Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

March 12, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: The Horse in the House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, there was the poop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAYER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a start. A good start.

Amen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remember, I remember,

The fir trees dark and high;

I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky:

It was a childish ignorance,

But now ’tis little joy

To know I’m farther off from heaven

Than when I was a boy.

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

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

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

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

 And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

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

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

 and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

 and run my stick along the public railings

 and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

 and pick the flowers in other people’s gardens

 and learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

 and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

 or only bread and pickles for a week

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

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

 and pay our rent and not swear in the street

 and set a good example for the children.

 We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

 But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

 So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 26, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Gilgamesh, the Oldest Spiritual Hero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 19, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

TESTIMONIALS

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

Mike – A Listening Minister:

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

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

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

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

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

Dana – who used our Listening Ministry:

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

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

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

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

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

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

Caroline – A Listening Minister

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

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

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

Rebecca – who used our Listening Ministry:

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

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

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

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

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

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

SERMON:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

18 December 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON: Love Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

11 December 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

We spend so much time looking for magic in the wrong places. We think it must be a hard thing to get, this magic, and we go through the motions of all the incantations, prayers, lucky charms and tricks we can find, trying to trick some magic into entering our souls.

This is the season when we will be charged a lot of money for seeking magic in the wrong places. And no matter how much we spend, toys aren’t likely to deliver the kind of magic for which we really yearn.

It’s the season when we chase after the spirit called Holy, and wish we could be caught by it.

It’s an important chase, but we don’t need to bring our credit cards. For the spirit of life and love and everything really worth the chase – not only is that spirit free, but it is also inside of us, waiting to be awakened, and noticed, so that it might do its work.

This season, let us conspire with the holy spirit to transform our hearts from stone to flesh, to reawaken our gratitude for this miracle of life, and our love for those who help feather our heart’s nest.

There is a glow, and a warmth that comes from looking for magic in the right places, and it can’t be begged, borrowed, stolen or bought. But it can be brought forth, from its home in the manger of our heart, and it can bless us. That blessing, that warmth, that connection, that feeling – that’s the magic that’s really worth seeking.

These holidays, let us seek for the magic of the season, but let us seek it in all the right places.

Amen.

SERMON: Magic

I began thinking about the idea of magic when I was talking with a colleague who is doing an interim ministry at an unhappy church. “I’m getting ready for the Christmas services,” she said, “but I don’t feel the magic.” Christmas is such a magical holiday that without that magic, it isn’t really Christmas.

I’ve been reading a book about magic, a book called Not in Kansas Anymore (Christine Wicker). The author used to be a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News, and brings a lot of skepticism to this subject of magic. But she spent a couple years looking for it among some very colorful people. She spent time with witches, vampires, werewolves and elves, and a host of others in all the costumes you could imagine, and some you couldn’t imagine.

This wasn’t about party tricks, or producing a quarter from behind someone’s ear. It’s what the communities she studied call “High magic.” It’s about transforming yourself. Magic is a search for a power of life by people who are missing it and want it. Magic is the effort to create a feeling that we’re somehow connected to larger powers, and that connection can bring us a feeling of being more alive.

Of the groups she studied, the most fascinating to me were the psychic vampires, because I’ve known a few. They told her they could drain energy from others just by being around them, and she said she sometimes felt drained after they left. These psychic vampires divided the world into two kinds of people: vampires and victims. Those who steal life, and those from whom they steal it.

While all these alternative magic-seekers are usually people for whom traditional religion can’t give them this power or satisfy this need, you don’t need religion to explain where they would get this view of our world as those who take and those who are taken from. They could get it from our economy, which serves the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest. Or they could see it in our imperialism: the notion that since we have the military might, we have the right to invade and rob any country with assets or strategic location we desire. Both our economy and our foreign policy operate a lot like vampires and victims: those with brute power feed on the life energy of those whose powers are more vulnerable, more easily stolen from them.

It’s about trying to take, steal, or buy something from others that can give us a kind of life feeling we don’t have. The whole notion is wrong: that we can steal or buy a worthwhile life. And once you think a quality life can be stolen or bought, we’re at the mercy of the advertising agencies who have made a multi-billion-dollar art of convincing us that their product can give us the magic we need.

So I’ve been thinking about the Christmas season in terms of magic this week. As some of you have heard, it’s the same week in which a bunch of evangelical Christian megachurches announced that they’ll be closed on Sunday the 25th of December. That tiresome crank, Jerry Falwell, has denounced them, as he has denounced the White House for sending “Holiday Greetings” cards, insisting that Christmas is a completely Christian holiday.

But Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday. As even a conservative New York Times op-ed writer reported yesterday (John Tierney, 10 December 2005), it is a winter solstice festival, and has been so for thousands of years. In the ancient calendar, the day we call December 25th was the date of the winter solstice. As such, it was automatically the birth day of all solar deities, including the Roman god Mithras. December 25th wasn’t adopted as Jesus’ birthday until the fourth century, the same time that Sunday was adopted as the Christian holy day. But Sunday is the day of the Sun: the holy day of solar deities. So nothing about this season, or Sunday, has anything to do with the man Jesus.

Christmas isn’t even a religious holiday; it’s a merchants’ holiday, the day they finally close their stores after the Christmas selling orgy that produces about a third of their annual sales. The truth is, Christmas is a secular holiday. If you doubt this, just look at the gifts that are given. Bibles make up an infinitesimally small percentage of Christmas gifts. What we buy has nothing to do with religion. But what we are trying to buy is magic: the magic of the season. And how odd, that we are told that we must buy it!

Here at church, I’ve been getting spammed with e-mails telling me what the hottest toys of this season are, presuming I might want to run out and buy them so I can feel the magic. It’s a confusing array. And somehow, each manufacturer has their own idea of the season’s hottest toy. I’ve read that the season’s hottest toy is the Microsoft X-Box 360, selling for $399. The company says they expect to sell over three million of them. They’re hot.

But there are so many hottest toys of the year! One e-mail says the hottest toy is the Remote control Hovercraft; another says no, it’s the Remote Control UFO that’s the hottest toy of the year. Then there’s the Twinkle Twirl Dance Studio with Twinkle Twirl Pony and Accessories. That’s hot. There’s the Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Play Set, which is more than I want to know about that. Or the Barbie Swan Lake Unicorn, with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken. That doesn’t do a lot for me, but I’ll bet some of you have daughters who hope they get one. There’s even the Room Moodz 6″ Rotating Disco Ball Light for $14.99. I hope disco balls aren’t making a comeback!

The magic of the Christmas season is for sale in stores, through catalogs and online, delivered to your door to transform your Christmas into the magical sort of thing you think you want. These gifts are promising to make your holiday season, to connect it with that larger power that you don’t have. It’s the power of being really cool, excited, keeping up with or staying ahead of your friends. You know, you can’t buy just any Sewer Lair Play Set. It won’t be the right brand. It won’t have the kind of magic that only the Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Play Set has. And you can’t just go down to the Dollar Store and buy some scruffy old unicorn. It won’t have the magic of the Barbie Swan Lake Unicorn, with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken. Just ask your kids. We’re not buying toys; we’re buying holiday magic. And we’ll spend an average of $700 to $1,000 buying it because we aren’t being told that we have the magic within us. This reminds me a lot of those psychic vampires. And think about all these hot toys, and what we do with them. We use them alone. We go off alone, absorbed in our X-Box 360, or the Twinkle Twirl Dance Studio or those sewer turtles. This magic we’re spending so much money for takes us away from contact with almost all the real human beings around us.

But you know this can’t be right. Even saying it out loud sounds silly. We’ve been convinced that holiday magic is something we have to buy, that we don’t have it and can’t call it forth on our own; we have to buy it. And it’s a strange and transient kind of magic, at that. Because the magic of this year’s hottest toys won’t even last a year. Next year these toys won’t have the magic any more. It never ends. Can real magic expire in just a year? Can it be as easy as charging it on a credit card? Is that really what we’re after? I know psychic vampires have to hunt continually for new life to steal, but is that the best we can do?

This is where I want to bring in a different way of looking at the magic we’re looking for. It’s a lens borrowed from Christianity, though one we seldom think about. It’s what the choir sang about this morning. They sang selections from Vivaldi’s Magnificat. Some of you will know where that word “Magnificat” comes from, and some of you won’t. It comes from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 1 verse 46, from the Christian myth of the birth of Jesus. This gospel was written about eight years after the man Jesus was born, half a century after he died, so it’s imaginative religious storytelling, not history. We really don’t know a thing about just where or when the man Jesus was born. Still, it’s a lovely story. Mary’s friend Elizabeth tells her that her baby will be the Messiah. For centuries, Jewish women hoped, at least at some level, that their baby might be the long-awaited Messiah, and Mary has just been told, in this story written more than eighty years after Jesus’ birth, that her baby will be the one. That’s when she said the line that has launched a thousand concerts: “My soul magnifies the Lord.” That’s what the Latin word “magnificat” means: magnifies. My soul magnifies the Lord. Mary was saying “I carry within me magic of the highest order, the magic of God himself, placed in my womb to be born into the world. My soul magnifies the Lord!”

Sure, this is wrapped in that archaic language of a first-century myth; but you have a feeling for what it means. It’s about real magic! Not bought, not something that will wear thin by next season, but a gift of life, a visitation of all that is most holy, growing right there inside of your body. Every mother knows the feeling; every father can relate to it. Today, we get a set of plastic Barbie and Ken dolls, or some sewer turtles. And what does that magnify? The power of advertising to convince us that we want things we don’t really need? Is that what our souls magnify at Christmastime today? The power and the glory of advertisers taking advantage of our gullibility by tapping into our yearning for some high magic?

Mary’s magic was free. And really, in Jewish teachings, all people are the sons and daughters of God, who was their heavenly Father. It was magic, and it was free. Today, we get Barbie and Ken, and we buy them because we’ve been taught that we don’t have the magic in us any more. It’s a lie, but as long as we believe it, it’s true.

Think back this week on your very favorite, your most magical, Christmases, and see what made them so magical. I can remember some from my childhood. And I can’t remember a single present that I got at any of those best Christmases. It was other things: the feeling of our family being together, being happy, the wonderful smells of pine needles, and of cookies and bread baking, the magic of Santa Claus. We put out milk and cookies for Santa every Christmas Eve, and knew for a fact that there was a Santa because every Christmas morning, they were gone. Our father helped us choose the right kind of cookies; he seemed to know just what Santa liked. Then there was that warm glow of the multi-colored tree lights, and the glow in all the windows up and down the street. It was all magic. Nothing Christian about it, but it was magic. And what did our souls magnify? I think it was as simple as the joy of being together, being in a safe place where love lived and we lived, and where we mingled with love and called the place Home. I don’t mean I didn’t often hope for certain presents, but I can’t remember what any of them were.

What about you? When you think back on your best holidays, what did your soul magnify? What spirit were you channeling? What kind of powers or gods were you serving? I’ll bet they were happy ones, warm ones that cherished you and cherished those around you. Your soul magnified the power of love, and gratitude, and that magnification transformed the holidays into something special, something magical. But it was home-grown magic that accomplished the miracle: not store-bought magic.

We pay a fortune for gifts each year, gifts that will be out of fashion within a few months, because we have forgotten that the real magic of the season is all around us. But the center of this season is all about what we are magnifying with our souls. If Mary had said “My soul magnifies the fads of the season,” nobody would have cared. If she had rejoiced in stealing life from God, who was her newest victim, nobody would even have written it down, because you can’t get it more wrong than that.

Our souls are going to magnify something this season. Maybe just Microsoft’s profits and the stock portfolios of those who own a lot of Microsoft stock. Maybe just the fads of the season, new hot toys that start losing their heat within weeks. And in some ways, we spend all the money because, like psychic vampires, we think we’re missing something that can only be taken or bought from others. It never ends, because it’s looking for magic in all the wrong places.

I hope we can magnify more important things this holiday season. Like the warmth of a mutual relationship with another live human being. Like learning that it isn’t the love we buy or steal that saves us; it’s the love we share. This is the season of infinite dreams, when we dream even of finding, and magnifying, things like love, life, tenderness, compassion, the Holy Spirit – the spirit of the God of Love. Let our souls magnify all that is truly holy and life-giving this season. The very best magic is free; it’s still the only enduring miracle of this or any other season.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

27 November 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us not make life any harder than it is, by pretending that its meaning lies hidden in some faraway secret place, or that life’s secrets are heavily guarded, and we can’t know how to live without them.

Nothing is hidden. The fact that love is better than hate is not a secret; nor that people of good character are called, commanded, to follow a loving path.

And the fact that we are as precious as the next person, means the next person is as precious as us. This simple fact has implications for how we must treat one another and how we must live.

It is not a secret that truth must trump deceit, or that justice must play the tune to which all decent people want to learn how to dance.

These things may be rare; they may be hard. But they are not hidden, not secret.

The truth that can set us free is that everything we need is within and around us, hovering between us as a magical force field inviting us to touch its energy, and to be touched and transformed by it.

Life has many real problems we must solve: what to do for a living, how and where to work, what gifts we must offer to make a connection with our world. But the bigger questions of whether we are worthwhile and how we should treat one another – here, nothing is hidden. Here we stand like all others, needing to give and receive love, needing someone to need our gifts, needing to learn how to recognize and cherish the gifts being offered to us from those whose love or affection we cherish.

Here, nothing is hidden; nothing is hidden at all. Let us learn to live in this land without secrets, and let us learn to live with one another. For we are all children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and we need one another.

Amen.

SERMON: Secular Wisdom: Thoughts between Holidays

Most sermons are like treasure hunts. We look through religious writings for the few things worth bringing home: the gold nuggets scattered around in the compost.

Since we can find some golden nuggets in every religious tradition, preachers feel confident that their religion – whichever one it is – is a gold mine. And of course they are right: every religion has served, among other things, as a kind of magnet that draws together some wisdom, and some wise commentary on that wisdom.

But the truth is that you don’t have to go to religious traditions for this wisdom or these nuggets. They are everywhere, if only we’ll look for them. On the one hand, that’s a good thing because nearly 80% of Americans do not go to church regularly. On the other hand, this hunt for gold nuggets still requires that we be serious about the search, and look for the right things.

One of the things you find when you look for religious themes in folk sayings, secular parables and quotations, is that there is a widespread distrust of religion, churches, and ministers! It’s everywhere.

Benjamin Franklin said that “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” A German proverb says that “In the visible church the true Christians are invisible.” A French proverb echoes this when it says “He who is near the church is often far from God.” The French also observe that “Many come to church to air their finery.”

God doesn’t fare well, either. A century and a half ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that “The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.” But more than two thousand years before him, the Greek Xenophanes had observed from his travels that black people create black gods, while the gods of red-haired people have red hair, and blond races create their gods in their image, as everyone else does.

If neither churches nor gods fare well in the public arena, neither do preachers. Germans say, “There are many preachers who don’t hear themselves.” That’s almost kind. But a Yiddish proverb takes the gloves off: “It was hard for Satan alone to mislead the world, so he appointed rabbis.”

And religion itself is often seen as a bad thing. Over two thousand years ago, the Roman Lucretius wrote with disgust about the evil deeds that religion could prompt (Lucretius, 96-55 BC, De Rerum Natura). More recently, the New York Times quoted a modern Lucretius saying that, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” (Steven Weinberg (1933 – ), quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999)

And while I spent several years reading many theological books on the way to a degree in theology, I have to love the barbed wit of the American critic of religion H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) when he wrote that, “For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the not-worth-knowing.”

So today, on this day between holidays, I have decided to do something I’ve never done for a sermon before. As you may already have gathered, I won’t be searching through religious scriptures for wisdom today. Instead, I’ve gone treasure-hunting through the non-religious wisdom of the kind of common-sense we find in some of the thousands of sayings and proverbs floating around every culture in every era.

I’m not hunting randomly. I’m not looking for the goofy or the cynical. I’m looking for the same kind of nuggets I look for in religious traditions. I want to see what wisdom there is on the human condition, what the enduring problems are that we seem to face, and prescriptions for what we should do. But even limiting the search in this way, it is a rich field with a lot of gold nuggets.

Here are some sayings I suspect we’d all agree on, from a wide range of times and places:

Each day provides its own gifts (American Proverb). Noble and common blood is of the same color (German Proverb). Good advice is often annoying, bad advice never (French Proverb). And “As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand” (Josh Billings).

We would resonate with the Latin proverb, “Live your own life, for you will die your own death.” – Though it isn’t yet clear just how we should live it. But we would agree with Abigail Van Buren – “Dear Abby” when she said “The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.” By Dear Abby’s standard, our country wouldn’t register a very good character now, either at home or abroad.

I read sayings like “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us,” or that “It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living,” and I agree (Oliver Wendell Holmes). And I think we’d all agree with Thomas Jefferson when he writes that, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson can still make us uncomfortable when he writes, “Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves” – but we know he’s right. Surely Abraham Lincoln was right too, when he said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” And it’s worth writing down Gandhi’s formula: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Then we read the line, “As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” and think Well, that Leonardo de Vinci could think as well as he could draw, paint and sculpt!

We might not agree with American comedian George Burns (1896-1996) when he says that “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” But surely the great Frenchman Victor Hugo nailed it when he said that “Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.” (Victor Hugo, 1802 – 1885, Les Miserables, 1862)

And we dearly hope, and usually believe, with the 19th Century Unitarian William Ellery Channing, that “Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.”

And what role does our character play in our happiness? A modern philosopher says “Our character…is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be. (George Santayana, 1863 – 1952, “The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis”) And there he echoes the ancient Greek Heraclitus, who 2500 years ago simply said “Character is destiny.” (Heraclitus, 540 BC – 480 BC, On the Universe).

We might not agree with Emerson when he says, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” But when he says, “Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you,” we want to write it down – unless we prefer 20th Century Rock philosopher Janis Joplin’s shorter version: “Don’t compromise yourself; you are all you’ve got.”

The Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh says “People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But … the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” We read this, and we’re glad he raised the discussion up a level.

But it isn’t enough to sit and admire ourselves or stare at the world all moon-faced for long. We’ll bore everyone to sleep in five minutes. “What [we] actually need is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of [us]. What [we] need is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by [us].” (Victor Frankl)

And like Leonardo de Vinci, Albert Einstein also grew beyond his own science when he said, “Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.” How do we do that?

Psychotherapist Victor Frankl said,”If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.”

And the late movie actor Christopher Reeve wrapped it in poetic language when he said, “I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don’t know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do.”

So far, we can find as much relevant wisdom from secular sources as from religious ones.

But somewhere around here, fear enters – or as one woman put it, “Now comes a sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?” (Jane Wagner)

You can’t talk about idealistic pictures of life without talking about fear. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that fear of the unknown is the source of all religion. Even if we won’t go that far, we would agree with the Swedish proverb that “Fear gives a small thing a big shadow.” “Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed (Michael Pritchard).”

Fear is costly both on individual and national levels, for as Edward R. Murrow once said, “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.” Some have said that there are two kinds of people: those who are alive, and those who are afraid (Rachel Naomi Remen). And the truth is, “Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live (Dorothy Thompson).”

Henry James, the 19th century novelist, said “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.” We want him to be right. The fear usually comes from feeling inferior to the task before us. Then we’re reminded that Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.”

We cannot lose hope. For “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Trumpet of Conscience”) We “must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” (Mohandas K. Gandhi)

But for now I’ll end these thoughts on fear with a wonderful paragraph written by Marianne Williamson – and often mistakenly attributed to Nelson Mandela, who also used it: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel unsure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. As we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

What possibilities beckon to us from beyond the walls of fear? One is the possibility of loving – which can itself dispel fear. The comedienne Lucille Ball once said, “I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.” Something about that feels right, doesn’t it?

She’s joined there by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who took it much farther: “Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

Some would just call this a religious awakening. But, “A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.” (Jessamyn West, The Quaker Reader, 1962).

So one answer that lies beyond fear, and can lead us beyond fear, is love. And many have found it the secret of a worthwhile life. For others, it is not just love, but love turned into service, that is the secret to a life we will be proud to have lived.

They say, “Service is what life is all about,” that “Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.” (Marian Wright Edelman), and that “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” (Albert Einstein).

Albert Schweitzer said, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

And while Helen Keller wanted to accomplish great and noble tasks, she thought it was her “chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along,” she said, “not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

Somewhere along here, even though I’m using secular writers, we come to the question of faith, of what we shall or should believe. The psychotherapist Carl Jung once famously wrote, “Among all my patients in the second half of life … there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.” But these aren’t priests talking. They don’t need to defend religion, gods or orthodoxy, and they don’t.

The French writer Anais Nin says “When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.” Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with her, for he said we should “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear,” and that “It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.”

This doesn’t mean their religion was atheism. “Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.” (Don Hurschberg) But it does mean that their religion is profoundly liberal, drawing from anywhere they find healthy wisdom. Ralph Waldo Emerson said to “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.” And Jefferson did make his own bible, by working from Greek and Latin versions of the New Testament to cut out all the supernaturalism, leaving just a book of the ethical teachings of the man Jesus.

And see if you don’t like this short definition of religion: “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” That may sound like Carl Sagan, but it’s actually His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Religion is a fairly simple and straightforward thing for these people. Lincoln said, “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.” That sounds like Emerson, who said, “Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble”; or Einstein, for whom “True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.” And these aren’t new ideas. The ancient Roman Marcus Aurelius’s advice for living was short and to the point: “If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.”

Eventually, all faith must be turned to actions that direct our life, because “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. (Paulo Freire).” You can put it in one short sentence: “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.” Those aren’t my words: they’re Gandhi’s.

A few of these thoughtful secular people wrote more about the faith that gave their lives meaning, and that are worth sharing here. The socialist Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), an early 20th century champion of workers’ rights:

“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

And Bertrand Russell, who was a famous intellectual, atheist, libertarian and anti-war activist, wrote these lines that are almost poetic:

“Three passions have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

“Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. In the union of love I have seen in a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

“With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. I have wished to know why the stars shine.

“Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth; cries of pain reverberated in my heart: Of children in famine, of victims tortured, and of old people left helpless. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

“This has been my life; I found it worth living.” (Adapted)

And two other short comments were too profound not to include, on topics as important as any in the world. George Bernard Shaw wrote that “Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.” And Bill Cosby said that “For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.”

Finally, a few words about the end of it all, and thoughts about death.

First, the author W. Somerset Maugham’s wonderful advice about death: “Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.”

Then there is this kind of looking back, so musical it almost wants to be sung:

“And now the end is near

And so I face the final curtain,

My friends, I’ll say it clear,

I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.

I’ve lived a life that’s full, I’ve travelled each and evr’y highway

And more, much more than this, I did it my way.” (Paul Anka, written for Frank Sinatra)

That’s really not much different than Harriet Beecher Stowe saying “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

Perhaps it is true – we hope it is true! – that “The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also (Felix Adler).” It does seem true that “People living deeply have no fear of death (Anais Nin).” And the lovely thought that “Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.” (James M. Barrie) We pray this one’s true!

And words from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC demand inclusion: “Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”

“A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back — but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.” (Marian Wright Edelman)

Yet this can’t end with guilt or judgment. So I’ll end it with the words of a theologian, though one who spent much of his career trying to present the case for responsible religion in plain language. His name was Reinhold Niebuhr, who was my teacher’s teacher. Here’s what he said:

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. [And] no virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness” – the first really religious word in the sermon. And just in time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

20 November 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us give thanks: for imperfect lives in an imperfect world, let us give thanks. Let us learn to be grateful for the blessing of life, even though it be a terribly mixed blessing, with enough of sorrow and loss to make us bitter if we let it.

When our vision becomes narrowed and our expectations become inflated, we wonder how we could ever be thankful for something as flawed and often unsatisfying as life can seem to be. Our job is not as we had imagined it would be. Our relationships are not as fulfilling as our fantasies of them had been; our friends are neither as numerous nor as true as we feel we deserve. Our families have problems.

We think, perhaps, that if only life would get better, we would be glad to be thankful for it, but that surely no one would be thankful for this kind of life. Yet it is precisely this life for which we must learn to be thankful. For it is the ability to see life as a blessing rather than as a burden which can lift its burden from our backs and let us sing and dance with the sheer joy of being alive.

This is the season when we are given the opportunity to renew our attitude of gratitude toward life: to recapture the sense of joy and of gratitude for the simple fact that we are here, that today life is ours, and today there is the chance to relish it.

And so let us give thanks: for imperfect lives in an imperfect world, let us give thanks. Amen.

SERMON: Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a holiday like Christmas or the 4th of July, in that the original story always needs to be retold as the background for each year’s remembrances and reflections. Also like Christmas or the 4th of July, Thanksgiving is about a spirit, an attitude that we want to stay with us on all days, not just the holidays.

As the 4th of July celebrates the spirit of Independence, and reminds us of the struggles necessary to earn that independence, and as Christmas reminds us that the birth of the sacred can occur any time, any place, and in the humblest of surroundings, so Thanksgiving reminds us of the attitude, the vision, needed to let life’s sorrows be trumped by life’s joys and blessings.

Thanksgiving isn’t a religious holiday in the sectarian sense; it is a religious holiday in the deepest sense, arising from the hopeful and trusting depths of the human spirit, that place from which all the gods have also been born. It is a holiday especially for people who have lost something and need to know how to go on. If everything in your life is just swell, and it has been just swell for as far back as you want to remember ‘ well, that’s really swell. And then Thanksgiving will just be another swell day, with turkey.

But if you have lost something this year, you need to lay claim to this holiday, because it is for you. I mean hard, painful losses: a parent, a partner, a child, a beloved friend or relative, even a pet you loved. Or the loss of a relationship, a community, even a lost chance. Or a more abstract pain: a loss of innocence, outgrowing a faith too small to cherish you without yet knowing how to replace it. Or the loss of a job, or the loss of confidence, optimism and hope.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the original Thanksgiving story. It was so long ago; it’s hard to imagine it could still be such a big thing. It took place 384 years ago. Bach wouldn’t be born for 64 more years. The founders of the United States ‘ Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Washington ‘ wouldn’t be born for another century or more. The United States itself wouldn’t exist for another 155 years. Charles Darwin was 200 years in the future, and the new world he would help establish wasn’t even imaginable back in 1621 at the first Thanksgiving.

But one of the most poignant, enduring and life-affirming stories in our history was being lived out back then, in real time.

The year before, 102 Pilgrims had left to make their way to the New World. They started out in two ships, but one wasn’t seaworthy, so they came over in just the one ship, the Mayflower. They left on September 6th; the trip took 66 days, they arrived on November 11, 1620.

They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusetts winter. Of the one hundred and two who left to come here; by the following summer, only 55 were left alive. Nearly half of them died.

Imagine this! 102 people leave their homes, say farewell to families and friends, say goodbye to a whole way of life, a whole world. They arrive as strangers in a strange land, and the land knows them not. It is cold, indifferent and deadly, and they spend a lonely and fearful winter freezing, starving, and dying. They bury nearly half of their number: one half of these Pilgrims buries the other half, and in the spring they plant crops and they hunt for food.

They had the amazing good luck to land near a village where the famous Indian named Squanto lived. Squanto probably spoke more English than any Indian on the continent, and he helped them survive and plant crops. Without him, they might all have died.

The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. I cannot imagine how they might have felt: the combination of life and death, tragedy and joy, famine and feast. It was like all of life, compressed into one year. And by late summer, when they could at last celebrate a good crop, half of those with whom they had hoped to celebrate were dead.

Maybe that’s why the first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and ninety of his people. The menu for the feast was venison stew cooked over an outdoor fire; spit-roasted wild turkeys stuffed with corn bread; oysters baked in their shells; sweet corn baked in its husks; and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. The food was served on large wooden serving platters, and everyone ate their fill.

After dinner, legend has it that Chief Massasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popped popcorn, which the Pilgrims had never tasted before.

These are the bare bones of the story of the first Thanksgiving: we don’t know many other details. It was the story of a small group of people who seemed to have both the character and the courage necessary to transform hell into heaven.

If the Pilgrims had all given up and died of despair, we’d have no First Thanksgiving, and no good story worth telling. It was their victory over the tragedy of life that transformed it into a feast of thanksgiving.

We think of miracles as supernatural things that some foreign power just does or doesn’t do, and we sit as passive recipients, holding a remote control that won’t work. But that’s not true of Thanksgiving. It’s our miracle. We must turn tragedy back toward the attitude of thanksgiving, or it’s not likely to happen. Oh, time helps. Time heals all wounds, we say, and there’s much truth in it. But finally, we must decide to throw the party, to sit at life’s feast, which is always there, though it gets so easily hidden by the tragedies and monotonies of life.

It’s a special kind of vision being celebrated in Thanksgiving. It’s a vision we’ve all had, and most of us lose as we grow older. Thanksgiving is an invitation from life itself to take back that vision and restore both life and ourselves to wholeness.

It’s as though when we are children, still na’ve and prone to seeing magic and miracle everywhere, it is as though we see life as being made of gold. Then as we grow older, as we come upon our share of losses, sorrows and tragedies, we gain that cynicism so often associated with maturity, and we think ‘Well, it was only a very thin gold leaf, that’s all ‘ and very thin gold leaf, at that!’ Then sometimes, if we can come full circle, we return to the childlike awe at the wonder of it all. Life becomes a gift again, and we realize that under the gold leaf are rich deposits of gold. Not pure gold, but enough of it to help us regain a proper sense of awe and gratitude.

Yet the gold is always there. There’s a syrupy poem most of you know that’s sold a billion posters and greeting cards, by the name ‘Footprints in the Sand.’ Published for years as anonymous, it was apparently written by a woman named Mary Stevenson in 1936 when she was a girl. She was finally awarded the copyright for the poem in 1984. I suspect you’ll all remember seeing it somewhere:

Footprints in the Sand

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord.

Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.

Sometimes there were two sets of footprints,

other times there were one set of footprints.

This bothered me because I noticed

that during the low periods of my life,

when I was suffering from

anguish, sorrow or defeat,

I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord,

‘You promised me Lord,

that if I followed you,

you would walk with me always.

But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life

there have only been one set of footprints in the sand.

Why, when I needed you most, you have not been there for me?’

The Lord replied,

‘The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand,

is when I carried you.’

– Mary Stevenson, 1936

This is such a favorite poem of so many people, I don’t want to debunk it, but I do want to clarify what it’s really about. Everyone in the world can identify with this experience of somehow being ‘carried’ even when we felt hopeless and abandoned. Buddhists, Taoists, theists, atheists, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, everyone. So calling it ‘God’ is just giving this human experience the familiar name of our local deity. But what carries us, all of us, is the momentum of life itself, and life almost always tilts toward the positive, the healthy, and the good. What carries us is that capacity is the trustworthiness of life and of most of our fellow humans and other animals on the planet. That’s the manger into which we were born, and it’s a trustworthy home. And resting in life, even when we think we don’t know how to go on, can carry us across that chasm of despair, to return to awe, gratitude and thankfulness, in spite of the sorrows and tragedies life brings our way. That’s the kind of victory that Thanksgiving is celebrating.

It reminds me in some ways of a very different kind of story from one of my favorite contemporary storytellers: a physician in San Francisco named Rachel Naomi Remen. She tells a story about how as a girl growing up in Long Island, New York, she would spend many summers on a deserted beach there, gathering shells, digging for little clams, doing child stuff. It was a magical place. Every morning, the sea would wash up new treasures’pieces of wood from sunken boats, bits of glass worn smooth as silk, the occasional jellyfish. Once she even found a pair of glasses with only one lens left in them. Some of her most vivid memories were of beautiful white birds that flew constantly overhead, and when they flew between her and the sun, their wings became transparent like angel wings. Her heart soared with the magical white birds, and she too wanted wings to fly.

Then she wrote these words: ‘Many years later I had the opportunity to walk this same beach. It was a great disappointment. Bits of seaweed and garbage littered the shoreline, and there were seagulls everywhere, screaming raucously, fighting over the garbage and the occasional dead creature the sea had given up.’

‘Disheartened,’ she says, ‘I drove home and was halfway there before I realized that the gulls were the magical white birds of my childhood. The beach had not changed.’ But through the passing years, she had lost the vision, lost the ability to see the ordinary as extraordinary, and the everyday happenings of life as the magic of life itself, unfolding all around her. Yet that grander and more life-giving vision was always there ‘ sometimes like footprints walking beside her, sometimes carrying her. (from Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen, pp. 70-71)

We need this ability to return to an attitude of gratitude, an attitude of Thanksgiving amidst the graveyards of lost people, lost hopes and dreams, lost chances, lost magic. This isn’t just about sitting in church on Sunday grooving on a happy-face feeling, like a weekly dose of hallucinogenic drugs. It’s one of the greatest secrets of life.

The historian Will Durant (1885-1981) wrote about this in another way. He was a prolific reader and writer, who over the course of a 96-year life wrote 15,000 or more pages on the whole history of civilization. Then, testing the boundaries of arrogance, he wrote a 100-page book called The Lessons of History, to summarize his life’s work. Following that, he was once pushed even farther into the wilds of arrogance, when an interviewer challenged him to sum up the history of civilization in half an hour. He said he did it in less than a minute. Listen to these few lines; you’ll hear the whole story of Thanksgiving running through it, the message of restoring us to balance and life:

‘Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues.

‘The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.’

Choosing to identify with the banks rather than the river is the act of choosing life, because only from the banks can we regain an honest and appropriate attitude of gratitude. Every great loss demands that we choose life again.

Sometimes we focus so intently on fixing life we lose sight of the fact that it is not broken. It is developing, it is unfolding, it is always incomplete, becoming more complete, but it isn’t broken. Something in us is capable of turning tragedy and suffering back into hope and trust, and joy, because we are being carried by the momentum and the magic of life even when we can’t see it, like the image of those footprints in the sand. It happens through grieving the loss, attending to the hole it has left in the fabric of our lives, and then being handmaidens to the healing passage of time that weaves us once again back into the fabric of this miracle of life. And it happens up on the banks, not in that river rushing by, but up on the banks where life, love, gratitude and hope dwell.

This is what the Thanksgiving story is reminding us of. That river that carries all of life’s awful happenings ran right through the community of the original Pilgrims. The first year in their new land, 47 of them died. By all rights, all 102 of them should have been dead by spring. But they were not dead, and they proved it in a way that still beckons to us by its sheer magnificence of spirit. After the harvest, in the midst of a field dotted with the markers of almost four dozen graves ‘ graves of wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters ‘ in the midst of this field, they threw a party of thanksgiving. They invited over some new friends, had a wonderful feast, probably said some prayers to honor the still-warm memory of those they had lost. And then they did a simple thing so powerful that it freed them from despair, a simple thing so powerful that it can still do the same for us. They gave thanks.

They gave thanks, because they knew that this life – even as it is punctuated with occasional pain, suffering, loss of life and loss of hope – is still pure miracle, mostly gold, the greatest gift we will ever receive.

May we all, this Thanksgiving, find again that more adequate and more honest attitude toward life: that attitude that overwhelms us with the sheer wonder of it all. May we give a rest to our habits of complaining that the gift is not perfect, long enough to recognize that the gift is miraculous, and fleeting. And may we not let it pass us by without stopping to give thanks. Happy Thanksgiving, good people.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

13 November 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Ask all veterans to stand, thank them for serving

Prayer

We who send soldiers to die, let us remember what they are like alive. For they do not begin as young dead soldiers. They begin vibrant and alive, with their whole lives ahead of them. They are full of hope and full of future. Their marriages, children and families are still ahead of them. All the challenges life brings, the successes and failures, life’s unpredictable array of comedies and tragedies – all are still ahead of them. The whole hope and promise of life beckon them.

When we send them into war, we are promising them that this cause will be worth it – worth cutting off their lives for, worth dying for.

Yet looking back just over our own lifetimes, how few wars there have been that rose to the height of actually being preferable to all those young dead and wounded soldiers?

Just the pull of a trigger can end so many young lives. But the most powerful trigger isn’t on a gun. It’s the trigger we pull when we send them into the meat-grinder of wars that are not worthy of them, not worthy of our own or America’s highest and most honest ideals.

We too pull the triggers that send the young to die.

Let us remember the look and feel of alive young soldiers. And let us not be trigger-happy.

Amen.

SERMON: T.T.T.

The odd title comes from a poem and drawing by Piet Hein. The picture was of what looked like a section of Stonehenge: three large upright blocks, with three large horizontal blocks across their tops, looking like three capital “T’s” in a row. The poem, titled “T.T.T.” read:

Put up in a place where it’s easy to see,

The cryptic admonishment: T.T.T.

When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb,

It’s well to remember: Things Take Time.

This fits many occasions, and certainly fits the mood many have after the resounding defeat of Proposition 2 in the election this past Tuesday. (Proposition 2 was an amendment to the Texas constitution defining “marriage” as existing only “between one man and one woman,” and prohibiting the state from setting up any comparable set of rights and entitlements for non-heterosexual couples. While only a little over 15% of Texas voters turned out, the amendment passed by over 76% to 24%, making Texas the 19th state to pass such an amendment.)

But the amendment, which passed with 76% of the vote, makes it clear that voters are not likely to endorse such a request framed in this way. Rather than focusing on that amendment, I want to back off and talk about the idea of reframing liberal issues in terms that can fit the atmosphere of American fascism within which we’re now living.

It has been just over a year since I sat here and delivered the sermon titled “Living under Fascism” (7 November 2004). As that sermon took on a life of its own on the Internet, it spread to what are now thousands of sites. It also brought a book contract, a lot of radio interviews, the recent interview in the online version of the UU World (http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/2222.shtml), and the recent award from the Austin Chronicle (“Best Minister/Spiritual Leader” in the 2005 Best of Austin awards). And I just learned yesterday that the sermon was quoted at length by a political writer in the Sydney, Australia Morning Herald – not writing about America, but using the sermon to diagnose what the writer saw as Australia’s slide into fascism.

Looking back a year later, I think that sermon’s diagnosis was on the mark, and that we are increasingly living under an American style of fascism. That American fascism involves plutocracy, imperialism and fundamentalism, and it has changed some of the most important rules of life, both here and abroad. Those new rules must be taken into account when planning any new social or political endeavor.

While these comments are political, they’re not partisan; our slide into the American style of fascism grew continuously through the past four presidential administrations, both Republican and Democrat. President Clinton’s selling of both American and world workers through defending and passing both the WTO and NAFTA played key roles in bringing about the New World Order that has now wreaked such havoc at home and abroad. And while we are justly concerned about the more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths we have caused since invading their country, the embargoes Bill Clinton applied to Iraq caused the deaths of five to ten times as many. Neither political party seems to have any clear or good answers.

So today, a year after offering critiques in the sermon on fascism, I want to begin offering some suggestions for operating in this Brave New World Order that looks more and more like 1984. If we are living under an American fascism, then our tactics have to work under the conditions of this new world order.

The primary rule of fascism is that it is the state that matters, not the individual. We may not like the rules, but they have won the day, control both political parties, a majority of Congress, the Senate, high courts, more and more laws, and the media.

This means that continuing to frame arguments in terms of individual rights is suicide, even when it is individual rights that are under attack, as they will be more and more often in coming months and perhaps years.

Arguments for gay rights that can be presented in ways that suggest sex will fail overwhelmingly, which is what happened to the gay marriage issue.

Arguments for individual rights that can be framed as selfish and indifferent to or destructive of the soul of America will fail.

Arguments that can be framed as a plea for a weaker America will fail.

Arguments against our rapacious capitalism will fail as long as that capitalism can be successfully framed as a synonym for what is best about America.

Arguments now need to be framed in terms of what is best for the state, for the good of the majority of Americans of all religious and political persuasions. We need to be people who want to serve the interests of our country, and who try to persuade a majority of our fellow citizens to join us. I don’t think we can convince either political party or the media. I think we have to focus on persuading the huge majority of Americans who have been disenfranchised.

Now the truth is that not many people here are really interested, or going to become active in, politics. I doubt that more than 5-10% of our church members really plan to invest much time in this. And I’m one of that majority who don’t see political action as very compelling.

But each of us has something positive to offer, even if it is as undramatic as simply living a healthy, vibrant and loving life of integrity.

There must be a new plan of action; and its center must be moral and ethical, concerned with what is best for the country, for the common good of the vast majority of our citizens..

The religious right is correct when they say we need to operate out of deep moral and ethical values. They call these values “religious,” though the literalistic style of religion they sell is too narrow and disingenuous to serve us.

Furthermore – media hype notwithstanding – we’re not a Christian nation. We’re the most pluralistic nation on earth. The largest Hindu temple in North America is just south of Austin, and Los Angeles has the world’s largest array of Buddhisms. And the best studies of church attendance say that only about 21% of Americans of all faiths attend any religious services regularly. Nearly four out of five Americans don’t think religion is interesting enough to get out of bed for on the weekends very often.

So this morning, while there are a hundred topics that need to be addressed, I want to talk and think with you about just three: the economy, politics – and the solution to our problems, which I would define as saving our souls, reclaiming a noble soul for America, and helping to reconstitute the world. Let’s begin.

1. The Economy. Since President Reagan, we have moved resolutely into an economy of greed, designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, disempower worker unions, remove the social welfare net and increase the gap between the rich and the rest. None of this is news. But the question would be how we might make the case than an economy of greed is bad for human life, America and the world.

The assumption since 1980, now simply taken as true, is that it is a dog-eat-dog world, and the government should help the biggest dogs. With a few exceptions – like the first president Bush’s raising taxes – these rules have governed Reagan, the Clintons, and both Bushes. It’s bi-partisan, established in the assumptions of both parties, and it’s wrong.

Why is it wrong? Not because of its logic, but because of its fundamental misunderstanding of what an economy is supposed to do. We think it’s about numbers and profits, especially profits for stockholders. But that’s not what the word “economy” means. The Greek word “nomos” means laws, rules for doing something. And the root, those letters “Eco,” mean “home.” Economics means “home-making,” how we can make a society a home for its people. Defining it as merely being concerned with making profits for owners and stockholders is as wrong as defining democracy as being concerned only with the whims of the rulers. And the problems we’ve created follow absolutely logically from that bad definition of what an economy is supposed to do. Bad assumptions plus good logic equals logical but bad conclusions.

When profits count more than people, we will turn people into things to serve profits rather than seeing profits as serving the lives of all our people.

Then it is perfectly logical to cut worker’s pay and benefits, logical to ship jobs overseas to the cheapest markets, logical to coerce poor areas of the world to get their people to make our goods for pennies an hour, in inhumane working conditions that can not buy them enough food. And it’s logical to support tyrannical regimes who can control their people as we milk them for cheap labor, if profits for the few are more important than high standards of living for the many. Because they have ceased to be people, and have become merely things, whose only use is making profits for others, and who can and should be discarded when something or someone else can do it cheaper.

It’s perfectly logical to say that people don’t deserve anything they can’t afford to pay for – as large corporations have been claiming, and selling even water to poor people in South America. And it’s logical to say that those who own the country should run it – as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, said over two centuries ago. The idea may be wrong, but it is not new; it has a long history in our society.

And, since the masses won’t like this new and degraded, subhuman role, it’s also logical to use public relations, advertising and the media – and the police when necessary – to manipulate them, to lead them in the direction needed to keep using them as things.

Noam Chomsky has a book out about “manufacturing consent”; but that phrase was actually coined more than half a century ago by the American psychologist Edward Bernays. Bernays played a key role in the development of internal American propaganda during the 1940s, and he described the science of manufacturing consent as a good thing, as the way the masses need to be manipulated in a large country, so they will follow the agenda of those who rule them. By now, the manipulation of us masses to manufacture our consent has grown into a high and fine art and science, having been perfected by advertisers, politicians and the media.

It’s why both political parties have agreed, with the eager cooperation of the media, to avoid dealing with significant issues at all during presidential and many other elections, and just to distract the masses with attack ads, personalities, scandals and sensationalism. These things draw crowds, draw audiences to TV programs, and the companies that pay for the news shows want the biggest crowds they can get to hawk their products to.

And as those who control the money control the laws, presidents and judges on major courts, it’s logical to say democracy is working, no matter what a real majority of the people think or feel, no matter that we have the highest percentage of our people – about 40% – without health care. They don’t deserve health care if they can’t afford it, according to the logic of an “economics” that sees its role as rewarding the rich while disempowering the rest. And the estimated 18,000 Americans who die each year due to inadequate health care deserve it because they can’t afford – well, the price of life.

All of this is logical. I think it’s evil, but it’s logical.

The task is to persuade – not the owners, not the politicians, not the media, but the majority of citizens – that this is a bad definition of people, a bad understanding of the proper relationship of people and money, and a mortal enemy of democracy and the greater good for the greater number.

Our media keep telling us that what’s driving our economy is the concern that we have an increasingly better standard of living. But that’s not true. Since 1980, with few exceptions, the vast majority of us have had increasingly worse standards of living. We have no savings, credit card debts of over $10,000, fewer benefits, less job security, less health care, and less of a voice in the laws that are passed. And I read yesterday that this president has now borrowed more money, has put the United States into deeper debt, than all previous 42 presidents combined. No matter how you try to spin it, that is not an economy that is working, let alone making a safe and comfortable home for our citizens.

These things are not the inevitable result of Progress. They came from valuing profits for the few over life for the many. That was both an unwise and greedy decision, and an evil one if human life has something intrinsic that must be honored and valued.

So, since economics is supposed to be – not the art of profit-taking, but the art of home-making, we can argue that for the sake of the vast majority of our brothers and sisters in this great country, we have been subjected to a terrible definition of economics: an economics of greed. And those terribl assumptions have harmed, even killed, people of all religious and political persuasions. For the greatest good of the greatest number of Americans, we need to redefine economic priorities to make profits serve and empower the many rather than the few.

No, politicians and the media will not support this. I don’t think either major political party can be converted from their allegiance to those with the most money – at least not any time soon. And the Christian Coalition will probably keep saying that the rich shouldn’t be taxed, and that social programs and health care should be taken away from all who can’t pay for them.

But the voices that might change these rules will have to convince the vast majority of our fellow citizens that the role of money is to serve them, not the other way around. That would be a revolution of the highest order.

2. Politics

I want to use one recent experience I had here in Austin as a way to frame the whole huge subject of politics. It was a rally on November 2nd, when I was asked to speak from the Capital steps for a group working nationally for the impeachment of our president. I agreed to speak, though I don’t like political rallies, because I think our president is guilty – ironically – of the same two charges used to impeach President Clinton: lying and obstruction of justice.

Several people from this church were there. I don’t know how all of you experienced it, but for me it was a very distasteful experience. The biggest signs I saw people carrying were simply vulgar and childish, and I left feeling dirty, and wanting to get away from those people. The woman who organized that rally and invited me to speak at it came to see me on Thursday, so we could talk about these things. I asked her if she really thought such vulgarity would persuade others to want to be associated with their cause, or wouldn’t it instead make it easy for people to say that, if this is the kind of behavior associated with people who dislike President Bush, then they would be glad they were for him.

She said that they couldn’t censor anyone, and didn’t want to exclude anyone, and besides, she knew their cause was right, so the rightness of it would, she hoped, attract many more people than the 200 or so who showed up at the little rally and march. I could not convince her that vulgar behavior automatically excludes all those who are repulsed by it, and don’t want to associate with people who define themselves through it.

So, without trying to pretend that one rally of about two hundred people really represents all grand political activities, I do think it points up some key errors the political left is still making, that the political right is no longer making.

One of the errors is thinking this is about being right. It isn’t. It’s about being persuasive to those who do not agree with you.

We need to go back and study some of the films of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. It stopped me short at the time, and is still inspiring to me today, to see the sight of so many black people in the South, marching in the summer heat and wearing white shirts and ties.

They didn’t stoop to the low and often vulgar levels of those who were calling them names, denying them rights, and sometimes beating or murdering them. They saw their mission as raising the level of civility and behavior, of presenting a better picture than the other side did.

They were presenting a picture of a more civil and decent America, and I think it was that picture, rather than their logical arguments, that won over the majority of Americans that passed the Voters’ Rights Act and won the unlikely victories for their just and noble cause. They didn’t win because they were right – though they were right. They won because they were persuasive. And they were persuasive because they presented an image, and acted in ways, that were morally superior to the image and the actions of those who opposed them with vulgar alternatives and vulgar language. (After I delivered this sermon, a member of our church came through the line to tell me the sermon had brought some tears to her eyes because she had marched in those civil rights demonstrations. And she said she well remembered how often they were told that “We had to be better than those who hated us; we had to be better.” They were, and they won the hearts and minds of enough other Americans that they could change the laws that had been stacked against them. But it was their behavior and their higher level of civility, I am convinced, that let them win their battle.)

If the civil rights marches had carried angry, vulgar, self-righteous signs and the people had dressed like slobs, that civil rights movement would have failed. That’s a lesson we need to reclaim today. People who watch marches and demonstrations look to the character of the demonstrators more than they look at their signs. They’re looking at the image, and deciding whether these are the sorts of people who their society should look like. It isn’t about being right. It’s about being persuasive. And the character we play plays a bigger role than our rhetoric.

3. The solution: winning our souls, the soul of America and reconstituting the world.

It’s clear to me that the tactics that can win under the rules of American fascism must behave in ways that those who disagree with us can respect. I’m also clear that arguments grounded in the “rights talk” of the 1970s will not work in this atmosphere. Fascism is about the primacy of the state, not the individual.

The battles are for the image of America and of the best kind of American that a majority want to identify with. The arguments are made more by image and behavior and role modeling than by rhetoric and logic.

And this becomes a religious issue, because the question is, “How then, shall we live and act toward those with whom we disagree?” Shall we call them idiots, carry vulgar signs about them? Is that noble? Is that the image of ourselves or our country that we could be proud of, and think would be persuasive to those who already think we’re wrong? How do we act in ways that can serve the highest notions of God rather than low ones? Or: what is the essence of being most fully human? How would we act if the noblest people of history and religion were watching? These are the questions that helped the civil rights movement of forty and fifty years ago to be persuasive. We need to remember and reclaim them.

So. In rallies or politics, under the current rules, if we want to win, we must realize it’s not about being right; it’s about being persuasive. And persuasion comes more through our image and behavior than through our logic or speeches. No majority wants to identify with angry or vulgar people. Nor will they want to identify with people who are perceived as hating America.

This was a mistake the Left made during the Vietnam War, from which they have never recovered. They burned American flags, rather than waving them and demanding that the country live up to the noble values symbolized by that great flag. To reclaim the soul of America, we must love our country – love the highest and noblest and most just and compassionate kind of nation that it could be. The whole enterprise needs to be grounded in love rather than anger or hatred. We must be better than those who dislike us and have disempowered the vast majority of our brothers and sisters.

How, then, shall we live and act? The best answers to this are still found in the greatest prophets and sages of history:

We must be people of high character. No matter how those around us behave, we must behave nobly. We must not do to others what we wouldn’t want them to do to us. This includes calling them names, treating them like moral inferiors or morons, or flinging vulgarities at them. We must act in ways we could be proud of if the noblest people of history and all of our own personal heroes were watching – as if God were watching.

It isn’t about being right; it’s about being persuasive. It isn’t about being self-righteous; it’s about acting like a person others want to be near and hear. It isn’t about hating what America has become under the misguidance of bad values; it’s about loving what America has been, and can again become, for the empowerment of the vast majority of her citizens.

And these are not just lessons for winning political battles. They are lessons to live by. They are lessons for living more wisely and well, for becoming the kind of person we can be most proud of, for blessing our little part of the world as we pass through it.

Is this guaranteed to win dirty and dishonest political battles? No. But it’s guaranteed to help you become a person you can be proud of, and guide you toward behavior that is a credit to people of good character and good will. You may lose the battle, but you will gain your soul. This thought comes to me from the saying attributed to Jesus, when he asked what a man gained if he gained the whole world but lost his soul. “Soul” here doesn’t mean a little metaphysical bag of air; it means the core of what makes you admirable. If you lose that, you don’t have a lot left. And without this, winning the battle can lose your soul, by lowering you to the level of the shadow side of those who disgust you.

Life isn’t about being right. Everyone thinks they’re right! It’s about being decent, noble, civil, respectful, compassionate, and persuasive. No matter how low others may drag the standards of behavior, we must not follow them there. First, we save our souls. Then we save the soul of the ideals, the picture of America that we care about. Then we reach out to those who disagree with us to offer them both understanding and arguments, always being more civil and more respectful than they might be. We model what we want America to become.

This is the Buddhist teaching that if we want a peaceful world, we must become peaceful. If we want a compassionate and just world where everyone is heard, we must become compassionate and just and strive more to understand than to be understood. These are moral and ethical teachings, and among the highest religious teachings. They trump political tactics. They can let us wade through vile fights without becoming vile, through angry and dishonest fights without becoming angry or dishonest; through hateful fights without becoming hateful. This has always been the teaching of the best prophets and sages. And it has always been the high moral path, the only path worth taking.

Our society, and the world we are abusing, invading and robbing, is in need of deep reform. This reform transcends political parties, because it runs counter to the basic behaviors of both political parties of the past twenty five years.

You don’t have to be political activists, which is good news because the vast majority of you don’t want to be. You are improving the world if you can love one another, love your children, play fair, treat those you love with compassion and those you meet with civility, and always act in such a way that you have improved the level of both civility and humanity, understanding and compassion, that you find around you. It can save your soul. It can save the soul of our society and perhaps of our world. It may be the only thing that can.

This won’t be quick: things take time. But during that time, whether we are fighters, talkers, thinkers or lovers, we face the same challenge that decent and noble people have always faced. That is the challenge of becoming people of character and compassion who seek more to understand than to be understood, where there is hatred, we must seek to spread love; where there is vulgarity of speech and action, we must spread a higher civility, and invite others to join us at that more compassionate place.

Things take time. They also require intelligent, aware and loving people of good character, living in ways that bring blessings to them and the world around them. It’s our world. Let us reclaim it with diligence and dignity.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

30 October 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us not be scared too easily. Not all who come in costumes are monsters. Sometimes the new forces that appear in our lives are forces of healing and of life, that we just need to learn how to recognize.

The voices most familiar to us aren’t always good voices. And new, unfamiliar voices may be those of friends we really need to make.

This Halloween when so many wear masks, let us be reminded that we all wear masks. So let us try not to be impressed by the masks, including our own.

Let us look behind the masks, including our own, and ask Who goes there? Who goes there in our dreams, our relationships, our families, our country. Who goes there, that we may know their heart rather than their mask.

The masks are parts of children’s games we play. Behind them are people who need to connect with others in authentic ways, at levels of both mind and heart. Let us look forward to and be ready for, the great unmasking when we shall see and be seen, face to face, in both truth and love.

Amen.

SERMON: Happy Halloween

Like nearly all Christian holidays, including Easter and Christmas, Halloween – a shortened form of the Eve of All Hallows, or All Saints Day – is a “cover” of a much older pagan festival. Some scholars say that November 1st was the beginning of the new year in ancient Celtic reckoning, and that the evening before it – called “Summer’s End,” or “Samhain” – was the most important holiday of their year.

Samhain marks one of the two great doorways of the Celtic year, for the Celts divided the year into two seasons: the light and the dark, at Beltane on May 1st and Samhain on November 1st. Some believe that Samhain was the more important festival, marking the beginning of a whole new cycle, just as the Celtic day began at night. For it was understood that in dark silence comes whisperings of new beginnings.

With the rise of Christianity, Samhain was changed to Hallowmas, or All Saints’ Day, to commemorate the souls of the blessed dead who had been canonized that year, so the night before became popularly known asAll Hallows Eve(ning), or Halloween.

A night of glowing jack-o-lanterns, bobbing for apples, tricks or treats, and dressing in costume. A night of ghost stories and seances, tarot card readings and trying to see the future. A night of power, when the veil that separates our world from the Otherworld is at its thinnest. It was a ‘spirit night.’

The most interesting belief was their belief that on this night, the spirits of the unseen world – usually the dark spirits, the spirits of the dead – came through to our world. A Jungian psychologist might rephrase this by saying that we are invited to confront our shadow sides, the unexpressed part of the world that is less obvious than the part that we’re living. Usually, that means that we live in positive images, suppress or deny the fearful things – that’s how we make it through the day, you might say. But on this one night, the veil between layers of consciousness is lifted, and we are given a kind of ritual permission to let our unconscious become conscious.

You may be sitting here thinking “Well, that could be scary!” And then you’ll have a much deeper appreciation for the kinds of costumes people wear on Halloween. They are mostly the costumes of our fears, let loose for one night of the year – though by now, they’re so dressed up as cartoons they hardly scare anybody.

This is why Halloween is so spooky: because it is trying to reach through the cartoons to let us confront our own shadow sides. And that’s spooky.

Preachers often love a chance like this to get all morbid, to delve into all the deep suppressed things we carry around, drag them out and whack you with them. You may have experienced that in church before. It’s part of the sadism of this religion business. We say “Have a spooky Halloween!” – then we snicker.

This year, I’ve decided to do it differently – even to risk being too optimistic. Because this year the times are “out of joint,” as Shakespeare put it. There are signs that this may be a different kind of Halloween – not a spooky Halloween, but a Happy Halloween. So I want to use Halloween as a lens for looking at our world today. And I decided to use what might seem like a very unrelated and unlikely symbol as a kind of teaching aid: the Yin-Yang symbol of ancient China:

Most of you probably didn’t even know that the ancient Celts knew about ancient Chinese philosophy. Well, they didn’t. But all the best religions and philosophies are trying to give form and substance to some of our enduring questions, the things that just always seem to be part of the human condition. And sometimes it’s useful to mix the teachings of different cultures, to let them illuminate each other – and, hopefully, us.

This symbol (Yin-Yang) represents the ancient Chinese understanding of how things work. The outer circle represents “everything”, while the black and white shapes within the circle represent the interaction of two energies, called “yin” (black) and “yang” (white), which cause everything to happen. They are not completely black or white, just as things in life are not completely black or white, and they cannot exist without each other. Each carries within it, at its strongest, the seeds of its own undoing, so the dance goes on forever.

While “yin” is dark, passive, downward, cold, contracting, and weak, “yang” is bright, active, upward, hot, expanding, and strong. The shape of the yin and yang sections of the symbol, actually gives you a sense of the continual movement of these two energies, yin to yang and yang to yin, a kind of nonstop dance, an undulation, causing everything to happen. The yin/yang symbol isn’t meant as a snapshot, but as a dynamic image of the forces whose movement define nearly all reality.

If you think about it, the weakest position you can be in is to be at your strongest and fullest position, for it means that you will soon be giving way to the kinds of forces you have suppressed. And the strongest position to be in is the weakest, the force just beginning to come up, because it just gets better during your turn to lead in the next round of this dance.

Yang (white) is the strong force, and Yin is the weak force. Is the strong force always good? No, just strong. Back in history when both Halloween and the yin/yang symbol were born, I suspect the strong forces were seen as good, because they were identified with the planting and growing season, where the dark forces were identified with winter, when the seeds lay fallow in the ground.

But today, they’re psychological and social and political symbols and forces. And the strong forces aren’t always good. Just strong.

You can find some of our most timeless sayings reflected in the dynamics of this yin/yang circle. At the top, when the strong forces are at their peak, you can think of saying “pride goes before a fall.” And at the bottom, when the darker forces have become out of balance, you remember the saying that it is always darkest just before the new dawn.

You experience this rhythm in your own life, with its ups and downs. You experience it in your relationships, with give and take, strong and weak moments or periods. It’s what Hindus and Buddhists have called karma, the cosmic law of cause and effect.

All actions have consequences. You can see this in nature, especially now. We have allowed a very high level of destructive omissions from vehicles and factories for years, to increase the profits of the owners and stockholders. Those emissions led to global warming, which has led to the melting of the ice caps. Many scientists are saying these changes in the balance of the atmosphere were the root causes of the record number of destructive hurricanes we have been having. Not only is it not nice to fool with Mother Nature, you can’t get away with it for long. All actions carry within them the seeds of their own undoing. It is about as cosmic a law as we have.

These risings and fallings of strong and weak forces are the dynamics of all life. If you are in a relationship and you fail to address important issues for too long, forces will rise from the depths of one or both of you that will become more dissatisfied until something erupts.

Want a faster and worse eruption? Try betraying the trust of your partner. Lies, betrayals, brutality, violence – all these things carry the seeds of their own demise, as the forces of yin and yang do. And the opposing forces represented in the “seeds” – those small circles – will arise in time to reverse the direction of relationships, even nations.

And it works the other way, too. Plant seeds of trust and compassion, and see how they change the people around you, and the atmosphere of your life. Take advantage of people, you plant seeds of uprising and vengeance. Empower and educate them, and you can raise citizens and neighbors with strong bonds.

I grew up in such an empowering time. The GI Bill after WWII let more Americans go to college than ever in our history. The Marshall Plan invested huge sums of money to help the people we had just defeated in the war get back on their feet and rebuild. Those were the actions that earned America the respect of most of the world, as a moral leader.

Now, the tide has turned, as it does, and our nation’s spirit is greedier, harsher. How can we be the only developed country that doesn’t provide health care for all its citizens? How can that have happened in America? How can we possibly be arguing, as the Vice President did this week, for the right to torture prisoners without restraint? How could leaders lead us into a war by manufacturing claims about weapons of mass destruction and a tie between Iraq and the attacks of 9-11 that they knew never existed? All these actions are strong, but they carry the seeds of their own undoing. How can leaders ask our young soldiers to die in a war of imperialism and greed, and then vote to cut veterans’ benefits by $25 billion? Such deceit and betrayal carry their own undoing in them, just as Hindus observed in their law of karma thirty centuries ago.

Well, you can extend this list of questions as well as I can. In the yin/yang picture, these are pictures of yang at its fullest and most arrogant size.

These are very strong forces, but they are not forces of life. Every new news story carries more facts about the deceit at all levels.

But the other voices are rising. This week, the first indictment came, for the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United States. And Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, also had a meeting with President Bush’s criminal defense lawyer, the content of which was not revealed.

The media are starting – though weakly – to write more critically of the President, and to show him in more awkward poses rather than the staged photo-ops. This is a shift in emphasis. It’s rounding the top of the circle, moving from one kind of force to its opposite.

Cindy Sheehan’s witness has had a big effect. I was visited this week by a local woman who won a Best of Austin award for her idea of putting up billboards of conscience along I-35. She came to talk about billboards and posters outside many church entrances that might simply say “Thou Shalt Not Torture.” That is a very different kind of voice. You can feel the difference. 70% now disapprove of the war. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.

And the rise of fundamentalism isn’t as strong or enduring a force as the media and others are trying to make it. It is tempered, for instance, by the seldom-publicized fact that new studies are showing that only about 21% of Americans attend church regularly. We are a far more secular society than we are being led to believe. (Studies done by Kirk Hadaway, who has written a dozen books in the field.)

I’m speaking this Wednesday from the capital steps for a group that is part of a national effort to move for the impeachment of President Bush. Does it have a realistic chance? I don’t know, but it’s important that these voices be heard, and it feels right to be a part of them.

Europe is rejecting the US control of the Internet. That’s a huge move. China holds so much of our debt it could bankrupt us in a heartbeat if it thought it could find other adequate markets – or calculated that it was worth making that power play. Citizen groups and lawyers around the country are rising to take on corporations, to try and get corporate money out of elections – the things that our elected officials haven’t had the gumption to do.

I think all of these new voices are voices of truth, of life, of justice and compassion. Proposition 2 will probably pass by a large margin: its counterpart passed in Michigan earlier by a vote of more than 60%, as it has done in a couple dozen other states. At least we’re just following the parade it bigoted Bubbadom, rather than leading it. But the bigotry and hatred that produced these bills carry the seeds of their undoing, too. I think the rise of this new bigotry is a sunset, not a sunrise.

Why does this matter? For several reasons. First, these are the forces that make up the atmosphere of our society and the stresses in all of our lives. And to feel that we’re passing over the top of this yin/yang circle, is to feel a surge of life coming.

All these voices of life and compassion are holy voices, and should be encouraged. You’ll hear those voices of life and compassion in this church in as many ways as we can manage. You heard these voices singing out through the piece the choir sang this morning, that wonderful piece by “Sweet Honey in the Rock.”

So I am optimistic this Halloween. I think we see the signs of turning toward a more honest, healthy and empowering direction that we’ve needed for a long time.

It is almost impossible to kill the human spirit. Life is profoundly good, and that goodness may start to define us in the near future. People are still falling in love, parents are still having children and excited by their coming and their being. And while it’s easy to blame “the government,” we have many people in this room who work for the government. And most people who work for the government are good people who want to make a positive difference. After all, Patrick Fitzgerald works for the government, too.

The beauty of the universe isn’t playing to a passive audience. It’s an interactive game. We’re all a part of it, each in our own small but important way.

Halloween is about bringing the shadow sides up to the surface, to restore balance. Usually, those forces are a little scary, and Halloween is spooky. But the point isn’t to scare us; it’s to help integrate us and help us become more authentic and power-filled. Because an authentic person rejuvenates the world.

And so I hate to risk upsetting you with this big bunch of optimism, but I’m optimistic. Happy Halloween!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

23 October 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

NOTE: This is the third of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia.

Prayer

So often the stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone of the building we really need.

Let us ask whether it has happened in our own lives. Have we rejected insights and unpleasant truths we should instead be building our lives around?

Have we adopted tough, rigid values that have damaged the compassionate and vulnerable connections with the people around us?

Have we rejected tender mercies as too soft, too weak, and traded them for too much tough love?

Have we made such a habit of associating only with our own kind of people, that the richness of the larger human community is slipping through our fingers and our lives?

So much in building depends upon the cornerstone. Are we building our lives and relationships in solid, honest and loving ways? Or is there a large stone missing, a cornerstone that we finally need to bring into our lives and into our relationships?

So often the stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone of the building we really need.

Let us attend to the building of our selves, our souls, our relationships and our world.

Amen.

SERMON: Liberal Religion, Part Three

The Religion of Jesus vs. the Religion About Jesus

You probably aren’t aware of what a significant day this is. For today, October 23, 2005, is the 6009th birthday of the universe! Yes, according to Archbishop Ussher’s seventeenth-century calculation, made by adding up all the days he found in the Bible, he concluded that the world was created on October 23, 4004 B.C. Pretty exciting. Also pretty absurd.

Yet that absurdity is part of one of the main styles of religion that exist within Christianity, so it’s worth understanding those styles, and the implications of that absurdity.

Within the tradition of Christianity, there are two distinct and diametrically opposed religions. They have almost nothing to do with each other, and both began in the first century, about thirty to forty years apart.

The first is the religion of Jesus, which can be found in his most profound teachings. The second is the religion about Jesus, which is called Christianity. The differences between them are sometimes almost total, and they had two very different origins. So I want to talk about these two religions this morning, because those two styles of religion – the liberal and the literal, the religions of trust and of fear, of love and of hate, seem to be eternal parts of the human imagination, wearing the costumes of the culture and era in which they appear in each of their new forms.

Let’s start with the religion of Jesus. We know almost nothing about the man. We think he was born around 6 or 7 BC, but we don’t know. The tradition says his father was a carpenter, and that he may have been one too. We don’t know. He seems to have been born and raised in Galilee, a country north of Israel, in very complex and contentious times.

There was no unifying identity in Galilee, and many little religious and ethnic groups lived together without sharing a lot of values or traditions. The conquests of Alexander the Great’s Greek army and then the Roman army had destroyed all the temples that had served as the unifying centers of the several different religious and ethnic groups in the area. The different religious and ethnic groups living together didn’t share enough social or ritual identity to provide a cultural center. Jews wouldn’t eat pork or shellfish. Greeks, who were often their neighbors, loved both.

It was a time of great religious experimentation. Religious entrepreneurs abounded. A dozen religions and mystery cults flourished. The cult of Isis and Osirus was popular, as were Dionysian festivals and meetings of the new religion of Mithraism, from which Christianity took much of its structure.

And there were great animosities between some groups in particular. The Samaritans hated the Jews and the Jews hated the Samaritans. Each considered the others to be half-breeds. And Greeks, Jews, Samaritans and others were all under the rule of the Roman Empire, whose gods were more like social binding agents than the markers of deep personal beliefs.

Each little group had its own stories, and each of their stories tended to make them the center of the universe. As small stories always do, they were too small to include or care for those not in their club. In this respect, their world was a lot like our own.

Jesus had been a disciple of John the Baptist, a very charismatic teacher who said the world was ending and the kingdom of God would be coming with judgment and wrath. After John’s murder, Jesus emerged as a new charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him.

But Jesus’ message was radically different. His was not a supernatural message. He didn’t think the kingdom of God was coming at all. He thought it was, at least potentially, already here. That phrase “the kingdom of God” was a popular phrase in the first century, and a lot of groups used it. It meant the best kind of world, the world where compassion and justice ruled rather than the values that almost always rule us.

John the Baptist’s supernatural religion had said there was nothing we could do, that it was all in God’s hands. We had to wait for God to act. Jesus reversed it. He said only we could bring about the kingdom of God, and that it would be here when we treated one another like brothers, sisters and children of God. No short-cuts and no magic: God was waiting for us to act.

He attacked the Jewish identity that exalted Jews over Samaritans and others. But if he had been a Samaritan, he would have attacked their small, exclusive and judgmental rules. What was distinctive about Jesus was that he had that kind of grand vision that we associate with history’s greatest sages and prophets. He thought he saw how to make the world whole, and he put the ball squarely in our court.

He had no creeds, nothing people were required to believe. He didn’t seem to care what they believed. He never spoke of heaven or hell, though those who wrote the gospels a half century after he died put words about heaven in the mouth of their Jesus. But Jesus wasn’t concerned with rewards, punishments, or an afterlife. He was concerned with how people treated one another. He said they shouldn’t judge others, and that the quality of their faith was determined by how they treated “the least among them,” the poorest and most vulnerable people. This group “the least among you” is a moveable group, different for each of us, and sometimes changing several times a week or day. It is whatever person or group of people we are currently treating as things, as means to our ends, as less precious than we are. For some today, it’s gays or lesbians. For others, it’s independent women, or the poor, or liberals, or atheists, or fundamentalists.

Jesus didn’t think rich people could get to heaven, didn’t trust or respect the priests, and wasn’t interested in quoting the Bible as an authority. This was not a man you’d want at a polite cocktail party or a political gathering.

He spoke, they said, under his own authority. And this always irritates priests, who have decided they speak for God, since God couldn’t possibly believe any differently than they do. The teachings of the priests were seldom about behavior. Just do the rituals, recite the prescribed beliefs, love who they love and hate who they hate, and you’re saved – at least in the imaginations of the priests and the others in your particular club.

More accurately, Jesus spoke from within a vision of life that was so big it transcended the beliefs of any religion and the teachings, creeds and absurdities of the priests. He would have been bored or angry if someone tried to tell him on what day the universe was created. He didn’t care. He cared about how we were to treat one another while we are here, and those are much harder teachings because there is no place to hide from them, no simple creed to recite and shut off your responsibility toward others.

Few people seemed to understand Jesus, including his own followers. This isn’t covered over in the New Testament. It’s right out in the open. At one point, the author of the gospel of Mark has Jesus saying to his disciples, “You still aren’t using your heads, are you? You still haven’t got the point, have you? Are you just dense? Though you have eyes, you still don’t see, and though you have ears, you still don’t hear!” (Mark 8:17-18, Scholars’ translation from The Five Gospels, by the Jesus Seminar)

At one point, he even called his disciple Peter Satan, in the famous line “Get thee behind me, Satan!” He said this because Peter didn’t understand him or his mission. Peter kept wanting to exalt him as a superhero, and Jesus kept saying not to call anyone good but God.

The spirit of the religion of Jesus was profoundly liberal. He excluded no one, even made a Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous parables. It’s hard for us to imagine how disgusting it would have been for his fellow Jews to hear a story about the Good Samaritan. In the year 6, Samaritans had thrown human remains over the wall into the courtyard of the huge temple in Jerusalem. They did this to define the space, but also to make a particularly vulgar insult. The Jews hated them. Nobody could imagine linking the idea of a Samaritan with the idea of a good person – and Jesus made the Samaritan a better model than the priest and the Levite. Today, to get such an effect, you might have to tell the story of “The Good Terrorist.”

He saw God as a God of love, not judgment or exclusion, and told people not to judge, not to puff themselves up, not to wave their good deeds about for others to see, because it was phony, and you can’t do honest religion with that kind of phoniness.

The truth is, that while the religion of Jesus was profound and timeless, it would never be very popular, either then or now. It’s too hard.

After he died, maybe in the year 30, maybe a little later, there were groups of people who collected his sayings, and wrote some others in his style, to augment them. They saw his sayings as offering wisdom for living wisely and well here and now, and they passed them around, talked about them, and saved them.

But there is something remarkable about this group of people, who you could call Jesus People, but not Christians, for they had never heard of Christ. They didn’t consider him a savior, a son of God, or a miracle-worker. They didn’t even tell a story about his arrest, trial or crucifixion. In fact, they seem never even to have heard of these stories. They just knew and loved his teachings, as some of them could remember hearing them from Jesus. (This fascinating story can be read in the now-classic book by New Testament scholar Burton Mack called The Missing Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins.)

What this means is that the biography of Jesus had not been written yet. He had died, but nobody had invented his life yet. He was just a teacher who even the gospels described as a glutton and a drunkard, who hung around with the outcasts and prostitutes, and taught really disturbing things. But for many groups of people in the 30s, 40, 50s and 60s, Jesus wasn’t any kind of a savior, miracle worker or son of God. This is remarkable. Because – think about this with me – if they had believed this man was born of a virgin, or a son of God, or a miracle-worker or a savior, or rose from the dead or walked on water, they could not have left that out! Can you imagine people saying “Well, this guy was a son of God and all that stuff, but forget it. We just want to talk about his teachings.” It’s not possible! If the story had existed, if they had ever heard it, that supernatural story would have trumped a mere collection of teachings. But the religion of Jesus didn’t have a Christ, just a Jesus. In the 30s, Christ had not yet been invented.

The religion about Jesus seems to have originated with Peter, the one Jesus called Satan because he couldn’t understand either Jesus’ teachings or his sense of mission. Peter was also the one who denied Jesus three times when he was arrested, claiming he never knew the man.

And in a favorite line of mine, Roman Catholic scholar Thomas Sheehan has written “And Peter continued his denial of Jesus by inventing Christianity.” Roman Catholicism considers Peter to be the first Pope.

The Christ myth was constructed two or three decades after Jesus died. And to turn him into a savior and a god-man, the early Christians patterned him after most of the other god-men and saviors well known in the culture at the time.

So like many Greek and Roman gods, he was born of God and a young woman. He was given a virgin birth, but virgin births were a dime a dozen in the first century. Even Caesar Augustus, who had died in August of the year 14, was awarded a virgin birth by the Roman Senate a month later.

The category of savior figures was a genre in the first century. There were things that would-be saviors needed to be able to do. So the life of Jesus as the Christ was patterned after the well-known savior figures already known to most people of the time. Like the Greek Aesculapius, Jesus raised men from the dead and gave sight to the blind; like Attis and Adonis, Jesus is mourned and rejoiced over by women. His resurrection took place, like that of Mithra, from a rock tomb. And like Dionysus, Jesus turned water into wine, and his body and blood were symbolically eaten by worshipers.

In Christianity, everything Jesus cared for has been thrown aside. Now Jesus has been turned into a god-man and a supernatural savior. And once again, there isn’t much we need to do except believe the stories being taught by the new priests. Once again, there is our in-group, and everyone else is the out-group, a fit target for scorn or hatred. This was the situation Jesus spent his whole life fighting against! All religious wars have been designed to kill or eliminate those who wouldn’t get in line behind the story of the priests of the day. Jumping ahead more than a thousand years, remember that the Crusades were undertaken to kill all the Muslims. And the Christian soldiers were promised a trip to heaven if they died in this holy war, just as the Islamic Jihadists are promised by Muslim fundamentalists today.

In a sentence, Christianity – the religion about Jesus – has been the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus, ever since Jesus called Peter Satan.

It was those who followed the story put together by Peter and Paul who put together the gospels, forty to eighty years after the man Jesus had died. And the victors write the history, as well as the gospels. No, the gospels were not written by disciples or by eye-witnesses. Mark and Matthew were given their names in the second century by a Catholic bishop named Papias, who thought it would sound better if the gospels were written by disciples.

But the difference between the two religions is fundamental, profound, and often deadly. Jesus hit people between the eyes with his demand that they treat all humans as equally children of God. The religion about Jesus demanded obedience to their teachings, not his, and to their ever-changing and usually strange creeds. Catholics teach that there is no salvation outside of the church. Jesus never talked about salvation at all. Baptists say Presbyterians, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists and just about everyone else is going to hell. Jesus never talked about heaven or hell at all – though the community that wrote the Gospel of John put words in his mouth sixty years after he died, that made it seem otherwise.

If you look back through the history of Christianity for its absurdities, as many like to do, you will find virtually all of the absurdities in the religion about Jesus, but almost never in the religion of Jesus. Like people saying Jesus was both God and man, when there has never been a theologian who could make coherent sense of such an absurd statement except as poetry. Churches exhorting believers to go into holy wars and kill other people, as they are now exhorting American Christian Soldiers to kill people in Iraq who look a whole lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. It’s absurd. They’re also saying the universe is just 6,000 years old, and may well agree with the 17th century Archbishop Ussher that today is the universe’s birthday. It’s a dangerous kind of absurdity.

Voltaire once said that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities. That’s why absurdities like thinking this is the universe’s 6009th birthday are potentially so dangerous. Because those conditioned to believe that are also conditioned to believe that teaching about “Intelligent Design” is intelligent, or that God hates homosexuals, or wants America to rule the world, or invade Iraq, take its money and oil, and kill anyone who gets in the way.

I know many people who call themselves Christians who reject this kind of Christianity. What they are saying is that they prefer the religion of Jesus, the teachings of a holy spirit rather than a bigoted and deadly spirit.

When you compare the teachings of Jesus with the religion about him created by far lesser people, it is easy for Christians and non-Christians alike to hate the religion that has so often served as the enemy of the teachings of Jesus, the enemy of love, the enemy of the kingdom of God. But of all the people who might hate Christianity, none would hate it more than Jesus.

And Voltaire’s saying keeps haunting us, that notion that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities.

Today, we hear the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and a host of other morally and theologically reprehensible preachers say that Christianity demands that the rich not be taxed, that uppity women and all gays and lesbians be excluded and suppressed, and that you don’t have to act as Jesus wanted, you only have to do as today’s priests and politicians say. It’s hard to imagine a teaching designed as more of an insult to the man Jesus. It is the new crucifixion of Jesus. And today, Jesus is being crucified by Christians.

And when you think of the times that Christianity has been combined with state power, as is happening now in our country, it is always the religion of the priests, the religion about Jesus, but almost never the religion of Jesus.

Proposition Two is coming up for passage on November 8th, to add an amendment to the Texas constitution forbidding any area of Texas to give gay couples status or rights similar to marriage. This is an excellent example of this religion Jesus would have hated. I suspect it will pass by an embarrassing margin, and the Christian churches will be able to take major credit for passing it. That’s what I mean by saying the religion about Jesus is, as it has often been, the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus.

Now what does any of this have to do with you?

For one thing, since we are hearing a low form of Christianity being increasingly mixed in with our government and our war, it is important to be able to point out that this is a religion, filled with bigotries and hatreds, that is a complete betrayal of the teachings of Jesus. We don’t have to be against religion to be against the religious right; we only have to be against dishonest and ungodly religion. We can attack the religion about Jesus in the name of the religion of Jesus – which is what Jesus would have done.

For another, it’s important for us to understand that virtually all liberal Christians in the country would agree with us in this. I have now set up the Round Robin series of guest preachers for January, when we’ll have a Muslim preacher and three Christian preachers. All three of those Christian ministers are trying to stand up for the religion of Jesus against their churches who have nearly beat it to death with the religion about him. We’re all on the same side, and it will strengthen us all to know that.

But there is another reason, and ironically it is profoundly Christian, from some of the best thought in that religion about Jesus. When you study the philosophy of religion, you learn that, theologically, what the invention of the Christ figure represents is the realization that the only God we’re likely to find, now or ever, is the one that has taken human form and acted in loving and godly ways right here on earth. It seems that’s what Jesus taught in the Gospel of Thomas, too. That’s where he said that those who understood him became him: that we are all potentially incarnations of the divine. That’s really why Jesus is so beloved by so many Christians and non-Christians alike: because he was the embodiment of love for the least among us, the kind of love we have always thought of as God’s main job on earth.

That notion that we can become incarnations, embodiments, of a spirit of compassion and love that might rightly be called holy – that is a sacred notion, and a profound one.

Maybe, if Voltaire is right that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities, then maybe it’s also true that when we are led to profundities, we may also be led toward acts of compassion and courage, with the power to reconstitute, to save, both ourselves and our world.

We can only hope – but not only only hope.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

16 October 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

NOTE: This is the second of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia.

Prayer

We give thanks on this beautiful day for the beauty that is all around us and within us.

For the beauty of the earth, we give thanks, and we accept its stewardship.

For the love of family and friends – love we did not earn – we give thanks, and we vow to be worthy of it.

For the love that lives in our own hearts we give thanks. We hope and pray that we can nourish that love until we are filled to overflowing, and the world around us is fed with the overflow.

We are stewards of love and life that come through us more than they come from us. And only by sharing these gifts can they – or we – grow to full size.

We give thanks for the many gifts of life. Now it is also our turn. Let us share the gifts of life – with ourselves, with others, and with the often hungry and lonely world around us. Let us share our gifts.

Amen.

SERMON: Liberal Religion, Part Two

Three weeks ago, I began talking about liberal religion, and have decided to make it a short series of sermons, on the worldwide phenomenon of liberal religion that dates back to at least 2500 years ago.

This is a much broader sense of liberal religion than you’re probably used to, so let me take a couple paragraphs to explain.

Between about 2200 and 2800 years ago, in what one scholar named the Axial Age, religious thought all over the world turned on its axis. Before that, religions had been religions of fear, centered on offering bribes to the gods for our safety, trying to see the whole world as somehow revolving around our wishes, if only we could find the right sacrifice, the right ritual formula, the right appeasement. It was a million fearful people in search of a persuasive magician.

Ancient religions both East and West had human sacrifice, meant to be the most precious gift they could offer, to bribe the gods and gain favor. It was the picture of powerless and frightened humans trying to bribe a sort of cosmic Alpha Male or tribal chief for safety and favors. And echoes of all this can still be seen in the world’s major religions today.

But in this Axial Age, for reasons we don’t know, cultures that had no contact, no relation to one another, all began to see religion as looking for ways to live more wisely and well here and now, in spite of whatever slings and arrows Fortune might bring. This was the birth of seeing religion as a quest for wisdom rather than ways to bribe or fool the gods. It was the birth of the spirit of liberal religion, which has always been about the search for wisdom to help us live more wisely and well.

And while some religions, like Hinduism, kept their supernatural stories about some sort of afterlife, the focus in the emerging liberal styles of religion was on the here and now, on our souls, our own capacity for understanding and meaningful action.

There are many ways to sketch this history, both in long and short versions. I want to do it this time in just three or four sermons, so I’ll take what might feel like a simple approach.

Last time, I talked about how the messages of the emerging liberal religions can be found with and without supernatural stories, with or without gods. Hinduism taught reincarnation as a central belief. But in one of the Upanishads, you read “there is no consciousness after death.” (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad) You’re recycled. Your parts become the parts of other things. Nothing is destroyed, but your consciousness and memories and identity die with you. That’s a bold message in the history of religion. It’s a message that prophets proclaim and priests suppress.

Buddhism also teaches about reincarnation, which they inherited from their Hindu origins. Yet the more advanced Buddhist teachings don’t mention the supernatural stories, as much as they mention living in the here and now, and outgrowing our need for illusions. This is the spirit of liberal religion in Buddhism.

And Taoism and Confucianism are all about how to live, with almost no supernatural stories to sugarcoat their teachings.

The best teachings of religion can be done with or without supernatural stories. The Hindus had both the teachings and the stories, as Buddhism also did. And you know that Judaism, Christianity and Islam also come with both the teachings and the stories.

But it’s important to know that the stories are optional. And nobody taught us this better than the ancient Greeks. I want to talk about the Greeks today, because they introduced some very new ideas into Western religious thinking. Their concern, going all the way back to Homer, was with how we should live. They thought breeding mattered, but they focused more on how we can create noble humans out of the raw material we’re born with.

If you think about this with me, you’ll see how deeply logical they were about this. And you’ll learn a new word, which you might think at, first is completely foreign to anything in our world, but you’ll then see that it is absolutely fundamental.

The Greeks had both teachings and stories. But their gods were intended from the start as symbols of, projections of, the natural forces around and within us. Gods like Zeus and Poseidon were responsible for thunderstorms or storms at sea, as Demeter controlled the growing of the crops and Hestia gave us the subtle ability to add human feeling to worship and home. It was the presence of Hestia’s spirit that made a religious service feel like a worship service, and that made a house feel like a home.

Other gods and goddesses were personifications of some of the psychological styles that have always been part of human nature. The war-making, angry spirit familiar to many men came from Ares, the god of war. Our cleverness, as well as our ability to understanding subtle and sacred meanings in things came from Hermes. Women whose lives revolved around the care of their children were the daughters of Demeter, as those with a fierce and focused ambition claimed Artemis. Several years ago, I read a book on the gods of Greece by Arianna Huffington. She grew up in Greek culture, and said her life has been a series of trade-offs between the demands of Demeter – since she is a single mother of two daughters – and Artemis, since she is also extremely bright and very focused and driven.

So these gods and goddesses weren’t really about supernatural creatures, but about the dimensions of our world and of ourselves that always set the stage for our lives, and that seem to drive us through them. The Greek gods and goddesses – originally they had six male and six female deities – were aspects of the human experience writ large, rather than distant and unrelated powers we must appease. When Muslims say that Allah is closer to them than their own jugular vein, they are showing the kind of awareness from within which the Greek gods were created and clothed.

The Greeks did make sacrifices to them, especially Apollo and Athena. But it was more like trying to bring those facets of life into sharper focus, to feel their presence more fully – though they still hoped for favors.

But the other development of the Greeks is what concerns me more today. And this is where the famous Greek logic is especially logical. They believed that we create noble people out of the raw material we’re born with, and that we do it by shaping them in the form of the highest and noblest ideals we know. There are no gods in this picture, only humans, ideals, values and education.

Now if this is true, then the most sacred treasure of any society is precisely that collection of their highest and noblest ideals. Every citizen would be responsible for holding, serving, and passing them on. And that’s how the Greeks saw it.

Here’s your new word for the day. They had a collective noun that referred to all their highest ideals, the most sacred treasure of their civilization. That word was paideia. It was found in the roots of their words for both child (paidos) and education, just as we still find our Anglicized versions of it in our words pediatrics and pedagogy.

Every citizen, in every action, was responsible for upholding these highest ideals. A favorite story makes the point.

It involves Aristophanes, the great comic playwright. He’s the only comic playwright whose works survive, so for us he’s the best by default. But the Greeks thought he was great, too. And while the humor in his plays sounds like 14-year-old bathroom humor, his plays made points that were serious. Some historians think one of his plays (“The Clouds”) was the reason that Socrates was brought to trial and condemned to death for corrupting the youth by questioning the values of the paideia.

The story is about a scene witnessed between Aristophanes and a younger comic playwright, whose play had just won a gold medal in competition. (When the Greeks put on their Olympic games, and the Pythian games and others, they gave medals for athletics, and also for playwriting. They thought the whole person needed to be formed: mind, body and spirit.)

You might think old Aristophanes was congratulating the young writer, but he was reaming him. What he said, in essence, was “You simply went for laughs. You never presented or transmitted the paideia anywhere! You failed in the only sacred mission you had, and compared with that failure, all the gold medals in the world are worthless!”

It’s almost impossible to imagine such a scene today, isn’t it? We’re used to seeing writers rewarded for going only for the laughs. Then again, this young man in ancient Greece had also just won a gold medal.

But the soul of the Golden Age of Greece – the real gold – was a seriousness about preserving, presenting and transmitting the highest ideals they could articulate, knowing that without them, they were unlikely ever to mold the noblest sort of human beings, including themselves. That was a high point in human history, and you could argue that it produced the greatest outpouring of literary and artistic genius of any culture in history. This was secularism raised to its highest level. The word “secular” means to be concerned for this world. So it can overlap with the aims of liberal religion, but only when it’s raised to such a high level.

That old story with its commandment to serve only the highest ideals has been an inspiration to me in my own work ever since I read it over twenty years ago. But even with this story, you have probably still never heard of paideia. At least not in Greek. But you know it in Latin.

For a few centuries later, the Roman philosopher Cicero became acquainted with the ideals of the Greek culture, and with the word paideia. He realized that they had neither a word nor a concept in Latin like this. He also believed that this was one of the most important ideas in any civilization: the notion that we create noble people by molding them in the image of noble values. It’s how we become most fully human.

So Cicero continued to serve the aims of liberal religion through non-supernatural secular means, by coining a word to translate this into Latin. The word he coined was humanitas, which means roughly the essence of what it means to be most fully human. That word, and that concept, became the soul of the “humanities” and the liberal arts in Western educational curricula from his day to our own. These are the courses designed to make us more fully human: an aim we inherited from the Golden Age of Greece. It’s also the root of our word “humanism” which, at its best, still preserves the ancient Greek ideal of preserving and passing on the most sacred of ideals, without using any stories of gods at all.

Indeed, the Greeks were the first Mediterranean people to pass down their highest ideals without wrapping them in religious or priestly authority. Here was the essence of liberal religion, expressed in ordinary language, and expressed in some of the finest dramatic plays, poetry, philosophy, and athletic games our species has ever produced.

You might think that Greek philosophy doesn’t really have anything to do with religion, especially Christianity. You’d be wrong. It had almost everything to do with it. “Philosophy” means, “love of wisdom,” and the Greeks loved wisdom, or “Sophia.” But the Sophia they loved was not a collection of facts or abstractions. The kind of wisdom they loved was the wisdom to live by. After Socrates, it didn’t so much matter what you said, or how smart or wise it was. What mattered was who you were, and whether you had a right to speak such words, whether you had striven to embody them in your own life.

Beginning at least with Plato, philosophy was no longer about acquiring mere knowledge, but about questioning ourselves, because we have the feeling that we are not what we ought to be. (Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? p. 29) This started with Socrates, whose effect on some people was so much like a religious experience; it’s hard to know how it’s different at all.

For example, Plato records the words of Alcibiades, one of the prominent men whose life was changed by Socrates. “I was in such a state that it did not seem possible to live while behaving as I was behaving. He forces me to admit to myself that I do not take care for myself.” (Ibid. p. 31)

If this doesn’t sound profoundly religious, it should, because it is. No gods, no supernaturalism, no afterlife, no stories. Wisdom, stripped down to its most naked and arresting, with the power to bring people like Alcibiades forth in a kind of ancient altar call.

This is really what Greek philosophy was about: how to live. They weren’t trying to inform students as much as they were trying to form them, into the noblest sort of people, aware of themselves, their world, and inspired – even driven – to live according to only the highest of personal and moral values. Philosophy was a way of living, not a way of thinking.

They all agreed on this, even though the philosophers disagreed on other things.

The Stoics, who mixed ethics, astronomy, astrology and fate together, believed that everything was a result of the fates, everything that happened was part of a plan. If this sounds very Christian, it’s because the Christians took this attitude, and the structure for most Christian ethics, from the Stoics. So for the Stoics, it wasn’t important whether we were happy, but whether we lived right, served the Good, and always intended to do good.

The Epicureans didn’t think there was a plan. They thought life was essentially a crapshoot, that we were the playthings of Chance. And in this world, they said we need to be able to enjoy whatever our lot is. If it’s steaks, enjoy the steaks. But if it’s only bread and cheese, you should be able to enjoy that just as thoroughly. And what mattered most, they said, was friends: being part of a warm and loving community of friends. This is a teaching I don’t think Christianity ever picked up, unfortunately.

For Plato, it was living in harmony with the abstract Ideals: the notions of pure Beauty, pure Goodness, pure Justice, pure Truth, and striving to emulate them, to serve and become one with them. It was quite mystical, and Platonism is the style of thinking from which Christian mysticism was later derived.

And then there is that other Greek word which, like paideia, provided both the foundation and the transition from secular Greek philosophy to Christian theology: the word logos. It’s a hard word to translate. It referred to the logic of, structure of, essence and understanding of something, as well as the words we use to express all this. We find it in our words “psychology” (the structure and understanding of the psyche, or soul), anthropology (the understanding of humans), and the word “logic.”

For Heraclitus, it was all about the logos, the essence of what is most real and enduring, sort of the hidden Center of all reality. In the second and third centuries, when early Christian thinkers were trying to define just what this new religion was, they were exposed to, and accepted, the Greek notion that philosophy is a way of life, the way we should live here. And they accepted the notion that there was a logos, an invisible sort of structure and understanding, kind of the secret of life, that could be communicated to us, and which became the center of any worthwhile philosophy of living.

Not many Christians know this, but Christianity was first defended to Greek thinkers as a philosophy, a way of life. That’s also how Saint Augustine understood it. He agreed with Plato’s notion that philosophy meant living in the best way, being the best sort of person. Nietzsche once described Christianity as “Platonism for the masses,” and he could have had Saint Augustine in mind, for Augustine could have agreed with him.

Where the Christians thought they had the edge on Greek philosophy was in that idea of logos. For the Christians said they had the ultimate, the final, logos, in the person of Jesus Christ. The opening words of the Gospel of John are almost always translated as “In the beginning was the Word.” But the Greek word there is logos. Let me read it to you with the correct translation, and you can see in just a few sentences the modulation from Greek philosophy to Christianity as the ultimate philosophy:

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” (John, 1:1-4).

Now there. In just a few sentences, we moved from secular philosophy without gods or myths, right into Christianity with its God and its very different myths. Snuck in through that one hard-to-translate Greek word logos. And in the history of Western religious thought, it also happened almost that smoothly.

What’s this like? It’s like a holy spirit moving through time, granting life to those it touches, but wearing a hundred different costumes, each suited to the imagination of the ages in which it appears. It appeared first in the Upanishads, wrapped in their innumerable gods, their wonderful webs of myth and story, and cradled in the concept of reincarnation, which promised that we would have all the time we need to get it right.

Then in Buddhism it shed its gods and most of its supernaturalism. In Greek philosophy, it shed them completely, and brought at least the idea of a perfect human down to earth in plain talk.

And the Christians, writing further variations on this timeless theme, said they went one better. They said they had brought God himself, the Logos, down to earth, in human form, in the person of Jesus Christ, to teach us how to live.

Next time I’ll talk about the liberal religious spirit in Christianity. But you don’t get off easy, you know. We’re in dangerous territory here. We’re talking about how we should live, who we should be, and it isn’t just a sterile list of objective facts. It is the living spirit of liberal religion and of life, and it looks at you. It looks at you, and asks “What about you? Are you living as you should? Are you taking proper care for yourself? These aren’t just mind games, you know. There are lives at stake, and one of them is yours. So you: What about you?”