them.

We pray we may move beyond the terror and into healing.

Let this awful numbness pass,

And return us to life and to hope.

We are so very fragile.

So here, in desperation and determination,

We fling this simple prayer outward and inward,

To all the gods and all the suffering souls

Who will listen. And we say simply: Be with us.

Amen.

SERMON: Responding to the violence of September 11

Where do we begin? For me, it began in anger – in fury. When I heard of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and a section of the Pentagon on Tuesday, I wanted loud, bloody revenge. I thought “Kill the s!” I didn’t know just who the s were, but I wanted them dead.

Now, five days later, I see that bloody and angry theme is on the verge of becoming our country’s battle cry, as we masses are being cranked up for a long and costly war against an invisible enemy – an enemy defined not by a country but by an ideology.

I can sympathize with the bloody anger because I felt it too. These mass murders were reprehensible by any moral code. Civilized Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and all the rest condemn these actions as contemptible and against all of our highest values.

It is hard to know what to do, though it is suddenly very clear what we will not do:

– We will not react as Mother Teresa did when officials from Union Carbide flew her – after making a donation to her charities – to Bhopal, India following the deaths of 2,000 from Union Carbide’s escaped chemicals. Met at the airport by the media, Mother Teresa was asked what message she brought to the suffering people, and she replied “Just forgive, forgive.” To forgive in these extreme cases is to condone, and we will not condone these murders.

– Nor will we follow the Christian teaching of “turn the other cheek.” I haven’t heard any ministers suggesting this, and can’t imagine it. Turning the other cheek would be a cowardly acquiescence to terrorism, and we won’t do it.

– We might follow the even older teaching of “an eye for an eye,” a tooth for a tooth, a body for a body, carnage for carnage. I hope not, but our leaders and media pundits are trying to herd us in that direction and they may succeed.

The wisest teaching I know of that still applies to these murders comes from Confucius. 2500 years ago, he said we should repay good with kindness, but repay evil with justice. That seems the noblest and most humane goal here. We should strive to repay these deeds not with vengeance, but with justice.

But what is justice here? Last week I asked what is truth, which suddenly seems like a shallow question compared with the quest for justice following the mass murders of Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.

With truth, I said the kind we’re after in religion gives more life, connects us with more people and a bigger world, builds bridges rather than bulwarks. Justice might be defined as truth plus compassion plus power. And while it does not require that we love our enemy – a teaching for calmer situations that would be vulgar here – the quest for justice does require that we try to understand these people who threw away their lives, and more than 5,000 American lives with them.

But to try and understand requires that we back off, and it may feel too soon to back off from the raw feelings of anger here. In some ways it feels too soon to me. So please forgive me if it seems that I am backing off too far and too soon from an attack without precedent in our country’s history.

The hardest part of trying to understand these attackers is in understanding that they didn’t see this attack the way we do, just as they don’t see us as we do.

The first thing we must understand is that this was not an attack on freedom or on democracy! The attackers made it crystal clear through their choice of targets what they were attacking. This was an attack arising from a deep hatred of our country’s military and economic actions and policies, which they see as selfish, bloody and evil.

To us, the Pentagon is the symbol of America’s military strength, which we like to believe is used in the service of freedom, honor, and decency the world over.

But there are many people in the world who don’t see it that way. To them, the Pentagon is the symbol of a military might which is selfish, bloody and evil.

We point to our more than five thousand freshly dead brothers and sisters and say “This is barbaric.” How could you have done it? We’re right: it was barbaric, and no decent person should have done it.

But they point to other lists of military actions that they also believe to be the work of terrorists.

They point to Iraq and the nearly complete sham of the Gulf War. We destroyed the water purification facilities ten years ago, and since then have carefully controlled through rationing and embargoes how much chlorine and other chemicals needed to control water-borne diseases are permitted into Iraq. As a result of these continuing actions, an estimated one million Iraqis have died during that time, including over 500,000 children. “Where,” they ask, “are your tears for these men, women and children you have killed?”

They point to our invasion of Panama – an invasion made in violation of all international law. They remind us that we shelled a poor ghetto area of Panama City for several hours, shouting instructions to surrender over the bullhorn – in English, not Spanish – and then bulldozed the bodies of about 4,000 people, mostly civilians, into an unmarked mass grave. Decent people cry for all the world’s s. “Where were your tears for these?” they wonder. What would we have felt if this had happened in one of our cities?

They point to our continued uncritical support for Israel, again in opposition to the consensus of world opinion. Most nations, they point out, agree that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal, and that there should be a Palestinian state.

It looks to many people in the world like we only appeal to international law and a consensus of the world’s people when it suits our own selfish purposes. When it doesn’t we break the laws and flout the world’s consensus like drunk, gun-toting bullies. We send three billion dollars a year in military aid to Israel: the guns and bombs that are killing their Muslim or Arab relatives were made in the USA. What about our complicity in these acts of murder and terror, they ask?

The list of military meddling could be extended by adding more countries from South America, from Africa, some little islands, Bosnia, Guatemala, Vietnam and more. But these are a few of the reasons that many people in the world hate us and believe our military power is a symbol of selfishness and of evil.

It’s the economy, stupid!

The bigger targets and the bigger symbol, though, were the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. This attack wasn’t about freedom or democracy or religion. It was about economics. And these murdering fanatics represent a large number of people who are neither murderers nor fanatics, who see our country’s economic behaviors and policies as greedy, destructive and evil.

None of this is new. People from all over the world have been picketing and protesting the World Trade Organization and the World Bank for twenty years – though such protests don’t get much space or time in our media.

But these people see us as a country whose economic plan is to reduce the economies of all countries to the two-tiered structure of third-world economies, where a rich few have complete power over the desperate many. They see this plan as so obvious they wonder why we don’t see it too.

We learned a few years ago that the Nike company had paid Michael Jordan a promotional fee Ñ $25 million – that was more than twice the combined annual wages of all Asian workers in all companies making our tennis shoes. Many people around the world wonder why that didn’t bother us, why we didn’t see it as a clear example of America’s economic plan for the world, dividing it into only two classes, separated by a bigger gulf than at any time since at least the Middle Ages, if not any time in history.

They wonder why we don’t see the same plan working in our own country. NAFTA opened the borders for corporations to shop the work out to the cheapest workers in the world. This has made American workers give up pay raises and benefits in order to keep their jobs. Every time workers are laid off, they remind us, stock prices soar and CEO bonuses increase. They wonder if we think this is a coincidence. They see it as the economic plan of the corporations that have begun to control the US government, and wonder why we don’t see it too.

Our workers make less in real dollars than they did thirty years ago, while Bill Gates’ personal fortune exceeds that of the bottom 40% of Americans combined. Our workers have fewer benefits, fewer unions, and less job security than they have in decades. In the meantime, the pay of top executives has skyrocketed. This, say our critics, is the plan of America’s economy. It is greedy and destructive, and our armies serve the interests of those at the top of our economy.

They might remind us that Chapter 11 of NAFTA gives corporations the right to sue state and national governments whose actions cut into their profits – by, for example, prohibiting toxic or dangerous products. Under Chapter 11, corporations have already sued both state and national governments, and have won. National sovereignty has been subordinated to corporate profits without even firing a gun.

These are among the reasons why the twin towers of the World Trade Center are seen as symbols of greed and evil, and why citizens and children in Egypt and elsewhere could be seen cheering their fall. Not because they are barbarians who hate our freedom, but because they are workers who hate our greedy and destructive economic plan and the military meddling that is its servant.

These people know full well that they can’t match our military power. But they also know they don’t have to. They learned, from watching us in Vietnam, that we do not know how to fight against guerillas or terrorists, that we have no defense against individuals serving a powerful ideology who are willing to sacrifice their lives by becoming suicide bombers.

What should we do?

So what should we do? How should we respond? Several options are already presenting themselves.

We could just “bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age,” as some have suggested, and as our President seems eager to do. It could be very showy, and might some great TV moments that the media toadies would put on tape loops to play all day. The problem with bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age is that the Russians already did it a few years ago. Afghanistan is a desolated country with no economy, few schools or hospitals, no infrastructure, and a population of hungry, powerless, desperate people.

One Afghani has circulated an e-mail essay I read yesterday. I don’t know if it is all correct, but I suspect it is close. He said the way to think correctly of the situation there is to see Osama bin Laden as a Hitler, the Talibad as the Nazis, and the Afghani people as the Jews in the prisoner of war camps. The Afghanis aren’t our enemies. They were just earlier victims of the others. Still, our leaders, aided by the rabble-rousing abilities of the media, seem poised to bomb Afghanistan until even the struggling life it has left is gone.

Another tactic that we’re hearing is that of turning this into a battle of Caucasians against Arabs, and Christians against Muslims. This is a tactic that has worked well in our drug war by making white people fear black crack addicts – though most drug money is made by white people. It is a “misdirection” tactic to divert us from the more vital events and schemes, but it too is gaining strength.

And a third tactic – likely to be used in combination with the first two – is a long and costly large-scale military campaign. This too seems to be in the works. Perhaps it will all come to pass.

But I want to back off from these imminent war plans and look at them quite differently than we are being trained to see them. I want to assume, with our critics, that this is primarily about economics, not anything of nobler virtue. And the fact that this is driven by corporations’ concern for profits has dramatic and terrifying implications for the coming wars.

When (or, perhaps, if) we begin the massive, years-long War To End All Evil, it will be the greatest boon to the economic plan to convert us into a two-tiered economy of a powerful few giving orders to the desperate many imaginable:

– Individual rights and democratic freedoms will be curtailed “due to extreme circumstances” and “for reasons of national security.” A culture of obedience will be established without effort, in a top-down hierarchical form that is the dream of every fascist.

– Religion will be subsumed under nationalism, and repressive religions will have the government’s sanction. The Falwell and Robertson clones will become our own version of the Taliban weaker, but still frightening.

– The hundreds of billions of dollars needed for the war efforts will take all surplus from our economy for years to come, so that there can not be money available for education, health insurance, unemployment, or any of the other government expenditures that give the lower classes a glimmer of hope or a step up.

– The Social Security funds will be drained completely, all under the guise of military necessity.

After the war, the economy of the United States will have been restructured into a two-tier economy where, by then, people are simply used to having few choices and fewer individual rights. As a part of the Economic Plan, a long-lasting all-out war against Everything is an absolutely brilliant scheme.

This scenario is as cynical as it is ingenious (or at least fortuitous) for those working to complete the structural changes in our economy. If history and the nature of greed and power are any indications, it is what lies ahead for us.

A slim hope

There is another option. It wouldn’t cost much, it could empower not only our people but nearly all people of the world, and it seems possible. At least, it is already being done. It’s a lesson we can learn from the Irish.

Ireland has dealt with terrorism as a fact of life for decades. But in 1998, the vision and will of the people suddenly changed, and it has made all the difference. That was the year of the Omagh bombing, when a car bomb exploded in a crowded market, killing dozens of shoppers. During the following week, as memorial services took place all over the island, a lot of people began saying Enough. Enough terrorism, enough violence. Some of the more psychopathic terrorists on both sides tried frightening the Irish back into the deadly status quo, but – so far, at least – they have not succeeded.

The Irish were not just saying Enough to the violence perpetrated against them. They were saying Enough to all violence. They refused to harbor or cover for any terrorists, including those working for their side. It wasn’t a decree against the ideological enemy; it was a decree against all violence from all sources. Terrorism and violence were no longer accepted as methods they would tolerate.

It has been just three years, but so far it is still working there.

Could the American people be awakened and stirred enough to say Enough? It couldn’t mean just Enough violence from Muslim terrorists. It would also have to mean Enough violence from the US government. It would be a public refusal to allow the kind of arrogant militarism in the service of economic greed that has marked us for decades. It would mean refusing to be the Good Germans who know, but ignore, their own country’s violence against others. Enough would simply mean Enough!

Such a move, a move with the courage the Irish are now showing, could empower the majority of people throughout the world, and raise Americans to a role of leadership future generations would remember and adore. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, you name it. The vast majority of people on earth hate this violence, are disgusted by terrorist activities from all directions. And that vast majority – like the Good Germans of the Nazi era, again – have mostly said and done very little.

If we began, if we found that vision compelling enough to be converted to an insistence on peaceful and respectful means, we could have the power to short-circuit our government’s greedy and bloody plans – plans that will be written in our blood, not theirs, after all. It could change the face and the course of history, and avoid the bloody and insane chapter we are just being taught to begin.

There is a Buddhist story with some wisdom to offer here, one from the Samurai tradition. The Samurai warriors were known for two things: skill with a sword, and a high, uncompromising moral code.

This Samurai warrior had tracked down an evil man whose deeds called for death. Finally cornering his foe, the warrior closed in to kill him. Suddenly the man stepped forward and spit in the Samurai’s face. The warrior flushed, sheathed his sword, and left. His culture called for him to kill for only the highest reasons. When the man spit in his face, he realized that if he were to kill him now, it would be out of personal rage, not noble ideals.

Please understand, I’m not suggesting that what happened to us this past Tuesday was in any way like merely having someone spit in our face! It was not. It was a bloody, cowardly, vile mass murder. But it has moved us to the point where we can be whipped up by our leaders and the media into murdering many others out of our rage, rather than from any higher or nobler motives.

If we do that, we will not only demean ourselves and our nation, but will also flood the earth with rivers of blood – almost all from s. It is fine to wave the American flag – I’m proud of this country too, when it lives up to its highest callings. But to wave the flag over vengeance from low motives is not to honor our history, but to dishonor it.

And so it seems a way out is offered, at least if we are truly people of noble character. Will we take it? Will we find the collective courage and resolve to say, and mean, Enough? I don’t know. I’m not a prophet. I’m only a preacher. All I have right now are prayers, and this is my prayer.

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Davidson Loehr

July 15, 2001

The text of this sermon is unavailable but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This morning I want to take an insight from those great seldom recognized philosophers of our society. Those in the world of professional wrestling. They have a distinction that I think might be useful and helpful in thinking about balderdash.

In the world of professinal wrestling they divide the whole world into two categories which they call “The Smarts” and “The Marks”. The Marks are those who actually think that professional wrestling is an athletic contest and wonder who will win. The smarts know that what they are seeing is a loosly scripted, highly choreographed physical art form like a sweaty soap opera. Both the smarts and the marks can enjoy the wrestling, but they are enjoying fundamentally different shows…

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Davidson Loehr

April 1, 2001 

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PUPPET SHOW

Written by Davidson Loehr and the No Strings Attached Puppet Players

This Performance : Ryan Hill, Julie Irwin, David Smith, and Eric Kay

Parrot, two raccoons and Mother Parrot.

Parrot and raccoons appear, raccoons on one side, parrot on the other.

Parrot

Hey, see my new hat?

Beavis Raccoon

Hey, where’d you get that hat, bird?

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah. That’s a cool hat. How’d a goofy-looking bird get such a cool hat, huh?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh, heh, how’d that happen?

Parrot

Well, I got it volunteering for “Wings on Housing”, that’s how.

Butthead Raccoon

Uh….don’t you mean “Paws on Housing”?

Parrot

No, Wings on Housing. That’s where we rebuild the nests for birds in the forest who need help.

Butthead Raccoon

(To Beavis Raccoon)

Hey, I like, want that hat!

Beavis Raccoon

Hey, yeah, I want it too, heh heh.

Parrot

Well you can get one if you volunteer, too. The next one is on April 28th and 29th.

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, right. Well, how about we just take it!

Beavis Raccoon

Take it! Yeh, that’s good, let’s just take it! Heh heh.

(The raccoons go over and take the parrot’s hat.)

Parrot

Say, what are you doing? You took my hat!

Butthead Raccoon

Took your hat?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, took your hat?

Butthead Raccoon

Why are you saying we took your hat?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, why?

Parrot

YOU TOOK MY HAT! YOU TOOK IT RIGHT OFF MY HEAD, AND NOW YOU HAVE IT ON YOUR HEAD! THAT’S WHY!! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!

Beavis Raccoon

Heh, can’t do it?

Butthead Raccoon

Can’t do it? You mean you haven’t heard about the law?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, I’ll bet the dumb bird has never heard the law!

Parrot

Law? What law? You stole my hat!

Butthead Raccoon

The law – well, it’s the law that says raccoons have the right to take the hats off of parrots, that’s what!

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh, heh, because we’re bigger-

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, and there are two of us.

Beavis Raccoon

It’s the law, heh heh.

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, it’s the law, you dumb parrot.

Parrot

I don’t believe you! What a dumb law!

Parrot Exits Below

Beavis Raccoon

Well, um, it’s the law.

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, bird, it’s the law.

Beavis Raccoon

Um- like, where’d the bird go?

Parrot enters with a scarf on.

Parrot

All right, keep my hat you dumb raccoons!

Beavis Raccoon

Hey, cool scarf!

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, cool scarf, bird!

(The raccoons mutter between themselves, agree, laugh, then one goes over and takes the scarf away from the parrot.)

Parrot

Now stop that! You stole my hat! You can’t steal my scarf too!

Beavis Raccoon

Boy, you really don’t know the law!

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, what a dumb bird.

Parrot

Now what law is this?

Butthead Raccoon

Um- it’s like, the law that says- .uh-

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, the law, the law that says that-

Butthead Raccoon

Heh- It says that once we have your hat, we can have your scarf too!

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, because like the hat and scarf like go together, and if we have one then we need the other.

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh. Dumb bird.

Parrot

(Pulls out a candy bar or some sweet treat.)

Oh, I’m so unhappy, this just isn’t fair!

Beavis Raccoon

Hey, hey, uh, what’s that?

Parrot

When I feel sad, I have a candy bar. It makes me feel better.

The raccoons mutter quickly to each other, then one takes the candy bar.

Parrot

Hey!

Butthead Raccoon

Sorry, bird, but it’s the law.

Parrot

What law? You’re making these laws up!

Butthead Raccoon

Well bird, that’s the law.

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, it’s the law.

Parrot

What law?

Butthead Raccoon

Well, um- the law that says when we have more stuff than you do-

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, like hats, scarves, things like that-

Butthead Raccoon

That we can take anything else we want from you too!

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, like you know if you don’t have any stuff, then you don’t have any rights to have other stuff!

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah right, we have your stuff, so we get the rest of your stuff.

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, yeah, it’s like in the bible, or something-

Parrot

The Bible?

Butthead Raccoon

Yeah, it’s like religious and everything. It says “To them who have, even more shall be given”

Beavis Racoon

“and to them that don’t have, even what they have will be taken away.”

Butthead Raccoon

So like it’s the law, and it’s religious.

(The raccoons start laughing, mocking the parrot, making fun, waving the hat, scarf, candy bar, etc.)

(Mother Parrot enters and quickly takes the hat, scarf and candy bar away from the raccoons.)

Butthead Raccoon

Hey, like, what are you doing?

Mother Parrot

April Fool! April Fool! (Laughs.)

Beavis Raccoon

April Fool? What’s April Fool?

Mother Parrot

It’s April Fool’s Day! You didn’t really think I’d like you steal everything from the parrot, did you?

(Gives everything back to the parrot.)

After all, that wouldn’t be fair. And the real rules are fair, not set up so you can just steal from each other!

Beavis Raccoon

Aw man “that”

Butthead Raccoon

Aww, come on, you’re spoiling our game.

Parrot

It was just awful! I thought they were going to take everything I had! I was so scared!

Mother Parrot

No, nobody can do that. Only on April Fools’ Day would they think they could do that! Here, have another candy bar, it’ll make you feel better

(Gives another candy bar to the parrot).

Parrot

Oh, thank you,

(Parrot exits)

(Raccoons look at each other.)

Butthead Raccoon

Candy bar? You have more candy bars?

Mother Parrot

Oh yes, I have lots of candy bars.

Butthead Raccoon

So, like, can we have some more?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, heh heh, like you know we would like a whole bunch of candy!

Mother Parrot

(Laughs and laughs and laughs)

No!

Butthead Raccoon

No? This is like another April Fool thing, isn’t it?

Beavis Raccoon

Yeah, we really get a bunch of candy bars, don’t we?

Mother Parrot

(Laughing)

Nope. April Fools is all over now. Say goodbye!

Raccoons mutter grip and yell as they all disappear.

(Somebody holds up a “THE END” sign)

CENTERING:

From Healing and the Mind by Bill Moyers:

A Story by Rachel Naomi Remen

I bought a little, falling-down cabin on the top of a mountain. It was so bad that when a friend came to see it, he said, ‘Oh, Rachel, you bought this?’ But with two carpenters, an electrician, and a plumber, in three years we have remodeled the whole thing. We started by just throwing things away–bathtubs, light fixtures, windows. I kept hearing my father’s voice saying, ‘That’s a perfectly good light fixture, why are you throwing it away?’ We kept throwing away more and more things, and with everything we threw away, the building became more whole. It had more integrity. Finally, we had thrown away everything that didn’t belong. You know, we may think we need to be more in order to be whole. But in some ways, we need to be less. We need to let go, to throw away everything that isn’t us in order to be more whole.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you–all the expectations, all of the beliefs–and becoming who you are. Not a better you, but a more real you.

SERMON: “It Ain’t Necessarily So”

(It ain’t necessarily so, it ain’t necessarily so; the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so, etc.)

April Fools’ Day demands some foolishness and some seriousness, and I think they should be mixed in unpredictable ways.

As a student of religion, I agree with almost every word in that Gershwin song from 1935. But the orthodoxy I want to challenge today isn’t from the Bible.

Most of the time, people expect their religions to keep them content and happy rather than awake and concerned. Nobody comes to church hoping they will feel worse for the trip. But like the little poem on the cover of your order of service by Danish poet Piet Hein, I want to mix fun and earnestness today. (“The Eternal Twins”: “Taking fun as simply fun/ and earnestness in earnest; shows how thoroughly thou/ none of the two discernest.”)

I want to think about one of the oldest pronouncements of religion, which is that the love of money is the root of all evil. I think that’s far too simple: evil has a whole lot of roots, though the love of money is certainly one of them. This isn’t saying that money is bad, or that it isn’t good to have it. It just says that it’s seductive, that we’re easily seduced, and that if we make the mistake of falling in love with money rather than people, the effect on us and on our world may be deadly.

Take the trillion-dollar drug business. Whether you are in favor of legalizing all drugs or not, it is clear that the business wouldn’t be so big if it weren’t so profitable.

Or take pornography, which is now a $10 billion-a-year business in this country. It’s routinely attacked by conservatives as though it were a liberal demon. But when there’s that much money to be made, you should expect big businesses to be getting in on it, and they are. The New York Times recently revealed that General Motors now makes $200 million a year from pay-per-view sex films aired through its DirectTV subsidiary. That’s more money than Hustler magazine’s Larry Flynt makes on graphic sex movies. (Hightower Lowdown, 2-2-2001)

Another big profitable company, AT&T, outsells Playboy in the sex business, offering a hardcore sex channel called Hot Network that reaches 16 million homes on cable TV, plus selling pay-per-view sex in a million hotel rooms. “Revenue-wise,” says an official with AT&T’s cable channel, “it’s one of our biggest moneymakers.”

That’s an astonishing statement: “Revenue-wise, it’s one of our biggest moneymakers.” And the unspoken ending to the sentence is “Therefore, it’s a defensible activity for a reputable business.”

Please understand that I’m not bashing the rich. I don’t think poor people are any more or less moral than rich people. Given the same temptations the majority of us would act the same.

But if the love of money really is one of the roots of evil, then nobody who falls in love with it is likely to be immune.

Those stories of General Motors and AT&T embracing pornography as good business raises the question of just how far we will go. How many people are we willing to sacrifice, given the temptation of enough power, profit and privilege? It’s a sobering question. And it is a huge area. Originally, I had intended just to talk about economics, in a kind of sequel to the sermon I gave here last fall on “The Dark God of Capitalism.”

But I got sidetracked by Bill Moyers’ two-hour PBS television program this past Monday (March 26, 2001). It was called “Trade Secrets,” and was about the rules that have governed some significant areas of the chemical industries for a long time. I want to use some of that material to sketch a broad picture. Then I’ll go into much more detail on just one story that he didn’t mention, one tragic story that has been unfolding for decades, and which has probably touched almost everyone in this room. And then, as in any good sermon, I’ll relate everything back to this morning’s puppet show.

The documentation for Moyers’ program was several million pages of private letters and inter-company memos obtained from the major chemical manufacturing corporations. Some documents go back over forty years. While there is room for differences of opinion on some parts, other parts seem unambiguous.

I hope many of you saw the program. While I took a lot of notes, it was much too detailed to repeat here, and would take too long. It was a story, documented by the actual confidential memos of some giant chemical corporations like B.F. Goodrich, Dow Chemical, Union Carbide and Esso, of the wholesale betrayal of both employees and citizens. It showed that the companies have known, as far back as the 1950s, that some of their most profitable chemicals were toxic, caused cancer, dissolved bones, sterilized and killed people. They acknowledged this in private letters to each other, as they also insisted that they must all agree to keep this secret from their employees, the government and the general public. 1

One of the chemicals was vinyl chloride, the key ingredient in PVCs, which you may remember from the news stories about them not too many years ago. B.F. Goodrich knew as far back as 1959 that they were toxic and posed serious health risks to their employees, which they did. In 1966, they wrote to Monsanto, Union Carbide and others that exposure to vinyl chlorides could cause bones to dissolve. Their advisors suggested reducing it to less than 50 parts per million – though concentrations in their factories were five to ten times that high. But they never published the warnings, and continued to tell their own employees that vinyl chloride was harmless.

In 1973 Union Carbide acknowledged in private memos to the others that the companies’ secret actions in these areas could be seen as criminal conspiracy. Nevertheless, they continued to cover up and lie to employees about the deadly concentrations of vinyl chlorides in which their employees were working.

Another infamous chemical was benzene. As early as 1958, it was identified as toxic by Esso and other companies. It was linked to leukemia, and they wrote that it was so toxic that only a level of zero was safe. Also in 1958, Dow Chemical knew that Benzene’s active ingredient could cause sterility in men, and concealed this from their workers, who experienced exceptionally high rates of sterility – and which the company insisted were not work-related.

As the threat of government regulation gained force in the 1970s, the chemical companies wrote more secret memos to each other trying to find or invent a way to get more money, so they could have more political influence – or, to put it less romantically, so they could buy more politicians. Finally, before the 1980 election PACs were created as a way of pooling money to buy greater access and influence in politics. They have been spectacularly successful. In his first month in office, Ronald Reagan delayed all EPA regulations of the chemical industry until the EPA could prove their claims conclusively. The rest, you could say, is history. Many of the toxic chemicals are still unregulated.

As part of the program, Bill Moyers had samples of his own blood taken and tested. The tests showed that he had 84 foreign chemicals in his blood, including more than 15 in the dioxin family, and more than thirty in the vinyl chloride group. It’s a good bet that we do too.

These chemicals have been known to be toxic for decades, during which time the company memos show they have conspired to keep this secret from their own workers and the country as a whole. For the record, these are also the companies who own the patents and are doing the work on genetically engineered foods, introducing mutant genes and invented chemical combinations into us at every meal. These artificial products haven’t been well tested because they can’t be well tested. The slow processes of evolution have not prepared any life form on earth to deal with these new chemical inventions. So there is no way – and probably can be no way — to predict what their medium or long-term effects will be. They are, however, profitable.

What will the costs be? We don’t know. But already, brain cancer in children is up by 26%, and there is over a 60% increase in testicular cancer in young men from the profitable chemicals that are already in us.

At the end of Bill Moyers’ program, an executive representing the Chemical Manufacturers’ Association, while evading almost all questions, kept saying, “We’re a science-based industry.” No, that’s not right. Chemical companies use science as an essential part of their business. But science doesn’t drive the business or tell them to mislead their employees and the general public. They’re a profit-based industry. It’s not clear that they could survive if they weren’t. Their history shows that it is profits, not science, that steer their decisions.

I have a personal story about this difference and the difference it can make. Sixteen years ago, while I was writing my dissertation, I was offered a job as a staff chaplain at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, a huge hospital in downtown Chicago. The hospital had just been restructured to respond to what the insurance industry called DRGs, or Diagnostically-Related Groupings. The length of time the insurance companies would now reimburse the hospital for any patient’s stay was now determined not by the attending physician, but by a chart allocating a certain number of days for almost every imaginable sickness or surgery. Coincidentally, very few patients stayed longer than their insurance would cover. (To add some balance, the DRG system was the idea of Medicaid, an effort to curb excessive spending by hospitals, and patient stays that were longer than proper medical care warranted.)

My boss, who had been the head of the chaplaincy program there for about fifteen years, was struggling to understand what this change meant. The hospital’s board had been changed from doctors to MBAs and accountants, and each time he returned from a board meeting he seemed more confused. “Something fundamental has changed here,” he would say, “and I can’t see what it is.” After two or three months, he did see it, and he taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten.

Both the quality and the cost of patient care had always been central concerns of the hospital, and the same language was still being used, about quality and cost of care. But formerly, they used to say “We try to make medical care as cheap as possible, considering our primary commitment to the quality of patient care.” Now, while using the same words, the formula had been reversed. Now they were trying to provide the best medical care they could, considering their primary commitment to profitability.

That’s what the chemical companies were saying in the memos exposed in Bill Moyers’ television program. They cared about public safety, and about profits. But they cared more about profits than about public safety, and quietly sanctioned the disease and death of tens or hundreds of thousands of their employees and their fellow citizens over several decades because, revenue-wise, it was a big money-maker.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

This may be hard to believe. It is certainly disheartening to believe. But to see both the horror and the cynicism that are represented by letting concerns for profits rather than people govern a country, as I think they are in fact governing our country now, I want to tell you in some detail about something that has become an annual national tradition. You’ve all heard of it, it is called Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Last October was the fifteenth, the sixteenth annual BCAM is coming up in six more months.

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’s core message is the importance of early detection, with a special emphasis on regular mammography exams. It also carries the subtle implication that breast cancer is just something that’s somehow just “out there,” without any specific cause, and that if women get it, it’s partly because they didn’t take adequate care of themselves. How on earth can we go through sixteen years of concern about a killer like breast cancer without ever once raising the question of its possible or likely causes?

Imagine how different this story would sound if we learned, instead, that breast cancer had been linked to some chemicals commonly found in pesticides and other chemicals produced and marketed by a giant international chemical conglomerate by the name of Imperial Chemical Industries. It’s true, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month was invented by AstraZeneka, one of the subsidiary companies in the conglomerate that produced the cancer-causing chemical.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month was not devised as a public service but as the kind of “misdirection” that magicians do to distract you from the real trickery. AstraZeneka has always been the primary sponsor of this program, and has final control over all promotional and informational copy published in connection with Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As a result, no mention has ever been made of some of the known causes of this murderous disease. AstraZeneka is no longer under the giant ICI firm. But it now produces and distributes another controversial chemical called tamofixin, which has been approved to reduce the risk of contracting cancer in women with a high risk of breast cancer. So it still wants to be associated in the public eye with efforts to address breast cancer, though not with discussing the causes of the cancer.

The official story, celebrated every October, is that we are all blessed by better living through chemistry, and the chemical companies are our life-saving friends in a naturally hostile world.

But there is another way of seeing it. That is that the world is not naturally hostile. It was made hostile and deadly by the very chemicals that this and other companies are polluting us with, knowing full well their murderous effects, knowing they also make a good profit. And, as General Motors and AT&T have done with pornography, when these companies come to a fork in the road where profits go one way and concern for people go the other way, they seem to follow the profits, and create a cynical and intentionally misleading Breast Cancer Awareness Month to hide the evidence that all these women are being killed not by nature, but – at least in part — by them.

In this country, about 40,000 women will die of breast cancer this year. The disease has skyrocketed over the past 40 years. In that time, more American women have died of breast cancer than the total of all American soldiers killed in all the wars of the 20th century combined. If there is a more cynical story around, a story continually showing brutally how greed kills when profits are elevated over people, I don’t know what it is.

Now we have a new president in our country, and every member of his cabinet comes with longstanding and powerful ties to the biggest and most powerful corporations in America. I won’t read you the whole list here, though I’ll put it in the version of this sermon that is posted on the church website and printed in hard copies. But twelve of President Bush’s cabinet members came from, have strong ties to, or will return to, virtually every major corporation in the country. And both the President and Vice President come from and represent the oil industry.

Some people who claim to be knowledgeable claim that the corporate control of our national government has never been this complete. I don’t know. But if programs like Bill Moyers’ expose of the chemical industry and the sad, cynical story of the real origin and purpose of Breast Cancer Awareness Month are fair indications of what lies ahead, we may be entering a chapter in this country’s history that we will look back on in shame. Many European countries already see it that way.

The most fundamental power that rulers can have is the power to write the story within which we agree to live. Those who control a society’s story are its invisible puppeteers.

The mother in this morning’s puppet show was an April Fools’ joke. There is no mother to keep the rules fair. There’s just us. I think that enough rules are out of control that we are on the verge of losing our health, our safety, perhaps our country.

I think that at least some of what I’ve said here has been persuasive for some of you. You are the brightest and most creative group of people with whom I’ve ever had the privilege of working. I wonder if there isn’t something that we can do in this area to make a positive difference in the lives of ourselves, our children and the larger community? I can’t organize anything, but if there are those here who feel drawn to these issues and have some organizational skills, I will do what I can to help you. There must be many ways in which we can begin to make a positive difference. I don’t know what they are. But I keep thinking of that puppet show. Those raccoons and the parrot – they were just puppets. We’re not.

—————

Addenda:

Here is a partial list of President Bush’s Cabinet members and their corporate connections, taken from Jim Hightower’s newsletter The Hightower Lowdown. I’m repeating most of this from a column by Molly Ivins where she quoted Hightower:

Elaine Chao – Bank of America, Dole Foods, Northwest Airlines, Columbia/HCA Health Care

Norman Mineta – was a top Washington lobbyist for Lockheed Martin before joining the corporate cabinet as Transportation secretary.

Gale Norton – Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, Ford, and Phillips 66, all funders of the Mountain States Legal Foundation from whence she came. She also chaired the Republican Environmental Advocates, funded by American Forest & Paper Association, Amoco, ARCO, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and Ford.

Paul O’Neill – Alcoa, International Paper Company, Eastman Kodak, and Lucent Technologies.

Anthony Principi – QTC Medical Services, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems, and Federal Network.

Donald Rumsfeld – General Instrument Corporation, G.D. Searle & Co., Asea Brown Bavari, the Tribune Company, Gilead Sciences, Ind., RAND Corporation, Salomon Smith Barney.

Colin Powell – America Online and General Dynamics, plus a very long list of corporations that paid $100,000 per speech.

G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, & Commerce Secretary Donald Evans – all Texas oilmen representing the oil industry.

John Ashcroft – Particularly close to the Schering-Plough pharmaceutical company and was heavily funded by BP Amoco, Exxon, Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, Union Carbide, and Weyerhauser.

Spencer Abraham – Energy Secretary, sponsored a bill to abolish the Energy Department and led the fight in the Senate to defeat greater fuel efficiency for SUVs, a cause dear to both auto and energy industries.

Ron Paige – Education Secretary, is an enthusiastic corporatizer of the public schools. While he was superintendent in Houston, he privatized food services, payrool, and accounting, signed a contract with Coca-Cola to put Coke bottles in the halls, and with Primedia Corporation to broadcast Channel One in the public schools.

Ann Veneman – Agriculture Secretary, was on the board of Calgene, Inc., which produces genetically altered food, and was connected with an agribusiness front group funded by Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Kraft, and Nestle.

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Davidson Loehr

March 25, 2001

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This is the fifth in a series that I have been doing on different approaches to belief. Even though it would be easy to do a hundred sermons on the different approaches to religious experience this will do it for this year. So far I talked about religious experience talked about through “God Language”, expressed through rational or scientific language, or in mystical styles. Last week I talked about reclaiming some the the feminine symbols and life. These are four different directions and I know people who think they are mutually incompatible….

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Davidson Loehr

February 18, 2001

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: “What you need to grow”

There was a boy with an unusual problem. He was only two feet tall, and all of his school classmates made terrible fun of him, calling him all the names you might imagine, and more. One day he heard that there was an old Wise Woman living on a hill outside of town, who had been known to be able to solve problems like this.

So he went outside of town and climbed the hill to find the old woman. She was there, and welcomed him in. “Old Wise Woman,” he said, I have a terrible problem!” “Well,” she replied, “have a seat, and tell me your story.” So he did, pointing out that he was only two feet tall, and nobody else he knew was only two feet tall.

The old woman smiled, studied him for a bit, and then announced, “Well, I know what your problem is, for I have seen it before. Your problem is that you don’t have enough stories in you.”

“What?” said the boy, very surprised by such a silly answer. “I don’t have enough what?”

“Stories,” she repeated. “You don’t have enough good stories in you. Without good stories, you will probably never grow any bigger at all. So go back home, and during the next year start listening to stories, and collecting them. Come back to see me in a year, and we’ll see how you’re doing.”

He hardly knew what to do! He’d never really thought of collecting stories before! The idea! He didn’t even know what to listen to, so he just listened to everything that came easily along. He heard a lot of very bad jokes, and a lot of very nasty gossip about his own friends, always spoken behind their backs.

The next year, he returned to the cabin of the old Wise Woman. “Stand up,” she said, “and we’ll measure you.” She did, and the news was very bad: he had actually shrunk! “Goodness!” she said as though she were surprised, “What kind of stories have you been listening to?” He told her, and she just shook her head. “Well, no wonder you’re shrinking! You can’t grow by taking in bad stories! They can only make you smaller! Now go back home, and this next year I want you to listen to stories of what people love. Just that. Now go!”

Another frustrating year! Though the second year wasn’t as bad as the first, for he heard much nicer stories. He learned that his friend had a gerbil named Max that she loved like crazy. She invited him over to her house, showed him her pet, and even took Max out so the boy could hold and pet him. “Oh, wow!” he said, and he felt like he had just grown an inch.

Another friend loved riding his bicycle, because he rode it, he said, to the most beautiful place in the whole world, a place he loved more than anyplace. So the boy rode out with him one day, to the top of a very high hill, and saw the most beautiful view he had ever seen. “Oh, wow!” he said.

There were other stories he heard that year, about pets places and people that were loved by his family and friends. He had never known these things about them before, and each time he learned what someone else loved, and shared that love with them, his world got a little bigger, and he felt like he was getting bigger too. He could hardly wait to see the Old Wise Woman again!

And, sure enough, he had grown, and grown a lot! “You see?” she said, shaking her finger at him, “You need good stories in order to grow! Now go back home and collect more stories. This time, learn what it is that makes people bigger. Now go!”

Well, this year was more fun. He began learning about all his friends’ religions, the things they believed that made them bigger, and he learned all sorts of things! One friend told him about Jesus. She told him all kinds of stories about Jesus, and about how having Jesus in her life made her feel better and more safe. She even showed him her blue bracelet that said “WWJD?” on it, and explained that it meant “What Would Jesus Do?” and was the question she asked herself whenever she had a hard decision to make.

“Oh, wow!” he said: “Jesus!”

Another friend had just moved to this country with his family from Iran during the last year. He said he was a Muslim, and told the boy about Allah, who was the God of his religion. He spoke of how he kept Allah in mind during the day, how Allah was like an invisible friend and parent, and how he never felt alone because of his faith in Allah.

“Oh, wow!” said the boy: “Allah!”

Still another friend was Buddhist, another religion the boy had never heard of. The friend told him the famous story of how the Buddha had once held up a Lotus blossom in his hand, to teach that the Lotus blossom is like the whole world: it seems so small, so easy to hold, but when it unfolds it contains all kinds of wonderful and unsuspected things.

“Oh, wow!” said the boy: “Buddha!”

These stories were so interesting, he collected them for a long time, and forgot about the Old Wise Woman. Years later, when the boy had grown, he decided to go see her once more. “Let’s measure you!” she said when she saw him, and she stood up to face him. He was now taller than she was! “Yes!” she exclaimed, “This is the day I’ve been waiting for! Come sit here,” she motioned toward her own chair, “there is someone who wants to meet you.”

The boy sat in the chair, the Old Wise Woman seemed to disappear, and suddenly a young girl entered the room. “Old Wise Man,” she said, “I have a terrible problem!”

He looked at the girl, who was only two feet tall. He smiled at her, and said “Please sit, and tell me your story.”

SERMON: “Oh, God!”

 “There is no race so wild and untamed as to be ignorant of the existence of God.” That’s an old quotation. The god he was talking about was Jupiter, for those words were written by the Roman Cicero, 2045 years ago (44 BCE). Well, today perhaps we are that race “wild and untamed,” for few of us spend three thoughts a year on Jupiter or his Greek version, Zeus (though we spend some time on them, as we will see).

If you read in some religions like Buddhism or Taoism, you won’t encounter the word “god” much, because those faiths don’t use god-talk to think about life. But in all Western religions based on the Hebrew scriptures, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you read about God on nearly every page. So since almost all of us were raised in this Western culture, it may sound odd when I say that religion isn’t about God. But it isn’t. Religion isn’t about God. It’s about something else. Still, when you read the great writers of (especially) Western religions, It looks like God is what they are going on about, especially if you read literalistic, rather than liberal, theologians.

It’s an odd fact, but in their own time, almost every famous theologian of history was quite liberal, and most of them took great pains to distance themselves from the literalists of their day, and they seldom did it politely, either! When they used the word “God” they meant something with it that sounds pretty modern, no matter when they lived. I’ve chosen some quotations from some ancient and some modern people talking about the meaning of the word “God.” I’ve picked only a few, because of the well-established scientific fact that if you listen to more than six theologians in a row you are almost certain, right on the spot, to drop dead from boredom.

First was one of my favorites, the 3rd century Christian theologian Origen. It is said that when he died, he left behind over one thousand theological writings. He was born in 185 and died, after imprisonment and extended torture, in 253.

“God must not be thought of as a physical being, or as having any kind of body,” he wrote. “He is pure mind. He moves and acts without needing any corporeal space, or size, or form, or color, or any other property of matter.”

The other ancient theologian is St. Augustine. He lived in North Africa, from 354 to 430, and could be considered the inventor of Roman Catholicism. Augustine had some complex and strange ideas about sex and sin, but when he talked about the meaning of the word “God” he was quite liberal:

“Some people imagine God as a kind of man or as a vast bodily substance endowed with power, who by some new and sudden decision created heaven and earth. When these people hear that God said “Let such and such be made”, and accordingly it was made, they think that once the words had been pronounced, whatever was ordered to come into existence immediately did so. Any other thoughts which occur to them are limited in the same way by their attachment to the familiar material world around them. These people are still like children. But the very simplicity of the language of Scripture sustains them in their weakness as a mother cradles an infant in her lap. But there are others for whom the words of Scripture are no longer a nest but a leafy orchard, where they see the hidden fruit. They fly about it in joy, breaking into song as they gaze at the fruit and feed upon it.” (Confessions, p. 304 in Penguin Classics edition).

I’m not sure that many newspapers would even print quotations from liberal ministers today who described fundamentalists as being “still like children”! You get the idea that God, at least in the hands of the best theologians, is a bit of a mystery. It sounds like a Fellow, but it isn’t a Fellow, isn’t a being, doesn’t live in the sky, doesn’t have a body at all. It’s something else. I hope for us to get a glimpse of what that something else is today.

Let’s jump from the fifth to the nineteenth century, to one of the first Unitarian preachers in the United States. His name was William Ellery Channing. These two sentences come from the 1830s, but see how similar they sound to the two ancient ones, and to things you might say today:

“God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth. The only God whom our thoughts can rest on, our hearts cling to, and our conscience can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls.”

I’ll add two more thinkers from the 20th century, a historian and a novelist. First, the historian:

“I find in the universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law, and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order, and law of the world.” Will Durant, This I Believe, 1954

And the novelist Upton Sinclair wrote “I am sustained by a sense of the worthwhileness of what I am doing: a trust in the good faith of the process which created and sustains me. That process I call God.” (What God Means to Me, 1935)

It looks like Voltaire may have been right when he wrote that “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him”!

Still, the best theologians have been clear that the word “God” isn’t the name of a Being somewhere. It’s a symbol, our most powerful symbol, being used to allude to something that is beyond our ability to express.

The Buddhists have a metaphor for this. They call it the finger pointing at the moon. They say we usually mistake the finger for the moon. We do that with symbols. We mistake them for what they’re point to, and worship the symbol instead of that unnameable thing to which the symbol is pointing. You could almost say that we worship God rather than that to which the symbol of God is pointing.

For many people today, perhaps for many of you, the word “God” is associated with so much hypocrisy and deception you don’t even want to hear it. I don’t have such strong reactions against it, but I’ll admit that for me too, God-language isn’t the most interesting or useful way to talk about life’s most enduring questions and yearnings.

On the other hand, I don’t think illiteracy should be defended, and that includes religious illiteracy. I think God-language is one of the languages we need to understand, especially if we want to communicate with most other people.

So what is it like, this business of using powerful words like God? Here is an analogy that might be useful. I pick up a Stradivarius violin, perhaps the best violin ever made. I put a bow to it, saw back and forth, and make horrible squawking noises that scare the cats. I put it down and say “What an ugly instrument is the violin!” But the fault wasn’t with the violin. I just didn’t know how to play it.

I may not want to play the violin. Most of us don’t. I’d prefer the clarinet, which I can’t play very well either. But our lives can be enriched if we are open to hearing the music that can be created by those who can play the violin well.

The music analogy is helpful for religion, though it isn’t exact. Those who love the violin have never declared war on clarinet players, tried to convert them to violin, or burned them at the stake for persisting in the heretical love of clarinet sounds. A symbol like the word “God” is just far more powerful. If we get it right, it can be sublime. If we get it wrong, it can be vulgar, vicious, deadly. Some of the meanest hatreds I have ever seen were defended as God’s will.

But that’s where god-talk is like a violin again. It measures the character, imagination and heart of those who use it. Or maybe its double-edged quality makes it more like a bow and arrow. If you are an archer, you can use a bow and arrow to get food, to attack an enemy, or — if you’re really good at is, as Cupid was as a vehicle for expressing love.

At its best, God-language is a language of power and glory. We know that’s true, but it’s odd. How would a word have that kind of power? Nationalism has a similar potential for power and glory. It is not a mystery why these two vocabularies of God-talk and patriotism have that deep kind of power and glory, but it’s worth mentioning it.

It goes far deeper than religion. It goes far, far back into our evolutionary past, and is studied in the field of etholgy, or comparative animal behavior. Both the worship of God and the allegiance to a country are behaviors that look a lot like behaviors in a million other species. So let me back off from religion for a minute, to look at it from outside.

We are deeply territorial animals. That means that our sense of who we are is deeply connected to our place, our people, and our way of life. We build fences around our yards, defend our borders, and make battle-cries out of territorial boundaries like “Fifty-four forty or fight!” When we do these things, we are doing with weapons, flags and rationalizing speeches what a million other territorial animals do with teeth, threats and squawks or roars. Remember that a dog barks at strangers from inside your fence for the same reason you built the fence. So “nationalism” and “patriotism” are the words we have invented to describe and call forth our territorial instincts.

Besides being territorial animals, we are also hierarchical animals. We defer to presidents and kings, we fear the boss’s wrath. The ancient Greeks used to talk about how their god Zeus would throw lightning bolts down from above when he was angry. And even today, when somebody speaks out against authority figures, we still talk about “waiting for the lightning to strike.” In short, as students of animal behavior have noticed, God looks a lot like an Alpha Male. Alpha Males are the dominant males that rule the troop or herd. They are the top dog, the silverback gorilla, the male lion who rules the pride of lions. In a million different species, including ours, the acknowledged role of Alpha Males is to set the behavioral boundaries, reward the obedient and threaten or discipline the disobedient. They protect and punish and bomb Bagdhad and those under them fear their wrath and seek their approval. Their job is to draw the boundaries of their tribe’s permissible world. They keep the natives in and the aliens out.

A lot of scholars have said that the god of the ancient Hebrews looks like a super-sized tribal chief. And the God of the Bible was probably first formed as a projection of a tribal chief from somewhere in Canaan, the source of the ancient Hebrews’ religion. But even more anciently, it looks like the Alpha Males of a million other hierarchical species.

So God is an Alpha Male that embodies and claims ultimacy for our sense of place, normative behaviors, our amity toward those who are like us and our enmity toward outsiders. Religious wars show this on a large scale. Creeds, heresy trials and shaming sinners are close-up examples.

There’s something in us that needs to know who we are, whose we are and where our place is in life, the world, everything. And judging by our history, it looks like we need to believe that we’ve heard the answer from On High.

So God, at least in the three religions based on the Bible, is a symbolic vehicle for our highest hopes, our deepest fears, our assurance that the world is safe, we have a meaningful place in it. We make him our father, our father who art in heaven. We crave his love and fear his wrath and seek our peace in an obedient relationship with Him, usually mediated by priests, creeds, rituals and sacraments.

You see that what we’re exploring here is not gods but some of our own deepest levels. Our most powerful symbols measure us as a Stradivarius violin measures us if we try to play it.

Once you frame your quest in god-language, you can go either shallow or deep, the language permits both literalism and liberalism, as theologians have been noting for a couple thousand years or more.

Origen, that 3rd century Christian theologian I quoted earlier, taught that religious scriptures had three levels, which he called the body, soul and spirit. The “body” was the lowest level, the literal level, and he had nothing good to say for it. He thought nothing religious could happen at that level. To understand the “soul” of scripture meant you could raise it a level, and understand the key words, including the word “God” as symbols and metaphors for a deeper kind of awareness and wisdom. And at the highest level, those who understood the “spirit” of religious writings finally see that religion isn’t finally intellectual. It isn’t finally about holy words, but about living a holy life. He wrote that the cardinal rule of understanding religious scriptures is to seek out those things “which are useful to us and worthy of God.” That was the 3rd century, and it’s about as liberal as you can get!

So what is god-talk? It isn’t the name of a Being. It’s a language, an idiom of expression, a certain stylized way of thinking and talking about the human situation understood profoundly.

For me, part of what it means to become human religiously lies in learning how to hear spiritual music played in different keys, on different instruments, in different idioms of expression. It’s being able to hear the violins, the clarinets, the trumpet, drums, the oboe and the rest of it. In religion, it is the learned ability to allow the many different religious languages easy access to our minds and our hearts. The whole human sound, and the full divine sound, goes up only from the full orchestra and chorus.

I work every week, struggling to find words to wrap around who we are, what we seek, and how we might find it and let it find us. Expressing it with power and glory is an art. I seldom achieve it, and always admire it when I hear someone else do it. There are things we know, and things for which we yearn, and I don’t think they have changed much throughout our history.

We know that whatever the forces of life are, they’ve been a part of us forever. These incomprehensible dynamics gave rise to the world and all life on it, including ours. In the span of our planet’s billions of years, we’re hardly here for an eyeblink, then we fly away, and return to the dust from which we came. Our lives are swept away by these infinite forces, as though we didn’t even matter.

Who can begin to measure this power? The sustaining parts of life may feel like love, but the destructive aspects, accident, disease, war, the death of those we love, if we take it personally, and we almost always do, those things can feel like anger, even wrath. If we could get a little humility by seeing ourselves and our vanities against this immense background, we would probably be wiser than we are. In the face of this immensity, we yearn for a sense of peace, a sense that we are, somehow a beloved, a cherished, part of it all. And we wish the things we work for during our lives could somehow become established, and outlive us. Most people can die in peace if they know that the things they have loved, the things they have worked to create, will outlive them. I think, though my language wasn’t very poetic, that everyone who has ever lived has had these feelings and hopes.

Now let me play you the same song I just gave you in the last two paragraphs. But this time, I’ll play it on a borrowed Stradivarius. Listen to those same basic human concerns, as they were expressed by an anonymous poet of perhaps 2500 years ago, in the 90th Psalm of the Hebrew Scriptures, or “Old Testament.” Here is that old tribal god, that ancient Alpha Male, raised to the level of timeless beauty.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.

Thou turnest us back to dust, saying “Turn back, O Children of Adam!” For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.

Thou dost sweep us away; we are like a dream, like grass which is renewed in the morning: in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.

For we are consumed by thy anger; by thy wrath we are overwhelmed. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For all our days pass away under thy wrath, our years come to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of thy anger, and thy wrath according to the fear of thee? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on thy servants! Satisfy us in the morning with thy steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad as many days as thou has afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil.

Let thy work be manifest to thy servants, and thy glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

Oh, God!

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

February 11, 2001

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PUPPET SHOW:

INTRO. (Lisa): Now is the time for children to come down for the Story for All Ages. Children please come sit in front of the curtain and bring your gifts for Caritas so you can put them in the wagon after the puppet show. And now The First UU No Strings Attached Puppet Players present”The Lesson”.

GRUMP: I am so bored, nothing ever happens at this church.

BIG RACCOON: We’re looking for sticks!

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

BIG RACCOON: You can do lots of tricks with sticks. Can you help us?

LITTLE RACCOON: Were in a fix. We need some sticks!

GRUMP: Uh, no. (sarcastically)

WOLF: I need some bricks to go with their sticks ’cause we’ve got a lot of fun things to fix. Would you like to join us and show off your tricks?

GRUMP: You people. I mean puppets, are nuts!

CATERPILLAR: I was wondering whether, you might have a feather? If you join me, we could make things together.

GRUMP: What do I look like, Big Bird?

CATERPILLAR: Could I assume, you don’t have a plume?

GRUMP: No, but you need a padded room.

BIG RACCOON: (appears with sticks) Would you help us with our sticks?

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

WOLF: (with brick) Would you help me lay some bricks?

CATERPILLAR: (appears with feathers) Would you help me glue some feathers?

ALL PUPPETS: We can all have fun together!

GRUMP: No, I will not help you with your sticks! I will not help you lay some bricks! I will not help you glue your feathers! Why don’t you all get lost together!

BIG RACCOON: Okay.

LITTLE RACCOON: Have it your way.

WOLF: You don’t have to huff and puff about it.

CATEPILLAR: What a bird brain!

(Puppets disappear and make all kinds of construction noises.)

(Raccoons and Wolf appear with house)

WOLF: All you do is gripe and grouse.

BIG RACCOON: But look at us.

LITTLE RACCOON: We made a house!

GRUMP: That’s not fair! I don’t have a house!

WOLF: Stop your complaining.

BIG RACCOON: Stop your grousing! You had your chance.

(Turn house to logo)

LITTLE RACCOON: at Paws-on-Housing!

GRUMP: DOH! (Buries head in hands)

BIRD: Look at me up in the sky. With these wings, I can fly!

GRUMP: I want to fly. I want a house. I wish I hadn’t been such a louse. You’re right, you’re right. I’ve learned, I’ve learned. I have no right to what I’ve spurned. I’ve learned my lesson. Okay. Okay. Now what can I help you make today? (Walks over to side of puppets.)

BIG RACCOON: I ‘ve got some string.

LITTLE RACCOON: String!

WOLF: I’ve got some glue!

BIRD: Let’s go figure out what to do!

ALL: Yea!

END

SERMON: Choosing the Feathered Things

As many of you have read in the latest church newsletter, your governing board and I have been busy during the last month, on two very exciting projects. The first was the remarkable offer of 142 acres of land in the Hill Country, complete with four buildings, a new barn and an outdoor pool. Some of you have visited the land; I hope others will make the trip to see it before you vote on whether to recommend that your board accept this gift in the congregational meeting two weeks from today. There are some legal and financial details we are still investigating, and some good sober questions we need to resolve, but it’s an amazing gift, filled with exciting possibilities.

For me, though, the other project was even more exciting. Your board and I developed an ambitious model for serving the church that we have modestly called The Austin Model. While it will evolve and change over time, as a living thing would do, its essence is really very simple. We know that organizations, including churches, exist to make a difference in the world, that they are supposed to be doing something. It is like sailing a boat rather than minding the store, and like standing on the bridge to see where we’re actually going rather than being in the engine room check oil levels. We’re not just trying to stay afloat, we need to ask where are we going, and are we making any progress?

Here’s another way of understanding it. We are taking nearly a half million dollars a year from this community, and the time and talents of over five hundred adults. What are we doing that’s worth that amount of time, energy and money? The money could be used instead to open a bookstore, a little coffee house, maybe a donut shop. In what ways is what we are doing more worthwhile than that? I think we need to be able to answer, both to ourselves and to the community, just what differences we are making that are worth that kind of time and money. And I think you need to be able to give a satisfactory answer to your Baptist or Catholic friends who wonder what in hell (or at least the preparation for hell) you are doing here.

We want to begin consciously planning the actions of myself and the other staff to make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and the community. And as far as possible, we want to take a rough measurement of the differences we are making, and keep you informed of them so that you will feel some of the excitement as we move in this new style.

This may all sound very obvious, you might expect that of course all churches and all organizations would think this way. But they don’t. And to be honest, it is an intimidating prospect, this business of actually taking who we are and what we’re doing with your money and your trust seriously enough to measure our actions by the differences they are making.

It is exciting and frankly, a little scary. It changes, or at least sharpens, my focus in planning sermons.

I wonder what I should do to be more intentional and effective in addressing issues that might make a positive difference in your life, the lives of your children and the community? How do we choose the things in life that might make a positive difference? Or in terms of this morning’s puppet show, how do we choose those things we need to make a home, or those feathered things that can help our spirit take flight? It was Emily Dickinson who said that hope is the thing with feathers, and I’ve always liked her definition. Hope is the thing with feathers, the thing that lifts us up. How do we choose that thing?

There is plenty to gripe about if we’d rather do that, you know. Our lives aren’t as perfect as we fantasize they should be. Not everybody loves us, or even understands us. Our jobs are like most jobs, filled with ups and downs, but not ideal. And as of this week with Motorola’s layoffs, there are over 4,000 fewer jobs in Austin, a number that may soon increase. Besides our jobs, our relationships are seldom perfect. And our kids will almost all grow up to be just regular old adults, not the envy of the civilized world. They’ll probably make about as many dumb mistakes as we did, as will their kids and their kids’ kids. It’s easy to just sit it out, gripe that Nuts, I don’t like this place, or this place, or this place. And we do it too often and too easily, don’t we?

It’s as though we come to believe that the world owes us something. As though we were born with this long list of entitlements. I don’t think we are. I think there is only one gift offered to us, and that is the gift of life itself. I think we’re paid in full the day we’re born. After that, it’s up to us to learn how to negotiate for the other things we wish we had. I don’t think the world owes us love. It doesn’t even owe us fairness or justice. Those are conditions we have to create if we really want them. We were given life, and the chance to make something of it, or just sit and be disappointed. It matters what we believe. It also matters what we choose.

And given the choice, we have to work to discover who we are and make a home for ourselves in life. We need to choose the things with feathers. And I think we must wish the same for others, and try to make our interactions with them positive rather than negative, creative rather than destructive. If our beliefs can’t help us do that, we probably have the wrong beliefs. If they can help us do that, they’re probably working fairly well for us and those in our greater community. That’s a pretty pragmatic approach to religion, but I think it’s the right one.

But the only real miracle is the gift of life. It wasn’t supposed to be perfect, it was only supposed to present itself to us, to let us see what we would and could do with it. If we sit back like couch potatoes waiting for life to please us, it will probably be a very long wait. This is true in churches, too, including this one.

Several years ago I was talking about things like this with two colleagues, and we discovered that the same visitor had been to each of our churches a few times, and then went away. So she had visited a Unitarian church, an American Baptist church, and a liberal Disciples of Christ church.

They were all good churches with good people. In each one, the visitor could have found ways to ask her questions, to meet wonderful friends, to struggle with personal and spiritual issues on several levels. None of the churches was any more perfect than the visitor, but they were all good enough. Maybe she finally found a church where she decided to take root, make friends and become a participant rather than an onlooker. If so, she was the exception.

It’s easy to read this as a failure of the church to integrate visitors, and it’s fair. We could do more to integrate visitors into the body of the church, and we should. But it isn’t only a failure of the churches. It’s also the habit of people to see themselves only as shoppers who keep moving on until something finds a way of keeping them there.

If you are a visitor here, or have just been coming for a few months, here’s something to think about: less than half of you will still be here a year from now. In this or any other church, most who come never join, never make a commitment, and never become a part of the church. Liberal churches, conservative churches, big churches, little churches, it’s the same: most visitors don’t last a year.

I think people visit churches sort of thinking, “Well, I’ll just sit here quietly and see if they swarm around me to make me feel welcome.’ The truth is, it isn’t likely to happen very often. So while I want to welcome all visitors, I want to challenge you. Don’t be passive here. Don’t expect these people to try harder to keep you than you try to stay. We’re not any better at it than you are, and creating a meaningful relationship is a two-way street.

And the way you stay ‘ here or anywhere ‘ is to seek for and choose those things, those relationships, that you can build on and grow from. Seek the things you need to make a home for yourself here, and seek the hopeful things, the bits that nourish you.

This isn’t something I have always known. It is something I learned in a memorable moment. And while I can’t give you the experience I had, I can tell you the story.

It was about twenty years ago, in a preaching class in graduate school. David, our professor was a very gifted preacher who was deeply serious about the ministry, and equally serious about professionalism. In those minutes before class begins, several of the students were whining about the church they all attended, complaining that the preacher was horrible, the service was amateurish, and they didn’t get a single thing out of it. David glared at these future ministers and said ‘How hard did you try?’

That was the first time I really understood that attending a worship service, like attending to living, is meant to be an activity, not a passivity. It changed a lot for me. The church I attended during graduate school also had a very poor preacher, and I could fall into whining about not getting anything out of the worship service as quickly as the next person.

But after that day in class, the question ‘How hard did you try?’ stayed with me. And, while I seldom heard a sermon worth remembering in the next five years, I was always glad I had attended church, but each week I saw it as a personal challenge to find something moving, something memorable in the service. Sometimes, it was the organist, sometimes the sound or feel of a hymn. Sometimes, it was just sitting there as the candles were extinguished, watching the wispy smoke rise up into the dark at the top of the big old church, thinking of the smoke as a spirit set free. But every Sunday, I went to church to try and find something, and it made all the difference.

So if you are a visitor, or have been coming here less than a year, I want to offer you a challenge. Don’t sit passively with us. Come try with us. Or if this church doesn’t suit you and you need to find another, try hard there.

Most churches are pretty good, and this one is pretty good too. We can raise spiritual questions here without any regard for whether they cross over the boundaries of an orthodoxy. You can find some interesting and engaging people here whose spiritual searches are similar to your own, once you get to know one another. We have a strong and active social conscience, we are important parts of our community, and during the coming years we will learn to make even bigger positive differences in the community.

So I challenge you to try hard here, and to come up to me next February and tell me you are still here. We’re not unfriendly. In fact I think many of us are quite friendly. But acceptance and community here require some effort on your part. If you want meaningful relationships and associations here, you have to try. If you want to feel chosen, you have to choose. If you want to live in a friendly community, you need to make friends. I challenge you to come see me and tell me you have done it.

Now some of you are sitting there thinking “Yeah, right!” It’s a lot easier said than done. We sit passively; we hesitate to reach out, to meet new people, partly because most of us just aren’t very good at it, but also because it is very risky. You could fail, feel rebuffed, and be embarrassed. It is so easy to stand back, mind the shop, wait cautiously to see if maybe the world will take the first step, come to you, and make it easy.

It’s like sailing a boat again. Much of life is kind of like sailing a boat. On shore, the boat looks good, and you can have all these great fantasies about how cool it would be to be sailing. But once you actually put the boat in the water, it’s bound to get messier. The wind comes up, the balance shifts, you have to learn what you’re doing, and not all lessons keep you dry.

I like this sailing metaphor even though my experience with sailboats has not been impressive. I was about sixteen the first time I went sailing. My friend Tom took me out in his family’s small sailboat. He steered, I sat on one side feeling the breeze and thinking how cool this was, this sailing business. Within a few minutes, he uttered the strangest sentence I had ever heard in my life. “Prepare to come about,” he said. “Prepare to come about,” I thought: hey, that must be sailing talk. Now I really know I’m a sailor, because we’re talking sailing talk. This is so cool!

Then, with absolutely no warning, I learned what that four-word bit of sailing talk meant. For the land-lubbers here, those words are a kind of shorthand that mean “In about three seconds, the sail is going to swing across the boat, hit you in the chest, knock you overboard, and tip the whole boat over!” Tom explained that to me while we were swimming around in the middle of the lake. And I decided, right there bobbing up and down like fish bait, that I didn’t much like sailing. I still liked the idea of sailing, and the fantasies about it, as long as no boat containing me ever touched the water.

So I understand the fear of failure, and the fact that wishing something were so doesn’t accomplish a single thing, though it’s not as intimidating as putting the boat into the water. I suspect that’s why, in so many areas of life, we are controlled by our fears rather than our hopes, and keep our boats on the shore. We don’t want to fail, we don’t want to be embarrassed, and we don’t want to feel like an idiot.

Sometimes, it helps to hear stories about others who have failed, so we don’t feel so alone when it happens to us. So I have another story for you about someone who was so good at failure he made a career out of it. If you’ve ever felt foolish or inadequate because you made a fool of yourself, this might make you feel better.

It was a while ago; he was a man without any apparent gifts or any apparent luck. I have never personally known such a failure, and I doubt that you have either.

First, he failed as a businessman. Maybe he thought politics would be easier, so the next year he ran for the state legislature, and lost. He went back into business and two years later, he failed in business again.

Besides his habit of failure, life wasn’t very kind to him and he wasn’t very lucky, because the following year his sweetheart died and the next year, not surprisingly, he had a nervous breakdown. Two years later, incredibly, he tried politics for a third time, and for a third time he lost. Then perhaps thinking that his problem was that he had set his sights too low, he ran for Congress. He lost.

About this time in reading his story, I thought this is a guy who just didn’t get it. There are people like that, and he was one of them. Life was giving him all the clues he needed, and he wasn’t listening. If he had any gifts, it seemed pretty clear they didn’t lie in running a business or in winning elections. How many times do you tip the boat over before you decide you weren’t meant to be a sailor?

Still, three years later he ran for Congress again, and was defeated again, and two years later he tried again and again he lost. This man had never won an election. He had run five times and lost five times. When do you get tired of bobbing up and down in the middle of the lake like fish bait? But he wasn’t through. He decided to aim still higher.

So his sixth defeat was for the Senate, his seventh defeat was for the Vice Presidency, and his eighth consecutive defeat, with no victories, was for the Senate again.

Finally, finally! Two years later, he was elected President. Then he won the second and last election of his life when he was re-elected as President in 1864. If you look on your calendars or your daily planners, they’ll tell you that tomorrow is his birthday. We Americans tell a lot of stories about Abraham Lincoln. But we almost never remember that in his whole life, he won only two elections and one war and his victory in that war is still not universally acclaimed in some parts of the South.

But how, after so many successive defeats, was he able to keep choosing the feathered thing? How did he keep putting the boat in the water, when it had turned over on him eight times in a row? I honestly don’t know. I wouldn’t have done it. I would have given up, or found another career, some time before the eighth consecutive failure. I suspect most of you would have, too. That’s just one of the reasons that we won’t have our birthdays written into the next century’s calendars. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time looking for sticks and bricks, looking to stop and make a home. But Abraham Lincoln had an amazing ability to keep looking for and finding hope over, and over, and over again.

If this were a competition, we could feel pretty inadequate next to Lincoln. But this is church. This is the time and the place when we gather together to seek inspiration from higher visions and strivings of more nobility and character. Sometimes we do it by looking to the lives of great religious figures. Today, I used the life of a great American for whom official religion was not a very important category. It is remarkable, I think, how many similarities we find in the lives of great religious figures and great civic figures.

They all show the powerful presence of an invisible kind of force, a kind of dynamism that helped them steer the course of their lives. It isn’t a “force” in the sense of some scientifically demonstrable energy field; it is the force of a powerful and life-affirming kind of attitude. The power of that hopeful, trusting attitude beckons to me through these stories, and I hope it beckons to you as well.

Because life wants to be an active word, not a passive one. And there is a source for that activity that seems to dwell within and around us. Call it the will of God, the inner and outer moving of the Holy Spirit, the Tao, the dynamic presence of the Life Force, or call it something else. As long as you can call it forth, it doesn’t much matter what you

call it. But it has feathers, this indescribable thing. And if we can keep seeking and choosing that feathered thing, it will absolutely make all the difference: all the difference in the world.

Endnotes

The puppet show script was a collaborative effort. I gave the puppeteers a script that gave the general direction and made the points I had incorporated into the sermon. They modified and adapted it, adding their own creative twists. They also turned it into Dr. Seuss-like rhyming. The puppeteers were Lisa Sutton, Eric Kay, David Smith and Melissa Smith.

The Story of a Life

Failed in business – 1831

Lost election for legislature – 1832

Failed again in business – 1834

Sweetheart died – 1835

Nervous breakdown – 1836

Lost second political race – 1838

Defeated for Congress – 1843

Defeated for Congress – 1846

Defeated for Congress – 1848

Defeated for US Senate – 1855

Defeated for Vice President – 1856

Defeated for US Senate – 1858

Elected President – 1860

(Abraham Lincoln)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

December 24, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

There are so many stories about these days at the end of December, and this morning I would like to tell you just a few of them. Each of the three main stories I’ll tell you seems to embody a certain central word, and for each of those three words I will light a candle. Then later in the service, I’ll use the candles to light something else, as you’ll see.

1. The oldest Christmas story is thousands and thousands of years old. That long ago, people noticed that every year at this time, when the days have been getting shorter and the nights longer, the cycle reverses, the sun starts coming back, and the days start getting brighter and longer again. Today, we call this the winter solstice. It’s December 21st on our modern calendars. But in the ancient calendars it came four days later. So in the world of several thousand years ago, long before the man Jesus lived, December 25th was already a symbolic and famous date, the date of the winter solstice.

People didn’t call it the winter solstice, though. They spoke of things in terms of their gods and goddesses. And December 25th was the birthday of their sun-god. When you think about it, the winter solstice is the day the sun starts being born again, so by definition it is the birthday of all sun gods. There were many sun-gods; each culture had its own. For the Greeks, tomorrow was Apollo’s birthday, and they carved pictures of Apollo driving his chariot pulled by flying horses across the sky, and pulling the sun behind him.

Another religion, which was much more important for our own history, even though most people have now forgotten its name, was the religion of Mithraism. Mithra was also a sun god, and tomorrow would be his birthday. Mithra was called the Son of God. Shepherds followed a special star in the sky to find the place of his birth, and they brought gifts to him on his birthday, and taught that he was the Son of God, sent to save the world. Since he was a sun-god, the sacred day for this religion was Sunday. They also carved bas-reliefs of Mithra in a chariot, pulled across the sky by flying horses.

If this story sounds familiar it’s because back in the year 336, the Christian church adopted Mithra’s birthday, December 25th, as the official birthday of Jesus, and also adopted Sunday as the holy day of Christianity. Until then, Jesus didn’t have an official birthday, and Christians didn’t celebrate Sunday. In fact, Christian writers of the first three centuries used to brag about the fact that they had no holy days, which they regarded as purely pagan practices. All that changed in the early fourth century.

And as a footnote to complete a theme I’ve mentioned twice, around 1865, the Civil War cartoonist Thomas Nast created an important image that brought an ancient theme full circle. Nast was the man who first gave us the Republicans’ elephant and the Democrats’ donkey. He was also the man who drew the picture showing us that Santa Claus rode in a flying chariot pulled through the sky by flying animals on the eve of the ancient winter solstice.

The story of Christmas on December 25th really goes back many centuries before either the Christians or the Jews existed. It was a religion of great faith: a faith that nature is trustworthy, faith that life and light will always begin returning at this time of the year, and a faith that their God was there and that he cared for them. They used evergreens, holly, ivy, mistletoe, and lights as symbols of their faith. And we still use all of their ancient symbols, as signs of our own faith.

So the first candle we’ll light for this season is the candle of Faith.

(LIGHT CANDLE OF “FAITH” AND TURN IT AROUND SO THE NAME “FAITH” SHOWS.)

2. If you are Jewish, or if you have Jewish friends, they tell a different story about this time of the year, though it is similar, too. It is the story of Hanukah, which begins on the 25th day of the Jewish month Chislev, which corresponds to what we call the 25th day of our month December.

(Tell Hanukah story)

It is a story of faith, and it is also a story of hope: hope that these forces that make the world so predictable and comfortable for us will continue to be friendly to us. They called these forces Lord, or God. For the Jews, it was and is a story of faith and hope in their God.

And so on Hanukah, Jews light not one but eight candles to stand for the faith and hope they felt when their oil light, which had only enough oil to burn for one night, burned for eight days, until more oil arrived. It was the hope that the God who had cared for them would continue to do so, and the hope that they would continue to serve that God with their hearts, minds and souls. And so the second candle we light for this season is the candle of HOPE.

(LIGHT CANDLE OF “HOPE” AND TURN IT AROUND)

3. The third Christmas candle will come from the third Christmas story. It may be the one you know the best, it’s the Christian story about December 25th. It was written about fifty years after Jesus had died, more than eighty years after he had been born. But those who put the story together put it together from parts of much older stories.

– Like the god Mithra and the Greek god Dionysus, Jesus was also a son of God, with the power to save his followers.

– As in the older story of Mithra’s birth, men followed a special star to find the place of Jesus’ birth, and they brought gifts fit for a savior or a king.

– Like Dionysus, Jesus’ father was the most high god and his mother was a young woman.

– Later in life, Jesus would have twelve followers, as Mithras had. He would heal the sick and raise the dead as Asclepius had, and turn water into wine like Dionysus.

– Jesus and his twelve followers would have a Last Supper at Easter time, at which they would eat bread and drink wine that had been associated with his body and blood – just as the followers of Dionysus and Mithra had done for a long time.

Religion scholars who study the stories of Jesus and other ancient religions love to point out the similarities and borrowings, and there were a lot of them.

But there was a difference, too, that brings in our third Christmas candle. Jesus had faith, he trusted his God and he was not afraid of the world, like the believers in the religion of Mithraism. And Jesus taught hope, too. He hoped and believed that his God would keep being there and keep caring for everyone.

But for Jesus, the answer to the world’s real problems didn’t rest with the return of the sun, or waiting for a God to make things better. He said that the Kingdom of God – which meant the kind of world God wants us to have — was up to us to bring about. It was within us and among us, he said. And it would be here as soon as we learned how to love one another. When we could treat everybody else as our sister or brother, as a child of God, he said, this whole world will become like a kingdom of God. Because of all the powers on earth, the most powerful is the power of Love. Love can forgive us when we make mistakes, can embrace us as we struggle, sometimes fail. Love can love even the unloveable. And if you love your enemies, as he also taught, they’re not your enemies any longer. That’s a great power.

And so the third Christmas candle we light is the candle of Love.

(LIGHT “LOVE” CANDLE AND TURN IT AROUND).

Religious people have celebrated faith, hope and love forever, and they are important parts of this winter solstice or Christmas season. But they aren’t the whole story; they’re only part of what is going on inside of you this season. Because you know as well as I do that not all of the feelings you have are feelings of faith, hope or love. Part of living is that sometimes we are afraid, or sad, or we are filled with regret, which means that we are sorry we did some of the things we did, or we wish we had done some other things instead. And those feelings can make it harder for you to enjoy Christmas, or even to enjoy yourself, you know?

So besides faith, hope and love, you have some Fears at Christmas. (PICK UP “FEAR” PAPER AND SHOW IT). What are you afraid of at Christmas? Well, you’re afraid that the people you’ve given presents to might not like them. Think of all the times that you’ve said or thought to yourself “Oh, I hope he likes it!” or “Oh, I hope she likes it!” And this doesn’t stop when you grow up, either. You are always giving people things you hope they’ll like, and are always a little afraid that they might not like them.

Or you’re afraid you won’t get the presents you want. Or you’re afraid they won’t be “cool” presents so you can impress your classmates. Or maybe you’re afraid that if Santa Claus is making a list and checking it twice, and is gonna find out who’s been naughty and nice, that maybe he will find out that you haven’t been as nice as you might have been.

These fears are awful things, even though everybody has them, and even though you will have fears of one kind of another for the rest of your life. And they can make Christmas a lot less happy for you.

And so for this Christmas, I’m going to tell you a secret about how to get rid of your fears. You think of the things that you can count on, the things that give you hope. Spring will come again; the days will begin getting longer and warmer. You can count on your family, your friends. You can count on your church community. Your parents love you; your friends love you. God loves you – all the gods love you. There are a lot of things you really have faith in, and faith cuts fear like scissors cut paper. So think about the things you can count on, the faith you have. Then take your fears (LIFT THE PAPER WITH “FEARS” ON IT) and you just take them over to your FAITH, say “Begone, fears, and let Christmas come!” and touch them to it (TOUCH THE FLASH PAPER TO THE CANDLE FLAME)

Besides fears, you might have some sadness this Christmas. (PICK UP THE “SADNESS” PAPER AND SHOW IT). Someone you love or someone who loved you may have died this year, and you may be sad about that. Or you may have lost a pet, whether it was a cat, or a dog, or a hamster or a goldfish, and that’s sad, too. Or someone you love may be sick or hurt or far away. It is hard to enjoy Christmas when you’re sad.

And so for this Christmas, I’m going to tell you how to get rid of some of your sadness. Think of all the things that you are glad for, all the things that give you hope. The presents, the toys and clothes and cool games, the fun of swapping Christmas stories with the other kids in your classes. Think of all the things you have to look forward to, and see how that makes you feel less awful. Just gather together all of your sadness and take it over to your Hope, and you just let your hopes touch your Sadness and say “Begone, sadness, and let Christmas come!” (TOUCH THE FLASH PAPER TO THE “SADNESS” CANDLE)

Besides some fears and some sadness, you might also have some Regrets. (PICK UP THE “REGRETS” PAPER AND SHOW IT). In other words, you might wish you hadn’t done some of the things you did this past year, or you wish you had done some things that you should have done but didn’t. You could have been nicer to your parents — or to your kids. You could have worked harder in school, or in sports, you could have done more around the house, you could have played more and had more fun than you did. You could have done a lot of things that you didn’t do, and you wish you had.

Don’t think these feelings only come to kids. You’ll have them for the rest of your lives. Older people also look back and wish they had done a better job in their jobs, or with you, or a hundred other things. These regrets can get you down, and make it hard to feel like celebrating Christmas, if you let them.

But this year, you don’t have to let them. Because for this Christmas, I’m going to tell you how to get rid of some of your regrets. Instead of getting all sad about the things you wish you hadn’t done, or the things you wish you had done that you didn’t do, think of somebody you love. You know, they did some things wrong this year too, and you still love them. That’s a pretty good clue that they still love you, too. So this Christmas, gather up all of your regrets (PICK UP THE “REGRETS” PAPER) and you take them over to thoughts of people you love or people who love you. Then you say “Begone regrets, and let Christmas come!” (TOUCH THE FLASH PAPER TO THE ‘LOVE” CANDLE.)

These are tricks that work on Christmas or on any other day. But don’t just think about it, do it. Oh, it’s easy to make excuses and put it off. “I’d love to get back in touch with my faith, hope and love,” you may think, “but there’s just too much to do. Maybe next year.” So you put it off, this Christmas season comes and goes, and you’ll never be blessed by its magic at all.

There’s only one time to try all these things, to let your faith, your hope and your love burn away your fears, sadness and regrets. And that time is now! (HOLD UP THE “NOW” PIECE OF FLASH PAPER.)

So have a good Christmas now. Because if you wait too long, this moment, and this Christmas, will quickly disappear. (HOLD “NOW!” FLASH PAPER OVER A CANDLE.)

Merry Christmas!

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Davidson Loehr

December 17, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Five months ago today I left St. Paul, Minnesota and began the two-day drive moving me to Austin. Though I’d been born in Tulsa, I had lived in the North for the past thirty years and I knew there would be some cultural adjustments here. Before I moved here, I was instructed by e-mail in the proper use of the word “y’all.” It was explained to me that “y’all” is singular, while the plural version is “all y’all.” After arriving, there were other new things to absorb, in addition to the heat. Like the armadillo races in Leukenbach, or the amazing number of pick-up trucks that aren’t hauling anything.

As Christmas decorations began going up, I was surprised – though no native Texans seem surprised – to see that Santa Claus had a Lone Star belt buckle, a cowboy hat, boots and spurs. And I don’t know whether this is a state-wide custom or not, but I was also surprised to see that some of the public Christmas decorations down in Gonzales included not only four or five Wise Men, Santa with boots and spurs and assorted farm animals, but also Popeye and Olive Oyl!

Besides the funny and fun differences, there are some other new traditions, coming mainly from the Hispanic communities. And of these, one of my favorites is this seasonal custom of La Posada.

Dawne Spinale, our interim DRE, told me about it when she came up with the idea of turning today’s coffee hour into an invitation for the adults to visit the religious education classrooms. Then I was moved, as I know many of you were, in learning of the La Posada enacted in town recently between Hispanic and black churches, where Hispanic Christians went from church to church seeking admission, only to be told there was no room for them, until the final church welcomed them in for hospitality and food. It was very moving for the participants, and for most of us who read about it.

It’s a whole different lens through which to see the Christmas season, and a profound one. I had never seen the old story of Mary and Joseph being told there was “no room at the Inn” as being more than a prelude to the tales of the stable, the animals, and the birth of Jesus in a manger.

They really weren’t asking for much. Just a place that would take them in, someplace where a child might be born. But there was no room at the Inn.

La Posada, though, brings out so much more. It takes the focus off of Christmas presents and makes us the gifts to one another, whether we choose to offer those gifts or not. We want somebody to see us as a fellow human being, just to say, “Of course there is room. After all, you’re just like me: alone, in need, vulnerable, and dependent on the compassion of others. Of course there is room.”

For me, this changes the whole Christmas story. Something sacred wants to be born. The opportunity presents itself, as it almost always does, in the plainest, simplest way. A couple anonymous people who don’t look like anything special will give birth to something holy, and the world has no room for it. Religious stories are seldom about kings and queens. The surprise is always that the highest comes out of the lowest, if that’s not too crudely put. The holy is within and among us, just as Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was, and our abiding failure is the failure to recognize it.

Now if we could see these as sacred opportunities, there would always be room in our Inn. If these people dressed or looked like such important messengers should look, we’d be there for them. If they wore a crown, or came as movie stars or football quarterbacks or beauty queens – well then, of course there would be room at the Inn. But a couple simple-looking ragamuffins? Get away! Go sleep in the barn. This Inn isn’t for just anyone. It’s for the right kind of people, our kind of people. Go away.

This spirit of refusal has always been a part of us. It’s Scrooge, with his “Bah Humbug!” attitude. It’s the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. That’s what this spirit does, this “No-room-at-the-Inn,” Bah-Humbug spirit: it steals Christmas, turns it back into just another Monday. Something holy wants to be born and we won’t see it, so this spirit of refusal says “Sorry Mac, there’s no room at the Inn.”

It is a way of using what is or what has been to forbid what might be. That’s the sin involved here. It’s a way of keeping life small, forbidding its possibilities to grow beyond our habits. It’s ancient, much older than the Christmas story.

Something in us hates it when others might outgrow us, when they’re not like we are, not “our kind of people.” Churches do this too. In every church I have served, I’ve heard the same stories from visitors and newer members. They may not sound like they’re related to this La Posada story, but see if they don’t begin to feel familiar.

Newcomers to our churches usually arrive excited by this amazing range of possibilities, a religion for both head and heart, where no questions are forbidden. They have dozens of ideas for how we could spread this “good news” with the hundreds or thousands of others in the community that would love a place like this if only they knew about it. But when they say their ideas out loud, they feel that the old-timers just find reasons why they wouldn’t work, or want it studied by a committee for a year. New people come with excited ideas of what might be, and find them shut down by established habits of what has been. Looking at this from the outside, it feels like fear of change, fear of the new and different. Looking at it as an old-timer, it feels like protecting this institution you’ve loved and nurtured for so long. But if you’re an excited newcomer, it begins to feel like there’s no room at the Inn for the new life that is begging to be born.

So they go away: because, as they will tell you and as many of you have told me, they were never really invited in. There was no room at this Inn, so they left.

Nothing here is evil or awful; it’s just human nature. We get used to our people and our habits and we’re glad to see our people on Sunday, so we don’t notice there are lots of other people trying to find some room in this Inn, and not knowing how to get in. When they leave, they take with them the possibilities that might have been born here if they had stayed. There are starting to be more and more of them, they’re starting to wonder if there isn’t room for them here after all. It’s happening. And I think some new possibilities are beginning to be born. We’ll see, but I’m optimistic.

See how reality changes, depending on what kind of story you view it through? If you just see classic stories like the La Posada story as fables from a distant past, they’re not much help. But if you enter them, and let them enter you, they are a window onto our own lives, our own world. I just tried using the metaphor of people finding no room at the Inn to talk about the experience of many newcomers to many churches, including this one. But there are many more down-to-earth, more personal, examples of finding, or allowing, no room at the Inn. You can think of many as you let this subject settle in this week.

I’ll share just one story with you, a personal. I hadn’t thought of it as relating to the Christmas story at all until I learned about the La Posada tradition, but now I think it was a good example. It involved the last time I saw my grandfather, thirty-one years ago this month, just a few months before he died.

I hadn’t seen him in nine years. I had moved out of state, gone into the Army, gone to Germany and then Vietnam, then gone to Michigan to finish college. My brother called to say he didn’t think our grandfather would live much longer, so I decided to drive the four or five hundred miles to visit. He had always been such a sweet man.

I phoned information for Clarinda, Iowa, got his number, and called him. He was very happy to hear from me, and it would be “just fine” if I visited after Christmas. I called again a couple days before leaving, and he was still very happy to hear from me and it was still “just fine” if I visited.

A few miles outside of Clarinda, which is in the extreme southwest corner of Iowa, my car broke. I went up to the farmhouse, but the lady didn’t want to let me use her phone. Finally her husband came down, a big burly fellow, and she allowed that I might come in while he was there, but don’t go walking into other rooms.

The operator gave me the Ford garage, the only garage in town that would be open now. They towed my car in. I had a 1966 Datsun 1600 two-seater sports car, and I had some doubts that there would be a Datsun mechanic in Clarinda, Iowa. Once they got the car in the garage and popped the hood, it got better for a minute, as three big old farmer-mechanics in overalls all leaned over to look at the engine. I heard some positive, approving grunts. Then one of them looked up at me and said “Nice car. Did you make it?”

And I thought, ” I’m going to die here!” It was the alternator, they said. The alternator was broken. I know nothing about cars, and an alternator sounded like an exotic piece of equipment. My mind began replaying the worst scenes from old Alfred Hitchcock movies as I imagined how my end might come. Then they discovered that my little Japanese Datsun used a Delco alternator, which was made by Ford and which they had in stock! I accepted it as a miracle. They charged me a very fair price, gave me a donut, and told me where to find my grandfather’s house, just a few blocks away.

By the time I got there, it was about nine o’clock: cold, dark and windy, with blowing snow. I knocked at his door, and within just a few moments he came. When this dear old man opened the door, I was suddenly aware of two things, simultaneously.

The first was that he had no idea who I was. He was quite senile; his mind was almost completely gone. He didn’t even know he had grandsons, and he didn’t know me, though he thought my last name rang a bell, since it sounded like his.

I came to see my grandfather, and he opened the door to find a complete stranger, come from far away on a cold, dark, snowy night.

The second thing I noticed just as quickly was that, even while he had no idea who this strange young man on his porch was, he was opening the door as wide as he could, and welcoming me inside. There was room at this Inn, even for a strange young foreigner.

I stayed for two days, and in the few lucid moments he had, there were some warm and wonderful memories with this dear old man. His mind was mostly gone, but his heart was still working, and working well. I would have to introduce myself to him several times a day. Every time I would come out of one of his rooms and he would come out of another, he would be mildly shocked to find a stranger in his home and would say again “Well hello and welcome! And who may you be?” Every time I would tell him my name and let him know I was his grandson. And while he tried to react politely, I knew that for all but a few minutes he had absolutely no idea who I was.

I remember some of the stories he shared during his few lucid moments, stories from sixty-five years earlier, the story of how he had proposed to my grandmother, back in 1907, stories told in crisp and poignant detail, as though he were still there – which, in some ways, I guess he was.

Now when I think back on that strange visit of so long ago, I am transfixed by that image of him throwing his door wide open to invite into his home a total stranger on a cold dark night. I keep trying to remember the lines from the poem: “I was hungry and you fed me, I was alone and you took me in-” That’s not quite right, I can’t quite remember them.

But I do remember what it felt like the night I knocked at a stranger’s door and he took me in. I try to write a script for him as I replay the scene in my mind. I have him saying dramatic things like “There’s room at this Inn!” But the words aren’t right. They’re too phony, too contrived. He did it better, without any words. He just opened the door as wide as he could, welcomed me inside, saw my little suitcase, and showed me to a bedroom where I might sleep. I learned it was his bedroom; he had taken some blankets to the big sofa. But he wouldn’t hear of offering his young guest – whoever I was – anything but the best bed he had. I will remember that visit for as long as I live.

Well, that’s kind of how the Christmas story ends, too. Mary and Joseph were finally welcomed in, and something holy was born, something holy and memorable that had the power to save the world.

That part’s true. It can testify to it. Every time there is room at an Inn, every time we overcome fear with love, the stage has been set for another kind of manger scene where something holy can be born. And the attitudes, the spirits, the memories that are born of that encounter of finding that yes, there is room at the Inn and we will find you a nice bed – that attitude really can change the world. It changed mine. Even hearing about it second-hand in this story may bring a change into yours. Something happens to the one who, against all odds, was welcomed in by the stranger, something that will never be forgotten.

If only, somehow, this spirit could become contagious and others could catch it! That’s the kind of miracle that really might save the world. In fact, it’s the only miracle that could save the world.

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Davidson Loehr

December 10, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

These are remarks in response to the book The Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People Are Changing the World by Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson. The good news is that a thirteen-year study of American society shows a huge and growing number of people – between 25 and 50 million whose guiding values sound a lot like the basic values of most people who happen to attend UU churches – who could be the next “silent majority” with the numbers and the creative power to change the direction of our society. The bad news is that, for decades, Unitarians have developed – some would say, “reveled in” – an identity at the fringes of American society. The power offered in this new group – which has not been self-identified yet – lies near the center, as a part of the larger society, rather than apart from it, as cultural liberals have so often been. Is this a challenge, and a calling, which we can, should, or even must meet?

PUPPET SHOW: “The Lone Ranger and the Posse”

STORY: The show begins with the Lone Ranger opposed to The Posse (four puppets). It’s a point of both pride and identity with the Long Ranger that there’s only one Lone Ranger, while The Posse is (just) a group, a herd. But then a second Lone Ranger appears, and then two more. They are all still clear that they are “The Looooooone Ranger,” but as there become two and four of them, they’re confused, and look at the other “Lone Rangers.” Finally, after four of them appear and they look at each other, they begin to move together, until finally it is clear, from their unison movement, that the Lone Rangers have become The Posse. (There needs to be some hat or mask or something that is easy to slip on a hand puppet and identifies them as Lone Rangers.)

NARRATOR: This is the story of the Lone Ranger

Lone Ranger puppet appears and cries, “I’m the Looooooooone Ranger!”

NARRATOR: – and The Posse.

Four puppets appear, moving together, like they’re riding horses. They go to the left (up and down together), then turn and go back to the right, then disappear.

NARRATOR: The Posse always had some friends with them –

The four puppets appear again, quickly go in formation to the left, then back to the right, then disappear.

NARRATOR: – the Lone Ranger was always alone.

Lone Ranger appears and cries, “I”m the Looooooooooone Ranger! The heck with The Posse!” Lone Ranger stays in sight during next line, and turns toward the Narrator’s voice during the following line:

NARRATOR: And sometimes, it was pretty lonely.

Lone Ranger: “I’m the Looonely Ranger!”

NARRATOR: But not The Posse-

The Posse appears and starts going together to the left as the Narrator continues.

NARRATOR: They were never lonely.

The Posse turns and goes back to the right, then disappears.

NARRATOR: But one day, something very unexpected happened. First, the Lone Ranger appeared –

Lone Ranger: “I’m the Looooooooone Ranger! The heck with The Posse!”

NARRATOR: – and then, out of nowhere, a second Lone Ranger appeared!

Second Lone Ranger appears on the right side: “I’m the Looooooone Ranger! The heck with The Posse!”

First Lone Ranger suddenly turns at the sound of the second Lone Ranger. The second Lone Ranger moves across stage, over to the first, and snuggles up against the first Lone Ranger. As the Lone Rangers are moving together, the Narrator continues:

NARRATOR: And just as they were getting used to there being two Lone Rang-ers –

Two more Lone Rangers appear on the right side of the stage.

NARRATOR: two more Lone Rangers appeared!

Two new Lone Rangers: “We’re the Loooooooone Rangers! The heck with The Posse!”

First two Lone Rangers, from the left side: “We’re the Loooooooone Rangers! The heck with The Posse!”

This is when the most important movement happens. The two sets of Lone Rangers sort of begin moving (maybe kind of up and down, like horseback rid-ers) and begin moving towards each other. Once all four are together, they are kind of moving independently, but begin moving more and more in synchronized movement – their movement needs to show the audience that they are becom-ing The Posse.

NARRATOR: But in spite of all their yelling, something had happened, and the Lone Rangers – all four of them – hadn’t even noticed it! Have you? Have you seen what’s happened?

The four Lone Rangers, who have been moving from the left side to the right side together like synchronized horseback riders, separate – two going to each side – then reach down behind the screen and bring up a big sign between them that says

“THE END”

SERMON: From the Fringes to the Center?

Something revolutionary has begun being born in the past forty years, and it’s arriving almost unnoticed. It is the birth of a new worldview, a fundamentally new way of understanding ourselves and our world. It is dramatically different from the two American worldviews which preceded it. I think it signals a cultural revolution already in progress, and still nearly invisible.

I want to talk with you this morning about three fundamentally different worldviews. One has been with us for centuries, one has been part of us for about the last 150 years. And the third one is really just about thirty years old – still a baby.

What is a “worldview”? What does that word mean? Your worldview is the content of everything you believe is real – God, the economy, technology, the planet, being moral or smart, conformist or rebellious. It includes your view of how things work, how you should work and play, your relationships with others, everything you value. (The Cultural Creatives, p. 17) Most of us change our worldview only once in a lifetime, if at all, because it changes virtually everything in our consciousness. (pp. 17-18)

That’s also why it is useful to group people by their worldviews. If you understand a person’s worldview, you can understand a lot about them. You’ll have a good idea how they will vote on a wide variety of issues, what kind of heroes and heroines they are likely to have, what kind of a life they admire, and what they think America and the world should be like.

I’m trying to do several things this morning. I may be biting off more than I can chew. I am reflecting on a very provocative book called The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth Anderson [New York: Harmony Books, 2000]). I’m also trying to back off from the book far enough to find some very broad and clear patterns, and I’m trying to present these patterns in a way that will feel relevant to your lives. Finally, I’m trying to make this into a sermon, rather than just a book review. Only a fool would try to do this in thirty minutes. Let’s begin.

The three worldviews: Traditional, Modern, and Creative.

Traditionalists

The first, and oldest, American worldview might as well be called Traditionalism, because that’s what it sounds and feels like. Traditional Americans feel that the best American values were represented by images like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed or Doris Day. They look to global figures like Mother Theresa, Billy Graham, or Pope John Paul II as people of the right kind of moral values. Their hope for America is that it might, somehow, rediscover a romanticized, idealized version of the small-town and rural America of a hundred years ago, when life was simpler and people were, they believe, more responsible and moral. They love Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura, though him more than her.

They hate feminism. They hate the idea and fact of gay or lesbian rights. People are supposed to know their place. Men are supposed to be men and manly, women are supposed to be nurses, teachers, wives and mothers. Sex and passion of all kinds must be kept under control in all areas. Life isn’t complex if we’ll all just follow the rules. All the guidance you need to live by is contained in the Bible. And if people read their bibles more the world would be a much better place. Preserving civil liberties is nowhere near as important as restricting immoral or unpatriotic behavior. (pp. 31-32).

One quarter of American adults fall into this general category, about 48 million people. Those with strong religious feelings tend to be Catholics, Mormons, fundamentalists or evangelical Protestants. Many are African American or Hispanic American. About 70% of these Traditional people are religious conservatives who oppose abortion. They oppose it, however, for two main reasons that are seldom acknowledged. First, because it’s too much inappropriate independence for women. And second, because a woman’s right to an abortion is felt as a symbol of a whole immoral order that rejects the rule of men, the church, and “the way things are supposed to be.” But this group isn’t mainly about politics. It’s about beliefs, ways of living, a sense of the world’s order and their place in it.

You know these traditional-minded people. They’re in your family, as they are in mine and everyone else’s. Some of them love you dearly, as you love them, even though your beliefs drive each other crazy. We might think of them as “The Posse” – that big group that all moves together – but they’re really not. They were more numerous and powerful 150 years ago. But they have become the “moral minority,” and have no chance of being the vision of the future unless the country takes a turn toward fascism, which seems unlikely.

Modernists

The second worldview that has defined our society developed during the 19th century, and most of the 20th century. This worldview can be called the Modernism, and Modernists make up about half of the population. They believe that science, technology, and capitalism are the secrets of America’s success and the best hope of humanity.

Since they’re half the population, we all know lots of them, and know them well. We’re really living in their world. They value Success – and seem to spell it with a capital “S” – and making or having plenty of money, whether they actually have it or not. Bill Gates is the richest of them, and they think we should be in awe of rich people. They know that science, not religion, is really the answer to most of the questions we have. “Spirituality” is kind of a flaky concept. Our bodies are pretty much like machines, not temples. They don’t relate to John Wayne as much as they relate to Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, or Madonna. It’s not being traditional, obedient and moral that matters as much as being smart, aggressive and rich. These are the people who believe, and sometimes live, the American Dream. When Ronald Reagan was asked what he thought was the greatest thing about America, he said it’s a country where you can get rich. Half the population thinks that’s pretty solid.

You can see the Modernist worldview everywhere. Read Time magazine, the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes or USA Today, and you’ll be soaked in the official worldview of the Moderns. You know these people too, they’re part of us, they still run the country.

But see what a different world they live in than the Traditionalists! Science counts for more than religion. Being smart, independent and successful are more important than being faithful or moral. And religious notions like “the meek shall inherit the earth” or the poor will “get their reward in heaven” just seem foolish to them.

For most of us, society seems to be a battle between these two groups, the Traditionalists and Modernists. This is the battle between science and religion, or pro-life versus pro-choice. Jimmy Stewart or Jimmy Carter served proudly in the armed forces when they were called to, as Traditionalists should. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did not, and avoiding the draft was seen as the smart thing to do. They really are two different worlds, two fundamentally different ways of understand what is good and right.

Creatives

But since about 1970, a new worldview has emerged. If the first worldview, the one from 150 to 200 years ago, is Traditional, and if the second one – the one soaked in science, technology, and the American Way – is Modern, the new worldview might be called Creative. It’s more concerned with trying to heal and mend, trying to become whole people in a whole world, than with taking sides. That’s very different!

Now: how to persuade you there is a new worldview and that you are probably up to your eyeballs in it? It’s kind of like trying to explain “water” to fish. Let me ask you about a dozen questions, and just mentally see how many you would answer Yes to. And as we’re going through them, feel how fundamentally different they sound than anything in the Traditionalist or Modernist world-views:

1. Do you love nature, and are you deeply concerned about protecting it?

2. Are things like global warming, the destruction of the rain forests, overpopulation, ecological irresponsibility and the widespread exploitation of people in poorer countries important to you, and would you like to see us take action to act more responsibly in these areas?

3. Would you be willing to pay a little more in taxes, or for your consumer goods, if you knew the money would go to clean up the environment and stop global warming?

4. Do you give a lot of importance to developing and maintaining your personal relationships?

5. Do you think it’s important to try and help other people develop their unique gifts?

6. Do you believe in equality for women at work, and more women leaders in business and politics?

7. Are concerns about violence and the abuse of women and children around the world important to you?

8. Do you think our politics and government spending should put more emphasis on children’s education and well-being, on rebuilding our neighborhoods and communities, and on creating an ecologically sustainable future?

9. Are you unhappy with both the left and the right in politics, and do you wish we could find a new way that’s not just in the “mushy middle”?

10. Would you like to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country?

11. Are you uncomfortable with all the emphasis in our culture on success and “making it,” on getting and spending, on wealth and luxury goods? Do you feel that it all misses the most important things in life?

12. Do you like people and places that are exotic and foreign, and like experiencing and learning about other ways of life? (p. xiv)

Now: how many people, what percent of the American adult population, do you think shares those values? Maybe two percent? Five percent? Those are the answers that researchers get when they ask this question. Very few, maybe five percent, maybe not that many. We’re the Lone Rangers, not The Posse.

But no, it’s about 26% of the adult American population who share those values. Since the 1960s, about fifty million people have changed, or been born into, this new worldview.

These figures don’t sound believable. When researchers began publishing them, a lot of Europeans didn’t even believe them. Three years ago, officials in the European Union decided to do a survey in each of their fifteen countries. In the fall of 1997, they found an even higher percentage – and between 80 and 90 million people — in their own cultures who had, almost unnoticed, somehow changed to (or been born into) a worldview that embraced all the values in those questions I just asked.

A very important piece of this new way of looking at the world is that it is a vision that is beginning to appeal to, and that works in, business. Where political liberals have spent decades bashing business in the name of ecological and other concerns, business leaders are beginning to discover that, ideology aside, it simply makes better business and earns more money to be ecologically responsible, to hire the best people available, and to create healthy and respectful working situations. I’ll tell you just one business story.

Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, Inc., the largest commercial carpet firm in the world, read a book several years ago called The Ecology of Commerce and he had a kind of conversion experience. He turned his company, with manufacturing sites spread across four continents, into a business that not merely recycled its waste materials but returned to the Earth more than they took out. His people (in 110 countries) are reimagining and redesigning everything they do. And it pays. In the first five years, they invested $25 million in waste reduction and saved $122 million. By 1998, Ray Anderson was giving more than 100 speeches a year to business and environmental groups around the world. He wants to create “the next industrial revolution.” (11) Other large multinational companies – like Electrolux and Mitsubishi Electronics – have also begun changing their philosophy and their ways of doing business – again, not so much out of a notion of ideological purity as out of the simple and powerful realization that it makes more money to work smart.

We know where this new worldview came from. Its origins were in the civil rights movement, the movements for women’s rights, gay rights, the environmental movements and the anti-war movements of the 1950s – 1970s.

But while these different ways of thinking about nature, women, sexual identities, animals and the rest each began in a separate movement, they have now coalesced into this new Creative worldview. If you meet with the activists at Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco, for example, you’ll hear about more than rain forests. You’ll also hear them talk about feminism, gay liberation, so-cial justice, organic foods, spirituality, and people of the third world. All these issues are in the air they breathe. They’re imagining a whole new culture that’s trying to heal what has been divided and broken for so long. (p. 166) That’s the Creative worldview.

To Traditionalists, all of this just sounds like a weird bunch of people. They see the 1960s and 1970s as the birth of the Age of Narcissism and the loss of our moral center as a society. There is a lot of narcissistic personal behavior around to support the idea. But a better case can be made that we are actually far more morally aware and responsible today than we were forty years ago. I gave you a list of questions with which nearly all of you identified. Now here’s another list that we don’t think about often enough. It is a list of moral attitudes and behaviors that were normative forty years ago, but are nearly impossible to defend today:

White supremacy.

Discrimination against women in the legal system, colleges and the work-place.

Creating a hair-trigger risk of nuclear war, in which the amazing phrase “mutually assured destruction” was the main military strategy, ignoring the fact that it would kill billions of people or even all life on Earth in a nuclear winter.

The McCarthy-era suppression of civil liberties in the name of anti-Communism.

Expecting people to stay in stultifying, dead-end, or harmful jobs in the name of security or loyalty.

Expecting people to stay in stultifying, dead, or harmful marriages in the name of security or loyalty.

Expecting people to stay in churches and religions that are stultifying, dead, and lacking in spirit. Just this morning I saw a bumper sticker coming from this sort of feeling. It said “If going to church makes you a Christian, does going to the garage make you a car?”

Treating our souls, or psyches, as steeped in Original Sin, or as a sewer of unconscious drives, rather than being full of positive human potential. What an amazing revolution the “human potential movement” was, to define us as basically healthy rather than basically evil!

Gay and lesbian bashing.

Routine mistreatment of animals in research laboratories.

And subjects like drunkenness, old age, ethnicity, race or gender as the butt of comedians’ jokes.

All of these attitudes have deep moral dimensions. And in all these ways and many others, we are far more mature and responsible today than we were fifty years ago in the days of “Ozzie and Harriet.” Furthermore, the Lone Rangers from all these movements have now become the new Posse. There are more “Cultural Creatives” today than there ever were in the Moral Majority!

It is a huge movement, with far greater intellectual, political and economic power than it has yet realized – primarily, I think, because it isn’t aware of itself. For example: In 1998 and 1999, the top-selling movie video, The Lion King, was advertised and promoted everywhere. You couldn’t turn on the TV or go to a fast-food place without seeing posters, cups and gadgets promoting that block-buster movie. But it wasn’t the top-selling video of the time. The Lion King was outsold by an instructional video for yoga, which sold more than a million copies. In fact, among Amazon.com’s ten top-selling videotapes for those two years were two other yoga videotapes as well. (p. 328)

So what does all this mean? For one thing, it means that if you hunger for a deep change in your life that moves you in the direction of less stress, more health, lower consumption, more spirituality, more respect for the earth and the diversity within and among the species that inhabit her, you are not alone!

It’s funny, how new world views are born. During the Industrial Revolution, the image of the machine became the central image of Modernism: it still is. Our new worldview also has a powerful guiding image. And just as the picture of the machine wasn’t possible before the 19th century, so our new picture wasn’t possible until the late 1960s. Interestingly, both the picture and its power were almost prophetically predicted over twenty years earlier. In 1946, astronomer Fred Hoyle said that when the first picture of the Earth taken from space was shown, it would change the world. (p. 303)

The photos of earth taken from the moon are powerful signs of a new consciousness, a new picture of our interdependence, our interrelationships, a world without borders that is an organic whole. Those photographs of the blue-green earth floating in space are the baby pictures of a new worldview. Our first baby pictures.

As we approach the Christmas season, it’s a good time to think of things like baby pictures. Christmas is about the birth of something hopeful and lifegiving, something that might even save the world. We’re not the Lone Rangers any more. There are about fifty million of us; we’re The Posse. Extending the Christmas story metaphor, I wonder: What if we are the infant in this new manger? What if our mission is indeed to save the world, and our most sacred task is to get about the business of discovering, together, how to do it?

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Davidson Loehr

November 11, 2000

Whenever war breaks out, the media treats it as an unexpected tragedy. When we look for the causes of a war, we tend to look at superficial things — as though each new war is a unique problem rather than an enduring and predictable part of who we are. As a veteran of our most unpopular war (so far anyway), it’s always been important to me to help us recognize the causes of war as lying in a place much closer to home.

 

(PLOT: Set a scene, maybe on a playground. The kids have played a game during a field trip. They visited a zoo, and two groups were taken into an elephant’s cage, blindfolded. The first group was taken to feel the elephant’s ear. The second group was taken to feel the elephant’s tail. That’s all that either group got to touch of the elephant: the first group touched the ear, and the second group touched the tail. And they weren’t told what kind of animal it was. When they returned to school, the two groups got into an argument about what this thing was that they had all felt. The first group said, “It was broad and flat, like a giant leaf.” The second group said “No it wasn’t! It was long and thin, like a rope. It was nothing like a leaf at all!” Then the kids in the first group started saying that the kids in the second group must all be stupid if they thought a broad flat leaf felt like a long thin rope, and the kids in the second group said the first kids must be stupid, if they thought a long thin rope felt like a big leaf. Before they knew what was happening, a fight broke out. Meanwhile, the adult playground supervisors are standing by watching, but do nothing to stop it. They weren’t at the zoo, and have no idea what on earth the two groups of kids are talking about. But they say that the kids obviously feel strongly, and kids who feel strongly about something should be able to act on it. So the two groups are beating each other silly. Now the Smart Patrol — the kids in church — have arrived, and it is up to them to figure out what caused this fight, and how it should be stopped.)

RESPONSIVE READING: #518

Grandfather, Look at our brokenness.

We know that in all creation

Only the human family

Has strayed from the sacred Way.

We know that we are the ones

Who are divided.

And we are the ones

Who must come back together

To walk in the Sacred Way.

Grandfather, Sacred One,

Teach us love, compassion, and honor.

That we may heal the earth

And heal each other.

— from the Ojibway Indians

SERMON: Why Do Soldiers Die?

This is an awkward Sunday to be preaching. I began with a sermon on Veterans’ Day. It’s an important day to me, and I wanted to ask what there is in us that keeps leading to social, political and military fighting. I wanted to explore why our soldiers die.

Then the presidential election began to unfold last Tuesday, and five days later it is still not unfolded. Here too we are dividing into warring camps, often very self-righteous about our candidate and that other idiot.

People are confused and restless. We are such a deeply hierarchical species that the lack of a clear leader drives us to the borders of our rationality. But this dividing into social and political camps looks a lot like enlisting soldiers for a battle.

So I will try the unlikely, by combining thoughts on Veterans’ Day, why we fight, our current post-election confusion, who we are, and what we are called to do in the coming years.

It’s so ambitious; I count on your forgiveness when I fail. I’ll start and end with stories.

There was a poignant story about a WWII veteran on the front page of yesterday’s “Life & Arts” section of the Austin American-Statesman. It was about a Texas man, now 80, who had to leave the one true love of his life in France in 1941, never to see her again. It was many years before he learned that she had died a few months later. He served in the war, came home, had some marriages but no lasting loves, and still dwells in memories of 59 years ago. He’s written a script about it which he’s trying to get turned into a movie, and it would probably make a good one. We love stories of thwarted love set in wartime — it’s the plot of “Casablanca,” maybe the greatest of all romantic war films.

The combination of war and love is the most powerful in our history. In Greek mythology Ares, the god of war, was the favorite consort of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and their liaisons produced three children, named Fear, Terror and Harmony. Neither of these gods was ever considered wise by the Greeks, though they were powerful. But Aphrodite’s loves were too local, too limited, and Ares was all rage, no reason.

They were like the “ear” and “tail” people in this morning’s children’s story. Like the other gods, Love and War represented partial passions, too incomplete to be enough. The Greeks had such good insight here. For when incomplete but passionate visions clash, they might produce Harmony. But it is far more likely they will yield Terror and Fear.

War is a kind of mirror held up to let us see some turbulent parts of ourselves. Or it is those turbulences, projected outward from our psyches onto the stage of the world. But every clash of partial visions and half-truths seems to be an example of the same rule, a rule so deeply a part of us we have probably never been without it. The rule is simple:

We must enlarge either the size of our visions or the size of our armies.

Like the playground fight in this morning’s Children’s Moment, wars mostly occur between ear-people and tail-people. Wars happen because we are trying to defend what is right and good against those who stand up for what is wrong and bad. And on the other side, wars exist because those others are trying to defend what is right and good against we people who stand for what is wrong and bad.

There are those few precious times when we are convinced a war was really about right vs. wrong. WWII was probably the only such war in the last century, though. Since then, our wars haven’t been such proud affairs.

When I say “war” I don’t mean only the fights between armies with guns. I mean all of the fierce confrontations between people who see different little pieces of reality, and fight in their name.

There’s an old story about this. One day the Devil’s messengers — who must be very busy — reported to him that some people on earth had discovered pieces of Truth. They wondered if the Devil didn’t see this as a threat. “No,” he laughed, “they’re only tiny pieces of the truth, too small for wisdom. They’ll turn those little pieces into orthodoxies, dogmas, and ideologies. Then they’ll form armies to fight for their little pieces of truth. That’s how I will take over the world!”

Why do we fight? If this is a scientific question, it’s an easy one. Like a million other species, we are territorial animals. We identify with our territory and defend it against all outside threats. We wave our flags and parade our armies like other animals bare their fangs and arch their backs. Remember that a dog barks at you from behind its fence for the same reason that its owner built the fence.

We have expanded our notion of territory to include conceptual territory. We defend our ideas with the same kinds of attack and defense strategies that we and other animals use to defend physical territory. A lion may kill another lion for infringing on his hunting territory or putting the moves on his mate, but he won’t kill another lion for holding the wrong religious or political beliefs. That extension of territory to include intellectual territory seems to be ours alone. That’s what I mean by calling most of our fights a game of ear-people against tail-people. But there’s a catch. When we are willing to fight and kill for our notions of right and truth, then unless we really know what’s right and true, we become foolish and dangerous. And history shows us that we always seem to identify the Truth with what we happen to believe. It would be amazingly lucky for us if we were right. So, since we can’t enlarge our understanding, our vision, we have to enlarge our armies.

It seems the world has always been run by the outcomes of wars between one set of special interests against another set of special interests, won b y the side with the largest army. Then the strong demand what they will and the weak grant what they must, and time rolls on to the next act, which is much like the last act.

One reason that the religious teachings of thousands of years ago still survive while almost all the scientific teachings from ancient times have been forgotten is that we have solved most of the scientific problems. But the problems addressed by the great religions — these problems are as much with us today as they ever were.

And the religious answers have a striking similarity. They often speak of seeking a “God’s-eye view” of the world, kind of like that photograph of the earth taken from the surface of the moon, where all the boundaries vanish and the world is whole again:

Live in harmony with the Tao, said Lao-Tzu twenty-five centuries ago. The Way is a balance of light and dark, aggressive and receptive, sunlight and shadow, everything is part of the whole, live in a way that honors the whole rather than the isolated parts.

Seek first the Kingdom of God, Jesus taught two thousand years ago. And that Kingdom of God, he was clear, was not something magical or supernatural, no matter what the religion that followed him has taught. Jesus’ Kingdom of God was simply a world in which we treated each other as brothers and sisters, children of God, and refused to accept any smaller or more local identity.

“We are all limbs of the body of humanity,” said the Roman Seneca. And the task of trying to grow into our fullest humanity is the task of trying to identify with the whole body, rather than just our parts of it.

Perhaps the oldest of these teachings is still the ancient Hindu story of the blind people and the elephant, from which I adapted this morning’s children’s story. The “elephant” is life, and none of us can ever see the whole of it. We just see the parts we can touch or experience: an ear, a tail, a leg or a trunk, and we think it must be the whole thing.

But religious teachings often get a kind of glassy-eyed unreality about them. We listen to them as part of the Sunday ritual, but there’s a disconnect from the real world. So rather than milking these religious teachings further, I want to share an example of this same kind of thinking that solves problems by transcending and including their different aspects, taken from the real world.

This isn’t just abstract or irrelevant. If our current election is resolved as it seems it will be, with Governor Bush becoming our next president, we will almost certainly have several very important and very emotionally loaded social issues to examine or re-examine, from abortion, affirmative action and individual rights to restructuring of our environmental and tax laws. We could use a model that has actually worked somewhere.

To find this model, I’ll move from the contentious subject of war to the equally complex issue of abortion. About fourteen years ago, a Harvard law professor named Mary Ann Glendon did a comparative study of around twenty industrialized cultures, including ours and about nineteen European cultures, comparing their policies on, among other things, abortion. Our country came out worst. We had done the least to resolve these issues, for reasons she found easy to show.

Her argument is a simple one. Thirty five years ago, all over the world, industrialized cultures began discussing some of the variables involved in this issue of unwanted pregnancies. The discussions came about because, all over the world, birth control pills and condoms became more widely available, and abortions became more openly discussed as options. These discussions were going on across societies, in many social circles, at many levels. Religious beliefs, beliefs in individual rights, in a woman’s responsibility to the unborn life she carried, in a society’s responsibility to care for unwanted children, in the things that a child needs in order to have a shot at the kind of life we want to give our newborns. All of these issues and more were being discussed in the countries of Europe, as they were just beginning to be discussed here in the early 1960s.

Yet in Europe, abortion issues have never reached the intensity and hatred that they have here, because Europeans continued the public discussion until they reached a consensus. In this country, our Supreme Court short-circuited the process of public discussion with its Roe v. Wade decision. It created a law before the society had finished debating the issues, and so the law never settled the deep differences and angers that still torment women at abortion clinics or help murder physicians who provide abortions. Because we wrote our law before we had found common ground, our society has often been divided into the rigid ideological clans of “pro-life” or “pro-choice” platforms. This is the structure of ear-people against tail-people that leads to wars. And this has been the American path.

In European countries, on the other hand, people continued the open discussions until much more substantial compromises were reached. Now, most European societies have laws stating that the most important single consideration must always be the sanctity of life. But that concern for the sanctity of life, they say, must be placed in a realistic understanding of the conditions of life: the social, economic and psychological situation of the pregnant woman, the probabilities of that unborn child’s finding the quality of life that we in society want for the future of our species, and so on.

The result has been that women in many European countries have access to abortion at least as liberal as ours. In Catholic Spain, for example, the government pays for legal abortions. Yet we don’t hear of “right-to-life” people declaring war, barring the doors of abortion clinics, or murdering Spanish doctors who are providing abortions, because they got what they wanted: the admission that life really is sacred, and that the sensitivity to the sacrality of life comes first, before a woman’s right to choose. It hasn’t restricted the choices much, it’s mostly dissolved them within a larger moral and ethical picture.

It has avoided wars and murders in many European countries, has resulted in lower rates of unwanted pregnancies, fewer abortions, higher adoption rates, and greater roles for societies in caring for unwanted children. So you think they must be doing something right!

I’ll take only one case to make the point, though there are many. The case happened in Catholic Spain. It involved a single women who wanted an abortion during her eighth month of pregnancy. Under Spanish law, as also under American law, this woman had to get the court’s permission for such an abortion. Initially, she had wanted to keep the baby. Though she was a single woman, was not planning to marry the baby’s father or receive any support from him, and though she only worked at about minimum wage, she felt that she had no right to deny life to this baby just because it was inconvenient for her.

However, late in her pregnancy she had amniocentesis performed, and discovered that the baby she was carrying was severely deformed, both physically and mentally. It would cost a lot of money and take a lot of energy to care for such a baby, and she told the court that she wasn’t capable of caring for such a child. Therefore, she wanted the court’s permission to have the abortion.

The court agreed. She obtained the abortion, and the government of Spain paid for it, as they pay for all legal abortions in Spain. But the court’s reasoning showed a deeper and broader vision of life, pregnancy, and responsibility than we hardly ever hear in this country. The court noted that even though Spanish law insisted on the sanctity of life, Spanish society had not put its money where its mouth was. Spanish society did not have the ability to provide care for such a baby. They lacked the social services, the financial support, and the educational and nursing services to provide any decent quality of life for such a child. And if the government was unable or unwilling to commit the money and the resources to caring for such a child, they said, then it would be brutally unfair for them expect a single woman to do so. Therefore, they granted the abortion. They hoped, however, that some day Spain would be able to provide services for such children so that they could grow to live useful and happy lives.

What I want to suggest to you is that Spain, like most European countries, has avoided the wars we fight over abortions here in our country, because they were able to develop a more mature and responsible understanding of the many issues involved in unwanted pregnancies.

Instead of building armies, they increased the size of their vision. And this borrowing from Spain points to the kind of solution that could also help avoid social incivility in many areas here at home.

I don’t think that liberals have enough wisdom to guide our society adequately today. Nor do conservatives. The view of an ear plus the view of a tail still don’t do much justice to an elephant.

If we react ideologically during the coming social changes, liberal and conservative camps will just circle their wagons and try to keep short-circuiting the process by getting our kinds of laws passed.

Our instincts will push us to react like territorial animals, to defend our position harder and help create the conditions of social hatred and violence. But we have a chance, during the coming social changes, to try a different path. It is a path I want to recommend, especially to liberals, and most especially to religious liberals.

Soldiers die for our failures of vision. They die mostly because we are like the ear- and tail-people, who make big armies because we don’t know how to make bigger visions. We don’t want to see that those on the other side of almost all complex and powerful issues are our moral equals, our intellectual equals, our brothers and sisters. We think we’re right, they’re wrong, and that the important problems of life can somehow really be as simple as that kind of cartoon. And as long as our visions remain too small, we will have to create bigger armies. And then it starts all over, the next act looking much like all the last acts. And in every generation, people will find all the old religious teachings about peace rather than war, and wonder why they are still so apt. I went through a few of those visions earlier, in their Taoist, Hindu, Christian and Stoic versions. You may know of more.

But whether it is the Kingdom of God, the Way, the whole elephant or the body of humanity, the same message comes to us through all the ages of humanity, and it is a message we need now as much as at any time in memory.

We are still coming through a frustrating presidential election. By almost all accounts, these two men were not exciting candidates; half of our citizens didn’t even bother to vote. We were frustrated with the choices, and no matter how it turns out, at least half the country will be frustrated with the results. If governor Bush is finally elected, there may be some significant changes in our society, and in many areas.

We will be sorely tempted to circle the wagons around our own ideology as we feel it assaulted by its opposite. We are primed to play, once again, the parts of ear-people and tail-people, gearing up for warfare against those others who, we feel, must be wrong if they disagree so strongly with us.

I hope you and I will resist the downward pull of stunted visions, and seek instead to expand the horizons of discussion and debate:

• On the subject of abortion rights versus rights to life, I hope we can work to frame the issue, instead, under the larger umbrella of how we can treat all these questions as moral issues whose roots go into the sanctity of life, as several European countries already have.
• On the important issue of individual rights versus individual responsibilities, I hope we can insist that the two concerns be linked together, for neither one alone is sufficient.
• On economic issues, I hope we can also find and articulate the bigger umbrella. There will always be inequalities in income and opportunity because there will always be inequalities between people. Greater gifts deserve, and will anyway get, greater rewards. But our laws and economic structures must be used to encourage and reward gifts and character wherever they are found, not merely wealth and privilege.
• On issues of religion and education, I hope we can see past the separation of church and state far enough to realize that we must find a place in public education for the deeper questions of ethics, morality, and responsible living which have always been held as primary by the best religions.

And in all the other divisive issues which beg us to become small soldiers for limited visions, I hope we will resist. We come to, and from, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. We are the bearers of a proud, bright, deep religious tradition that has inspired the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others, including you.

We are meant to be among the intellectual and moral leaders of our community and our world. It is our gift and our calling. I believe it is our duty. In all these areas and more, rather than enlarging our armies let us enlarge our visions. We can serve our exclusive territories or our inclusive humanity. We can define ourselves by our divisive differences, or by our inclusive commonalities. Let it be the latter.

There is an old Buddhist story that is on point here. A fierce soldier approached the Buddha, brandishing his long sharp sword. “I am a mighty warrior and I am going to kill you!” he shouted. “Well then,” replied the Buddha, “with that much power, you ought to grant me two final wishes.” “Very well,” bellowed the warrior, “but make it quick!” The Buddha pointed to a sapling tree nearby and said “Cut off a small branch from that tree.” With one stroke of his sword, the deed was done, and the warrior handed the severed branch to the Buddha. “And now?” he roared. The Buddha handed the little branch to the warrior and pointed to the tree: “Now make it whole again.”

It is reported that the warrior experienced enlightenment at that moment, and spent the remainder of his days working to heal rather than destroy, to make whole rather than cutting apart.

My friends, let us aspire to the same.

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Davidson Loehr

October 29, 2000

Halloween is a holiday that comes to us in costume. It wears a mask, covering a much older, and much different, message. That older message is also deeper, and more valuable. But to find it, we must first unmask Halloween. And after we unmask Halloween, we will find some ancient symbols, parts of a very old myth, and some parts of ourselves.

 

SERMON: Spooks from the Depths

Halloween comes to us in costume. It wears a mask, covering a much older, and much different, mask. Under that mask, still another mask. And after we unmask Halloween, we will find some spooks from the depths of ourselves and our world. Since you have a lay service next Sunday that will also be dealing with symbols and myths connected to the concept of the Goddess, I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach here, using less myth and more history and social commentary, so you don’t get over-mythed.

Let’s start with recent history. In 1967, by Lyndon Johnson’s presidential decree, Halloween officially became UNICEF day, when little children, dressed as make-believe goblins, frighten you into making the sacrifice of some spare change.

Going back another century, Halloween first became a national event here after more than a million people from Ireland emigrated to the US after the Irish potato famine of 1848. At that time it was the adults rather than the children who dressed up in costumes, pretending to be all kinds of evil spirits and other supernatural beings. They visited homes where friends made offerings of food and drink to them. So it was partly a creative way to party. But that too was a caricature, a cartoon. Halloween itself is a kind of mask put on over something much older, more primitive, more powerful, and perhaps more healing.

The Christian church invented Halloween and All Saints Day in the 9th century, then added All Souls Day a century later. They were invented to “cover” an ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (“Sow-en”), just as Christmas was moved to December 25th in the year 336 to “cover” the birthday of the solar deity Mithra, and Easter is a Christian “cover” over older festivals celebrating the vernal equinox. Our November first was the Celtic first day of winter, and first day of their new year. So Samhain was to the Celts something like Rosh Hashanah is to the Jews-a day of reckoning, a day of atonement.

Above all, Samhain was a time when the barriers between the human and supernatural worlds were broken – or as we might put it today, the barriers between the conscious and unconscious levels of our awareness. They believed that the whole spectrum of nonhuman forces roamed the earth to take revenge for human violations of sacred duties. To bribe the gods – always our first impulse, it seems – they offered animal and sometimes human sacrifices. So this beginning of the new year was a terrifying time of year in the old days. It is not surprising that they needed some relief from it. I would not be surprised if the custom of dressing up like goblins and bad spirits went back to the beginning.

This is such fantastic talk! Gods, demons, goblins. When we hear things put in such otherworldly, supernatural ways, we can be pretty sure we’re talking about something terribly primitive, something that has probably been part of our human psyches since we’ve had human psyches.

This business of supernatural powers and unseen forces sounds a little spooky nowadays. Most of us don’t like to think of invisible forces that direct our lives. But they are still present, still pulling our strings, and are often still fearful, though there isn’t anything otherworldly about them.

Let’s go to a different level of history to find a metaphor for exploring this subject of Halloween. Five or six centuries ago, before the Spanish and the English began sailing around the world, world maps looked very different than they do today. One of the most interesting things about those old maps is that in the unexplored areas, the mapmakers used to print “There be monsters here.” Once we had explored and incorporated the rest of the world into our maps, the monsters disappeared. But when those spaces were still unknown, we thought they must be filled with monsters, because we tend to think that everything unknown to us might be filled with monsters — as most of our science fiction movies still show.

Like unfinished maps, incomplete selves and uninformed worldviews are havens for the monsters of our imaginations. The unknown is usually fearful. To defend against it, we create tyrannies of partial visions, walls of our comfortable biases, to protect us from the monsters that always seem to lie just beyond the limits of the familiar. In that way, we’re still like the medieval mapmakers and sailors.

And Halloween, or Samhaim, is one of those special times of the year that open the door, that offer us another chance to incorporate the unknown, to dig deeper into ourselves and make our worlds bigger. When we can assimilate the unknown into ourselves, the monsters disappear. What we cannot assimilate haunts us like goblins and demons.

Another way of saying this is that life’s deepest problems can’t be solved; they have to be dissolved, by enlarging our maps, by incorporating the things that we fear. The solution of the world can’t be found on the surface. It’s not simple. It has to be complexified before it has enough nuance, enough room, to spread out the full-sized map and begin filling it in.

But we don’t tend to do this, do we? We tend to stick to a kind of comic-book simplicity. Our heroes are big bulky physical characters: big bodies, thin characters. Rambo was an angry adolescent who never did grow up. Professional boxing matches get millions of viewers at $50 each on pay-per-view television to watch a few exciting minutes of two guys beating each other senseless. Wrestling matches also earn big bucks, and feature cartoon-like characters with huge bodies and cave-man actions.

Preachers often seem to describe God as though he were just like a bigger version of Arnold Schwarzenneger, powerful and fearful, interested in obedience rather than in our ability to make subtle grown-up distinctions about morality and ethics. That does poor service to the concept of God! Movie superheroes, wrestling champions and even the sense of the heroic have become like brute versions of a social Darwinism, a kind of survival of the biggest and meanest.

Our heroes have become as simplistic as masked Halloween characters, and this simpleness does not serve us well. Religions have not helped this picture much, too often defining people’s refusal to believe in unbelievable gods as faithlessness. But that’s wrong. For the worst form of faithlessness is the fear that the truth will be bad. The worst kind of faithlessness is the belief that there be monsters here, when what there is instead is our failure to see, to understand, to assimilate the nuances of difference into ourselves and our world.

Sometimes I look at our world as a kind of masked ball. Or like playing ostrich, refusing to see beyond very simplistic terms, shrinking our world, and turning it into a fantastic video game between heroes and monsters, winners and losers.

Ostriches hide their heads in the sand, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of denial. But when they do, they are vulnerable to everything they can’t see, and so are we. The “trick or treat” game of Halloween is like this too. The game was played most directly, perhaps by the Irish adults of 150 years ago. Their trick-or-treating was saying “Reward our masked, phony role or we’ll do terrible things.” This is the message of hate-groups, too, who are also playing masked roles. When a group like the KKK throws its costumed tantrums, it is saying “Support our rage, our non-integrated rage, or we’ll strike out at you.”

When we’re wearing the masks, we easily become the roles, and think that our simple certainties are letting us see more clearly. Really the masks are blinders, narrowing our field of vision, burying our heads deeper in the sand. And then everywhere we cast shadows by blocking the light, something deep inside of us whispers “There be monsters here!” But the monsters are the parts of ourselves and our world that we haven’t learned how to incorporate, how to include on our map. The monsters are not external dangers, but internal failures of integration.

There is a rule in religion, and the rule seems to be that either our world must get bigger, or our defenses must, to protect against the imagined monsters.

I’ll give you some examples of how we draw lines and create monsters to defend a world that is too small.

A few weeks ago I spoke about what I have called “the dark god of capitalism.” I tried to persuade you that putting profits ahead of people has unavoidable, and terrible, consequences. If we are measured by our financial success, if that’s a measure of our worth as people, then financial failure is a personal and moral failure. The poor people, the losers, are no longer our brothers and sisters, but failures, almost like India’s caste of Untouchables. Then we draw lines on our maps to keep them away. They vanish from TV commercials; they’ve almost vanished from TV and media coverage completely.

Not all the lines we draw are invisible. Some are built of reinforced concrete. In Austin, I-35 is one of those lines. We all know what it means to refer to “east of I-35” or “west of I-35.” There be monsters east of I-35 because we don’t know how to incorporate them into our world.

The more people there are without a realistic chance of making a decent living, the more people make indecent livings, and the more people we put into our growing number of prisons. There be monsters there, too: growing numbers of them.

Other unassimilated people may not be considered monsters, but they rarely appear on our maps. The more than 16% of children in Austin living below the poverty line; the roughly 40 million Americans without health insurance, the child mortality rate, the highest in the developed world, the so-called “working poor” who have jobs but are homeless because they can’t afford houses.

These are among the areas of our society that don’t make it onto our maps, that we don’t know how to incorporate into the body politic. We don’t know how to think of them, or treat them, as brothers and sisters, children of God, so we call them other things: the poor, the disadvantaged, the homeless, prisoners, outcasts, and sometimes monsters. And still the number of people from whom we distance ourselves, and of whom we are afraid, continues to grow, and we don’t see that our whole society is playing a masked role that is not worthy of us. Ostriches.

Our masks, are our blinders. They reduce the size of our world, draw the lines between our kind of people and those other kinds of people. Once the map is complete, it’s like a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Could it be different? Is it naive and foolish to hope for a change as fundamental as enlarging our world? Am I just spouting ignorant and childish preacher-talk? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s either naive or foolish. We have done it many times in many ways, we just don’t seem to be doing it as well lately. 135 years ago black people were freed from slavery. Just over eighty years ago women were given the right to vote. Less than fifty years ago our public schools were ordered integrated, and less than forty years ago it happened in Texas, the last state to integrate its public schools. During the past thirty or forty years we have seen huge increases in the numbers of women graduating from colleges, law schools, medical schools. Women have gone into space, been nominated for Vice President, become presidents of prestigious schools. I think that the University of Chicago was the first such school to hire a woman as president. She had wanted the job at Yale, the university where she taught, but they would not hire a woman president. I served on a committee with president Hanna Gray at Chicago, and remember thinking on several occasions how foolish Yale University had been to lose such a woman.

The range of acceptable sexual identities has expanded within our memories, in ways no one would have imagined possible fifty years ago. And while some church leaders may still try to restrict options, the fact is that we are now beginning to accept as natural an immense range of religious options and styles. I will be offering one of the prayers at an ecumenical Thanksgiving service next month in which at least eight major religions are represented. This couldn’t have happened during the good old days of Ozzie and Harriet.

In all these ways — and in more ways that you can think of as well — we have enlarged ourselves, our maps, and our world. And with each enlargement, each new incorporation, more monsters vanish, and are replaced by fellow citizens, brothers and sisters. Don’t think we can’t change, don’t think we can’t become more whole, more inclusive, more noble. It’s a realistic hope. We’ve been doing it, and while we still have far to go, some of the strides we have taken seem gigantic.

Each time, in order to grow, we have to confront some more of our individual and societal biases, fears, bigotries. Each time, we must take off another mask. Each step of growth involves incorporating more former outsiders into the organism of the body politic, and expanding the membership of the human family. Each time we do it, we are reaching out to another group of people and saying “We welcome you. You are one of us.” Powerful, magical words.

It’s not hard to make monsters vanish. Sunlight kills mildew, and it does a good job on our demons and goblins too. But first, it takes being aware of them, and it takes the courage to confront them.

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” the monster is dissolved in an unusual way. The wicked witch of the West is finally destroyed — dissolved — when a determined girl throws water on her, and she melts. You know, I don’t think it was water that did it. I think the water was just stage business. What dissolved the witch was a girl having the courage to confront her face to face, without blinking. It took a girl who was not afraid of anything. The trick looks like outward magic. But it isn’t magic, it’s growing up.

Ambrose Pierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.” One lesson of Halloween is that all of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears. Other lessons of Halloween are that ghosts vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can be transformed into possibilities. On second thought, maybe that’s magic after all.

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Davidson Loehr

October 22, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is an old sermon that seems more relevant each year. It is not a defense of atheism; I think “atheism” only makes sense at the level of fundamentalism. The “God” atheists don’t believe in is one only a fundamentalist would care to defend (and not many of them, at that). It’s a deeper question arising here, the question of whether there is something built in us as humans that is deeply and irreducibly religious–older than the gods–or whether “religion” is just a bag of beliefs picked up at a church. If we are profoundly religious people, there’s hope for our dreams of peace and justice. Otherwise, I’m not as sure. Still, I think the real religion of atheists–assuming that I have it right–may surprise you.

STORY: “The Raft”

The Buddha said, “A man walking along a highroad sees a great river, its near bank dangerous and frightening, its far bank safe. He collects sticks and foliage, makes a raft, paddles across the river, and safely reaches the other shore. Now suppose that, after he reaches the other shore, he takes the raft and puts it on his head and walks with it on his head wherever he goes because of the important role that raft once played in his life. Would he be using the raft in an appropriate way? No; a reasonable man will realize that the raft has been very useful to him in crossing the river and arriving safely on the other shore, but that once he has arrived, it is proper to leave the raft behind and walk on without it. This is using the raft appropriately.

“In the same way, all truths should be used to cross over; they should not be held on to once you have arrived. You should let go of even the most profound insight or the most wholesome teaching; all the more so, unwholesome teachings.” (Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus, pp. 135-6.)

SERMON: Religion for Atheists

No matter how intelligent or sophisticated we think we are, it has always been the case that good stories teach us better than a slew of philosophical footnotes. And the more important an insight is, the more likely we have learned it from a story.

During my very first year of graduate studies in religion over twenty years ago, I had an experience that came wrapped in such a story. It came at the end of a course on constructing worship services that was taught for both University of Chicago Divinity School students and students from Meadville-Lombard, the small Unitarian seminary a few blocks away. The Divinity School students were all getting ministry degrees rather than academic degrees, and preparing for some brand of Christian ministry. Meadville’s students were also getting ministry degrees and preparing for the Unitarian ministry. Since I was a Divinity School student getting a Ph.D. rather than a ministry degree, and preparing for the Unitarian ministry, I usually found myself between or outside both those camps.

Our teacher was a gifted pastor and preacher, with a remarkable ability to bring others to a quick and powerful appreciation for what religion is really about. For our final assignment, he told us to plan and conduct a worship service together. Then he left us to our task, eavesdropping from the other side of the large room as we proceeded to make fools of ourselves.

The fights were about language, and they began when the Christians wanted to put in an intercessory prayer to Christ. Whereupon the Unitarians threw a fit, insisting that this “Christ” character wasn’t a part of their religion, and wasn’t welcome as a part of this joint worship service, either.

The Christians put up some struggle, but did agree that for this particular service they could leave Christ out. After all, one of them said, the purpose of Christ was really to point to God, anyway.

Whereupon some of the Unitarians again complained. “Let’s not call it God,” said one woman. “That’s so archaic and patriarchal and all. Couldn’t we just call it “the sacred”?

This time, the Christians fought quite a bit longer and harder. Some said that a worship service that left out God was a contradiction in terms. After all, this was to be a worship service, not a discussion group. But the Unitarians dug in too, and after one woman suggested that we might bring God in as long as we also had a prayer to the Goddess, the Christians relented, and agreed that in this increasingly strange service we were planning, there would be neither Christ nor God. One of them, trying to lighten things up a bit, quipped that we had just wiped out two-thirds of the Trinity. “At least,” she said hopefully, “we’ve still got the Holy Spirit.”

Whereupon – yes, one of the Unitarians objected to that word “Holy.” “It sounds so pre-modern,” he said. “Why don’t we just call it “The Spirit,” or maybe “Spirit of Life”?

This time, however, the Christians would not give in. One shouted something about flaky New Age Unitarians who were frightened of anything remotely religious. Another wondered why the Unitarians were even bothering to go into the ministry, rather than just joining a book club somewhere. And one passive-aggressive woman sweetly suggested that we all needed psychological help.

The Unitarians, for their part, tried to say that they liked the idea of having the “spirit” in the service in some way, they just didn’t want to call it “Holy.” This time, the Christians would not yield.

Finally, when the harangue had reached a completely embarrassing level, the professor, who had been listening in from across the large room, made his dramatic entrance. He got up slowly, walked toward us very deliberately, sat on the corner of a table in the middle of our space, gave us that “Father-is-displeased” look, and said sternly “What is your problem?”

Immediately, we all began acting like six-year-olds trying to shift the blame, pointing to the other side and complaining about their unfair demands.

He glared at us: “And the only thing you have been able to agree on is that you would like the Spirit to be a part of your worship service?”

Yes, we all stammered: “But we don’t know what to call it.”

Still the stern father, he shot us a punishing glance and said three words: “Call it forth!”

“Call it forth.” Unless you can call forth the quality of spirit that is rightfully called holy, you don’t have a chance of staging a worship service anyway.

For me, that story is about the very soul of religion, and the core of what it means to be a human being. For all of human history, we have tried to call forth more in life: deeper and more enduring meanings, causes and ideals to serve that can survive us, and grant us a feeling of immortality. We have tried to “call forth” a larger and more encompassing context for our lives, and to claim that we are intrinsic parts of this larger reality. We’ve always done this.

We have discovered Neanderthal burial sites in China, for example, from 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, in which the dead were buried in fetal positions, in womb-shaped graves, facing east, toward the direction of the rising sun. It looks like they were trying to call forth the invisible powers of the sun and the earth to give their dead people a kind of rebirth. So some of the oldest evidence of human activity we have found shows these early two-legged animals treating the ground as Mother Earth, and burying their people in styles and positions suggesting that they believed they were parts of a benevolent cosmic whole that might, somehow and somewhere, let them be “born again.”

More than thirty thousand years ago, primitive hunters painted hundreds of pictures on the walls of an underground cave at Lascaux, France. This cavern system was used for nearly fifteen thousand years, and has been called the world’s largest and oldest religious shrine. The pictures still exist, and were only rediscovered during this past century. They show the animals that tribe hunted, but among those ancient colored drawings was the drawing of one of their shamans. In hunting cultures, a shaman was a highly intuitive man who had a kind of sixth sense about successfully hunting the animals on which they relied for food. The picture of this shaman showed him to be composed of the parts of a dozen different game animals. Here was one of our most ancient efforts to claim a transcendent kind of relationship with the other animals on earth. Here were our ancestors, trying to call forth those unpronounceable spirits that seemed to guide both themselves and the animals they hunted for food.

Also around thirty thousand years ago or more, others among our ancestors made a lot of small “Venus” statues that our modern archaeologists have unearthed. They were small stylized figures of women without heads or arms, but with large breasts and hips. We’re not sure how they used these symbolic figures — though one woman scholar told me a dozen years ago that we are sure than men controlled both the societies and the symbols then, because only men would reduce the visualization of women to faceless, armless breeders! But the statues imply that they had already identified human females as possessing the same kind of generative powers they found throughout their world. Here were our earliest statues showing that some more of our ancestors had conceived of “Mother Earth.” And to do this, they had to assume that they were somehow part of a cosmic style of communication that included not only animals, but even the plant kingdom — indeed, all the creative life forces on earth.

And the human animal hasn’t changed much since then. Back in 1972-3, we sent the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 rockets up, the first spacecraft intended to go beyond our solar system, our first such attempt to communicate with whatever other intelligent life there might be in this corner of the universe. And on these spacecraft, we included small gold plaques with crude drawings of a human male and female. The male has his right hand raised in what we must assume all life in the universe might recognize as a peaceful gesture. We still assume that we are, somehow, small parts of a great and wondrous reality that beggars our imaginations, and yet with which we can somehow, intuitively, communicate.

We have called these unseen dimensions of life by many names, and depicted them in many ways. But always, those who were the most religiously musical or imaginative have tried to call them forth, to make the greater context of our lives visible and memorable.

We have created gods in human form or in animal form, and invented a thousand rituals — from lighting a fire to reciting the same words in the same ways to begin and end ceremonies. It may look like we are worshiping those gods, whether drawn as an ancient shaman made of animal parts or created in our own image, like the gods of the Greeks, Jews, and Hindus. But we are not necessarily worshiping those gods or enslaved by the rituals. Instead, the gods are among the vehicles we have created along the way to carry this great burden of ours.

That “great burden” is the unending quest that lies at the heart of religion. In our society, where fundamentalists have taught most of us our basic understanding of religion (even atheists are atheists in a game invented by fundamentalists), we’re used to hearing this quest called the longing for salvation. But even the two words “religion” and “salvation” give the game away. “Religion” comes from a Latin word meaning “reconnection,” as though we were once connected but have somehow come loose. And “salvation” comes from the same Latin root as the word “salve”: it means to make healthy, to make whole. That is the quest that has defined our magnificently flawed species since before we could even formulate the question: how to get reconnected to a larger kind of reality than our daily lives usually show us.

And we come to churches, including this church, still hoping that somehow something might happen this Sunday to help us find the path between who we are and all that we are meant to be. We come hoping that greater set of possibilities and connections might somehow be called forth.

Unfortunately, we also have an equally deep and ancient flaw. And that flaw is our inability to tell the difference between the sacred quest, and the temporary vehicles we have used in pursuit of it. The quest, the continual human search for greater connections or enlightenment, is sacred. The vehicles are not. Yet we generally exalt the vehicles — and forget the search. Religious wars are the most violent and comic examples of this. We kill one another in the name of our peculiar gods, the same gods whose primary purpose is to help us see that we are all brothers and sisters.

We worship the doorways rather than going through them. Symbols and metaphors seem to confuse us completely, and we are forever mixing up dreams and reality, imagination and fact. In some ways, we are a terribly primitive and unformed species.

When you look at human history, from the caves in Lascaux, France to the Greek gods and goddesses, one of the loudest lessons we learn is that eventually all gods die, all religions pass into other religions, or pass away. Finally, all the vehicles fail, and we are left to go on alone — sometimes, comically, still carrying the dead vehicles on our backs, like lucky charms, or for old times’ sake. Then the spirit has gone out of the religion, and what’s left is little more than a potentially dangerous social club.

Maybe we shouldn’t call it the “spirit.” We tend to be such literalists that we might try to imagine some kind of a ghost, or a cosmic consciousness sort of hovering about, and that isn’t what it is about at all.

So I’ll put it a different way. The ancient Chinese sage Lao-Tzu spoke of “the Way,” which is usually called the Tao, as in the religion of “Taoism.” But he was writing about this same deep quest, this same journey, that has identified the religious dimensions of humans since the beginning. This “Way” is the way of living that we’ve always sought, a way of living that reconnects us with that Spirit, makes us whole, makes us one with the way things really are. Here is how Lao-Tzu put it 2500 years ago:

The Way is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

Lao-Tzu might have added that it gave birth to God, or that it created all the gods as temporary vehicles to carry us on our searches for this Way. But it is that Way of living and being that we have always been trying to call forth, through all the religious and poetic and ritual languages humans have known. And the way you can tell when someone has found that Way, or is nearing it, is through the quality of their character. Martin Luther King Jr. used to say he dreamed of the time when we would all be known by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. The content of our character is the clearest measure of whether or not someone has found the Way, or is still lost. And there is something terribly deep within all human beings that knows this instinctively.

A few years ago, people the world over were willing to overlook Princess Diana’s adultery and other nude chicanery, because of her many humanitarian activities on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged. People saw her as a vehicle for a sacred kind of concern for others. And they were willing to accept imperfections in the vehicle because it was a vehicle that seemed to have found the Way.

Mother Teresa was recognized by many as a saint, and it had nothing to do with her religion, only with her actions. Gandhi the Hindu was revered by Christians, Jews, Muslims and others all over the world because there was something sacred about him, too. He had “found it,” and we recognized it. He had found that reconnection, that wholeness, that “Way,” that we all recognize as the most sacred of all human quests. Tibetan Buddhism’s Dali Lama is likewise recognized by people of all faiths as one who has that special dimension, one who has called forth that elusive Spirit, found the Way.

This isn’t limited to religious figures. Muhammad Ali is still revered all over the world, and only partly because of his once-great gifts as a boxer. He’s more revered for his great gifts of integrity and moral courage, because those show us that he too had found the Way. How we adore and chase after those who seem to have found it! And we all know that the secret of Mother Teresa’s character, or Gandhi’s, the Dali Lama’s or Muhammad Ali’s had nothing to do with their official religions of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam. The secret of their character came from a place far deeper. It came from that place in us that preceded the gods, that identified us before any of the world’s religions were ever born. That’s why people all over the world can so easily recognize people who have found that Way, whose lives have that deep spiritual dimension, regardless of their religion: because what all religions are after is something older than religion itself: older than God, as Lao-tzu put it. And what we are after is that same quality of spirit, wherever it is found.

But do you see what has happened here? There is a rich irony here, an irony worth trying to put into words. It means that within us, within each of us and all of us, are the yearnings that gave birth to the gods. And salvation, or wholeness, or finding what Lao-tzu called the Way, happens only when we are reconnected with that level of ourselves, responding to that level in others, anchored in that level of life itself. All salvation, in other words, is salvation by character. And we know it instinctively. We admire Muhammad Ali and are repulsed by Mike Tyson because the first had a quality of character that the second did not. We neither know nor care what Princess Diana believed, because that deeper quality of character showed so brightly in her crusades against land mines and for the disadvantaged.

Some of you may have heard about, or seen televised clips from, Mike Tyson’s fight with Andrew Golota Friday night (20 October 2000). Golota was taking a beating, and after the second round he simply refused to fight any more, and left the ring — still guaranteed the three million dollars or more he received for the fight. What was most interesting about the sportscasters’ comments afterwards is that they never mentioned his boxing — only his character.

If you doubt that we know what is and is not sacred about people, go to funerals or memorial services. Imagine a eulogy saying the best thing about this person was that they faithfully recited all of their religion’s prescribed creeds. What a thunderously damning eulogy that would be! No, if we are to speak highly and warmly and honestly of people, we must speak of the quality and content of their character. They cared, they tried to serve noble ideals. They tried to be constructive parts of a world not made in their image. They showed moral courage when it counted, and so they were a blessing to the world as they passed through it. That is where salvation dwells, and we all know it. People may pass through the doors offered by their particular religions or philosophies to find that deeper level of life. But the doors are not holy, only the passage through them.

When we reach the foundations of the religious quest, we find, like Lao-tzu did twenty five centuries ago, that we are standing in a place older than the gods, older than religion. We are standing in that place from which we came, and to which we have sought a reconnection all of our lives and for all of our history.

Then we aren’t asking questions about orthodoxy. We’re asking much simpler and more eternal questions. We are asking “Who am I, and who am I called to be? What do I owe to others, even to strangers? What do I owe to my species, and to history? Where is the path I can travel to fulfill these questions? Where is the Way that can make me whole again, by reconnecting me with all others who live, all who have ever lived, and all life that ever was or ever will be? How can I live in proud and noble ways, rather than selfish ones? How can I live my life under the gaze of eternity and still hold my head up high?” Now we are looking for the Way, and calling forth the Spirit called “Holy.”

How this changes everything!

 Now when we ask where the sacred dimension of life, the Spirit, the Way, is to be made manifest, the answer comes back “Perhaps here.”

Now when we ask when this sacred dimension of life is to be called forth, the answer comes back “Perhaps now.”

When we ask whose task is it to call forth this saving spirit that can make us feel more whole, the answer comes back “Perhaps it is our task.”

When we look around our world with a thousand different religions and cultures, and ask how on earth we are to accomplish such a sacred and eternal task here and now, the answer comes back “Perhaps together.”

One of the greatest ironies in all of human history is the fact that when we arrive at the very foundation of all our religious questions, we have moved beyond religion, to a place older than the gods. It is the religion of salvation by character and wholeness. It is the religion of atheists — and, ironically, it is the deepest religion of everyone else, too.

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Davidson Loehr

October 15, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Before moving to Texas, I never gave much thought to the death penalty. Here, in a state that executes more criminals than almost all countries, it’s hard not to think about it. As I read and listen to the standard religious arguments against the death penalty, I’m not convinced that there are any problems as simple as those religious prescriptions. The best I’ll be able to do in this sermon is to expand the horizons of thinking, and explore a variety of arguments of varying persuasiveness. But for now, I’ll confess that my guiding thought is that the quality of human lives follows a bell curve, with saints at one end, most of us in the middle, and some truly evil people at the other. Perhaps this will give us all the chance to re-examine our feelings and values on this complex and emotionally loaded issue of the death penalty.

PRAYER:

We pray to the angels of our better nature as we approach the subject of capital punishment, a subject on which we do not, and will not, agree. In our disagreements, we would seek to engage each other as moral equals. Moral equals. If we can know that much about each other, even our disagreements may be ennobling. We ask this depth of compassion from ourselves. Realistically, we can probably ask no more. As a people of faith, we can ask no less. Amen.

SERMON: “Not Fit To Live?”

Honest religion is supposed to develop our souls and expand our understanding of the world. The result is almost never a clear and unambiguous answer that all good people must follow like marching orders. Instead, it is a broadening and deepening of our understanding of the world so that our differences may be enriching and fertile, rather than divisive. That’s a noble goal, seldom achieved. It is my goal here this morning.

Those of us here today represent almost the entire range of opinions about capital punishment. Some here are deeply against it, considering it too barbaric to be defended. Some are strongly in favor of it and consider it a just and appropriate end for those who have committed the most heinous crimes. Most are somewhere in between. It is a complex, emotionally loaded issue on which intelligent people of good will can and do disagree.

Most religions, though not all, are against the death penalty. Their arguments are almost all variations on the same theme, which is that life is sacred, period. Western religions have this in spades; the creation story in the book of Genesis makes it clear that we were just dirt until God breathed life into us. So life, in Western religions, has been seen as a gift of God, not a byproduct of nature.

Of course, this idea that life is sacred has seldom been honored in the real world. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have never had much trouble killing others of God’s children, as all religious wars have witnessed to, and as we’re still seeing today in the Middle East. And the Christians have had a long list of scapegoats: Jews, Muslims, witches, native Americans, and anyone else who got in the way of their “Manifest Destiny” to rule the world have always been fair game for killing. So the reality has never matched the rhetoric. Still, the notion that life is a kind of sacred gift is in almost every religious argument against capital punishment. Also, it’s an emotionally appealing notion, even if it’s not historically common.

The most coherent — and my favorite — form of this argument is what the Roman Catholic Church calls its “seamless garment” argument for the sanctity of life. Catholics are officially opposed to killing life at any stage, whether in an abortion or a state-sanctioned execution. The reason, again, is that all life is a sacred gift from God, so beyond our authority to destroy.

We’re so used to hearing this that we tend to forget how ancient it is, this idea that all human life is sacred — and that it had historical origins. The reasons life was considered so sacred — especially the lives of males, we should add — are easy to discover. Children represented more workers for the farming or herding through which the family fed itself. Children were the “pension plan” for their parents, expected to take care of them in their old age. Infant and child mortality rates were higher, so more children increased the chances that some would live to adulthood. And we can’t forget how important it seems always to have been for men to have a boy to carry on their name. This was true in the ancient story of Abraham. It drove the English King Henry VIII, and many, many fathers today. I’m not demeaning this, just observing it as a persistent part of our human nature. And of course we think life is sacred because we want to think that something about us is deeply sacred, worthy of respect and protection.

All along, it seems that the sanctity of human life has been driven, in part, by a feeling of scarcity — the fact that life always seemed fragile, and we needed more people. The feeling made sense when the population of the world was less that 1/60th of the population today. Just a look at the population figures from the last three millennia can show us how much has changed.

In 1400 BCE, about the time traditionally assigned to Moses, the total population of the world is estimated to have been about a hundred million, a little over a third the size of the United States. (Daniel Quinn, The Story of B, p. 264. I hope and assume that Quinn did his homework on figures so easy to check, since I didn’t do my homework.) By the time of Jesus, the world’s population had doubled, to about two-thirds the population of the United States today. (Quinn, p. 267)

By 1200, in the Middle Ages, it had doubled again. So 800 years ago, the total population of the world was about the same as today’s population of the United States plus Canada. Wars, plagues, high infant mortality and early deaths still made life seem fragile, and high birth rates were still defenses against all kinds of both real and imagined extinctions. (Quinn, 269)

In just five hundred more years, by 1700, the population had again doubled, to about eight hundred million people — less that the present population of China. (Quinn, p. 270) The next doubling took only two centuries. And then, from 1900-1960, the population doubled again, in only sixty years, to three billion humans. (273) And in the thirty-six years from 1960-1996, the population doubled again, to more than six billion people. (Quinn, 274)

Human life, which must once have seemed as rare as diamonds, is now as common as pebbles. And today all over our country and all over the world, in ways both large and small, our behaviors show that in fact we do not think of life as sacred, or as something that automatically trumps all other considerations:

— Abortions. Whether or not life is regarded as even desirable, let alone sacred, depends on whether we are willing to support it, to give it the time, energy and money it would cost. I think these are the real arguments most women would make for abortions, and I think they are valid arguments. Furthermore, our society and the societies of almost all industrialized countries also treat life as something we can choose or not. Not only birth control, but also abortions, and now the growing availability of the RU-486 pill, the “abortion pill,” have let our actions speak for us. Life is natural, not supernatural, and it’s a choice, not a demand.

— Our wars, most of which have been for economic advantage, show that we regard money as more important than life.

— While many religious conservatives still argue that birth control and abortions are sins against God, Even Roman Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as non-Catholic women. Life isn’t that rare, and we say No to life every day. Like it or not, we have higher priorities.

— Nicotine causes nearly a half million deaths a year. If you’ve ever smoked, you know as I do that the alleged sanctity of life can’t hold a candle to a good smoke.

— We could even mention that we know every year about 50,000 Americans will be killed in traffic accidents. We also know that we could probably save 49,500 of those lives every year by reducing the national speed limit to 10 mph. Almost nobody would vote for it. We’ve got places to go and things to do that are a lot more important to us than 50,000 lives.

So the ancient religious insistence that the mere quantity of life, even the possibility of life is sacred, is no longer held by many people at all. We have shifted to valuing quality over quantity of life.

But a few romantic preachers aside, life has never been regarded as the ultimate value, sacred beyond compromise or cancellation. We have always believed that certain social behaviors are required of human beings, and that if you are dangerous to others, you may lose the right to live. Not just to live in society, but even to live. One of the costs of living in any society is that we must give up some control to the society. It sets the rules, and when we go over the line, all societies have the right to deprive us of our money, our freedom, our property, even our lives.

This idea that some anti-social behaviors make us unfit to live also has roots in one of the most misunderstood and mistaught stories in the Bible, the story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The famous part of the story, which you probably know, is that a group of local men wanted to sodomize — as it’s now called — a visitor to town, and that his host (after offering his daughter to the mob) finally gave the man over to be sodomized and murdered.

When religious literalists say that God’s destruction of the city was because of homosexuality, they are mis-teaching the story, and every good biblical scholar knows it. The crime for which the city was destroyed was the crime of giving over a visitor to be murdered. The crime was uncivil and murderous behavior, not sodomy. The visitor wasn’t a heretic, wasn’t an enemy of the faith, he was just a human being with a right to expect civility and protection from other human beings.

This failure to provide the most basic of human protection and kindness, the ancient Hebrews taught, was so hated by God that those who transgressed it were no longer fit to live. You don’t have to agree with the story, but it does help make the point that for all of recorded history we have found some people unfit to live because of their behaviors — whether you choose to call those behaviors anti-social, psychopathic or evil.

There seems to be something deep inside of us that sees certain criminal or psychopathic behaviors as putting us beyond the pale, making us unfit to live.

When it’s said this way, the idea sounds so foreign it’s hard for me to relate to, and I imagine many of you also find it foreign. For some of you, the idea that someone can do something so heinous that they are not fit to live will never be an acceptable idea. For others — and apparently for quite a majority of Americans — it is a very acceptable idea.

I want to see if I can help us relate to this idea, even if we will never find it attractive. If we can’t relate to the idea, we will not be able to understand the position of a majority in our society. So I’ll use two stories, one strong but fictional, the other true but weak.

I suspect that many of you watched the award-winning television miniseries named “Lonesome Dove” a few years ago. I think it was one of the finest and most powerful dramas ever aired on television, partly because the actors were so powerful. Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall and Robert Urich are the three I’m thinking of, and they were involved in a very powerful scene that I want to remind you of.

Robert Urich’s character seemed to lack something essential — a moral center, a sense of right and wrong. He fell in with two psychopathic murderers, who tortured, killed and then burned a farmer. Urich didn’t help with the killing, he was just there with them, watching, and not stopping them — kind of like the host in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

When Robert Duvall’s and Tommy Lee Jones’s characters found the murdered and burned farmer, they became agents of retribution. They tracked down and caught the three men. They were surprised and saddened to find the Robert Urich character among them, for he was their friend. Urich’s character didn’t seem to understand what he had done wrong. As I remember it, Duvall said “You crossed over the line.” “I didn’t see the line,” said Urich. “I’m sorry,” was the answer, and the three men were hanged.

That scene has seemed to me very profound, with an insight into the nature of human nature and of justice that I can’t shake. There is a line, I believe, that we cannot cross, and when we do we are beyond the protection of society. We’re even beyond the love of God, according to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I think almost all of us know this line intuitively. What we do with people who cross that line is a political and legal decision. Is it worth spending money to keep murderers, rapists and other psychopaths alive for twenty to fifty years? We know prisons will not rehabilitate them. Is that how a society wants to spend its resources? I don’t think this is a question to which there is an obvious answer.

Still, it is so hard to put ourselves in the place of the two cowboys in “Lonesome Dove” who hanged the three men. This is where this whole subject feels most likely to slip away from my ability to grasp it, and perhaps from yours.

So I offer you a second story, from my own past. You may decide it is a weak analogy, and it is a weak analogy. But it’s all I have. Twenty five years ago my wife and I raised purebred dogs. It was a fairly rare breed called Briards, a French sheepdog. The males could stand 28″ at the shoulders and weigh over 110 lbs. My wife was obsessive about the breeding, and matched our females with the best-bred stud dogs in the country. Many of the puppies we sold later became champions. They were just wonderful dogs. But over a period of four years, two of the puppies we sold grew to become dangerous. One female was so protective that when her owner’s two-year-old daughter ran into the room in the middle of the night because she had had a nightmare, the dog attacked her. The animal shelter called us the next day when the recognized the breed, and we picked up the dog and brought it home. A couple years later, a big male dog simply had something wrong, he was like a dog version of a psychopath. My wife and I both felt completely safe around this 110 lb. dog. But he chased and bit two children, and then without any warning attacked a friend of ours during a bridge game in our home, tearing open his face so badly it required over thirty stitches. He was a professional photographer, and nearly lost an eye.

I don’t have to tell you these dogs crossed over that line. You know they did. And you probably know what happened next. Both times, I took the dogs to the vet and had them killed. I had to feed these dogs tranquilizer pills so they would not be a danger to the vets or the teenagers working in the clinics. I will tell you without shame that both times I cried all the way to the veterinarian’s office, and all the way home again.

We had had such high hopes for these animals! They had the best breeding, the best food, excellent obedience training. Anyone here who has owned a pet knows how much we can love animals, and both my wife and I loved all the dogs, even these two, named Mairzy Doats and George. We could have chosen to build on to the kennel, to keep them separate from our other dogs and from our friends, and kept them alive for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t worth it. We didn’t have that much money or space, which is to say there were many other ways we preferred to use what money and energy we had.

But we shed many tears, even over these animals that had done terrible things, had crossed over that line, and who we chose to — well, we use the euphemism “to put down,” but it means we chose to execute them. I don’t want to imply for even a second that I equate dogs with people. It is a different order of being. I tell you the story partly to say that I know what it is like to decide to kill a dangerous animal, even one I loved. Our reasons for killing the dogs were reasons of money, space and priorities.

The subject of executing human psychopaths, murderers, dangerous people who have crossed over that line is not this simple. And there are several dimensions of the capital punishment debate on which we would probably all agree. I need to mention some of these.

— First, the legal system that sentences and executes our prisoners is imperfect. Blacks and other minorities, but especially blacks, are both imprisoned and executed in disproportionate numbers. I don’t know if this is race or economics. I suspect that much of it reflects the fact that poor people die in disproportionate numbers both in and out of prisons. They can’t afford the best lawyers, the best doctors, the best education, the best health care. American children raised in poverty are up to five times more likely to die of various causes than the children of more privileged families, regardless of their race. The system isn’t adequate and we all know it.

— Some prisoners who are executed are innocent. In Illinois, in Texas, everywhere. The legal system is a human institution, so it will never be perfect. We don’t like to admit it, but innocent people die in almost every human endeavor. In war, some soldiers are killed by what we call “friendly fire,” meaning that our own troops mistakenly killed their comrades. Even when we do the best we can, some innocent people die. However, even if we can’t make the system perfect, it can and should be continually monitored and improved.

— It is also clear, I think, that capital punishment is no more a deterrent than prison time is a rehabilitation. It is retribution, punishment, the vengeance of society. If there is a persuasive argument that either imprisonment or capital punishment are any more than that, I haven’t heard it.

There are more areas besides these three that we could probably all agree need to be addressed and improved, no matter what our position is on the death penalty.

However, they don’t change the basic issue of whether the most proper and desirable punishment for those who have crossed over that line is life imprisonment or execution. And I don’t think many people on either side of this argument are likely to have their minds changed.

But in a society where so many of our laws and behaviors show that we do not consider the mere fact of life to be sacred, or even to trump all other considerations, I don’t think the “seamless garment” argument of the Catholic Church is adequate. It’s a seamless garment built on an assumption that doesn’t fit any enduring human society.

I do like the idea of a “seamless garment” argument, a consistent attitude toward life that we can use both for abortion and for the subject of capital punishment. I don’t find it a black-and-white picture, however. I find it filled with grays. The quality of human lives seems to be like a bell curve. Most are precious. Some few are exquisite, even saintly. We can all think of some people in that category. And some, at the other end, have crossed over a line that even some of our most ancient religious teachers have believed make us unfit to live. As ugly as that sounds to say, and perhaps to hear, I believe it is true.

And my personal opinion, I am somewhat surprised to discover, is that I can’t find any persuasive arguments against capital punishment, especially from religious writers. Yet the logic isn’t enough. It isn’t enough for me, and I hope it isn’t enough for you. The intellectual arguments, the mere logic, aren’t enough. At least two more things are needed.

First, since we will probably never agree on whether or not capital punishment is just, ethical or moral, we must strive to broaden and deepen our understanding of the issues involved so that our disagreements can be insightful rather than spiteful, informative and enlightening rather than merely divisive. We need to understand that intelligent people of good will — people just as intelligent and just as moral as we know we are — can and do disagree on all complex issues, from abortion at the beginning of life to capital punishment as an end of life.

But something is still missing. There is sometimes what seems like a hardness, even a smugness from some people on both sides of the capital punishment debate. I have heard Governor Bush’s attitude during the recent presidential debates described as smug, even taunting, when he bragged that in Texas murderers are killed. I hope he doesn’t feel that way, because that attitude will make us miss what I believe is the most important of all attitudes toward these prisoners who are condemned either to die or to rot away in hellish, inhumane prisons.

What’s missing are the tears.

Even with the two dogs I had executed, I cried like a baby. God, there were so many hopes and dreams that died with those two dogs.

Where are the tears for the failed humans? Where are the tears for all the hopes and dreams that die, die, every time we slam shut forever another prison door or kill another prisoner?

I believe it is possible for good and moral people to decide that capital punishment is appropriate and just. The voting majorities in 38 of our 50 states, and both of our major presidential candidates, apparently feel this way. But I do not believe that it should be possible for us to accept either the growing prison population or the growing number of prisoners we choose to execute, without hurting so badly that we have to cry. Unless we feel, and live with, the terrible sense of loss of dreams and hopes and all that we have always wished were sacred — unless we have the tears, I think we will lose more of our own humanity than we can afford to lose. And to lose that degree of humanity is finally to suffer the irony of having capital punishment execute a piece of our own soul, and the soul of our nation.

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Davidson Loehr

October 8, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

I want to talk with you about capitalism and economics – not as an economist, but as a theologian.

I know very little about economics. I’m not a CPA either, and couldn’t begin to analyze complicated financial pictures. But I am a theologian, and I do know about gods. I know how they work, how powerful they are, how invisible they usually are, and know that beneath nearly every human endeavor with any passion or commitment about it, there will be a god operating, doing the things gods do.

Gods aren’t “Critters in the sky,” like big cartoon characters, even though it’s common to speak of them that way. Gods are those central concerns that our behaviors show we take very seriously. We commit our lives to them, we are driven by them, and in return they promise us something we want, or think we want. Whether what they promise us is good or bad is a measure of whether the god involved is an adequate or an inadequate one. Good gods really have the power to bestow a greater and nobler quality of life. Bad gods pretend to, but in the end it turns out that we serve them. They get their power, we learn too late, by sucking the life out of us. In return, we get very little that was worth the sacrifice of our lives. The Greeks have a wonderful picture of the seduction, and the consequence of following, idols. It’s in Homer’s Odyssey, on Odysseus’s return home. Just before he comes to the Straits of Messina (where he is given another choice with profound psychological and existential echoes today), he has his famous encounter with the Sirens. Sirens were powerfully seductive goddesses whose sweet talk lured any sailors who heard them to their deaths. The sweet voices promised a life of love, ecstasy, ease, and all-round wonderfulness that was just too good to be true. When you looked on the beaches of their island, you saw nothing but the bleached bones of the fools who had followed them: they were too good to be true. Odysseus, you may remember, wanted to have the experience and feel the temptation, but was wise enough to know that no mortal can long resist the sweet voices of Sirens. So he had his men tie him to the mast, making them swear they would not untie him no matter what he may say. Then they put beeswax in their own ears, and sailed past the Sirens. The Sirens were so persuasive that Odysseus screamed at his men to untie him, that he might sail toward them. But they couldn’t hear him. So-in spite of his momentary wishes, you might say-Odysseus lived to serve nobler causes.

As a theologian, I’d say that the most important fact we can know about ourselves is to know the gods we’re serving in our lives and in our societies, and whether they are really worth our lives.

And in this age of skepticism and disbelief, one of the biggest misunderstandings about us is the thought that we have no gods, that we’re not a religious people. In general, we serve our gods well, even when they’re not worth serving at all.

 

Gods and Idols: Serving People or Profits

I’m interested in this battle between gods and idols, and how that is being played out in our economy today. It isn’t a simple thing, the contrast between people and profits. Its roots go all the way back to comments made by the Founding Fathers, over 200 years ago. Our founding fathers had very mixed opinions of “we the people”–many of them pretty insulting.

Alexander Hamilton declared that the people are “a great beast” that must be tamed. Rebellious and independent farmers had to be taught, sometimes by force, that the ideals of the revolutionary pamphlets were not to be taken too seriously. (Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People, p. 46).

Or as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme court, put it, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” (Chomsky, 46) Others among the founding fathers agreed wholeheartedly. The primary responsibility of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” said James Madison. (Chomsky, 47) Those “without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights,” Madison explained. His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who “come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable set of men.” (Chomsky, 48)

This sounds like today’s cynical capitalism, but it was not. Like Adam Smith and the other founders of classical liberalism, Madison was precapitalist, and anticapitalist in spirit. But education, philosophical understanding and gentility were associated with money (I don’t think they would see that connection between money and character to be as strong today).

Still, Madison hoped that the rulers in this “opulent minority” would be “enlightened Statesmen” and “benevolent philosophers,” “whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country.” Such men would, he believed, “refine” and “enlarge” the “public views,” guarding the true interests of the country against the “mischiefs” of democratic majorities, but with enlightenment and benevolence. (Chomsky, 51-52).

For a man of James Madison’s depth and brilliance, that’s quite a naive hope!

He soon learned differently, as the “opulent minority” proceeded to use their power much as Adam Smith had predicted they would a few years earlier. They were living by the motto “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” By 1792, Madison warned that the rising developing capitalist state was “substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty,” leading to “a real domination by the few under [a merely] apparent liberty of the many.” (Chomsky, 52)

Thomas Jefferson also distrusted the emerging class of capitalists: “The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.” (Jim Hightower, If the Gods Had Meant for Us To Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates, p. 283). Sounds surprisingly modern.

The battle between democracy and private profit-making has been a continuous thread in our history since the country began. A century ago, the American philosopher John Dewey was still writing, in the same key as Jefferson and Madison had, that democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” John Dewey wrote this in the days before radio, television, or mass media. He also wrote that in a free and democratic society, workers must be “the masters of their own industrial fate,” not tools rented by employers. (Chomsky, 52)

It is a little eerie how much John Dewey sounds like James Madison, when Madison wrote more than 200 years ago that “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.” (Chomsky, 53)

So there are these two powerful and opposite ideas in our society, both with roots going all the way back to our founding. Both centers of thinking are still battling to be the gods (or idols) that define us, our hopes and possibilities, our society. Will the people rule the country, or will big businesses rule the country and the people, while bamboozling the masses to keep them from understanding how badly they are being manipulated?

We live in the time when the scales have tipped heavily toward capitalism and away from democracy.

How did they get tipped so badly this time? One obvious culprit–or hero, depending on your perspective here–is the great economist Milton Friedman, who said, in his influential book Capitalism and Freedom, that profit-making is the essence of democracy, so any government that pursues antimarket policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. (Chomsky, 9) That’s a powerful, terrifying, revolutionary redefinition of democracy. It’s amazing to me any anyone would ever have let it pass, let alone enshrined it.

But once you decide that the goal is profits over the wishes of people (“no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy”), the manipulation of us masses is a constant part of the scheme. Because of course people don’t want to do more work for less money, to lose their power, their possibilities, even their chance of realistic hope. So the art of deceiving us has been with us a long time, too.

The art of bamboozling us is not a secret art. Until recently, it was talked about quite openly, going all the way back to at least the 1920s. The name from that time, one of the most important names in the art of bamboozling the masses, was Edward Bernays. Bernays had worked in Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the first U.S. state propaganda agency. Bernays wrote that “It was the astounding success of propaganda during the [First World] war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.” (Chomsky, 54)

Here are more words from this most influential American: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” To carry out this essential task, “the intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically,” because of course they alone “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and can “pull the wires which control the public mind.” This process of “engineering consent”–a phrase Bernays coined–is the very “essence of the democratic process,” he wrote shortly before he was honored for his contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1949. (Chomsky, 53)

Another member of Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda committee was Walter Lippman, one of the most influential and respected journalists in America for about fifty years, and a brilliant, articulate, man. The intelligent minority, Lippman explained in essays on democracy, are a “specialized class” who are responsible for setting policy and for “the formation of a sound public opinion.” They must be free from interference by the general public, who are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” The public must “be put in its place”; their function is to be “spectators of action,” not participants–apart from periodic electoral exercises when they choose among the specialized class. (Chomsky, 54)

About a trillion dollars a year are now spent on marketing. Much of that money is tax-deductible, producing the irony that we are paying many of the costs of the manipulation of our attitudes and behavior. (Chomsky, 58)

But that’s just local news. And capitalism, like all gods, is a jealous god, and knows no boundaries. Eventually, most gods and idols seem to want to rule the world.

 

Enter NAFTA

When the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) legislation for Canada, The United States and Mexico was rushed through–over about a 60% public opinion against it–contradictory studies were suppressed or ignored. The Office of Technology Assessment, for instance, which is the research bureau of our Congress, published a report saying that NAFTA would harm most of the population of North America. That report was suppressed. (Chomsky, 102)

The defenders of NAFTA sometimes slip up in their public acknowledgements of how it is producing such record profits for corporations at the expense of workers. Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in February 1997, for example, Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan saw “sustainable economic expansion” thanks to “atypical restraint on compensation increases [which] appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity.”

What NAFTA made possible on an international scale was the ability of corporations to serve profit for the owners and shareholders by disempowering and dismissing the masses who worked for them. Workers were and are terrified that the owners will take the business to Mexico, Saipan, Burma, Vietnam and other cheap labor and forced-labor markets, which is what they are doing. We have become a little numb to the fact that whenever the stock market rises it almost always means that tens of thousands of our neighbors have been fired, their benefits or insurance cut or eliminated, and work is being done by dollar-a-day workers in other countries, often in conditions of inhumane forced labor. This is capitalism working perfectly, and it is an unmitigated disaster for almost every economy it touches.

After all the hype to push the passage of NAFTA through in spite of public objection, we don’t hear much about the post-NAFTA collapse of the Mexican economy, exempting only the very rich and US investors (protected by US government bailouts). Mexico was successfully transformed into a cheap labor market with wages only 1/10th of US wages, as the people, the masses, have been driven down farther into poverty, and their American counterparts lost their jobs. In the past decade, the number of Mexicans living in extreme pov-erty in rural areas increased by almost a third. Half the total population lacks resources to meet basic needs, a dramatic increase since 1980. The list goes on, it is quite a long and sad one. You don’t have to ask who won. This is capitalism. The people who control the capital won. Nobody else.

We seldom read about many of the effects of NAFTA in this country, either. Shortly after the NAFTA vote in Congress, workers were fired from Honeywell and GE plants for attempting to organize independent unions. The Ford Motor Company had fired its entire work force, eliminating the union contract and rehiring workers at far lower salaries. (Chomsky, 125)

Wages here have fallen to the level of the 1960s for production and non-supervisory workers. The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment predicted that NAFTA “could further lock the United States into a low-wage, low-productivity future.” (Chomsky, 126-127) But that report, like the others, was suppressed.

 

The Almighty Stock Market?

The quality of our economy, according to the pundits on television, is determined by the stock market. Yet again, we must ask what small part of the economy we’re talking about. Half the stocks in 1997 were owned by the wealthiest one percent of households, and almost ninety percent were owned by the wealthiest ten percent. Concentration is still higher for bonds and trusts. (Chomsky, 147) Today’s upper-class prosperity is built almost entirely on the bloated prices of corporate stocks. (Hightower, 149)

While the number of Americans getting college degrees is increasing, there are some who feel that this is a cynical ploy to make the degrees more worthless, because the real growing job market looks to be low-tech and low-paid. Between now and 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the thirty fastest-growing job categories include only seven that require even a bachelor’s degree. More than half of them pay under $18,000 a year. (Hightower, 152-153) And these are the thirty fastest-growing jobs coming up, the immediate hope for desperate people.

Times like this make me think of the great American philosopher Yogi Berra, when he said, “Half the lies they tell me aren’t true.”

Let’s bring it closer to home. Here in Austin, there are some 350 developers putting up some ten thousand homes a year. Less than five percent of these houses are priced below $100,000. Apartment construction here is also up. But of the 4,312 units built in 1998, only five percent were moderately priced. A bitter irony for the construction crews building these apartments is that they’re averaging about ten bucks an hour, and can’t find any place they can afford to live here. (Hightower, 157) Across the US, seventy percent of renters now pay more than a third of their monthly income on rent. (Hightower, 163) Indeed, some in this church are paying more than half their monthly income on rent. It isn’t because they can’t handle money well, it’s because prices are going up while wages and benefits are going down.

Twenty-five percent of the jobs in today’s celebrated economy pay a poverty wage. That’s 32 million people. (Hightower, 165)

Farmers today get only 20′ of the food dollar you and I spend, a nickel less than just a decade ago. That’s a 20% drop in income, in just one decade. (Hightower, 240)

If you back off to think of this battle of the rights of profits versus people, you could imagine, at least theoretically, an extreme kind of world in which the rights of corporations–which, incidentally, have no rights at all, only the privilege of existing as long as the public believes the corporations are serving the public’s general good–could actually trump the rights of people, states, even nations. Imagine a world in which corporations could sue nations if those nations took actions that cost the corporations revenues. In other words, imagine that a nation decided a gasoline additive was toxic to the environment, and banned gasolines containing it, and that nation was then sued by the corporation for loss of revenues. Or imagine a case where a corporation went into another country, used its power to create an illegal monopoly driving local firms out of business. Let’s say the locals caught on, took the corporation to court, ruled against it and even fined it for illegal business practices. It could happen. But in this most bizarre of imaginary worlds, imagine the corporation could then sue the entire nation for loss of profits. And imagine, since we’ve already crossed over into the insane, that the corporation could bypass all the courts in the nation it was suing, and win a multi-million dollar judgment against a country decided by a three-person team of financial advisors, of which the corporation got to pick one

 

Welcome to Chapter Eleven of the NAFTA agreement, for that world is already here, and so are the lawsuits.

First is a case reported on Jim Hightower’s radio show by a staunch, even rabid, Republican from Mississippi, a man named Mike Allred. Allred got involved when a funeral parlor owner from Biloxi, Mississippi came to him for help. A massive funeral home conglomerate from Canada named the Loewen Group had come into Biloxi, as it had come into many other cities in the United States, and used a variety of unlawful practices to force other funeral parlor operators out of business, then jack up the prices. One man sued them. In 1995, a Mississippi jury agreed that the Loewen Group was unscrupulous. The local man was awarded $100 million in damages by the jurors, and they added another $160 million in punitive damages. Loewen’s lawyers got the judge to force the jury to reconsider the punitive award, and the jury increased punitive damages to $400 million. The Loewen Group tried a couple other legal end-runs to avoid payments, but were unsuccessful.

Then one of their lawyers discovered Chapter Eleven in the new NAFTA agreeement. In 1998, Loewen suddenly sued the U.S. government, claiming the Mississippi court system expropriated the assets of its investors and harmed their future profits. The fact that Loewen was guilty of illegal and un-scrupulous practices was irrelevant. The Mississippi court took money from the corporation, in violation of the investor rights granted them in the NAFTA agreement. In other words, NAFTA had bestowed a legal right on foreign corpo-rations that allows them to avoid the punishment our state courts impose on them when they break our laws, allowing them to demand that our national government pay for any fines and financial losses the corporation incurred as a result of the guilty verdict. Loewen is now demanding $725 million from the US taxpayers.

There’s more. The case bypasses all US courts. It goes before a special “corporate court” of three trade arbiters, one of which is chosen by Loewen. The results are imposed on our nation, our taxpayers, and are not subject to review by any of our courts. The people from Mississippi were not allowed to appear, since their testimony that the Loewen Group’s behavior was illegal, monopolistic, unethical was irrelevant.

There is also no requirement that either the corporation or the government has to make the case public. Some feel that a victory for Loewen would completely undermine the American civil justice system, putting the profits of foreign corporations above any and all interests of all of our citizens and all of our laws. But even if Loewen loses this case, the rights are still there, guaranteed to investors but not to nations, for other corporations to try.

At least two other such cases have been filed, I’ll talk about only the shorter one. The Ethyl Corporation, based in Virginia, has already sued the Canadian government for banning their leaded gasoline and labeling its additive toxic (our own EPA is working to ban the same toxic additive). Canada was sued for $251 million, the little panel of trade arbiters met with government officials, and settled for having the government pay them $13 million and apologize for implying that their gasoline additive is dangerous, even though they, and our own EPA, know it is dangerous. By doing this, they have set a precedent for corporations being able to sue governments for loss of profit, and by denying people and whole nations the right to protect their people and their environment from poisonous chemicals added to their fuel or food, as long as some corporation is making a profit from it.

Remember Thomas Jefferson’s prescient statement from two centuries ago: “The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.” The spirit of capitalism is a lot like the spirits of the Sirens, promising what they can not deliver, but doing with so very seductively. What is happening is what Thomas Jefferson and many of the other founders of this country feared would happen. The power has shifted from the people to the corporations, and laws are being enacted and enforced that let profits trump people and international corporations trump nations. This is the logic under which the media and politicians of both major parties can define ours as a “strong” economy while wages for the majority of Americans are lower in constant dollars than they were thirty years ago, personal bankruptcy rates set new records every year, we have the highest child poverty rate in the developed world, the highest mortality rate for children under five in all the industrial nations, our nation’s companies are eliminating about 64,000 of the better-paying jobs each month, and Americans in their 20s are the first generation who can not expect to do better financially than their parents. If this is a “strong” economy, we need to ask “for whom, and at whose expense?”

To me, this story is about the only story worth writing about, it is a betrayal of democracy barely short of treason. I think it will become a “cause” for me, something I’ll devote some time and energy to in the wider community. I’ve called Jim Hightower’s office and the Austin Metropolitan Ministries, suggesting that clergy should become involved in sponsoring public lectures and panel discussions on the subject of the systematic selling out of people for profits, and I’ve offered to serve as either lecturer or moderator for public panels.

If you think I’m wrong, I challenge you to produce some data and arguments that can account for these facts in another way, and suggest that this church could provide an important service to itself and the greater community by sponsoring public discussions of what, exactly, is happening in our country in this age old battle between profits and people.

Perhaps I’ve made some mistakes here. I’m not an economist. I’m not a CPA, I don’t even balance my checkbook. But I am a good theologian. I know the difference between gods and idols, and I know how deadly the worship of idols is and has always been.

Capitalism is doing very well. It is serving the needs of those who control the capital above all other needs, as it is supposed to do. Our economy, despite the raving stories, is not doing well. It is doing poorly. It’s bad housekeeping, it’s making a bad home for us as a nation.

But our problems are not primarily economic. They’re religious. We’re worshiping false gods. For the past generation in this society, our social and political policies have been increasingly dictated by the overriding concerns of capitalism, of bottom-line profits for the few who control capital, at the price of dismantling and disempowering the middle class.

You see, it’s all happened before. We’ve always been so seduced by the glitter of gold that we’re on the verge of making it into a god. There’s nothing new here. And there’s nothing new about the results, either.

Once money is turned into a god, it is–like all deities–a jealous god, and will not permit any other consideration to come before it. So we sell the righteous for silver, and Vietnamese girls for a pair of Nike tennis shoes. We transfer wealth, power, and possibilities from the common people to the very few who have gotten enough money to be players in the game of capitalism.

When we exalt capitalism as we have, when we change tax structures and income distribution to create, as we have, the greatest disparity between rich and poor since the Middle Ages–I can see, and feel, that our problems aren’t about money. They’re theological. We’re worshiping false gods again.

And unless we stop it, everything else will follow inexorably from that–as it always has.

 

Afterthoughts:

In many ways, this was a very frustrating sermon to write. It touches so many areas, it should have been a five- or six-sermon series. In final drafts, I cut more than half the material from the sermon–which was still too long.

I notice that I’ve also referred to only two books here–Noam Chomsky’s Profits Over People and Jim Hightower’s If The Gods Had Meant for Us To Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates. Some of the other books I read to pre-pare for this ‘ obviously a list far too short to “prepare for” any topic this vast ‘ included the following:

Arianna Huffington, How to Overthrow the Government

Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy

Michael Janeway, Republic of Denial

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, How to Watch TV News

While this is a partial list, it’s obviously not long enough to give me an “expert” understanding of the disciplines touched on. One of the thrills and frustrations of the liberal ministry resides in the fact that every subject has religious implications if taken deeply enough. This makes us, by definition, generalists rather than specialists.

However, I’ve always been blessed with very bright and informed congregants, who seem forever eager to help me learn more about whatever discipline they think I’ve slighted–especially when it’s their discipline! Perhaps you’ll be among them?

 

Addendum:

Since this sermon has appeared here, been sent to several other servers and gained a small life of its own, I have received several letters insisting that it contains some important factual errors, especially concerning the case involving the Ethyl Corp. and Canada. I don’t have time or resources to check, but want to include some of these points (and invite other critiques of fact or argument). Here are some of the points I have received. Again, I don’t know if they hold up, but want to share them:

That the MMT additive is NOT toxic to the environment. It harms the exhaust system of cars, but not (directly, anyway) the environment.

One respondent said the ‘horrible toxin’ (MMT) is methyl tertiary-butyl ether, which is used undiluted in the human body to dissolve gallstones. Check this out in Merck Manual. Far from getting rich in the manufacture of this lead replacement the stock has dropped to less than $2.00, and all dividends have been discontinued.

Others have insisted that the real culprit is not merely capitalism, but our whole social structure of priorities that endorse and strengthen the more greedy and individualistic varieties of capitalism. Among these larger social trends, they include the ‘winner-take-all’ mentality (which sanctions big winners and ignores the vast majority of other players), and the superhero (and super wealthy) status of top sports stars and celebrities.

I appreciate and agree with this larger framing.

Davidson Loehr, 11-27-00

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Davidson Loehr

17 September 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

 

PUPPET SHOW

A. (Head hung down, looking sad)

B. What’s wrong?

A. I’m lonesome

B. Lonesome? I can help you! You know what you need?

A. A friend?

B. You need Crest Toothpaste!

A. Toothpaste? I need a friend!

B. Well, the reason you don’t have a friend might be because your breath stinks! If you buy this Crest toothpaste and brush your teeth with it, your breath won’t stink and maybe you’ll get some friends. Here, give me a dollar.

A. (Gives a dollar to B, who gives toothpaste to A. Both disappear.)

A. (Head hung down, looking sad when A. reappears.)

C.What’s wrong?

A. I’m lonesome.

C. Hey, that’s because you need some new Nike tennis shoes!

A. Tennis Shoes? I’m lonesome, not barefoot!

C. Well, you’re lonesome because you don’t have cool Nike tennis shoes, that’s why? Here, just give me a hundred bucks and I’ll give you some cool Nike tennis shoes, then you’ll be set!

A. (A gives C money, C gives A shoes. Both disappear.)

A. (Head hung down, looking sad when A. reappears.)

D. What’s wrong?

A. Oh, I don’t want to talk about it.

D. You know what you need?

A. Go away.

D. You need fifty bucks’ worth of Pokemon toys!

A. Yeah, right. (A gives fifty dollars to D, who hands A the toys. Both disappear.)

A. (Head hung down, looking sad when A. reappears.)

E. You look lonesome.

A. I need a friend.

E. Me too.

A. (Brightens up) You want to be friends?

E. Oh, yes! (They hug.)

A. This is what I’ve needed!

E. Me too! You wouldn’t believe all the junk I’ve bought when what I’ve really wanted was just a friend!

A. Tell me about it!

Exit.

 

‘THE VOICES’

A. (A sweet feminine voice.) Looking good isn’t a matter of luck. It’s a decision. Call us, we can save you. Smith and Roberts, Austin’s most caring plastic surgeons.

B. (A gruff, macho male voice) Get it. Today. Pit Stop. Tough enough for famous race drivers. Because it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how good looking, even how successful. If you stink, you stink. So listen to me. We can save you. Get it today. Pit Stop. Famous race drivers’ favorite deodorant.

A. (Woman’s voice) Oh no, Jane’s great date turned into a disaster ‘ again! She’ll never find anyone to love her as long as she has those yellow teeth! If only she would buy SparklyWhite Toothpaste and Bleach. Then she could find a man who would love her, buy her things, and she’d be saved. Otherwise, she’ll probably just be alone forever.

B. (Gruff macho voice). Hey Jack! Yeah, you ‘ the loser in that dinky little compact car. When are you gonna get it? The kind of woman you’re looking for doesn’t like guys in dinky little cars. Size matters, Jack. Wanna be saved from more years as a loser? See this Ford F-150 V-8 pick-up truck? It can save ya, Jack. Buy it today, before we run out of ’em.

A. (This is a ‘straight-from-the-heart’ kind of pitch. She’s selling, but trying to seem genuine, like the listener’s friend. If it were TV, she’d be looking directly into the camera, acting sincere.) You want to be saved? We’ve got your salvation right here. But it isn’t free, you’ve got to buy it. And there’s a lot to buy, if you want to look good, smell good, feel good, and impress your friends and boss with how cool you are. The right clothes, shampoo, toothpaste, deodorant, perfume, diamonds to get and keep the lady, beauty and sexiness to keep the guy. There’s a lot to buy. You’ll probably be in debt forever, at 21% interest rates on your VISA card. And there’s always more to buy. It never ends. (Minister gets up and walks to podium.) But if you really want to be saved, we can save you. We can ‘ hey, who’s the guy up there in the robe?

B. He’s the preacher.

A. What’s he doing? He messed up my pitch.

B. He’s going to try to get them to ignore us.

A. Fat chance!

B. Shhhh! It’s his turn now.

 

SERMON: Salvation, American Style

Those voices are everywhere. They are the priests and priestesses of the religion of salvation, American style. I want to convince you this morning that it really is a religion, that it’s a very bad religion, and that the alternatives are not hard to find.

Now you’re a very bright group, and I doubt that any of you are convinced yet. You think I’m exagerrating for effect, or to set up something in a few minutes. You don’t think I really mean that commercials represent a real religion in America. But I do. And by the end of the morning, you may too.

I’m not just picking on television programs, though most of them are silly, too full of sex, violence and vacuousness. But picking on sit-coms is too easy. I want to argue that all of television exists primarily to serve The Voices that are selling us this religion of salvation, American style. I even want to argue that news programs aren’t really about news that matters, or that we need to know for any reason. Instead, they are entertainment shows, and their primary purpose is to attract an audience through their sensationalist stories of blood, violence, sex and gossip, so The Voices can make their pitch to this crowd. I want to argue that television programs, and television news, both exist almost entirely to serve the real God behind the television industry. And that God’s name is Our Sponsor, Who Art in Heaven.

Why are there so many news programs on? Thirty years ago, there was only about fifteen minutes of national news a night, and it seemed to be enough. Why is there now an entire CNN network with news 24 hours a day? Is there that much that we need to know, or about which our knowledge could make any difference at all?

We could spend hours dissecting news programs, as many authors have. The best known of these media critics, and the best writer among them, is probably Neil Postman. I’ve read several of his books, including one called Amusing Ourselves to Death and How to Watch TV News.

Basically, the problem is controlled by economics, as so much else is. It costs about half as much to produce a news show as to produce a comedy or drama. And people who watch the news are good attentive audiences. That’s attractive to advertisers, and during the past twenty years or so, news programs have eliminated most of their in-depth investigative journalism and concentrated instead on more exciting and titillating stories that can be produced more quickly ‘ as newspapers also have. Violence, sex, intrigue, gossip and blood dominate the news programs because, like car crashes, they attract audiences. And the job of news producers is to keep putting new and exciting stories in front of us every day, then dropping them when something more titillating comes along tomorrow. The news casters are like carnival barkers, and their main purpose is not to educate us, but to draw us into the tent so the sponsors can make their pitches to us.

Perhaps you won’t agree. Perhaps you think that at least the national news must be important, must be relevant to our lives, must be something we need to know. If you believe this, if you think the news is important, rather than just a carnival barker’s show to get you inside the tent so you can see the commercials, I have some questions to consider. How much of the news from two weeks ago can you still remember? If it was important, if it was worth all the shouting and hype the news producers wrapped it in two weeks ago, why isn’t it still news? Have all the problems of last month’s news been solved? And if they were important but haven’t been solved, why aren’t we still being told about them? How many people are starving in Biafra or Rwanda today? Where are they getting their food? What has changed since the news stories of a few years ago got the whole country excited about these terrible human tragedies?

Questions like these ‘ and you can think of dozens more ‘ help show us what should be obvious: The news isn’t important. We’re really not supposed to care about it. At least not for long. It isn’t put on to educate us, it’s put on to draw us into the tents on the carnival midway so the snake-oil sellers can preach their story of salvation, American style.

Whenever I get into this subject, whenever I spend much time reading or talking about it, I am reminded of that great American philosopher Lily Tomlin, who once observed that ‘No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up!’

But none of this is news to advertising firms or television executives. They know that the purpose of all television programs is to draw a crowd for the commercials to play to. That, plus the highly competitive market, are the reasons the news has become dominated by car-crash journalism, why there is so much violence, sex, terror and blood on the news.

Some years ago the media critic Marshall MacLuhan was asked if there was any good news on television. Yes, he said, the commercials are the good news. The commercials take your mind off the bad things happening, and show you in just thirty seconds how you can improve yourself, become lovable, popular, and successful.

The phrase ‘Good News’ is a religious phrase. That’s what churches are supposed to be offering: the Good News that can save us. And like religious teachings, most commercials take the form of parables, teaching viewers what the Good Life looks like and what we need in order to have it.

Let’s do a commercial to show this. You’ll recognize it as being like most other commercials you’ve seen. Like most commercials, it’s a thirty-second drama done in three acts.

Act One shows a man and woman saying goodnight at her door after an evening out. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back, expecting a kiss. He steps back in a state of polite revulsion and says ‘Well Joan, it was nice meeting you. I’ll call sometime soon.’ That ends Act One, which took ten seconds.

Act Two shows Joan whining to her roommate. ‘This happens to me every time, Betty! What’s wrong with me?’ ‘Your problem,’ Betty says, ‘is your mouthwash. It’s all mediciny and it doesn’t protect you from bad breath. You should try Minty Fresh.’ Then Betty holds out a new bottle of Minty Fresh, very nicely lit. That ends Act Two, also ten seconds.

The final scene, Act Three, shows Joan and her formerly-revolted date getting off the plane in Hawaii for their honeymoon. Joan is deliriously happy, he adores her. Minty Fresh mouthwash has done it again!

You have seen tens of thousands of commercials with this plot. It is the plot of salvation, American style.

But now let’s go back to that commercial and make a slight change, to make it a little more real, to make it sell a different kind of religion.

Act One is the same. But in Act Two, when Joan asks her roommate what’s wrong with her, Betty says: ‘What wrong with you? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you. You are boring! You are dull, dull, dull. You haven’t read a book in years, couldn’t tell Beethoven from the Beastie Boys, and have no idea what’s going on in the world outside of your boring little life! It’s a wonder any man wants to spend more than ten minutes with you!’

‘You are right,’ says Joan, ‘but what can I do?’

‘Read a book! See a movie! Listen to some good music! Take up a hobby that excites you!’ screams Betty. Joan looks forlorn: ‘But that will take forever: months, maybe even years!’ ‘That’s right,’ replies Betty, ‘so you better get started!’ The commercial ends with Betty handing dull Joan a copy of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Joan looks sad, but begins to finger the pages.

Now this is also a parable. And its message is more like the messages of real life, where there no problems as simple as the answers provided by The Voices speaking in commercials. But you’re never likely to see this parable on television. It could break the spell that commercials need in order to work, the illusion that all our problems can be solved by a chemical.

The advertisers know something that enables them to ignore criticisms like this. They know that the average television viewer will see about 30,000 commercials in the next twelve months. They know our kids will spend about 19,000 hours in front of a television set by the time they graduate from high school, compared with only 13,000 hours in school. They know those children will see, in that time, about 650,000 commercials. And they know that repetition is an effective teaching method, and that eventually, most of us learn what we are taught.

Whether you call commercials religious, anti-religious or something else, they are the most constant source of value propaganda in our culture. Don’t underestimate them. Commercials are never about anything trivial. They address our deepest needs and fears. Mouthwash commercials are not about bad breath, and commercials for clothing and hair products aren’t about clothes or shampoo. They are about the need for social acceptance, the need to feel attractive, to be lovable and loved. Automobile commercials are about our need for autonomy or social status. Behind every successful commercial there is a very real human need and fear, the same kind of needs for which other religions give very different prescriptions.

Boredom, anxiety, rejection, fear, envy, sloth and the rest ‘ in TV commercials there are easy remedies for each of these. The remedies are things like Scope, Comet, Toyota, Bufferin, Alka-Seltzer, and Budweiser. In the religion of salvation, American style, they take the place of good works, restraint, piety, awe, humility, character, and transcendence. On TV commercials, The Voices try to convince us that moral deficiencies as we usually think of them do not really exist. A commercial for Alka-Seltzer does not teach you to avoid overeating. Gluttony is perfectly acceptable ‘ maybe even cool. Your gluttony is no problem: Alka-Seltzer will handle it.

The Seven Deadly Sins, in other words, are superficial problems to be solved through chemistry and technology. Make no mistake. Commercials are trying to convert us to a new religion, and the religion is almost always the same one. My academic training was in religion, and I know one when I see one. Here are some of the parts of the religion of salvation, American style. See if you don’t recognize them too:

1. We begin in a state of Original Sin. And our original sin is that we are ignorant of the products that we need to buy in order to be saved.

2. The Priests and Priestesses of the American salvation story are The Voices who come at us through the ether, to show us what our problem is and tell us the products we must buy in order to solve our problem. They serve the God of this salvation scheme, Our Sponsor, Who Art in Heaven. And their mission is to make it on earth, as it is in the commercials.

3. Like great religious teachers, the Priests and Priestesses teach us primarily through stories and parables. Almost every commercial is a story or parable, showing us what’s wrong with us, what awful things might happen unless we get saved, then showing us the product that can save us, and giving us a glimpse of heaven ‘ like the Hawaiian honeymoon.

4. But just as in religious fundamentalism, we must believe in order to be saved. A voice from above has given us the facts we need, and we must believe. Unless we believe, we are among the unsaved, the damned. We won’t have friends, no one will ever love us, no one will think we are cool, we’ll spend our lives alone and being laughed at.

5. One of the great advantages of this American salvation scheme is that it is so very easy. Think of all the things that are not parts of this religion. There is no introspection, no soul-searching. We don’t need to be good people, to care about anybody but ourselves, there are no good deeds involved, no notion of needing to develop a full and healthy character, no concerns for our character at all. We just simply watch, listen, obey and buy, and we will be saved. Then it will be on earth as it is in the commercials, and we will be honeymooning in Hawaii because once we started using the right mouth wash we were cleansed of our sin, we were lovable, and we will spend the rest of our lives in a heaven on earth, happy beyond our wildest desires ‘ all because of Minty Fresh mouthwash.

The picture painted by the American salvation story is a lot like the portrait of Dorian Gray. You probably know this story, written a century ago by Oscar Wilde and made into a powerful movie. Dorian Gray was an attractive, even seductive, young man. He was also cold and selfish, and often quite nasty. He wished he might never change, that he might forever look like the portrait which has just been painted of him. In a bizarre kind of devil’s bargain, he got his wish. He never aged, never looked a day older or a bit different. He remained attractive and seductive ‘ and cold and selfish and often quite nasty. But while neither time nor the effects of his nasty character ever showed up in Dorian Gray, they all showed up in his portrait. Hung in a secret place in the attic, the portrait showed a man becoming older, uglier, and more vile.

Our lives, and our illusions, aren’t this dramatic. But it’s a reminder that when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Andbehind the pretty, wrinkle-free, stain-free, forever-young images with which commercials bombard us, there are some ugly truths, some details of the aging portrait in the attic. Like the fact that credit card debt and personal bankruptcy filings are at an all-time high. All commercials act like the last problem we would have is coming up with the money to buy the products they want to sell us. And both politicians and newscasters talk incessantly about our strong economy. But we can’t afford to buy our way to salvation. And behind the high employment figures is the fact that unemployment is low because couples can’t make it on one salary.

Most of the new jobs the politicians and newscasters are bragging about are low-paying, without insurance or other benefits. Job insecurity keeps workers from fighting for living wages, as well as competition from lower-wage workers abroad. In nearly 30% of American families, both husband and wife now work. But the actual earnings of these families are now 12% less than they were in 1973 in constant dollars. The men’s paychecks have fallen by 30% during the past 27 years, and even with women working, the family income ‘ now with two workers ‘ is still 12% less than it was in 1973. Also since 1973, the number of workers with at least a four-year college degree has doubled, as their pay has shrunk by about 16%.

The money has been systematically diverted from the workers to those who own and control the capital. I heard Al Gore brag this week that our economy is the strongest in this country’s history. That is cynically misleading. The gap between the richest and the poorest in our society is the greatest it has been in this country’s history ‘ some have written that it is the greatest gap between rich and poor in the past thousand years of Western history.

It’s hard to get our minds around a gap this big, but here are a few figures that might help. Bill Gates’ personal wealth is now about double the Gross National Product of Central America. While the top 1 percent of American households doubled their share of national wealth since the 1970s, the percentage of American children living in extreme poverty has also doubled. If the poorest member of the Forbes 400 list gives away a million dollars to charity, that’s equivalent to the median American household ‘ which makes about $35,500 a year ‘ giving less than $75. That’s not the strongest economy in our nation’s history.

Nor is it true that ‘a rising tide floats all ships.’ The average incomes of families with children in the bottom 20 percent of the U.S. income distribution fell by 21% between 1980 and 1996 (from $11,759 in 1978-80 to $9,254 in 1994-96). The top 20 percent, by contrast, rose by over 23% during the same period (from $94,158 to $116,200). During the period of 1977-1994, the bottom 20 percent of families in our country lost 16 percent of their after-tax income; the top 20 percent of families gained 25 percent and the top 1 percent saw their after-tax income go up 72 percent. A rising tide floats the yachts, while many of those who can’t afford boats are paddling for their lives.

These are among the features on the portrait in the attic of the American salvation story. And so salvation, American style is a lot like the story of the portrait of Dorian Gray.

It’s also like a puppet show. When we back off and admire the manipulative genius of the advertising industry, it’s easy to marvel at the brilliance with which they have learned to pull our strings. I use Crest toothpaste, Scope mouthwash, and Right Guard deodorant, and I don’t know why. But the advertising industry probably does. Over the past generation or two, the very best research into human motivation and understanding why we do the things we do has been done by, or used by, the advertising industry. These folks are very, very smart. In some ways, they know more about us than we know about ourselves.

We walk through a world of strings held by invisible puppeteers, voices from somewhere above us, pulling us this way and that, promising salvation so sweet, cool and sexy we jump like fish toward baited hooks, or like puppets pulled by strings we can’t even see.

The strings are there, and they are real. But they are not the only strings connected to us. There are also other strings, of a better kind, that might help fill the emptiness so abundant in our culture, and that hardly cost a thing:

We have strings tying us to our families, and our friends. People who love us for who we are instead of for what they can get out of us. Those are also strings to which we could respond.

We have strings ‘ no, whole webs ‘ that could connect us with neighbors, our community, our world and the future if only we would attend to them. They take energy and compassion and time, but no VISA charges.

And we have our heart-strings, to tie us to what we really love. We have those tugs from the angels of our better nature, pulling us toward deeper affections and more meaningful allegiances in place of the passing fancies, passing before us in thirty-second commercials, more than thirty thousand of them a year for most of us.

Life has a lot of strings attached. What a tragedy it will be if we settle for shallow bit parts in someone else’s designs on us, and lose ourselves in the process. It was Jesus who asked ‘What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?’ ‘ the question’s still relevant.

It is our show, our life. We are children of God, precious bits of the universe, made entirely of stardust. We don’t need to buy our salvation. We are already worthy, and real. In all the ways that matter, that’s enough, if only we could see and believe that good news. And that good news comes without any strings attached.

 

‘THE VOICES’

A. (As minister sits down.) Well I didn’t like that at all!

B. It was unAmerican.

A. I didn’t like that silly puppet show, either!

B. It was unAmerican.

A. If anybody actually listened to stuff like that, we’d be in serious trouble!

B. Don’t worry.

A. Don’t worry? Why not?

B. He only gets an hour. The rest of the week, they’re ours.

A. Ah! Then it’s ok!

B. It’s time to leave.

A. Yes, let’s get out of here. This place gives me the willies!