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© Davidson Loehr

 December 7, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

(Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech words taken from Marianne Williamson)

HOMILY: Is Courage Ever Enough?

This is at least the third time in twenty years that I’ve written a sermon inspired by a famous line from Anais Nin. She said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

Something about those nine words is wonderfully appealing, and seems profoundly right. You can think of times when fear made you shrink, and courage expanded you in a hundred ways:

— You were afraid to ask someone you really liked for a date, then finally got the courage to do it and now here you are.

–You were afraid to try something – trying out for a team or a play or a choir. If you never got the courage up to try, you may still wonder what you missed, how your memory of yourself might have been enlarged if you had just mustered up the courage.

— You finally applied for the school or the job you wanted, and you got it. Or even if you didn’t get it, you know you did the most you could do, and there’s comfort there: a comfort that wouldn’t be there if you’d never taken the risk.

You can multiply the list from your own life, but we can all think of times when courage absolutely seemed to expand our life, and fear shrank it.

So it’s easy to say Yes, that colorful French woman was right – life certainly does shrink and expand according to our courage.

And that word “courage” is interesting in its own right. It comes from a French word meaning “heart.” Reacting to something from the heart feels like we’re coming from a strong place, and that can expand life too, for ourselves and those whose lives we touch – because we can feel the difference.

We actually just heard a beautiful example of this a few minutes ago, in Benjamin Britten’s lovely Ceremony of Carols. There is a footnote to those carols that appears in many program notes for their performance. Besides being one of the 20th century’s great composers, Britten was also a political radical, a gay man, and a conscientious pacifist, opposed to all war. It was tougher to be those things seventy years ago. When England declared war on Germany in September 1939, Britten and his partner left England and moved to the United States. He had good success here, but two and a half years later it became a matter of principle for him to return to England. He returned home in March and April 1942, in a five-week North Atlantic crossing right in the middle of the war. Britten couldn’t have known what would happen to him on his return. He would at least be met with great hostility, and he could have been put in prison.

I can’t imagine what Britten must have felt like during the five dangerous weeks crossing the North Atlantic to return home to an England, always in danger of being sunk by German U-boats. And he wasn’t traveling in anything like first class, or any class. He was cooped up near some large machines that put out a constant roar, high temperatures, and very noxious smells. Right there is where and when he composed the Ceremony of Carols we’ve just heard. The music is so lovely and lively it sounds like it couldn’t possibly have come from that setting. But it didn’t come from the bowels of a ship; it came from his heart – his “cour,” his courage – as his decision to return home also did. Britten was finally accepted back into his country, and this composition from his heart certainly expanded his life, and the lives of thousands like us, still to come. It is a tribute to our music director Brent Baldwin’s great perspicacity that he chose that music long before I had any idea what I was going to be talking about today.

Now you can see that it would be easy to do riffs on words like “heart” and “courage” all morning. But I want to leave the surface level of those wonderful nine words and look a little deeper, because there is another level at which something is wrong with just saying that life expands in proportion to our courage. Something is wrong, something is missing, it just isn’t that simple, and I think the whole saying is backwards. Courage isn’t enough, and isn’t what really makes life expand. That’s what I want to look at this morning. In fact, I think Anais Nin missed the most important point, or just assumed a much simpler picture than life really offers.

So I want to retrace the steps that led me down this provocative path and bring you along with me.

I first started thinking about our movie superheroes, and that we really create them as people who are so strong that they don’t have to be afraid of anybody. It’s that strength that lets them always do the right thing, as we wish we could too. So we project our need for courage onto them, then identify with them as they run, fly or rocket around battling the forces of evil. We think that if only we had the strength of Superman, or the agility and the wonderful gadgets of Batman or Ironman, then the courage part would be easy. So we think OK, it’s courage plus strength. Or courage plus strength plus a lot of cool gadgets.

But that’s not right either, because what sets these superheroes apart really isn’t their strength, cleverness or courage. After all, the supervillains are always pretty well matched with them. Lex Luthor, The Joker and Ironman’s many enemies were brilliant, also had clever gadgets, and weren’t afraid of anything not even superheroes. They had all the courage and strength you could hope for. But their courage didn’t make life expand.

Then I thought, Well OK, but everybody knew the supervillains were wrong. They were just obviously evil characters, like Lone Rangers from the Dark Side: aberrations, Bad Seeds.

But when we push it farther, that simple picture doesn’t hold together either. We have read or seen videos on YouTube of the families of young men or women in Iraq or Palestine who gave their lives to their cause by strapping bombs to their chest then killing themselves and as many strangers as they could. Their families, their communities, often even their religious leaders praise them as martyrs and heroes, not villains. You can say Well, they live in this closed little world where their beliefs are like a house of mirrors, repeating back to them only their own biases, and they’ve been taken in. Their courage has been seduced, we say. But you know they’re saying the same thing about us. It’s complex. It’s about more than courage. Life shrinks and expands not just in proportion to our courage, but also in proportion to the size and inclusiveness of our vision and our heart.

It isn’t courage that makes life expand. It’s courage in the service of high and noble ideals that makes life expand; courage in the service of coming alive, seeking truth, and healing the world.

Courage is the ability to take action. But whether that action expands or shrinks life depends on whether the spirits we serve are good or bad: whether we’re serving the angels of our better nature, or the angels of our worst nature. And how are we to know?

There is no foolproof way, but there’s a famous formula from a third-century theologian I’ve always loved as one of the best guides for people of good heart (Origen, c. 185-254). Our course of action, he said, must always meet two criteria. It must both be useful to us, and at the same time worthy of God. Because life also shrinks and expands in proportion to the size of the god we are serving.

(As a kind of scholastic footnote, Origen used this two-part test to determine whether you were interpreting Scripture rightly, though I think using it to determine whether you’re interpreting life rightly is a fair extension of his intent.)

Now you might want to argue that the families of those human bomb people would say the murder of their enemies was worthy of God. But the most revered thinkers in any religion, including Islam, don’t say that. Only the religious hacks praise murder; the more mature and nuanced say that unless our actions are guided by love and compassion, they are not worthy of God, period. When tactics are brutal or dehumanizing, we have already lost the ability to claim that they were good.

Many of you read a perfect example of this in the national news just two days ago, in a closing chapter to the O.J. Simpson saga that has been going on for fourteen years. On Friday, Las Vegas Judge Jackie Glass sentenced Simpson to a minimum of nine years in prison. Simpson tried to argue that he never meant to hurt anybody, he just wanted to recover his personal things, including his slain wife’s wedding ring. In other words, he was saying that what he did was not only useful to him, but also decent and noble, the sort of thing God would like. The judge pointed out that when he took a gun and accomplices, when he kidnapped and threatened people, his actions put the lie to his words. Once he adopted those tactics, he lost all claim to good intent. If we have a conscience at all, we know the difference. It’s one of the things about us that we have to be able to count on for a legal system to work, for juries to work, for anything to work. We know the difference.

It’s never as simple as saying that life expands in proportion to our courage. In every case – from superheroes and supervillains to suicidal bombers or the latest installment in the O.J. Simpson saga, it’s a similar lesson. Life expands in proportion to our courageous service of healthy and life-giving ideals, nothing less. It’s like another metaphor I’ve used here before, about the two wolves. A boy went to his grandfather for advice, saying he was often torn between wanting to do whatever he thought he could get away with, and what he knew was really right. Yes, the grandfather admitted, he had always had those same two voices in him. He thought of them as two wolves, each fighting to define his soul. One urged him to use his strength, courage and cleverness to get away with whatever he could, and the other would accept only fair and caring actions. All his life, the grandfather said, these two wolves have been fighting to own him, to steer his soul. When the boy asked which wolf wins, the old man said, “The one that I feed, my son – the one that I feed.”

Whether we think of these competing spirits as two wolves or as the angels of our better and worse natures, it matters tremendously which one we choose to feed, because only one of them – only one of them — has the power to expand life.

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© Davidson Loehr

 16 November 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us find a spiritual North Star to steer by when we are torn between life’s over-rated pleasures and its under-rated treasures.

We want to feel the difference between being opportunistic and being authentic, and learn how we can better choose the one that gives us more and better life.

Let us find the determination not to do what we should not do, the courage to do what we should do, and that elusive wisdom that lets us tell the difference.

How often we chase after things we don’t need, like dogs chase cars, not knowing what good they’d do us if we caught them. Can we learn to yearn for what we need rather than what we merely want?

And as for our lives – if they can’t be as long as we would like, can they be as rich and rewarding as we wish?

These are just some of the questions we feel along life’s path on this day as on many days. We offer them up, to speak them out loud in the hope that the person who hears them will be us.

Amen

SERMON: The Transient and the Permanent in Religion

There’s something exhilarating about being present when high ideals and aspirations are discussed, even if all we do is listen. We consult experts in diet, exercise, ecology, finances and a few dozen other areas, all important, all with a few really gifted and motivated people available to pass on their inspiring visions to us, and it feels well worth the money we’ve spent. In the meantime, we stay overweight, out of shape, eating poorly, handling our finances poorly, and the rest of it. Still, it’s inspiring.

Hearing about gifted religious visionaries and prophets is like this, too. This is the third in the series of three sermons on the early 19th century thinkers who helped define Unitarianism as a separate religion in America, a religion that was derived from, but distinct from, liberal Christianity. All three men were in their 30s when they delivered the sermons that Unitarian students are still required to read. William Ellery Channing was 38 when he delivered the sermon called “Unitarian Christianity” in 1819. Ralph Waldo Emerson was 35 when he gave his address at the Harvard Divinity School – the last time he was invited to speak there for 30 years. The minister I want to talk about today was Theodore Parker, who was just 31 when he delivered a sermon called “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” in 1841. I have to say that Parker is my favorite of the three, and was from the first time I read their sermons nearly thirty years ago.

Parker was an almost mythic person. Born the eleventh child of a farmer, he grew up very poor. He was mostly self-educated, then wound up graduating from Harvard Divinity School. By the time he entered the ministry, he could read twenty languages. After he died, at the age of 49, it was discovered that his library was the largest personal library in America, with about 50,000 volumes. His biographer (Henry Steele Commager) said that Parker wrote notes in the margins of almost all of them. If he actually read them all, that would be almost three books a day from the day he was born.

At his peak, he preached to around 3,000 people, the largest audience in America – without a microphone. His sermons routinely lasted over an hour, were thoroughly researched and brilliantly written. Besides being the most powerful and combative voice of liberal religion in America – he was far more combative than either William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson – he was ferociously active on behalf of women’s rights, prison reform and especially anti-slavery causes in the 1840s and 1850s, well before that was a cause most Unitarians would touch. That was partly because many wealthy Unitarians made a lot of money from the business of slavery, and partly because it was a rude subject, not suited to high-class cocktail hours. They looked to their ministers for comfort, not challenge.

He was part of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape from the South. One story about him that shows both his courage and his ferocity is about the time that he performed a wedding ceremony for two escaped slaves, holding a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other, to shoot anyone who tried to stop him.

Martin Luther King once said, “We begin to die the day we become silent about the things that matter.” As far as I can tell, Parker never had one of those days in his life. He was uninhibited in his writings against dishonest religion. The things he said in just this one sermon defined the theological debates in America for the next generation, and are still relevant and powerful.

But I want you to hear his words, because he was very good with words. So imagine, if you can, sitting in a Unitarian church on May 19, 1841, when American Christianity – including Unitarianism – was still quite supernatural and often so conservative that it would feel a bit like today’s right-wing Christianity. Imagine hearing some of these words spoken by a brilliant and fiery 31-year-old preacher. (I’ve paraphrased some of these excerpts, to transport them from early 19th to early 21st century ways of speaking.) –

While true religion is always the same thing, in each century and every land, the Christianity of the People, which is the religion that is accepted and lived out; has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands.

Anyone, who traces the history of what is called Christianity, will see that nothing changes more from age to age than the doctrines taught as Christian, and insisted on as essential to Christianity and personal salvation. What is falsehood in one area passes for truth in another. The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next. The stream of Christianity, as men receive it, has caught a stain from every soil it has filtered through, so that now it is not the pure water from the well of Life, which is offered to our lips, but streams troubled and polluted with [a lot of] dirt.

Since our various theologies are so transient, why do we need to accept the teachings of men, as though they were the word of God?

Almost every sect, that has ever been, makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, rather than the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves. It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity should rest on the personal authority of Jesus, any more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid, or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, must rest on the truth of his words.

Wasn’t Jesus our brother; the son of man, as we are; the Son of God, like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety, — sweet and celestial as they were, — are they not what we also may attain? In him, as in a mirror, we may see the image of God. Viewed in this way, how beautiful the life of Jesus is.

God’s word will not change, for that word is Truth. From this Jesus subtracted nothing; to this he added nothing.

Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God.

Real religion gives men new life.

One hundred sixty-seven years later, many of these words would still send most believers into fits of apoplexy.

For Parker, the only sanction that religion requires “is the voice of God in your heart; the perpetual presence of Him, who made us – Christ and the Father abiding within us.” This is the permanent religious core of genuine Christianity, for Parker; the rest is transient and dispensable – including the creeds, orthodoxies, rituals, costumes, and if yo think about it, even the churches and ministers. (Gary Dorrien, The Making of Liberal Theology, 1805-1900, p. p. 86).

As you can hear – though Parker seemed not to hear it – the logical implications of his insights pulverized the intellectual foundations of Christianity, theism, and all religions, reducing them to little more than ways of talking about high morals and ideals – which of course can be done without using any religious language at all.

Even if his ministerial colleagues couldn’t articulate it, they must have felt the force of this earthquake in the foundations of their comfortable faith, because they reacted by cutting him off from the privileges of ministerial fellowship. Nearly all of the Boston area ministers refused to exchange pulpits with him, and some refused to speak to him (Dorrien, p. 88).

The Unitarian ministers told Parker it was his moral duty to resign from the Unitarian Association, but he was both too bright and too shrewd to make it that easy for them. He said they would have to expel him, thereby showing they do have a creed. They backed down – my image is that they had their tails between their legs. And so, as one historian puts it, “The first Unitarian heresy trial was over (Dorrien, p. 90).”

Parker believed the time had come to sweep away all religious authorities except the authority of reason and spiritual intuition (Dorrien, p. 99).

True Christianity, he said, is not about the death or divinity of Christ, but about the death of sin and the life of holy goodness in our heart: “Each man must be his own Christ, or he is no Christian (Dorrien, p. 99).” He defined real Christianity simply as “Being Good and Doing Good” – not needing any miracles or supernaturalism or creeds – or churches or ministers. This drew complete outrage from nearly all clergy, including the Unitarians.

At first, Parker naively hoped that American Unitarianism could become America’s best religious hope, but within a few years, decided that it was so unwilling to see or to think that there was no hope for it.

It’s a little confusing that he continued to insist on calling himself a Unitarian – especially since the leading Unitarian ministers wouldn’t claim him, swap pulpits with him or speak to him, and wanted him to resign.

But Unitarianism was a complex thing in the Boston of his day. It was a religion of the upper class, associated with intelligent, educated and sophisticated people, and Parker wasn’t willing to let go of that identity, which he had worked so hard to earn. He had grown up as a very poor boy, worked hard, married a very wealthy woman. They moved in those social circles – though Parker’s anti-slavery work really ended their welcome there, too. I think that giving up the “Unitarian” label would have felt to him like losing that social and personal identity.

He wanted the rest of the Unitarians to grow into the larger and more honest understanding of religion that he had found. He said the Unitarians were “standing still, and becoming more and more narrow and bigoted from year to year-. There is little scholarship and less philosophical thinking among the Unitarians,” he wrote. “Some of them engage in the great moral movements of the day, such as the anti-slavery movement. But the sect as such is opposed to all [intellectual] reforms (Dorrien, p. 101).”

His opponents used his notorious radical social activities to label and smear him, partly so they wouldn’t have to answer his powerful critiques of their unexamined but comfortable religion.

So Theodore Parker lived the powerful contradiction of preaching to the largest crowd in America while being deeply alienated from the Unitarians, and spurned as unbearable by most respectable high-class socialites (Dorrien, p. 103). No matter how fierce he was in public, he grieved his whole adult life in private over the continual attacks and rejection from the people and the denomination to whom he believed he offered valuable but unwanted help.

In January of 1859, he was told that he was dying of tuberculosis. It did not diminish his spirit, and one of the most inspiring things he ever wrote, he wrote in his Journal after receiving this death sentence: “I am ready to die… nothing to fear. When I see the Inevitable I fall in love with her (John White Chadwick, Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900, p. 352).”

Since his wife had money, they could travel. He left Massachusetts to spend his last year traveling Europe, and settled in Rome. He would die in Italy in 1860. A few months before he died, he wrote another memorable line to a friend: “I have had great powers” he said, “and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).”

All three of the great Unitarian preachers of the early 19th century were absolutely brilliant men who stood head-and-shoulders above almost everyone around them – though whether any of them can really be called Unitarian is a different matter.

William Ellery Channing, who named “Unitarian Christianity,” refused to join the Unitarian Association when it first began in 1825, fearing it would just dumb down religion and lure people to the lowest common denominator where they wouldn’t think for themselves, but would look for some sort of creeds (or principles) to recite. To put it in modern terms, Channing feared that the Unitarian Association would grow into a narcissistic cult, where people were taught to worship the kinds of things that their kind of people believed – that’s a working definition of narcissism. And their churches would tell them when they entered just what those things were that their kind of people needed to believe, and maybe even print them on wallet-sized cards. And that’s one element of a cult.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous of the three, called Unitarianism “corpse-cold,” and was not considered a Unitarian by any of the leading ministers of his day. He thought Unitarianism had become smug, shallow and irrelevant.

And Theodore Parker, the most brilliant of them all, was blacklisted from all the Unitarian pulpits in Boston because of his liberal thinking, was told he should resign from the Unitarian Association, and told that he wasn’t a real Unitarian. One member of the church where he delivered his most famous sermon even said that he’d rather see every Unitarian church burned to the ground than to see Parker’s beliefs preached from a single pulpit.

The important truth is that these three men stood out against the background of Unitarians of their day because the overwhelming majority of Unitarian ministers of their day were not memorable, and their beliefs and actions are hard to look back on with much admiration when we hear these stories. This is true, of course, of all the great visionaries of history: they only stand out because the vast majority of people around them couldn’t see or wouldn’t pursue the vision they saw so clearly.

So these three men were prophets of a higher truth than almost any Unitarians would or could see, though they continue to inspire new Unitarian ministers who are still required to read them. The righteous words of those who opposed them are long, and deservedly, forgotten.

These three weren’t serving Unitarianism, and they were all pretty clear about it. They were serving what Parker finally labeled as the Permanent in religion: True Religion, Absolute Religion, Honest Religion. And throughout history, those voices have always been a tiny minority in all religions – Unitarians are no better or worse than the rest.

We like to think that we listen to serious religious thinkers the way orchestras listen to the concert “A” that is played before all rehearsals and concerts, for them to tune to, though that’s not really true, because we so seldom do tune to their visions in any life-changing way. We really listen to them the same way we listen to all the other experts and motivational speakers in so many other areas: diet, exercise, ecology, finance and the rest of them. We may not be motivated enough or courageous enough to follow them down the demanding path of getting into our best spiritual shape, but we’re at least serious enough to listen, and to carry home some fertile seeds in the form of ideas.

There haven’t been many thinkers in any religion who wanted to move beyond the easy comfort of fitting in with like-minded people. That’s still why we come to church, isn’t it – to enjoy the company of like-minded people? Just think of how strong that gravitational attraction is for you, and how much effort it would take to break free of that gravitational pull. That’s a measure of how unlikely it is that great prophets will ever really effect the changes they see. I think that’s why we’re actually happier with these outspoken types after they’ve died, when we can treat them reverently rather than seriously.

But if these prophets, including Theodore Parker, are right, then getting in spiritual shape is as easy and as hard as actually thinking about who we are and why we are here, about what is most worth believing and doing.

This seems to be what all the prophets have said in their many different ways: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha, the biblical prophets, Jesus, Mohammad, all the way up to relatively minor – but still stirring – people like Channing, Emerson and Parker.

These were people at the Olympic level of spiritual development, no matter how out of shape they may have been in other ways – none of them was in very good financial shape, for instance, and I don’t think any of them lifted weights. They were both empowering and troubling people. They didn’t exist just to tell us that we’re really special just as we are, or that this business of authenticity is easy. They said, as Jesus put it, that the road was narrow and very few ever wanted to take it, even though it was open to all. They said salvation was free, but it wasn’t cheap. It’s about transformation, not blithely following along with a group of like-minded people.

Yet they are mesmerizing, aren’t they? They’re like charismatic self-help gurus, only moreso. I keep thinking of some of the words Theodore Parker wrote near the end of his life: “I have had great powers – and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).”

There, at least, is where Parker was so much like the rest of us: we all have great powers that we have only half used. Isn’t that one reason we come here – to keep being exhorted to develop the other half of our great powers, and to use them to help ourselves and our world come alive? We come seeking wholeness, and so often we don’t want to admit that, if only we will, we can have it.

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© Davidson Loehr

 August 31, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

When we are tempted to get carried away with how special we are – so much more special than everyone else – let us remember that the words “humanity” and “humility” have the same root.

If a self-absorbed arrogance blocks us from growing into our fuller humanity, we may have better luck along the path of a more selfless humility that leaves room for the larger world to find its way into us.

Wherever we build walls of self-righteousness, we exclude ourselves from participating in a world that is larger and usually more blessed than all our little fossilized certainties.

One of the most profound ironies of life is the fact that we don’t become bigger by exalting ourselves, but by finding our calling as small parts of a much larger reality.

Another of life’s delicious ironies is that humility enlarges us more than hubris, embracing differences makes us better people than demanding similarity, just as the willingness to understand another shows that we are more highly evolved than the eagerness to judge them.

We pray for greater humility, understanding and compassion. For those are among the spiritual vulnerabilities that truly are more powerful than tight little strengths.

Our world desperately needs people who can become more fully human. We pray for the humility to become one of them. Amen.

SERMON: To Come Alive

We gather here to pursue the promises of honest religion: to come alive, to seek truth, and to heal our world. We’re here in search of that special kind of light that has always been at the center of nearly all religions. It is the light that lives in words like enlightenment, spiritual illumination, and that halo that medieval painters used to put around the heads of all the saints. One of religion’s two most enduring questions is “Where are you hurting?” The other is who and what is that religious light, that religious truth, meant to serve? And those two questions are deeply intertwined.

Most of the sermons this fall are planned to help us all find a more informed and more commanding connection to our several religious traditions. We are religious liberals, our style of worship here has been heavily influenced by the Protestant Reformation (whether we’re Christians or not), and some of our most important beliefs – of which you may not even be aware – have been shaped by the best Unitarian thinkers of the early 19th century. Our religious heritage has several levels, and I think you will resonate with each of them. They are all like successive incarnations of the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of liberal and liberating religion, the search for the kind of truth that makes us come more alive, that helps us make ourselves and our world more integrated and authentic. That’s the gift of life that all religions are meant to offer, and at its best I think liberal religion does it best of all.

I’ve always like etymology, the study of the origin of words, because it can show us deeper meanings of ordinary words that we might otherwise overlook. For instance, the root of the word “liberal” is also the root of words like liberation and liberty, and it means “free.” In religion, it means free from the constraints of anyone’s orthodoxies, creeds, or salvation schemes that include them but not you. I”m not knocking salvation. It comes from Latin words meaning “to save,” but it’s also the root of our word “salve” – it’s about a healthy kind of wholeness. There is a salvation scheme that transcends all religions, that most of the wisdom literature in the world points to, that is as true and life-giving today as it was 4,000 years ago, in the first incarnation of the liberal spirit that we know of.

Today, I want to give you one kind of introduction to honest religion, liberal religion, and what it has involved since its first known appearance at the dawn of history. This is very broad, like flying over a continent pointing out what shows from six miles up. We’ll revisit some of these themes throughout the fall, both in sermons and in the adult education class our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson will be leading on Monday nights starting September 22nd. This is a class where you can read and hear what the influential Unitarian and Universalist thinkers wrote in the early 19th century. It’s a little sobering to realize that students preparing for the Unitarian ministry only have to read one essay each by a total of just three Unitarian writers, the most recent one dating to 1841. That sounds pretty paltry, and in some ways it is. But Unitarian thinkers have not contributed much of anything to mainstream Christian thought since then, because they have not been interested in mainstream Christian thought since then. But the new perspectives they brought in a century and a half ago are still profound, still life-giving, and still absolutely essential parts of how almost everyone here understands religion. This may surprise you, like that Voltaire character who was surprised late in life to learn that all his life he had been speaking prose, but it’s true. So one theme for this fall will be learning what it means to be both a liberal and a religious liberal.

How old is this spirit of honest religion, this spirit of liberal religion? It’s at least 4,700 years old, which makes it almost prehistoric. It is found in the oldest story in the world, the story of Gilgamesh, a real-life ruler who lived about 2750 BC, which makes it older than the Bible, older than the earliest Hindu writings, and more than 1500 years older than the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Gilgamesh story is also the source of the Flood story in the Bible, and the source of the myth about Noah and his ark. I’ve done a whole sermon on the Gilgamesh epic, and don’t want to repeat it except to show how powerfully it illustrates the spirit of liberal religion, that quest for the kind of light that is at the heart of spiritual illumination and religious enlightenment.

Those who wrote the story more than four millennia ago described their age as the “modern” age, which sounds impossible, when they didn’t even have wi-fi or TV dinners. But writing had just been invented right there in Sumeria, a hundred years earlier, so they saw all the pre-literate people as ancient, and themselves as modern. They knew writing had changed the world forever, for now history was born, and the past could always be present as never before. It gave them a kind of synoptic view of history that pre-literate people couldn’t have, so they saw themselves – rightly – as modern. And as modern people, they had the audacity to ask whether the gods were still useful, and they decided the gods were no longer relevant. This didn’t frighten or depress them. Instead, Gilgamesh decided that the purpose of life is right here among us. It is about living well, loving friends and family, building and contributing things to the future, and being enlarged by the joy and fullness brought through music and the other arts, and the enthusiastic participation in life.

In other words, they decided, more than 4700 years ago, that the purpose of life is to seek the kind of truth that makes you come more fully alive, and to participate passionately in the many opportunities and blessings life offers. Even that long ago, they grew beyond being interested in some tricky way to live on, whether through an afterlife or a reincarnation. The Buddhists, who wouldn’t appear for another 2200 years, would have said it was the kind of truth that could awaken us from our illusions.

That’s the liberal spirit in its earliest known incarnation: the spirit that will question and challenge and shrug off anything that no longer gives us the kind of truth that makes us come more alive. It is a very courageous spirit. It is also very disturbing. Imagine that – simply deciding the gods are no longer useful, and shrugging them off! I think the Gilgamesh story went farther and more boldly than all of the Bible-based religions that hadn’t even evolved yet.

When they did evolve, when the ancient Hebrew tribes put together their notion of God by combining Yahweh and the Elohim gods (“Elohim” is plural), and borrowing from other religions, they put together a God from which, in some important ways, we are still suffering. What I mean by that is that biblical scholars are clear that Yahweh evolved originally from a tribal chief, and has always kept much of the authoritarian character of that ancient tribal chief. The covenant between that God and his people was based on an earlier Hittite treaty between a ruler and his subjects. That’s the covenant – which I’ll talk more about next week – that says “I’ll be your ruler and you will be my people. I’ll protect you if you obey, and punish you if you disobey.” That’s the attitude that still lets Western believers move way too effortlessly to persecuting or murdering those who believe differently. It’s been harder to shrug that God off as irrelevant, because its followers may kill you for it – as many martyrs throughout history have discovered the hard and painful way.

But this liberal spirit that ranks getting right with truth higher than getting right with God, and coming alive higher than coming to Jesus – this is a dangerous spirit in all times and places. It believes that “New occasions teach new duties,” and that “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” Those are the words of 19th century poet James Russell Lowell, but Gilgamesh walked that talk more than four thousand years before him.

When Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Reformation nearly five hundred years ago, reincarnated that ancient liberal spirit, he threw out five of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, and said that informed believers trumped uninformed popes. So you can’t be too surprised to learn that he had to hide out for over a year because the Church had a contract out on him – the same kind of contract that the Ayatollah Khomeini had out on the novelist Salman Rushdie when Khomeini said it was the religious duty of Muslims to kill Rushdie because he had insulted old beliefs.

The liberal spirit is about freeing the light, liberating the light from the little cages we keep building for it through our creeds, orthodoxies and rituals. The Unitarian church I served before coming here, in St. Paul, MN, has a wonderful version of this message engraved on the outside of their building, with a picture of birds flying – the bird is a nearly universal symbol of the spirit. The words were by one of their ministers from half a century ago (Wallace Robbins) and say, “We dare not fence the spirit”. We dare not fence the spirit! There is the spirit of liberal religion in six short words.

There is a kind of eternal game in religions, between the liberal spirit and the conservative enclosures that keep trying to limit the light to only their own comfort, to fence the boundless energy of the Holy Spirit into the confines of their parochial certainties, the limits of their current orthodoxies and creeds.

Now I”m not going to keep singing the praises of that liberal spirit without stopping to attack it – well, if you believe in the liberal spirit, you have to attack it. Because here we come up against the catch in all of this wonderful and arrogant talk about freedom. Because when you read it this way, this liberal stuff can sound misleadingly heroic. It can sound like the point of criticism and inquiry is simply to shatter whatever beliefs people have erected to help them through their lives, as though destroying is a higher calling than creating, as though merely knowing some truths is more important than coming alive. That’s the seduction that liberals must avoid if they’re to be religious liberals. For finally, religion isn’t about knowing the right facts; it’s about coming alive. It isn’t about knowing truths; it’s about living them. It isn’t about preaching peace; it is, as the Buddhists say, about becoming the peace that we want. And that is so much harder!

The liberal spirit says that if we mouth second-hand beliefs, we’re living someone else’s life, which means there’s nobody left to live our life. But the spirit of religion says that if our beliefs are only about us, only serve us and our kind of people, then we’re serving something too small to give us life, too partial to be a truth that can help us become more whole, too limited to heal either ourselves or our world.

Another way of putting this is to return to the words I used in the first paragraph of this sermon. All of religion – meaning all of healthy, honest and adequate religion – can be boiled down to two questions. Yes, this is sort of the Cliff Notes version of Religion 101, but at one level it really is this simple and clear.

The first question is, “Where are you hurting?” Half of honest religion is seeking a path to lead us beyond our existential discomfort, our spiritual ennui, the sense that our lives could somehow be “more” and the longing for that “more”. We don’t need a flashlight for this; we need the kind of light that lives within illumination and enlightenment: that kind of light, that big. And absolutely nothing may stand in the way of our search for it. No orthodoxy, no creed, no belligerent beliefs forced on us by those who stopped their own search before they should have, and who are threatened by voices like old Gilgamesh’s that say their precious gods, creeds and rituals are irrelevant and useless. These are the voices that say time really can make ancient good uncouth. Not just wrong, but uncouth. The liberal spirit empowers us to barge through all obstacles in the way of finding the kind of truth that can set us free, make us feel more alive, and help us heal ourselves and our world.

But the second question – and I think this is the deepest and most easily overlooked question in all of religion – is “Who and what does the Light serve?” This truth we seek: what must it serve? To what must it bind us in order to be the kind of truth that can really grant us the kind of wholeness, aliveness and health we seek? The word “religion” means “reconnection.” It is about binding us to life-giving truths through a personal covenant – which is the subject of next week’s sermon.

But when we move to this second question, we are no longer in the realm of simplistic scientific or rational answers. Now we are in the realm of poetry, metaphor, and love-talk. And in love-talk, the answer is that the truth and the light must serve God. Even more than God. It must serve Life: all of life. The kind of truth that can help us come more fully alive originates within the life force – not within religious scriptures or communities – and must return us to that life force to complete the circle, and to bring us home again.

If it builds fences at the edges of our own comfortable beliefs, and excludes or damns those who believe differently, than we have found something too small to be worthy of our yearnings. If it divides the world into the saved and the damned – where we and those who think like us just happen to be among the saved – then we have hitched our wagon to a lie, rather than to a star. If the light we find starts becoming a little spotlight shining just on our face and telling us we – just we – are special, special, special, then we have been duped and seduced, and need to be awakened from our illusions.

There is a little passage in the Christian scriptures that sums this up in just ten words: “Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

Examine everything carefully – that’s the liberal spirit. Hold fast to that which is good – that’s the spirit of religion. And what is good – the light that is truly a light unto the world – is what connects us with truths that make us come alive, that help us heal ourselves and our world. You can call it what is good, what is of God, or what is sacred. We can only get at this sort of thing through symbols, metaphors, and love-talk.

That kind of light is the most ancient symbol of religion. We’ll light the light up here on our little ledge every week, as a symbol of that transcendence, illumination and enlightenment, to lift up and liberate the light that is the promise of honest religion. We’ll light a light every week. But it won’t always be the same. Today it’s just one flame. Next week there will be three flames, and three banners hanging above them. Then in a few weeks there will be some more feminine shapes for the candle bases instead of just these X shapes. At the end of September, there will be a family of five candles of different sizes and shapes, lit by a family of five of our church members. On the 12th of October there will be seven lights arranged like a four-foot wide menorah for a service on Atonement in harmony with the Jewish high holy days. A church member who is a rabbi will blow the shofar, the traditional ram’s horn – you don’t want to miss this – and I’ll try to find seven church members with Jewish backgrounds who would like to come up and light the seven flames. You get the idea. We want to liberate the light, to let it point in many directions, not just toward us. We dare not limit the light or fence the spirit, because in order to serve us well, that light and that spirit must serve all of life. We are cups of water from the ocean of life; we need to be reconnected with the ocean.

There is an aliveness in us that wants us to become whole and fulfilled. Call it our spirit, or the spirit of life within us, our Buddha-seed or our God-seed. It’s that spark of the infinite within us, the stardust that resides in every atom of our being. Sometimes we get frightened, or seduced, or bribed, or numbed by habit and conformity. We settle for smaller, second-hand identities. We become merely a man or a woman or an American or a Christian or a Muslim, merely a Unitarian or a University of Texas booster. You’ll find that distinction between small and large, first- and second-hand identities, preached by almost every good religious thinker in history, including the three 19th Century Unitarian preachers we’ll talk about later this fall.

To some extent, the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus is all of our stories – that’s why myths last for centuries, after all. He fell in love with his own reflection and was so entranced by it that he could no longer experience the huge world around him. We so easily go to sleep.

That’s why we gather here: to call forth the better angels of our nature, that they may kindly or rudely awaken us and beckon us back to the spirit of life, where we belong, where we can examine everything carefully, and hold fast to what is good. It’s that challenging combination that makes us both liberal, and religious. It’s a very good place to be.

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© Davidson Loehr

 June 15, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us give thanks for this amazing and miraculous gift of life, and let us work to complete it. Life comes to us in kit form, with some assembly required. But most of the pieces are blessed indeed – far more than are not.

Let us never doubt that we are a gift to this world, and let us pray that our world will be a blessing to us as well.

So much is uncertain in life: how long we will live, how well we will live, the balance of our happy and our sad days, how we will love and be loved. So much is uncertain.

But all the uncertainties take place within the larger miracle of life itself. The miracle and the gift is the fact that we are here at all. Let us not become so confused or jaded that we let ourselves become numb to that most important of facts.

If the only prayer we ever uttered was simply “Thank you,” it would be sufficient. Thank you to Life, the universe, God, the unnameable mystery by whatever names we call it forth. Thank you.

Let us give thanks for this amazing and miraculous gift of life, and let us show our gratitude by becoming a gift to ourselves, and to others. For we are not only gifts, but the bearers of gifts, and the world would not be as complete without us. So let us, above all else, remember to give thanks for the sheer gift of just being alive. Just being alive.

Amen.

SERMON: Brokenness

I’ve never preached on “brokenness” before. When I Googled it, I found it is a very popular word among many Christian writers. I love good and insightful thinking from all religious traditions, but the things I read on this word “brokenness” have an odd, even morbid, undertone. Let me read you the comments of six different authors who were among the first dozen or so to come up on the Google search, and you’ll see what I mean:

One says, “An unbroken person cannot be trusted.” (Gary Rosberg)

Reknowned Catholic priest Henri Nouwen wrote (in his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son) that “it is often difficult to believe that there is much to think, speak or write about other than brokenness”.

Another author (Mark Buchanan) wrote that brokenness “molds our character closer to the character of God than anything else. To experience defeat, disappointment, loss”the raw ingredients of brokenness”moves us closer to being like God than victory and gain and fulfillment ever can.” This sounds like some of the teaching of 12-step programs, and it’s true that sometimes we have to hit the bottom before we’re willing to wake up. But as a model for living our lives? We can do better.

Another (Alan Redpath) says, God will only plant the seed of his life “where the conviction of His Spirit has brought brokenness.”

A fifth author (Charles Brent) says that every call to Christ is a call to suffering, and every call to suffering is a call to Christ.

And a sixth says that “Worship starts with a broken heart.” (Calvin Miller)

I want to say that these voices are coming from another world, but not the one most of us are living in or would want to live in. They are speaking from within only one vehicle of insight and wholeness, the vehicle of one popular version of modern Christianity, and I want to suggest that what’s broken is not us, but that vehicle. I want to bring in a couple evangelical writers who speak to that, and then offer you some wisdom from a very different, perhaps unexpected, source.

A couple weeks ago, I talked about a new book by Christine Wicker called The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church. She was raised in the evangelical Baptist church, came to Jesus at age nine, then grew away from the church, but kept a soft and warm spot in her heart for it. A major publisher asked her to write a book about what great successes the megachurches were as the spearheads of the evangelical movement. But after more than a year of research, the leaders within the churches convinced her that she was writing the wrong book. She went back to her publisher and took another year to write, instead, about the unreported fact that evangelical churches and numbers are declining, have not kept up with population growth for the past hundred years, and that we”ve been duped into thinking they were strong because they learned to manipulate the media very cleverly. They represent perhaps 7% of Americans, not the 25% we”ve been told – and the churches know this. She includes herself among the duped, as she was a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News for seventeen years.

The reason for the decline is the same as the reason for the decline of almost all traditional churches: our world has changed, our minds and hearts have changed, we no longer need the kind of God traditional religion has to offer, and we need other important things that it can’t offer. If you think about it, that’s a revolutionary statement. On Father”s Day, this stands out to me more, because this sounds like the data that say far more women attend church than men, because men want more hard-nosed empirical stuff than all the airy-fairy poetry of religions. I don’t think it’s quite that simple, though there’s something to it. But I think it is more about parents than just fathers.

In the world today, we need to be able to act, to adapt quickly, to think on our own, rather than blindly following authority. We feel a visceral imperative to be more open and flexible than humans have been in the past, which is another reason we may see the blind obedience taught by evangelical parents as dangerous thinking that will not prepare their children to live in the real world after they leave home (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 171).

It’s in families, raising children, where the real world and the world of religious dogma are most incompatible. Evangelical children, says Christine, are learning to obey authority while other American children are learning to question authority, to voice strong disagreement, to follow their own ideas. While evangelical parents may protect their children from growing up too fast, other American parents – both fathers and mothers – begin preparing their children to make decisions at earlier ages. These deep-seated differences in what parents believe their children must have and in how children are being formed as a result are the greatest reasons Americans will never, and cannot ever, return to the old-time religion. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 173)

The idea that a happy, self-reliant person with adequate self-esteem is more likely to be a moral, good citizen has replaced the Christian image of humans as sinful, broken creatures in need of outside salvation. What was once called sin is now considered sickness. So health rather than holiness is the modern parent’s goal. And I want to say, that’s a good thing. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 185)

It seems that a new way of judging what’s moral and what’s not is coming into being. It means people don’t feel the same need for the kind of God traditional religion supplies. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 187)

This kind of thinking makes our children flexible, thinking, reasoning, searching, very unorthodox people. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 187)

It leads to deeper, more aware, honest, nuanced and integrated kids. This state of hopeful wholeness was once called “salvation,” but today we call it health. So one point is that traditional religion has lost its roots in, and lost the ability to prepare us for, the real world outside the walls of the church and many fathers and mothers don’t trust their kids to it.

Let’s hear from one more evangelical who”s writing from inside that faith, rather than having left it as Christine Wicker did. Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College , and wrote this for the Wall Street Journal just over a week ago. (“Too Much Faith in Faith”, 6 June 2008, p. W11). Here’s some of what he wrote:

“If there is one agreed-upon point in the current war of words about religion, it is that religion is a very powerful force. Is it, though? I have my doubts, and they begin with personal experience. I am by most measures a pretty deeply committed Christian. I am quite active in my church; I teach at a Christian college; I have written extensively in support of Christian ideas and belief. Yet when I ask myself how much of what I do and think is driven by my religious beliefs, the honest answer is “not so much.” The books I read, the food I eat, the music I listen to, my hobbies and interests, the thoughts that occupy my mind throughout the greater part of every day – these are, if truth be told, far less indebted to my Christianity than to my status as a middle-aged, middle-class American man.

“When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they’re not acting as I usually do, out of motives and impulses over which I could paint a thin religious veneer but which are really not religious at all.”

Now this man isn’t a Christ-hating savage. He teaches at Wheaton College in Illinois , the alma mater of Billy Graham, which has never been known as a bastion of liberal thought.

So one former evangelical author says the membership in the churches is declining, that they can’t convert enough new people to keep from shrinking because they’re too out of touch with the world we’re really living in. And a current professor at evangelical Wheaton College says that even within the religion, the truth is that the religion has very little to do with what we think, read, feel or do. This is a measure of a religion that has become a broken vehicle for helping us find more meaning and purpose in life. Its wheels have come off.

So I began with the idea of brokenness, which is a concept deeply embedded in a lot of modern religious thinking in our culture. I shared some of the research by a former evangelical who now, as an outsider to that worldview, reports that even the churches know they are losing more members and more appeal every year. She suggests it’s because their message is grounded in biases that have lost their roots in the world we’re really living in, and a growing number of us prefer the real world. Then Alan Jacobs, who is not only still an evangelical, but teaches at one of the flagship conservative colleges, says that even as a believer, he has to admit that his religious beliefs actually play almost no role in how he thinks, feels, or lives. I think there’s good evidence that many of the loudest religious voices telling us we’re broken and need their special salvation are, in fact, themselves broken, and failing as useful vehicles for our most important hopes, fears, dreams and yearnings.

So what if, instead, we were to seek out some wise figures who live in the real world, are at home in it, and are also asking questions about life, meaning and purpose? How different would their advice sound than these messages insisting that God only cares for broken souls?

Well, it just so happens that we have some of these voices among us. So I want to read you a few things from their wisdom, so you can hear and feel the difference. Remember, the question guiding us this morning is the question of brokenness: are we broken, is brokenness really a healthy and useful way of looking at our lives, or is there a way of understanding ourselves that is not broken, and is better for us? Some of you have already heard these voices, because they are four of our own high school students, who presented short homilies during their Youth Service last Sunday. If you missed it, you missed something very special. Listen to a few insights from four teen-agers who live in the modern world, are creatures of that world, and believe what they’ve learned in this church – and I hope could learn in any good liberal church – that their questions and feelings matter, that they can trust their minds, and can find their own healthy and whole path through life if they choose to.

Now as you listen, don’t mentally patronize these young people. Don’t think “Oh, that’s so good for a kid, it’s just swell.” Don’t mentally pat them on the heads. Be tough. Listen to them as you would listen to anyone offering wisdom, and see how it stacks up. See, especially, how it stacks up against advice about how we’re broken or sinful. They didn’t come here to show off; they came here to try and offer something that might be both true and useful for you, so hold them to the high standards they’ve requested.

Josh is one of our students, and says, “As our lives change, we lose and discover things about ourselves. We change from what we were, to what we are, to what we could be. Sometimes we also find friendships we thought we could never have, without even trying. In my short 16 years I have moved a total of 10 times and every time I seem to find these wonderful and amazing people without even looking. They seem to pop out of nowhere and change my life. That I think is the greatest thing anyone could find: the love and joy of friends.” He doesn’t sound broken.

Listen to the trust here. He has found a way to back off and see life as a moving picture. He isn’t trying to cling to a dogmatic truth, he knows already that life is about change. He isn’t looking for water wings, but for swimming lessons, and he’s swimming pretty well.

One youth reflected on a Rolling Stones song from her parents” generation, about how “You can’t always get what you want”but if you try sometimes, you can get what you need.” She says, “No matter how much we want something or how much we think we must have something, or how hard we try to get it, sometimes the universe just won’t let it happen. But, if you try sometimes, if you try new things and expand your world, you can get what you need,” even if you hadn’t known you needed it.

She told a story to illustrate this, about a time she was digging through the family couch, looking for loose change to buy candy at the movie. I imagine nearly everyone here remembers doing that. She didn’t find enough change to get the candy, but she did find something without which many teenagers might not be able to survive for even one day – her cell phone. She didn’t even know she’d lost it. And so the world, she said, is like a big couch, “littered with all sorts of random objects, and waiting for us to dig around in it. Maybe we will find what we want. Maybe we will find what we haven’t been looking for, but need more than we thought. Nevertheless, the choice is ours whether or not to look in the first place.” And she thinks we should be out there digging around in the couch of life. She doesn’t sound broken.

Our third student, Shane, thought about the whole idea of gaining experiences. He said that unless you live under a rock, you’re experiencing things every day. And that even if you do live under a rock, you’re probably experiencing things too, like pain and boredom. But it’s not like you can go to the movie store and pick out which experiences you want, and skip the bad ones. If you want to have really valuable experiences, you have to be patient, because not all experiences are either valuable or pleasant. And when the really valuable experiences do happen, it may not be when or where you expect. Does this sound like a modern teenager, or an ancient sage?

Then Sierra talked about happiness. She’s already learned that you can’t buy it – even with money from the couch. “You have to know where to find it. And this is the tricky part. How can we get it? You can try as hard as you possibly can to reach this happiness, and still not get it. You can’t control it. You can alter your mood and surround yourselves with things that supposedly “make you happy”, and some days the happiness just won’t come.”

She decides that maybe happiness is more complex than we think. Maybe it has to include the sadness, the fear, the satisfaction, the contentment, the surprise, and the regrets. Like Natalie, she invents an analogy for us. She says maybe happiness is like white light. White light is made up of all the colors, and if one color were missing, it wouldn’t be pure white, just like if one of our experiences was missing or an emotion was suppressed for a lifetime, it wouldn’t be as full, as complete a life. It isn’t about pretending we can only have happy, fun experiences. I”d say that’s not the real world; that’s Disneyworld . She says, at age 15, that in our real-world pursuit of happiness, we are gathering experiences that at the end of our lifetime might just combine and finally give us our greatest happiness – the most full and satisfying life – the way all the different colors combine to make pure white light.

These young people are not finished growing, but they’re not broken. They see the good and bad as inherent parts of life, and see happiness as living in a way that can let them integrate all of our experiences, and weave them into a character with depth and nuance.

We are completely at home in the real world. Whatever is sacred, is there – which means that whatever is sacred is already within us, too. We are linked with all other life on earth. We are part of this world, all the way down. We are at home here, all the way down. And our salvation, our wholeness, must be rooted deeply in the real world around us to its most profound and life-giving parts, all the way down.

That’s the voice you hear coming from our own high school students. Not because they were taught a doctrine or dogma, but because they were taught that they must think, they must interact with the world and that it can mostly be trusted, and so can their own powers of reasoning and meaning-making. We are saved, today, not by dogmas or orthodoxies, but by an empowered imagination, and our ability to imagine our own most fulfilling paths through life.

we’re not broken. we’re unfinished. We don’t need to be made holy; we need to be made whole. And that has changed everything. We can trust life. We can trust ourselves, we can trust in the best of human relationships, and it’s ok when we occasionally fail, because failing is part of living, just as succeeding is part of living.

Let me sum this up in the words of some local sages. As we go digging through the big couch of life, we can find things we want, and things we need, as we change from what we were, to what we are, to what we could be. If we want to have really valuable experiences, we have to be patient, because not all experiences are either valuable or pleasant. And when the really valuable experiences do happen, it may not be when or where we expect. But don’t be afraid of the wide range of life’s experiences, because in the end they can all go together like rays of different colored lights to create a kind of white light so complete we can call it by its ancient religious name: Enlightenment.

That isn’t broken. It’s whole. It’s blessed. And it’s very, very good.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 1 June 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not confuse hype with hope. We know all that glitters is not gold, but let us not be misled when the glitter looks good anyway. Let us not be taken in by someone else’s excited messages that don’t feed our enduring hungers.

We are here to grow into our highest callings as children of the universe, children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. Let us not accept messages that don’t bless us.

May we learn to shun voices that say, “You’re nothing without me. You’re nothing without Jesus. You’re nothing without God.” These messages don’t come from Jesus or God, but from those acting like “used God” salesmen who hawk them for personal profit or power.

Our good news – the kind of truth that can set us free – may indeed be a truth that passes all understanding, but not a truth that bypasses understanding.

We are all looking for good news. We need truth that makes us feel more cherished, more alive and whole, a truth that commands us to serve higher ideals than we might otherwise have done, and live a life of greater integrity and courage than we might have stumbled into. And it must bless us and make us feel beloved of this place. Without these things, it isn’t our good news, and we need to keep listening. For it will come, our good news. Let us keep listening for words of truth and empowerment, the good news that can make us free. For it will come. Amen.

SERMON: Can Evangelicalism be (Gasp!) Dying?

We’ve been told, for years, that Christian evangelicals make up 25% of the U.S. population and are growing, that evangelicals and “values voters” delivered the last two presidential elections – rather than that both elections were stolen. We’ve read that atheists are the most distrusted group of people in the country, and that they are at any rate far less moral than the kind of evangelicals who have given the Religious Right so much political power since 1980. Now I like evangelism, and even think of myself as an evangelist. The word means spreading the good news, and I think that’s what honest religion should be about: spreading the good news. But when evangelism isn’t done honestly, when it’s more about deceit than delivery, then it’s a bad thing, the good news lies elsewhere, and we need to know about it.

An author named Christine Wicker has written a new book called The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church. She was in town for a presentation last week, and I had several hours to talk with her over a long dinner and longer lunch. I’ll draw on some of her work for the sermon in two weeks. But I want to introduce you to it today in the time we have left, and talk about why she sees the evangelical movement dying, how she says we”ve been duped about the strength of the movement for almost 30 years, and what it might all mean for us: what the good news really is.

Christine was raised an evangelical Baptist, came to Jesus in an altar call when she was nine years old, left the church some time later, and still has a warm place in her heart for evangelicals, though she says she can’t imagine ever wanting to go to church again. She was a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News for seventeen years, and understands how to find good sources. She quotes a lot of figures that are quite damning to that picture of evangelicals in America, but all the figures come from inside the churches themselves. Here are a few of the things she says.

Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. ix)

The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. xiii). As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 123) The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four. The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals. And since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, I suspect the real figures are higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no powerful groups pushing the story.

And as far as respect goes, when asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-Christians rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower. In an almost comic side note, I wonder how the prostitutes feel about that. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 143) Atheists and nonbelievers are looking pretty good.

Misbehavior is so widespread among evangelicals that one evangelical author (Ronald Sider) calls the statistics devastating. When pollster George Barna, himself an evangelical, looked at seventy moral behaviors, he didn’t find any difference between the actions of those who were born-again Christians and those who weren’t. His studies and other indicators show that divorce among born-agains is as common as, or more common than, among other groups. One study showed that wives in traditional, male-dominated marriages were 300 percent more likely to be beaten than wives in egalitarian marriages. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 80) Evangelicals make up only seven percent of the population, but about twenty percent of the women who get abortions (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 81).

Every day the percentage of evangelicals in America decreases, a loss that began more than one hundred years ago (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 198). This is part of the bigger picture of the continual decline of Christianity in our culture, which is another story that’s been underreported.

These are just some of the headlines. I’ll go into more facets of this in two weeks, because they have deep and compelling implications for us and for all liberal churches.

Who’s to blame for all this? Not the bible, not God, and not the churches. Modern life, changed circumstances, the new realities that we live among are to blame (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 4). Evangelicals tried to fight the modern world and the world won.

What’s eroding Christianity is the rise and victory of the more scientific and humane worldview we’re a part of: a worldview that incorporates almost all the basic assumptions of liberalism. It affects all religions, but in different ways.

I’ve heard for 25 years that 95% of Unitarian kids leave the church after high school. I don’t think anyone has actually done a methodical study that could produce reliable numbers like that, but I suspect that it’s probably in the ballpark. Why? Because evangelical youth are leaving at about the same rate. Josh McDowell, who has worked for Campus Crusade for Christ since 1964, says that 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years. The Southern Baptists estimate that 88% of their kids leave the church after high school. So this is not an indictment of liberal religion; it’s a description of American 18-to-20-year-olds. On the surface, it looks like we’re all in the same situation.

But when you look at why evangelicals or religious liberals leave their church, it gets more interesting, and suddenly we’re not all in the same situation.

The world evangelical kids enter when they leave the control of the church isn’t much like the world the church has offered them. There’s more freedom to question, no subjects declared off-limits, less self-righteousness, more science, more independence. And nineteen out of twenty of them find the real world more appealing than the world the church had given them. Evangelicals lose their kids to the modern world. But we don’t lose our kids to the modern world, because we”ve worked to prepare them for it. It’s the worldview they learn in churches like this. We just want them to find more depth of fulfilling meaning and purpose within it than the soul-killing “market value” idols offer.

During the past century, evangelicals have never kept up with the population growth in this country. Not for a century. They don’t have anywhere near the real power they have claimed. They have fought to make abortion illegal for 35 years. It’s still legal. They have fought for a Constitutional amendment to outlaw homosexuality. Nobody’s buying it. And though they have done harm to and through the Republican Party, they don’t have anything like control there either. Remember that the recent court decisions permitting homosexual marriages in Massachusetts, California and New York all came from Republican judges. They have censored some school textbooks, but one result is that American students now lag far behind students in Europe and Asia, especially in science education, which will make us less competitive. Eventually, even market forces will have to improve the quality of our public education, because we need independent thinking workers, not just obedient ones. They are training for the world of yesteryear, but we and our children are learning to live with imagination and hope in the world of tomorrow. We and the modern world are winning, and will win.

What is at stake is whether children must become independent minded and able to reason through tough decisions on their own at early ages or whether they will be sheltered from such decisions until adulthood by families in which obedience to parental and allegedly godly authority is more highly valued. Parents who”ve changed their parenting style have come to believe that their children need new strengths as they face a rapidly changing world, and those strengths need to be developed early. For these parents, physical punishment encourages violence in later life. Bolstering the child’s self-respect and autonomy is important. The idea that a happy, self-reliant person with adequate self-esteem is more likely to be a moral, good citizen has replaced the Christian image of humans as sinful creatures in need of outside salvation. What was once called sin is now considered sickness. So health rather than holiness is the modern parent’s goal for their children and for themselves (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 185). This is the way you’ve raised your own children, but so have a growing army of more conservative parents. As Christine says, when was the last time you saw a child being beaten in public? Public standards have changed, and have become more humane and civil than those of the conservative churches. That’s one way to lose parents and children by the drove.

Trying to hold back the modern world and our sciences and our intellectual freedoms is not like the old picture of the Dutch boy with his finger in the hole in a dam trying to keep the water from squirting through. It’s more like a crowd of believers standing side by side in a river, imagining they can stop it. But the water just goes between, around and through them, and the river goes on as if they weren’t there.

The saving message here, the good news, is that America is a very different place than many of us have been led to believe it is. And Americans themselves are a very different kind of people. More thoughtful. More reasoning. Less doctrinaire. More changeable. More flexible. Less religious. This is news of a new and powerful form of salvation that comes from knowing the truth, being aware, and acting in fair and compassionate ways. And growing numbers of people are finding it offers better salvation than the traditional Christian stories (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 56). Sometimes they find it in more liberal churches like this one. Sometimes they just find it on their own. But more and more, they know where they’re not going to find it.

Another way of putting this is that repressive and regressive religions tried to fight the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is winning. The spirit of truth, freedom and empowerment is winning, and religions that can’t embrace that spirit cannot make their people whole. Any way you cut it, from any informed religious, ethical or moral perspective, that’s good news. It’s the kind of good news that can save you – It’s the kind of good news that can save your mind, save your souls and save your children. It’s the kind of good news that can save the world. You can get that good news at a lot of liberal churches. You can get it here. That’s not just good news. That’s Halleluja news! And that’s worth an Amen!

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© Davidson Loehr

 18 May 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not tell paltry stories about ourselves. We don’t just work at a job, we have a mission that is part of the cosmic effort to improve and perfect the world.

We’re not just sweeping the floor, throwing out stuff and trying to get this place cleaned up before guests arrive. We are a modern incarnation of the goddess Hestia, the one whose sacred gift is to transform a house into a homey place, to let those who enter feel cared for. We’re not just a doctor sewing stitches into the fourth patient to cut himself this hour. We’re healing the sick, caring for them in the spirit of old Aesclepius, the patron saint of physicians. We’re not just taking a lawsuit to court so we can stick it to whoever we have in our sights. we’re agents of fairness and social trust, working to help the powerless balance the scales of justice. We’re not here just to whistle little ditties, but to sing small spiritual symphonies with our lives.

We are, whatever we are, so very much more than we have given ourselves credit for being. Our biggest failures are failures of imagination. We need a story worthy of us. We need the largest story that wraps us in the most imaginative tapestry of life lived skillfully, caringly.

Let us find a story worthy of our spirit, and tell it. Salvation can come through telling and believing the right stories about ourselves. It may be the only way it does come. Let us become spirited parts of stories that are worthy of us.

Amen.

SERMON: Life as a work of art

Life as a work of art: what does that mean? I want to begin with a quotation that Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote over eighty years ago:

“Every person, in the course of his life, must build – starting with the natural territory of his own self – a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. [She] makes [her] own soul throughout all [her] earthly days; and at the same time [she] collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of [her] individual achievement: [that greater work is] the completing of the world.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1927)

He used the word opus for the work of a life. That word opus is also used for a musical composition or an artist’s total production. We are also works of art. We are partly the artistic designers of our own life, and it is the most important work we will ever do. (Thomas Moore, A Life at Work, p. 2)

Boy, does that sound easier said than done! How to make a life? When most people hear this, their first thoughts are probably more economic, like how to make a living.

Some of the older folks here will remember how much this has changed in the last half century. In the 1950s, the object was to get a job with a good company, work for them your whole life and they’d take care of you. You”d have health care and a good retirement. For women, the work options were severely limited – most were steered to becoming nurses or teachers or stewardesses (and in the 50s only young women could be stewardesses, and there were no male flight attendants). For all, the goal was to get married (heterosexual only – nobody was “out” in the 1950s), have kids, raise them to be good Americans. America was the most respected nation in the world after WWII and its Marshall Plan to help Europe recover. We were generous and just, trusted by almost everyone.

It’s amazing how much of that has changed now. Our nation is no longer respected by many. There’s little or no job security – I think I read that people entering the work force today should expect to have eight different jobs in five different fields during their career. Job benefits keep getting cut, unions have largely been disempowered, and it’s been widely reported that this is the first generation that can’t look forward to a higher life style than their parents. The divorce rate is about 50% – so many people have neither a job nor a partner for life.

There is a lot more competition for good schools and jobs, school loans put people into far greater debt. Twenty-five years ago, I spent seven years in a very expensive graduate school and graduated owing a total of $17,500. Today, Unitarian ministers leave a three-year seminary owing between $50,000 and $80,000 or more, and I’ve talked with at least one student here at UT who’ll owe $100,000 for a four-year Ph.D. program in Latin American studies. And it can get much worse. I have a niece attending medical school in Israel through a Columbia University world medicine program, who”s also getting a Master”s in public health from Johns Hopkins. When she’s done in two more years, she’ll owe about $300,000. She had wanted to be the next Albert Schweitzer, devoting her life to helping needy people in Africa – but not with student loans like that.

So it’s harder to make a living today than it was fifty years ago.

It’s easy to get depressed, or go into a rant.

But the job of making a life – as opposed to the job of making a living – really isn’t fundamentally different now. It’s still a religious task, though today we use the word “spiritual” more, and it doesn’t need to involve churches or even gods.

Many churches still talk about this life as though it were just a meaningless prelude to some life in heaven forever – if we obey a certain concept of God or church. But I don’t believe the world is built that way. I think we do it here and now. So in many ways, it matters even more, to try and make a good life. What’s it mean?

By a good life, I really mean something as simple as a life that lets you stand in front of a mirror in ten or fifty years and be able to say, “If I only get one shot at this, I’m glad I lived the life I’ve lived.” In your whole life, there’s hardly anything you could say that’s more important. It may not be the life someone else would choose, but you’re not supposed to live other people’s lives. You’re supposed to live your own. And to some extent that involves making it, crafting it, like a work of art. And while I think that’s a little more complex than it used to be, it isn’t fundamentally different.

We need the sense that we are here for a reason, that life wants something from us, that life grants us honor, and a task. Being part of a larger purpose can give meaning to our smallest acts and helps create a strong identity. (Thomas Moore, A Life at Work, p. 17)

If I were an old-fashioned preacher talking in old-fashioned ways, this is when I could say, “Come to Jesus! Come to Jesus and be saved!” I think very few people here think or talk that way, but there can be a powerful kind of truth to that Come-to-Jesus invitation. It means, “Recast your life as a beloved part of a larger reality, as a child of God rather than just one more lost person stumbling through life. Then it can be about the larger you precisely because it’s no longer primarily about you, but about your part in a bigger story, a transcendent scheme. You’re no longer just doing the kind of fairly menial work we all do; your work has now become part of the plan of the creator of the universe. So come to Jesus, and be saved!” There’s both poetry and power there.

What’s right about it is that we need to be able to cast our lives as parts of a bigger and more enduring story than just making it through another day.

But we have to try to say it in less parochial terms today. Fewer and fewer people are learning to talk about their lives as though they were about Jesus or God. The fastest-growing “faith groups” in the country are not evangelicals, but non-believers, even atheists, as I’ll talk about more in two weeks. But no matter how we put it or what we call it, we need to call forth this image of our life as part of something greater. And it isn’t hard, though we’re not taught how to do it. I want to give you some examples of recasting life as part of a bigger story, in a few different styles, both with and without gods.

One is a story that Rev. David Bumbaugh read to you three weeks ago, and it’s worth repeating.

In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a visitor went into one of these huge buildings. Over to the right were carpenters, and he said to them, “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? we’re carpenters. we’re building pews!” Then he went to some stone masons. Again he asked, “What are you doing?” They laughed, and said they were members of the masons’ guild, the finest of all the guilds. They acted like just belonging to that group meant they didn’t actually need to be doing anything at all.

On the other side of the room there was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters, the masons and the others. Of her too, he asked, “What are you doing?” This woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him, “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!”

We could look at her job and say it was the least important of the three, just sweeping, cleaning up. But it gave more to her than the jobs of the carpenters and stone masons seemed to give to them, because she had made her life part of a much larger story, in which even cleaning up was helping to build not only a magnificent cathedral, but a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God! It’s hard to beat that. There’s a simple life transformed into a work of art through an imaginative story. We all have simple lives, and we all need that kind of transformation.

Many Hindus can still do this through their belief that their soul is part of the soul of the universe, their spirit is part of the creative spirit of everything. And that’s not just a belief; it’s true. All of our lives are parts of that bigger picture. But it’s so hard to see them that way. I think that’s why “Come to Jesus” is so appealing. It sounds so simple, so quick. No waiting in line, Just BAM! You’re saved!

I often envy the ancient Greeks, who knew these spirits were eternal, and turned most of them into gods. And so craftspeople and artists weren’t just making pews or doing stonework; they were serving the gods of art, music and beauty: Hephaestus, Apollo, Athena. They were doing sacred duty in their work. Parents planted seeds of tomorrow, and nurtured them, as part of the creative force of the universe. They were the current incarnations of the spirits of Zeus, Hera and Demeter, as the Greeks would say. Homemakers, those with gifts for making a house feel like a home, or making a church service feel like a worship service, were serving the invisible goddess Hestia, the goddess of that feeling of being deeply at home.

Thinkers weren’t just ivory-tower eggheads, overeducated chatterers – look at some of the ways we describe ourselves! Mechanical, cold, condemning, not loving. But in Greece, thinkers were those who helped bring fire, bring light into the darkness, modern incarnations of Prometheus. Soldiers weren’t just murdering foreigners. They were serving the dangerous but sometimes necessary god Ares. Even politics could be transformed – even today”s politics. A Hillary Clinton could be recognized as the spirit of the goddess Athena, and maybe Artemis, and Obama could be seen in the role of Hermes, the messenger of the gods who carried the message beyond comfortable boundaries, because the message was more holy than the boundaries. Heraclitus once said that everything is filled with gods, and in his world it was. You didn’t have to come to Jesus. You didn’t have to go anywhere because the gods were everywhere. You just had to understand your gifts and your passions as gifts from the gods, callings, duties – because they were.

Look how this could transform human lives! It still can. Arianna Huffington is a Greek, born in Athens and educated at Cambridge, and the ancient Greek gods still help frame her life. She wrote that as an ambitious single mother of two daughters, she saw her life as a constant dialogue between the demands of Artemis and Demeter. How much more dignifying, and also descriptive, that is than just calling herself an ambitious single working mother with two girls. It’s so much easier to view our life as a work of art when we think of ourselves as incarnating eternal spirits. But today, our spiritual vocabulary is so sparse, we hardly know how to talk about it. Talking about gods leaves many people cold today – even ancient Greek gods. It sounds so “otherworldly,” in a bad way.

So let me share part of my own story with you, two of my own “Come to Jesus”-type moments that transformed how I defined myself and my job as a minister, as your minister. I’ve told parts of this before, and I’m not doing it to talk about myself, but to offer you more ways to talk about your own life.

I went to one of those elite graduate schools, worked as hard as the others there, and earned my Master”s and Ph.D. degrees. I saw it as a pretty solitary adventure. You go to seminars, you read, you read some more, you discuss, you read, you write, eventually you graduate. Graduation ceremonies have never meant much to me, and I’ve avoided them. But a classmate told me I had to go to the ceremony to be given my Ph.D. “Why?” I asked. “They can mail it.” “You don’t understand,” he said, “You have to hear what President Gray says to all the Ph.D. graduates.” Hannah Gray, who was then president of the University of Chicago, was the first woman president of what they called an elite university. I admired her, and was on a committee with her. But come on – commencement addresses are like political speeches: all predictable rhetoric, no significant substance. My classmate assured me I was wrong and I trusted him, so I bought the cap, rented the gown, and went.

It was a come-to-Jesus moment. I’ve never been the same since that day. When the other degrees had been awarded, she called the doctoral students forward, and she said those magical words which were burned into my memory instantly. She said, “I welcome you into the ancient and honorable community of scholars.” It was transformative. Suddenly, we were no longer just a few more unkempt graduate students hiding out in libraries working on papers and dissertations nobody but our three readers would ever be likely to read. No, now we were part of something grand: an ancient and honorable community of scholars, of which I hadn’t even been aware until then. Plato, Aristotle, and us! You try not to dwell too long on Plato, Aristotle and those at their level, or the magic would wear off and it would just feel really embarrassing. But for the first time, I believed I was part of an ancient tradition of millions of people who had been so curious and passionate about something that we wanted to devote years to its study, and lives to its service. I knew it was obsessive – but I didn’t know it was also sacred.

The other come-to-Jesus moment had happened a few years earlier, during some of that reading. I read a book by a very influential 20th century conservative theologian (Karl Barth), where he was addressing a group of young ministers. David Bumbaugh and I talked about this when he was here, and he said he also memorized this the first time he read it over forty years ago, and also took it as a sacred commandment. The theologian had said, “Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”

I think of this every Sunday, every week when I’m preparing a sermon. It isn’t about me, it’s about that ancient and honorable community, that sacred duty to take people perhaps even more seriously than they take themselves. In my mind, those ancient and honorable people are watching me; I can feel their eyes. That isn’t always a good thing. I don’t always succeed at this, as you know. Nobody does. But those two statements transformed my life from the life of a single fairly unimportant Unitarian minister to someone who feels empowered and commanded by an ancient tradition far larger and more enduring than I am. These are the same feelings as coming to Jesus, but without the Jesus, the gods, or the dogma.

Now this isn’t your story, so you might say, “Oh, come off it. You’re just a preacher at a church most people in Austin have never even heard of, preaching to less than one-tenth of a percent of the population!” And that’s true. Just as it’s true that the peasant woman was only sweeping the floor, or Arianna Huffington is just a driven woman with two kids. But these larger callings – whether her seeing herself as incarnations of the spirits of Artemis and Demeter or my believing I’m part of an ancient and honorable community of scholars charged with helping people take their lives more seriously – these larger callings transform solitary lives into little works of art, because they reconnect us with those enduring, perhaps eternal spirits that we serve.

And what about you? After all, that’s the point of all this. How would you describe your life? In ways that make you seem isolated and small, or in ways that connect you with a life force that transcends, empowers, and commands you? Are you just insignificant little you, or are you one of the masks of God, an incarnation of holy spirits, a small but significant part of a cause, a belief, an ideal that is timeless and incredibly necessary? Sweeping the floor, or building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God? Putting a few bucks in the collection plate here, or becoming the church rather than merely attending it? It’s your choice. I”d like you to discuss these things this week with your friends, your family, somewhere you can feel safe and won’t get put down for dreaming. You can choose the story of which your life is a part, whether small or large, and that choice makes all the difference in recasting your life as a work of art.

And so. What about you? As happens so often in this church, it’s your move.

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© Davidson Loehr

 11 May 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not be so filled with ourselves that we cannot forgive others their sins and foibles when we knew they meant better. And let us not be so empty of ourselves that we let others use our forgiveness as a license to behave badly.

The balance between justice and mercy is always a dynamic balance, meant to empower the best kind of life within and around us. If our sense of justice is no more than punishment, it is a poor justice. And if our sense of forgiveness does no more than enable bad behavior, it is a poor forgiveness.

Let us try to balance a rich sense of justice and an empowering kind of forgiveness, as though the quality of life both within and among us were shaped by them.

Amen.

SERMON: Forgiveness

This is the third sermon I’ve done on a one-word theme. I’m planning to do one a month, and am developing a list of 36 themes, so we’ll revisit each theme once every three years. The themes may be only one word, but they don’t seem to be simple. Forgiveness – perhaps especially within Western religions – is very complicated. In fact, I’d start by saying that “Forgiveness isn’t always a good thing.” And the reason is that forgiveness suffers from a deep imbalance in Western religions, and when it’s unbalanced, it can be a very dangerous and bad thing.

The best-known story about forgiveness in the Bible is probably the Prodigal Son story. You know the story. A father had two sons – their mother is never mentioned – and one of them demanded his full inheritance in advance. That was permitted within Jewish law at the time, but if a son did it, he had no more claims on his family, ever. The father had to come up with cash for half of all his property was worth. It probably meant he would have had to sell things, and it also meant that after the younger brother left with the money, both the father and the older brother would have had to work much harder to get the work done. The young brother squandered all the money on wine, women and song, and returned home to ask if his father would take him back – this time, just as a servant, since he had forfeited all right to be taken back as a son. To the older brother’s disgust, the father welcomed him home and threw a great feast to celebrate.

Most adults who hear the story side with the older brother, and don’t think it was right of the father to forgive the young brother.

To see and feel how sex-linked notions of forgiveness are, all you have to do – especially on Mother’s Day! – is change the story to one about two sons and a mother. Suddenly, it changes everything. We would expect the mother to forgive him!

We expect the father to stand up for justice, but the mother to offer forgiveness, don’t we? Forgiveness seems closer to a feminine trait than a masculine one. It might be interesting to ask trial lawyers whether, if they were defending the younger brother, they’d rather have a jury of men or of women.

Forgiveness does seem to be a feminine trait, especially in our Western religions. In Hinduism, the goddess Kali is a fierce and judging and punishing presence, and in Greek mythology, the goddess Dike is the goddess of justice, and is equally fearsome. So in other religions, goddesses can be fierce. But not in Western religions. It’s hard to think of stories from the Bible or in Christian history of women who are that fearsome, or men who are terribly forgiving. In the Bible, the traits seem deeply sex-linked. It’s worth asking why, and the answer goes all the way back to the birth of the God of the Bible. There is no story of the birth of God in the Bible. I mean the story that biblical scholars have discovered about where the ancient Hebrews got the idea for their God.

The Hebrew tribes were surrounded by people whose gods were nature deities, and almost always that means that the main deities will be female, as it’s females who give birth, nurse and nurture. But the ancient Hebrews’ god wasn’t a nature god. He grew out of the idea of a tribal chief. He didn’t want to put you in touch with nature. He wanted to be obeyed, and could be ferocious when he was disobeyed. Scholars have found that the Biblical covenant between God and his chosen people was modeled on an ancient Hittite sovereignty treaty between a ruler and the people he ruled. If they obey him, he will protect him. If they disobey, he may destroy them. It isn’t about understanding or forgiveness. It’s about obedience. It’s hard to think of many good stories about forgiveness – as opposed to favors shown to obedient believers – because there aren’t many.

Maybe that’s why so many people find it odd or even wrong for the Prodigal Son’s father to forgive him, but would expect his mother to forgive him.

The psychologist Carl Jung talked about the human psyche, or soul, as divided into a masculine style, which he called the animus, and a feminine style, the anima, and that framework seems helpful here.

They act in different ways, and in different directions. The animus, or masculine style, acts outward. It can be a fierce protector of things like duty, obedience and justice, and when it is unbalanced it can be quite dangerous to others, because it will insist on a kind of obedience and justice without any rounded appreciation for our human frailties. Even the word animus is the root of the word animosity.

The anima or feminine style is inward, and seems to be the key in which a forgiving kind of understanding is played. But it also needs to be balanced with a concern for what’s fair: for justice. Unbalanced, it can be dangerous to us, by endorsing abuse without insisting on justice or respect.

I’d say that great religions are all trying to develop our animus for its sensitivity to justice, and our anima for its sensitivity to forgiveness and mercy. Justice and mercy. The conflict is between “mercy that negates justice” and “justice that negates mercy.” For either of them to be humane and safe, they have to be balanced. And in Western religions, because of the nature of their God who evolved from, and in most ways has remained, a tribal chief, we are raised with both justice and forgiveness out of balance.

Now many Christian scholars like to jump on this and say “Oh yes, the Jewish God was a God of judgment, but you see that’s what Jesus brought: a god of forgiveness rather than judgment.”

For example, whereas it’s hard to find clear stories teaching forgiveness in the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus once told people that he didn’t expect them to forgive just seven times, but seventy times seven. He also said you shouldn’t judge, so you won’t be judged. So it sounds like he is emphasizing forgiveness over judgment. But now it is an unbalanced kind of forgiveness. In Christianity, forgiveness too often has no component of justice in it, no holding others accountable to a social contract. And without that balance, forgiveness can be dangerous to us, just as an unbalanced sense of justice can be dangerous to others.

Jesus’ saying we should forgive seventy times seven has inspired at least one book by that name, with hundreds of short tales of people who forgave all manner of things, with no concern for justice at all. There’s even the story of a man who had been badly physically abused by his father – sometimes beaten unconscious – until he finally ran away from home in his teens. A few years later when he joined a church and told his story to the minister, the minister insisted that he write his father and beg his forgiveness for running away! That’s as unbalanced and dangerous as the passages in the Hebrew scriptures listing all the disobediences for which your children, wives and neighbors should be stoned to death. This is the kind of forgiveness that can be demanded by a tribal chief who can do what he likes without accountability. It’s unhealthy and wrong. And it’s not rare in Christian history. We have been taught to transfer the obedience owed to the tribal-chief-god to those who dress up in his clothes, or just those with money and power, however obtained.

Mother Teresa provided a memorable example of an unbalanced and dangerous forgiveness, when Union Carbide essentially hired her to do their PR after their chemical spill in Bhopal, India which killed 3,800 people. They made a donation to her Sisters of Mercy charity, then flew her to Bhopal. When she landed, the media were there, wanting to know what she advised following this horrible tragedy. She said, “Just forgive, forgive, forgive.” That’s not enough. This is a forgiveness that becomes an accomplice to corporate irresponsibility, a forgiveness that is the active enemy of justice – especially when the company had hired her. I think Mother Teresa only meant the inward kind of forgiveness, but she had been bribed by a large corporation, and her message suited their non-religious agenda perfectly. Nor do I think she was unaware of this.

Other examples of forgiveness so unbalanced that it becomes dangerous to the ones doing the forgiving are the many battered women’s shelters in our country. A majority of the battered women return to the men who beat them – probably not for the first time, nor for the last. This license to abuse seems granted only to husbands, not wives, as St. Paul taught the early Christians that men are made in the image of God, while women are made in the image of men. (As ridiculous as this sounds, it comes from a literal reading of one of the two creation stories in Genesis, where the male God first created the male – in his image – then created the female to be like the male, as his helpmate.) Once again, these are the ethics of deference to a powerful male tribal chief. The biblical God’s birth story has colored almost all the ethics of Western religion.

My dictionary offers two definitions of forgiveness that might be helpful ways to understand it. American Heritage Dictionary (1969) defines forgiveness:

1. To excuse for a fault or offense; to pardon.

2. To renounce anger or resentment against [someone].

The first definition is forgiveness that goes outward, pardoning someone for their behavior. The second goes inward, releasing their psychological hold on you so you can move on. Ideally, both kinds are possible. But they often aren’t.

The first kind of forgiveness is only safe if the other person is in a mutually respectful relationship with you. If an abuser can’t or won’t come into respectful relationship, it’s unwise and probably unsafe to forgive them, because it won’t be much more than permission for them to do it again, as tens of thousands of battered women have discovered the hard way.

There has to be a social contract in order to forgive someone for bad behavior against you. Then it’s a restorative kind of forgiveness, meant to restore a good relationship. There is a Proverb from the Hebrew scriptures that shows how important the social contract is. It’s one of my favorite Proverbs from the Bible – and on the surface, one of the strangest.

Proverbs 25:21-22 – “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; so you will heap glowing coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.” Now there is something weirdly delicious about this image of being kind to those who have abused you because it dumps hot coals on their head as God applauds, but the real meaning is less bizarre. A note says that these “hot coals” really mean deep shame and remorse. So acting in a forgiving way will shame them back into behaving well. This is restorative forgiveness, meant to restore a respectful and healthy social contract. If they can’t or won’t feel shame, however, forgiving them will only give them permission to abuse you again, because you’re an easy mark.

Without the mutual relationship, the first kind of forgiveness can’t be done. Sometimes, people just aren’t capable of or interested in a mutual relationship. But sometimes, they’re dead or gone, and you have to move on because you can never restore the relationship with them, and so have to settle for resolving it within yourself. Then it’s more of a rejuvenative forgiveness, meant to rejuvenate your spirit, to reconnect you with your life force and your sense of optimism and hope.

I have a story about this that I’ve told before, but is worth telling again. About fifteen years ago, I was the Theme Speaker at a Unitarian summer camp in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. There were about five hundred adults there for the week, and while I didn’t know any of them, I conducted the worship services every morning, so everyone sort of knew who I was, and would come up to talk, or to confess something, during the week. The most memorable was a woman who asked me, after lunch, whether she could talk to me about something very painful and awful she was going through. We sat on a bench under a tree outside, and she told me about what sounded like an absolutely horrible divorce she had been through. It was so painful, it hurt to listen to it. It was like a wound still completely raw. I felt very sorry for her. “When did this happen?” I asked. She looked at me sadly, and said, “Ten years ago.”

Ten years ago, and she was still bleeding from it! Of course, I don’t know any of the facts of the story for sure. Maybe he’s a jerk, maybe he just fell out of love with her, maybe it wasn’t as good a marriage as she thought, maybe she didn’t even notice whether he was happy, maybe she was the jerk. I don’t know. But it really didn’t matter any more. There can be no restorative forgiveness, because the relationship can’t be restored. The only kind of forgiveness she can hope for is the second kind, where she lets go of the hurt and the hate, and moves on with her life. She had a dream for her marriage, and it didn’t come true. Not all dreams come true, but all dreamers deserve the chance to dream again, and they can’t do it if they’re wrapped up in hate and hurt.

This kind of rejuvenating forgiveness, which we do not for others but for ourselves, is a decision to let go of resentments and thoughts of revenge, and to move ahead with our life.

This internal forgiveness takes away the power the other person continues to wield in your life, where your pain and anger have possessed you like demons. Through forgiveness, you choose to no longer define yourself as their victim. Rejuvenating forgiveness is done for yourself, not the person who you think wronged you.

It’s this second meaning that has the most religious and psychological power. The first, the restorative forgiveness, can be powerful within a relationship of trust and respect. Without that trust and respect, it just frees the person to do it again; it rewards abusive and selfish behavior. The second can be powerful within our own psyche, by cutting loose the hold that anger, resentment and hatred can have on our hearts. Be careful confusing the two categories of forgiveness. People don’t have a right to demand forgiveness: that’s a gift only we can give, and we shouldn’t give it if it will be likely to hurt us or be understood as a sanction for abusive behavior.

You don’t have to forgive the person – the person may be long dead. But (like the woman divorced ten years earlier) the anger lives on as though it had happened yesterday, keeping your heart from even being open again, let alone loving again. You can’t dream again when you’re possessed by the demons of hurt and hate. You’re trapped, not your partner or parent. Do yourself the favor, not them.

You can forgive within yourself what you would still hold the abuser responsible for. That inward forgiveness does not necessarily mean you want to be around the person again. It means you relinquish the hold that anger and hatred have on your own heart, so you can move on and dream again.

It seems important to say over again that restorative forgiveness only works within a relationship of mutual respect and trust. Otherwise, it’s enabling the worst behavior in another, and rewarding it. And there must be transparency. A mate who cheats in secret, then tries to rationalize it by demanding his/her privacy is not to be trusted. No one is safe in that relationship. Without honesty and transparency, there will be neither respect nor safety.

Now I want to go back to an earlier point, left over from that version of the Prodigal Son story with a mother rather than a father. It almost sounds like it’s the mother’s job to forgive, while we don’t really expect it from the father. This could sound like it’s the mother’s job, or women’s jobs, to teach men how to forgive – and I don’t want to say that, especially on Mother’s Day, because it’s just assigning women another job. But the other piece from the story is that if women do most of the forgiving, then where do they find forgiveness? Where do they find the understanding and forgiveness they need for their own sense of failure? – which may be that they weren’t able to accomplish a list of tasks not even Wonder Woman could manage. Maybe this is a good hint to the men and the children in their lives on this Mother’s Day. There is a woman living with you who may have been more forgiving of all of you than you’ve been. Now where is she going to find the understanding and forgiveness she needs?

And while the men and children are figuring out just how and where they might be more understanding, a final word to the mothers. If you are good at forgiving, don’t forget to forgive yourselves.

Just like justice needs an element of humanity in order to be a safe thing, so does forgiveness need a sense of justice to be a safe thing.

Let us try to balance a rich sense of justice and an empowering kind of forgiveness, as though the quality of life both within and among us were shaped by them – because they are.