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© Davidson Loehr

10 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING WORDS:

Is life sacred? Always? Is a birth a blessed event? Always? Morality is about behavior that honors life by treating it as it deserves at its best. So is the morality of abortion. These are hard and emotionally-loaded questions we’re asking this morning. It is almost impossible to be neutral about them. But if important and emotionally-loaded questions can’t be raised in church, it’s not much of a church. We gather to ask hard questions, and dare to suggest that we and our society might need to look at these issues in an entirely new way. And that willingness is part of the reason we can say that

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

A place for questions more profound than answers, 

Vulnerability more powerful than strength,

And a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

STORY: The Girl Who Loved Hamsters

Once there was a girl who loved hamsters. She badgered and badgered her parents until they finally did two things, one good and one not too smart. They bought her a hamster cage, food, and a hamster. That was good. But they bought her two hamsters. This wasn’t smart, because two hamsters don’t stay just two for very long. Hamsters are very friendly animals. And before long, she no longer had two hamsters, she had twenty.

But this girl loved hamsters, so she saw it as a good thing. She went to her parents protesting that twenty hamsters were too many for the small cage she had, so they needed to buy her a much bigger cage. They did, and the hamsters kept doing what hamsters do. Before long, she didn’t have twenty hamsters, she had three hundred! They started buying food in ten-pound bags.

Still, the girl loved hamsters, so this was fine. But they had overgrown their cage, were running all over the house, hiding under and in the beds, crawling out from under pillows just as you were falling asleep.

“We need bigger cages, and many more of them,” she pleaded to her parents. “And a special roof in the back yard where we can keep all the cages.” The parents yielded, and soon there was a kind of tenement rising in the backyard, with cages organized into blocks with little streets between them. The girl and a couple friends pushed a wheelbarrow down between the cages, throwing food into the rapidly increasing hamster population. They began buying food in hundred-pound bags.

And it was indeed increasing rapidly. Soon there weren’t three hundred hamsters, but about fifty thousand of them! They escaped from the cages, from the yard, and were running all over town, getting into everyone’s house, hiding under everyone’s bed and under everyone’s pillows. There was a loud outcry.

A town meeting was called, but the girl was ready for them. “I really love hamsters,” she said, “but I understand you don’t want them running loose through your town. So the solution is to build a large boat, with several floors, and float it out in Town Lake for these lovely, fluffy little hamsters. Then I can take a rowboat out each day to give them food.”

Somehow, she was persuasive, and the town actually built a huge boat – it would have put Noah’s Ark to shame, it was so big. Before long there were far, far more than fifty thousand hamsters on the big boat. But now nobody could count them. They were breeding so fast they were getting crowded, and they seemed to get meaner, so that it was no longer safe to get onto the boat to play with them – not that anybody could really play with millions of hamsters anyway!

Each day, the girl who loved hamsters rowed out to the big ship in her rowboat filled with hamster food, which they were now buying by the ton, and shoveled food over the sides of the ship before rowing back to shore. Still, she loved hamsters, and loved the idea of knowing there were so many of them out there, even if she had no contact with them any more.

While no one could count the hamsters any more, everyone in town could get a sense of their growing numbers just by watching the big boat sink lower and lower into the water every day. There were millions and millions of them onboard now.

Finally, the big boat sank into Town Lake, taking all the hamsters with it. The girl was very sad, and she called another town meeting.

“The problem,” she said, “was that the boat wasn’t big enough. We need to build a bigger boat – and more boats. And we should buy our own company to make hamster food, it will be cheaper. I”ve done some research, and if we fire about five hundred public school teachers and double the class size in public schools, and stop repairing the roads quite so often, we can afford to do it. And we must do it, because I really love hamsters.”

What to do, what to do?

CENTERING:

For over a generation, America’s cultural liberals have treated abortion as a matter of individual rights, where the mother but not the baby is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have countered by claiming rights for the baby, though the law hasn’t recognized a fetus as an individual.

That may soon change. On March 5th, this Tuesday, the Bush administration published a proposed rule designating embryos and fetuses as “children” eligible for medical benefits under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP – 67 Fed. Reg. No. 43, pp. 9936-9939). The pregnant woman herself is not considered the patient, only the embryo or fetus.

This is a brilliant and creative extension of individual rights designed to negate a pregnant woman’s individual rights by pitting her against the fetus, and putting the government only on the side of the fetus. It will be defended as a caring act by those who love children. Is it?

Or is it a cynical tactic to disempower women, to help remove them from the workplace and tie them to caring for children they do not want in an economy set up to treat the desperate children of desperate women as minimum-wage workers without any empowered choices?

Is forcing the birth of unwanted children really caring? Is caring that easy? Is it just a matter of saying we feel strongly about someone else? Or do caring and loving demand more? What would it really take to love children, and how can you tell when someone really does? These are our questions this evening, and I invite you into them.

SERMON: The Morality of Abortion

Fields like religion, ethics and morality differ from history, sociology, or anthropology in important ways. History can ask what people actually did. Sociology can study what different subgroups do, anthropology can try to discern the kinds of behaviors, good and bad, that characterize our species. They”re descriptive disciplines.

But religion, ethics and morality are our attempts to be normative. Religion, ethics and morality can ask whether the gods we’re serving or the rules we’re following are good or bad. Are we following a morality of enslavement or empowerment? Shakespeare observed that “we love not wisely, but too well.” We usually also worship not wisely but too well, and a key role of religion is to ask whether the gods we’re serving are worth serving.

With morality, we always need to ask whether it’s good or bad morality. And the only way we can answer that is to ask whether it helps people achieve their own kind of excellence and grow into their full humanity, or whether the morality being foisted on us is aimed to disempower segments of our society, to turn them into obedient things rather than empowered citizens.

Each kind of life, each species, even each individual, has certain kinds of excellence and development available to it. With lower species, it’s mostly just survival and breeding. Flies, ants, roaches and rats, jellyfish and lobsters are about self-preservation and propagation of the species: survival and breeding. Period. That’s the definition of lower forms of life, and of life reduced to its lowest possibilities.

This is the framework within we need to understand the morality of abortion. We must relate it to the larger question of whether it serves the empowerment of people toward their excellence, or the virtual enslavement of people to levels of diminished capacity where they can hope mostly just for survival and breeding. The morality of abortion is the question of whether it enslaves or empowers both the parents and the potential children.

Human life can be defined down in many ways. Totalitarian regimes can do it, whether in Stalinist Russia, the reign of the Afghan Taliban or the morality of the fundamentalist American Taliban, by curtailing individual rights and freedoms. Overbreeding can do it, by letting a concern for quantity, for the mere existence of life, trump the concern for quality, the development and empowerment of life. People kept desperately poor overbreed, have few real choices, and must obey those who have turned them into starving and desperate workers. The immoral downgrading of human life can be identified through any of these symptoms.

And now we are ready for Pope Leo XIII. By 1891, huge numbers of the world’s poor had been effectively reduced to things, to desperate creatures struggling merely for survival, who could be treated as a desperate labor force under the worst conditions. Children worked in mines by the age of eight or younger, and could look forward to no more than this until they died – usually at an early age.

The Church’s role had been immoral for centuries, conspiring with the wealthy to keep the poor desperate and overbred. And the religious argument always came down to the same passage from the Bible, one that anyone raised in a very conservative religion has heard before. It’s from Genesis, after Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, that the line occurs. “By the sweat of your brow you shall live,” the writers have God saying: By the sweat of your brow you shall live. You see, life just is nasty, brutish and short. It’s hard, it’s unfair, and that’s God’s plan, an enduring punishment for the fact that Adam and Eve preferred development over blind obedience. That line had been used for hundreds of years to keep the lower classes of people in their desperate, overbred, hopeless state.

What Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 was to use the same Bible passage to justify the opposite position, and to lay the foundation for workers” unions which the Church would support through its offices. Leo did it simply by emphasizing a different word in the sentence. “By the sweat of your brow,” he said, “you shall live!” And what, he asked, does it mean, ‘to live”? Does it mean merely to exist, to subsist at starvation level? Does it mean to live like lower animals do, or maybe like slugs or plants do? Are we promised, by this God in the Old Testament, only the absolute lowest possible quality of life? Is the mere quantity of life, the mere fact that we breathe and can move all that religion offers? Is it, to keep it in the language of theism, all that God demands, the absolute minimum quality of life?

No, said Pope Leo, it is not life like a lower animal which this God of the Old and New Testaments demands for us. It is the life of a human being. And not the absolute minimal life of a human being, either. Pope Leo’s God demanded that our labors enable us to live fully, to realize the full potential of human beings. That means time for education, time for leisure, time for relaxation with friends and family, time not only to bear life like a burden, but as well to enjoy it, to live it.

Leo contrasted humans with lower animals, which he called “brutes.” Now hear this remarkable Pope Leo’s words as he describes the “brute”:

The brute has no power of self-direction, but is governed by two chief instincts…. These instincts are self-preservation and the propagation of the species…. But with [humans] it is different indeed…. It is the mind, or the reason, which is the chief thing in us who are human beings; it is this which makes human beings human, and distinguishes them essentially and completely from the brute. (“Rerum Novarum,” in Seven Great Encyclicals, New York: Paulist Press, 1963, p. 3)

And what is the role of the Church in all of this? “Its desire is that the poor, for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives,” wrote this Pope. (p. 14) And if conditions existed which robbed humans of the possibility of living like humans rather than brutes, if people found themselves in “conditions that were repugnant to their dignity as human beings… if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age”in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”

And why? Why must the Church and the law do these things? Because God demands it! Demands it, because humans must be given living conditions which allow them to develop fully to the limits of their potential as educated, intelligent, creative, and joyful people. It is for that they were created, and conditions which make that impossible are not merely wrong, they are evil.

This is the theological argument which Pope Leo XIII made over a century ago, and which has changed millions of lives through the force of both its argument and its implementation by the church’s people with the church’s help. And, at the bottom, that’s the only foundation on which a solid and durable theological argument can ever stand: that God demands it.

The only other point that it is important to mention is that this new understanding, issued 111 years ago, changed the position of the Church, a position which it had held and enforced for nineteen centuries. Even traditions which have existed since the beginning of the religion can be changed, as our understanding of the fullest potential of life is expanded. In other words, the fact that things have always been done a certain way is not necessarily an argument for continuing to do them that way. And now we can bring this full circle.

Times have changed. The population of the world has doubled – twice! – since 1891, even more so since the era when the Old Testament and New Testament were written. Two thousand years ago, the world’s population has been estimated at about 200 million. It doubled three times in 1900 years, to about 1.5 billion in 1900. Then in the next sixty years it doubled again, to 3 billion by 1960. And in the next 39 years it doubled again, passing six billion by 1999. The deadly effect of overpopulation and under-education on the possibility of living like human beings has never existed the way it does today. Neither the religious scriptures of the west nor established theological traditions have yet had to address this changed situation.

What this means is that breeding is not a high calling for our species, and hasn’t been for centuries. We have too many people in the world. We don’t need more people, we need better people, and you can’t have both. You can favor quantity – the mere fact of human births – or quality.

Would you like to see what it looks like when human beings live only like animals, driven only by self-preservation and propagation of the species? Go to Mexico City. Or Chicago. Or Detroit. Or New York City. Go to the ghettos, the slums, the shantytowns of the world, and you will see the evil conditions, and the results of those evil conditions.

Do you want to see it up close, one-on-one? Look at fifteen-year-old girls pregnant with their third child, trapped in a welfare system that makes it most profitable for them to remain unmarried and unemployed. Not that there are many kinds of employment open to many of these women. With grade-school educations, what are they to do anyway? They can be prostitutes and their boyfriends can be pimps, drug pushers and drug takers, or exploited laborers living at the edge of starvation and kept there by a system which can demand of them what it chooses and give them no more than it must.

The Church’s understanding of sex arose when high breeding rates were seen as necessary for survival, when breeding was a high calling for people living at the margins.

But that was already a fundamental misunderstanding of the needs of this species. For thousands of years, humans have been able to reach their own peculiar kind of excellence through structures that favor quality of life over quantity of life, that stress development and education, not breeding.

Again: breeding is not a high calling for our species, and hasn’t been a high calling for centuries. We don’t need more people, we need better people. There are too many people in the world, and it is immoral to increase their quantity at the expense of increasing their quality.

Let’s look at some examples of abortions and consider whether the decisions were moral or immoral:

“A young woman gets pregnant and chooses an abortion. That is a completely moral choice, probably the most moral decision she can make. Why? Not because she chose it. Women’s choices aren’t any more or less moral than men’s. But because breeding is not a high calling, we don’t need more people we need better people, and she didn’t want a child. Maybe she sensed that she didn’t have the maturity, the emotional or financial means to give an unwanted child a better life than she had. But she knew she wasn’t ready. Under these circumstances, it would have been immoral to bring the child into the world.

Why not force her to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term, to make her produce a baby for older and wealthier people who want to adopt? Because it is immoral to turn a human being into breeding stock for more privileged people. Because we have too many people in the world. Because we do not need more people, we need better people, and we cannot have both more and better people.

Is it caring or cruel to suggest that more babies can be a bad thing? China has for quite awhile now been urging that their people have no more than one child. That hasn’t received good press here, but it came from the government’s realization that quantity and quality are absolutely opposed in human life, and that the only chance their people have of raising the standard of living for a population of more than billion people is to reduce their numbers to a sustainable level.

When I was in Thailand last month, one of our guides told us that the Thai government has also suggested that Thais limit their families to only two children, for the same reason. Our guide understood it as the government’s concern for the quality of life available for her people, and treated it as responsible leadership.

Let’s consider another common case.

A 20-year-old college woman gets pregnant because she and her boyfriend weren’t careful. He wants to get married and raise the child, but she doesn’t love him, doesn’t want to marry him, and doesn’t want to raise a child. She wants to prepare herself for a career that might let her bring a child into the world later, when she can better provide for the child both materially and psychologically. The abortion is probably the most moral decision she can make. That decision honors the potential of her life, and honors the potential of her future child’s life. Letting the blind fact of pregnancy overrule the higher distinctions she can make with her mind is letting quantity trump quality, letting the merest fact of a potential human life trump the greater concern for the quality of that life.

A married woman with two or three children gets pregnant, does not want another child and gets an abortion, even though the husband wants another child. That is a completely moral decision. Why? Because bringing a new human life into an already overcrowded world is only a moral decision if we honestly believe we can give it a better quality life than we have, and that takes two willing parents, not just one unless that one is going to take full care of the new life.

We have been trained to think that the mere fact of a pregnancy is a kind of moral imperative, trumping other considerations. But it is not, and hasn’t been for centuries. Breeding is not a high calling for our species. We have too many people in the world. We don’t need more people, we need better people, and those closest to the pregnancy know better than anyone whether this is the right time or place for another birth to take place.

The girl who thought she loved hamsters did not love hamsters. She did not even to have known what love is. She confused it with her selfish preoccupation with watching large numbers of desperate little bodies.

Unwanted pregnancies for which a mother is not ready to be a mother should almost always be aborted. Not because a woman has individual rights, but because it is the only moral choice available unless she consents to become a breeder for others.

I’m not trying to answer all the questions tonight, just to sketch a new and different way of understanding the morality of breeding and the morality of birth control and abortion. It is hard enough really to love hamsters. Learning how to really love humans in their highest rather than their lowest possibilities is much, much harder. And much, much more important.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

3 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is the first of two connected sermons, and should be read in conjunction with the sermon “The Morality of Abortion,” delivered 10 March 2002.

OPENING:

For about 30 years, America’s cultural liberals have understood abortion as a secular matter of individual rights where the mother, but not the baby, is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have framed it as a moral issue based on the assumption that life is sacred in and of itself and everyone has a right to it. Under Roman Catholic teaching, when push comes to shove the baby has a greater right to life, since it stands to get a bigger quantity of life.

I expect the Roe v. Wade decision to be overturned during President Bush’s term, and I think the majority of our citizens do believe abortion is primarily a moral issue.

If this is the case, America’s liberals now need to begin doing what we should have done thirty years ago. We need to reframe abortion as a moral issue rather than an issue of individual rights. And if we believe abortion is morally justified, we need to develop moral arguments for it that can be persuasive not only to us, but eventually to a majority of the voting public. I have believed this could be done since I first preached on abortion over 15 years ago.

Now, this week and next week, I will try to persuade you, and hope the picture I sketch is solid enough to begin persuading others.

To tackle such a big issue is to risk failure, and you may not be persuaded, you may decide I fail at it. Still, it is too important a subject to ignore. A new discussion must begin somewhere, and this is a good place to start.

CENTERING:

Is life sacred? Always? If so, what makes it so? Can we ever assume the authority and the right to say No to life? Through birth control, family planning, abortion, capital punishment or war? Ever? If so, how? When? Why?

These are questions more profound than answers. Let us not approach them lightly or we will do a great disservice to them and to ourselves. Let us first be humbled by the subject before us: Life.

Is life sacred? Always? If so, what makes it so? Who are we to pronounce on it, and how? We are here through the accident and gift of life. If we would deny the gift to others, how, when, and why would we do it? Let us begin by letting the questions settle in and being humbled by them, during the silence.

SERMON: The meaning of life

Aristotle said the meaning and purpose of a life was to grow into its own characteristic kind of excellence, to become an example of that particular life at its best. Each species, and each person, has its own unique potential, and the purpose of its life is to blossom into that – for the greater good of its society and world, he might add.

It’s easier said than done, though I think it’s the right answer.

But it takes a lot. It can’t be done alone. As Aristotle also knew, it takes a good community, good friends, a life that offers us the likelihood of this kind of development. Statistically, few people become what they could or should become. So many people with great gifts of art, intelligence, who never develop it, never become the one person that they and only they could become. The obstacles include poverty, toxic home life, mental illness, psychological aberrations, wars, or accidents of life.

So the primary duty of societies is to establish and nourish the conditions within which their citizens can become the best kind of people and society – in the slogan of the US Army, to become all they can be.

This simple insight into the meaning and purpose of life is something we can all agree to, but it has profound implications for all areas of living. I want to explore some of these implications this morning.

But the first thing I want to say is that we all know almost everything I’ll be saying this morning. We know that we are supposed to grow and develop our potential, to become the best sort of person we can, for ourselves and our larger world. It’s what we admire in other people, and in ourselves. We know this.

For example, think of people who breed and show dogs or horses. I was married to a woman who bred and showed a rare kind of French sheep dog called a Briard, and spent about six years attending dog shows and programs put on by breeders concerned with serving and improving their breed.

In dog shows, the breeders of each breed write the standards by which their breed is to be judged. These standards are the best that can be expected of this breed in each area. The dogs are only expected to be what they can be, not what some other breed can be. Greyhounds don’t get any extra points for being able to herd sheep, and sheep dogs get no credit for being able to retrieve a wounded pheasant. Each breed can and can’t do certain things, and the breeders say, as Aristotle did 2400 years ago, that each breed is capable of a certain distinct kind of excellence. The purpose of its life is to strive toward its own kind of excellence.

Horse breeders operate the same way. An Arabian stallion needs to have a certain scoop, or “dish,” a curve from its eyes to its nose. Its nostrils should be flared in official photos, showing an alertness and energy. Its ears should be forward; its body should conform to certain standards. The ideal is the essence of what an Arabian can be at its best, and it is that standard that judges and breeders use to guide them in breeding and training those magnificent animals.

The meaning of each creature’s life is to strive toward its own particular form of excellence. Those who care for the breed try to create the situations within which that might best happen. And they are quick to protect the animals they love from conditions that can harm them – bad food, unhealthy surroundings, cramped quarters or brutal trainers.

With our species, it’s more complicated and more demanding. Ancient writers used to describe us as being caught midway between the beasts and the gods. And the quality of human excellence – the meaning and purpose of our lives – was something available neither to the beasts nor the gods, they said.

We have a degree of consciousness, self-awareness and articulateness that is, as far as we know, not shared by any other species. In that sense, we’re at a higher stage of potential than the other animals. We stew over who we are and how we should live in ways that chimps don’t seem to. We know we will die, and that’s the ever-present background against which we live. We have high existential anxiety compared with dogs or horses.

So we expect more of ourselves than we expect of dogs, horses or chimps, and we judge ourselves failures in ways they don’t seem to care about.

Yet we’re not gods. We aren’t omniscient, omnipotent, or undying. We can articulate more than we can actualize. We can see more than we can be. We yearn for more than we can earn. We yearn for peace, love, justice, a world where the content of our character trumps the color of our skin. And these yearnings are among our noblest traits.

We fail; we fail at almost all of these. It’s a continual battle between high aspirations and low inspirations. And we are marked as human by this odd, frustrating combination. We do not respect people or governments that sell out to low and mean motives. We do not respect those who side with the stronger against the weaker. Something essential is missing in people who do that, something we think is necessary to becoming fully human.

Yet we continually fail. And our history can be seen as the struggle between a glorious vision and an often-vainglorious reality.

The meaning and purpose of human life is to live toward that level of awareness, that level of responsibility, to know the difference between fairness and greed, altruism and narcissism, between treating people as fellow children of God, and treating them merely as things, things that do not even engage our tender mercies or make Lady Justice insist that the scales be balanced and the games played fairly.

And I suggest to you that you know all of this whether you”ve ever articulated it this way or not. You know it.

If you doubt that, try this mental experiment:

Imagine that some benevolent aliens land here, are trying to assess what kind of creatures these humans are. They say “Point to the people, alive or dead, who exemplify the best your race has produced, all that you can be.”

I have a long list of candidates, you probably do to.

I would include Mahatma Gandhi who, even though his revolution in India failed, continued to live by the highest ideals he could see, rather than selling out to the lower interests all around him. This great Hindu heard and answered a higher calling, as we expect our best people to do.

I would include Martin Luther King Jr., who had a vision of Americans as children of God and inheritors of the American dream, and preached that we should, that we must, accept the responsibility to bring this kingdom of God down to earth where it belonged.

I would include Einstein, Darwin, Picasso, Mozart, Bach, Homer, Shakespeare and others as examples of the human imagination and understanding at its finest.

I would include the firemen from September 11th, who died going up the stairs that others were running down, because a sense of duty and compassion called them upward, a compelling link to the suffering of others.

And I would include whole long lists of public school teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, clerks and cops who have lived, each in their own way, to be agents of love rather than hate, understanding rather than prejudice, compassion rather than greed.

I would point to these and say here, here is what we can be, if only we will. Here is that kind of excellence that is uniquely human. Here are people who exemplify the meaning of human life, whose lives and examples I try to learn from.

Make your own list, but see if your nominees aren’t people who exemplify this very human struggle to become, and help others become, the best they can be, to establish the just society, the kingdom of God, the possibility of a true democracy, honest and responsible government, and a sense of fairness that pervades all.

Now look at some of the implications of this. Look what is required for people to become fully human, to act like children of God, to be true to the calling of a species with as much potential as ours has.

It can’t be done alone. It takes more than a village to raise a child. It takes a culture: a healthy and courageous community. Because societies and laws that oppress people – that force the game of living to be played by rules that empower the strong and cripple the weak – are societies and laws that are the enemy of our possibility of becoming human. Morally, those conditions are evil which imprison the weak within small or selfish visions imposed on them by the strong or the morally blind.

Quantity versus Quality

There is one simple rule that points toward whether we have set up rules to foster life at its highest or to frustrate it. And this too is true of many species of animals. The question to ask is whether we are exalting the quantity of life or the quality of life. The meaning of life is about rising to our highest potential quality, not just existing. Are we set up to encourage more births, or more excellence?

I’ve seen the results in dog breeding. Briards are still a fairly rare breed, because that’s the way the breeders want it. They have seen what happens to breeds that become too popular, when irresponsible breeders begin accenting quantity over quality in order to sell puppies. Irish setters are now plagued with a whole host of genetic flaws because they were so poorly overbred. German shepherds, Old English sheepdogs and others have had hip dysplasia bred into them, so their mature years will be painful and crippling. Doberman Pinschers, Rottweilers, even Pit Bulls have seen their breeds degraded through breeding for quantity rather than quality, producing lines of mean and dangerous animals.

Quantity is the value of much lower forms of life, forms that depend on breeding large numbers in order to survive. I’m thinking of insects, sparrows, rats and roaches. We seldom speak of an excellent mosquito or a really exemplary fire ant. We just note whether ants, roaches or mosquitoes are present, whether they”ve survived. And in order to survive, they must breed in sufficient quantities. Several centuries ago, and in desperate times, the same was true of humans in some places. When infant mortality was high, when few lived to adulthood, humans needed to breed in large quantities in order to have a few survive to breeding age. That, of course, hasn’t been true for a long time.

With show dogs or horses or humans, emphasizing numbers isn’t a mark of success, but of failure. For the higher and more complex an animal gets, the more we judge it by quality, by how or whether it lives up to the highest that can be expected of that kind of life.

You know this, we all know this, we just seldom speak of it this way.

Serving our daimon Some observers raise the bar of expectations for our species quite high. One of those is worth mentioning because he’s respected, and because his theories are both complex and interesting. This is psychologist James Hillman, whom some of you have read and others may have heard of.

In a book called The Soul’s Code, Hillman suggests that we have within us, from birth, a kind of spirit or “daimon” as the Greeks called it, that urged us toward a specific form of life for which we were made. I won’t follow him all the way, but I follow him part way, maybe you will too.

He cites the stories of a few exceptional people – geniuses, as we”d usually call them – because he believes that in geniuses these daimons, these fires of destiny, burn brighter than they do in most of us.

He tells the story of Manuel Manoleta (1917-1947), the Spanish bullfighter many still regard as the greatest matador who ever lived. As a young boy, Manoleta was shy, afraid, and regarded as a mama’s boy because he would hide behind his mother’s apron, and seemed generally afraid of the world. That all changed when he was eleven years old, and was suddenly interested in nothing but bulls. From that point, he was afraid of nothing. In his first bull fight, he stood his ground and suffered a groin injury, but refused help and walked out of the ring under a new kind of power and a new kind of identity. He had, as a boy, grown into the destiny to which he had been called.

Freudians might interpret his life behind a red cape as a manifestation of early neuroses, where the red cape took the place of his mother’s apron. Hillman says it’s more interesting to turn it around, and suggest that he hid as a child because he was not yet ready for the dangerous challenges for which he had been made.

Let’s take a less bloody, less macho story. The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin also saw his calling at an early age. When he was just three, he heard a great violinist play a difficult cadenza in a concert, and was transfixed. He later said that he knew from that moment that he must become a violinist. He asked his father for a violin for his fourth birthday. A relative gave the young child, instead, a toy metal violin with metal strings. But the four-year-old Menuhin threw the toy on the floor and would have nothing to do with it. His calling was to play a Stradivarius, not a toy. The fact that, at age four, he was too small to hold or play a regular violin made no difference. The young boy had received an adult’s calling, and struggled to grow into it. But the guiding spirit, the daimon, was there very early.

The word “genius” is a clue to this way of thinking. It means someone who is possessed by a spirit, or “genie,” and who serves that genie with their life. The genie gives them great powers, but it also directs their life. I’ve known a few geniuses, and this describes them better than anything else I can think of does. I don’t mean to imply some kind of supernatural mechanics, just a poetic metaphor for an intensely focused sense of purpose and destiny in a few of our most exemplary people.

Or finally, take the story of Golda Meir, the former president of Israel. As a young girl growing up in Milwaukee she was outraged – as a fourth-grade student – at a school policy requiring students to purchase their books, which she felt manifestly unfair to poorer students. This young girl organized a protest, rented a hall, and arranged for classmates to speak, adding her own unwritten speech. At the age of 11, Golda Meir was already a Labor Party Prime Minister.

These stories seem to imply that there is something in us almost like a spirit, a holy spirit, that holds our calling and destiny. We must hear it, respond, and be in an environment that can nurture this aspiration so that we may grow into our own distinctive kind of excellence. That would mean that things which thwart this development are enemies of the holy spirit. And that’s raising the idea of our calling, or the meaning of our life, to a whole new level.

To put it in God-language, it means that not only are we children of God, but that if we will listen, God has a plan for us. There is this ‘s till, small voice” inside us that we need to listen to in order to know who we need to become.

To put it in natural language, it is saying that life gives us not only our genetic packages, but also a certain style of character, a style of being, and our gifts uniquely equip us for certain callings, through which we both grow into our fullest humanity, and nourish the world around us.

Either way, it raises the question of the meaning of our lives to a higher plane, where it becomes our sacred duty to become who we were meant to become, and the sacred duty of our communities and societies to provide the kind of social and legal structures that enable and empower us to do so.

If that is so – and I think it is at least partly so – it is a new way of looking at ourselves, and at human life in general. And seen this way, the prospect of bringing new human life into the world carries with it a tremendous amount of responsibility. Now breeding isn’t a high calling for our species, only excellence is. And this, I’ll suggest, changes the whole moral structure of our views on life and death.

But this isn’t just about what I think. I want to engage you too. This week and next week I want to challenge all of us to think in a very new way about life, and about birth control and abortion.

So take these thoughts with you for a week, and turn them over. Think about the difference between forms of life where quantity is paramount, and forms where quality is paramount. And think about the implications of all this for thinking about abortion, both as individuals and as a society.

I’ll end in mid-air because we are in mid-air on this. Let yourself be stirred, even disturbed, and form your own opinions about the morality of abortion and how you would explain it to yourself, or to a city government. It isn’t supposed to be easy; after all, we are striving to serve human life, which we regard as sacred – and to serve it in the way its unique kind of sacrality demands.

But I will leave you with a teaser. One of the greatest ironies in the area of trying to find good moral arguments for abortion is the fact that the best one was developed by a Roman Catholic pope, over a century ago. I will be using an argument first and famously written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 in one of the most famous and best papal encyclicals ever written, the Rerum Novarum. No, he wasn’t writing about abortion. He was writing about the condition of labor. But he wrote about it, in this encyclical over which the Church is so proud it issued commemorative updates in 1931 and 1961, by developing an argument which said that concerns for the quality of human life must trump concerns over mere quantity of life. I’ll see you next week with my friend Pope Leo XIII and the brilliant and courageous encyclical he wrote 111 years ago.

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© Davidson Loehr

3 February 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON

The most famous definition of fundamentalism is probably still H.L. Mencken’s from over seventy years ago, when he defined it as “The terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun.” There’s something to this. It’s too fearful, too restrictive, too lacking in faith to provide a home for the human spirit to soar or for human societies to blossom.

But there isn’t enough to it. There are far more fundamental things to understand about the phenomenon of fundamentalism, especially since September 11th. Also, an adequate understanding of fundamentalism has some inescapable and uncomfortable critiques of America’s cultural liberalism of the past four decades. We were given the rare chance of a revelation in the aftermath of those attacks. That revelation came in two stages.

First was list of things some Muslim fundamentalists hate about our culture:

– They hate liberated women, and all that symbolizes them. They hate it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when or whether they will become breeders, when they show the independence of getting abortions, and changing laws that previously gave men more power over them.

– They hate the wide range of sexual orientations and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies. They hate homosexuality, can’t confront the homosexual tendencies that exist in them, so project them outward and punish them in others.

– They hate individual freedoms that allow people to stray from the single rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all people. They hate individual rights that let others slough off their simple certainties.

Not much about these revelations was really new. We saw all this before, when Khomeini’s Muslim fundamentalists wreaked such havoc in Iran in the years following 1979. We have long known that Muslim fundamentalism is a mortal enemy of freedom and democracy.

But the surprise came just a few days after September 11th, in that remarkably unguarded interview on “The 700 Club” between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It was remarkable partly because these men are so media-savvy it’s amazing they would say such things on the air. But it’s also remarkable because as they listed the “causes” of the September 11th attacks, we heard exactly the same hate list the Afghan Taliban had outlined:

– They hate liberated women who don’t follow orders, who get abortions when they want them, who threaten, or laugh at, their arrogant pretensions to rule them.

– They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that have always characterized human societies. They would force the country to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where the husband works and the wife stays home with the children – even when that describes fewer than one-sixth of current American families.

– They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country. Pat Robertson has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn’t a fit form of government unless it is run by fundamentalist Christians of his kind.

It is terribly important for us to realize that the fact that “our” Christian fundamentalists have the same hate list as ‘their” Muslim fundamentalists is not a coincidence!

From 1988-1993, the University of Chicago conducted a six-year study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done. About 150 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.

They identified five points shared by virtually all fundamentalisms:

1. Their rules must be made to apply to all people, and to all areas of life. There can be no separation of church and state, or of public and private areas of life. The rigid rules of God – and they never doubt that they and only they have got these right – must become the law of the land. Pat Robertson, again, has said that just as Supreme Court justices place a hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, so they should also place a hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. In Khomeini’s Iran of two decades ago, and in the recent Taliban rule of Afghanistan, we saw how brutal and bloody this looks in real time.

2. The second agenda item is really at the top of the list, and it’s vulgarly simple: Men are on top. In every way. Men are bigger and stronger, and they rule not only through physical strength, but also and more importantly through their influence on the laws and rules of the land. Men set the boundaries. Men define the norms, and men enforce them. They also define women, and they define them through narrowly-conceived biological functions. Women are to be supportive wives, mothers, and home-makers.

3. A third item follows from the others – indeed all of these agenda items are necessarily interlocked, and need each other to survive. Since there is only one right picture of the world, one right set of beliefs, and one right set of roles for men, women and children, it is imperative that this picture and these norms and rules be communicated precisely to the next generation. Therefore, they must control the education of the society. They control the textbooks, the teaching styles, they decide what may and may not be taught. In Afghanistan, women were denied any education at all beyond basic literacy – and sometimes not even that much. And in our own country it was a long and hard battle to get women access to college and professional educations and credentials.

4. A fourth point isn’t an agenda item, but an observation voiced by several of the scholars: there is an amazingly strong and deep resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism. Both have almost identical agendas. Men are on top, women are subservient, there is one rigid set of rules, with police and military might to enforce them, and education is tightly controlled by the State. One scholar suggested that it’s helpful to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. Fundamentalists spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed. Likewise, the phrase “overcoming the modern” is a fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941.

5. And the fifth point is the most abstract, though it’s foundational. Fundamentalists deny history in a radical and idiosyncratic way. Fundamentalists know, as well or better than anybody, that culture taints everything it touches. Our teachers, our times, color how we think, what we value, and the kind of people we become. If you have perverse teachers or books, you develop perverse people and societies. And they agree on the perversions of our current American society: the air of permissiveness, narcissism, individual rights unbalanced by responsibilities, sex divorced from commitment, and so on. The culture must be controlled because it colors everything in it. So far, so good.

What they don’t want to see is that exactly the same thing was true when their own sacred scriptures were created. Good biblical scholarship begins by studying the cultural situation when scriptures were created, to understand their original intent so we can better discern what messages they may still have that are relevant for our lives. But if fundamentalists admit that their own scriptures are as culturally conditioned as everything else, they lose the foundation of their certainties.

St. Paul had severe personal hangups about sex, for instance, that lie behind his personal problems with homosexuality and women. How else would he say that it is a shameful thing for a woman to speak in church, or that men are made in the image of God, but women are made in the image of men? These are the reasons that informed biblical scholars take some of Paul’s teachings as rantings rather than revelations. But for fundamentalists, their scriptures fell straight from heaven in a leather-bound book, every jot and tittle intact.

Now something should be bothering you about this list. And that’s that except for the illustrations I”ve added, you can’t tell what religion, culture, or even century I’m talking about! This realization also stopped the scholars a dozen years ago while they were presenting abstracts of their papers at the fall meetings in Chicago. Several of them noted that all their papers were sounding alike, that we were reporting on ‘s pecies” and needed to be studying the “genus,” that there were strong family resemblances between all these fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact, no way to influence each other.

This is one of the most important things we need to learn about the agendas of all fundamentalisms in the world. They are all alike. And the only way that can be the case is if the agenda preceded all of the religions.

And it did. These behaviors are familiar because we”ve all heard and seen them many times. These men are acting the role of Alpha Males who define the boundaries of their group’s territory, and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of tens of thousands of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. Or to put it into jargon, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children, there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected, the outsiders are expelled or fought.

What the conservatives of human societies are conserving is the biological default setting of our species – virtually identical with the default setting of ten thousand other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is tens of millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been. It is the picture of life that gave birth to most of the gods, as its projected protectors.

It’s absolutely natural, ancient, powerful – and completely inadequate. It’s a means of structuring relationships that evolved when we lived in troops of 150 or less. But in the modern world, it’s completely incapable of the nuance or flexibility needed to structure human societies in humane ways. It’s absolutely natural and absolutely inadequate.

But it does help us better understand the relative roles of conservatives and liberals in modern society, and the role that liberals play in giving birth to fundamentalist uprisings.

The conservative impulse that has its starkest form in the fundamentalist agenda is our attempt to give stability to our societies. And as many observers have noted, hierarchical structures tend to be very stable.

The liberal impulses serve to give us not stability but civility: humanity. And they do this by expanding the definitions of our inherited territorial categories. The fundamental job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal advances in society.

Giving women the vote eighty years ago was expanding the in-group from only adult males to include adult females. Once that larger definition was established by liberals, our conservatives began defending that definition of the in-group rather than the smaller one.

Likewise, the civil rights movement was a way of saying that our in-group was multi-colored as well as including both sexes. Every liberal advance adds to the list of those who belong within our society’s protected group.

This means that, while society is a kind of slow dance between the conservative and liberal impulses, the liberal role is the more important one. It provides civility and humanity, it makes our societies humane rather than just stable and mean.

It also means that in order for the liberal impulse to lead, liberals must remain in contact with the moral center of our territorial nature and our need for a structure of responsibilities. Fundamentalist uprisings are an early warning system telling us that the liberals have failed to provide an adequate and balanced vision, that they have not found a vision that attracts enough people to become stable.

Just as it’s no coincidence that all fundamentalisms have similar agendas, it’s also no coincidence that the most successful liberal advances tend to be made by wrapping their expanded definitions in what sound like extremely conservative categories. Take just a couple:

John F. Kennedy’s most famous line sounds like the terrifying dictate of the world’s worst fascism: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask rather what you can do for your country.” Imagine that line coming from Hitler, Khomeini, the Taliban, or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell! It is a conservative, even a fascist, slogan. Yet Kennedy used it to effect significant liberal transformations in our society. Under that umbrella he created the Peace Corps and Vista, and enlisted many young people to extend our hand to those we had not before seen as belonging to our in-group: Liberal ends achieved through what sounded like conservative means.

Likewise, Martin Luther King used the rhetoric of a conservative vision, expanded through his liberal redefinition of the members of our in-group. When he defined all Americans as the children of God, those words could sound like the battle-cry of an American Taliban on the verge of putting a bible in every school, a catechism in every legislature. Instead, King used that cry to include Americans of all colors in the sacred and protected group of “all God’s children” – which was just what many Southerners were arguing against forty years ago. Liberal ends, conservative means.

When liberal visions work, it’s because they have kept one foot solidly in the moral center of our deep territorial impulses, and the other free to push the envelope, to create a bigger tent, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.

And when liberal visions fail, it is often because they fail to achieve just this kind of balance between our conservative impulses and our liberal needs.

During the past half century, many of our liberal visions have been too narrow, too self-absorbed, too unbalanced. And their imbalance has been a key factor in triggering the fundamentalist uprisings of the past decades. When liberals don’t lead well, others don’t follow. And when society doesn’t follow liberal visions, liberals haven’t led well (or at all).

– When liberals burned the American flag during the Vietnam War rather than waving it and insisting that America live up to its great tradition, they lost the most powerful territorial symbol in our culture, and lost the ability to speak for our national interests. This created an imbalance that planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings.

– When liberals defined abortion in amoral terms, as simply a matter of individual rights – where only the mother, but not the developing baby, were “individuals” – they created a moral imbalance that planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings (as well as quietly losing the support of many liberals, including liberal ministers).

– When liberals over-emphasized individual rights while ignoring the need to balance them with individual responsibilities toward the larger society, they planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings.

Those uprisings are happening in some Muslim societies that hate us and hate the influence our culture is having on their own. They are also threatening within our own culture, as shown by that amazing interview on “The 700 Club” and some of both Robertson and Falwell’s statements of the past two decades. I have heard now that Jerry Falwell has filed suit in federal court to challenge Hamilton’s interpretation of the separation of church and state. I’m not sure how to check this, but if it’s true it is a sign that the Taliban’s power could be transported to our own shores. It would only take revoking the separation between church and state, and the use of state power to enforce church-dictated behaviors and norms for all. And the degradation of American education through the influence of fundamentalist lobbies on textbook publishers is already well-documented.

But if I’m right in what I’m suggesting here, it isn’t their fault. The fundamentalists are reacting absolutely instinctively – whether they think they have instincts or not – to a threat to social stability made up of the narrow and unbalanced liberal teachings of the past three or four decades.

Maintaining both stability and civility, humane content and enduring form in human societies, is an unending dance between the conservative and the liberal impulses within our societies. But the task of liberals is much, much harder.

It’s really quite easy to be a fundamentalist. All you have to do is cling tightly to a few simplistic teachings too small to do justice to the complex demands of the real world. You just have to cling to these, and then pretend that what you have done is either honest or noble.

But to be a liberal, really to be an awake, aware, responsive and responsible liberal – that can take, and that can make, a whole life.

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Davidson Loehr

6 January 2002

Text of this sermon is not available but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Like most religious literalists, I think religion is about our search for salvation. Unlike religious literalists, I think our salvation comes here and now or it never comes at all. I’m not inventing a new meaning for the word, I’m returning to its original meaning. It comes from the same Latin root as our word “salve,” and means health or wholeness. So what is salvation about for religious liberals? What makes us most healthy and whole?

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© Davidson Loehr

December 16th, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

CENTERING

Let us consider how we are united in our religious quests. Religion is the universal language of the human heart. Differing words describe the outward appearance of things. Diverse symbols represent that which stands beyond and within. Yet every person’s hunger is the same, and heart communicates with heart.

Ever the vision leads on, with many gods, with one, or with none. With a holy land washed by ocean waters or a holy land within the heart. In temperament we differ, yet we are dedicated to one commanding destiny.

Creeds divide us, but we share a common quest.

Because we are human we shall ever build our altars.

Because each has a holy yearning we offer everywhere our prayers and our anthems.

For an eternal truth lives beneath our differences. We are children of one great love, united in one eternal family.

Let us remember that our home is with one another, and that we are home.

(Adapted from Rev. Waldemar Argow)

SERMON

This is the time of year when it’s our job to get into the holiday mood. If any of you are having any trouble getting into the holiday mood you’re not alone. You go downtown to a big mall, you’re surrounded by red and green and little sparkly lights everywhere, and tinsel. And the sacred music of the year, like “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly,” “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” and, of course, “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.” I get overloaded when I’m in the middle of all that eye candy and ear candy, and I wonder what the meaning of Christmas is.

Then you hear, especially this year, that it’s now patriotic to spend money on Christmas presents. It’s a new twist. It’s sort of like red, white and blue bunting on the manger. We hear that we’re expected to spend our average of a thousand dollars each on Christmas gifts, that merchants are counting on it, and the American economy and probably the American flag and God and America are counting on it. Because merchants make over a third of their annual profit on the Christmas gift sales. I went to Best Buy and The Container Store yesterday, and I was just overwhelmed with red and green and silver and candle and glitter, and a thousand new glitzy things that I’m supposed to buy for everyone I love, to prove I love them. And three hundred kinds of wrapping paper and ribbons to wrap it all in. And I get overwhelmed, and I wonder what the real meaning of Christmas is.

We hear the question about the real meaning of Christmas as though the answer were obvious, but it isn’t obvious. Because Christmas is a very complex holiday, and that’s because it’s a combination of three completely separate and unrelated holidays that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. One is a holy day, and two are holidays.

First is the Christian story, the story of baby Jesus and the notion of God being made incarnate in the child of simple people. That’s the “holy day” of the season. Second is December 25th and all of its history, unrelated to the Christian story. And third is the story of Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas. These are the “holidays” of the season. These three have nothing to do with each other. It’s so complex I’ve decided to take two weeks to do Christmas this year.

Next week I want to get us immersed in the Christian story of Christmas. The story of the notion of bringing God down from the heavens and making the notion of the highest incarnate in someone from the lowest, is a profound and powerful story. I want to spend time with it next week, letting it soak into us. So next week we’ll talk about the holy day.

Today I want to talk about the holidays. Because the holiday spirit that we have has virtually no connection to that story of the manger, except for a couple of songs. So I want to talk about the two holidays that we have at this season. The first has to do with December 25th. Now we know that December 25th was not the day that Baby Jesus was born. We have no idea when Jesus was born. We don’t even know what year he was born, let alone what day. The best scholarly guesses are that he was born between 4 and 6 B.C. – that’s something only Jesus could do! But we have no idea what the day was. For the first three centuries of Christianity, the notion of Jesus? birthday wasn’t important. There were several days celebrated in different local regions for it, but they weren’t big celebrations. In some parts of the world January 6th got settled on as Jesus? birthday. In the Eastern Orthodox Church Jesus? birthday is still celebrated on January 6th.

What we do know about December 25th is that in the ancient calendar it was the date of the winter solstice. In the modern calendar we date that at December 21st. Two thousand years ago it was dated December 25th. What that means is that December 25th, was, by definition, the birthday of all solar deities. That’s the day the sun is “born again” each year. That’s the day the days start becoming longer again. So December 25th was Mithra’s birthday; it was the birthday of half a dozen solar deities celebrated and known at the time.

It didn’t become Jesus? birthday until the fourth century. Around the mid-fourth century Christianity was forced to adopt two days from the religion of Mithraism. Most people don’t know this. The first date was December 25th, which was Mithra’s birthday and was adopted around the mid-fourth century as Jesus? birthday. So now Jesus had a birthday. The second thing Christianity was forced to adopt in the mid-fourth century was the holy day of Mithra. And a sun god has as his holy day the day of the sun. That’s why Sun-day is the holy day of Christianity. In the first three hundred years you can read the church fathers bragging about the fact that there is no holy day in Christianity because only pagan religions have holy days named after their gods. By the mid-fourth century Christianity had one, which we’re still meeting on today.

The winter solstice is the day that had been celebrated for thousands of years as the day that the sun returns. I think it’s our most optimistic holiday. It’s the day in the times of the shortest nights of the year when we throw the biggest party of the year. The Romans had a huge party that they threw at the time. It was the celebration of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun, returning again. They celebrated it with red and green stuff just like we still use – evergreens, holly, ivy – and mistletoe that they probably got from the Druids. These are holidays that borrow props from more traditions than we can even count any more.

After the fourth century when the Christians were forced to adopt the 25th of December, Mithra’s birthday, as Jesus? birthday, the Christians liked the idea of going to the Roman parties. The Church didn’t like it and tried to make it a more somber holiday, but by the sixth century the Church had lost, and the pagan festivals and all the decorations and customs of the winter solstice festival got combined with the story of the birth of Jesus.

When the Protestant Reformation came a thousand years later, most of the Protestants liked Christmas too, though not all of them. There are still some conservative Protestant sects that will not celebrate December 25th as Jesus? birthday because they know that it’s a pagan solstice festival. And we’ll talk about that when we get to the history of Christmas in this country, which has been quite a mixed history.

Martin Luther, the man who started the Protestant Reformation, loved Christmas. He’s credited with being the first person to bring a whole fir tree inside the house for the season. Now Mithraists would have recognized all this, because the fir tree was the sacred tree of Mithras. So we have ancient, ancient religions and traditions involved in December 25th, but none of them had anything to do with the story of Jesus.

When Christians came to this country – this country was settled by Puritans who were very strict – they didn’t like Christmas. They didn’t celebrate December 25th as Christmas; it was not a holiday. You could go to jail if you were caught taking December 25th off work. How do you like that? So this country’s had a hard time getting into the holiday mood too.

What finally brought Christmas into our consciousness and gave us the holiday the way we have it today was really the Romantic era. In the nineteenth century art and music and sort of the whole atmosphere were concerned more with feelings than with facts and rules. Christmas cards began around 1850 in England and became very popular as nice little notes people could send to each other this time of year, and they caught on quickly in this country too.

In the 1880’s Clement Moore wrote his famous poem about the night before Christmas, and he brought a new element into the story that we haven’t heard yet. He brought Santa Claus in. Santa Claus is about a whole different tradition that had nothing to do either with Christmas or with the winter solstice. It’s the second holiday and the third day being combined in this December time, and it’s a story worth knowing. Some of you may decide that you think it’s really what Christmas is about when you hear the story of St. Nicholas told straight.

St. Nicholas, from whom the Santa Claus story evolved, was a real man. He lived in the fourth century, in the early part of the fourth century, before there was a Christmas in Christianity. He was a rich man with a generous heart, and he would go around unseen – because it was important to him that this be done secretly – and give gifts, little bags of gold, to some of the needy people in his town. Eventually he was discovered, it was learned where the gold was coming from, and the story of St. Nicholas and his generous heart spread like wildfire.

When St. Nicholas died around the middle of the fourth century, he died on December 6, and December 6th became known then as St. Nicholas Day. It was a day when Christians were supposed to celebrate the memory of this generous man with his generous heart, by giving gifts to the needy. It had nothing to do with Jesus or Christmas. The gifts weren’t to be given on December 25th. The idea was to give them to the needy on December 6th, and to give them anonymously.

Now the truth is that we may sometimes be big-hearted, but we like to get credit for it. So the idea of anonymous gifts didn’t seem to stick. By the 1880’s, when Clement Moore had made his story of Santa Claus, what was going on in England and this country was that merchants had seized on this and decided that they could combine all the festivities of the winter solstice with the Christian story and the story of St. Nicholas. They had a bonanza. And in the 1890’s, St. Nicholas Day and Christmas became combined, and the notion of giving gifts now became part of Christmas – although it was mostly the notion of giving gifts that you bought, not gifts that you made.

You still find people who don’t combine these. In Holland, St. Nicholas Day and the day of gift-giving is still December 6th. And in some more conservative Christian denominations they don’t combine the two. I have a Mennonite friend who says that all the time she was growing up they separated the holy day of Christmas from the secular day of gift-giving. The problem with not trading gifts is that your kids are the only kids in class who didn’t get Christmas presents, and so they get made fun of. So what her family did was to celebrate St. Nicholas Day on December 6 as a day when they exchanged presents. They celebrated this as a completely secular holiday. Then on the 25th her family would celebrate Christmas. That was a religious holiday when they celebrated the birth of their Lord and Savior. They gathered around the piano, they sang hymns, they had a wonderful Christmas dinner, and they spent the day together as a family.

So what’s the meaning of Christmas? Well, part of it is the meaning of celebrating and singing and having evergreens and holly and ivy. Part of the meaning of Christmas is having fun and throwing a party in the darkest days of the year. That’s the oldest part of it. Part of it is the notion of giving gifts, especially if they can be given true to the old St. Nicholas story.

I want to tell you a story that I just got this week, that retells the St. Nicholas story in a new way. I got this story written in the first person, and I think it reads best in the first person, so I’ll read it to you that way instead of changing it.

* * *

My Grandma taught me everything about Christmas I needed to know. I was just a kid. I remember tearing across town on my bike to visit her on the day my big sister dropped the bomb: THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS! Even dummies know that, she said. My grandma wasn’t the gushy kind. She never had been, and I fled to her that day because I knew she’d be straight with me. I knew Grandma would tell me the truth, and I also knew that the truth would go down a lot better with a couple of her world-famous cinnamon buns. Grandma was home, the buns were still warm, and between bites I told her everything. She was ready for me.

“No Santa Claus,” she snorted. “Ridiculous! Don’t believe it. That rumor’s been going around for years, and it makes me mad, just mad. Now put on your coat and let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?” I was still eating my second cinnamon bun. “Where? turned out to be Kerby’s General Store, the one store in town that had a little bit of just about everything. As we walked through its doors, Grandma handed me a ten-dollar bill – that was a lot of money in those days.

“Take this money,” she said, “and buy something for someone who needs it. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

With that, Grandma left the store. I was only eight years old. I’d gone shopping with my mother, but I’d never gone shopping with myself, and I’d never been in a store full of that many people. I just stood there for a minute, very confused. I was clutching the ten-dollar bill, wondering what to buy and who on earth to buy it for. I thought of everybody I knew: my family, my friends, my neighbors, the kids at school, the people who went to my church.

I was just about thought out . . . when suddenly I thought of Bobby Decker. He was a kid with bad breath and messy hair, and he sat behind me in Mrs. Pollock’s second grade class. Bobby Decker didn’t have a coat. I knew that because he never went out for recess during the winter. His mother always wrote a note telling the teacher that he had a cough. But all the kids knew that Bobby Decker didn’t have a cough, what Bobby Decker didn’t have was a coat.

I picked out a nice red corduroy coat with a hood. It looked real warm; just what he needed. I couldn’t find a price tag on it, but I figured ten bucks would buy anything. I took the coat and my ten-dollar bill, and I put it on the counter, and I pushed it across the counter to the lady. She looked at the coat and looked at my ten dollars and looked at me. She said, “Is this a Christmas present for someone?”

“Yes,” I said shyly, “It’s for Bobby. He doesn’t have a coat.”

The nice lady smiled at me. I didn’t get any change. But she put the coat in a bag, and she wished me a Merry Christmas.

That evening Grandma helped me wrap the coat in Christmas paper and ribbons and write “To Bobby from Santa Claus.” Grandma explained that it was very important that it be done that way because Santa always insisted on secrecy.

Then she drove me over to Bobby Decker’s house, explaining as we went that I was now and forever, officially, one of Santa’s helpers. Grandma parked down the street from Bobby’s house, and she and I crept noiselessly and hid in the bushes by his front walk. Then Grandma gave me a nudge. “All right, little elf,” she whispered, “Get going.”

I took a deep breath. I dashed for his front door, threw the present down on the step, pounded his doorbell and flew back to the safety of the bushes with Grandma. Together we waited breathlessly in the darkness for the front door to open. Finally it did, and there stood Bobby. He picked up the present and took it inside.

Forty years haven’t dimmed the thrill of those moments spent shivering beside my Grandma in Bobby Decker’s bushes. That night I realized that those awful rumors about Santa Claus were just what Grandma said they were. They were ridiculous, because Santa was alive and well, and we were on his team!

* * *

This Christmas, let me suggest that you give at least one present to someone who needs it, and that you do it anonymously, so they don’t know who gave it to them. You might find that it transforms the whole memory of this Christmas for you.

This is the season when holiday spirits are all around us and are beckoning us, and if we can’t get into the holiday mood, it may be because we’ve got it backwards. It may be because the point of it this season is to let the holiday spirits get inside of us. They’re here. They’re all around us, as they’ve always been, and we have a chance, if we’ll take it, to be on their team. I recommend it, for all of us.

Merry Christmas!

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© Davidson Loehr

November 25, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Trying to preach on something like forgiveness is a real preacher-trap. It’s one of those words, like love and truth and sweetness, that can so easily get reduced to the level of Hallmark cards.

There’s a story about President Cal Coolidge that comes to mind. He was called “Silent Cal” because he spoke little and seldom. He returned home from church one day and his wife said,”How was church?”

“Fine.”

“What did the preacher talk about?”

“Sin.”

“What did he say?”

“He’s against it.”

Forgiveness is one of those topics and I have this fear that some of you are going to go home today and someone will ask you what did preacher talk about and you’ll say forgiveness, and he’s for it. So if you want to cut to the chase and get a Cliff Notes version of the sermon, that’s it. It’s about forgiveness and I’m for it.

But forgiveness is not only a tricky thing, it’s a word and a concept that is more foreign to most of our worlds than we seem to be aware of. And before going too far into forgiveness, I need to say the point in life is not learning how to forgive everyone you know over and over, day after day. The point in life is learning to associate with the kind of people and to have the kind of relationships that you don’t have to forgive over and over, day after day.

Still, we mess up – or in religious jargon, we sin. I’m going to be using more religious jargon this morning than I usually do, and it’s worth talking about why. This word forgiveness seems to come primarily from Western religion and almost nowhere else. It’s not a Buddhist concept. The notion in Buddhism that you need to be forgiven shows that you’re suffering under an illusion that you need to be freed from. But in Western religion, it’s pretty powerful stuff.

It’s like the concept of sin. The word sin, which I think is really a good word, comes from an ancient Hebrew term that was actually an archery term. It meant “to miss the mark.” So when we use it in religion, it means that we’ve missed the mark in a bigger way. We’ve missed the mark in that we’ve missed living as the kind of person we should have, establishing relationships at the level that’s worthy of us and worthy of the other person. We’ve missed that kind of mark.

Nevertheless, the problem for an immense number in our society, not just most people here, is how do you find forgiveness when the notion of a Heavenly Father is no longer either coherent or compelling for you? How do you find forgiveness without a forgiver? In the twentieth century, the role of hearing confession and granting absolution for sins, to put it that way, that role was really taken over in our society from religion by psychology. Even ministers and priests went to see their shrinks to get forgiven rather than going to see each other.

It’s an often told story that if you have a problem with alcohol addiction or drug addiction, the last person on earth you want to tell is usually your priest and the last place that you feel comfortable saying that out loud is your church. That’s why people went to twelve step programs and twelve step programs have been called by some the most successful spiritual groups of the twentieth century.

There was a survey done twenty years ago to find out whether people of different religions nevertheless shared similar values. Unitarians were one of the groups that were in this study. And the study was surprising perhaps in a couple of ways. First, it found that we really don’t differ much from other groups in what we believe. We tend to believe in truth and love and justice and compassion and that life is a gift and so on, the whole list. We may put it differently if we don’t put it in traditional jargon, but the values are the same.

Where we did differ though, sort of sadly, was in what we didn’t value that most others did value. For almost every religion in Western religious traditions, forgiveness ranked right up at the top in things that were valued and yearned for. Among Unitarians, it was near the bottom. Now, if in this survey, they had also included the majority of people in this society who don’t attend any church on Sunday, I would guess that the real percentage of people in this society who actually attend church or temple or synagogue regularly is about twenty percent. For fifty years, the surveys have been saying it’s forty percent, but once in awhile other studies come out to say they’re really sort of fudging these numbers and doubling it. So if it’s true that about eighty percent in our society don’t attend church, and I think that’s probably close, if they had asked that eighty percent, I think they also would have found that forgiveness was something that ranked low in their values. I think the reason it ranks low is because for most people the word forgiveness has all kinds of metaphysical and supernatural overtones. It’s been dipped in centuries and centuries of a religious tradition that say forgiveness is something that comes from the grace of God, and I just don’t know what to do with sentences like that anymore.

There are a lot of other places that you don’t find the word forgiveness and some of these are very surprising to me as I was doing my homework for this sermon. If you look in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you won’t find an entry for forgiveness. Seems odd. If you look in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, you won’t find an entry for forgiveness. Seems odd, that’s been an idea for a long time, I think. Even if you look in the Encyclopedia of Religions, the sixteen volume encyclopedia that’s sort of the standard work for all world religions, you don’t find and entry for forgiveness. You find and entry for , and for all kinds of animal sacrifices bizarre practices, but not forgiveness.

Now that’s odd. Where you do find forgiveness is in a thesaurus, but even there it says that it means things like to excuse, to absolve, to let someone get away with, to bury the hatchet. It’s all about us. Where you also find an entry for forgiveness is in the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. I have all these reference books, I think my secret religion believes in salvation by bibliography. I don’t get to look at them very often, so I’m glad to have a word like this to look up, it makes me feel I was justified in buying those things all those years ago.

In the Interpreter’s Dictionary in the Bible, there’s a very long article on forgiveness. And the person writing the article is saying that estrangement and reconciliation or sin and repentance and forgiveness are what the whole bible is about.

Now those are more religious words so I have to unpack them or you’re going to think we’ve gone into Disney World and I don’t want you to think that. When the bible talks about the fundamental human problem being one of estrangement from God, don’t think in terms of a big critter in the sky. Think in terms of the people who wrote these stories saying that the fundamental human problem is that we are estranged from the center of life, the source of life, those things that make life feel more real, more true and more full. The word God is a symbolic shorthand way of saying that. And a shorthand way of relating to that. But don’t turn them into Hallmark cards.

What’s different about forgiveness in the bible and in western religions is that forgiveness isn’t about us. Forgiveness is part of a relationship that we have with life, with God, whichever terms you’re comfortable putting it in. Sin means that we have missed the mark in trying to live up to what we think is most true, most noble, what we know is demanded of us. Repentance means we’re trying to find a way to say this and somewhere to say it, and someone to whom to say, “Look, I missed the mark, can I be made whole again?” Life isn’t about being perfect, it’s about trying to become whole. And forgiveness is part of a process that lets us restore a wholeness that we’ve lost when we’ve missed the mark.

The fact that you can’t find forgiveness an entry in major reference encyclopedias of the twentieth century, either for philosophy, the history of ideas, or religion is a measure of the fact that our whole world has changed in the last couple hundred years. We’ve lost that easy access to a sense that there is somewhere we can go to say, “I sinned, I messed up, I missed the mark. Can’t somebody forgive me? Can’t this somehow be made whole again?”

There’s a poem written about 160 years ago that I like here. I think usually our poets are aware of these things before most of the rest of us are. I want to read you this poem, it’s one you may not have heard before. A poem by Thomas Hood, a man about whom I know almost nothing, except that he lived from 1798 to 1845. And he lived during the time in the nineteenth century when we were losing touch with the mythic world, the older world, the stories, the Father in Heaven that we could talk to about things like forgiveness. It’s a nostalgic poem and a romantic poem, but see if you can’t identify with some of the feelings, at least at the end of it.

The name of the poem is “I Remember, I Remember?

I remember, I remember the house where I was born,

The little window where the sun came peeping in at morn.

He never came awake too soon nor brought too long a day

But now I often wish the night had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember the roses, red and white,

The violets and the lily cups, those flowers made of light.

The lilacs where the robin built and where my brother

Set the laburnum on his birthday, that tree is living yet.

I remember, I remember where I used to swing

And I thought the air must rise as fresh to swallows on the wing.

My spirit flew in feathers then, that is so heavy now.

And summer pools could hardly cool the fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember the fir trees, dark and high

I used to think their slender tops would touch against the sky.

It was a childish ignorance, but now it’s little joy

To know I’m farther off from Heaven than when I was a boy.

We’re all farther off from Heaven than when we were children and that’s why a word like forgiveness can’t seem to find its way into our consciousness or even into our reference works anymore. It seems to be part of a world long ago. The problem is that the need for forgiveness comes from within our human condition, so it still remains.

In my way of thinking, forgiveness connects naturally with another religious concept. It’s an idea from the Jewish tradition and it’s the concept of atonement. The Jews have a day of atonement called Yom Kippur every year. This year it was the end of September, the 27th , I think. It’s quite an interesting holiday, but the word atonement is what’s most interesting to me. At the end of the day of atonement, Jews are all supposed to go out and do a good deed for someone else as soon as they can. So the notion of atonement ends with reestablishing connections with others.

The word atonement is wonderful. It’s the only English word, I believe, that became a theological concept. And the meaning of the word is in it’s spelling. If you look it up, the word means “at -one-ment?. It means just what it says. It’s the sense of being at one again as part of a relationship from which we’ve become estranged, that got breached, that somehow now has been made whole again. And the thanks for this is something we express by going out and doing something good for others.

Jewish thought is usually very down to earth and non-supernatural. You see this way of thinking in some of the Jewish writings and some of the psalms, especially the 90th Psalm, one of my favorites. The 90th Psalm begins with words about how God has been our dwelling place forever and ever and ever, but now God is gone, long gone and not around our lives and there’s the hope in the psalm that God will return again – not so God can fix things, but so we can be inspired to fix things. And the end lines in the 90th Psalm are the key to this. The psalm ends with the words, “Let the favor of our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yea the work of our hands establish thou it.”

It’s easy to see why so many people would still go to God to find forgiveness. And for those people for whom that language works, I envy them. It doesn’t work for me. But mostly the kind of atonement we need, and mostly the kind of forgiveness we need is the work of our hands. And we’ve often forgotten how to do it. Because it involves reestablishing a connection to a bigger relationship that once gave life and that got broken because somebody, maybe us, missed the mark.

I have a story about the kind of forgiveness and the kind of atonement that’s much closer to the kind that most of us need in life. The story was told to me as a true story. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it’s one of those myths that are always true whether they ever happened or not.

It’s a story about a nurse named Sue who one night, in a blustery winter evening in January, went down to check on her patients and she checked on the man down in 712. He’d had a mild heart attack earlier. And she checked on him and all of his vital signs were fine, and everything seemed to be stable. But as she turned to leave his room, he suddenly grabbed his sheets so tight that his knuckles turned white and he raised up in bed and he said, “Please, you must call my daughter and you must call her now.” He said, “It’s urgent.” And she said, “Well, sir, you seem to be doing fine.” He said, “You don’t understand. She’s the only child I have and you must call her now, it’s urgent.” And she noticed that his breathing was now quite labored and quite irregular. He said that the daughter’s name and number were in his records and the nurse said she would call her. As the nurse turned to leave, the man said, “Nurse, do you have a piece of paper?” And she looked in pockets and found a yellow scrap of paper so she gave it to him and went to call the daughter.

She expected the daughter to concerned about her father’s health but she didn’t expect the daughter to become nearly hysterical. The daughter was screaming, “No, this can’t be true, he just can’t die.” And the nurse said, “Well, we don’t know and he seems fine although his breathing is a little labored and he wants you to come right away.” And the daughter said, “You don’t understand.” She said, “We’ve lived in the same town for thirty years.” And she said, “I haven’t seen him for a year. And the last time I saw him, we had a terrible fight. I screamed at him, “I hate you, I wish you would die?, and I slammed the door. He just can’t die!”

After this call, the nurse went back to check on the man who’d become now a part of her world. And she found him very still. She checked his pulse and there was none. She did CPR while she was waiting for the emergency team to arrive. But the team was too late. And no matter what they did, they realized that the man had died. One by one, the emergency team left the room, someone finally turned off the gurgling oxygen machine.

The nurse was the last to leave the man’s room and she saw in the hallway one of the doctors talking to a very upset young woman who had to be the daughter. The nurse went out and brought the daughter in to her father’s room. And the daughter cried almost uncontrollably. And then she grabbed the sheet that had covered her father and used it to wipe her eyes and cried more. When she did this the nurse saw the yellow piece of paper that she had given the man. And she picked it up and looked at it and handed it to the daughter. What the man had written on the yellow piece of paper before he died was, “I love you. I forgive you. I hope you forgive me. I know you don’t hate me.” And it was signed Daddy.

That’s forgiveness. And it happened by reestablishing a relationship that had been broken because two people had missed the mark. Maybe the daughter could have found that kind of forgiveness and at-one-ment on her own in years to come without that piece of paper, through thought or through therapy or through time. But I doubt that it would ever have had the power that it had from her father. And isn’t it sad that the forgiveness and the atonement only went one direction? Isn’t it sad that the daughter never got the chance to say those words to her father before he died?

I’m reminded of one last piece of religious wisdom that’s little known and worth sharing. It comes from the Lord’s Prayer. As many of you know, I’ve been involved with The Jesus Seminar for over a decade. That seminar has done a lot of good things. One of the things that it’s done is in clarifying the Lord’s Prayer and translating it. We’re clear that as the prayer as written Jesus never said it, for a variety of reasons, one of them being the whole notion of speaking on behalf of a group of people that he didn’t do anywhere. He would never have said “Our Father?. He would talk about life or truth or the need to establish a more authentic relationship with God, but he never spoke for a group of people or acted as though he were their minister.

But three lines in the Lord’s Prayer are, we think, true to what the man Jesus cared about and would have said. One is the line “thy kingdom come.” Jesus taught about his notion of the kingdom of God, and wanted it to become established on earth. A second line is “give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus and his followers begged for their meals, and we believe he would have asked for just the day’s bread. The third line is the one that is almost always mistranslated. We’ve learned it as “forgive us our sins, as we forgive the sins of others,” and that’s kind of a nice line. But the word “as” needs to be translated better. Read rightly, the sentence should read “Forgive us our sins to the extent that we forgive the sins of others.” To the extent that we forgive the sins of others. Very different!

We need to take this out of mythic language. This isn’t about someone talking to a God in some dramatic way. That’s not what sacred writings are really about. This is an insight into the facts of life. And the insight is that we seem to find forgiveness to the extent that we are able to grant it to others. So finally it is the work of our hands we seek to establish, though it is work we always struggle to learn just how to do, because it is hard for us.

Let us try to seek this kind of forgiveness before we run out of time, before we have to grasp at little scraps of paper to write the messages we can’t find the courage to say out loud here and now. Let us confess our sins for missing the mark, and repent of them, and seek the forgiveness that reconnects us with our larger relationships. The work of our hands, all of our hands. Here. Now. Let us seek it before it is too late. Amen.

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© Davidson Loehr

September 16, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

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

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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.

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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)

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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?