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© Davidson Loehr

February 9, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

In some ways, the answer to all prayers is about the same. You are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. You are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

If you come here feeling alone, know that you are not alone. You are among friends, even if you have not yet met them.

If you came with guilt over your sins of commission or sins of omission, know that you are the healthy company of others with the same guilt over the same kind of sins of commission and omission.

If you come wishing your life were more whole, more satisfying, perhaps even more perfect, know that the honesty of those wishes marks you as someone who belongs here, where we come to face the truth unafraid, even when we are afraid. Because we know, even when we do not want to know, that the truth can set us free. Perhaps not painlessly, but the truth can set us free.

And so: Know that you are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. Know that you are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

Amen.

SERMON: Original Sins and Blessings

The theme of this series of four sermons is “What’s the true story of our origins, our human nature, the human condition and what we need?” Never mind what different religions may say, what do we really believe to be true? The sub theme is “How and why have the religious teachings of our society strayed so far from the truth?” The truth is empowering, it can set us free. Bad creation stories, false pictures of human nature and unhealthy concepts of God diminish and demean us. Part of the road to salvation is learning to tell the difference between religious stories that empower us, and those that enslave us; between healthy and unhealthy myths.

Last week I began by talking about the true story of creation: how the universe got here, what it’s made of, what life on earth is made of, and how deeply it’s all related. We’re made of stardust, the stuff of the universe. And here on earth, life is made from just five chemical building-blocks that make up DNA and RNA. We are more deeply related to one another, more deeply a part of one another, that we can begin to imagine. The dynamic powers of the universe are within us, if we will see them and free them. We are part of a linked continuum of life; we should expect similarities with all other life on earth.

And yet the creation story in the Bible distorts this, takes the power and dignity away from us and gives it to the Hebrew God who was created as a projection of an ancient tribal chief. For historical reasons we can understand, the ancient writers turned it from a true story of empowerment to a false story of enslavement and obedience to the priests who spoke for the God they had constructed.

Religious myths are to be judged by whether they serve the truth or not. Some do, some do not. In Western religions, the myths as interpreted by the dominant orthodoxies do not serve the truth well. I want us to look at that, no matter how rude it may seem to do so.

Today, I want to look at human nature. What kind of creatures are we? How is this odd species we call homo sapiens put together? What are our original blessings and sins?

I want to do this as I did last week, by beginning with the true story, then bringing in biblical myths to compare with it. By the true story, I mean one we can verify through sciences, but also from common observations and experience, as you’ll see. It’s what we can demonstrate to be the case about humans, regardless of our beliefs. In computer language, human nature includes both hardware and software. Most of the hardwiring is obvious and easy to find examples of, though we don’t think about it much:

1. We are a social species. There is an old German saying “Ein Mensch ist kein Mensch.” It means “one person is no person,” and it echoes an ancient Greek proverb that said the same thing. We are, as Aristotle noted 2400 years ago, a profoundly social species. Alone, we’re not complete. We need a connection to others, which we have to learn how to make wisely and well.

2. We are hardwired to be in “families” of about four to twelve. When we think of intimate groups, groups small enough for us to feel known in, that’s the size we seek. Most of our small social and professional groups are in this size range: bridge groups, church committees, covenant groups, Evensong. Our sports teams also fit this: basketball, baseball, football, soccer. Almost all are in that range of four or five to a dozen. Juries are a dozen; church boards are usually a dozen or fewer. If you ask Why, the answer is that this is the kind of species we are. It isn’t about free will, it’s about predestination here. Each species has its characteristic family or brood size, and that’s ours. It helps shape most of the small groups we create, in most areas of our lives.

3. Each species also has a characteristic troop size, and ethologists say the characteristic troop size of our species is about 150 to 200. That’s about the most people each of us is likely to be able to know, to keep in mind as our real “community.” It’s almost amazing, the number of times and places this size comes up.

A. Back in graduate school, I read a book by the German scholar Hannah Arendt on the 1917 Russian revolution, which she witnessed firsthand. She was interested to see that the chaos didn’t last long. Some charismatic leaders seemed to emerge from nowhere, and people gathered around them in groups. However, when the groups got to about 200, they always divided. That was the biggest group that seemed stable.

B. When I spoke at the LAMP group at the University of Texas last year, I mentioned some of these facts. Later, one of their leaders said they had tried for years to increase the number of people who were active, but had never been able to get it above 150: the number present on that day. This is predestination, not free will: it’s who we are and how we are made.

C. Church consultants use these numbers, too. The hardest and most unlikely growth is for a church to grow from an average attendance of 150 to one of 250 or more. Most don’t make it over that hump, because that’s as big as our biologically-wired troop size has prepared us for. You have to learn how to grow larger. You have to learn how to grow beyond our biology, which has not prepared us for the modern world. Ironically, when a church does figure it out, it can do a much better job of providing structures of intimacy than a smaller church. Because in a small church, you have a troop, with a few de facto alpha males and females who control its power. If you don’t like their style, you don’t have a home there.

But in a larger church, there are many sub-communities, and you can move more freely between them, finding places that feel more homey to you. When they are well-done, large churches have much better structures of intimacy than small ones. Because in small ones, there’s one de facto troop leader or small group that defines the group. If you don’t fit with their politics, you won’t fit with the group. In larger churches, there are subgroups, and you have choices.

Still, it takes intelligent work to create structures of intimacy that can let a church grow, because our biology hasn’t prepared us for the modern world, and we have to work to grow into it.

We can say a lot more about our species, about the kind of creatures we are. Here are some other traits. A century ago, none of this was controversial. A generation ago, some of this was controversial; now it’s not very controversial again:

We are a profoundly territorial species. We build fences around our yards, for goodness’ sake! We identify with our ‘turf,’ our nation, our state, our neighborhood. The next time you’re walking down the street and a dog barks at you from behind his master’s fence, remember that the dog is barking for the same reason the master built the fence: it’s their turf, and you’re a potential intruder.

All territory is really conceptual, not drawn on the ground in yellow lines. We think of this with humans, but territory is conceptual for all animals. I used to raise a breed of French shepherd called Briards: extremely territorial animals. They still use them in France to herd sheep. We saw movies of ranchers waking the dog around the boundaries of their territory – no fences. Then the dog learned that territory, internalized it, and kept sheep inside of it. The tendency is hard-wired, but the content is learned. We learn what counts as “our territory”: UT? Austin? Houston? Ann Arbor? America? The world?

We are a profoundly hierarchical species. We think in terms of categories like top dogs, “The Man,” kings, presidents. We seek to identify the “top” one: Miss America. I’ve never heard of a beauty contest to find “the seventh most attractive woman in Travis County.” We only care about #1. We award gold medals to the winners, and put some of them on cereal boxes. Nobody even remembers the names of the athletes who won silver medals: they were the losers. Grocery story magazines inform us who “the sexiest man alive is” – this week, I think it’s still Ben Affleck, in case you had forgotten. We don’t think to ask how, in a world of six billion people, anyone could ever think of narrowing that category down to below about a million people. We’re not built that way. We want to know who’s on top. We only reward the winners. I’ve seen some of the football fever here in the fall. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, another football superpower. And never in either city, and never on any televised game, have I seen players and fans excitedly screaming “We’re Number Two!” Something inside of us thinks that number two doesn’t really count. We’re wrong, but it’s how we’re made.

There are good things about us, too. We are naturally altruistic. Cats and dogs will risk themselves for their young, monkeys do, so do horses, cows, and humans. And sometimes altruism extends beyond species lines. We stop to save an endangered dog we don’t know. Why do we do that? Maybe we just feel related to them. You’ve read the stories of dolphins saving humans from drowning. They swim under the person, lift them to the surface and take them into shallow water. Why? It’s how they’re made. We are caring, altruistic animals. Our behaviors show we are linked very deeply, and recognize the connections. Our altruism doesn’t come from religion, it wasn’t a gift from the gods, it comes from nature.

This next one will sound kind of mushy, like I’m moving from science into mystical gobbledygook, but it isn’t. There just isn’t a clear word for this next trait. But every animal has a soul, a self, a style, a character, that distinguishes it from others. You can sense this being around them. If you’ve watched a litter of puppies or kittens for long, you see that each one has its own “personality,” its own style. Some are trusting, some more afraid. Some are adventurous, some are shy. And if you’ve raised those kittens or puppies, you know they keep those styles all their lives, just as we do. Human babies have different characters from the start. But so do other species.

A member of this church, Clare Tilson, has her Ph.D. in entomology, and once spent several minutes explaining to me about the individuality she found in, of all things, moths. For a graduate school project, she had to feed a few dozen very large moths each day, and found great individual differences between them. She had to grab them, turn them on their backs, and put some sugar water into their mouths. She could identify the individual moths based on their different styles. Some fought her every day. Others quickly learned the procedure, and flopped onto their backs as soon as she picked them up. Some even stuck their tongues out for her. And one moth, she said, was just so sweet that she kept feeding it even after the experiment ended because she had grown to like it.

Each creature seems to need and want to live in a way that is consistent with its unique style. This is something everyone here has struggled with. We know that we must be true to ourselves, to our styles, to our “souls” if you like, and that if we don’t do it, we are not living integrated or authentic or very satisfying lives. One of Jesus’ famous rhetorical questions was “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” That’s what this is about. A “soul” isn’t some little metaphysical gas bag, it’s that inner integrity of remaining true to our own soul, our own style.

In a social species like ours, there is a necessary conflict between each individual’s unique style, and the style of its troop and world. The effort is to find an integrated way of living that honors all levels of our identity, all our territories and individualities, has marked humans from the beginning of recorded history. When we talk of getting our lives together, we mean something like this: living in a way that is true to ourselves while also fitting into “the world” in a harmonious way. It isn’t easy to do, you know?

Our original blessings are considerable. We’re curious. We want to learn about ourselves, our environment, about the difference between life-empowering and life-enslaving values – what some have called the difference between good and evil. We feel connections to others and to much of life, and we’re a caring species that wants to act on these deeply-felt connections. All these are blessings, gifts to us from life.

Our original sins are also considerable. And our biggest and most dangerous original sin is that we can’t tell the difference between good leaders and bad leaders, good stories and bad stories, good groups and bad groups. We follow leaders, especially charismatic ones, and follow them into untrue stories that enslave, into wars that slaughter, into stories of such nonsense they should but don’t boggle even our minds.

I was just remembering the Heaven’s Gate cult of about five years ago. You recall that Matthew Applewhite led a group of people to believe that they needed to commit mass suicide – all dressed alike and wearing Nike tennis shoes – so they would be transported up to the Mother Ship, which was hidden behind the Hale Bopp comet.

The media, thankfully, identified Applewhite as an Episcopalian, for which we can be grateful. But last week I learned that he had also been the music director of the First Unitarian Church in Houston. As a Unitarian who used to be a musician, I’m not sure which eccentricity finally drove him over the edge. But I watched several of the videotaped interviews of his people before their suicides. And they looked absolutely at peace, completely sure of what they were doing. They were wrong, but they were certain. They followed a man they saw as a spiritual leader and it cost them their lives. Others have strapped bombs to themselves and walked into crowded buildings to kill themselves, or flown planes into buildings, because some nut has told them seventy virgins will await them in heaven for dying like this. I can’t imagine that anyone thought to ask the virgins what they thought of this. Our worst original sin is that we often can’t tell the difference between good stories and bad ones, and often serve gods that aren’t worth serving at all. We’re easily distracted and misled. Advertising, politics and bad preachers count on it.

The only hope we have is good education, to teach us the difference between good and evil, health and unhealth, sanity and insanity. But in doing that, we’re growing beyond the limits of our biology, which has not prepared us for the kind of world we’re living in.

These are a few of the things we know to be true about human nature, a few of the things we know about how we are put together and who we are.

Now let’s look at the story in the Bible to see what it says about who we are and who we are supposed to be. Listen to the story against this background, and see if it strikes you as an empowering or an enslaving story:

Genesis 2:15-17: The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Genesis 3: 1ff – Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, “You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened ….

Afterwards, God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” – therefore God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. (RSV, emphasis added)

And so: education, learning to make distinctions between good and evil, gaining wisdom, takes you out of a fool’s paradise. But look at this story. Here it takes humans, born curious, whose great hope and strength is our ability to learn, to grow bigger, to learn the difference between good and evil, and to become more godlike by doing so. These are among our original blessings. But this story condemns humans for their very strengths. This was the god shaped in the image of a tribal chief, who wants people to be obedient rather than empowered. Do you see how clearly this shows up when you begin to look for it? It isn’t hidden, we have just not been taught to look for it.

This is an untrue story and a bad myth that does not offer empowerment. Christianity made this concept of God central for many centuries. For most of its history, the Roman Catholic Church taught that its people were not to read the bible for themselves, but were to be taught its meaning by the priests. Some in this room grew up in that kind of a church: I’ve talked with members here in their 30s who went through 12 years of Catholic schools, and said they were still being told not to read the bible, just fed the relevant passages with their interpretations. That isn’t an empowering or ennobling style of taking life seriously. The churches should be ashamed.

The message of Jesus reverted to a loving rather than an authoritative God, and for the first four centuries of Christianity, it was often a religion that empowered women, poor people, and social outcasts. You hardly ever hear about those first four centuries of Christianity, when there was very widespread theological diversity, including some very non-supernatural varieties with which most of us would be comfortable.

But in the early 5th century, when the Roman Empire was crumbling, St. Augustine believed the church needed to take some of the authority the Roman Empire had had, to structure and stabilize society. The story of Eve eating the apple had been celebrated for the first four century of Christianity, as a story about our free will.

But Augustine changed the story. He made it part of his new notion of original sin. This original sin meant that people couldn’t be trusted, and couldn’t be trusted even with their own lives. They needed to be kept in line through the Authority of the Church, like sheep kept in line by shepherds.

It’s impossible to measure the harm that story of original sin has done. It’s important to say, as clearly as possible, that the story was a lie. It was not true to human nature. It became a story of enslavement rather than empowerment.

Even worse, it hid the real answer from us. The real answer to the human condition was provided by the serpent, and acted on by Eve. We must eat the apple. We must learn the difference between good and evil, and begin to reclaim some of the power transferred to this God so long ago. We must transform stories that enslave into more honest stories that empower. That’s how we grow up, that’s how we leave the fool’s paradise of childhood and grow into powerful, confident adults.

The snake was right. Eve was right. That concept of God was wrong, untrue, and disempowering. Next week I’ll wrestle with the concept of God. But look back on your own religious stories this week, and ask what parts of them were empowering and life-giving, and what parts were enslaving or demeaning, taking power and dignity away from you. I think you’ll find that the places you felt empowered were places where the true story broke through. Maybe through a preacher, a Sunday school teacher, a parent or mentor. Or maybe you just found the hidden truths for yourselves.

As you look back through these stories – and this can be a painful process – remember those things that are the answer to almost every prayer:

Know that you are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. Know that you are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 2, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER:

Once in awhile – not often, but once in awhile – a very painful moment gets our attention. It breaks through all the mind-numbing manipulations of our best advertising and political geniuses, and wakes us up, often rudely. It hurts. And, if we will let it, it may bring us some wisdom.

I love that paradox of wisdom coming through unwanted pain. The best statement of it I’ve ever read was written by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, some 2500 years ago:

Pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop

upon the heart

until in our despair

there comes wisdom

through the awful

grace of God.

Yesterday another of those awful moments got to us. Our space shuttle Columbia exploded and disintegrated over Texas around 8:00 yesterday morning, less than 15 minutes before it was to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Here was a crew of seven people, an international crew: a black man, an Israeli, two women – one from India – a couple American Top Gun Air Force pilots, some doctors and scientists. Different sexes, races, nationalities, and religions.

Yet we all knew immediately that all these lives were equal, not ranked according to their ethnicity or ideology. If we hadn’t realized it, there would have been something dangerously missing from us, I think. Perhaps that realization is some of the wisdom that comes through what Aeschylus called “the awful grace of God.”

Yet the timing of this tragedy will bring a revelation, if we will let it. For our elected leaders are preparing to invade a sovereign nation and slaughter an estimated tens of thousands of innocent civilians. They and we try to ignore this human sacrifice by calling it “collateral damage.”

But no one yesterday dismissed those seven deaths as collateral damage from our space program. It would have been vulgar to do so. We showed each of their faces. We told their stories. We cried for the families they left behind.

Yesterday we remembered that all the lives lost were equally precious, regardless of sex, race, religion or nationality. Can we really now forget it again so quickly, and resume our talk of unprovoked war, of using our weapons of mass destruction to destroy huge masses of our brothers and sisters in Iraq?

If we are to squeeze a lesson from yesterday’s tragedy, let it be to remember that all lives are equally sacred, and that war – even if it were an honest war – is the ultimate failure of our imagination, our leadership, and our humanity.

Let us pray that those seven deaths do not go by without letting them remind us that no other people are enough different from us that we have license to kill them in an unprovoked war.

SERMON: In the Beginning…

Those of you who heard the Rev. Donald Wheat preach here on December 29th will remember he said one reason liberal religion loses out to the many more literalistic varieties is because we don’t have a good story. He meant a story of creation, of human nature, of the human condition, and of prescriptions for the yearnings and fears that always seem to arise for those of us in the human condition.

Last summer, my 16-year-old niece had an even more pointed accusation. She’s a Christian fundamentalist, and she and my brother visited me in Quebec while thousands of UUs were mobbing the city for their General Assembly. She studied this odd tribe as though she were doing fieldwork in a foreign, and weird, island. She engaged some of them in conversation – just gathering data, I suspect.

On about the third day, she announced “Uncle Davidson, I know why your religion is such a miserable failure.” “Well,” I said, “that would be interesting to know.” “It’s simple,” she said: “You don’t have a Book.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I said, lamely, that we had lots of books, but that wouldn’t wash: “Nope, you can’t just tell people to go browse around the library and see if they find any wisdom. You’ve got to have a Book so you can say “Hey: go read the Book.” But you can’t say that ’cause you don’t have a Book. That’s why your religion is so miserable.” I think (or at least hope) I thanked her for her insights, but didn’t have an answer for them.

I suppose my answer to the “Book” issue would be that one book isn’t enough, that the range of life’s questions surpasses the scope of any one book or any one religion. No, I don’t think she would have bought it.

So I’ll return to the easier challenge of Rev. Don Wheat. This month I want to offer four sermons to address his critiques. I think we do have a coherent story, and a true one; but I don’t know that it has ever been put into the form of a good myth. And when it comes to showdowns between facts and stories, good stories will win almost every time. Even the sciences rely on stories to make their points: like the story of the Big Bang and the story of evolution.

The kind of stories people really seem to yearn for have to help us find answers to a lot of very basic questions: like who we are, where we came from, how we should live, how we should live together, and what, if anything, will remain after we are gone, to testify to the fact that once, we lived, loved, and gave our lives to things we thought enduringly important?

These are the questions we have been asking for, probably, hundreds of thousands of years. Only a fool would try to address them in four sermons. Let’s begin.

Most religions start with a creation story: “In the beginning….” Non-theistic religions like Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism don’t use creation stories. But all our Western religions begin with essentially the same creation story.

Creation stories are very powerful. They tell us where we come from, what we’re made of, where the real power in life lies, and how to get it. If you know someone’s creation story, you can understand their salvation story, for the two are almost always linked, the one being a mirror image of the other.

That point alone is worth a half dozen sermons. You might think of asking about your own story: what you think you’re made of, what gives you your worth, what you need to do to become more whole.

But for now, let’s think about our creation story, about how everything came to be: us, life, the universe, everything. Forget about religious myths for now. Just think about how we really believe it all began. The myths will come in later.

Most of us answer these questions with our sciences. That’s where we go for our most convincing stories. About fifteen billion years ago, we’re told by our scientific storytellers, it began with a Bang. It all exploded and expanded faster than we can imagine, but everything in the universe was once all together in a little sort of ball.

This means that everything in the universe, including us, is made of stardust. Our birthplace was literally in the stars. And it means that everything everywhere, the whole shebang, is made of the same stuff.

This seems to be true. We have discovered 109 different elements so far, and all the information we’ve gathered through our space probes and spectrographic analysis of images from the Hubbell Space Telescope hasn’t found any others. We’re made of the same stuff that everything else is.

Here on earth, life evolved in ways we’re still just beginning to understand. But again, it’s the case that a very few materials make up the warp and the weft of all life on earth. All DNA, from ours down to the DNA of bacteria, is made from just four different building blocks:

A = Adenine

G = Guanine

C = Cytosine

T = Thymine

When you consider RNA as well, you add one more chemical: Uracil replaces Thymine.

And when they combine, each one is always and only attracted to just one other: the adenine always links with the thymine (or uracil), the guanine always connects to the cytosine. Very simple building blocks, simple rules. They have formed millions of shapes, millions of kinds of living things, but once again, the whole shebang is made up of the same stuff. Animals, plants, all intimately related, made of combinations of the same five building blocks. All life on earth is part of the same family.

And it’s a cycle. We live by killing and eating other plant and animal life. Then when we die, our bodies are broken down and become the bodies of plants, then the plants become the bodies of other animals, from the beginning of time till the end of time. It’s nature’s great plan, reducing life to its basics, then recycling it over and over again.

I’m not trying to sell you on reincarnation. But I am trying to sell you our most honest story of creation, which is that we are deeply linked with all life on earth, all the way down. That is our deepest identity, and carries powerful suggestions for how we should think about each other and treat one another.

The great poets and sages of the world’s religions seemed to intuit this thousands of years ago. And they built it into their myths, myths that survive today. Native Americans had rituals like the Buffalo Dance, done to repay the buffaloes they ate by helping them regenerate. I’ve read other Indian rituals of talking to trees before cutting them down for a canoe or for tipi poles, treating the tree as a brother and explaining why it was necessary to cut it down. They felt, and expressed, a familiar connection that sciences show us is really, deeply, there.

Even the most ancient Neanderthal burial sites discovered in China, dating to more than 100,000 years ago, show a sense of our being a part of the whole world. Those Neanderthals buried their dead in womb-shaped graves, curled into a fetal position, facing east, the direction of the rising sun. While they didn’t explain it in words, it looks like they are entrusting their beloved dead to mother earth, returning them to her womb curled up like babies, ready to be reborn as the rising sun is reborn. And similar burial practices have been found among the ancient Peruvian people, and the Dogon people on Mali.

The true creation story tells us that we’re not strangers here. This is our home. We are one with everything here, intimately connected with all life and all matter.

The ancient Greek myth of creation expresses this by saying that in the beginning Father Heaven mated with Mother Earth, and everything here was born from that mating. We’re the children of heaven and earth, the children of the gods. Every particle of us is sacred, just as every atom is stardust.

It’s poetry, but it’s good poetry, poetry that tells the truth. Remember, one of the most famous of all religious prayers is that it become “on earth, as it is in heaven.” We may be made of earth, but the earth is made of stardust, and we want to regain a sense of our regal beginnings and our true home.

This is the real story of creation, and of the creation of life on earth. It’s all made of stardust, and is all intimately interconnected. Here is the plea for universal peace and brotherhood that sings like a leitmotif through every great religion in the world. The power that created the universe is within us; it is our own power. If we would remember our real creation story, if we would claim that power and if we would act in ways that are consistent with our interrelation with everyone and everything else, how different our local, national and international worlds would look!

That’s the good news: there really is a true creation story, which can be verified not only by our most advanced sciences but also by some of the greatest myths in the world’s most ancient religions.

But there’s a problem, and it is an absolutely gigantic problem. It’s one of the most important things to learn about religion, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and how they become demonic. And that’s that the true story has usually been changed by priests (or politicians) into a story that takes the power and the dignity away from people and transfers it to priests, tribal leaders, religions and rulers.

Archaeologists and biblical scholars are now fairly sure that the ancient Hebrews developed from the more ancient tribe of Canaanites. Modern scholars are beginning to say with some force that there was never an Egyptian chapter in ancient Jewish history, and that Moses was not a historical character in their actual history. They came from the Canaanites, and developed their religion in large part to contradict the older Canaanite religion.

We know the Canaanite religion was a powerful nature religion, with an Earth Mother who gave birth to all. This is the same basic story the Chinese Neanderthals acted out 100,000 years earlier: the earth is our mother and our natural home. It was a religion that might have empowered its people through rituals to put them in touch with the power of the earth and their own power, though we don’t know that.

But the Hebrews created a new religion, in direct opposition to the Canaanite religion. You can see it in their creation story, which was obviously adapted from the creation story of a Mother Earth. Why? Because when you read a story about a deity creating everything by itself, you know it is a woman’s story, not a man’s. Mother earth can do it, but not Father Sky.

Scholars have argued that the god invented by the ancient Hebrews was a simple projection of their tribal chiefs, with the same powers and duties as their tribal chiefs. The chiefs set the rules, laid out rewards and punishments, and defined the way of life for the tribe, just as old Jahweh did.

And other scholars have shown that the covenant made between God and humans in the bible was modeled after ancient Hittite treaties between tribal rulers and their people. The people were expected to have no other ruler above the tribal chief. They were punished if they disobeyed, but were rewarded and protected as long as they were obedient. This is the basic structure of the covenant between the ancient Hebrews and the God they created.

And so their male god, they wrote, created the whole world and all the life on it, all by himself. In their new creation story, we were made out of dirt, and were nothing but dirt until this male tribal-chief-god breathed his breath of life into us. By ourselves, we were nothing. We had nothing sacred in or about us. It was all loaned to us by this new God. In return, we had to obey him. Or, more accurately, we had to obey those who claimed to speak for him: the priests and rulers.

Even if you were never Muslim, Christian or Jewish, you were soaked in this creation story just because you grew up in this society. And we’ve not been trained to back off from the story, look at it critically, and ask bold questions like whether or not it is a true account of creation, or even if it is a good myth. But that’s what I’m asking you to do: to back off far enough to see that the dominant creation story, and the dominant style of religion in Western civilization, may in fact be bad religion based on a false creation story.

And this is important because creation stories are so closely related to salvation stories. They can either empower or enslave us, and it’s our job to try and find out which kind we’ve given our hearts and minds to. The true creation story empowers us. It says we are carriers of the dynamic power of the universe, related to all of creation, and the power is ours to claim and act on, to make it “on earth as it is in heaven” by acting like all other life forms are related to us, in our family. The power and the responsibility are ours. What would such a world look like? Jesus called it the Kingdom of God: the world in which we simply treat all others as our sisters and brothers. Buddhists could call it living in Nirvana, connected with true life by being freed from our misleading illusions about it. Honest religion needs an honest creation story, or it isn’t likely to have a healthy salvation story.

But in the ancient Hebrew revision of that story, everything is different. Now there is nothing sacred about us at all. We are dirt, God is God, and the most we can hope for is to establish an obedient relationship with this God – through the priests and the rulers who claim to represent him.

The first creation story says our salvation comes through realizing our identity with the sacred forces of the universe. The second says all we can hope for is a relationship with those forces – now identified not with the universe, but with this God – a relationship defined by our being obedient to the priests and rulers who speak for this God created so long ago.

The first salvation story is found in advanced Hinduism, when the teacher points the student outward toward the whole world, the whole universe, and says “That art thou!” That is a religion of empowerment, grounded in the true story of our creation and birth. It is found in all mysticisms, which also teach our fundamental and unmediated identity with all that is sacred.

The second is taught by religions that teach obedience rather than empowerment, and threaten all who disobey their church’s rules with damnation. It’s a dishonest religion, founded in a dishonest creation story, and we need to say it loud and clear.

Religious liberals and millions of secular people who reject the biblical creation story and its authoritarian God are routinely attacked as heretics, as though they weren’t really seeking the truth. But the facts show otherwise. It was the ancient Hebrews who falsified the real creation story. It seems to have arisen from their boundary disputes with their closest religious kin, the Canaanites. But they created a creation story that was untrue, and a God who disempowered people and transferred both their dignity and their power to the priests who claimed to speak for that God. And that habit has continued all the way down to the present, as we know.

Power belongs to those who control the story. If we don’t know the true story, we’re not likely to have much power or dignity at all. And the churches aren’t likely to have any honest authority, either, no matter how many costumes they wear.

This last point was made clear to me in an unexpected way last week. While I was in Berkeley, I spent a little time with John Dominic Crossan, an acquaintance of mine who was the cofounder of the Jesus Seminar. Dominic spent nineteen years as a Catholic priest, then left the priesthood, married, and raised a family. But he is still a Catholic who fights much of what his church is doing, and fights it on the basis of his forty years of work as a biblical scholar. Dominic spoke of the arrogance of the bishops, cardinals, and the pope today on the terrible cases of sexual abuse – where they want to be regarded as authoritative even though they are wrong. He said “We Catholics are yearning for the days when the worst thing the Church did was sell indulgences.” (The sale of indulgences was the church practice that led to the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago.)

What Catholics and non-Catholics alike have come to see is that religions that aren’t grounded in the real truth have no necessary moral or ethical authority. The good news in religion is that you really can’t fake it.

The other good news is that if you know the truth, the truth can set you free. It may not make you popular with members of your tribe, but it can set you free. It may be the only thing that can set you free.

This morning, I began our four-part sermon series by telling you the true story of creation. There’s much more to consider in the coming weeks: the nature of human nature, good and evil, and the prescription for what ails the human condition. But this was a beginning. Think about the story this week, and about the difference between religious stories that empower you and stories that enslave you. If you find yourself feeling a little more free, it’s a good sign that you may be a religious liberal. And that, for the record, is also good news!

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© Davidson Loehr

15 December 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Prayer

Let our prayers be like Christmas stockings this month, hung by the chimney with care. Let them be simple, even childlike, sewn together out of hope and anticipation.

Let us dare to ask for what we really need, and believe that if our prayers are heartfelt and honest, there is always a chance our stockings will be filled.

And even if our wishes aren’t granted, our honesty will gain the respect from those who matter most, including ourselves.

Let us sing the song of our heart’s true desires like a Christmas carol: dashing through the days, laughing all the way.

Because we’ve remembered what it felt like to be a child for whom dreams really might come true if only we could be open to them and prepare a manger within ourselves where they might be born.

‘Tis the season of good dreams. Let us welcome them, as we prepare for the holidays in the hope that they may also be holy days.

Let our prayers be like Christmas stockings this year, hung by the chimney with care, and with faith, hope and love. And let us allow, even dream, that like our Christmas stockings, we might be filled to overflowing.

Amen.

SERMON: Dreamcatchers

I think Christmas is a tough time of year for an honest preacher. We say this church offers a religion for both head and heart. We say you don’t have to check your brains at the door, but you don’t have to leave your heart outside either.

It’s a bold boast, and the Christmas season always threatens to make a mockery of it.

Who would dare to tell the truth about Christmas during the Christmas season? We know all the supernatural stuff never happened. The world isn’t built that way. Not now, and not two thousand years ago. We know it, but how could you say it? Especially now?

Some few people do say it, of course. Nine years ago at this time of year, the Jesus Seminar published their book The Five Gospels: the Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. In it, they said that an eight-year study of every saying attributed to Jesus had convinced a large international group of scholars that fewer than 20% of the sayings should be considered authentic, the rest written by the people who wrote the gospels, or taken from other sayings and sources at the time.

The choice of timing – bringing the book out just before Christmas – was the publisher’s decision, not the Jesus Seminar’s. But as the publisher explained, Christmas and Easter are about the only times of the year that people much care for the subject of Jesus. Still, telling the truth can change the world, even when it’s unpopular.

If you think the book didn’t make a difference, consider that every magazine cover or network television program on Jesus since then has come either from this work of the Jesus Seminar, or in angry opposition to it. The last I heard, it had sold over 300,000 copies: an amazing number for a book only a tiny fraction of the public would even be interested in.

Still, everybody already knew a lot of what it said. The miracles didn’t happen, just as the miracles in other mythologies didn’t happen. Neither Jesus nor anybody else walked on water or was raised from the dead because the world isn’t built that way, not now or then.

Sure, we knew that. But how could you say it out loud, especially at Christmas?

And they said more. The stories about Jesus were written about him long after he died by people who hadn’t known him. The gospels were not written by his disciples. They were written anonymously. They weren’t assigned their present names until the second century, when a rich layperson named Papias thought it would look better if the gospels were given the names of some disciples, and donated enough money to make it happen.

This probably isn’t surprising. All history looks a lot less dramatic when you strip away the veneer. But how could you say this, especially around Christmas?

And of course there’s a lot more that scholars have said. The baby in the manger, the star, the wise men, the gifts, the colorful trip with the donkey, none of it is historical. We know absolutely nothing about just when the man Jesus was born. In the early centuries, his birth was said to have come in May, in March, in August, probably in a few more months.

December 25th was the date of the winter solstice in the ancient calendar, and wasn’t adopted by the Christian church as the official date of Jesus’ birthday until the year 336, the same time that Sunday was adopted as the religion’s holy day. Both December 25th and Sunday were taken from the religion of Mithraism, where they were the birth day and holy day of the god Mithras.

Still, how could you say this around Christmastime?

One answer – you’ve probably noticed since you’re such a quick group – is that I just did say all this. And if you look in that 1993 book by the Jesus Seminar, you’ll find that my name is listed in the back among the Fellows of the Seminar.

So one answer to the question of how you can keep religion honest by speaking the truth at Christmas time is that you do it in sneaky ways, by saying it while pretending to wonder how on earth anyone could say it.

So far, you didn’t have to check your brains at the door today, and being honest was pretty painless. In truth, liberal religion has always been good at honoring your mind. Even in the first century, religious writers were saying that no literal reading of scriptures is ever religious, and no religious reading is ever literal. St. Paul said that the letter kills and the spirit gives life. Everyone who has ever read any religious writing symbolically and metaphorically knows it’s true.

A lot of times, though, honest religion is also sterile religion that may let you feel smug, but can’t nourish your spirit. So we can’t stop here or you wasted time by bringing your heart to church this morning.

If we did stop here, with these academic critiques of Jesus, Christianity, and Christmas, we would be stopping too soon. So far, we have treated it as though stories like this were meant to be no more than empirical science or dry history. And of course they are not. The hardest part of this is still remaining, for the Jesus story, like similar stories found in most of the mythologies of the world, are not primarily history-catchers or fact-catchers. Like all religious stories, they are primarily dream-catchers.

I think the native American dreamcatchers are doing what honest religion tries to do. The web is like the honest part, keeping bad stories out. And the little hole in the middle is like the religious part, letting the good stories through.

In that story of a baby both human and divine, a baby born to the poorest of parents, in whom the whole hope of the world resides – in that simple and timeless story, a lot of dreams have been caught. For if the birth of the sacred can come even to poor parents at a manger in a stable, surely it can find us too.

No, of course the story isn’t true. So what? The story doesn’t have to be true to be magical, any more than the story of Santa Claus has to be true to work its magic. We have to help. When we are children, our naivet” lets us into the stories. As adults, we have to work harder to regain our suspension of disbelief.

The native Americans who make dream-catchers know perfectly well how they work. They require faith. If we can believe that sticks and string can keep back our fears and bad dreams, then they may indeed keep back our fears and bad dreams. That is the miracle of both myths and dream-catchers.

You know the same is true in the story of Santa Claus. If we can enter into the really odd story of a fat man in white fur who slides down chimneys without getting smudged, then Santa Claus may also become a dream-catcher, and bring us a miracle or two.

Let me ask a question of both your mind and your heart: Does knowing that the story of baby Jesus born in a manger wasn’t true ruin it? Even during the Christmas season? It’s a trick question, be careful how you answer. For if it does, then all the scholars and preachers who ever lied or sugarcoated the truth were justified in their low opinion of the human spirit. Because if hope and confidence can not find a comfortable home within the world as it really is, then there is no hope at all for us. And then the best teachers and preachers would have no choice except the choice of misleading or lying to their people.

But no, there is far more to us than that. Let’s give ourselves some credit here. We are not that destitute of imagination, especially during the Christmas season. Good lord, this is the season of imagination! As incredible as it sounds, this is the season when millions of people – probably including some of you – line up and pay good money to see the story of a Nutcracker that comes to life! And large mice, that dance! Full-grown people have been known to cry during the Nutcracker. I’ve been one of them.

This is the season when we again watch the story of Scrooge visited by ghosts from Christmas past, present and future. It didn’t happen, you know, it’s just a story. They’re actors. But everyone who has ever been moved by that story knows there is a deep and important kind of truth to it. This is also the season when Jews light their Menorah to symbolize a light kept burning by faith through eight long dark nights, even though that never really happened either. And the Grinch: we don’t actually need to be told that the Grinch never really lived, do we?

A good myth is true, but it isn’t scientific. A good myth is something that never happened but always is. It’s that kind of true: way more true than mere facts.

Must a story be true to transport and transform the human spirit? If that were so, no one would ever buy a novel, watch a soap opera, cry at a movie, or cherish a song that brings back to life a memory and a hope so long gone you thought you”d never find them again. With good stories, whether they are true or not is the least important thing you can know about them. It is far more important to know whether, with our help, they can be transformative. Good dream-catchers are hardly ever made out of straightforward truth.

I wish for us this Christmas season the innocence and trust of our most childlike parts, so that we can enter once more into stories of unlikely veracity, because those stories offer us much more than mere facts. They offer us new life for old, joy in place of tiredness, a free ticket to some unearned merriment, and another visit to a place where all things are again possible, even if they seem as unlikely as a visit from the angels. And oh yes – there are indeed angels. They are messengers from the place where dreams live. And they always visit during this season to bring, to anyone who wants them, a few good dreams. All you need is something to catch them in.

Merry Christmas – and sweet dreams!

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Davidson Loehr

8 December 2002

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INVOCATION:

PRAYER:

SERMON: The Advent of…

What the heck is Advent? We have some sense of what Christmas is, and Hannukah, and the winter solstice. Whether we find any of those stories compelling or not, we have some idea what they’re about. Hannukah is past now, the other two aren’t here yet. But according to the calendar of Christian festivals, we’re now in Advent. So what the heck is Advent?

One answer is that Advent is the time of massive advertising hooey designed to make you feel guilty unless you buy at least $600 worth of Xmas presents in the next two weeks, and spend a total of over $1300 on holiday expenses. That’s about the American average, including about $300 spent online. It will take an average of six to eight months to pay off the credit card debts. Some people just pay off last year’s Christmas bills in time to begin shopping for the next one. Retailers in America make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So Advent also means we are paying the highest prices of the year for a lot of stuff we didn’t even know we needed a month ago.

If this doesn’t sound like a spiritual exercise, it’s because it isn’t. The idea of giving gifts for Christmas only began about a century ago. Before that, gifts were given on St. Nicholas Day, December 6th, until merchants decided the two days could be combined to mix the secular and religious holidays together into one big frenzied buying spree.

While we’re at it, December 25th doesn’t have any necessary connection with Christianity, either. As many of you know, it was the date of the winter solstice in the ancient calendar. Christianity adopted it as the symbolic date of Jesus’ birth in the year 336. Before that date nobody celebrated Jesus’ birthday because nobody knows when he was born. The winter solstice goes back to prehistoric times. So that too predates Christianity by thousands of years.

The real origin of these holidays is from deep within the human spirit. All our holidays grow out of, and are ways of expressing, our need to feel more convincing connections: to the earth, to our most cherished values, and to one another. We create our holidays like we create our gods, from our own longings for reconnection to sources of life and hope. We are like spiders, spinning our connections to the world from something inside ourselves seeking a place to stick to.

And whatever our religion is, whether it’s a brand name religion or a boutique faith, we know it’s always possible that new hope and renewed trust can be born to us. That’s easy to say, but the truth is that it’s hard to believe this sometimes. It’s hard for me, it’s probably hard for you too.

We also know it doesn’t always happen, and doesn’t necessarily happen. Life can go on being frustrating and hard. It’s happened before, hasn’t it? That’s what makes it so hard to keep hoping. Maybe we’re afraid we’ll just be fools. We hope, we yearn, but we don’t have a lot of faith that it’s likely.

There’s a colorful story about this that comes from W.C. Fields. Fields was a great comic actor of the 1930s and 40s, a curmudgeon who loved being an old grump. One of his most famous famous sayings, for example, was “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.” It’s no surprise that he hated Christmas, too.

One Christmas, a young reporter had heard that Fields hated Christmas, and asked him about it in an interview. The young man was kind of a gosh-and-golly fellow who just couldn’t grasp Fields’ style.

“Mr. Fields,” he began, “people have said that you hate Christmas, but…”

“That’s right,” Fields interrupted. “I hate it.”

“But gosh, Mr. Fields, that can’t be true. I mean, nobody can really hate Christmas. It’s just so wonderful with all the songs and angels and lights and everything. You don’t really hate it, do you?”

“No,” said Fields, “I understated it. Actually, I detest Christmas. I loathe it.”

“But how, how could you possibly hate Christmas, Mr. Fields? How?”

“Well, I’ll tell you how,” the old curmudgeon snarled at him. “You know all that rot they tell you about how this is supposed to be a season of love, how the world should be filled with generous spirits and all the compassion we never see the rest of the year? You know about all that hokum?”

“Gosh yes, Mr. Fields, but how could you hate Christmas for that?”

“Because,” growled Fields, “I believe it!”

That’s one of my favorite Christmas stories, maybe because it’s easy to identify with. Like W.C. Fields, I believe it, too. But every year I still have to struggle against the cynicism. If you only watch TV commercials or see chocolate angels and video games of war and violence being hawked for you to buy as part of the $30 billion each year spent by and for kids, it’s easy to feel that not much is going on here that’s sacred.

I don’t know whether W.C. Fields ever experienced a holiday season warmed by those poignant things he really believed in, or if his hopes just languished like a dream deferred, like a raisin in the sun, like a hope abandoned before it could blossom. But if he didn’t, it was probably because he missed the point. He didn’t understand holy days because he didn’t understand what the heck Advent was about.

Advent is the time we have to spend getting ready for holy days, so they have a chance really to be holy. We have to prepare for the advent of sacred times. We have to create a place where these warm and lovely possibilities can come into our hearts. We have to provide the manger in which sacred possibilities might be born.

W. C. Fields built a wall instead of a doorway, a gravestone rather than a manger. He had dreams, but didn’t know that he had to prepare a place for them to be born.

A manger is really built out of an attitude. An attitude of hope, faith, and trust that it really might happen, that this year we really might find ourselves opened like a present. Mangers are built from the expectation of miracles. Not David Copperfield kinds of miracles, simpler kinds. Like the miracle of loving and being loved, the miracle of watching young children light up in the certain knowledge that Santa will come, of remembering what it felt like when we knew Santa would come. A manger is a kind of mindset, not a box of wood and straw.

Without preparing ourselves, the holidays have no chance to become holy days. It’s hard to do. Especially now, you might say. For many, the times ahead look very dark and scary. We are watching our government become a right-wing command-and-control government. Individual rights are being restricted under the attitude of fear that both our leaders and our media are working so hard to maintain. Women’s rights to safe abortions will certainly be curtailed, as will civil rights and the right to dissent. A war of unprovoked aggression will almost certainly be waged against a country with no connection to the events of 9-11 at all, but with strong connections to 112 billion barrel oil reserves and a strategic position in the Persian Gulf for our economic and military ambitions.

What’s to hope for? Why be optimistic? All the elves in the world can’t change our political mess. The truth is, there is always enough misery and fear in the world to justify feeling hopeless.

We always have that choice of materials available to us. We can build our attitudes from cynicism, or from hope and faith. But if we build our mangers from cynicism, nothing life-giving can be born there.

Holidays are easy. But preparing for the possibility of a holy day is an achievement. It takes some work, and a lot of faith. The attitude that can make advent happen and build a manger in which something lovely might be born is like the image of a little green shoot growing up through a hard crusted path. New life is only possible if that unlikely little green shoot can appear, even in our lives.

We can still go into an eight-month debt buying glitzy presents without doing any of this work to prepare. But if that’s all there is, the glitz and the presents are really a kind of seduction, as though what we really need in our lives is more toys, and higher credit card bills. That may be a merchant’s dream, but there’s nothing religious about it, even if the department store has a cr”che in front and sells Santa candy and Jesus-shaped candles. Giving presents is the showy part. The gifts stand in as symbols, or substitutes, for the quieter kind of gifts we’re really hoping for. We make the manger, and determine in advance what’s likely to be born there, whether video games or the gift of a holy spirit.

And what if we do pull it off? What if we do manage to get ourselves into the attitude of Advent? What if we can again find the faith that life might become more? What if we do manage to enter into Advent with the ability to trust and hope that this year some miracles might happen? What will come of it?

Like W.C. Fields, we know all the things this season is supposed to bring, and like him we’re usually at least a little afraid because we really want to believe it, but we often really don’t believe it. We fake it.

It’s always easier to disbelieve, it says that nobody’s going to fool us, we’re too smart to be fooled again. But like Fields, we really do believe, no matter how unlikely it is. At least we want to believe.

I don’t mean we believe the old Christmas myths of a baby born under a special star with all the supernatural hokum attending it. The world isn’t built that way, and it wasn’t 2000 years ago.

I mean that somewhere inside, we really believe that life, love and hope can be reborn even within us. We know we can’t earn it, can’t command it, but we really hope it might happen, even if we won’t admit it.

That manger: if we build it, will miracles come? Will those hopes and dreams really be fulfilled, or will we just be fools again, like Charlie Brown falling on his fanny when Lucy pulls the football away again? I don’t know. I only know that if we don’t build it, the miracles probably won’t come. And really, which is the greater gift anyway: the presents, or the ability to believe that miracles could still happen?

I don’t like talking about miracles for too long. It can get seductive and misleading. We do need some realism when we start talking about wishing for miracles. There are lots of things we would be foolish to wish for. There is a difference, after all, between miracles and delusions.

I was reminded of this just awhile back. Since I’ve been in Austin, I’ve used the same hairdresser. Over the two and a half years, we’ve developed a nice familiarity. A few months ago when I sat down in her chair, she said “Well Davidson, how do you want it?”

“I want it to make me look like Brad Pitt,” I said.

She poked me and said “Hey, I’m a hairdresser, not a magician!”

There is a difference between a miracle and a delusion. If we think we’ll find prince or princess charming, win the lottery or undergo a complete personality change for Christmas so all our problems will disappear, we’re not being serious. Those aren’t miracles, they’re delusions.

So hey, you’re probably not going to look like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Heather Locklear or J-Lo. But you might come more alive this season. You might open to the possibility of seeing and experiencing all the wonder that’s always around us. You might express some warmth or love you’ve felt for a long time but have never said out loud. You might strengthen or reestablish a relationship with someone you’ve gotten in the habit of just passing time and doing chores with. Those are miracles too, and they might really come to pass, if we can prepare for them.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, my favorite philosopher, once said something cryptic and almost magical. “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.” (p. 73, Culture and Value) Another poet named Piet Hein said the same sort of thing in a poem, and even drew a picture of it, which I’ve put on the cover of your order of service so you can have a mental image of this.

Advent is like this. It takes walking on a thin tightrope of faith as though it might hold us up. The support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. You know?

The holidays are coming. Perhaps, if we really want them, some holy days will come, too. In the meantime, we need to build some mangers.

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Davidson Loehr

17 November 2002

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

CENTERING:

(Selections from the beatitudes in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, read interspersed with the lyrics to Bette Midler’s recording of “Hello in There.” written by John Prine)

SERMON: Homeless in Austin

You probably recognized the words I read in counterpoint with the song “Hello in There” as the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.” You may not know that there are two versions of those beatitudes in the New Testament, and that they are quite different. They were edited by two very different kinds of early Christian communities.

The version most of us know comes from the gospel of Matthew.” It’s the spiritual version:

Most biblical scholars are clear that this is much more like the other messages of Jesus: very down-to-earth and concrete.”

Even though I’m not a Christian, I have always liked Jesus’ sayings, because they make people so uncomfortable.”

Churches are polite, well-dressed, refined places compared to the streets.” The sermons are always rated “G”; even last week’s war stories wouldn’t be rated worse than “PG.”” We gather here with our kind of people, you know.” They look like us, think like us, are probably educated or over-educated like us.” They’re clean; they dress well.” They don’t embarrass us by coming up to us during coffee hour to beg for spare change, and they don’t smell.” Sure, they may be spiritually hungry or homeless, but they all eat regularly and have a warm place to live.

Things aren’t so neat with people who are really poor, hungry and homeless.” They aren’t always fed.” They can’t always find a warm or safe place to lay their weary heads.” Their clothes are usually dirty, and they often smell.” They’re not our kind of people.” Not much like the people who gather at any church.”

And when we think of giving some spare change to them, we usually do it kind of furtively, seldom meeting their eyes.” We do it because they made us feel guilty, or because it makes us feel better for a bit.” But it’s almost never anything you would call a spiritual experience.”

Jesus sided with them, but then he was homeless himself.” He had no home, no job.” He begged for his food.” So of course he felt at home with the street people: he was one of them.

Christianity has always had this double message, about both the spiritually hungry and homeless, and the really, physically, hungry and homeless.” So have most other religions:

In some of our worst inner cities, the Black Muslims have become well known for their work on the streets, among the poor, hungry and homeless.

Hinduism probably has the most spiritual and least literal of all god-images.” They have four arms, or the head of an elephant, so that nobody could ever take them literally.” They’re all spiritual symbols.” And yet right here in Austin we have the largest Hindu temple in North America.” It’s the Barsana Dahm temple south of the city, where many of us will be next Sunday afternoon, as they’re hosting the 19th annual AAIM Thanksgiving service.” And as anyone who’s been there knows, one of the most dramatic and impressive things in the whole compound are their two huge commercial kitchens, with cooking pots over three feet in diameter that can cook more than fifty gallons of food at a time.” They routinely feed two to three thousand people there: real, down-to-earth delicious vegetarian food.”

And some Buddhists take this physical care for other life more seriously than any of us would want to take it. Since they believe that all life is linked, that all living creatures were once humans in a former life, some Buddhist monks are carried through the streets, lying in beds filled with bedbugs. They collect money for food, but the food is the monk, whose sacred duty is to feed the bedbugs.

OK, that’s going way too far for me.” I couldn’t be a good Buddhist in that order of monks.” Still, all religions teach about caring for both the spirit and the body.””

But so far, these are all kind of superficial teachings, about duties we owe to those less fortunate.” Frankly, while I agree with them, the argument has never moved me very much.” I think they’re true, but not very compelling.” Nor are they particularly religious.”

When I’m being brutally honest, I have to admit that I don’t feel any particular kinship to beggars.” I’ve worked hard, I have a job, and I don’t always understand why they can’t.”

On any given day, about 300,000 of those homeless people are Vietnam vets.” I have some feeling for their pain, because it’s a pain I have felt myself.” But it’s been thirty years!” Something in me cares for them; something else in me wants them to get on with it.

I’m speaking only for myself here, not for you.” But if you look at our actions, I’m betting they show that we look at helping the homeless as a charitable act we would do, in which they really couldn’t offer anything in return.” A condescending kind of charity, where we do all the giving, they do all the receiving, and we get to feel virtuous.

As long as we see it just as a matter of economics or exchange, it might be ethical, but not very spiritual.”

But there’s another dimension to this idea of interactions between fortunate and unfortunate people that opens this out in directions that are profoundly spiritual.”

Whenever we deal with stories about spiritual transformation, we’ll almost always find they’re written in supernatural, fantastic language, with magic, gods, miraculous transformations and so on.” This seems to be because this kind of magic goes beyond the reach of our ordinary language.”

Here’s one of the stories, for example.” It’s about a poor man who was told a great treasure would await him if he could find gods and cover their heads.” He was given five brand new beautiful hats, and he started home.” He was looking for gods, though he didn’t know exactly what gods looked like, so it wasn’t easy.” On the way, he was very tempted to exchange one of these beautiful hats for his own hat, which was old and dirty.” But he didn’t.”

He walked home slowly, looking everywhere for gods but not finding any.” He was almost home, when he saw six filthy beggars sitting right in front of his house.” One was blind, two were crippled, and all looked thin and smelled bad.” They had clothes, but the winter wind was blowing bitterly, and their heads were exposed.” He stopped to think about it, then said to them “Well, my friends, I am home and I couldn’t find any gods, so I give these hats to you.” It is said that if you can place them on the heads of gods you will find a great treasure.” I hope you have better luck than I did.”” He placed the five hats on the first five beggars, then stopped.” The sixth beggar looked into his eyes, and he couldn’t bear to refuse him, so he took of his own tattered hat and put it on this last beggar.” Wishing them well, he walked into his house, but he could hardly recognize it.” It had been transformed into a mansion of marble and gold, with sacks of gold coins everywhere.” He looked outside just in time to see the six beggars begin to glow with a bright golden light, then ascend back up into their home in heaven. They only looked like beggars; but their essence was sacred.

Here’s another story.” A certain Jewish synagogue had fallen on hard times.” It was now very small, no new members ever stayed, and all the old members picked and griped at one another, each blaming the others for their sad state of affairs.” They knew this was punishment for some undiscovered sin.” Finally, when they heard that a famous rabbi was coming through their town, they sent one of their members to ask him what was wrong, and who was at fault.”

He explained the whole story to the visiting rabbi, who began nodding knowingly before he even got to the end.”

“Yes,” the rabbi said, “you are being punished for a sin.” Your sin is the sin of ignorance.” You see, one of you is the Messiah, and you act like you do not know it.”

The old Jew walked back to his community completely puzzled.” And when he told them what the rabbi had said, they were all puzzled.” The Messiah, among us?” How could this be?” Who could it be, they all wondered silently?” Surely it couldn’t be this one; he was nasty.” And that one was too rude, and the other too selfish, and all the others are so very ordinary.” Still, the rabbi said it was one of them, and they obviously couldn’t tell by looking which one it was.

Gradually, they began treating each other kindly, just in case.” Rather than blaming, they began offering to help.” Before long, the word got out in the larger community that there was a synagogue in town where everyone who came was treated like he might be the Messiah.” Soon, they had more members than they could hold, the place was bursting at the seams, and they built a new synagogue, dedicated to the belief that the Messiah was always among them, so they should treat everyone as if it might be them.”

When you look at people and see the holy in them rather than just their failings, it can transform both of you.

How many fairy tales are there with a similar plot?” The princess kisses a frog, and he turns into the prince of her dreams.” Or was she just able to see that he was already a prince, needing a tender kiss to awaken his sleeping soul?

Beauty performs the same miracle with the beast, and probably in the same way.” He was never really a beast; people just couldn’t look at him through the eyes of love.”

The ugliest duckling becomes the swan, Cinderella becomes the princess, and beggars turn out to be incarnations of God.”

The miracle happens, I’m convinced, when we can look into another’s eyes, see their spirit, and say “Hello in there.””

Jesus once said “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.”” It’s that same story.” Treat them like dirt, and we betray the fact that our religious vision can’t see beyond our own kind of people.” Treat them like children of God, they feel more like our own brothers and sisters, and we realize that, my God, we are all in the same family, we’re all in this together.

It’s the season when we will start providing dinner, a warm place to sleep and breakfast for about fifty adult homeless people here on nights when the temperature is close to freezing. The woman who works at the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless which coordinates freeze nights told me her people really like coming to churches.” “Why?” I asked.” “Our floors are hard, we don’t have cots.” “No,” they said, “but in the churches, people talk to them.” They are so hungry to be spoken to, to be treated like people.””

What she’s saying is that more than almost anything, almost more than food, they wish someone would meet their eyes and say “Hello in there.” When that can happen, at a very human level they suddenly become our kind of people.”

We’re hosting a panel here tomorrow night called “Faces of Homelessness,” with the panel made up of present or former homeless people.” Come hear them, see if you don’t feel these people are much more like us then not.” They bleed when they’re cut, shiver when they’re cold, cry when they hurt, and hurt when they’re sloughed off as though they weren’t people at all but only dirty things that clutter up our streets.

One trap for liberals in preaching on subjects like this is that it sounds like Democrats or Green Party people wrote all of our examples.” So I was delighted this week to find a “Republican” reading.” It comes from the great Hindu writer Rabindranath Tagore’s book Gitanjali:

“I had gone begging from door to door in the village path, when your golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings!” My hopes rose high and I thought my bad days were at an end, and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.” The chariot stopped where I stood.” Your glance fell on me and you came down with a smile.” I felt that the luck of my life had come at last.” Then you held out your right hand and said, “What do you have to give me?”” Ah, what a joke it was to open your palm to a beggar to beg!” I was confused and stood undecided, and then from my wallet I slowly took out the least little grain of corn and gave it to you.” But how surprised I was when at the day’s end I emptied my bag on the floor to find a least little grain of gold among the corn.” I bitterly wept and wished that I had had the heart to give you my all.” (Tagore, Gitanjali, #50)

What would happen to us, what would happen to our society, if we began to believe these people homeless in Austin really were our brothers and sisters?” What kinds of laws would we then fight to change?” What kind of safety nets would we then work to create?” Even the most fortunate of us is little more than one serious brain injury or a few financial disasters away from the streets.” We don’t think it could happen to us.” But once, they didn’t think it could happen to them.

What happens to us when we stop seeing these poor, hungry and homeless people as things, and see them as our brothers and sisters?” What is the treasure that both religious myths and children’s fairy tales say can come to us when we treat them as though they might be incarnations of beauty, of ultimate worth, of God?”

Something in us looks into them; something in them looks into us and we say “Hello in there.” Hello.” I recognize you.” You’re like me.” I know your hopes and dreams and fears because I have them too.” Hello in there, my brother, my sister, hello.””

One thing I’m sure of is that once we see how much alike we are, how much we really are all sisters and brothers, that it can change our world.” We can easily let subhuman strangers live lives of dangerous desperation, but we can’t as easily let it happen to those to whom we have said “Hello in there.””

Because when that happens, we feel that we didn’t encounter a beggar after all.” We encountered something holy; we encountered God.” Then the homeless people are no longer the dregs of life; they’re the essence of life.” We know, then, that our souls came from the same stuff, are woven of the same fabric of hopes, yearnings and fears, that we are all trying to find ourselves a home in this world.” In a spiritual sense, we become homeless together, as children alone in the world with only ourselves and each other to count on.

You may wonder how that could really change the world.” The truth is that it’s about the only thing that can.

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Davidson Loehr

10 November 2002

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Though I’ve had an article of my experiences in Vietnam published, I’m very uncomfortable talking about it for a reason that may seem perverse: they were sacred experiences. But if we’re going to war, let’s not pretend it’s a video game in which people you love won’t be killed, wounded or broken. I’m one of many, many thousands of Americans who had the experience. Perhaps I have a duty to share some of the stories, to talk about real wars.

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Davidson Loehr

27 October 2002

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INVOCATION:

PRAYER:

In everything we do or fail to do, we’re making memories, writing the story of our lives.

Too often, the fantasy and the reality of our lives are a world apart.

Sometimes we can’t find our way, or can’t recognize the way when we have found it.

Sometimes we are confused and our vision is clouded.

Sometimes it seems the cost is just too high to take the high road, so we settle for a lower road because we believe it is all we can really afford.

Let us take this time, this place, these moments, to remind ourselves of our higher calling. Let us be open to hearing the voices of gods rather than idols, entertaining those angels of our better nature rather than the little demons and goblins of our lesser selves.

Let us think and act in ways that can do honor to us and to those who love us.

For we are the gatekeepers of our better tomorrows.

We are, all of us, brothers and sisters, children of God, and the best hope of a more compassionate world.

Let us act as though God were watching, as though those whom we love were watching, as though all the great and noble souls of history were watching.

Let us live in such a way that when we are finished, we can say, “In my time here, I was as compassionate, as courageous as I knew how to be. In my time I was, if even only in my small way, a blessing to those whose lives I touched.

“I came, I cared, and in the most important matters I tried to be authentic. I wasn’t perfect; but I was the best person that I knew how to be. And that is enough, it is enough.”

Amen.

SERMON: “Making Memories”

This sermon theme came to me from two very different stories.

The first happened a dozen years ago in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I was visiting friends. They wanted to take us out to dinner at a memorable restaurant, so we all got in their van. Don was driving, and after about fifteen minutes it was clear that he had no idea where the restaurant was, and not much of an idea where we were.

“You’re lost!” his wife started teasing him. “Good lord, we invite our company out to dinner, try to be good hosts, and all we can do is get ourselves hopelessly lost in the back streets of Milwaukee!”

Don wasn’t phased. “Naw,” he said cooly, as he turned onto another dark empty street, “we’re not getting lost. We’re making memories.”

He was right. I don’t remember the dinner that night at all, but I’ll never forget the memories we made driving aimlessly around Milwaukee. I’ve always believed that if we could reframe all of our mistakes as times we were just making memories, we’d all be under a lot less stress. It would help even more if we could all convince our bosses of this.

The second story about making memories is a different kind of story, and an ancient one.

It comes from the Book of Joshua in the Bible, and is the story of the twelve tribes finally crossing over the Jordan River into the Promised Land. This was the land of milk and honey, the heaven on earth, that they had been wandering around the desert for forty years looking for. I’m sure that both I and my friend Don are descendants of one of these tribes.

The story of crossing over the Jordan River into the Promised Land was written over 2500 years ago, while the ancient Hebrews were captives in Babylonian. And it was written about events that happened – if they happened at all – six or eight hundred years earlier. It is a retelling of the story of crossing through the Red Sea to escape from Egypt.

Here is a story about leaving a familiar slavery for an unfamiliar wilderness, or leaving a now-familiar wilderness for a Promised Land that may last only until the next Babylonian captivity. Both times, the people didn’t want to go. After Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, they spent the next few years whining at him, wishing they were slaves in Egypt rather than wandering around the desert. They were used to the slavery; this was unfamiliar, even if it was “freedom.”

As Shakespeare said, we would rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. We may be in a rut, but it’s our rut.

You don’t have to be an ancient Jew to feel this. It’s almost disheartening, how often we will refuse to change our situation or our strategy, even when it is painfully obvious it isn’t working.

Many of you know of the battle of Galipoli in the First World War, or have seen the Australian movie. Thousands upon thousands of men climbing out of their foxholes, obeying orders to march into machine gun fire and dying in huge heaps. Tens of thousands killed on one day. One of the stupidest single days in the history of warfare.

You can see it a lot closer to home too, as people who work with battered women can tell you. To the frustration of everyone else, women who are battered usually return to the home where they will be beaten again because they prefer the suffering they know to the fear of what might happen if they leave.

It’s also what makes it hard for so many people to leave an old religion that seems to own their soul even though it does not nourish them. We are an easy species to manipulate; we’re slow to leave old habits and ruts.

But back to the story of the people crossing the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. When they finally reach the Jordan River, they have to cross it, and it’s dangerous to cross it. The priests of the twelve tribes go first. They’ve been told that if they have the courage to walk into the river, the waters will stop. So the priests walk into the rushing waters of the Jordan, sustained by their faith. Sure enough, the waters stop, the priests cross, and the people – who are a thousand yards behind watching – see that it’s safe and cross over.

Then comes the really magical moment in the story. As they cross over, they pick up big rocks from the bottom of the river. They carry the rocks across, and pile them up to make a marker. They stopped to make a memory: because a miracle happened here, and when miracles happen, we simply must stop to make a memory, because it would be terrible to forget that they can really happen to us, these miracles. So they make a memory, from the rocks that marked the place where they showed the faith and courage to cross over a significant boundary.

In real life, it is hardly ever the priests who lead us. I’ve gone to one of those locked shelters for battered women, and asked the women what advice they got from their pastors when they go to them for help. Many said their ministers told them God wanted them at home, as their husband’s helpmate. I have spoken with some of the women who worked on the locked floors of a YWCA where battered women could seek refuge, and they have told me that the most astonishing calls they get are from the pastors of the battering husbands – ministers who tell them that they are to release these women so their husbands can take them back home.

Far too often, priests don’t help people choose life. Far too often, political leaders don’t lead, either. Far too often the print, radio and television media don’t have the courage or the freedom to run the most important and revealing stories, so they offer programs of sensationalist distraction instead – a kidnapping, sniper shooting, plane crash, stories that draw crowds but don’t educate or enlighten them. Those who should lead, too often mislead.

Most of the time those who are first willing to cross over dangerous boundaries are ordinary people, like the police and firefighters on 9-11. Most often, those who lead the way are regular people who found the courage of their convictions and stood firm as a symbol for others, as a memory of the uncommon courage of common people, and the real hope of the world.

What does this mean in your everyday life? It can mean a lot of things.

You have a friend who is involved in a relationship where they are being abused: psychologically, physically or both. What do you do? If you care about them, you do what you can to help them see where they are and how to get out of it.

You tell them there is another way to live, that they need not stay in a relationship that insults them, that they can escape from their slavery, and that it is worth escaping from their slavery, even though it has become familiar to them.

You have a friend who is enslaved by an unhealthy religion. They wish they could leave it, but they are scared to go because that religion has got a hold of their soul even though it doesn’t nourish them. Or you know someone with no religion, and an emptiness in them that needs an honest style of religion for both their head and their heart. You can say “I know a church you might like, where you can be uplifted rather than put down, and where you can find inspiration without intimidation. Why don’t you come to church with me this Sunday?”

But there is another level of this old Bible story that hadn’t occurred to me until this week. One of the marvelous things about great stories is that the more time you spend in them, the more windows and doors they can open for you.

It’s the difference between leading and just posturing. The priests in this story were actually leaders. When they crossed the river, the people followed. But as any of us who have been involved in many political rallies know, especially now over this war, a lot of the time the positions are stated with such self-righteousness it seems the people are just posturing, just wanting others to see them and think of them as virtuous. The speeches are designed to rouse an audience to applause rather than make them think. They aren’t meant to persuade those who believe differently. That’s not leadership.

A colleague in Michigan wrote me about a march against the war a couple weeks ago. The sign that stopped him cold was the one carried by members of a local Unitarian church. It said “UUs for Social Interaction.” What on earth is that about? Social interaction? Is the idea that if we’d all play together everything would be just swell? Who is that supposed to persuade, and what could it possibly lead them to do? That’s posturing, not leading.

Another story comes from San Francisco, where a huge herd of four hundred costumed clergy gathered on the Golden Gate Bridge a couple weeks ago. They wanted to protest the war, so what they did was stand on the bridge in their robes, holding hands. They wondered why, even though the media were there, they didn’t ever air this. What would they air? What would the story be? “Four hundred local clergy gathered to be seen in public holding hands?” Here’s a looming war with a lot of complex and interrelated issues and arguments that must be researched, understood, and addressed. If all the ministers can do is dress up and hold hands, I think that’s posturing, not leading.

I’m not saying leading is easy. I struggle with it all the time. I spent most of yesterday at a six-hour program of speeches and panel discussions on the prospect of war in Iraq.

The high points of the day came early. Our Congressman Lloyd Doggett and a community activist named Bert Sachs from Seattle each said that it is a waste of time and energy to preach to the converted, that we must try to communicate with people who see these issues differently than we do. One of them said those who want to prevent or stop this war must not demonize anyone. I know they’re right, but it’s hard to remember it.

After that high point, I participated in one panel discussion and listened to another. It seemed to me that most speakers were posing rather than leading. It seemed to me that they felt morally superior to those who want war, and had no strong interest in communicating with them. That’s not leading, that’s posturing. It’s a waste of spirit. We can’t afford it.

And there’s still another message hidden behind this story. It’s never stressed, but always had to be there. Behind the scenes, during all that wandering and dramatic crossing over, life went on. And that’s important to remember now.

When war is in the air, the job of ministers is more complex. I must remember that war can’t be allowed to numb us to the fact that life still goes on. There are still joy, laughter, tender moments with friends. People still fall in love and get married, babies are still born, and there are memories to be made with children and loved ones. There are still important jobs to do as mothers, fathers, people of faith and citizens.

Personally, I must try to speak out in Austin against what I believe is the foolishness and the deception of our proposed war. I will struggle to learn how to lead rather than just posturing, and I think that’s hard to do.

But the war will not be our primary focus here, even though the experience of war will be the focus of the Veterans’ Day service in two weeks. My primary focus and our ministerial intern Cathy’s primary focus will remain on you, your lives, and the life of our church.

This morning, I needed to remind myself that in everything we do or fail to do, we’re making memories and writing the story of our lives. Maybe you needed reminding too. So the prayer I offer is for myself, for you, for our political and religious leaders, for all of us:

Let us remind ourselves of our higher calling. Let us be open to hearing the voices of gods rather than idols, entertaining those angels of our better nature rather than the little demons and goblins of our lesser selves.

Let us think and act in ways that can do honor to us and to those who love us.

For we are the gatekeepers of our better tomorrows.

We are, all of us, brothers and sisters, children of God, and the best hope of a more compassionate world.

Let us act as though God were watching, as though those whom we love were watching.

Let us live in such a way that when we are finished, we can say, “In my time here, I was as compassionate, as courageous as I knew how to be. In my time I was, if even only in my small way, a blessing to those whose lives I touched.

“I came, I cared, and in the most important matters I tried to be authentic. I wasn’t perfect; but I was the best person I knew how to be. And that is enough, it is enough.”

Amen.

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Davidson Loehr

20 October 2002

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Storytime – “The Great Stone Face”

Once there were people who lived in a valley at the foot of a large mountain. High at the top of the mountain there was a face, a great face carved in the stone. The people said it was the face of a god. And if you could see that face clearly, they said, it would show you who you were, and how you were meant to live your life.

That sounded easy enough, but it was not. For the face was in a part of the mountain impossible to climb, and so high up clouds or fog almost always obscured it. Furthermore, the face seemed to look differently in different light, and no two people ever saw it exactly the same.

But it was important, this face, because if only it could be seen clearly-well, then you would know who you really were, and who you were meant to be. And so the people studied what they could see of the face, as best they could, and they told others what they thought they saw.

Stories even arose, stories about times that the great face had actually spoken to someone, and what the great face had said. People wrote these things down, and tried to make a list of do’s and don’t for living, but no two lists ever completely agreed. Still the people told their stories, and listened to the stories of others, because after all there was so much at stake, if only they could get it right.

And as they believed they understood the message of the great face in the stone, they tried to live in the ways they felt they were meant to live. Usually, this meant they tried to be kind to one another, to be good neighbors, to work hard, to make their little valley a better place for their having been there, and so on, as you would expect. There were always a few, of course, who did not care much about making the valley a better place. They lived to chase after power or wealth or other things like that, and they too, if pressed on it, would argue that this was the way the great face of stone had intended things to be.

From time to time, as you would also expect, there were people who said that all of this was just nonsense, that there was no face at all in the stones above, that these were just these silly myths. And it was certainly true that if there was a face up there in the rocks, it was very faint, so faint that you couldn’t even be sure you were seeing anything at all.

Yet others would then say that without the face, and the stories about the face, the people in the valley might not have been so eager to be decent to one another, and then what kind of world would they have? After all, you needed something to live for, and some kind of rules to live by.

But as any visitor or other objective person could see, if there was any face at all up there, it was too vague to be clear about, even on a sunny day. All you could be sure of was that the people had these stories, and they lived by them. Should there be an expedition to the top of the mountain to try and see once and for all what the great face of stone was trying to say? Or should they instead be paying more attention to their stories, and their lives? If they could never see the great face clearly, then all they had were their stories, and their efforts to live well together. And if someone swore that the great face had indeed spoken clearly but the way it wanted them to live made no sense, either to individuals or to the community, then who would have cared what the great stone face said, anyway?

Well, as you can tell, this is not settled, neither within that valley nor elsewhere. And yet there is something here of importance, and we cannot seem to stop thinking and talking about it.

Prayer:

We use words to move us toward an awareness beyond the reach of words. We offer prayers not to appease a powerful creature, but to awaken ourselves, to take ourselves and our lives more seriously, to remind us of our higher possibilities and nobler callings.

We pray we can feel safe enough to remove our masks, and the hard crust created by our fears.

Let us get in touch again with our soft center, that place of hope, doubt, vulnerability and possibility.

Let us be open to those softer voices within us: the pleadings of our most tender mercies, the inspiration of the angels of our better nature.

Words fail us in prayer: these things don’t have clear names, though they come from real yearnings.

But we don’t have to know what to call them, so long as we can call them forth.

Let us call forth those gentle hopes and tender mercies, and say “Be with us here, be with us now, be with us always, and let us live in ways that are worthy of you.”

Amen.

SERMON – What If There Isn’t a God?

This is one of those sermon titles so ambitious you wonder if it could possibly be serious. Yet it’s dealing with a confusing word.

You have probably been asked at one time or other whether you “believe in God.” Pollsters love it; everybody writing about religion seems to think it is the most important question to ask.

But the question is incoherent, as are answers to it. It is the oddest thing: we think this “God” business is so important, yet nobody ever wants to say just what they mean by the word. That’s the elephant in the room of religious discussion, and has been for a few centuries: what exactly do you mean by the word “God”? Once that’s clear, it will be pretty clear whether many people would “believe in” that sort of a god. Let’s just take three definitions for the word “God,” you’ll see the question of “belief in God” dissolves once you’ve settled the definition:

God is a physical being with kneecaps, toes and ear lobes. He occupies space and has weight; a video camera could record him. He lives somewhere where we can’t see him, probably “up above the sky.” I don’t think I know anyone who believes in this God. The better theologians have always considered this kind of literalism to be vulgar.

God isn’t a being, isn’t physical, you can’t see him/it, but is still objectively present as very real energy – and not just psychic energy. If we could get the right scientific instrument, this God-energy could make the needle jump. Once this is spelled out, I’m not sure many would want to defend this one either. It would certainly not be the “God” discussed in the bible. And it would be hard to imagine projecting anthropomorphic attributes to such a pure-energy-God. And then, why would this sort of God care about us? It might have an attraction for electromagnetism or gravity, but why (and how) would it care about a carbon-based life form on an obscure planet?

“God” is a symbol, a metaphor, an idea, a concept. It takes no more space than truth, beauty, justice, love or “America” do. Yet it is profoundly important, in spite of the fact that it is just a concept. Most of our most powerful words are just concepts: love, truth, justice, America. God-language isn’t about a heavenly Critter. It’s an idiom of expression, one way of talking about the enduring human concerns.

By the time you get to the third definition, almost everyone I know would subscribe. But now the question “Do you believe in God?” has no meaning. It isn’t about believing in some “thing”; it’s about recognizing that idiom of expression as a significant one.

So learning about God isn’t like exploring outer space in search of a great cosmic being with whom we might sit down and talk about the meaning of life. It is more about exploring inner space.

Religious stories tell of hundreds of different gods. But we don’t live in a world where hundreds of gods walk by us on the street. We live, instead, in a world of stories people have made up about the gods. Many of them are great stories: stories about gods who created the world, created us, who interact with us in various ways — not the physical way we interact with each other during coffee hour, but the way our conscience or our love for someone interacts with us and affects our lives.

But if there isn’t a God in the sense of a Guy in the Sky – and I don’t know anyone of any religion who really wants to argue that there is a guy in the sky – then all we have are our stories, which become terribly important.

It’s like the story of the Great Stone Face. People may quibble about whether it’s literally there, but nobody quibbles about the fact that what is most important is learning how to live more fully and responsibly. I want to weave together some ideas from wildly different places to help sketch the picture I’m trying to make for you.

The first comes from the writer Jorges Borges. He wrote something I use at most memorial services. He says we die twice. The first time is when our body dies and is no longer present. But the second and final death comes, he says, only when there is no one left to tell our story.

The same is true of Gods. Gods also have two deaths. The first death comes when our understanding of the world no longer makes a place for the gods to exist except as ideas and concepts. So the deities of ancient Greece have died their first death, but not their second death. 2400 years or so after people stopped taking those gods literally, we still tell their stories, and the names of their gods and mythic figures still provide us with the names for our space programs (Apollo) and millions of Americans who would never think of “believing in” the old Greek gods know and love their stories, and use them to help make a better kind of sense out of our lives.

The second death comes when even the ideas and concepts are no longer compelling.

In Western religion, we have been between the first and second death of God for a couple centuries. As a being, a critter, God has nowhere to live now. Yet the stories, poems, music, prayers devoted to the idea of God are still with us, and for many of us still quite powerful and precious. And so it feels important to us to tell these stories.

In the Hindu tradition, one of the two central stories is called the Ramayana. I’m reading it now and already, there has been a scene where Rama entrusts his story to a character called Hanuman. He grants Hanuman conditional immortality, meaning that Hanuman will live as long as he keeps Rama’s story alive. When he stops telling the stories, he no longer lives.

You have heard of Sheherezade, and her 1001 Arabian nights of telling stories. She told stories to a deranged king who would have killed her in the morning except that he wanted to hear the next installment. She was no dope, and continued the installments for 1001 nights until she had finally softened his heart and converted his soul. Sheherezade told her stories in order to live. But we are all under the spell of Sheherezade; we all tell our stories in order to live, and in order to keep our gods and high ideals alive.

The concept of God found in the Old Testament has a kind of life cycle. It began, as biblical scholars have long noted, as a projection of a tribal chief, the man who makes the rules, sets the boundaries, and offers protection to the obedient and punishment to the errant. The covenant between God and the Hebrew people was modeled on ancient Hittite treaties between minor rulers and their people, in which the rulers promised protection to their people as long as the people didn’t follow after other competing rulers.

By the time of Christianity, people spoke as though this God existed up above the sky, in heaven, which was a place Jesus could go “up” to and where we might all somehow “go” after we died. In the first century, most believed the universe was a small affair, and heaven wasn’t all that far away: that anthropomorphic kind of God had a place to live in their worldview.

But for centuries now, we have known there is nothing above the sky except infinite space at temperatures near absolute zero. Western theologians have been saying for centuries that the word “God” doesn’t exist in that way.

In other words, that God has already died his first death, he can no longer exist as a being in the world as we know it to be made. That leaves the stories.

The stories are entrusted to the religions, or at least claimed by them. Most religions teach the stories of their God as though they were true, as many of you know. It’s as though God made these pronouncements long ago before human history, and they were faithfully recorded, we preachers now tell you what God said and wants, and you obey – and pay us for it.

In part one of this two-part series, I joked about the better divinity schools having some hidden and secret courses that we take that tell us the answers that you don’t know, so we can sit here and tell you the secrets on Sunday. There is something to this. There are things you learn in any good and extended study of religion that fundamentally change what you once thought religion was about. There are lots of “Aha!” kinds of experiences that seem to reveal some of the best-guarded secrets of religion.

I hate to risk punishment from the union of those who protect religious secrets from the people in the pews, but I’ll tell you one of those stories that I learned, that helped me understand how religion, belief, and gods work.

It’s the story of an Australian tribe that Joseph Campbell reported on, a tribe where the “bull-roarer” plays a major role. The bull-roarer, if you’ve never seen or heard one, is a long flat slotted board tied to a rope. When you swing it in a big circle above your head, it makes an absolutely eerie kind of sound, a kind of ominous moaning.

The bull-roarers were sacred and secret objects. Only the male elders of the tribe were allowed to have them, and everyone was constrained to keep their existence a secret, under the penalty of death. In one case, a chief’s young daughter found the bull-roarer hidden under his sleeping roll, brought it out and asked what it was: the chief killed her. So this was a terribly powerful, sacred and secret object. It played a central role in holding the whole world together for the tribe.

When the male elders decided that their people were straying from the behavioral rules they thought were right, they would sneak out into the woods at night with their bull-roarers. Then, in the middle of the night, they would swing them and the night sky would be filled with that low and awful rumbling and moaning. It would terrify the children, and the women would pretend to be scared (though, really, they knew the story).

The next day, the elders would call the village together and explain to them why the gods were mad and what they wanted the people to do. The bull-roarer was the symbol and instrument of absolute authority in that tribe.

The magical, amazing moment came during the secret initiation rites during which boys became men. When a boy reached the right age – about 13 to 15 – some of the elders, dressed in scary masks, would come into the village from the woods and kidnap the boy. His mother would pretend to protect him, but in the end the men always carried the boy off.

They took the boy deep into the woods and tied him to a table. Then the masked men performed bloody initiation rituals of circumcision and subincision on the frightened boys.

Finally came The Moment. An elder dipped the end of the bull-roarer in the boy’s blood, and brought up very close to his face so he could see it. Then the man removed his mask, revealing a face the boy recognized. And he whispered into the boy’s ear the magical secret: “We make the noises!”

Without knowing that secret, the boy could never become a man. And the same is true in the study of religion.

Learning about religion is a lot like this – though it’s usually far less bloody. As you read theologians and philosophers and preachers, you begin to realize that the words you’re reading are not the words of gods, but the words of men, of theologians with their own agendas, their own limitations. That’s why you have to read so much: most people only get a little bit of it right, and you have to piece together for yourself your own mature picture of what a word like God needs to mean.

What you learn, in other words, are two important things. One is that we make the noises. People who preach, pray, write about religion, make the noises that define religion. You can do this yourself. Try writing a prayer to God, and you will find you have created the image of what, for you, is God. We make the noises.

And the second thing you learn is that there is something behind the stories about our gods that is very real, and which we are charged with protecting. A good minister knows there are things in life worth believing in, ideals that give life and raise us up, and that we must try to protect, articulate and advance these. Yes, we know we make the noises, but we believe that if we can learn to do it well, the noises will be in the service of values, ideals and allegiances that have the power to give more and better life to us, to those we love, and to our world.

This isn’t only about the gods. This is also the way it is with most of our other important ideals: love, justice, even America are things that exist as ideas, concepts, stories, but not as things that can speak for themselves. And look at all the stories we invent for these things.

A million love songs teach us what love is, says, does, and wants. Cupid, that little critter we made up with the magical arrows, shoots someone with an arrow and they fall in love with the first person they see. Cupid didn’t tell us that. This story was not an eyewitness account. Long ago, some poet said that’s how it seems love works.

And the American symbol of justice is Lady Justice, blindfolded, holding scales in which she weighs – and our lawyers and courts, as her servants, are to weigh – the facts impartially, to give us justice. In Washington she’s made of stone, a stone-face. Downtown on our own state Capital, the Goddess of Liberty stands on top with her sword and her Lone Star, and everything that goes on in that building is, according to the myth, supposed to serve her. But she doesn’t tell us how to do that. For that, we turn to the laws we have made: the stories we have made about how to do justice.

The word “America” is like this too. There’s nothing you can point to and call it America and ask it what it’s like and what it wants. It’s a symbol, and the noises are made by us, by those who presume to speak for America.

And the stories we tell about God are the same. Some tell stories about a God who wants war, wants obedience, dispenses punishment, and is a terrible fearsome thing. Others tell stories about a God to whom war is destroying his creations, slaughtering his children. The real America never speaks up to correct us, and neither does God. All we have are the stories. We make the noises.

If there really were a God in the sense of a being more powerful than any we could imagine, we would all know it. The rules would be clear, the punishments would be clear, and the bloody battles between the theological arrogance of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews could never have arisen. There couldn’t be hundreds of thousands of different beliefs, because God, the Goddess or the gods would have settled it, if they cared at all.

But if we make the noises, if the gods are ideas and concepts rather than beings or critters, then the world would look as it does today.

We would spin out our stories like a spider spins a web, making it from what is inside of it and connecting to the world around it. We would live in terms of our stories, spun from yearnings and hopes deep inside of us, and connected to the world around us. Then, like Hanuman and Scheherezade, we would tell our stories in order to live.

And then everything would depend not on the gods, but on the quality of our stories. For now our guiding myths would take on the role and the power of gods. The stories would create our worlds, give us our meaning and purpose. And competing stories that denied or ignored ours would be seen as dangerous rivals, threats to our world and our way of life. Those who believe differently would be dangerous enemies of the story that holds our world together, enemies who must be controlled or destroyed.

Unless” unless our stories were large enough to include all others as our beloved equals. And that would mean that attending to the quality of our most powerful stories and symbols is one of the most important responsibilities we have.

It would mean that when people degrade a word like “God” by turning it into a mean and hateful thing, we must speak up. We must say “No, whatever the word “God” means, it must mean more than something so petty.”

The same would be true of our other powerful words and stories. When “justice” is defined as something the poor can not hope to afford, we must speak up to say No, whatever Lady Justice means, it must be more inclusive than that.

And when “America” is defined as a belligerent and imperialistic nation claiming the divine right to invade and destroy weaker nations at will, we must speak up to say “No, an America worth loving may not be reduced to that level of warlike, bloody arrogance.”

If the gods were real, it would be our job to choose carefully and serve only the noblest and best among them. If they were merely powerful ideas and concepts, then it would be our job to choose and serve only the noblest and best stories.

Either way, our task is to develop an absolute relationship to absolute things, a relative relationship to relative things, and to learn how to tell the difference. And either way, it is our move: both alone and together, it is our move.

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© Davidson Loehr

22 September 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION:

What better place than a church to wonder about the existence of God! These are questions you can hardly raise in polite society. You probably wouldn’t feel comfortable raising them in most churches, either. But here, we’re safe, and our questions are safe. All of them. It’s one way we know that

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

A place for questions more profound than answers,

Vulnerabilities more powerful than strength,

And a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

PRAYER

We pray not to something, but from something,

to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are,

and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people, those experiences, and those transformations

that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes

with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

Amen.

SERMON: What if there really were a God?

What if there really were a God?

That’s probably the first time you ever heard that question asked in a sermon! Did you ever wonder why? Why do churches, synagogues, mosques and seminaries so studiously avoid this most obvious, most fundamental, question?

Maybe there’s something vaguely offensive about wondering, in church, whether there is or isn’t a God. Maybe something blasphemous, like there are church rules and one of them is that churches are supposed to tell people, above all else, that there is a God, then tell them what that God promises them and asks from them.

Like you don’t know, but ministers know because we went to preacher school, and in one of those courses – a hidden, secret course that you people don’t get to take – we learned the secrets about what God is and what God wants and so now we come out here to enlighten you, and you pay us for it.

If that were true, it would be easier just to offer that special secret course to all of you, so we could eliminate the middleman and we wouldn’t have to keep meeting like this. Unfortunately, no one has met or seen these gods, and those who do claim to talk to God are usually locked quickly away. There are no photos, videos or DVDs. It’s all just hearsay evidence. What we have are the stories and histories told by religious scriptures and historical sources.

So how do we find out whether there’s a god, and what it’s like? We can’t take a television crew out the way some have gone hunting for Big Foot or UFO’s . We know there would be nothing to photograph, no one to interview.

In seminaries and divinity schools, preachers look in books, like bibles. But one thing we learn in those courses is that religious scriptures don’t answer as many questions as you might hope.

The Bible makes the matter more confusing, not less. Judaism has been monotheistic since around 539 BCE, after their Babylonian captivity. But earlier stories in the Bible show that the early Hebrews worshiped several gods and goddesses – if you didn’t know that, it shows you haven’t been reading your bible.

Scholars have said that Jahweh was modeled after a tribal chief. Others have shown that the covenant between God and the Hebrews found in the Bible was modeled directly after international Hittite treaty formulas of over three thousand years ago, where the kings demanded exclusive allegiance to keep people from serving other kings, in return for protection. So from one angle, this whole God-business can be seen as a kind of protection racket.

The Canaanite religion, from which some scholars believe the Hebrews took their entire religion, was a nature religion, and the most important deity was the goddess Asherah or Astarte. So she was older than God.

Even Solomon in the Bible praised this goddess, and his son Rehoboam erected an image of her in the temple at Jerusalem. Even the Ten Commandments acknowledge that the Hebrews have other gods; they just insist that Jahweh be the number one God (The first commandment says, ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me.”)

And in Mecca, the center of the religion of Islam, the famous black stone there is thought to have been originally sacred to the Arabian goddess al-Uzza, the “mighty one” whose shrine was at Mecca until Islam suppressed this ancient goddess worship. So the goddess al-Uzza was older than Allah.

This means the question is not only what do we mean by the word God, but which God do we mean, of all that were worshiped: the newer one, or the more ancient ones? It seems the older gods and goddesses were there first. And if we’re seeking the more ancient gods rather than the latecomers, we want to look for the original deities.

Well, goddess worship was first, and it was practiced throughout the ancient world, all the way back to more than 30,000 years ago in Paleolithic times.

At those early times, carved goddess images outnumber male gods by ten to one. Inanna, the chief goddess of the Mesopotamian cultures where the ancient Hebrews lived, goes back to at least 3900 BCE, nearly six thousand years ago, long before anyone began telling stories about the much later God of the Bible. Maybe Inanna is God?

She was the principal deity in the first urban society of Uruk. Inanna was later and elsewhere known as Ishtar, Astarte, and worshiped by the early Hebrew people as Asherah. And she was almost certainly far more ancient. Lots of small goddess statues from 10,000 years ago have been found in the Jericho region. So is that what we need to mean by the original God? A goddess?

It was in the case of the Hebrews, and it seems to have been for the Greeks as well. The primary mystery religion of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries, concerned Demeter, the mother goddess, and her holy daughter Persephone, who was raised from the dead. Here is a mother and daughter god, long before the Christian story emerged of a father and son god.

The Egyptian goddess Nut, the sky goddess, was the mother of all deities, and the goddess Isis was called ‘the oldest of the old,” the one who made the universe spin. In Greece, it was Cybele who was the mother of all deities, and Tyche, or “fate,” was an Aegean goddess far more ancient than Zeus. And the Greeks always considered the fates to be more powerful than Zeus. So the ancient and apparently original goddess was still regarded as superior to Zeus even in the age of classical Greece.

Going farther around the world to Japan, the Shinto religion teaches that the world was created by a divine creator couple, the god Izanagi and goddess Izanani. They gave birth to the sun goddess Amaterasu, and up through WWII in ‘the land of the rising sun,” the Japanese emperor was seen as her descendent.

Everywhere we look to discover the original god, we find that before the gods there were goddesses. As an article in the Encyclopedia of Religion has put it, “In the lands that brought forth Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God was first worshiped as a woman.”

When we look into the history of civilizations, we find that the emergence of virtually every civilization was associated in some way with goddess worship. The phenomena of goddess worship is unbroken from Paleolithic times more than 30,000 years ago.

Many have thought that all goddesses were just symbols for fertility and feminine things, but that’s not true. They have symbolized everything imaginable. Throughout the ancient world, these goddesses represented rule, judgment, control, fate, writing, war, healing, ethics, morals, truth, architecture and building, as well as fertility, and the creation of all life on earth.

These goddesses weren’t dainty ladies, and they seldom needed men. In Greece, the goddess Athena was the goddess of war, and the protector of all the military heroes.

If we look for the original God, we find it wasn’t a god but a goddess, everywhere. But though that may be true, it doesn’t answer our real question. Whether a god or a goddess, what is it? Where or how does it exist? How can we investigate it in a cool objective way?

When we look at what religions have to say about their gods, it isn’t much help.

Take the religion of Islam. It’s the newest of the three main Western religions, with the most recent word on the subject of God, or Allah. But when you check the Encyclopedia of Religion, it says Islamic scholars agree on only two points about God:

1. First, the essence of God exists.

2. Second, the only other thing you can say is that this essence is eternal, and is not like any created things.

There are great differences of opinion on all else in Muslim thought. So God exists, has no physical or visible form and nothing else about this God can be known for certain – except, as one famous line says, they teach that God is closer to you than the jugular vein in your neck.

And in the Hebrew bible, the authors are clear that God can not be pictured, sculpted, seen, or even named – though again, one famous line says that God sometimes comes to us in a ‘s till, small voice.”

If this is all the hard data we have, it’s hard to make much of a case for the existence of God. There’s a famous philosophical puzzle used to address this question of the existence of God:

I tell you there is a dragon in your garage.

Well, you say, I don’t believe you, so I”ll open the door and prove it to you.

Ah, I say, that’s good, but you see it’s an invisible dragon.

An invisible dragon, you say. Very well, then you”ll spread flour all over your garage floor, and his footprints will show.

Another very good idea, I say, but you see this is an incorporeal invisible dragon. It doesn’t have a body, and doesn’t leave footprints.

Does this dragon breathe fire like real dragons do? You ask.

Oh yes, I say, this dragon breathes fire.

Very well, you say, then you will hang thermometers, and you will set up an infrared camera, and they will show whether or not there is any invisible and incorporeal source of heat in your garage.

Once again, I commend you for your good ideas, but must point out that the fire this dragon breathes is the same temperature as the air around it, and it doesn’t create any wind.

About now, you realize that there doesn’t seem to be any difference between my invisible, incorporeal, undetectable dragon, and no dragon at all! A dragon that can’t make a difference in our world doesn’t need to make a difference in our minds either, you say.

So perhaps this is it. Every religion says their God, or goddess, can’t be seen, doesn’t have a body, doesn’t exist as we do, can’t be detected by human means, and can’t be described by human words. Then perhaps God is like the invisible, incorporeal, undetectable dragon. There’s nothing there at all, it doesn’t exist, and we’re wasting a lot of time thinking and preaching about it. The majority of Americans and the vast majority of Europeans don’t go to church any more, after all. It looks like that’s what they”ve decided, and maybe you”re convinced too. So maybe that’s it: the word “God” is useless and we should stop using it.

Picking up the other end of the stick

And yet” yet something about this isn’t satisfying. Even though I agree with the logic of all the arguments, something is still missing. Because I have these feelings, and I am betting that you have similar feelings, that I still need to account for. I feel that I’m somehow part of something much bigger, that things like truth, justice, love, even though they”re invisible, are terribly real. And I need a way to call forth these feelings of connection to the larger context of which I feel myself a part. I feel that it makes demands on me, this larger context, that some ways of living are better than others, and that the best way to live is in harmony with the noblest and proudest values I can call forth. I even want to feel that I’m living in a way that serves these ideals and values, that they almost command me, that I’m more whole and authentic when I live in harmony with them, and less so when I don’t.

What are they? For me, they”re feelings of a need for connection, a call for me to become a person of character, a kind of blessing to my little part of the world. That’s almost a magical way to speak, but it’s how I feel.

And it doesn’t stop there. Other things also fill me with feelings and yearnings I can’t explain. Birth, whether the birth of a human baby, a puppy, or a baby bird from an egg, seems miraculous to me. The beauty of sunrises and flowers, the feel of rain and a gentle wind.

On any day, we can look up in the sky and see amazing machines that let humans fly. But while that’s interesting and convenient, it doesn’t impress me as much as the fact that a fly can fly. That I don’t understand at all. The myriad miracles of nature often leave me breathless. And so many more things!

Unexpected kindnesses from strangers: why do they do that? And you and I do it too: why do we do it? And how kids grow up into adults who have the same kinds of hopes, dreams and fears that you and I have.

The amazing sameness of people, such that I can read wise writings from three thousand years ago written by people living in a completely different kind of world than I, and they speak to me, I recognize all their human yearnings and hopes and fears and pains. That’s amazing to me. It makes me believe that we are all somehow connected, all somehow one, and I want to know more about how that is, and how it works.

And music; music is a miracle to me. I don’t understand how Mozart did it. I don’t even understand how Stan Getz or Charlie Parker did it. How can a few well-chosen notes, hummed, plucked or bowed, have such emotional impact, and affect so many people in similar ways?

It is as though, invisibly, everywhere, there are forces that connect us, that stir our souls, that can open our little worlds and our hearts until we want to learn how to strengthen those connections we feel, how to create bonds of compassion and love rather than remaining so separated by ignorance or indifference.

When I am open to it, when I will have the humility to be awakened and moved, an entirely different quality of life seems possible for me and those whose lives I can touch. And I want it, I want that bigger, fuller, more connected world.

The awareness of those connections, these powers, makes me feel unfinished. There is a tendency in me – I think it’s in you, in nearly everyone – that wants to take life more seriously and deeply, that wants to grow into a fuller kind of humanity.[1]

Or is it growing into a quality of divinity that I’m after? Words fail here. These powers and connections are bigger than I, they seem eternal while I’m merely transient. I can’t control them, they seem to be the enduring rules for living. I feel enlarged when I become aware of these greater possibilities. And I feel small in comparison with them. I’m born, live and die, they seem to last forever.

You all know these things, you know what I’m trying to talk about, though you may have different ways of putting them. Not only that, I think you value them much as I do. I think you have, as I do, high opinions of those people you have known who have felt these larger aspirations and tried to respond to them.

There is a drive in us to become conscious of and grow toward relating our own life to the lives of others and the forces in the world that seem most life-giving, most sacred.[2]

And what shall we call these drives, these powers, these still small voices? They”re invisible, incorporeal, not like us, not like anything we can see or touch, yet so important. Shall we call these connections Mother? Father? Nature? Shall we call them God? Through time, we have called them all these things, and more.

Something here is so very real. Even if we aren’t sure what to call it, we must try to call it forth, you know?

Now see where we have arrived in this morning’s journey. We started by asking what if there really were a God, and realize it’s not the right question. Almost immediately, that question dissolved into others.

But now, by giving voice to some of the enduring questions and yearnings we seem to share with all people who have ever lived, we have arrived at a special, even a sacred, place. It is that place of awareness within us which is the womb that gave birth to God, the birthplace of all our gods and goddesses. And we find that in this womb are questions more profound than answers, vulnerabilities more powerful than strength, and a peace that can pass all understanding.[3]

There’s another paragraph from the Encyclopedia of Religion that fits here, though it sounds a little academic:

“In human religious experience, manifestations of sacred power provide centers of meaning, order, worship and ethics. Humans have always felt that real life is in close contact with sacred power. Ideas and experiences of these powers, [usually expressed as goddesses or gods], thus are not so much intellectual reflections as existential concerns, revolving around the fundamental human question of how to live authentically in this world”. Their power meets human existence precisely at the most vital and crucial areas of life, in connection with such matters as food, fertility, protection, birth, and death. The fact that [we assign] personality and will [to our divine beings] means that human existence is not just aimless and haphazard but is related to the sacred pattern created or structured by the will of the gods and goddesses.”[4]

If you look seriously at religions, at every religion in which people have ever had faith, you”ll find that many of them are now dead, and their teachings have degenerated into a long series of empty customs, into a system of abstract ideas and theories. For many people, the same is true of Western religions. But when we examine the original elements, can’t we see that this dead rock was once the molten outpourings of an inner fire, a fire that we also share? Religions are the sum of all relations humans have felt to the enduring forces of life and the universe. By whatever names their gods or goddesses are called, it is this reconnection we have tried to call forth.[5]

And what shall we call these feelings we have, feelings that there is more to us, that there are more noble possibilities for our lives and our world? Shall we call them messengers from a higher power? The angels of our better nature? Holy spirits? We meet like this in churches to explore life’s most important questions. But today, we started with the wrong question. All religions have been clear that their gods don’t exist like we do. Looking for them through history or archaeology is a dead-end. The gods aren’t archaeological or physical realities. They”re psychological realities. And the feelings, fears, hopes and yearnings that continue to give birth to the gods are so deep in our souls that we wouldn’t be fully human without them.

The real question isn’t about God. It’s “What if these feelings we have are real?” These yearnings for more, these feelings that we are really a part of all of this – of one another, of the world, and the yearning to be more connected, more whole. What if those yearnings are real? Sometimes they seem the most deeply real things about us.

And as long as that’s true, we should probably keep meeting like this.

——————

[1] Adapted from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1799 book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, pp. 11-12, where he argues that religion comes from ‘the human tendency” that wants to take life seriously, to grow to our full humanity.

[2] Schleiermacher says the drive to becoming religious “is only the endeavor to become conscious of and to exhibit the grue relation of our own life to the common nature of man.” (Ibid., p. 149)

[3] Schleiermacher puts it this way: “”Man in closest fellowship with the highest must be for you all an object of esteem, nay, of reverence. No one capable of understanding such a state can, when he sees it, withhold this feeling. That is past all doubt. You may despise all whose minds are easily and entirely filled with trivial things, but in vain you attempt to depreciate one who drinks in the greatest for his nourishment. You may love him or hate him, according as he goes with you or against in the narrow path of activity and culture, but even the most beautiful feeling of equality you cannot entertain towards a person so far exalted above you. The seeker for the Highest Existence in the world stands above all who have not a like purpose.” (p. 210).

[4] Theodore M. Ludwig, “Gods and Goddesses,” in the Encyclopedia of Religion, volume 6, pp. 59ff.)

[5] Schleiermacher: “I invite you to study every faith professed by man, every religion that has a name and a character. Though it may long ago have degenerated into a long series of empty customs, into a system of abstract ideas and theories, will you not, when you examine the original elements at the source, find that this dead dross was once the molten outpourings of the inner fire? Is there not in all religions more or less of the true nature of religion, as I have presented it to you? Must not, therefore, each religion be one of the special forms which mankind, in some region of the earth and at some stage of development, has to accept?”

“the whole of religion is nothing but the sum of all relations of man to God, apprehended in all the possible ways in which any man can be immediately conscious in his life. In this sense there is but one religion.” (pp. 216-217)

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© Davidson Loehr

15 September 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

This is the time of year when Jews celebrate their highest holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. “Atonement” is, I think, the only English word that became a theological concept, and its meaning is it’s spelling: At-one-ment. It is the time Jews re-establish their relationship with God by confessing their sins.

It is customary for Jews to wear white on this day, symbolizing purity and calling to mind the promise that our sins can be forgiven. The realization that our sins can be forgiven without an intermediary would be enough all by itself to make this a High Holy Day. In respect and honor of this tradition, I would like to lead us in a prayer of atonement:

We confess we have not been perfect. We have missed the mark. We have done things we should not have done. Some selfish things, hurtful things, thoughtless actions and words, sins of commission and sins of omission.

We have failed in the past; we will fail in the future. Yet even knowing we are not going to be perfect, we are determined once more to aspire to be authentic and whole.

Before our God, before the spirit of life and the habit of truth, let us dare to dream again.

We dream of living out of our highest possibilities rather than our lower compromises. And we would again make promises before all that is holy to us, by whatever name we call it forth.

We promise in the year ahead to speak the truth in love rather than living in easier half-truths.

We vow to try our best to live out of compassion rather than indifference, to grow beyond our habitual blindnesses by seeking fuller understanding.

We say in the face of all that is sacred and makes a claim upon our hearts that we will always try to seek the counsel of the angels of our better nature, in whatever forms they come to us.

We vow to remember that our world can not be made whole without our participation in it, and we will participate.

We desire to be inspired by the hope of a more loving world, a more just world, what some have called the kingdom of God. We commit ourselves to this vision, and ask those who love us to help us remember our commitment.

Together we can be and do more than alone, and we commit ourselves, once again, to being together, as we resume the sacred work of making our lives more authentic and our world more whole.

Let these wishes of our hearts become the mission of our lives. We are forgiven the sins of our past, so that we may enter fully into the dreams for our future, and the future of our world. Let us help one another remember, and let us help one another. Amen.

SERMON: The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes

I can’t think about preaching on Bible stories without remembering my friend Todd. Todd was a Christian minister, my closest friend. He was a liberal minister in the Disciples of Christ, a denomination that covers the whole spectrum from fundamentalism to liberalism, and it really made him crazy. Todd loved stories too, but it seemed that every time he used one, half the people didn’t know it and the other half didn’t understand it. Todd suddenly died of a heart attack almost five years ago at the age of 46, and I still miss him and think of him, especially when I preach on a Bible story.

It was a dozen years ago when Todd called me as soon as I got home from church. He was so frustrated he was near exploding, and wanted me to meet him for lunch so he could vent.

He had preached that morning on the story of the Prodigal Son. He’d worked hard on the sermon and thought he had done a good job on it. Afterwards, in the line outside the sanctuary, a woman came up to him. She had been a member of that church for two dozen years and had taught adult Sunday school a few times. She shook his hand and said, “that was a really nice story. Did you write it?” Todd did a scene like the comedian Lewis Black, screaming “It’s the story of the Prodigal Son! How can she not know the story of the Prodigal Son! You can’t come to church for twenty-five years and not know the story of the Prodigal Son! It just isn’t possible!”

A lot of Unitarians don’t know much about the Bible, but the truth is that most Christians don’t know it well either, and don’t understand its stories. It’s a common complaint from Christian ministers: in order to preach on a once-famous story from the Bible, they have to tell the story, and often explain it as well, because many people will be hearing it for the first time.

This problem with stories isn’t new. When you read the stories Jesus told, you realize that most of his disciples didn’t understand them either. One of the most common themes in the Christian scriptures is Jesus telling a symbolic or metaphorical story and his disciples hearing it only literally. Nearly the entire gospel of John is composed of these examples. The disciples were literalists, he was telling them parables and metaphors, and they didn’t get it.

So it’s risky, telling Bible stories.

Last week I played with the story of Adam and Eve getting thrown out of Eden, and paired it with a Turkish folktale to offer a new way of looking at the idea of justice. This week I want to get into another story from the Bible, the story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. You probably all know the basic story. Jesus wanted to feed all these people who had formed a kind of loose congregation around him. He had seven loaves of bread and a few fish, and his disciples didn’t see how they could feed four or five thousand people. But they began feeding them, and the loaves and fishes multiplied until everyone was fed and there was lots left over.

I don’t want to know how many people think the story of the loaves and fishes is a story about an amazing magic trick where Jesus the Magician created a few thousand fish out of thin air. I can just hear my friend Todd going berserk over it. But Jesus wasn’t a magician; he was a teacher. What a shame if we miss the point of these great stories because we think of them as mere magic tricks.

They’re never about that. Jesus was not the first century equivalent of David Copperfield. Religious miracles aren’t magic tricks. They’re always participatory. You can only experience the real magic from inside of them, not outside of them. You have to get inside the stories, and let the stories get inside of you, just as you have to do with any other good story.

This story about the loaves and fishes wasn’t an eyewitness account. It was written many decades after Jesus died. He was hardly known at all during his life, and never gathered large crowds, certainly nothing like hundreds or thousands of people.

If you take courses in the Bible, you’ll most likely learn that the story is understood as a story not about Jesus but about the church. It’s found in the gospel of Matthew, the “church gospel.” It’s a story saying the way a few words of wisdom, a few bits of spiritual nourishment, can feed thousands is because the church multiplies the loaves and fishes through the participation of its members.

Both with real food and with spiritual food, a church is a gathering of people who spread the nourishment to others. Over three hundred of you experienced some of this here last night, at that lovely church party where we fed hundreds of people. The same happens with spiritual food. Here’s a church with one minister and one ministerial intern, yet there are more than a half dozen adult classes, covenant groups, Tai Chi classes, men’s breakfasts, a whole host of offerings, plus e-mail chats and all sorts of discussions here and with your family and friends during the week.

Now just describing it that way, it doesn’t feel very miraculous; it just feels like potlucks and various kinds of classes. But there is something else going on, and I want to see if I can show you what it is in these few minutes we have together.

Jesus died around the year 30. The gospel of Matthew, where these stories are found, was written more than fifty years later. What had happened during that half-century was that as the church began to grow, people came to hear its messages and they felt fed. They felt a kind of hole inside of them being filled, and it was a feeling they’d never had before. They found a community of people who were also asking questions about who they were, who they were meant to be, and how they were supposed to live. They felt their lives were being taken more seriously, and at a more significant and personal level, than ever before. And as they got fed and filled up, they wanted to feed others with the overflow.

And so they did. History says the early church had common meals like we had last night, that they fed the hungry and cared for the poor, both the economically poor and the poor of spirit, just as we try to do. In the version of Christianity that “won,” Paul’s sect, communion is a magical act involving eating the body and blood of a savior. But in most of the Christian communities even by the end of the first century, it wasn’t about that at all. The Christian communion was simply a common meal, much like what today we call a potluck. Early Christian documents (The Didache) never mention any association with the body or blood of a savior.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes was that the people who had been fed brought their own loaves and fishes to feed others, until the food that had first fed a few people began to feed a few thousand people. What does this mean in simple, down-to-earth ways?

I’ve heard some of our people here in their 20’s and 30’s talk about the small groups, or covenant groups, they have joined here. Some have said that after a month or two in such a small group they find that they’ve learned how to know and feel close to a half-dozen other people on a personal level, and they’ve never once talked about how much money they made or what they did for a living. They find their lives being measured by a new currency, a kind of personal or spiritual currency, and it feeds them.

If it ends there, they’ve just been fed. But when they start a new covenant group, or invite friends to come join them so that others are being fed, something miraculous is happening.

Whether you’re new to the church or have been here awhile, I strongly urge you to think about trying these small groups out. You can call the office for more information on them. They are one way we are taking a simple idea and using it to help a growing number of people feel nourished, and feel known.

I think any good church, including this one, is trying to turn a few simple ideas into spiritual food to nourish their people. Simple ideas like the idea that we want to take our lives seriously. We want to examine how we’re living, what we’re serving with our lives, and whether it’s worth serving with our lives. What actions bring us satisfactions, how can we live so we’ll be glad we lived that way when we look back on it in years to come? And how can we work, alone and with others, to improve the quality of our lives and of our world?

Those are the simple questions being asked by every church worth its salt. Simple questions, but the pursuit of them can feed us, and can make us want to help feed others too. That’s the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

I think of that passage in the gospel of John where Jesus tells his disciples “I have food of which you do not know,” and they don’t get it. They’re thinking hamburgers; he’s thinking soul food. It’s the deeper hunger that religious teachers are concerned with. Once a church has been formed, people always seem to want to help feed hungry people with both kinds of food: real food for food pantries, freeze nights for homeless people, and so on, but also spiritual nourishment, soul food.

That’s what this loaves and fishes business is about, but there’s more to it, too.

Did you even wonder, when you read or heard this story, what it might have felt like to Jesus, being able to feed others with his words?

Don’t get sidetracked because the story is about Jesus. Don’t start thinking “Oh, but he was the Son of God! That couldn’t have anything to do with me!” This isn’t about genetics; it’s about potential, and about transformation.

Consecration

There’s another concept from early in the history of Christianity that helps here. It was the early church’s notion of “consecration.” People brought their ordinary tools of work to the church. Carpenters could bring their hammer; women might bring rolling pins or baking pots. They brought them to have the church consecrate them, and they dedicated those objects to serving something bigger than themselves, then they took them home and built houses or baked bread, but with a huge difference. For now they were doing these ordinary things “for the greater glory of God,” and that changed everything. The money they gave for the church’s work was consecrated too, devoted to a higher purpose. Money that would have gone to buy bricks or flour now went, they believed, to making ‘s oul food” for the spiritual nourishment of others.

It’s like the story of King Midas, in reverse. King Midas had the power to turn everything, including people, into gold, and it drove him to despair. Consecration is about taking money, time, energy and care, and turning them into things that give life to others.

Spend a few minutes on this with me. When we work for something bigger than ourselves, when we can feed others, the time, money and energy we spend doing it blesses both them and us. That’s the secret of the loaves and fishes. The act of giving gives more to those who give than it does to those who receive. The saying “it is more blessed to give than to receive” isn’t just pap from Hallmark cards, it’s a deep truth of life.

That’s where the social witness of people of faith has come from – soup kitchens, homeless shelters, hands-on housing, food banks and clothing drives. Your clothes keep someone else warm. Your food fills the stomach of a person who was hungrier than you. Your money makes possible things that would have been impossible without it.

And because of this, the time and money you spend on things that feed others, both their bodies and their spirits, that time and money are transformed, consecrated. And so are you.

I can prove this to you from your own lives. If you eat three meals a day, you’ve had almost 1100 meals in the past year. How many of them do you remember? That’s a lot of time, a lot of your life spent eating; how many of the meals do you remember?

And of those you do remember, isn’t it because something else about the meal made it memorable? Someone’s birthday, a conversation over dinner where another person’s life opened to you, or you felt known, a meal where the conversation got so real there were tears, or deep laughter. And you knew you would never forget this moment because it was magical.

Suddenly, it had been defined as partaking of higher things, nobler things, more important things. It was consecrated and, for that moment, so were you. You went expecting a steak and instead found that food that you didn’t know of and didn’t expect. Food for the spirit. Nourishment for your soul. Ordinary time transformed into extraordinary time, mealtime become miracletime.

And then, during the past year, have you ever helped feed others, people you didn’t know? Fixed dinner or breakfast at one of the Freeze Nights here, where we offer food and shelter to about fifty at a time of Austin’s eight thousand or more homeless people? If you did, you remember those times. Among the 1100 meals of the past year, those are some you remember, because your time and those moments of your life were transformed and transfigured by being consecrated to the service of others, the service of something larger than you, outside your personal world.

When we consecrate our time and money to the service of high ideals and people in need, we experience the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the miracle of having the very quality of time change, the miracle of making those donations and those actions serve something bigger makes us bigger too.

I can only go so far on this topic, then sooner or later many of you may feel that I’m speaking from a world that’s different from the one you spend your days in. We live so alone today, we have taken individualism to such an extreme, we hardly know how to define ourselves as parts of something larger any more.

The book Bowling Alone that came out a few years ago talked about this, about the fact that there are more bowlers today, but fewer bowling leagues, because everybody’s bowling alone. If you grew up this way, it may simply sound strange or foreign to hear someone talk about consecrating your time or money by making them serve values and ideals you cherish, or provide services that help make positive differences in the larger world around you. We need to learn or relearn how to see ourselves as parts of something larger than ourselves, and a church is the safest place to do it.

Maybe even the idea of joining or supporting a church is a new idea that feels odd. If it is but you know it’s time to start, then start where it’s comfortable. There are people in this church who regularly pledge ten percent of their pay, ten percent of their gross pay before taxes. I envy and admire them, but I’m not one of them. That still feels too hard for me.

I pledge just half that, five percent of my salary and housing, and for now that feels right to me. I know some of you give a higher percentage, and I respect you for it. I’m not trying to seem holier than you, I’m just trying to be honest here, this is a place where we need to be able to be honest about everything. If you’re just starting and this still feels new, start at a percentage that feels right. Start out at just two percent if you like, just two cents on every dollar that you decide will go to support a church that is trying to feed people with the kinds of values and ideals that you honor and want to support. Then as it feels right, you can raise it a percent at a time, whether next year or next month.

But don’t look at it as just paying another bill. You’ll get more out of it if you look at it as a way of consecrating your gifts of money, time and talent to work toward offering soul food to others. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes wasn’t what happened to those who ate the fish. They just got a meal. The miracle happened mostly to those who fed them. They learned that simple acts done in the service of high ideals consecrate and transform us. They really do, and the miracle can occur on any day.

The poet Denise Levertov wrote a wonderful short poem about such a day, which I’d like to share with you. But think of particular days when you have experienced this kind of transformation, consecration, as you listen to it, and you’ll be able to feel it more fully:

“Variation on a Theme by Rilke,”

by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me – a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic – or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

What wonderful words: – “and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.” I can. And you can. And we can, and we can do it together.

Now I invite you to come forward and place your pledge card in this basket. If you are a visitor, I don’t want you to feel excluded. You can just bring your offering and put it in the basket with the pledge cards.

(Commitment ceremony follows.)

BENEDICTION:

From the beginnings of civilization, people have shared their resources to accomplish together what they could not do alone. Above all, they have set aside a portion of their money to be consecrated, dedicated to teaching and serving the values and actions that give life to themselves and others.

The multiplication of our gifts makes possible the multiplication of our efforts. As it has been throughout our history, so it is again here today. Together, we consecrate these gifts to our higher callings, and together we shall serve those higher callings.

And now for those who seek God, may your God go with you.

For those who embrace life, may life return your affection.

And for those who seek a better path, may that better path be found,

And the courage to take it:

Step, by step, by step.

Amen.

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© Davidson Loehr

8 September 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION

(from the Sanskrit salutation to the Dawn)

Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life,

 in its brief course lie all the verities and realities of our existence.

the bliss of growth, the splendor of beauty,

for yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision.

but today well spent makes every yesterday a dream of happiness

and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well therefore to this day.

It is good to be together again.

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

STORYTIME: The Wolves Within

(This story comes to us from the Native American traditions, but it comes more primally from within the human condition.)

A young boy was wronged terribly by his friend, and embarrassed in front of his peers. Hurt and angry, he plotted in secret for days to devise a plan to get even. But once he had perfected the truly nasty plan, he had the gnawing feeling that maybe, just maybe, he should get another opinion before proceeding.

So he went to his grandfather. His grandfather must be wise, because he was older than dirt. And he was kind, and a good listener. So even if he wasn’t wise, it was going to be a safe visit.

The boy told his grandfather the whole sordid story, from the awful thing his friend did to the even more awful thing he had devised to do in return.

“And,” asked the grandfather after he had finished, “is your heart set on doing this terrible thing?”

The boy paused at the word “heart.” “Well, grandfather, my head is set on it, but I’m not so sure about my heart. I am torn, I want to do it and yet I don’t want to do it. That’s why I came to ask your advice. I hoped you might understand.”

“Yes,” said the old man, “I think I do understand, for I have had these feelings all of my life. For as long as I can remember, it is as though there were two wolves living inside of me, fighting for control of my soul. One wolf is very kind and loving, and wants me always to do the kind and loving thing. The other wolf is angry and mean, and urges me to be clever and vicious, as you are thinking of being. All my life those wolves have been there, fighting for control of me.”

The old man stopped, just as the boy was wanting him to finish.

“I don’t understand, grandfather. Which wolf wins?”

“Ah,” said the old man, “that’s up to me. The one that wins is the one that I feed.”

PRAYER

Let us confess that we are capable of the most horrible crimes against each other.

We are capable of slaughtering our brothers and sisters with great self-righteousness, as though they were not humans but merely things.

Let us confess that the ability to hate comes from as ancient a place as the ability to love, and the ability to destroy is as deeply human as the ability to create.

Who are we, when we cheer the destruction of innocent people?

What drives us so often to seek revenge as a first response, rather than more reasoned and less bloody tactics?

We can be so tender toward our own children, our own mates, our own parents; how can we be so easily callous toward the children, mates and parents of others?

We come fully equipped to do both good and evil, to love and to hate, to be blessings or curses to the world.

How can we engender our tender mercies, and protect them against our furies?

Oh, let us give power and courage to those tender mercies, that we may help turn the tide of our world. As St. Francis of Assisi prayed:

Where there is hatred, let us sow love,

where there is doubt, faith,

where there is error, truth,

where there is despair, hope,

where there is sadness, joy,

where there is darkness, light.

Let us not so much seek to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

in forgiving that we are forgiven,

and in dying to hate that we are born into love.

Let us become the noble people we are meant to be,

for the world needs us at our very best.

Let it be so. Here, now, let it be so.

Amen.

(Partially adapted from the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi)

SERMON

There is an old story, told in many traditions, about a man who dreamed of a treasure map hidden in a faraway city. The dream was very clear about the location of the map, and promised the map would be an equally clear guide to the hidden treasure.

It was a three-day journey, but the treasure was worth the trip, so he set out. When he found the house he had dreamed of, he knocked on the door and told the woman of the house of his odd dream. “Why,” she exclaimed, “my husband had just such a dream himself three days ago, and set out to find his treasure map in a house in the village of – and here she mentioned the name of the old man’s town! How odd!

The woman let the old man in, he went straight to the loose rock in the fireplace chimney he had seen in his dream, removed it, and sure enough, there was the treasure map! He thanked the woman and left. Outside, he studied the map. It said the treasure was buried in a house in his home town: his house! He returned home and sure enough, discovered the treasure which had been hidden there all the time.

This is a story telling a lesson many have learned, that we expect treasures hidden in faraway places, but seldom suspect they’re also buried at home. It’s like the plot of “The Wizard of Oz,” where the goal was really to return to Kansas, which the girl didn’t learn until she had traveled to the land of Oz.

This is a common story in religion, especially now. We are bored with the religious traditions around us, and read books on all sorts of exotic religious paths from other places and times. It is true they have much to teach us. But sometimes what they teach us is that we could have found what we were seeking at home, if only we had looked.

So I decided to roam closer to home for some sermons this year, and take some stories from the Bible as seriously as I take stories borrowed from other traditions. I decided to start at the beginning, in the book of Genesis. The stories in that book have launched hundreds of thousands of sermons. Even the simplest story can be turned around in different ways offering a whole kaleidoscope of insights that are still relevant to our lives today.

And it gets even more interesting when you mingle a story from the Bible with a story from another tradition, which is what I want to do today.

The Bible story is the tale of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden for eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. There are a few things to realize about this old story:

— It was not written as an eye-witness account. It’s a myth, written long ago to give an imaginative twist to the human condition.

— It’s saying that one difference between us and the other animals is that we know the difference between good and evil, and that makes a huge difference.

— The story is also saying that the price of growing up and learning there’s a difference between right and wrong is that it expels us from a fool’s paradise.

— On a more sobering level, isn’t it also admitting that we know both of them, that we can do both good and evil?

So we live, the old storyteller says, east of Eden. A few chapters later, Cain is also sent to live east of Eden in what they call the land of Nod: the word means wandering, restlessness. We live in a world of restless wandering, armed with our prize – or is it our burden? – of the knowledge of, and capacity for, good and evil.

Now let’s make it more complex, by mixing it with another story.

This one comes from a collection of Turkish folk tales about one of the great figures of religious fiction, a holy man known as Nasreddin Hodja. Four boys were very close friends. They did everything together, and always strove to be completely fair in their dealings with one another.

When walnut season came, they went to the lone walnut tree in their village and spent the afternoon hunting among the grass for the freshly-fallen walnuts, for they all loved walnuts. They put them all in a basket, to divide them later.

But later, when the counted their walnuts, they discovered that they had found exactly eighty-three walnuts. Eighty-three? That number doesn’t divide by four. They would have to give twenty-one walnuts to three boys, and the fourth would get only twenty – and this wasn’t fair!

They returned to the tree, hoping for an eighty-fourth walnut. But of course if there had been another walnut, there wouldn’t be a story! They racked their brains, but no one could figure out how to divide them equally.

Finally, they decided to find the Hodja, their local holy man, to seek his wisdom on this difficult subject.

“What do you want?” asked the Hodja, after hearing their story.

“Justice,” they replied. “We want justice. But we don’t know how to divide eighty-three walnuts amongst the four of us.”

“Justice!” he intoned, shaking his head. “A very difficult thing! Well, you haven’t told me enough yet. I must know what kind of justice you want. Do you want God’s justice, or human justice?”

This was a distinction the boys had never before thought of, so they retired to talk it over.

In truth, they weren’t sure what either kind of justice would be. But the more they talked, the more stories they could remember of human justice going horribly wrong. One told the story of a judge who had been bribed to make an unjust ruling. Another knew of people who could not get a fair trial because they were poor, or outcasts. Finally their decision was clear.

“We have decided unanimously that it is God’s justice we want,” they told the Hodja.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “this can’t be undone, you know. Are you sure?”

Well, they were a little less sure than they had been a minute before, but yes, they were sure: they wanted God’s justice, nothing less.

“Very well,” said the Hodja, it is God’s justice you shall have. Then he took the basket from them and divided the walnuts. To the first boy he gave seventy walnuts, to the second ten, to the third three, and to the fourth none at all.

When I first read the story over a decade ago, I was sure I knew how it would end, but I was wrong, as you probably were too. It sounds rude, maybe even blasphemous, to suggest that God’s justice is the problem, and human justice might be the solution.

Then I thought back to the Bible, and remembered how many stories it tells about God telling the Hebrew armies to slaughter every man, woman and child in a neighboring village, to leave no thing alive. It’s the rule of might makes right, and it seems to have a lot in common with God’s justice.

And in history, it’s the same as it is in the scriptures. You think of the attacks of 9-11, of course, of those Muslim extremists who were sure God wanted them to kill 3,000 innocent people working in the office buildings that were symbols of America’s economic power. Their God even told them they would be rewarded in heaven with a prize of seventy virgins (without ever mentioning just why these virgins would want to be around murderers). Or you could think of our country’s retaliation, bombing the desperately poor country of Afghanistan, killing perhaps as many as 5,000 innocent people who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9-11.

But you also have to think of the Crusades of seven centuries ago, when Christians were told to slaughter thousands of Muslims, and were promised a place in heaven if they were killed in battle. God’s justice. The rewards go to the powerful, at the expense of the weak.

In every war, people call upon their gods, and in every war they are certain that their gods want them to kill thousands, perhaps millions, of other people. The ones who kill the most usually win. And they thank their god for their victory. God’s justice.

And the numbers are staggering. Here in this basket we have about 8,000 stones as a guess at the number of innocents killed here on 9-11 and in Afghanistan through our retaliations. To have a stone for every American killed in the Vietnam war, we would need 7-1/2 baskets full of stones. For the million Vietnamese who were killed, we would need 125 of these baskets full of stones.

I don’t know what god the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot cared for, but it would take 500 of these stone-filled baskets to count the four million of his own people he murdered.

So if God is the pre-eminent force in the world, than these things seem to be God’s justice. They certainly seem to be the law of the world, the kind of justice dispensed by nature. It is a kind of justice that lets the powerful few do whatever they like to the powerless many, even to the point of endangering or taking their lives.

Meanwhile, the voices of millions upon millions of people are crying out for a different kind of justice, and who will listen to them?

If we are really hard-wired to respect this kind of justice, this slaughter of the innocent many at the whims of the powerful few, then we need to take the notion of “original sin” more seriously, don’t we? For in all these cases, this justice of God is done by humans.

And we do seem to be hard-wired for this way of looking at life. Here, we can think of a hundred examples from our own lives. Everything seems to be stacked in favor of the powerful or gifted few, and against the many:

— The most attractive men and women have far more potential mates to choose from than most of the rest of us do.

— In all of our sports, all of our athletic contests, only the one winner is recognized and remembered. Football teams and their fans only want to be Number One. You never see fans chanting “we’re number three!”

— On television, you watch some of these “survivor” shows, and again everyone takes it for granted that only one person should win. 83 walnuts to the winner, nuts to the losers, and something in us seems to nod and say Yes, that’s how it should be.

I remember a few years ago when it was disclosed that Michael Jordan was paid a promotional fee of $25 million for endorsing Nike tennis shoes. If you added together all of the workers in all the Asian countries who were making all of our tennis shoes, Michael got more than twice as much as all of the more than 20,000 workers combined made in an entire year. But I don’t remember much outrage over this. 83 walnuts to Michael, and 20,000 invisible Asians can scramble for their $500/year.

We know this kind of justice. We know it well. Something inside of us resonates with it, in hundreds of ways. It’s what makes Americans shrug off the fact that Bill Gates has more money than the bottom 100 million Americans combined. If you translate this to stones, it means we would need 12,500 baskets like this one, all filled with stones. And if you put them all on one end of a scale of important and put Bill Gates on the other end, they would be equal. And no one is rioting in the streets over this, we just accept it. It is God’s justice, and we accept it without even blinking.

It is a kind of justice defined as the rule of the powerful few over the powerless many.

It is a justice that favors combat over compassion, and competition over cooperation. It is a justice that only remembers the winners, the few, while the many, nearly all of us, are forgotten as unimportant, almost invisible. God’s justice.

Yes, there are the cries of the poor, the starving, the powerless, cries for food, for mercy, for life, but they seem mostly to go unheeded, don’t they? People don’t listen to them, do we? Or do much about them? It seems that could only happen if something in us felt that this is indeed a form of justice that’s part of the way the world works. If it’s God’s world, it’s God’s justice.

This is the lens through which I’ve been looking at our country and our world this week, and it reveals some interesting patterns, some striking examples of God’s justice, dividing the walnuts with most to a few, and a few or none to the rest.

I’ve spoken before here, and will undoubtedly speak again, of the economic picture in our country, and how it has been dramatically changed over the past twenty years or so, to favor the very wealthy at the expense of nearly everyone else. Now I want to look at it as another example of God’s justice, an example of the way the world really seems to work, the way life runs here where we live, east of Eden in the land of restlessness.

The restructuring of our economy to transfer trillions of dollars from the lower and middle sections of our country to the very top few percent has not been subtle, but it has been rapid.

— between 1981-1986, the income tax on America’s wealthiest people was reduced from 70% to 28%. Twenty years earlier, it had been 91%. Taxes on corporations have fallen as dramatically, some large corporations now pay almost nothing in taxes. All this money has been taken instead from other parts of our society, which is why income tax rates on workers increased five-fold, from about 5% to about 25% since 1950.

During the decade of the 1980s, the portion of our nation’s wealth held by the top 1% nearly doubled, from 22% to 39%, probably the most rapid excalation in U.S. history (Phillips, p. 92)

For the past twenty years, the American economy has been identified primarily with the activity of the stock market. But of the stock market gains of the 1990s, 86% went to the top 10% of households, and 42% went to the top 1%.

This is the same kind of justice that the Turkish folk tale identified as God’s justice. It’s the same kind of justice that we accept without blinking when Michael Jordan makes twice as much as an entire workforce of 20,000 Asians combined, or when Bill Gates is worth more than 100 million of us.

In a way, this gives a kind of dignity to this sort of justice, doesn’t it? It’s everywhere, it seems to be the way the world works, and we seem to accept it almost without a whimper.

Not everyone was pursuing God’s justice to the extent that we were.

The author of the main book I read on this is a man named Kevin Phillips, who has been writing on “Wealth and Democracy” – which is the name of his newest book – for several decades. He’s a Republican, and he won’t consider it partisan politics. He reminds us that in 1972 the Republican platform actually criticized multinational corporations for building plants overseas to take advantage of cheap labor. But since 1980, all four presidents have helped restructure our economy to transfer huge amounts of money and power from the bottom three-fifths to the top, mostly to the very top.

He reminds us that NAFTA was enacted by Bill Clinton, with the provision in its Chapter Eleven that lets investors bring claims against the governments of the U.S., Canada and Mexico to demand compensation if national laws cost them profits – for example, by forbidding them to import unsafe products or services. One ruling against the U.S. required amendment of our Clean Air Act to permit the entry of Venezuelan gasoline that did not meet federal standards, for example. (Phillips, 231)

And the World Trade Organization, whose headquarters used to be in the World Trade Center, brings similar suits against governments that impede profits. Thailand, for example, was told to give up manufacturing a cheap AIDS drug after the US threatened a WTO suit on behalf of an American pharmaceitucal firm. These actions are decided by a three-person panel from the WTO, and are not subject to rulings by any of our courts.

Critics of these new laws have pointed out the potential dangers of a worldwide policy of formally putting profits ahead of people’s safety and people’s lives. Each year, Japan, the European Union, and Canada publish lists of American laws that they consider harmful to their profits, and therefore illegal. In 1999, ninety-five such laws were tentatively identified in California alone. (231)

This is God’s justice, just as surely as the bombing of innocent countries and the subjugation of powerless people all over the world is God’s just. If one is just, the other must also be. All this “God’s justice” business doesn’t seem to be helping very many of us.

Are these new laws merely changes we need to remain number one? No, they don’t seem to be working that way. In fact, they seem to go with rising indications that we are falling dramatically in comparison even to other industrialized nations.

During the 1980s and 1990s, for example, wages in our country lost ground while working hours increased, as many of you know quite personally. But during the same time in Britain, France, Germany and Japan, wages rose while working hours decreased. (Phillips, 163)

By 2000, the U.S. had the highest levels of economic inequality of all major Western industrial nations. (111)

“Today, a CEO would be embarrassed to admit he sacrificed profits to protect employees or a community.” (148)

We have the highest percentage of poverty in people over the age of 65 among the industrialized nations.We have the highest percentage of child poverty among the industrialized nations. We have the lowest percentage of students finishing high school. (345-6)

And we have the highest rates of youth homicides. (346)

While some of these figures may be news to you, the overall picture can’t be. We’ve been living in this brave new world for a couple decades already. The part that has interested me comes through thinking of all these conditions I don’t like as examples of God’s justice, not particularly worse than similar examples throughout all of human history.

Yet it is terribly ironic. We were driven from paradise, according to the old story, because we learned the difference between good and evil. The God who expelled us in that old story is on record in the Bible as sanctioning the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent people, including his own, when he destroyed nearly the whole world.

And so the Turkish folk tale seems to be right. All of this is an example of God’s justice, the rule of the world out here to the east of Eden.

What of the other kind, what of human justice?

In the bible, the voices pleading for human justice come not from God but from the human prophets. Amos sees the ancient equivalent of our Asian tennis-shoe sweat shops, and he has a fit. He says God is angry because the people of his time ‘s ell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes,” that ‘they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.” But it wasn’t God saying that. It was Amos.

The same was true of Jesus. He saw the way the world has always worked, what the Turkish story calls God’s justice. And Jesus calls for new rules, new ways of living. He says whatever we do to the least of these, we do also to God. He thinks so little of money that he wonders of rich people can even get into heaven. He attributes these sentiments to God, but history shows otherwise. They were Jesus’s sentiments, not God’s .

(One of the most important pair of essays in the history of Christianity was written by Clement of Alexandria in the late 2nd century. One essay, “stromateis,” wrote that Christians can use all Greek, Roman and other philosophers and writers, that all wisdom is welcome, to be used by intelligent and informed Christians. The other essay, “On that rich man getting into heaven,” said it is not money that is bad, but the uses to which it can be put. It advised wealthy people to use some of their money to benefit others, and implied that these are actions that can let the rich enter into heaven.)

The closest those four boys were ever going to come to justice was if they divided the walnuts themselves, gave three boys 21 and one 20, promising to make it up to him the next time. And the reason they could do that was because they liked and respected each other as people, and believed that all of them deserved justice equally. Their justice, human justice, was not based on power, but on compassion.

That’s human justice. It isn’t based on market value or on military might or concerned with which handful of people can survive in a dog-eat-dog world.

Isn’t it ironic to think of human justice as based on love, and as the only hope we have to escape God’s justice, which seems always to be based on the law of might makes right?

Throughout human history, in the midst of this world east of Eden in which the strong have always taken what the can and the weak have suffered what they must, the only chance we have ever had to create a just world has been through the application not of God’s rules, but of the rules of human justice, based on compassion not combat, cooperation not competition, and not power but love.

Only humans can do that, and only if they will, only if they will remember the difference between these two kinds of justice, and remember to fight for the more compassionate kind.

You may wonder why I chose to preach this sermon now, this sermon about the two kinds of justice.

One reason was because the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks is upon us, and most of the voices we’re hearing from our media and our leaders are demanding God’s justice from the angry God they have ordered to bless America. We can’t let that be the only voice we hear. We must be reminded that there is a higher calling, a calling higher than the trumpet calls of the flag-waving God who wants to declare unending war on anyone in the world who might not like us. I thought we learned in Vietnam that when you bomb and kill thousands of innocent people, you don’t win their hearts and minds, you simple create more people who hate you.

Another reason for this sermon was because we’ve been talking about our pledge drive for a few weeks, about wanting you to want to support this church generously with your time, your energy, and your money.

This may not seem related, but it is. It’s related to that story of the two wolves within us, fighting to control us, and how the one that wins is the one we feed. I’m not completely comfortable, though, thinking of the church as a “wolf.” Maybe it’s kinder and more civil to think of it instead as a fight within us between the angels of our better nature and the angels of our lower urgings. That’s a fight with which we can all identify, just as we all know that it is indeed the angels we feed, the voices we listen to, that determine our character and our destiny, as individuals and as a society.

This church is committed, and will remain committed, to being a place where those ancient and necessary cries for human justice are honored.

I will promise to help the leaders of this church make this place a haven for the very human spirits of compassion, understanding, justice and love. I will promise to keep it a place where we can find and nurture our human cries for a more humane world. The staff and the volunteer leaders of this church are one of those voices of the angels of our better nature, fighting for your support and commitment.

It’s a good bet that the voices we feed will win. Now it’s your move.

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Davidson Loehr

August 25, 2002

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING:

We gather here because certain questions call us together. We seek a deeper and more enduring meaning for our lives. We ask what we owe to our friends, to our loved ones, to our children, and to our future, that the world might be a little better because we were here. We ask how to recognize good, how to confront evil, and how to become the kind of people we were meant to be. These questions, and more like them, arise within us and command us to pursue them. And so we gather here, in this church, and our business together is blessed by the yearnings that bring us together. That is why we say

CENTERING:

In the center of our service, from the center of our lives, let us bring it down to a whisper and make room for silence. We come here with our private thoughts, our personal joys, sorrows, hopes and fears. We come knowing that we have done things we ought not to have done, and have failed to do things we should have done. Take these quiet moments to light a candle of memory or hope to give visible form to your special feelings, or to sit quietly and just be here, now.

PRAYER:

When people pray, they direct their thoughts in so many different directions. Some send them to God, some to the better angels of our own nature, some just concentrate, knowing that focusing our thoughts may strengthen our life force.

Wherever you send the words, however you would personally express this need, let us pray.

Help us to focus our life force. Don’t let us become so scattered, so diffused by the many demands of life, that we lose the sense of who we are, and lose contact with our important relationships.

Help us to be more present with those we love. Help us be more fully present to those ideals and causes that call our names. And help us to be more present to ourselves, so that we may be more fully aware of who we are and who we are called to become.

So much attention and energy are required by the transient things of life, let us not lose sight of its more enduring and precious aspects. Let us not forget how important it is that we try to connect ourselves with the most life-giving parts of ourselves and our world.

Help us to be more fully present to ourselves and to those people and callings that need our love and attention. Help us to be more fully present: here, now, and always.

Amen.

SERMON: YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN

The sermon title came from one of my many favorite Buddhist stories. It’s a modern story, about a Buddhist who was trying to be present, as Buddhism teaches you should be, but was having trouble understanding just why you’re supposed to be present. He knew the teaching he needed might come from any place if only he was open to it, so he was trying to be open, whatever that meant. While he was in this open and aware mood, he heard what had to be the noise of several hundred people in a large rental hall he was passing, so he went in. It was a big Bingo game going on. And there, right there on the front wall of the Bingo hall, was the lesson he had been seeking. It was a huge sign that said, in large block letters, “YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN.” When the student is ready, the teacher appears; it can happen anywhere.

The story also says we must choose to be present, or it isn’t likely to happen at all. And it helps to look in places where we’re most likely to find some wisdom and healthy connections. After all, it isn’t likely to happen at Bingo games very often. We have to be in the right place.

I’ll stick with Buddhism a little longer, because it has something to say about this too. You may know that Buddhism teaches an eightfold path toward Enlightenment, the eight right ways to think, act, and so on. But many people don’t know that they also say that before you can even hope to begin these you must find the first “right” thing, which they call Right Association.

You have to hang out with the right kind of people: people who honor the aspects of life that are really sacred. People who provide a safe and constructive environment for talking about ultimate questions rather than the more superficial things we usually talk about. This is true for teen-agers, just as it is true for people of every other age.

So usually, Buddhists seeking wisdom wouldn’t look for Bingo games. They would look for the right kind of community; they’d look for Right Associations.

That’s what a church is. Perhaps more than any other institution in our society, a good church is a place to find the Right Association with others who honor valuable questions and necessary actions.

I spoke last week of Georgia, the sister of a colleague of mine. Georgia attends a conservative Baptist church in a tiny town north of Fort Worth. Her church pays to send their high school youth to Indian reservations in Montana and Idaho every summer to help clean, paint and repair houses. And the church pays to send the kids to Mexico, and helps them find assignments in countries all over the world where they can be of service to others, because they are taught that they can transform the world through service. That’s Right Association.

My younger brother, who had attended Unitarian churches for over a decade, left them to join fundamentalist churches while he was raising his children, because he found conservative churches that were more concerned about morality, ethics, families, and service to the world than the Unitarian churches were, and he wanted to find the Right Association for himself and his family. His daughter who completed Airborne training this June spent the rest of her summer at the church camp she’s attended since she was 12, as a cabin leader. Each week, the campers were given a different theme to talk about, write and act skits on, and tell stories about. The week my brother visited them, the theme was “Love is all we need,” and his daughter had written a one-act play that her cabin was putting on for the camp. When we talked about it, he said “Where, can you tell me, are the Unitarians doing anything for their kids that even approaches this two-month church camp?” We do little things, short-term things, but I don’t know of anything like that camp. We just aren’t present in that way or in that area.

I know many Unitarians like to believe that only stupid people would attend conservative churches, but it just isn’t so. It isn’t even close. My brother didn’t get any dumber when he joined a fundamentalist church – and he didn’t lose his Ph.D. It will be healthy for us to realize that one big reason that conservative churches are so much bigger is because they do so much more, they are present in the lives of their members and their communities in so many more ways than we are.

There are plenty of examples of good large churches in Austin that we could learn from. Tarrytown United Methodist Church is one. Yes, that’s the church of both the governor and the President. They are in a very upscale part of town, and have 2,000 members. They also spend more than 25% of their annual budget on social and civic projects outside the walls of their church. 25%! We have to be proud to have such churches in our community. We also want to aspire to become one of them, because our community needs us to be present in that way. It would serve life in Austin, and in the lives of our members and their children.

So being present isn’t just for individuals. It’s also for institutions, including churches. And trying to be a place for Right Associations is the most important mission we have here. The mission statement that guides me and our board here is simply “To make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and our larger community.” That’s the mission of being a place of Right Associations. I don’t think there is another institution in our society that’s more worth investing money, time and energy in than a good church, if we’re trying to support places that honor the ultimate questions and compassionate values of life. Think about it this week.

Last week I talked about Georgia putting $100 a week in the collection plate at her church, which may represent 15% of her earnings. My brother, as a college professor, gave ten percent of his gross salary to his church. I am convinced that these people I know, and most of the people I don’t know, do it because they want to support places of Right Association, they want to be present there in every way they can. And they will tell you that they have already “won” there, many times. Investing money in a good church may be the most rewarding investment there is.

Now about this time, you have to know that a message like this sounds naively, almost insanely out of place in our society today. Every television ad tells us to buy things for ourselves, buy things for our spouses or children, buy bigger, newer, trickier and more expensive things. The message of virtually all our media advertising is salvation through accumulation. The one with the most toys wins. Saved By Stuff. And when our houses are full of the Stuff, we can – as George Carlin famously reminded us – go buy some Tupperware containers to hold the Stuff. We can even buy big plastic boxes that fill every square inch under our beds with Stuff. People can ask us “What is all that Stuff?” and we can answer “I don’t know, but I must have enough of it to be Saved!”

Our newspapers are still carrying stories of the corporations whose huge frauds robbed their workers and others of billions of dollars, because those in charge got greedy, thought they could get away with it, and thought that stealing money from others was the sort of thing that decent people do.

No, they didn’t put it that way, but it’s what they had to believe. You can’t imagine one of them saying “I know only greedy, scummy people do this, but I’m pretty proud!” Nor do they represent all, or even a majority, of corporate officials, most of whom have far more character and decency. But it isn’t hard to know where they could learn these greedy attitudes. The message of our society is about looking out for Number One. When Ivan Boesky told a class of Harvard students that greed was good, he was chanting the mantra of the religion of a perverted form of capitalism that has defined much of our world for the past twenty or more years.

Salvation by accumulation. Being saved by the things we own, saved by owning enough of the right things. It doesn’t really work: you’re more apt to find wisdom at a Bingo game. And these greedy excesses, for the record, don’t come from the liberal excesses of the 1960s. They come from the advertising and media excesses of the 1980s, 90s, and the early years of this twenty-first century. That’s the source of the messages of greed and self-absorption that are demeaning our lives and our society.

Against that background, it sounds odd to suggest that the most rewarding investment you can make may be in your church. But I’m convinced that it’s true.

I think of a saying attributed to Jesus: “What does it profit a man,” he asked, “if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?”

Now you have to understand that this “soul” thing is not a supernatural thing. It’s a way of talking about the core of us, what’s most important about and to us. The word for “soul” (Psyche) was developed by the Greeks over 2500 years ago as they looked for what was the most important facet of a human being. Was it intelligence, the breath of life, power, what? None of these things, they decided, but instead that deep collection of those ideals and values that are most life-giving, most compassionate, that most lead to a life worth living, and one that is a blessing to others as well. That’s our soul. That’s the “soul” Jesus was talking about too, though of course many lesser religious thinkers have made many lesser things of it.

What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world – if they accumulate all the things their house and garage can hold – if by doing so they lose their soul?

To nourish our souls, we must invest in them and in those relationships and institutions that serve them. And where are you more likely to find the kind of Right Associations that can fill your spiritual hungers and nourish your soul: on Wall Street, or in a good church?

I’m reminded of another Christian teaching that’s on point here, though it’s probably so esoteric most of you have never heard of it, and the rest of you may wonder why you’d want to bother with it. It’s the Christian concept of “Incarnational Theology.” All those syllables mean that true faith means living it: incarnating, embodying, the religious teachings you think are most sacred. For many theologians, that was what was so distinctive about Jesus: that he lived his beliefs. He was fully present, as good Buddhists are also fully present, and he “won” or embodied a kind of authenticity and wholeness that is still inspiring all these centuries later.

You must be present to win. I think of this every time I conduct another memorial service. Every time people get up to share stories and fond memories of the person who has died, they show that they know exactly what matters in life, that they know the difference between gaining the world and gaining your soul.

This may be hard to believe, it may even sound un-American, but I have never heard a eulogy listing all the accumulations the dead person had owned. Never. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that owning things was what made this person matter, or bragging about the dollar value of their Stuff. Never. What makes people matter – you can hear this at almost every memorial service – is that they were present. They were there when others needed them. They reached out, they cared, they were honest and authentic. I’ve also never heard a eulogy praising someone for being absent.

This is also a lesson you can learn from parents looking back on the years they raised their children. I’ve never heard one say they wished they’d spent less time with their kids. They’re more apt to wish they’d been more present more often. Most of us can remember the hit song Harry Chapin made of this twenty years ago, a song called “Cat’s in the cradle.” It’s the story of a father raising his son but never having time to spend with his son because of his job and other demands. Then at the end, the son has grown up with children of his own, but doesn’t have time to spend with his father, and the father reflects sadly that his son had turned out just like him. That’s a lament over not being present, over not having had the right associations, over not having invested in the things that pay dividends to our souls.

Religious lessons sometimes seem that they must come from monasteries, or at least from the lives of saints. But it isn’t so. They happen mostly in ordinary, everyday ways, not dramatic at all, just authentic. As many of you know, in a former life I used to be a professional photographer. I was a combat photographer in Vietnam 35 years ago, and owned a studio in Ann Arbor for several years. In 1976 I sold all my equipment and stopped taking pictures for almost 25 years because I discovered that I had never liked photography. You may ask how on earth someone can do something for nine years and never know they don’t like it. Well, it happens! And the laughter shows me I’m not the only one to whom it has happened.

For a quarter century I didn’t take pictures and never missed it. It didn’t feed my soul. Two and a half years ago, during a trip to Mexico, I suddenly discovered that I was “seeing” pictures again, for the first time in 25 years. I was astonished, took the pictures I saw with my little point-and-shoot camera, and found that they were good pictures, and looked like I thought they would. And I liked seeing and taking the pictures.

Returning to photography as a fairly serious hobby was one of the biggest surprises of my life. But I returned to it because now, for some reasons I don’t understand, it feeds my soul. It’s a gift to be able to see good pictures without much effort, and for the first time it’s a gift that feeds me. Now I’ve invested thousands of dollars in good photographic equipment because the hobby feeds me. That’s the key, I’m convinced: we must go where spiritual nourishment is, and must support the activities that feed us.

You must be present to win, and there can be terrible penalties for failing to do so. I’m absolutely convinced of that.

I have a story about this from Rachel Naomi Remen, the San Francisco physician whose writings I’ve used before here.

She attended the retirement dinner for a medical school faculty member while she was in medical school. He was internationally known for his contributions to medical science. She’s a good writer, so I’ll leave the story in her words:

“Later in the evening a group of medical students went to speak to him and offer him our congratulations and admiration. He was gracious. One of our number asked him if he had any words for us now at the beginning of our careers, anything he thought we should know. He hesitated. But then he told us that despite his professional success and recognition he felt he knew nothing more about life now than he had at the beginning. That he was no wiser. His face became withdrawn, even sad. “It has slipped through my fingers,” he said.

“None of us understood what he meant. Talking about it afterwards, I attributed it to modesty. Some of the others wondered if he had at last become senile. Now, almost thirty-five years later, my heart goes out to him.” (Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom, pp.205-206)

You can’t say this great doctor was never “present” in life. He was present to his students, and influenced hundreds or thousands of their lives. He was a blessing to them, and a tribute to the medical profession, and that counts for something. In some ways, he was very present indeed, and won great admiration and honor.

But by his own admission, there was another realm of life where he had not been present, and had not won. “It has slipped through my fingers,” he said.

You know this plot is a very old story. It’s the story of Rip van Winkle. You remember the children’s story of the man who fell asleep for twenty years and had nothing to show for the time but a beard. Of course like all good stories, it is about life, not a bearded man. It’s a story of people who are there but not all there, who are there but not really present, and who have nothing to show for their time.

There were all kinds of things going on around Rip van Winkle during those twenty years that he didn’t see, for which he wasn’t present. Maybe he never got to see that sign in the Bingo hall that could have told him the secret he needed to learn about life.

Maybe he never joined a church, or found any other way to join the Right Associations he needed to nourish and save his soul. If there is a lesson for us in this – and the Buddhists would insist there must be – that lesson may be to say if you’re going to come to a good church, for goodness’ sake be here! Don’t go to sleep here! This is a place to awaken your spirit, nourish your soul and enlarge your life. Invest your money, your time, your energy and be here!

There is a lot to win here – for us, for our families and for our greater community. In at least this respect, church is like life, which is like Bingo: If we really are present, we really can win.

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Davidson Loehr

August 18, 2002

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION:

“Today is a day the Lord has made,” says an old religious writer, “let us therefore rejoice and be glad in it.”

We hardly know how to talk that way any more. Today, we don’t think of a day as being made by a deity. We have more commonsense, mechanical explanations for the recurring phenomenon of a mere day.

But to express the awe, the sheer wonder that we are here, that we are here at all, the old poetry speaks with an eloquence deeper and more profound than mere facts. And so behold, today is a day the Lord has made. Let us therefore be glad and rejoice in it!”

It is so good to be together again!

For it is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this: let us begin it together in song.

PRAYER:

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think.

Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships that might, with our help, expand our souls.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us toward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.

Sermon: Faith Without Works is Dead

I hardly ever do sermons on old theological arguments – especially on topics as arcane as whether we are saved by faith alone, or whether we’re to be judged by our works as well as by our words. But I’ve been thinking about this from a new place, and hoped it would be worth your time here today.

It really is an old argument, in both Eastern and Western religion. Eastern religions are pretty clear that your deeds determine your karma, and the kind of reincarnation you’re likely to have. They usually don’t give a lot of credit for just thinking good thoughts.

Judaism has always taught that the two great commandments are to love God with heart, mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Those teachings didn’t originate with Jesus. He learned them as a Jew. Even on their day of atonement, which they celebrate on September 15th this year, it is made clear that in order to make atonement with God, you must first make peace with those friends and neighbors you have wronged.

And Catholicism has also taught that it takes both faith and good works – plus a little grace – to be saved, and that the grace is most likely to come to those who have done good works.

All of these teachings came from times when the vast majority of people were illiterate, and almost all teaching was done through stories passed down from generation to generation.

But after the printing press was invented and people began reading, things changed. Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation nearly 500 years ago by teaching that we are saved by faith alone. We need to read the book, to know what we believe, and we are saved by faith alone without the necessity of doing the good works to earn it, he taught.

I’ve always thought Luther was wrong there. But since I’m one of those people who likes to read and think, I’ve also always hoped he might be right. It’s easy for me to slip into believing in salvation by bibliography. Like if I can just get all the footnotes in the right places, I’ll be ok.

Luckily, when I get that far gone, I usually wake up, or whomever I’m talking to will roll their eyes or just doze off. Then I snap out of it and remember, again, that life is both bigger and better than books – even my books.

But I’m not alone here. Everywhere, I think, in all times and places, those who love to think about things have always been in danger of falling off of the world. It’s the special curse of intellectuals.

One of our oldest stories is about an early Greek philosopher who was walking around one day, head in the clouds, staring at the sky, when he fell into a well. For centuries afterwards, the Greeks told this story about those who think too much.

It’s the same story we still tell about absent-minded professors, who forget where they left their hat or parked the car, or who drive to school without their shoes on.

We think over here, the world’s over there, and we lose touch with it as we get seduced by our thoughts. You know what I’m talking about!

It’s the story of thinking rather than doing, faith rather than works. It comes out again and again in some of the jokes about intellectuals.

A friend who taught undergraduate philosophy courses told me that every year, her students’ very favorite story was the one she told about another great intellectual, the French philosopher Rene Descartes, whose most famous line was “I think, therefore I am.”

One night, Descartes went to a fine restaurant, and each time the waiter suggested another course, Descartes ordered it until he was so full he could hardly move. When the waiter returned to ask if he would like to order dessert, Descartes said “I think not” – and he vanished.

Sometimes I think that’s the abiding fear of people who think too much. We’re afraid that if we stop thinking we’ll disappear.

As though thinking were enough. As though faith is enough, as though it isn’t really necessary to spend time in the world after all. We tend to follow Martin Luther’s goofy idea in this, whether we’ve ever been inside a Lutheran church or not.

This also shows in some of the best jokes about Unitarians.

I’m remembering a famous scene from the television series “Welcome Back, Kotter” from about twenty years ago. Someone had been hurt, or was lying unconscious. One person shouted “Get him a priest!” Another said “He’s a Unitarian.” “Oh,” said the first, “then find him a math teacher!”

And the great joke about what you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah’s Witness: Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason.

In a perverse sort of way, I think we often like these stories, because they imply that we’re smarter than the average armadillo, and we like thinking that religion is about being smarter rather than being more whole and authentic.

But there’s another side to these jokes, another side to the idea that just faith, just thinking, is enough to make a religion or a life out of, and it isn’t always funny.

This week, for instance, I got a call on my office voicemail from a local nonprofit agency that does a lot of good works in the Austin community. It’s an organization I haven’t worked with, and was a call from a person I’ve never talked to or met. I won’t reveal their identity until I’ve had a chance to meet them, we’re still playing phone tag. But this person was almost laughing throughout the message. They had read that i was going to preach that faith without works is dead, and was amazed that I’d even try it. Then they laughed and dared me to come down for a tour of what it actually looks like to do good works.

I may not think the characterization was fair or even true, but it is a common perception of religious liberals.

And a month ago I had a much more sobering comeuppance, played in the same key.

I was preaching in Fort Worth, and went a couple days early to have some time with my colleague Diana and her sister Georgia’s family. We were guests at Georgia’s home in Ponder, Texas. Ponder is a small town (about 450) north of Fort Worth, known for a great Texas restaurant (The Ranchman’s), and the bank “Bonnie and Clyde” robbed in the movie of thirty years ago. They also have a great bumper sticker that just says “Ponder, Texas – Just Think About It!” Georgia owns the bank, it’s where I sleep when I visit.

We were all sitting rocking on Georgia’s front porch, and Diana and I were heavy into talking about work: how to talk to Unitarian churches about giving money to the church, since both the churches we’re serving are starting their annual pledge drive.

Georgia belongs to a quite fundamentalist Baptist church, I think it’s in the holiness movement (though I’m not sure just what that means). Diana and I were going under great steam when we realized we had left Georgia completely out of the conversation, and were ignoring her on her own front porch.

Diana said something about not meaning to be rude, but thought Georgia probably wasn’t very interested in this topic.

Georgia allowed as how she had been listening in, but was very confused. “I just can’t imagine having to plan tactics to talk to people about supporting the church,” she said. “Each week when I go to church, I put a $100 bill in the collection plate. If I don’t have money that week then I don’t, but usually I do. I figure if we don’t support it, who will?”

I suddenly felt very silly.

Georgia’s little church has sent their youth to Montana for a summer to help Blackfoot Indians clean and repair the homes on their reservations. They’ve done this for years, the church pays for it. They’ve paid to send youth into Mexico for two or three weeks at a time to do the same for needy people there. And one of Georgia’s daughters has had two trips to Thailand, where she spent two months teaching English to Thai adults, and she’s going back next summer. Thailand is 95% Theravada Buddhist, about 4% Muslim, less than 1% Christian. When I asked her daughter if she thought there was much chance of converting the Thais to Christianity, she seemed shocked and said no, they’re pretty happy being Buddhists. “Why are you doing it?” I asked. “In our church,” she said, “we were taught to serve.” I wasn’t sure I had anything from “my” church to offer her.

To me, it was astounding that a little Baptist church could do such far-ranging good works. I don’t know what percentage of her pay Georgia is giving to her church, but it must be over 15%. And she isn’t doing it because she’s scared of hell. Georgia isn’t scared of anything. She’s doing it because she can’t imagine ever doing otherwise. She’s doing it because she really believes that faith without works is dead.

The visit with Georgia was disturbing. It made me understand, more fully than I had before, that religion, like life, isn’t mostly about thinking. It’s mostly about doing.

A lot of little Unitarian churches are content to define themselves as friendly little places where you can find a few like-minded people and have interesting discussions. It isn’t enough.

And while people support churches like Georgia’s with 5, 10 or 15% of their income, Unitarian churches are lucky if people invest even 2% of their income in them.

Some studies say the average annual income of people who attend Unitarian churches is about $50,000. Two percent of that would be $1,000 a year, which is just a little above our average pledge here. First Baptist Church downtown has about a hundred more members than we do, and a budget that is three times the size of ours. If you haven’t been there, I urge you to visit it. I think it is stunning to begin to realize what a church like this could do in Austin and in Texas if we invested as much of ourselves and our income here as some other churches are doing.

It’s not that liberals are stingy. That’s simply not true. But we weren’t taught how to become parts of a vibrant institution, how to make that institution strong enough to help influence the thinking about important religious and moral issues in the larger community. Or sending our youth to other states and countries to lend a helping hand to neighbors they have never met.

We’re moving in this direction, and we’re actually moving there pretty fast. In the past year, we have accepted the gift of 142 acres of land and buildings west of Kerrville, which we are working to develop into a spiritual retreat center to serve our district and eventually the whole country. We designed and built an all-ages playground that lacks only the covered stage to be finished, and that is already serving our members of all ages in new ways. We started an innovative contemporary service to be more attractive to younger people, and are averaging about 70-80 now, most of whom are new to the church.

The list could go on, and it will go on. In fact, the members of the church who are working at all the church activities now have so much excitement and so many plans for the newer and better services we can offer that they want to increase our budget by about 40% next year. That’s part of a dramatic kind of conversion experience, I think. A conversion from a typical Unitarian church that mostly thinks and does internal programs to one that wants to balance faith with works, to make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children and our larger community.

Why is this so hard for liberals when it seems so easy for Georgia’s church and other conservative churches?

I think it’s because there’s an assumption in a religion just of faith or thinking that we haven’t examined, an assumption which is false.

Liberal religion often acts like it’s only for adults, like people are already finished by the time they arrive, like their character is already formed, and all they need to do is discuss interesting ideas. Salvation by faith, salvation by thinking, we think therefore we are.

But that’s not true. We’re not finished. We come to church partly to get finished, to learn and experience more of the activities and involvements that can make us more complete people.

A healthy church is the best place we have to develop a whole range of sensitivities and skills that make us more complete people. And while faith – thinking – plays an important part, it doesn’t play the biggest part. The biggest part of becoming whole comes from doing, from works.

Our small groups are ways to be part of a small safe group where you can learn to know and be known by others at more significant levels than just talking about work or money. I recommend them to you.

Those with creative or leadership skills can help this institution become far more important and influential in our lives and the lives of the larger community. That’s a great opportunity.

And everyone has the chance to learn here how it can enlarge you to define yourself as part of something bigger, how it feels to know you are helping to serve causes worth serving with your time, money and energy.

Faith without works, thinking without doing and being, are dead because they can’t give us the depth and breadth of life we need.

This is where it can happen. And it’s worth all the time, money and spirit you invest in it.

The form of today’s sermon was unusual because its real message came in the prayer I read earlier, and the sermon was designed to flesh out and lead back to it.

Now see if this morning’s prayer makes a different kind of sense to you:

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think.

Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships that might, with our help, expand our souls.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us toward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.