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© Davidson Loehr

Sally Miculek

9 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.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Miculek

My husband and I don’t have Cable. We don’t have satellite. We just have an antenna for our television, and sometimes find ourselves watching a little extra fuzz. A couple years ago, when we moved in together in anticipation of our coming nuptials, both of us looked forward to getting Cable hooked up. But then it just didn’t happen. We set up DSL. We signed up for Netflix. Finally, we talked it over and decided that maybe we don’t need all those extra channels after all. We get enough TV shows from Network Television, and the Netflix keeps us in a steady supply of movies, so my cinephile mate doesn’t think longingly about what he could be watching if we had HBO or the Independent Film Channel. Anything that comes on Cable that ends up good enough for us to want to watch it will come to DVD soon enough, and this way we get to skip the commercials!

Inevitably, one night as I was happily watching Antiques Roadshow or The American Experience, or some other vaguely wholesome PBS offering, the doorbell rang. I opened the door, encountering the ubiquitous Time Warner guy. He launched into his schpiel about the current offer from Time Warner, and how much money we’d save if we hooked up now, and what kind of introductory package we’d get, blah blah blah. I was in the process of turning him down when he looked around behind me, saw the television, and then stared blankly at me, incredulous. “You don’t want Cable?” “Nope.” “But you’re watching Public Television. Don’t you want better TV than that?”

Now, I realize that the poor Time Warner guy is programmed to tell people that Cable is way better than PBS, but come on! How on earth could the folks who brought us the Golf Channel possibly claim that what they’ve got to offer is somehow of higher quality than the Keno brothers? Are the Sopranos really much more interesting than a documentary on Appalachia? Needless to say, the poor guy didn’t get his commission that evening, and the Miculek household soldiers on in its Cable-free state, much to the shock of many friends and extend family members.

I’ll be the first to tell you I’m a media junkie. My VCR is programmed to record The O.C. And I admit it. I’m sure a lot of you are junkies, too, even though you may not watch shows about beautiful people in California. Maybe you don’t watch television at all. Maybe you’re addicted to your computer. Or books. I’m a junkie for media in most of its forms. My morning isn’t complete without Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep. I check multiple email addresses many, many times each day. I paid for New York Times Select so I can still read all the online articles I want. I choose purses and bags based on whether or not they’re likely to hold a copy of my trusty New Yorker and/or whatever book I may be reading at the moment. In short, I’ve got a lot of means at my disposal to tune out the world around me, and I’m a fervent user of them all.

But how do I keep from letting a small amount of media-induced isolation mushroom and truly cut me off from the things I love to do and the people I like to spend time with? I work on tilting the balance away from rampant media consumption and towards activities that encourage actively participating in my life. I record and watch two television shows on a regular basis. That number’s down from about four last year and about eight the year before. I still watch other TV, but I try not to let it become a priority. I try to make sure the books I read are good ones. I talk to people about what I’m reading, whether they’re going to read the same things or no. I jog. I use my husband’s new banjo habit and the endless practice sessions to help pass the time while I take on what would normally be tedious household tasks. I am definitely addicted, but at least I’m aware of the problem and am trying to do something about it. Maybe some of the folks in the congregation are on the same path. And perhaps someday we can all go toss our televisions and computers (figuratively, at least) off Mount Bonnell. Until then, though, a few minutes reading Maureen Dowd, or a little time spent dwelling on the trials and tribulations of the Cohen family isn’t going to kill us. And, no matter what, I’m keeping my books.

SERMON: Media Addiction

My name is Davidson and I’m a recovering television addict. That may sound silly, but it’s true. When I bought my house two years ago, I decided not to have cable connected. So for the past two years, I have not watched any television at home.

I made the decision to go cold turkey when I realized that I’d been watching an average of over four hours of television a night for several years, and couldn’t remember ever seeing anything I really needed to know, and very little that I could even remember.

Now I read more books, and go out to my shop and turn wooden bowls, and sometimes have dinner with friends – things I didn’t have time to do when my television addiction was in full swing.

Four hours a day may sound extreme, but it isn’t. An online Indian magazine just reported that in the twelve months from 20 September 2004 to 18 September 2005, the average American watched four hours and thirty-two minutes of television a day, and the television set was on for an average of eight hours and eleven minutes a day – the highest figure in the history of television. (http://www.Indiantelevision.com/, 29 September 2005)

Children spend more time watching television than they spend in school now, by over a hundred hours. They see an average of 30,000 commercials a year. At that rate, by age 65, they will have seen over two million television commercials. And the people who write commercials are much better storytellers and much better at appealing to their deep fears and wants than public school teachers are. After all, toy manufacturers spend 92% of their advertising budget on television ads.

In some important ways, television is the real teacher of our children. It’s where they learn the most powerful stories, see the most powerful images, where they learn how to look, what to wear, what to eat, and to a large degree who to be.

Still, is this really a spiritual or religious issue, or just the kind of rant you’d expect from a recovering addict?

It’s a spiritual matter, and I want to think about it with you in two different ways, one theological and one more down-to-earth.

Most of us grew up in the atmosphere of Western religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And all three religions make a big deal out of idolatry, the difference between worshiping gods and idols.

Here’s an easy lesson in Religion 101, on the difference between gods and idols. If you think in these terms, then it matters a lot what we worship, and whether it’s a god or an idol. To put that in ordinary language, it matters what values and ideals we put at the center of our life. We want to serve things with our life that serve us too, that make our life richer and more satisfying. Some theologians call these gods.

We all have them, whether we call them gods or just call them ideals and values. And we all make the same deal with them. See if this isn’t true for you. We make a kind of contract, a covenant.

We say “I’ll live my life in your terms. I’ll make you the center of my life and my energies and activities. I’ll serve you heart and soul. And in return, you must give me a life that will have been worth living.”

One person gives their life to working for justice as they define it. They’ll break dates to work at this, and gladly do this work rather than take a vacation or read a book about something completely unrelated to the kind of justice they want to see. And they do it gladly, because they believe that there is nothing that is more worthy of them and their time. They expect, when they look back in years to come, that they will be able to say, “I served this, I made it the center of my life, I made it my god, and it gave me a life I am proud to have lived.” If we can say that, we don’t ask much more.

But not everything we chase after can give us life. Some things we chase after were never really interested in us at all. They just use us for their own ends, and take life away from us, leaving us drained and empty and depressed. It’s such a shock when it happens. They were so seductive! We were so sure! It seemed so good!

This is what Buddhists or Hindus call the difference between living in illusions or maya, and living in reality. In Western religion, we call it the difference between serving gods and serving idols. And chasing after idols, like chasing after mirages or living in illusions, usually ends up by draining life from us rather than giving us more and deeper life. Because idols use their seductive powers to take us in, use us up, and throw us out.

This word “seduction” is the right word for what’s going on. It’s always surprising to learn that “seduction” comes from the same root as the word “education.” And the difference between the two words is precisely the difference between idols and gods, illusion and reality.

The root of both words is the “-duc,” which means “to lead.” So a conductor leads the musicians through the music, or leads his bus or train through the countryside. Induction leads you into something – the Army, or the Hall of Fame, perhaps. Education means to lead you outward, out of your smaller self into a larger and more adequate self. That’s what education is about. It’s why we go to school: to learn to become bigger, deeper, more aware and nuanced. We want to be led into a bigger sense of identity and a bigger life; we want to be educated.

And seduce? It means to lead astray: to lead off the path. To lead somewhere that doesn’t make you bigger or deeper or better. It means to lead you in ways that serve not you, but your seducer. Your seducer takes you in. You follow gladly, willingly, because you’ve been seduced but think you’re going to be educated. They you’re used to fill the seducer’s needs, used up, and tossed aside.

A seducer is an idol, a powerful but illusory presence that you want to follow but shouldn’t follow.

The oldest and most vivid story of seduction I know of comes from around three thousand years ago, in The Odyssey from ancient Greece. If you know the story, you’ll remember the scene where Odysseus’ ship must sail past the Sirens, those supernatural but deadly women who would seduce him and his crew with their Sirens’ Song. No one could resist that song, he was told. But he was curious. So he had his men tie him to the mast so he couldn’t escape, then had them fill their ears with wax so they couldn’t hear the seductive song, and they sailed by the island of the Sirens.

The Sirens called out, and even mighty Odysseus screamed for his men to turn to shore, to follow their seductive song. But they couldn’t hear him, so they kept sailing. If you looked closely on the shores of their island, you saw the many piles of bones bleached white by the sun and surf. That was all that was left of those who had followed the Sirens’ Song.

The seducers, like the Sirens, are only doing what comes naturally to them. They’re simply a lot better at it than you are, so they take you in. It’s so easy for them to take you in, and then to use you as they will. But anybody that easy to take in is hard to care very much about, and they don’t. You can see why so many people want to say that whatever else you could say about God, God is Love. Because love wouldn’t do that to you. Seduction would, but not God, not Education, not anything that cared about you.

What does this have to do with television? Seduction means leading astray, leading away from wholeness, truth, health, into a direction that serves the seducer at the expense of the seduced – in any field. Television distracts us from life in order to draw us into crowds to hawk their wares to.

You might ask, “What about news? We need the news!” I would ask you to think about how much news we get, how complete it is, how reliable it is, and whether news programs, just like other entertainment programs, aren’t really trying to draw a crowd for their sponsors, rather than educate them. If “news” is the information that keeps people free, I don’t think there has been much news on television for decades.

And look how the time is actually spent on news programs. About 30% of the total time is taken with commercials. Nearly 54% of the time is spent on war, crime and terror, and one of the slogans of nearly all news programs is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Is this education, or seduction? Do they want to serve you, or use you?

“Well,” you might think, “if the world is really that full of war, crime and terror, then don’t we need to know about it?” Well, we need to know why there is war, who is making money from it, what deceptions were used to trick others into losing their lives there. It would help to know the economic background of most of our crime, why people feel driven to crime in order to get by. But we don’t hear these things.

And the focus on crime and terror aren’t to educate us. They are the evening news version of “If it bleeds, it leads.” It’s car-crash journalism, meant to draw a crowd of passing sailors to its shores, like the Sirens.

For example, during one five-year period (1990-95), television coverage of homicides went up by 336% — nearly three and a half times. Yet during that same period, the actual homicides in the real world went down by 13%. That’s not news. That’s a Siren Song, a seduction, an idol.

And it’s not a secret. Four out of five Hollywood executives believe there is a link between TV violence and real-life violence. Over nine out of ten children say they feel upset or scared by violence on television.

The longest we go on television without a commercial break is eight minutes. Violence, terror, murder, sex and brutality are featured on the news for the same reason they are featured on so many regular television shows: because they draw a crowd that can be used by the superb seduction of the advertising industry to reward their sponsors. Is this education or seduction? Is it serving us or duping us?

Spending an average of four and a half hours a day watching television means that we are spending one quarter of our waking time, and nearly all our leisure time, sitting in front of the tube.

When I was watching an average of four hours of TV a night, I watched mostly the Law & Order-type shows, or CSI, or Monday Night Football. I found that I was more paranoid, more aware of danger, less aware of grace or kindness, more suspicious of others, and when I dreamed, the dreams often had violent themes. Since I stopped watching TV, I seldom dream, and almost never have violent themes in my dreams or my waking imagination. It is simply easier to see and believe in the loving and kind parts of people, and to see violence and deceit as sins against humanity, rather than the way things are in a dog-eat-dog world.

Even when I watched good dramas – and I thought a lot of the Law & Order shows were good dramas, well-acted – the aftertaste was violent. I never felt better after watching them, never felt uplifted, never had my faith in myself or in humanity strengthened, only weakened.

And so, like many addicts, I don’t have much good to say for the drug that seduces me so easily.

But I don’t hate television because:

1. of car-crash journalism that draws crowds to sell them things rather than to educate and enlarge them

2. or because it seduces Americans into living vicariously within the stories it spins to attract them, while its commercials help them run up their credit card debt to an average of about $10,000 at over 22% interest.

3. I don’t hate television because it tries to seduce us into wanting material wealth when what we need is spiritual wealth.

4. Or the reality TV that both reflects and programs the selfish and deceptive behavior used to get ahead while downplaying or ignoring our humanity, our decency and our compassion.

5. And I don’t hate news shows that titillate rather than educate, and turn serious debates into the shallow sensationalist joust of the day.

6. Or the fact that after a few years of watching over four hours of TV a day, I still can’t remember anything I learned that I needed to know.

7. And I don’t hate television because I resent the fact that commercials work, and I, like millions of others, keep buying things I don’t need.

Well … yes I do. Yes I do hate television for this, for all these reasons. But I hate it the way an alcoholic hates alcohol, because if it’s on I’m drawn to it like a moth to a flame or a sailor to bone-covered shores. I watch it like an idiot. When I’m on the road, I sit in front of the TV in my motel room for four hours every night. The next morning, I can’t remember what I watched or why, and am glad to return home to a TV set that only plays movies and videos on how to turn bowls.

You may not be addicted. Your self-control may be much better than mine – unless you’re also watching four and a half hours a night. But television is not an innocuous presence in our homes. I think it’s a dangerous one.

Because we are shaped by the most powerful stories we learn, molded by the ideals and values that we absorb. All of education and all of religion know and rely on this fact. So do advertisers. But education at its best is about leading us out of ourselves into a bigger identity and more satisfying life. Religion at its best is about inducting us into a Sangha, a community of faith where life is valued and only the best in us is encouraged. And the media, I think, neither educate nor induct, but seduce. They lead astray. They are the Siren Songs of today, and few of us seem very good at resisting them.

Think about it this way: Would you invite a storyteller into your home every night to tell you stories of blood, greed, murder and violence, leaving you more fearful and paranoid, robbing you of the time you might have spent doing things together? And then the next day, would you rush out to buy things you don’t need, so that the sponsors would send this same toxic storyteller back into your home again the next night? No, of course, you wouldn’t do that. Or do you?

A few years ago, the Surgeon General of the United States sponsored Turn off the TV weeks. When the Surgeon General sponsored a Turn off the TV week a few years ago, he said, “We are raising the most overweight generation of youngsters in American history … This week is about saving lives.” The surgeon general says television is bad for physical health. But most of it is just as bad for emotional, psychological and spiritual health.

A second grader named Drew Henderson of Donora, PA said “I really didn’t like TV-Turnoff Week except that I did notice that my grades went up and I was in a good mood all week.”

So I wonder. What if we could kick the TV habit, stop spending most of our leisure time ingesting stories that make us more afraid, more suspicious of our fellow humans, and more insensitive to real-world violence? And what if, instead, we had more time to spend with those we love – learning how to turn that love into memories worth having – and our real-world performance went up and we were in a good mood. If we could do that, would that be a bad thing?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

25 September 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 first of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Evangelizing Liberal Religion,

David Borden

Good morning. My Name is David Borden and I am here to share my thoughts on Evangelizing Liberal Religion. As you know, the numbers of Unitarian Universalists have stayed stagnant for some time. Meanwhile, evangelical Christian groups have seen an increase in numbers. Why is that?

I believe there are two reasons and we should learn from them:

1) Religions that grow pursue their faith with vigor.

2) Religions that grow have members that can articulate their main beliefs to potential members.

I did a bit of comparison shopping on the web. I found thousands of evangelical Christian sites. The first one I looked at was called evangelize.com. At the bottom of the home page there was a little box with a counter furiously running up numbers. It professed to be the number of people who had died since I had opened the page. Unfortunately, it stated, “the vast majority of them are going to hell.”

Another part of the site had a menu of 27 lessons to read and then act upon. Among the ones that caught my attention were:

-Your Legal Rights and witnessing in public

-100 responses to hard questions

 -Use Halloween to win souls

And my personal favorite:

-Throw an evangelistic Super Bowl Party!

Now the idea of winning converts during the Janet Jackson half-time show may be ridiculous, but it perfectly illustrates to what lengths the Christian Right will go in order to get their message out.

I also searched “evangelical liberal religion” and “evangelical Unitarian Universalism.” I got very few hits. Perhaps because these are oxymorons. I tried to read some of these pages, but my mind kept wandering. I wanted to get back to evangelize.com and watch the tally of the damned. I wanted to read about that Superbowl Party. What was wrong with this picture? Why were these UU articles about the need for evangelizing so boring?

I was telling my wife, Tamara, about this experience. She got right to the point and asked, “Why do you even care?”

Good question, I thought. And it is the question we all need to ask ourselves before we hit the street corners with soapboxes and bullhorns..

I care because I don’t wish to live in a world in which irrationality is a virtue, thinking is a crime, and religion is used to shackle people instead of setting them free.

So, what is the alternative? Why, Liberal Religion, of course. But what is Liberal Religion? It is when the Buddha said that salvation is to be found in the realization of truth. It is in Islam when it is said that giving alms is good, but giving anonymously is divine. It is the Tao Te Ching when it is said that only difficult things are worth pursuing.

But my favorite example of Liberal Religion is Jesus when he said to turn the other cheek. Many people take this as a call to pacifism. But I don’t think so. It is a call to subversion of the established social order. My wife and I lived in Morocco for 5 years. In Islamic countries you learn to do everything with your right hand because your left is reserved for less glamorous duties, and, thus, unclean. Imagine for a moment that you are a filthy commoner in need of a good slapping by a high-class gentleman. He is going to hit you with his left hand. You have no recourse because he is powerful. Striking back would only get you flogged mercilessly or killed. Both of these outcomes are counterproductive to your cause. Your only recourse is your wit. Turn your other cheek. Make him slap you next time with his right hand, his clean hand. Look the powerful dead in the eye and make him defile himself or yield.

That is what it means to be a practitioner of Liberal Religion.

Our call is one of sedition. It is not maintaining the status quo. It is about changing the world. Nothing worth doing is easy. If your religion is not worth fighting for, or proclaiming from the tree tops, you need to find a new one. Liberal Religion should not only be about guest speakers and green sanctuaries. It should be about your very soul and how you wish to live your life and in what world you wish to live it.

Your call today is to go out there and get slapped.

SERMON: Liberal Religion, Part I

Between about 2200 and 2800 years ago, in locations all over the world, liberal religion was born. It was and remains the hardest, most honest, and most liberating religious path the world has ever known, though it is not for the frightened.

Liberal religion isn’t small like a denomination or even a religious tradition. It is at the heart of all honest religion in all times and places. It is as universal, as honest and as infinite as anything on earth that involves humans.

Even though it wasn’t born until a few thousand years ago, it is really older than God, older than all the gods, this liberal religion tradition. It has been served under many names in most of the world’s great religions both Eastern and Western. Yet the various kinds of liberal religion have more in common with each other than any of them have with the literal religions in their own tradition. So liberal religion offers ready-made bridges of understanding and friendship to all the world’s people.

When a liberal style of religion is being served with honesty and courage – both are required – you don’t have to check your brain at the door; you don’t have to check your heart at the door, either. You can bring all of you inside, including your doubts and your flaws. Since it is honest, it need not fear questions. And in no liberal religion on earth are you expected to be perfect. They aren’t about saving you from sin; they’re about recognizing your innate blessings, and helping you to become more whole, to live a life of greater integrity and authenticity, by showing you the fairly narrow and hard path of integrity and authenticity.

The insights of liberal religion can, if you are open to them, replace our tendency to judge others with our capacity to love them. And it contains the truth that can set you free. But these truths of liberal religion are dangerous to discuss in their naked form, and almost never are. Usually, they are clothed in the many languages of myth, or mystery and miracle, because the message feels so much more welcoming when it comes in friendly costume. But sometimes, it comes naked.

We often say we want the straight truth, not stories, and we often say that’s what liberal religion is about. I’d say no, that’s what logical positivism or sterile mechanics are about. The truth that can set us free, I think, is usually a bit different. And while liberal religion may have the best handle on that truth, it often has the worst selection of vehicles for that truth, since we are often not very good at learning the important languages of symbol, metaphor and myth. So let’s begin.

Hinduism

Twenty-five centuries or more ago, the Upanishads appeared in ancient Hinduism, and they signaled the birth of the liberal spirit in that tradition. They said “Do you sense the vast creative power of the universe? The power that creates all things, sustains all things, and claims them all in the end? Well, you don’t have to bow down or feel insignificant, because you are part of that power. You are part of the infinite and the eternal, just as you are. If you deny God, they say, you deny yourself. If you affirm God, you affirm yourself. Today, we sometimes like to say we are made of stardust; it’s a kind of rational, semi-scientific attempt at a spiritual perspective. But the ancient Hindus were way ahead of us. Oh, they would say, but you have so completely understated the facts. We are not merely made of the dust and atoms of stars which exploded long ago; we are made of the unimaginable powers that created the stars, and which destroyed them.

And so they write, “Seek to know him from whom all beings have come, by whom they all live, and unto whom they all return. He is Brahman.” (Taittiriya Upanishad, p. 110)

And what is this Brahman thing about? What is it made of? It sounds like another costume for the Western God: some kind of Fellow giving orders. But it isn’t, not at all. Here’s what they wrote, more than twenty-five centuries ago: “Brahman is joy: for from joy all beings have come, by joy they all live, and unto joy they all return.” (“Taittiriya Upanishad,” p. 111)

Can you feel how much more healthy and whole and life-affirming this is than most that we hear from Western religions?

But Hinduism offers more than just this. It also offers you a roadmap of how to navigate this life here and now – the one where you do have consciousness. It’s about karma. The rules are very simple.

As you act in your life, so you become. If you do good, you become good; if you do evil, you become evil. By pure actions you becomes pure; by evil actions you becomes evil. (p. 140)

So the power you need is within you, an essential part of you. It includes both the power to create and destroy. And then, when Hinduism adds reincarnation, you have all the time you need to work through your karma. It sounds, and has been heard as, very comfortably wrapped in mythology, very friendly. Like the Western script, it looks like you never really have to die; you just live forever in one way or another.

But once in awhile, they would say it straight out and tell the naked truth. In the Upanishad considered the most authoritative of all, after talking about this atman-Brahman stuff and the reincarnations, the author slips in this amazing line. Just for the record, he’s saying, “there is no consciousness after death.” The other character this author created is stunned, amazed that after all these stories about reincarnation, eternity and the rest, he’s saying No, you’re done after one. Your memories, experiences, loves, disappear from all consciousness when you die. This is it. (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, p. 132)

That’s about as naked as the truth gets, but throughout the ages most have not found much comfort in it. It may be true, but it isn’t a very interesting story, and mostly we’d rather have good stories to live within.

Buddhism

Buddhism was born out of Hinduism about 2500 years ago, and it has a thousand stories, myths, images – something for everyone. You can see today’s Buddhists lining up in temples throughout Thailand paying the monks to make lucky charm bracelets for them, like the Rosary beads many Catholics use, or the St. Christopher statues they used to have on the dashboards of their car as supernatural lucky charms. They have the costumes, the saffron robes, the shaved heads, begging bowls, and a hundred other props that give Buddhism its rich tapestry of colors and customs. And for most Buddhists, reincarnation still means, as it does for most Hindus, another life – with consciousness.

But under the wonderful myths and images, Buddhism tells the naked truth more bluntly than any religion in the world. Our suffering in life, the Buddha said, comes from the fact that we live in illusions. And waking up – Buddhism is about waking up – means outgrowing our need for illusions, including our comforting ones.

And on what can you lean? What do the Buddhists give you at their most blunt level? A famous story tells it.

A student came to a Buddhist monastery to live and study. He was very anxious about finding the center of life, that on which he could lean, when he saw the Teacher of the order. “Tell me, Master,” he pleaded, “What is the Buddha?” The master studied him for a second, and said “The Buddha is the mind.”

For ten years, the young man studied everything about the mind that he could. He gained a lot of knowledge, certain that somehow this knowledge would add up to a foundation of rock on which he could stand securely forevermore. His anxiety went away. And ten years later, he returned for a second meeting with the Master. “Master,” he said, “ten years ago you told me the Buddha was the Mind, and I have learned much pursuing this great insight. Can you now give me a more advanced lesson?”

“Yes,” said the Master: “There is no Mind, and there is no Buddha.”

“But then why did you tell me there was?”

“I told you that because your baby was crying. I said it to help stop your frightened baby from crying. Now you are older, and are ready for the truth: there is no Buddha, there is no Mind.”

In other words, there is nothing to seek that will make a foundation, because no foundation is needed. You are here, you are now, this is it. Accept it as a gift. Accept yourself as a gift. Stop looking for something special, something hidden. This is it, and like it or not, it is enough. No illusions are needed. There is no consciousness after death; the quality of our life is determined most of all by how we live, and it is enough.

It’s a stark message, but then like the Master in this story, Buddhism offers enough myths and stories to keep your “baby” from crying, so that everyone can find a path that fits them. You like the naked truth? Fine. You prefer the story with the Buddha and the Mind? Also fine.

Taoism

About the same time the Buddha lived, the great Chinese sage Lao Tzu was writing his Tao te Ching. Here too is the voice of liberal religion, done pretty starkly, though with more comfort than just hearing that there’s nothing and it’s ok.

“When you realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu said, “the whole world belongs to you.” (The Tao te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell [Harper Perenniel, 1988], #44) This is like the Hindu saying that there’s nothing after death but the impersonal recycling of atoms.

But our comfort in life is realizing that there is a simple Way that things run, and that our life will be happiest if we are in harmony with this Way, or Tao.

“The great Way is easy, yet people prefer the side paths,” Lao Tzu writes. “Be aware when things are out of balance. Stay centered within the Tao. When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn – all this is robbery and chaos. It is not in keeping with the Tao.” (#53) No, that’s not from yesterday’s editorial page; it’s from 2500 years ago, from a completely different culture, but arising from exactly the same kind of human nature and timeless human condition.

“Let the Tao be present in your life and you will become genuine. Let it be present in your family and your family will flourish. Let it be present in your country and your country will be an example to all countries in the world. Let it be present in the universe and the universe will sing. How do I know this is true? By looking inside myself.” (#54) There’s that message again: inside, outside, all connected, and it is enough, right here and now.

“All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.” (#66) Jesus would have recognized this wisdom immediately.

And finally, one of the finest teachings in any of the world’s religions:

“What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.” (#27)

All of this is the spirit of liberal religion in all times and places, because it is about how to live wisely and well in the only human life we will have.

Confucius

K’ung-fu-tzu lived about 551-479 BC. Like all these paths, Confucianism deserves – and has been given – hundreds of volumes rather than a few paragraphs. Some feel it is not really a religion because there are no deities or prescribed rituals. But it does belong in the tradition of liberal religion, which is concerned with living wisely and well.

One of the old Master’s many sayings that springs from his recognition of the power of authenticity is, “A man should practice what he preaches, but a man should also preach what he practices.” We know the first half – but to do the second half requires that we’re actually living within the authenticity we preach.

Some years ago after speaking about some of these topics of existential religion – liberal religion – a man came up to me excitedly and said “You need to read my book!” He gave me his card; he was an emeritus professor of Chinese studies at Columbia named William deBary. His book was on a subject I would never have picked off the shelf: 13th Century Neo-Confucianism.

Yet he was right. For the central concept in this era’s Confucianism was what they called “living for one’s self” – where the correct “self” was the larger one consisting in ourselves, our society, and the art of interrelationships that can make our social life smooth and harmonious. One more path and dimension to living more wisely and well here and now.

And I’m reminded of another Confucian story I read long ago from a source I’ve completely forgotten. It was about some sophisticated students who had paid good money to study with an internationally renowned Master. They expected the story without “tigers,” especially from such a man as this. Yet in his first talk with them, he repeatedly mentioned a kind of “magic” on which he said everything depended.

This was outrageous, and very un-Confucian, they thought! With some edge to his voice, one student dared to challenge the Master, explaining that they were not children, nor were they superstitious peasants, and that if he was going to use a word as old-fashioned as “magic,” they would greatly appreciate it if he might explain what he meant, in a way they could understand and respect.

“Ah,” said the teacher, perhaps not expecting this challenge. “Well then, we can do that. But it is not a quick matter, and my throat is dry.” Then, turning to a student sitting near him, he said “I wonder if you would get me a glass of water?”

When the student returned, the Master took a long drink of water, set the glass down, and said “That was magic.” He did my bidding, without being coerced, without feeling demeaned or ordered about. He did it without threats, because he wanted to, and both he and I – and I suspect most of you – felt good about that asking for and getting a glass of water. No force, no trickery, just an honest and respectful request, and it was done quickly and happily. That is magic. And without learning that kind of magic, our lives together will be strained, even dismal.”

But the “magic” wasn’t supernatural or otherworldly. It was the mastery of the kind of respectful authenticity that make all social interactions fluid and gratifying. It is in complete harmony with the kind of “Way” that Taoism is about. It is liberal religion without the tigers but with the magic.

The Greeks

Plato brought this spirit into Western civilization with all of his teachings on how to live wisely and well – and again, he did it without using any gods. We were as complete as we needed, and just needed to learn how to pursue what is good rather than lesser things. You can hear the lessons of Karma here, or seeking the Tao, the Way.

We could go on through all of Western history from Plato to the present, and find many more thinkers, both religious and secular, who carried this same spirit. And I’ll do some of that other times. But for now, I want to comment on something I’ve been hinting at, and make it explicit.

Like all religions, the liberal style comes with a choice of languages. You can either hear the straight truth, stripped of all its poetry, imaginative stories and myths, or you can take it wrapped in myths, which give a warmer, more friendly form to it. Though to do that, we must learn to be mythically musical, to learn these most fertile and imaginative vehicles for expressing truths that pass understanding. And we’re often not good at that, so we sound unimaginative and sterile to those from richer traditions.

I’m reminded of Bruno Bettleheim’s classic book The Uses of Enchantment, in which he explains that the role fairy tales play in a child’s development is to give them pre-rational or sub-rational structures for integrating powerful emotions, years before they are mature enough to integrate them rationally. So a “wicked stepmother” offers an acceptable channel for a thought unthinkable to a five-year-old: that they sometimes hate their mother and think she’s an evil witch. This is the role that imagination plays throughout our lives. It is one of the most essential tools for growing into liberal religions of any era.

I read a book a few years ago that made this point about magic in a wonderful way. It was the 2001 book Life of Pi, by Canadian author Yann Martel. It is the story of a 16-year-old Indian boy adrift for 227 days in a large lifeboat, accompanied – according to the story – by a 450-lb. Bengal tiger.

Now that’s unbelievable, and turns out to be untrue. But it’s a better story than the truth, which was naked and brutal. The truth was that the boy and his family were moving from India to Canada, when their ship sank. His father was drowned. He, his mother, a cook and a passenger with a broken leg wound up in a large lifeboat. As food ran out, the cook killed the wounded passenger to eat. Pi’s mother was appalled, and shouted at the cook about his barbarism, so he murdered her too, even cut off her head and threw it overboard. Pi then murdered the cook with his own butcher knife, and after disposing of the bodies, including the headless body of his mother, he was alone in the lifeboat for nearly eight months.

Here is a boy who has lost both parents, watched his mother being murdered, then in turn kills her killer, and is left alone – to face losing his family, the brutal murder, and his own capacity to kill. You could say that something deep within him was awakened. Something ancient, powerful and wild, a dark side that he had to learn to master or it could destroy him. Speaking in merely factual or psychological terms doesn’t do justice to the power or the terror of this thing that has awakened within him, and that saved his life. And so instead, this naked story of brutality, murder, more murder and survival became the story of a boy alone in a lifeboat with a 450-lb. Bengal Tiger that he must learn to master, lest it destroy him.

The truth, you could say, is that he had everything in him needed to survive, including the capacity, when necessary, to kill. The truth was that he was now alone in the world, with bloody memories almost impossible to incorporate without nightmares. But the truth made an awful story, and not one with much room to live in.

When he finally made it to the shores of South America, the tiger disappeared, and he was met by two men from the company that owned the ship that had sunk. They wanted to know what happened, and how he survived. He told them the story with the tiger, and they didn’t believe him. So he told them the brutal story, and they realized the awful truth. Then he said Look, I have told you two stories, one with a tiger and one without a tiger. Neither story explains why your ship went down. So now: which story do you want? The one with the tiger, or the one without the tiger? The men said they would write it up as a story about a boy and a tiger.

Yet you can’t accuse Pi of living in fantasy or illusion. He knew the truth. But he wanted a more imaginative story to carry it in, and a less naked and brutal one.

Do you want the truth? Here’s one way to tell it. The truth is that there is no consciousness after death. There is no mind and no Buddha, no heaven or hell. It’s here, or it’s nowhere. You’re fully awake only when you can give up even your comforting illusions, and the only magic is the magic we can create together. We also have everything we need. We are adequate to the tasks of life. That’s one way to say it. It’s pretty ho-hum.

Or you could say that we are all parts of God, parts of the infinite and eternal powers of the universe, created from joy, bathed in joy, and wrapped in joy until the very end of time. And all, all, is blessed. All is holy, and we are essential parts of all that is holy.

Both these stories carry the truths of that spirit of liberal religion that was first born in the human soul close to three thousand years ago.

That’s the good news. It’s the news of liberal religion in all ages. It can set you free. You don’t have to check your brain at the door. You don’t have to check your heart at the door. And, for the record, you don’t have to check your imagination at the door, either.

The liberal religious message will work told straight and naked for some few people. It will work just as well – and for more people – enshrined in a myth to live by, a story with a comforting and challenging role for us. As long as you remember that the story isn’t really about the tigers or the myths, you can choose. In liberal religion, you don’t have to check your brain at the door, or your heart. You don’t have to check your imagination at the door either, or your childlike ability to enter into useful fictions. And so think about it this week: do you want the truth that can set you free with or without tigers?

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

18 September 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.

PRAYER:

Jack Harris-Bonham, Ministerial Intern

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, we present ourselves to you in this moment. We acknowledge that life is a lot bigger than any of us. We remember connections; we see familiar faces, smiles and hugs all around, some coffee, some cake. This feeling of being together, this feeling of community reminds us of something.

Some of us come from a hectic week in which being in touch with the presence of the moment escaped us. Some of us feel fine about the week, but we still wait for the other shoe to drop. That nagging feeling that any moment it, whatever we’re attached to, whatever we so desperately want will all go up in smoke.

We let go now of all that has followed us throughout the week. We give it up! Our burdens, helium filled, drift off our shoulders. We watch them as they float toward the clouds, smaller, smaller, and then suddenly … they are gone. We take a deep breath and let it all out. Another breath … another exhalation. We are nearing home. We see it just ahead. It’s that place we know so well. It’s safe there, comfortable. We’re at home and from home all life’s difficulties are simply the scenery of our lives, nothing more.

We know the place. We recognize it when we’re there.

For it is from this place that compassion arises. We can’t be truly home, until we realize that everyone – so-called enemies, those we secretly dislike – they have all come home with us.

Out of this realization, help us unnamed Mystery, to walk the way fully awake. And don’t let us look away, for as surely as we are witness and audience, so too, the world is witness and audience to us.

The Mystery is within us, just as we are within the Mystery. Help us then, unnamed Mystery, to find our home, and to find ourselves.

Amen.

SERMON: Who is Your Audience?

All the world’s a stage,

 And all the men and women merely players:

 They have their exits and their entrances;

 And one man in his time plays many parts…

(Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” Act II, scene 7)

A lot of us learned that bit of Shakespeare somewhere in school, but the language is so lovely it’s easy to forget that it’s also true. I doubt that any of us is aware of all the different parts we play in our lives, or all the different kinds of audiences we play to.

The Greeks had a custom that could make it easier for us to keep track of who we’re being at any given moment, and even though it’s pretty impractical, it’s also pretty vivid.

In ancient Greece, plays were performed in amphitheaters for t housands of people at a time, many of them fairly far from the stage – I’ve heard from tourists who visited one amphitheater that seated 13,000. So the actors sometimes carried large faces of their characters on a stick in front of them, so the audience could see which role they were playing. That’s quite an image, carrying your mask, your persona, around in front of you, super-sized. Can you visualize what your office would look like if everyone had to hold up the mask they were pretending to be at the moment? Or your home? Or your relationship? Or you? It doesn’t take long for this to get a little uncomfortable, does it?

The audiences cheered for the characters, not the actors: they cheered for actors who could play roles well, who could change into the persona shown on their masks. We still do that. One part of playing a role is playing to an audience, and you could even say that each kind of role we play is played to a different audience. Let’s look at a few of the masks we wear:

1. A teen-aged girl, in great physical shape, gorgeous, wearing the coolest clothes (and the right brand names), just the right jewelry, embodying, playing, the right image of a cool, attractive young woman. She’s playing not just to an audience of her peers, but an audience of her peers who know the rules of that role, which clothes matter, the connoisseurs of the young cool look. It’s a performance, and when she wows her audience, she knows it.

2. The older man in a $1,000 Armani suit and Rolls Royce, wearing the right kind of suave look is also playing a role, showing he has won at the game of financial success, he has made it. He’s not playing to the same audience as the girl, but to an audience of his peers, those who know that the car cost a bundle, that the mask he’s holding up in front of him is the mask of a hugely successful man, the hero of that sort of play: the kind Business Week might feature.

3. The hostess welcoming guests into her home, a home just dripping with Feng Shui, caressing you with subtle colors and textures, carefully and tastefully chosen furniture and just the right sort of paintings and sculptures, making the whole house a kind of mask held up to show a complete mastery of a certain kind of style and class. She’s not playing to the teenaged girl’s audience, and while the man could get out of his Rolls Royce and be comfortable in her house, she’s really playing to her peers, too, who know enough about the subtle arts of home décor to realize just how superbly she has done it. And she warms to their appreciation, given not in applause but in awed looks and compliments.

4. Or the child trying to be good, to please her parents, showing off good schoolwork, good art work, wanting her parents to see her soccer game or her middle school band concert. Probably without thinking of it, she’s hoping she plays her role as daughter well enough to – well, sometimes to earn their love, sometimes to earn their respect, sometimes just to do a good job playing this assigned role.

5. Our roles aren’t all positive. Teen-ages gang members, even in violent gang activities, are playing to an audience of other gang members. They wear the prescribed costumes, jewelry, maybe tattoos that mark them as members of this gang rather than others. Soldiers have many similarities. And high school kids who shout that they are radical individuals often wear the right costume, the costume of radical individuals approved by their peers, as they play for their audience’s approval. Those who have been in combat situations know that soldiers aren’t fighting for truth, freedom or the American Way. They’re fighting in front of the audience of their buddies, not wanting to disgrace themselves in the performance of this role.

6. Or a preacher, trying to invoke and evoke the presence of an attitude of seriousness, depth, trying to convince people he’s got a handle on what’s sacred and what isn’t – he’s also playing to an audience, and hopefully it’s one larger than the one in front of him. It’s the audience, probably in his mind, of those who know that worship services are meant to be a combination of reverence and relevance, challenge and comfort, done with the right kind of voice, body language and attitude.

I included my own role in the list because I want you to know that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with playing many roles to many audiences. They provide the background and the context for how we play our lives. Most young girls want to feel pretty, attractive and sexy, want to know that they can grow from the girl role to the woman role without feeling geeky. Those roles, in the right clothes and hairstyle, can ease them into some of the roles they’ll play as women.

The successful businessman might not know how to act like a successful businessman without the sense of a role, and might not know how to communicate his status to those who don’t know him. He worked hard for it; you can’t blame him for wanting to flaunt it a bit.

And if you’ve been in homes decorated by gifted hostesses, you know it feels great, and you’ve probably been among those in their audience who applauded the setting they created. I think such homes are almost magical, and a wonderful environment to be in.

The child – well, all children play these roles, just as we did. I had my “Little Man” role to play around my father, a different flavored role when I wanted to impress my mother, and still different roles with my brother, and my friends. It’s how we build our repertoire of moves in life, how we learn to steer our way through social circles as though we know what we’re doing. We couldn’t do much in many areas without having mastered a lot of those parts Shakespeare talked about.

With gang members, warriors, it can take on a dark and dangerous aspect, as they also want the approval of the audience that knows just how tough guys are supposed to look, talk and act. This often includes a toughness, even an indifference, to the suffering the cause others.

And I think you’re glad that I mostly act like a preacher when I’m up here, rather than fumbling around, slurring my words, looking down at the manuscript all the time and so on. All these roles are important. They’re part of how we try to please our several audiences.

And we know, or should know, that we’re playing roles, that we are an actor playing an appropriate role for the occasion. And once you get the feel for the many parts we all play, you can spot them just as though we were all carrying those big faces on sticks, like the Greek actors did.

If we don’t know the difference between the actor and the role, then we may not know the difference between what we do and who we are. I know that the movie “Batman Begins” says that “It’s not who you are deep down; it’s what you do that defines you.” But when you’re doing what you should do to be defined as a decent and honorable person, you are playing to a different audience than when you’re just fighting bad guys. And then it isn’t the character that matters, but the actor: who you are deep down.

There’s an old Jewish story this, told many ways. Rabbi Schwartz was taking a ribbing from his friend Smith, who was a great surgeon, Roberts, a distinguished scholar, and Rubenstein, a great musician. “Don’t you think you should have done more with your life?” they would ask. “You could have been a surgeon, or scholar, or musician instead of just a rabbi. Doesn’t it feel inadequate to you? Rabbi Schwartz said that no, it didn’t feel inadequate to him – though it felt inadequate in front of this audience. But he said that when he stands before his Maker, he will not be asked why he wasn’t a great surgeon or scholar or musician. He will be asked whether he was the best Rabbi Schwartz he could have been. And that, he said, is the audience he’s really trying to please.

There’s the distinction between the actor and the roles, and the distinction between the “B” level audience and the “A” level audience. In Western religion, most people think of this ultimate audience as standing before God, as they think of living as God would want them to live. The Greeks didn’t put it in God-terms in their Golden Age, but in terms of owing obedience to the highest ideals of the culture, which they relied on to help create the noblest kinds of people. The Romans didn’t put it in God-talk either by the end centuries of the Roman Empire. They said you should live “under the gaze of eternity”: as though all the greatest, noblest people who had ever lived or would ever live were watching you. Then, they said, do only what you would do in front of that kind of an audience.

There’s another story about this, a parable collected by a man named Anthony de Mello, one of the great collectors of spiritual stories from all over the world.

A woman in a coma was dying. She suddenly had a feeling that she was taken up to heaven and stood before the Judgment Seat.

“Who are you?” a Voice said to her.

“I’m the wife of the mayor,” she replied.

“I did not ask whose wife you are but who you are.”

“I’m the mother of four children.”

“I did not ask whose mother you are, but who you are.”

“I’m a schoolteacher.”

“I did not ask what your profession is but who you are.”

And so it went. No matter what she replied, she did not seem to give a satisfactory answer to the question, “Who are you?”

“I’m a Christian.”

“I did not ask what your religion is but who you are.”

“I’m the one who went to church every day and always helped the poor and needy.”

“I did not ask what you did but who you are.”

She evidently failed the examination, for she was sent back to life. When she recovered from her illness, she was determined to find out who she was. And that made all the difference.

– Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight, p. 140

She answered questions about who she was with answers about the roles she played, the collection of masks she owned. But here, she was playing to a higher kind of audience, asking about the actor, not the roles wanting a higher kind of authenticity than just that of her being a wife, mother, teacher, Christian or the rest of it – even though those can all be good and important roles.

Friday night, about seventy-five of us watched a wonderful movie called “The Movie Hero,” about a cast of characters who hadn’t found the right audience to play to, and the lead character who had found his audience, but couldn’t find the right role to play before this audience who wanted him to be the hero of his story. After the movie, the discussion lasted for about forty-five minutes, because everyone there could recognize some dimensions of their life and the lives of those closest to them in this cast of characters.

(“The Movie Hero” is among the films our church owns through our subscription to the Spiritual Cinema Circle – http://www.spiritualcinemacircle.com/. We show spiritual movies on the third Friday of each month, and have an “Uppity Movie Night” on the first Fridays, where we feature films about society, the economy, the war and so on.)

This isn’t about blaming ourselves for not being perfectly noble people. It isn’t about holding up one more yardstick that will find us wanting. It’s about reminding ourselves that the actor is more important than the roles we play, and if we forget that for too long, the roles may take over the actor, which can give our story a very sad ending.

Rachel Naomi Remen, a gifted physician in the San Francisco area, has written two books filled with stories about what matters most in life, and I want to share one of her stories with you – a true story from her own experience.

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

“None of us understood what he meant. Talking about it afterwards, I attributed it to modesty. Some of the others wondered if he had at last become senile. Now, almost thirty-five years later, my heart goes out to him.”

(Kitchen Table Wisdom, pp. 205-206)

Wearing his doctor mask, he had played to appreciative audiences his whole career. Only when he looked back on it, he realized it had been the role that had been developed, not the actor, and life had slipped through his fingers.

And sometimes, when people feel like personal failures, like it has slipped through their fingers, they get bitter, and try to poison the hopes and dreams of others. We have all known people like this, and they can be quite destructive. The people who delight in bursting others’ balloons, mocking their hopes because they are so empty inside and the emptiness hurts because they never found their audience, never found the right audience, never grew into the kind of person who knew who they were and were proud of it.

We all know cynics who tear down everything hopeful and good anyone puts forth, and use that destructive little role as an identity. But it’s the screaming lack of an adequate identity, not a real one. It’s the painful cry masquerading as a self. It’s the painful and dangerous cry from the forces playing to an audience drawn from the Dark Side, from the minions of Lord Sauron, from Voldemort, and those who are held in thrall by them.

How and where do you find an audience that cares whether you’re true to your best self rather than giving in to the trolls and demons that haunt you? What will lead you to a life you’ll be glad to have lived? What if you develop talent, succeed, and identify with your success rather than with your character, your soul?

We are born into a world that always tilts toward life and hope, and our deepest challenge is to adopt that tilt toward life and hope, to become eager servants of the best kind of life, the life that serves and heals the life within and around us, so that we won’t look back after many years and say “It slipped through my fingers.”

Where to find the kind of audience that expects the best from us? If we serve the gods of our culture, we will live to succeed, gain wealth, power, and seek the endorsement of our society as a sign that we’ve won in the rat race. Most of us do that, at least in part, and it mostly works, at least in part.

But as that great American philosopher Lily Tomlin said, “Even if you win in the rat race, you’re still a rat!” Even if you win at the game, is it enough? If you please an audience of rats or functionaries or repressed people, is it enough?

When you stand before the mirror at those times of your life when honesty invades and makes the rules and you must take account of yourself, it will not matter a great deal whether you played this or that role well. It will matter whether you were the best you possible, not what you imitated. It will matter whether you played yourself well. And the only audience finally worth playing to is the audience that believes there is something precious and singular in you that needs to be offered to the world.

Because there is. You are the only person in the world with the unique combination of quirks, gifts and style that you have: the only one. What a loss it would be to the world if you never put the mask down long enough to find the actor inside and bring him or her to light and to fruition. What a shame it would be if we focused so hard on the roles we must play that when we reach the end we realize that life slipped through our fingers. The audience that matters most dearly hopes you will do it, because they want you to be the hero of your unique story.

Don’t waste your “A” game on “B” audiences. At its best, this church is one of those better audiences that will prefer the actor to the characters. I try to preach from and to those places that listen for the better angels of our nature, that help us find the Buddha-seed, the God-seed that’s within us.

Because I don’t want, and you don’t want, life to slip through your fingers. You want life to be all over your fingers, all over your body, soaked deep into your mind, warming the very depths of your heart.

You want this, so that when the person whose opinion means the most asks “Were you true to your best self? Were you animated by love rather than envy or hate, by compassion rather than condescension, by understanding rather than prejudice” – and the other questions that will come up on that sort of existential exam – you want to be able to raise your head and say “Yes. Yes. I was not perfect, but I tried as well as I knew how to be a person of integrity and character, and a small blessing to the people whose lives I touched as I passed through life. I tried to make, and to be, a positive difference. And it was enough. It was enough.”

The applause won’t come from outside. It will come from the opinion that is finally the most important in your world. It will come from inside, because it’s your own most honest opinion that matters so deeply. It will be a silent kind of applause; but the noise from that silent applause can be deafening.

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Davidson Loehr

11 September 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 pray with our words, our hearts, and our resources. We’ll share our resources later in the service, but let’s begin by opening our hearts.

We hear of the continuing loss of life in Iraq, and wonder what to tell our soldiers if they return. Can we honestly tell them that the deaths and disfiguring injuries they received were justified by an illegal war sold to us through outright lies? That our lust for oil and military location was worth their sacrifices? And the more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens we asked our troops to kill – what was served by their deaths that was worth their lives?

At home, resources were diverted from strengthening levees in New Orleans known to be a danger for the past six years. The money was sent to Iraq. A hurricane came that everyone knew was coming. Many news personnel were evacuated several days before the public was warned to leave.

Yet still, we came with no food, no water and no apparent concern. The president’s mother, characteristically, laughed off the suffering of those stranded in Houston, saying they were poor anyway, so this isn’t so bad for them. And her son, the president, seems to show that the apple does not fall far from the tree.

These tragedies cry out for attention, even outrage. So many ways to spread the blame or remain in denial. Yet when the dust clears from the war and the flood waters recede from the Gulf Coast, there remain thousands and thousands of our brothers and sisters lying dead, and ten times that number suffering the loss of those they loved, those who loved them.

Religious voices are saying “We can only hope and pray, it’s in God’s hands.” We can hope and pray, and that might make us feel better. But we also have hands, and much of what must come is in our hands. And so let us hope and pray that these tragedies will end as well as they can. We never want to lose hope, so let us hope.

But not only hope. Not only hope.

Amen.

SERMON: Size Matters!

“By size I mean the stature of one’s soul, the range and depth of one’s love, one’s capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature. To me, this is the fundamental category, this is the essential principle.” This is the size that matters.

This paragraph was written over thirty years ago by a liberal theologian named Bernard Loomer. He was the Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School for a decade, then finished his career teaching religion in California, where he also began attending, and joined, a Unitarian church. Some may think he was one of us because he once joined a Unitarian church. I don’t care what his official religion was; I think he was one of us because he understood just how – and what kind of – size matters.

Today is the beginning of our annual pledge drive, and I want to talk to you about what religion is, what a healthy church is about, and why you should support generously whatever church you attend regularly. And I’ve decided to do all this by talking with you about this notion of size. So first I’m going to do the pitch, and then I’ll spend the rest of our time together explaining why these things matter so much, and why they should matter to you.

I read a story this week about a boy who wanted to help survivors of the Hurricane Katrina, so he sent some supplies, and also sent his $2 allowance to help with the disaster relief efforts. Just two dollars. The story was treated as cute. I also read this week that Sam Walton donated $23 million to the disaster relief efforts, and was praised by President Bush as a great philanthropist. But Sam Walton’s net worth is about $90 billion. If the average American family donated the same percentage of their net worth, it would be less than $8.00. Sam Walton’s gift sounds big. But it’s like most of us giving $8.00, which doesn’t sound very generous at all. So for this boy to donate $2, his whole allowance, is hundreds of times more generous than the Walton family was.

When we hear this story, we hear the boy as part of something big, not a boy-sized thing. If the boy had just said “Ah yes, I feel your pain,” I’m not sure we’d care much. But he got possessed by a very big spirit of compassion, and it made him a bigger person, opened him up, and he became a bigger person, far beyond his years, and far more generous than the richest man in the world.

And all his caring, all his praying, wouldn’t have helped a single family. That takes money.

Last week, closer to home, our own 4th and 5th grade boys baked cookies and sold them to help with the disaster relief. They raised $200.

Conservatives laugh at liberals when we talk about money, saying we’re all talk and no action because we don’t support our churches at a very high rate. They say, as many have told me over the years, that this just proves that liberals don’t believe in anything really worth supporting. We ask for 5% of your pre-tax income as a pledge – half a tithe. But we’re really averaging less than 2%. The First Baptist Church downtown has around 800 members and a budget triple ours. They’re a pretty liberal Baptist church – they withdrew from the SBC a few years back, and their minister’s wife has been here several times to attend some of the liberal social causes that meet here. Their members come from the same socio-economic slice of Austin that you all do. Yet they can do things we can barely dream of.

It’s not right. Our rightful place in this community is as a leader church and we’re not likely to do it without a healthy and responsible level of financial giving.

We count only about six hundred members here, meaning they have signed the membership book and made a financial contribution during the past year. But if you count everyone who has signed the membership book, we have over 900 members. Several hundred people attend here fairly regularly, and don’t contribute money to help pay the bills, and help the church realize its potential.

Don’t do that! Don’t do it to this church, and don’t do it to yourselves. I want you to join with us fully: not as a spectator, but as a full member and participant. Don’t stand back. Join fully with us. Invest your energy here. Invest your money here. Invest your spirit here. Choose really to be a part of this community of seekers. Join us fully. Come all the way in to this church.

The grown-ups, the adults, need to support it financially. It’s walking the talk, putting our money where our mouth and our values are. It’s consecrating our money and our energy to the search for size and for light that makes this church so special.

Now let’s talk about why all of this matters so much.

At its best, every religion is about this kind of size

Some religions make God big and you absorb some bigness second hand by worshiping God, like the moon is bright only by reflecting light that came from the sun. This is like identifying with your college on game day, or your country in war, feeling bigger as part of a bigger identity. All UT fans feel a little bigger today, after the UT football team, ranked #2 in the country, beat Ohio State, ranked #4, in the first meeting ever between these teams. As a University of Michigan alumnus, I’m glad Texas won, too – in spite of what Texas did to Michigan in the Rose Bowl! That’s a certain kind of bigness, but it’s limited: we don’t care a bit how they may feel in Columbus, Ohio today. So it’s a pretty local, and constrained, kind of size.

It’s like this in religion, too. You cozy up only to your own little club rather than the bigger purpose they’re supposed to be serving. Then everyone in other clubs is condemned because they’re not in your club – and then you’ve missed the whole point of religion. Baptists condemn others to their hell; Catholics say there is no salvation outside the church. And people who support them with their time and money are sometimes paying not to seek truth or authenticity, but merely certainty, safety. And those are so much smaller things.

Here, we say – though it is true everywhere, whether people say it or not – that you are not damned, ever. You have faults. You have done things you shouldn’t have done, and hurt people you shouldn’t have hurt. We all have. We don’t want to be that way, and we work toward offering more light than heat. But we are never condemned by our faults. That’s a different approach to life, and to religion. It’s valuable to have this kind of option, isn’t it?

And when we support causes and ideals like this, they raise us up and make us bigger, too. They can consecrate us, as we consecrate our money to supporting them.

“Consecrate” is a wonderful old word we don’t use much any more. The dictionary says it means to make holy, to set aside as holy. A Catholic Encyclopedia says only a priest can consecrate things, but this is not true. In the early church, members used to bring even their household items to church to be consecrated: their hammers, pots and pans, regular household tools. What that meant was that these things were dedicated to the service of God, wherever they were being used. Then they took them home again. But now when they were building or baking, they weren’t just doing it for themselves. They were doing it for the glory of God. That’s consecration. It increased the size of the imaginative world within which they lived almost infinitely.

And there’s a great story about this from a later time. In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a tourist once went into one of these huge buildings. Over at one side were carpenters, and he said to them “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? We’re carpenters. We’re building pews!” Then he went to the glass cutters who were painstakingly piecing together one of the monstrous stained-glass windows. Again he asked “What are you doing?” And again, they laughed and said they were assembling a window.

Then over on the other side was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters and glass workers. Of her too, he asked “What are you doing?” The woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!” Her job was bigger than the jobs of the carpenters and glaziers. Not “bigger” in the sense that it was more important to the cathedral, but in the sense that it was more important to her. She lived in a world where her simple act of sweeping was part of a magnificent service to God. And activities of that size absolutely bless us.

The great mythologist Joseph Campbell used a more modern metaphor to talk about small and great spiritual size, by comparing light bulbs with Light. You look up above, and you’ll see a lot of light bulbs that are on. But sitting here, you’re not aware of them. What you’re aware of is the light that comes from all of them. If one went out, if one or two more came on, you probably wouldn’t notice. And I suspect nobody here cares a bit about what brand those light bulbs are. We’re not here to look at the bulbs; we need light.

Religions are like this too, Campbell said. Each religion is like one light bulb that offers light to the world. But nobody else really cares about the brand name of the religions, any more than we care about the brand names of the bulbs above us. Their purpose is to provide light, not draw attention to themselves.

Now looking out at you, I don’t see light bulbs, but heads. But here too, you could say, Well, it’s a couple hundred heads, each doing their own thing. Or you could say No, here are a couple hundred heads all tuned into the words they’re hearing, hoping those words from this preacher in front might do for them what the light bulbs above are doing: giving them light they can use. And the preacher’s job is to serve the greater glory of light and enlightenment, not call attention to him- or herself. Here are two or three hundred people seeking light, opening themselves to its possibility. If you put it that way, we’re all involved in something much bigger. Then it isn’t about me or what I believe or say. It’s about whether and to what extent you can participate in the shedding of light, and can find some to catch in your imagination and take home with you, to tend to, to nurture, to ponder, to see what might be brought into your own life to make you grow in size.

Too often, religions don’t understand what they are supposed to be doing. They stay small rather than trying to become big. They think it’s about the light bulbs.

I experienced this in a ceremony at City Hall downtown a few months ago, and know some of you were there, too. Your reactions to it may have been different from mine. But to me, it was a very weird and disappointing ceremony. They brought together representatives of many different religious traditions, to offer our several blessings to the city and the City Council in their new building. I think they were asking for light, and bringing the individual lights in to offer it – maybe wondering if we had any light to offer.

But what happened was very disappointing to me. A Christian woman stood and read a confessional statement from her faith. Then, while she was speaking, a Buddhist began reciting something in another language. Then a Jewish cantor sang, very loudly, something in Hebrew. Then another and another and another. Here, a woman who defined herself as a wiccan came in costume and went through dramatic gestures with her arms. There, another, also in costume, chanting a chant no one else could understand. I wanted to shout that this isn’t about you! We’re not here to look at you! We’re here to see if you have anything to offer to people outside your club besides a chance to see you perform.

The idea was to be that here we have this wide variety of religions in Austin. But then all of them took this moment to shine their light not on the city, not on the City Council, not on those in attendance, but merely on themselves. It was as though they were all, one after another, shouting, “Now look at me! Now look at me!” They acted as though religions really are merely little clubs where club members dress and talk in idiosyncratic ways that those outside the club can’t understand, rather than little lights whose sacred mission is to help light both our individual and communal paths. It felt like a pep rally for a bunch of teams I wasn’t interested in rooting for because they were too self-absorbed.

You can’t light a path for others if each person shines their flashlight only on themselves. It gives religion a bad name, and makes us smaller.

Yes, they probably each have some light for the members of their club, expressed in ways that only those in their club can really understand, judging from the City Hall ceremony. But as the Buddhists have taught us, each religion is like a finger pointing at the moon, at the Light. And once you realize that, you realize that there isn’t anything special about any religion except its ability to point to a light that shines not just on its own club members, but on everyone. And that’s rare. How many times have you heard a church define itself and its religion that way?

(After this service, a couple people asked me, understandably, what I had said at the City Hall occasion. I’ve attached those remarks at the end of this sermon.)

We’re going to have an exercise in trying to offer something to the world outside our walls right after the sermon, when we take our offering. The entire offering this morning will be given to help people hit by Hurricane Katrina. Half of the collection will go to a UUA fund set up to help the thirteen UU churches damaged or destroyed, and some of their members who are now without a home. The other half will go into a restricted fund that we will use to help some of the families that have been relocated to Austin. At last count, we had over 4,000 survivors of Hurricane Katrina in Austin, and they will be here for several or many months. It’s the kind of challenge that asks whether we are here to shine our light only on ourselves, or to help enlighten the world beyond our walls.

You know we could sit here and pray for them and hold them in our hearts, and it wouldn’t help them one bit. Helping them takes money for food, rent, clothes and all the rest. The same is true of helping and supporting a church.

Our society has seldom needed strong liberal institutions as it needs them now, and the work of any good church can not be done on loose change and one-dollar bills, or even five-dollar bills.

I want to read you that paragraph on size that we began with. This is what religion is about here, what we are after, what we are trying to do with ourselves and with you. It’s a remarkable statement, let’s listen to it again:

“By size I mean the stature of one’s soul, the range and depth of one’s love, one’s capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature. To me, this is the fundamental category, this is the essential principle.”

How many churches have you ever attended that would describe what is sacred to them in a way this broad, this inclusive, with this kind of spiritual size? How rare are institutions like this? How important is it to support them, to consecrate some of your time and money to them?

This is the kind of size that makes us useful rather than merely decorative. And both we and our nation need this greater and more humane kind of size more than they have needed them in decades.

You can think of this as just a church, and you can think of supporting it as just paying money or putting in time. But you’d be wrong. We’re doing something here of much greater size. We are building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of life, love, truth, hope, God, and all the gods worthy of the name.

I invite you to become a part of it: a full, participating, supporting part.

—————–

Following are the remarks I made at that City Council affair mentioned in the sermon. While I had not heard of Bernard Loomer’s notion of “size” then, and hadn’t articulated my beliefs the way I did for this sermon, these beliefs – that we are here to share light with others rather than calling attention to ourselves – run so deep they color and shape most of what I try to do.

– Davidson

To our City Council:

Blessings, and a Challenge from Austin Area Clergy

January 2005

Rev. Davidson Loehr,

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

www.AustinUU.org

512-452-6168

davidson@AustinUU.org

When we all speak at once in our different languages, the messages of religions aren’t much more than cacophony: just noise. But beneath the noise, all the world’s great religions are in profound agreement about how we should treat one another, and who needs the greatest care and protection. And we hope and believe that the areas in which we speak with one voice can offer both blessing and challenge for you, and for all of us.

We have been invited to offer blessings to the City Council in your lovely new building, and we are pleased to do so. The blessings come in the currency of religion rather than politics, and it is a currency both rich and challenging.

So often, politics is the art of compromise between the different values, or currencies, by which people are to be measured and rewarded.

But religion and politics don’t always deal in the same currency, as you know. And many people would have you give power to currencies that disempower the majority of our worshipers and your citizens. There, our blessings are accompanied by the challenge to honor only the most humane, compassionate and just of values.

Citizens with more money want money to buy not only goods but also favorable laws and rulings, which favor them at the expense of those without money or power. And there, all the religions of the world rise as one to protest. For it is always the weak, poor and powerless who are the chief concern of religions being true to their best teachings. “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me” was a saying from Jesus, but fits as well with the teachings of Muhammad, the Buddha, the great Hindu teachers, Taoism, Sikhism, Judaism, humanism and so many others.

Employers may want the rights of employers to trump those of workers, in the interest of greater profits. Yet here too, we would ask you with one voice to serve the higher calling that honors the weak rather than the strong, and to defend them.

There is a dangerous mood in our nation now that sanctions the suppression of individual rights and individual voices, and counsels an unquestioning obedience to those who have gained power. Here too, the religions of the world speak as one to remind you that when push comes to shove, we must not push our sometimes cantankerous freedoms out of reach, or shove higher values aside for political agendas designed to serve much lower aims.

You requested blessings, not a sermon. But we would remind you of the higher ideals honored by all religions in defense of a currency that defines us by our simple and fragile common humanity. We hope to join you in protecting and serving those better angels of our nature here in our beloved city of Austin.

And so – blessings to you for this noble and challenging endeavor, in the name of all that is most sacred, through all the names by which it is called forth!

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Davidson Loehr

4 September 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This service followed the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, in which thousands are feared dead. At the same time, gasoline prices in Austin rose above $3.00 a gallon.

PRAYER:

We gather in this safe little room, in a world with so much death. It overwhelms us, all the death.

In the foreground are the thousands of deaths from the hurricane in New Orleans, and the survivors who are beginning to arrive in Austin for an indefinite stay. We read that the levees failed partly because over 40% of the funds requested for them were diverted to the war in Iraq.

The ironies abound. An illegal invasion of Iraq to liberate them from their oil, while a hurricane wipes out 20-25% of our own capacity for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has offered to send inexpensive oil to help with our oil shortage, shortly after one of America’s official Christian ministers urged our government to murder him – and the State Department is balking at accepting Chavez’s offer, for fear they may lose face.

So the games continue: the games of politics, one-up-manship, command and control, the illegal war. And the games and political intrigue can almost blind us to all the death.

But we are not blind, and our hearts hurt when we try to wrap them around so many dead brothers and sisters, in Louisiana or Iraq, so many crying, angry and grieving families, in New Orleans or Baghdad. At the moment of grief, the cause of death pales beside the awful reality of death, and of lives of survivors changing in unknown ways as they struggle on. And as we struggle on. My mind called on the words of an earlier preacher, John Donne:

No man is an island, entire of itself;

It tolls for thee.

We are surrounded by death this morning, near and far, from causes we can not easily control. This morning, we do not need to solve these problems. We only need to be aware of them, to feel them, to let our hearts and minds reach out to feel that we are all connected, and the loss of so many of our connections diminishes our own souls, our dearest world. We need each other.

Let us be gentle with one another as we begin to grieve our way through the death, all the death. Amen.

SERMON: WWJD?

You’ve never paid so much for gasoline in your whole life, and the prices promise to keep rising, as we’ve lost 20-25% of our ability to produce oil because of the hurricane damage in New Orleans and at its many offshore drilling rigs – and now Saudi Arabia is admitting that it can’t increase its oil production. So some of the rants of people claiming that the world is running out of enough oil no longer seem like rants.

We’ve suffered the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, with a death toll in the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands before it is through. And one factor in the levees that failed in New Orleans was the fact that tens of millions of dollars had been diverted to fund the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the war we now know to be based on contrived lies manufactured to serve the imperialistic agenda of the neo-conservatives who have taken over America.

The religious and political right are wrong about almost everything they say: on religion, the economy, sanctioning torture, killing over 100,000 of our brothers and sisters in Iraq – everything. And the religious and political left seem either too blind or too gutless to say or do anything that matters, as they have endorsed the war, the transfer of America’s wealth to the greediest of our individuals and corporations. Right now, it seems the platform of the Democratic party can only be “Wouldn’t you rather be robbed by Democrats?” And I’m not sure people would.

Asking what Jesus would do seems ridiculous and redundant!

Instead, I’m reminded of words from the great American philosopher Lily Tomlin, when she said “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up!”

Many Christians, including all the Christian ministers in town that I know – several of whom have preached here during our January Round Robin – are troubled and embarrassed by the way their religion has been hijacked, both by politicians and preachers.

And the voices from the religious right are never asking WWJD. They are so busy telling you who God hates or wants dead, that you realize this god of theirs really is a god of hate rather than love. And the reason they can’t ask WWJD is because you just can’t turn Jesus into a bigot, or a prophet of hate, or an ally of the rich against the poor.

In fact, when you hear people today asking WWJD, or putting WWJD bumper stickers on their cars, it’s almost always to criticize the direction in which our country is being led: “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” “Who Would Jesus Hate?” They’re rhetorical questions. Jesus wouldn’t bomb anybody. And the people he would be most likely to hate today are the Christians who have created such an ignorant, bigoted and hateful religion in his name.

Ironically, they are a persuasive argument for Unintelligent Design. For no intelligent designer would have designed people so willfully ignorant of science, sexuality or simple human decency. And no Christian deity would have permitted the most vocal Christians of today to drag Christianity into such foul gutters, in the name of Jesus.

This subject of Jesus is a little more poignant for me today because my friend Robert Funk, the biblical scholar and founder of the Jesus Seminar 20 years ago, is at home under hospice care this weekend, dying. (I learned Sunday night that Bob had died around 1 a.m. Sunday.) I’ve been a Fellow in the Seminar since 1991, have given a keynote address to the group at Bob’s request, and taught an adult Jesus Seminar program nearly twenty times in seven or eight states.

The Jesus Seminar is the only real group of scholars I know of that has cared to ask what Jesus really said or did, and what he might say about how we are living in America today.

Most in the religious and political left don’t seem to know enough about Jesus to ask what he said or would do. And those in the religious right don’t dare ask, because they know they and their ministers aren’t serving the teachings of Jesus at all, and he would hate what they’ve done in his name. So they just talk about their God, and who he would bomb, hate or want killed.

But Jesus was not a Christian, and he didn’t quote the Bible. He didn’t even think it was particularly authoritative. Jesus was a liberal Jew. He has become the most famous religious liberal of the first century.

But even though conservatives are people who worship dead liberals, you don’t hear them asking WWJD because Jesus was a liberal, and Jesus would hate the religion they’ve constructed around his name but not around his teachings.

The religion of Jesus has always been the enemy of the religions about Jesus: the supernatural religion of the baby and the cross; the religion of the gagged and crucified savior who is not allowed to speak. But when he was alive, Jesus the liberal Jew did speak. Here are some of the things he said:

Start with the list of beatitudes we read together earlier (Reading 640). These read like a translation by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar:

Blessed are you poor. The realm of God is yours.

Blessed are you who hunger today. You shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep today. You shall laugh.

Blessed are the humble. They will inherit the earth.

Blessed are the merciful. They will find mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be ranked as children of God.

Think of the direction America has been taking for the past quarter century. Think of our illegal invasion of Iraq, where we have killed over 100,000 people who look a lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. Think of the fact that we have a higher percentage of our citizens without health care than any other developed nation besides Africa. Or that about 18,000 Americans die each year because of inadequate health care, or of a dozen other things from the news of the past years, and ask whose side you think Jesus would be on.

Jesus said a tree is known by its fruits. What kind of a tree do you think he would say America has become?

He said “What good does it do if you love those who love you? Even the worst of people do that. No, you should love even your enemies.” Is this Jesus on the side of the religious right, or the religious and secular left?

He told a rich lawyer to sell all he had and give it to the poor. What do you think Jesus would say about the economic priorities of the Christian right, when men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson preach that there should be no taxation of the rich, no welfare, no social security, no medicare, and no public education? And that’s not even counting Falwell’s proclamation that we should “hunt down terrorists and blow them away in the name of the Lord,” or Robertson’s that we should send assassins into Venezuala to murder their president Hugo Chavez because Chavez, unlike American preachers or politicians, has had the courage to stand up the bullying imperialism of the US.

And when a group of self-righteous people asked him how the quality of their faith was to be judged, he said it would be judged by what they had done to “the least of these” among the people around them.

We live in a time when official Christianity has become the mortal enemy of everything Jesus held to be sacred. We live in a time, and in a state, where the governor can go to the Cavalry Christian Academy in Ft. Worth to sign a bill prohibiting the marriage of homosexuals who love each other: a time when he and the leaders of that Christian academy can wrap these bigoted and hateful actions in the mantle of popular politics and religion. It is a time when those who make their living by pandering to the worst among us have hijacked the name of the man Jesus who lived and died serving the least among us.

Unlike the Christian moralists of today, Jesus ate and drank, was called a glutton and a drunkard. He associated with prostitutes and tax collectors – whom those who wrote the gospels seemed to feel belonged lumped together. He constantly disagreed with the priests of his time, as he would disagree with the priests of all times.

For these are the things that prophets do, and Jesus was a prophet. The religion of the prophets is as far above the religion of the priests as the religion of Jesus is above the religion about him.

No, he wasn’t in our camp either. He was not a feminist, though some liberals have tried to make him into one. He would have given women fewer rights to divorce than they already had, and would certainly have considered abortion to be murder. And even though feminists often make much of the fact that Martha and Mary – or at least Mary – were his students, they sat at his feet, not up with him as his male followers did. Jesus would not vote a Democratic ticket today – or a Republican ticket. He was a prophet, and they are a scary bunch.

What’s that mean? A prophet is someone trying to speak to the issues of their times from what you could call a God’s-eye view.

What’s that mean? It means from the highest moral and ethical perspective we know how to see and say, nothing less. It means speaking on behalf of ultimate values, to confront those who would enslave us in the name of greedy, bigoted, imperialistic or hateful values.

As the scholars of the Jesus Seminar and many Jewish scholars have said, Jesus belongs in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. He sounds like them. He feels like them. Centuries earlier, the Hebrew prophet Amos, a shepherd, came into town to rail at the politicians for selling the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes, and to rail against the priests for sanctioning it. Sound political? Prophets are political.

Jesus was political. He turned over the tables of the money-changers in the big temple in Jerusalem. These were the people converting the foreign currencies of those who came from out of the area, so they could buy animals for the sacrifices done in the temple. The temple made a lot of money from the poor in this way, and the priests profited, as did the politicians. That isn’t what God is about, Jesus said. It isn’t what God wants. Jesus was attacking the habits of exalting profits over people, and the superstitious religion used to keep people frightened and obedient.

In the first century Jerusalem, Jesus was the most famous liberal alive. Today’s religious conservatives, and the political conservatives they serve, are not being true to either the letter or the spirit of the teachings of Jesus. Not by a mile.

Now if you have a feel for the kind of message the man Jesus spent his short ministry preaching and teaching, where do you find that voice, and those allegiances, today?

United States of Shame

by Maureen Dowd

Published: September 3, 2005

1. “When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

“When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans – most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line [Friday] while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first – they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.”

(Maureen Dowd, “United States of Shame,” NY Times September 3, 2005.)

2. “I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it’s in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich.”

— Congressman Charles B. Rangel – 09/02/05

3. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed–those who are cold and not clothed.”

(President Dwight W. Eisenhower)

4. And speaking of the tragedy in New Orleans, another voice said, “…it is the POOR, the MOST VULNERABLE, who are the first to suffer. The wealthy built their homes on higher ground, had better information, more insurance, and more avenues of escape. So whether it is in facing the rising waters in Bangladesh or Malaysia or Lousiana and Missippi, it’s going to be “the least among us” who will suffer most immediately.

– Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Magazine.

Most of these voices are liberal; that’s the state of social criticism today. But not all of them are. Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of World War II, a five-star general, and a two-term Republican president. It isn’t about liberal or conservative. It’s about decent or indecent, moral or immoral, honest or dishonest, compassionate or brutal.

And it really isn’t about Jesus, either. It is about wisdom, about being most fully humane and most fully human. And every religious prophet and sage worthy of the name has been trying to teach us how to do this since human history began.

You can find that quality of wisdom in many of those who came before Jesus: like Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the Buddha.

Lao Tzu wrote about the Tao, the Way:

When the Way is forgotten, duty and justice appear;

Then knowledge and wisdom are born, along with hypocrisy.

When a nation falls to chaos, then loyalty and patriotism are born.

Weapons of war are instruments of fear, and are abhorred by those who follow the Tao. The leader who follows the natural way does not abide them.

To rejoice in victory is to delight in killing; to delight in killing is to have no decent self.

Confucius had many sayings, including the saying that “To see what is right, and not to do it, is a lack of courage or of principle.” This is like Martin Luther King Jr.’s saying that we begin to die on the day when we fail to do what is right.

And the Buddha told a story about violence and war that is as good as any ever told.

One day a bandit came up to the Buddha, waving his sword. “I am the most powerful warrior in all the world,” he announced, “and I am going to prove it by killing you.”

“Ah well,” said the Buddha, “if you are so powerful, then you can grant me two final wishes.”

“Be quick about it,” snarled the bandit. “I’ve got places to go and people to kill!”

The Buddha pointed to a small sapling tree nearby, and said, “Cut off the smallest branch on that tree.”

“Hah!” yelled the bandit, and with one quick swipe of his sword it was done. “And what is your final wish, you old fool?”

The Buddha picked up the small branch, handed it to the bandit, and said, “Now put it back.”

It is said that the bandit achieved enlightenment then and there.

It isn’t just about what Jesus would do. It’s about what we should do. And we should try to follow the wisest and most morally demanding teachings we can find. They are our best hope for becoming most fully human, even though they demand a lot of us.

There is no evidence that Jesus ever heard of Lao Tzu, Confucius or the Buddha, who all lived about five hundred years earlier. But if he heard teachings and stories like these, I know what Jesus would do. He would say, “I’m with those guys!”

Then he would look at us – at you and at me – and he would say, “And you – who are you with?”

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Davidson Loehr

Jonobie Ford, Worship Associate

12 June 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Jonobie Ford

People have used the phrase “priesthood of all believers” to represent several different ideas. Martin Luther originally used it to express the idea that the common people were as close to God as the priests were. How is it used today? I went to the true source of knowledge, Google, and found many internet explanations, almost all firmly in one of two camps: Unitarian Universalist sites say there is no chosen class of people to tell us what to believe, but that we can believe whatever we we want. Christian sites disagree on the details, but they do agree on one thing: People can’t just “believe whatever they want”!

I originally heard the phrase “priesthood of all believers” in my exploration of modern Pagan religion, where many use it to mean that anyone can perform the rituals necessary to communicate with their Gods. Even before I ever heard the phrase, the word “priesthood” was a positive one for me. I’ve always thought of priests as a very special sort of people, ones who are confident and wise in their faith, live their faith fully, and spend much of their lives in service to others. The idea of all believers being called to be priests appealed to me, because it meant I was expected to be all of those things — confident and wise in my faith, living it fully, and spending time in service to others. The importance of having a priesthood of all believers isn’t about what we can or can’t believe, but about living our lives with these priestly attributes.

In thinking about incorporating those attributes into my life, I realized that although I am growing more confident in my faith, and I hope at least some of the time I am wise, I am definitely lagging behind in service to others. It’s not that I haven’t given my money to charities that serve others, but that I’ve never given my time. And I think without giving time there are many people’s stories I want to hear and need to hear that I haven’t heard yet.

In my life, I’ve been successful partly because I have such a strong network of friends. When one of us is having problems, we give each other advice and support. Now we’re trying to give that same suppport to others who need it. Several of us recently committed to a year-long volunteer effort through an organization called Family Pathfinders. We are paired with a single mother on public assistance. She is in her early 20s, has two kids, and is without a car. Without a car, even the smallest things like getting the kids to school or daycare can be surprisingly difficult. Our job is to help her and her family become self-sufficient by using our communal knowledge and networks; to give them the advice and support we give each other. This past Thursday, we met them for the first time, and I think all of us are excited and nervous about the coming year.

Even though the phrase is quite old, I wanted to tell you a recent story about my part in the priesthood of all believers. So far I have only a beginning, but I’m looking forward to the year ahead. I’m looking forward to learning new stories, and I’m looking forward to continuing my path among the priesthood.

PRAYER:

We daily pray, and daily fear that for which we daily pray.

We daily pray that we will finally be called by our true name, recognized for our best qualities rather than the other ones. For the world seldom acknowledges us as much more than a little piece in a puzzle we are to serve but not question.

That’s what keeps the majority serving the minority – people who are convinced they are powerless, serving those who have convinced them they alone are right.

It may be demeaning and disempowering, but it is also so common it seems to be the way of the world.

And so we daily pray that something in the wind will call us by our true name – as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. And we daily fear that it might happen, and that we will then feel compelled to act as though our highest name were also our highest calling, calling us to action.

Let us welcome the prayer, but not the fear.

Amen.

SERMON: The Priesthood of All Believers

I attended a Sierra Club benefit Wednesday night down in the warehouse district, at Antone’s. Arlo Guthrie was there, looking a whole lot older than I remembered him from 35 years ago, and his daughter was performing with her band. She told a story about Arlo that has stuck with me, as I was focusing on this sermon topic.

Arlo’s one big hit was the recording of “Alice’s Restaurant.” Later, he bought a church in the town where Alice’s Restaurant was. He was sweeping the floor, when a minister from town came in. He asked what Arlo was doing there, and Arlo said “Sweeping the floor.” The minister was upset by the idea that he had bought the church, and said “What kind of a church is this?” Arlo hadn’t been prepared for that question, so he answered “It’s a bring-your-own-God church!”

That sounds kind of irreverent, but the truth is, every person brings their own gods with them, to church and wherever else we go. And that includes the priests. If a million people say they believe in God, you can bet that the more you talk to them, the more you’ll realize that they believe in about a million different gods. Many, of course, aren’t worth serving at all. Yet we serve as Shakespeare said we love: not wisely, but too well.

The idea behind Martin Luther’s notion of the priesthood of all believers was that the responsibility to find gods worth serving is the personal responsibility of each of us. The fact that priests wear fancy costumes doesn’t mean they are any closer to God than we are. Luther also defined our gods as whatever it was that we were serving with our lives, which sounds very modern, very psychological and existential.

So the challenge in this god-hunting business is identifying gods worth serving, and then serving those gods, those ideals and centers of value, rather than something less. And I want to say, with Luther, that people shouldn’t put so much trust in churches to provide them with the right gods. What you get in church are other people’s gods. People tend to assume that – perhaps since priests wear dazzling costumes or at least hold the microphone – the gods they are offering will serve you rather than them. And sometimes this is true. But not always. The history of both religion and politics – which have now been married in an unholy union again – shows that those who control the big words and wear the dazzling costumes or travel with aides and attendants too often use their costumes and entourage to dazzle us so we will serve them.

The Protestant Reformation would probably not have happened when it did, had not the pope at the time, Pope Leo X, been one of the worst popes in history. Two quotations have been associated with him. In a letter to his brother, he wrote, “Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.” The other quote attributed to him is one I first read in graduate school 25 years ago, where he wrote, “It has served us well, this myth of Christ.”

Pope Leo X still stands as a prime example of a high office filled by a person of low character, using the title and a costume to deceive and bilk the masses. He wanted to raise a lot of money to built St. Peter’s in Rome, so he sold what were called “indulgences” to his masses. This meant that, for a fee, they could buy some pre-forgiveness for their many sins, so their punishment in purgatory might be shorter and less horrendous. So it was like an insurance policy: pay now, fly later.

But it was a good racket, because fear works well with disempowered people, and helps to keep them disempowered. So Pope Leo got more creative, and began selling indulgences for their dead relatives. You don’t want your mother or grandmother being tormented beyond belief in purgatory, do you? Well, even though they’re already dead, for a fee you can save them some suffering; it’s the least you can do for them. Didn’t they love you? How can you let them down now that they’re dead and suffering and need you?

This was the practice of “selling indulgences” that angered Martin Luther, and led to the Protestant Reformation and the splitting of Christianity into over a thousand pieces now. Luther’s primary message was that we are “justified by faith, not by works.” This was a 16th century way of saying that God didn’t make junk, including us, and that schemes like the Pope’s to convince us that he knows who is saved and who is damned are the schemes of a charlatan, which we are called to expose.

So the priesthood of all believers is really one of the boldest ideas in history. It says, Don’t be dazzled by costumes and titles because they carry no religious authority at all. None at all. Many who hold those titles and wear those impressive costumes know this, as Pope Leo X did. And they use the gullibility of the masses to mislead them, to rob them, and assign them a second-class status they don’t deserve.

Such false gods are almost always served by those in costumes, official positions and power. Why? Because if you can control a society’s most powerful symbols, you can control the majority of people in the society. If your side can claim to represent God, America, Truth, Justice and Love, you will win every election – even the fair ones.

Pope Leo X provides a religious example of someone in power abusing and betraying both the people and the high ideals he is charged with serving. But it happens at least as often in politics. And three days ago (June 9, 2005) was the anniversary of one of the most dramatic and inspiring examples of an American citizen exposing a political charlatan.

On June 9, 1954, Army counsel Joseph N. Welch confronted Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy during the Senate-Army Hearings. McCarthy had just shot out a cheap personal attack on a young member of Welch’s law firm, Frederick G. Fisher as a way of getting even with Welch for questioning him. It was more than Welch was willing to abide. In one of the most famous and high moral statements in the history of American politics, Welch said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” The audience broke into spontaneous applause, and that statement by Welch broke the spell of McCarthyism. Months later, the Senate censured McCarthy. With no chance of demanding a presidential nomination, he sank much deeper into his alcoholism, and died of alcohol-related illnesses three years later, at the age of 49.

I saw that confrontation on live television as a 12-year-old boy, and without understanding the full meaning of the proceedings, I knew that Welch was a heroic figure and McCarthy was an evil man.

Senator McCarthy was one of the most powerful and most vicious men in American politics. He had terrorized the country and intimidated other senators for over three years with his self-serving hunt for Communists. It was self-serving rather than patriotic, because he manipulated facts, people, and the media not to serve America, but to draw attention to himself – and, he hoped, to get a presidential nomination. The god he served was a selfish and brutal god that sanctioned any means necessary for him to pursue his own ends.

Do you see that what Joseph Welch did shows the same kind of individual moral authority that Luther had championed as the priesthood of all believers, over four centuries earlier? In both cases, a figure with position and title had betrayed the high calling of his office, degraded high ideals and turned people into things to be used like pawns. And in both cases, a person without any comparable authority or costume exposed them as frauds and charlatans.

Connecting these two stories with current events is almost too easy, isn’t it? But we must try to see the actual standards being practiced in our world contrasted with the highest standards, so that we can find ourselves in this ongoing drama, and wonder if we are called to do anything.

Last Sunday (5 June 2005), with one media-seeking flourish of his pen, Texas governor Rick Perry took a pen and lured a television crew to the Cavalry Christian Academy in Ft. Worth, where he signed a bill prohibiting gays from marrying, and prohibiting Texas from recognizing the marriage of gays in other states. So in one immensely childish and vicious act, Rick Perry and the Cavalry Christian Academy of Ft. Worth christened the new religion of Texas Christianity.

It is so bigoted, so hateful, and so much the antithesis of everything Jesus taught, that it could be called the cult of the anti-Christ. Not only are gays vilified, but Gov. Perry even suggested that gay soldiers returning from Iraq might want to move to another state. Jesus said “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.” Rick Perry hopes whatever he can get away with doing to the least of these will advance his political career.

Then the next day, the Pope came out against what he called “trivialization of the human body.” Oddly, he did not mean the sexual abuse of children by his church’s priests, but gay marriage between two adults who love each other.

When we look back in history, we have no trouble recognizing Joseph McCarthy and Pope Leo X as men of low character who betrayed the high calling of their office. Let’s not pretend it’s any harder here. Governor Perry behaved like a cheap and sleazy politician, dragging both Christianity and the highest aspirations of Texans down to the gutter because he hopes those who live in the gutter will bring him personal gain.

And Joseph Ratzinger, now known by the title Pope Benedictus XVI, has shown the quality of his low character all his life – from his days as an eager Hitler Youth to his days as an eager Grand Inquisitor. And last Monday he reduced a religion supposedly centered on Jesus to a level so bigoted and hateful he has disgraced every Christian on earth, and all people who believe in goodness, truth and love. The rigid, brutal and top-down style that is Ratzinger’s soul was the same style of the Grand Inquisitor and the same style as Hitler’s fascism.

Both these small men were traitors to any high calling, using their office to serve personal political ambition and a repressive and vicious form of authoritarian religion designed to subjugate people rather than empower them. Where is today’s incarnation of Joseph Welch, to look them both in the eyes and say, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Where are all the citizens who need to rise up and say those words?

The priesthood of all believers says that the common people without titles or dazzling costumes are as close to God as any governor or Pope. This week, we are considerably closer.

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Davidson Loehr

Don Smith, Worship Associate

22 May 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Don Smith

Money, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is (1) a current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes, and (2) property, wealth, possessions, resources, etc. viewed as convertible into coin or banknotes or having value expressible in terms of these.

That definition describes our natural tendency to think of money in terms of what it will purchase, but I’ve come to think more and more about money in terms of what it costs. For most of us, the money we have was obtained through an exchange of our time, talent, energy, and ideas. I think it’s worthwhile to pause and take account of the exchanges we’re making; to be sure that they are fair exchanges, and that they serve us well.

When I was an architecture student living and studying in a small town in France-and being exposed, for the first time, to a totally different culture than my own-I came to an awareness of how hurried life is in our country. I was surprised to see how leisurely life can be, and how rich an experience an unhurried life can be. I remembered the carefree days of my childhood, and I made a promise to myself that I would never allow having things to take precedence over doing things; that I would not put material possessions above free time, and the enjoyment of life. How well have I done? Not so well, I’m afraid. In the end analysis, I’m very much a product of my cultutre. And my culture is one of consumption. I don’t know when, where, or how our culture became what it is, but I struggle against it daily.

I was raised by loving parents who, like most parents, wanted for my sisters and me a better life than they had had. They told us as much. By this they meant that we should have more, and work less. Having grown up on farms in depression-era America, they spent a good deal of their youth working on the farm and having little in the way of material possessions. My sisters and I were not expected to do a lot beyond the chores that we were assigned for the purpose of teaching us to be responsible. My parents didn’t talk to us about money. They didn’t want us to be burdened, as they had been in their childhood, with concerns about money. It was my grandparents who talked to us about money.

Papa Smith, my paternal grandfather, told me that as long as one spends less than one makes all is well. Like Thoreau, he chose to make do with little, allowing himself plenty of time for fishing, playing dominoes, visiting with family and friends, and reading his Bible. He spent a lot of time reading his Bible. I’d be surprised to learn that he had any money when he died.

Daddy Kennemer, my maternal grandfather, told me that if I watched my pennies my dollars would take care of themselves. He watched his pennies very carefully and had a lot of money in the bank when he died, but he didn’t enjoy life very much.

The best advice I got came from Mother Kennemer, my maternal grandmother, who always said that money is a good servant, but a poor master. You should probably write that one down. Money is a good servant, but a poor master.

For me, the daily challenge is trying to strike a balance between having the money needed to do the things I want to do, and living free from worry about money; from being enslaved by a need for money.

I enjoy my work. I have the extreme good fortune to have found a profession that suits my bifarious nature-that involves both science and art, with each informing the other. I’m thankful to be so lucky. But I would almost always be happier sitting with good friends–discussing ideas, laughing, and getting lost in the flow of time–than meeting the demands of schedules and (sometimes unreasonable) clients. On a beautiful day I’d rather be hiking along Barton Creek or working in the garden, than sitting at a desk. I’d rather practice architecture for fun than for money, and I’d wear proudly the title of dilettante if I could make my vocation and avocation one, and thereby claim every moment of my life as my own.

I don’t have children, but if I did I’d want things to be better for them than they have been for me. Just like my parents, I’d want them to work less and have more. More time to enjoy and appreciate the best things life has to offer. More time to relax with friends and family, to discuss ideas, to read great books, to express themselves through art and artful living, and fully develop their talents. More time to work on the things that build community and make life better for everyone. I’d want to teach them that life is a wonderful journey; a mystery to be experienced to the fullest. And I’d want them to understand that journeys are best when the luggage is light.

PRAYER:

Let us be grateful for all the parents in this room. They have taken on the responsibility for lives in addition to their own. They are the stewards of our collective future, and we are grateful for their work and their sacrifices.

Let us be aware of and grateful for the work and the sacrifices each of us make, as we try to steer our way through life by serving those things most worth serving. And let us have gods worth serving with our lives. Let us have meaningful work toward positive ends, so we can all feel like stewards of our collective future.

Let us work to establish relative relationships with relative ends, but absolute relationships with absolute ends, and let us learn how to tell the difference between the two. The problem with the world is seldom with its people. We are overwhelmingly good people, doing the best we know how to do. Let us remember that. The problem with the world is that far too often, we serve gods not worth serving.

Let us be more aware of the gods we are serving, and let us be sure they are worth serving with the days and years of our lives. Let us attend to the gods we are serving with our lives.

Amen.

SERMON: The Cost of Money

This is a tough topic, because you already know all the things churches are expected to say about the subject. “Love of money is the root of all evil,” “You can either serve God or money but not both,” “Don’t you be worshiping those golden calves!” – that sort of stuff.

Besides, the US economy is so bad in so many ways that many of you are working your tails off to pay the bills and get the things you want for yourselves and your families. And getting assaulted for wanting money when you come to church is too much like piling on. After all, we want to have some nice things, and most nice things cost money. So talking against money is a little like telling a fish it shouldn’t be so attached to water: it’s just too much a part of almost everything we do.

And every time I say money isn’t as important as we make it out to be, somebody tells me that if money’s not important, maybe we don’t need their pledge. And we do want your pledges. I ask and expect you to pledge 5% or more of your pre-tax income to this church or any other church you think is worth supporting. Good churches offering honest religion are about the only place in our society where we routinely question the gods we’re serving – including the god of money – and ask whether it’s worth serving. As many have said, money makes a good servant, but a bad master.

Don has already done a nice job of talking about the ways money intersects with our personal lives, so I’ll go in a different direction, bring you some thoughts about money and share a couple stories.

The stories are two of the best ever written about wanting money too much or letting work take over your life. Both stories are from the Greeks.

The first one is the most famous, and one you all know: the story of King Midas, who couldn’t get enough money. Since he was a king, he didn’t have to earn the money, but he still wished it were easier to convert the world around him into gold. So he made the famous wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. This made it tough to eat anything. But the story’s tragedy came when he touched his beloved daughter, immediately turning her into a golden statue.

Like all good myths, there are a lot of ways to go with the old Midas story. There are a lot of ways to turn people into statues, to take the life out of their lives, by acting as though their only purpose were to make money. Because then if they can’t make money, they’re useless.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I read a report estimating that 18,000 Americans die each year because of inadequate health insurance. They haven’t got the money for the insurance, and if they can’t pay their own way, they’re not worth saving, according to our priorities. Seventy years ago, Hitler’s Nazis coined a horrible name for people like this. They were called “useless eaters.” Useless eaters. You only have a use if you can produce something, and your worth is measured by how much you can earn for others. Only 3,000 people died in the attacks on 9-11, and that has bothered us enough to spend $300 billion a year or so attacking a country that had nothing at all to do with the attacks of 9-11, but whose oil and strategic position we used 9-11 as an excuse to take. And somehow, just mentioning the 3,000 killed on 9-11 still seems to end most objections. Three thousand people is a lot. But the deaths of 18,000 Americans a year due to inadequate health care do not make the front pages. That’s coming dangerously close to treating them like useless eaters, don’t you think?

It may not feel quite like the King Midas story, but it’s closer than you think. Midas’s daughter was no longer seen as warm, loving, worth being around, because she had been converted into the lowest form of currency.

Maybe it sounds backwards to think of money as the lowest form of currency – after all, our national currency is based on the gold standard. But it’s not the currency in which human worth can really be measured. I’ve read that if you collected all the raw materials in our bodies, you’d be lucky to sell the whole pile for five bucks. We’re just not worth much money. So money can’t be the right currency for measuring human worth. Yet when we are valued and our lives are valued primarily by how much money we can make, the chief way in which we’re different from Midas’s daughter is that we’re probably worth a lot less money on the open market than a golden statue.

The Midas story doesn’t dwell too much on the other side of the equation, which is that if you want to value people primarily as people, then you probably won’t make as much money off of them. They may make more money for themselves, but you won’t be able to use them like things.

The story of Midas today isn’t often about individuals. It’s about attitudes of a whole society, like our society. The performance of our economy has been measured by how well the stock market is doing for so long it may seem that’s just how economies are always measured. But they’re not. It’s quite a drastic change from forty years ago. Then, the health of the economy was measured by how well the majority of Americans were doing. The country took pride in the fact that most people in most jobs could earn enough to buy a house and a car, on just one paycheck, and that almost anyone who wanted to go to college could afford to go without mortgaging an arm and a leg. The health of the economy was measured by how well the middle class was doing.

Now it’s measured by how much profit those who own stocks can earn every quarter. And once you do that – think about this – then people are defined in the currency of money. If workers are fired, whether you call it downsizing, rightsizing or firing, the stock prices usually go up. The money that would have gone to pay raises, health insurance and benefits for workers, workers’ pensions, that money that would have bought houses and cars and college educations for them and their children – that money is now funneled instead to other people. Not those who earned it, but those who own the stocks. We’ve lived so long in that world it might seem odd to question it. But you can value people for their humanity or for their earning potential, and when push comes to shove, one of those will shove the other.

Our challenge, and I think it’s a religious challenge, is to learn how to establish relative relationships with relative things, and absolute relationships with absolute things, and to know how to tell the difference. Which should be ranked higher: the profits of a few, or the livelihoods of many? Stock dividends, or health insurance and job security for workers? Earning more money, or having richer and more satisfying relationships?

These are religious questions because you cannot separate money from other areas of life. For example, I have read that the leading cause of divorce in our country is not having enough money, and the frustrations, guilt, blame and arguments that come from that. So one cost of valuing profits above people is that we soon diminish the humanity of most of the people around us, probably including ourselves. And that’s pretty close to a modern version of the King Midas story.

The other Greek story isn’t as well known, but it’s at least as good. It is the story about Hephaestos, whom the Romans called Vulcan. He was one of the Olympian gods – the only god who worked. But he didn’t just work. Work was his life. Work absorbed his passion, his love, his spirit. And in the ironic style of Greek wit, they had Hephaestos married to Aphrodite. Well, that’s not likely to work! She bore him no children, was never faithful to him, was never even seen with him. He had no passion left for relationships – even a relationship with the most passionate of the goddesses.

Hephaestos didn’t work to live, he lived to work. And when we live to work, it’s very hard to make room for another human being in our life. It isn’t quite like turning them to gold, but the old Greek story comes pretty close. It said that Hephaestos created golden servants to wait on him – robots.

What some interpreters have done with this is to say that this is what happens to those around people who just live to work. Without any energy or interest left for personal relationships, their mates and sometimes children are assigned roles much like the roles of golden servants: doing chores, cleaning, cooking, converting life into a series of duties. I suspect we’ve all experienced this at one time or other – or that we’ve done it.

Now this is a hard lesson to go very heavy on today when both the adults in many families must work to pay the bills, and some people have to take more than one job. This can make it feel like we’ve all been turned into robots, but it isn’t fair to throw blame around when people are doing the best they know how to do. The blame isn’t on those trying to make ends meet. The blame is on the economic priorities we as a society have adopted, that has taken so much money away from the majority of Americans that 18,000 of us die each year from inadequate health care, marriages end in divorce over the awful fights brought about by not having enough money, laws are changed and politicians and judges are bought to change the laws so those who control the money (and the politicians and media) can simply take it from those who work for it. It isn’t a healthy economy. It’s a greedy economy rewarding thieves like Kenneth Lay over fourth-grade teachers. But does anyone really want to argue that Ken Lay gave more to our society than an honest fourth-grade teacher?

Where we choose to spend money brings costs that are usually unseen. For example, there is a website you should all check out. It’s http://www.costofwar.com/. And the cost of our war in Iraq runs by as you watch, climbing hundreds and thousands of dollars each second. And you can select a city to see how much of the war’s prorated cost will come out of the incomes of that city’s residents. That’s the cost of money spent on war. In Austin, the war has cost us about half a billion dollars so far. Half a billion dollars spent there that can not be spent anywhere else. Not on education, not on health care, not on art or roads or anything else. Half a billion dollars: nearly $400 for every man, woman and child in greater metropolitan Austin (2000 census put the population at about 1.3 million). The cost of that money is measured in all the other things we can’t do with that money, and won’t be able to do for years to come.

But as a nation we aren’t valuing those things. And the things we value take value away from most of the people in our country and in the world. That isn’t just leftist rhetoric; it’s simple truth. The cost of our economic priorities is paid in devaluing the common humanity of all the common humans around us, including us. I wonder if you haven’t felt some of this in your own lives?

When we exalt profits over people, it means we don’t value people as much as we value profits. And if this doesn’t sound religious, I don’t know what is religious! It is exactly the meaning of the cry from the prophet Amos 2500 years ago that his people were “selling the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes.” How different does our world sound from that? It sounds very, very different than the America I grew up in, forty and fifty years ago.

There is another dimension to the story of Hephaestos and his golden robots that is worth considering. When Hephaestos decided to devote his whole life to work, the other gods rejected his choice. Nobody followed such a silly lead, because they all saw a lot of other options. But a generation later, those in the household of Hephaestos don’t know any other way of life, any other set of choices. So they went about their work robotically, they lived to work rather than working to live, because they didn’t know there was a choice. And that too feels like it has a lot to say to us today, doesn’t it?

For me, this whole subject raises a lot of questions more profound than answers – and more frustrating, too.

Does the money we spend enrich our lives, help us have more fertile experiences, more nuanced appreciation of life, more creative engagement with others, richer relationships where we can truly know and be known? Or does our money buy distractions from human interaction? Do we spend money on distractions to avoid relationships that aren’t very rich because we don’t know how to relate to others richly?

Money can be a good servant, but it’s always a bad master. When you think of the amount of time and energy and passion you spend earning money, do you think it is more like your servant or your master?

This is dangerous territory. We have a word for people who sell themselves for money, and it isn’t a nice word. And when people are simply owned by money – I think of some of the Asian workers who are reportedly chained to their work stations, but also of people here in Austin working two jobs to make ends meet – when people’s lives are nearly defined by the need to work in order to survive, isn’t that a kind of slavery? Is that the cost of valuing profits over people? The enslavement and prostitution of our bodies, our spirits, and far too much of our lives?

I don’t have your answers. I struggle with these issues too, not always successfully. But I can offer you some questions that might be useful.

What’s the cost of the money you’re earning?

What’s the cost of the money you’re spending? What aren’t you spending it on?

Are you working to live, or living to work?

What are you serving with the days and years of your lives? Does it serve the best parts of you?

Or put it this way: If you were to die this month and in your eulogy you were defined by what you have spent the major energies of your life pursuing, would you be proud of having lived that life?

What would you like to do about it?

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

Hillary Hutchinson

May 1, 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Hillary Hutchinson

May 1st is also Labor Day, hence the topic of today’s talks.

Good morning. My name is Hillary Hutchinson, and most of you know that I have been a member of this church since 1987. This is my third Affirmation of Faith. Pretty soon you are all going to know the story of my life, like it or not!

Today’s sermon topic is “The Myth of the American Dream.” This is a scary topic for me, because it hits a little too close to home. I was raised in a family that believed very strongly that if you worked hard, acted responsibly by going to a regular job, and took your vices in moderation, you would eventually get ahead. Promotions would come, raises would come, and retirement would be possible at age 65. No one talked to me about institutional or social barriers. No one told me I would get laid off twice through no fault of my own, once with a three month old baby. No one mentioned how difficult it was going to be to save any money while putting a husband through graduate school and raising two daughters. No one told me that being female and pregnant means a lot of employers are just not going to invest in you. No one told me that, from time to time, I would actually be working two jobs to pay expenses. Finally, no one told me that I would find myself stuck in a series of dead-end jobs just to pay the childcare and the mortgage. (A mortgage, I should add, that I would not have even been possible, except that my husband and I inherited some money in 1985. It’s not like we were able to earn the down payment.)

So, we bought a 900 square foot house with one bathroom and no air conditioning in the barrios of South Austin. Counting Phred the cat who came with the house, there were five us living in this small space within two years. Through it all I came to this church, looking for answers about how to live my life.

Davidson is going to talk to you about the problems with our American myths, but I see myself as one of the lucky ones: We did in fact succeed in living principally on one income. I had a series of jobs with insurance (indeed, I stayed in some horrible jobs because we needed the health insurance benefits). The Eva St. house was a big and terrifying investment, but it did appreciate. If Jon had not died in 1997, we might now be living quite comfortably on two incomes. White, well-educated, employed, and with a solid net worth based on my own income and assets, I have been able to begin pursuing my own dreams. I no longer wonder with Langston Hughes, “What happens to a dream deferred?” I am working toward a PhD in higher education administration because despite everything, I still believe in the value of a meritocracy. I still believe in the power of education. And I want to be in a position where I can help other people access education, and learn to think critically about the current state of human affairs.

Now that I no longer have to ask myself, “Is there enough money for food and shelter until the next payday?” I find my questions are more nuanced. I am more focused on whether I am doing the right thing, (a question Spike Lee left open for interpretation in his movie of the same name). I am more interested, like Martin Buber, in whether I am in “right relationship” with my fellow human beings. I look at my beautiful daughters, and I hope that they like me as well as love me. I hope that I am doing right by them in the choices I make moment to moment. I try to honor that by treating them with respect, listening to their opinions of the world, and laughing with them about the absurdity of some of our human actions. Teenage hormones are horrible and confusing (I remember it only too well!), so some rules for living are needed for guidance. In finding my own spiritual path at this church, I crafted a golden rule to teach my daughters when searching for guidance: “if your action adds love to the world, then its probably right; if your action adds hate to the world, then it is probably wrong.” Being good Unitarian Universalists, Kate and Clare tell me this is just another way of framing Buddhist compassion.

I think there is one other important element to compassion, and that is the capacity to imagine. This is where Davidson’s discussion of great literature comes in. To act compassionately we must first be able to imagine what it feels like to be someone else on the planet. Secondly, we must be able to imagine different outcomes than the ones we may have been taught. Karen Armstrong was just in town as part of the KLRU Distinguished Speakers series, and one of her comments was, “It’s quite possible to practice bad religion just like its possible to practice bad cooking.” So, since I haven’t the time or the skill to write a great novel with morality subtly built into the text, I’ll leave you with instead with this pragmatic ethics test, compliments of the Rotary International business club. It’s a great little shorthand piece to determine the next right thing to do. Ask yourself:

Is it true?

Is it fair?

Does it foster friendship and create goodwill?

Is it beneficial to all concerned?

How you answer these questions will help you to act with integrity at the next moment of choice. And maybe if enough of us practice this kind of faith, we can create a new American dream that truly does not leave anyone behind.

PRAYER:

Let us pray that we live within stories that can make us more whole.Let us have gods worth serving, rather than the flashier idols that use us until we are used up and gone.

Let us measure our lives and our worth in the right kind of currencies – currencies of compassion rather than control, empathy rather than empire, connection rather that separation, relating with people rather than using them for our own ends.

For there is something precious in the world that wants our attention – something sacred. If only we would serve those things most precious and sacred, they would return the favor, and might bless us.

We know those things. We are moved by them and warmed by their glow in the hearts where they live.

We pray that our hearts will be among the hearts in which the tender mercies dwell. We pray that our lives and our relationships might have that glow and that warmth. And we pray that our world may be the ally of these precious but fragile forces, rather than their enemy.

For these things we pray. But not only pray, not only pray.

Amen.

SERMON: American Myths

In one of the shortest sermons ever delivered, and one of the most famous, the Buddha said “All I do is sit by the river, selling river water.”

I think it’s one of the most profound revelations of the secret of nearly all wisdom: that nothing is hidden, that we just need to be reminded of things we already knew, so that perhaps this time we will awaken, and act.

We had two fairly large memorial services here this week. Both of them filled this room. And in both of them, I said something I say at almost every memorial service. I say I wish more people came to memorial services. Because if they did, and if they heard the memories and stories people get up to tell about the person who has died, they would realize that we know exactly what is right and wrong, good and bad. We know exactly how a noble life is to be judged. Not by might, arrogance, wealth or intimidation, but by the kinds of things every religion has always preached: compassion, understanding, peace, love. We don’t really fool people. That’s the river water, and every good preacher makes their living by selling it.

So as we’re going to talk a little about the American myths this morning, I need to say that we can talk about them, but you already know what’s wrong with them, and how life would look if we were living it more wisely. That’s the river water, and all I’m going to do here is bottle some for you to take with you. So let’s begin.

Every society has basic stories that define it, and it isn’t hard to list some of the deepest myths of America. I think there are four basic myths.

First is our fascination with newness. We have been the “New World” since at least 1492, but “newness” is a central part of who we are. To Americans, it has always symbolized an improved version of what came before. They called this the New World, and named their settlements New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New England. When they went west two centuries later, they named a patch of desert New Mexico.

If you read studies of traditional cultures, you find that all of them would regard this idea that “new” means “improved” as completely insane. Most societies look to the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of their elders, in a way Americans haven’t for a long time. If new means better, than old begins to mean outmoded and irrelevant. And if you don’t think old means irrelevant, ask a dozen people over seventy how they feel our society regards them. We don’t have elders to whom we routinely look for wisdom that surpasses our own.

The second part of the American story is about Success and Capitalism; and in America they are also tied to Salvation, for one of the most fundamental equations of American mythology is the simple formula that “wealth = worth.”

Our myth of success is probably the most important myth in American history. It was given its most powerful expression during the 19th century through the many stories written by Horatio Alger (1832-1898), the chief prophet of our American Success myth. Take just one of his stories, a story called “Struggling Upward or Luke Larkins’ Luck.” You have probably never heard of it. But a century ago, it sold fifty million copies in paperback and was read by millions more. That means that almost all of the adult population of the United States a hundred and thirty years ago bought or read that one little book. And Alger wrote over 134 books. I don’t think you can overstate the influence of a book read by virtually every adult in America, and don’t think we have had any book to match it since then.

Horatio Alger was a Unitarian minister in the 1860s. He was also a pedophile who took street children with him on his travels as sexual toys.

A third part of our American myth is our radical individualism. This is the country of Lone Rangers. The myth of the lone cowboy is one of our most powerful myths. We could talk about this for hours, but this is a point that hardly needs reinforcing in Texas.

The fourth part of our American myth that I want to consider is our imperialism.

From the start, the Pilgrims saw themselves as God’s chosen people, the faithful remnant come to the New Eden to create the New Jerusalem, with a mandate from God to extend the kingdom of Christ, to extend it across the whole new world, to bring civilization to this wilderness. In the 19th century, mythic heroes including Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Mike Fink, Calamity Jane, even Custer and Buffalo Bill saw themselves as God’s agents appointed to civilize the west. Buffalo Bill believed he stood between civilization and savagery.

Officially, our imperialism goes back at least to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which was quickly and repeatedly interpreted to mean that we could advance our economic interests aggressively in this hemisphere, which we have done ever since.

These parts of our script have been with us for a very long time. But things have not been good for the American Dream for quite awhile, at any of these four levels.

First, our addiction to the new has been frustrated at many points. We no longer have any new frontiers, no wildernesses left to take over or move on to. Forty years ago, the TV series “Star Trek” tried to satisfy our wanderlust by defining “Space” as “the final frontier,” sending our Lone Rangers off in space ships. But the frontier metaphor had already worn thin when we settled California over a century ago. And now the last of the Star Trek programs is being cancelled, and the last installment of the “Star Wars” movies has been finished – another series of cowboys on the space frontier.

Here’s an example of how completely we have adopted an imperialistic attitude toward the rest of the world. Think about this, if you will. Fifteen years ago, we essentially kidnapped the president of another country and brought him to this country to stand trial in a drug deal which had also involved agencies of our own government connected with the Iran-Contra affairs. We arrested him after a coup attempt we supported failed to kill him.

If you Google Noriega’s name, the third entry shows a mug shot of him after we arrested him. The caption underneath reads, “Manuel Noriega, former president of Panama, rescued by American marines for incarceration in the United States.” Now think about this. If Iraqis invaded the United States, kidnapped our president and took him back to put in an Iraqi prison for causing the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis in the past few years, how would you look at a caption of his mugshot that read, “George W. Bush, former president of the United States, rescued by Iraqi soldiers for incarceration in Iraq”? We have an attitude toward all other nations that we would find arrogant and criminal if they expressed it toward us. As almost anyone from other countries can tell you – even Canadians – this attitude is 100% American.

We have presumed the right to meddle in Middle Eastern oil pricing for eighty years, and assume that our actions must be justified because we want cheap oil. But think about this. Imagine Saudi Arabia or Russia sending troops into Kansas to regulate the price of wheat because they want cheap food. We have invaded half a dozen tiny countries in the past decade, taking armed forces there as though we had a divine right to do so. We have no such divine right. We never have.

Further, our imperialism is embarrassed by the growing awareness that we are not even the best at very many things any more, or anywhere near it. Our education is near the bottom of the industrialized countries. Our infant mortality rate is the highest in the developed world, our illiteracy rates are soaring, our cars are second-rate, we are barely in the running in televisions, stereos, and a dozen other items. Our family structures seem ineffective, and both in politics and in religion we have seen the norm moving steadily away from honesty and toward hypocrisy.

We murder fifty times as many of our fellow citizens as either the Swedes or the British do. We are a superficially religious society, but in 1989 a special edition of LIFE magazine conducted a survey showing that 70% of our citizens believed in an active spirit of evil they called the devil, and only 40% of them believed in a God. I’m betting that’s a far more honest and accurate poll than all the happy-face polls insisting that 90% of Americans “believe in God” (without ever asking people what they mean by the word ‘God’). The national mood increasingly favors not empowered citizens, but obedient ones. Well, this list can and will go on, but you can continue it on your own.

A third level of our American Dream has involved our radical individualism, which has led us into another blind alley, as our Lone Rangers have become mostly lonely rangers. There is an interesting medical syndrome that can serve as a metaphor for our predicament today. It is the syndrome in human babies known as the “failure to thrive” syndrome. It means that babies who are left alone without being picked up, held, and touched by others can die. They cannot live as isolated individuals, and neither can we. Our emphasis on individualism and our accompanying dismissal of the responsibilities we owe the larger society are way out of touch with the reality of human life, and we are paying the price for it. Psychological depression is ten times as common now as it was before WWII, and since the 1960s our dominant psychological problems have been narcissistic personality disorders. We too are failing to thrive, both as individuals and as a society.

In the fourth part of the American myth, our equation of financial success with personal value, of wealth and worth, there is really nothing new at all. The American philosopher William James spoke of Success as our “bitch goddess” a hundred years ago. But even then this was not a new observation. The ancient Hebrews worshipped the golden calf, and were scolded for it by their prophets. The prophet Amos accused his contemporaries of making people secondary to profits: of selling the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes. Jesus was clear in his own teachings that you can either worship God or money, but not both, and that it would be easier to get a rope through the eye of a needle than to get a rich man into heaven.

As individuals, we all know this. It isn’t news. And talking about it is like sitting by the river, selling river water. Most of that selling river water business has been done by our poets, artists and professional storytellers. When you look back into the first few decades of the 20th century, it is surprising just how accurately the failings of the American Dream were named, and in very famous books, all of which also became movies.

When Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 1949, he focused on the fact that capitalism is about selling both things and people: that to be a successful salesman you must sell not only your product but also yourself. That is what his character Willie Loman did. He sold himself in pursuit of the American Dream, but on a deeper level he had put his faith in the American Dream to give his life meaning, to make him whole-or, in religious jargon, to grant him salvation. It could not do it, and Willy Loman’s suicide was the death of a lost and hopeless soul, abandoned by its god. In the end, at a funeral hardly anybody came to, his eulogy was really summed up in just two phrases: “He was the best-liked,” and “He never knew who he was.” I am reminded of Jesus’s asking what a man gained if he gained the whole world and lost his soul. Poor Willy never even gained the world.

A decade earlier, John Steinbeck wrote his powerful book The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s variation on the theme of critiquing the American Dream was different from Arthur Miller’s, but no less devastating: it is a capitalistic dream achievable by only a tiny percentage of people, he said, whose power and greed will impoverish the overwhelming majority of the rest.

This is even more true today than it was in the late 1930s. During the past dozen years, the gap between the rich and the poor has become a chasm, as we have become a two-tiered society in which the richest 10% of our people control well over 90% of our wealth, a proportion more lopsided than at any time in the history of this nation. The salvation offered by the American Dream is increasingly a salvation available only to the priests and priestesses of capitalism, carried on the backs of an immense number of the masses.

At the end of his book, Steinbeck offered his solution in a form so graphic and powerful it may always fill theaters with sobbing, as it did when I saw it. Here are poor and desperate people who were merely used as dupes by those few who controlled the American Dream, who have been driven against the wall with nothing and no one to care for them but each other. And so the final scene has a young mother whose baby was born dead, now offering her milk to a starving man: a man she did not even know, except to know him as another human being in need.

Here is the “milk of human kindness” in its most elemental and heart-wrenching form. Steinbeck is saying that the kind of salvation we most dearly need cannot come from the American Dream or from economic success. It comes only from reaching out to the strangers around us and offering them what we have to share. This is river water. Every religion has sold it.

And a decade before John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald offered an even more fundamental criticism of this American Dream in his book The Great Gatsby, which many have called the greatest American novel of the 20th century. As Steinbeck saw that the salvation held out by the American Dream is an illusion for all but a very few, Fitzgerald saw that even for the very few, it is still an illusion, for it can not save anyone.

Gatsby had it all, and he had nothing of value because he had lost his soul: he had lost his integrity, his authenticity. That is the reward for worshiping false idols, as it has always been. That is the reward for spending a human life in the service of values and ideals that cannot grant life. As Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman ended with a death and a funeral, as Grapes of Wrath ended after the death of both a baby and the dream that the baby had symbolized, so The Great Gatsby ended with a death and a funeral – a funeral to which nobody came.

The novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story called “Two Old Men” about salvation, about wholeness, about where the sacred dimension of life is to be found, about the way in which life is given its most enduring meaning. Tolstoy’s story is not well known, but it is full of river water.

In this story, two old men decide to go on a pilgrimage to worship God at Jerusalem. On the way they meet a poor family near starvation. One of the old men goes on to the Holy Land the next morning, the other stays to do what he can to help the family. Emergency help becomes long-term aid, as he stays with them for months. He helps them plant crops, cooks meals for them, and spends all his money buying them what they need. Finally, months later, the family has recovered and the old man, his money gone, returns home.

The first man, now back from the Holy Land, swears he saw the other man in Jerusalem, surrounded by a halo-like glow and crowds of admirers. The second man, whose money and energy were spent helping the poor family and who never made it to Jerusalem, just changed the subject. The first old man, you could say, visited the Holy Land as a tourist; the second man had become holy. The first sought the sacred as a separate thing, the second reached out to others, gave of himself, and turned the place in which he found himself into holy ground.

This is like the last scene in The Grapes of Wrath: someone reaching out to offer the milk of human kindness to a stranger. Like the two old men in Tolstoy’s story, Steinbeck’s characters found nothing at the end of their journey but people like themselves: alone and in need, with little to share but their humanity. And so they reached out and turned a small spot on this earth into a momentary shrine where kindness overflowed and strangers were nourished. Jesus could not have said it any more clearly, nor could the prophet Amos, nor Mohammad.

This has been the message of the best prophets in all times: that we are the agents of salvation on this earth. And the measure of the gods we serve, the measure of our own spirits, is the measure to which we have overflowed, have reached out to strangers outside of our family, outside of our religion, outside of our race, to share with them the milk of our own human kindness.

This is the river water that is sold by every religion on earth that’s worthy of the name. It isn’t news. You don’t really come here to learn this; you come here to be reminded of it. Perhaps what we come to church for is not the river water. Perhaps, instead, we come to church hoping once more to learn how to be thirsty for it.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

10 April 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

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech – words taken from Marianne Williamson

HOMILY: Life Shrinks and Expands in Proportion to One’s Courage

A thousand sermons have been written on the sentiment in that saying from Anais Nin, that “Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.” And one of our most persistent dreams in life is finding the right kind of courage needed to help our life expand in the right ways. It isn’t easy.

There are a couple Buddhist stories about this. In one, there was once a mouse who went to God to ask for a favor. “What is it?” asked God. “I am only a mouse,” came the answer, and I live in constant fear of cats. Can’t you do something about my fear?”

There was a loud “Poof!,” a puff of smoke, and the mouse was turned into a cat. For awhile, this sufficed, but before long the cat was back to ask another favor of God. “And now what?” asked the Almighty.

“I’m still afraid,” came the answer. “Perhaps I’m still not big enough. Maybe if I were a very large dog . . .”

Again the “Poof!” and the cloud of smoke, and the cat had become something that looked like a cross between an Irish Wolfhound and a Saint Bernard, weighing in at 250 pounds.

In a week, the dog was scratching at God’s door.

“Now what?” said God – who, though he had infinite power, did not have infinite patience.

“I’m still afraid. Perhaps if I were an elephant,” said the dog. “Or a lion. Yes, that’s it, a lion, the king of the jungle! Let’s try that.”

A loud “Poof!” and a cloud of smoke. And when the smoke cleared, there stood, again, a mouse – who, realizing that it was again a mouse, began squealing for God.

“It is no use,” said God, “there is nothing I can do for you, for you have the heart of a mouse, and as long as you have the heart of a mouse, you might as well be a mouse.”

I’ve been thinking about this subject because courage is in right now, as you know. Arnold Schwarzenegger has informed us that men who would rather talk, negotiate and understand than take premature action are “girly men.” By this measure, some of history’s great girly men would include Jesus and the Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Our invasion of Iraq, whatever else you say about it, involves some kind of courage. We have killed over 100,000 Iraqis, and more than 1,500 of our soldiers have died there so far, plus another 20,000 or so who have been wounded. That is some kind of courage.

But there are different kinds of courage, and not all of them are admirable. It depends on where the courage is coming from, what it is serving.

That word “courage” comes from an old French word for “heart.” You could say that life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s heart. I would define courage as a heart’s effort to make the world in its image. So if it is a good heart, the courage can serve good ends. And if it is a bad heart, the courage – no less courageous – is likely to serve bad ends. It takes courage, after all, to strap a bomb under your shirt, board a crowded bus and kill yourself along with as many others as you can. But a heart that reduces innocent people to pawns in your own deadly chess game – that’s a bad heart, no matter how courageous.

One of the confusing things today is that some of the worst hearts, some of the voices calling for the worst kind of courage, are coming from the fundamentalist versions of our major religions. Some Israelis say God gave them their land, and reclaiming it is doing God’s will, no matter how many Arabs they kill.

Fundamentalist Muslims give their religion a bad name by urging them to kill Americans in the name of Allah. And in this country, far too many conservative ministers have preached war and justified violence, even if they haven’t gone as far as Jerry Falwell’s saying we should hunt down terrorists and blow them away in the name of the Lord. These are voices pleading for courage. But they are pleading from bad hearts, so the courage serves bad ends. And when you serve a bad heart, life expands in unhealthy, deadly ways, like a cancer.

In your own life, you can think of stands you have taken that served both good places and selfish places, can’t you? And you can remember the effects that taking those stands had – on you and your relationships. But sometimes it’s easier to see these patterns in areas where we can paint with broader strokes. So you can also tell the quality of our heart by looking at the form life is taking in our society.

Last week, I read an article by a local man, an editor at the Austin Chronicle named Michael Ventura. I know Michael; he’s spoken here at least once. I want to read you a little from the picture of America he paints. And remember, we reap what we sow; bad effects come from actions serving a bad heart. So listen to these things – some of which you probably know – and ask what kind of a heart our country seems to be serving, and if it is the kind of heart you want. All of these conditions are the direct result of the priorities we are serving. And our priorities come from the active heart of our society:

The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).

“The U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens” (The European Dream, p.80). Excuse me, but since when is South Africa a “developed” country? Anyway, that’s the company we’re keeping.

Lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary American deaths a year. (That’s six times the number of people killed on 9/11.) (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005.)

“U.S. childhood poverty now ranks 22nd, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower” (The European Dream, p.81). Been to Mexico lately? Does it look “developed” to you? Yet it’s the only “developed” country to score lower in childhood poverty.

Women are 70 percent more likely to die in childbirth in America than in Europe (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005).

The leading cause of death of pregnant women in this country is murder (CNN, Dec. 14, 2004).

“Of the 20 most developed countries in the world, the U.S. was dead last in the growth rate of total compensation to its workforce in the [past 25 years] (The European Dream, p.39). Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time.

“In a recent survey of the world’s 50 best companies, conducted by Global Finance, all but one were European” (The European Dream, p.69).

Three million six hundred thousand Americans ran out of unemployment insurance last year; (NYT, Jan. 9, 2005).

One-third of all U.S. children are born out of wedlock. One-half of all U.S. children will live in a one-parent house (CNN, Dec. 10, 2004).

“Americans are now spending more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined” (The European Dream, p.28). It’s the only hope many see of ever realizing the American Dream.

Forty-three percent of Americans think torture is sometimes justified, according to a PEW Poll (Associated Press, Aug. 19, 2004).

“Nearly 900,000 children were abused or neglected in 2002, the last year for which such data are available” (USA Today, Dec. 21, 2004).

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2005-01-21/cols_ventura.html

The bold actions that produced these figures took courage, skill, determination and a kind of leadership. But behind the courage, I believe that we have been serving a bad heart. We could add to the sorrow of figures like these by going down a similar list showing the number of killed, wounded and reduced to poverty in the more than one hundred countries where our country has soldiers stationed.

But I would rather tell you the second Buddhist story about courage. It’s one some of you have heard before here, because it is one of my favorites.

A notorious bandit came to the Buddha one day and informed him that he was the most fierce and brave bandit in all the world, and was going to demonstrate it by killing the Buddha. “Ah,” said the Buddha. “If you are that powerful, you can grant me two wishes before I die.”

“All right,” said the bandit, “but be quick. Time is short, and I have many more people to kill.”

The Buddha pointed to a young sapling tree growing nearby, and said “Cut off the smallest branch on that young tree.” The bandit laughed, and with one quick swipe of his sword, it was done and the tiny branch fell to the ground. The Buddha picked it up.

“Now, old fool,” said the bandit, “what is your final wish?”

The Buddha handed the tiny branch to the bandit, pointed to the tree, and said, “Now put it back on.”

Legend has it that the bandit achieved enlightenment in that instant.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

Victoria Shepherd Rao, Ministerial Intern

27 March 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: Victoria Shepherd Rao

May we understand redemption and self-sacrifice in life-enhancing ways.

Maybe it is not by the death on the cross that we are saved but by the death of our need to always be right, or to have the last word, to always have our own way. Perhaps we may be afraid that if we do not strive to be heard our voice will be drowned out by a thousand different noises, that if we do not stand up for ourselves, we will be overlooked by others. These are real fears.

May we redeem them for trust. May we trade our worries for ourselves for broader, more expansive concerns and by them feel the universality of human need. Need for enough food, for clean water, for shelter, for personal acknowledgement, for enough love. May we be moved by such universal needs – the needs we all share.

Our needs may be met or maybe some of our personal needs are not being met. May we have the honesty to accept ourselves just as we are and the strength of character to do what is necessary to take care of ourselves, so that we may each, in turn, care for others.

Easter is the high holiday, the day when Christians celebrate the supreme self-sacrifice of the one who called the Creator God so familiarly as “Dad.” Christians believe the whole world of possibilities changed in that sad act. Let us also seek to appreciate the unimaginable possibilities an attitude of self-sacrifice ushers into our world.

Let us recall the little parrot in the Jataka tale the children heard*. She shows us how the heart can be powerfully stubborn when it sets itself on the well-being of others. The promise which motivates the one who is self-sacrificing is not only the well-being of others but the possibility of an ultimate kind of satisfaction not with the self but within the self, the sense that there is truth in the statement, “I did everything I could.”

May we here today grow in our capacities to act and be with others in a spirit of self-sacrifice, and may we learn a new meaning for redemption, trading the confines of our self-interest for the expansive realms where concern for the well-being of all humanity, even all beings can bring meaning into our lives abundantly, hope into our outlook irrationally, and joy into our hearts unexpectedly.

* The story of “The Brave Little Parrot” is part of the Buddhist tradition of Jataka Tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives. In this particular story, a parrot does everything she possibly can to put out a fire which is destroying the forest home she shares with many other creatures, regardless of the danger and the seeming hopelessness of the task. Her efforts move a god to tears and his tears become a saving and restorative shower that puts out the flames.

SERMON: Eastering

Religion is a funny thing. On the one hand, we insist that our religion is about dealing with our deepest and most important questions: matters of morals, ethics, even life and death. Nothing in the world is outside the reach of religious concerns and questions.

On the other hand, we expect all our worship services to be rated “G.” There are animated children’s cartoons more risqué than the average sermon. This makes it hard to tell the truth, if the truth is too challenging, unorthodox, or just plain disturbing. And nowhere is this more true than in Christmas and Easter sermons! I have Christian colleagues who say these are often their least favorite sermons, because there is so much pressure to offer nothing more challenging than a Hallmark card with a Happy Face on it.

I’m not a Christian. But if I were a Christian minister and this were Christmas, the first words in my Christmas sermon would be “You know there was never a virgin birth, don’t you?” And for Easter, I’d begin by saying “You know that no corpse ever walked, don’t you?”

There is a saying that the first word in religion must always be NO – NO to the nonsense, so there is room to say YES to the more profound insights of the best religions. But it’s hardest to say No to the two central myths of Christianity – that there was something supernatural about either the birth or the death of the man Jesus.

There wasn’t anything supernatural – not because I said so, but because the world isn’t built that way, either now or then. Christianity was born in the first century, couched in the first century scientific picture of the world. They believed the universe was a local affair, with three levels. It’s the view of the world you can still see by going outside on a clear day; it was one of the most intuitive and common-sense pictures of the world we’ve ever had, even if it wasn’t within a billion light years of being true.

In the middle was the earth, which was flat sort of like a big pizza. The sky above was a dome made of rock – they called it the “firmament,” and the Greeks had their strongest god, Atlas, charged with holding the heavy thing up. Good gods and angels came from up there – either above the cloud layer around Mt. Olympus, or above the higher clouds in Christianity. And below the earth was the place of fire and brimstone, as you could see by looking at what volcanoes brought up from beneath. This was the home of the bad gods and demons.

That’s the first century scientific world picture you have to have in mind to make sense of a lot in the Christian scriptures. When the gospel writers say that the heavens opened and a voice shouted down “Behold, this is my beloved son in whom I am much pleased,” it demands that old picture of the world, where the top of the sky just wasn’t that far away. Or when they say that Jesus descended into hell or ascended into heaven, you need that same ancient picture to make sense of it.

That’s the way the world has to be built in order to have gods mating with humans, corpses ascending to heaven, descending to hell or going anywhere at all. And the world isn’t built that way, either now or then.

But it takes some courage for ministers to tell the truth on Christmas Sunday, or Easter, because in the opinions of most people, Christianity is about supernaturalism.

That’s because for two thousand years there has been this awful contradiction between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. The religion of Jesus is found in the things he taught people about how to live, how to treat one another. The religion about Jesus is the magical religion of the baby and the cross, in which the teachings of the man Jesus are often completely overlooked.

The religion about Jesus has always been the religion of literalistic and fundamentalist Christianity. It is about believing a certain story that few people would even know how to believe, with the promise that if you do, you’ll be saved some day after you die. Jesus would have hated that story. But then, Jesus never heard of either Christmas or Easter. They weren’t created until long after he had died.

The religion of Jesus is not supernatural at all. It is about how you can be saved, be made more whole, here and now, and how you can help make the world more whole here and now.

The message of Jesus was a message of liberation and empowerment; the messages from the religion about Jesus are too often aimed at frightening people into obedience to agendas like hating gays or independent women, or sanctioning a war against people in Iraq that look a whole lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. These are political and military agendas that Jesus would have seen as wrong or hateful.

And the religion of Jesus isn’t about Easter. It isn’t a noun. It’s a verb; it’s about Eastering. It’s about the miracle of new life coming from old, life out of death, right here and now. Nothing supernatural, though it feels so magical when it happens, you know? “Do you have a light?” Jesus asked; “Don’t hide it under a basket.” Have you been given a gift of life? Don’t hide that, either. Share it, give it to others. Life is about honoring that spirit of life that comes and goes as it likes, but when it comes our way it can make all the difference between feeling dead and feeling alive, you know?

Literalistic religion promises a Garden of Eden, which would be an awful place. A place where only obedient, unquestioning, uncurious people are welcome, a garden where no one is allowed to grow into their full humanity. It is not a garden at all, but a trap. It’s a trap in which your spirit can die, because living spirits, like living people, always question, always grow and change. In less than three days, the Garden of Eden would just bore you to death.

Literalistic religions say you can’t save yourself, it can’t happen now, and it can’t happen here. Liberal religions say “If not now, when? If not here, where? If not you, who?” And we answer, “New life can come to you. Here and now.”

If this were Christmas, I’d say that honest religion is a manger made ready for the birth of the sacred within our midst. The Easter Bunny doesn’t need a manger – actually, I’ve never really wanted to know how or why that rabbit lays colored eggs and foil-wrapped chocolates.

Liberal religion – and the religion of Jesus was a liberal religion, not a literal one – offers not a Garden of Eden, but a Garden of Eastering. A fertile place where new life is welcome because we trust the future more than the past.

That’s how I think of this church: as a garden of Eastering. A couple years ago, I overheard our current Board vice-president tell someone that this church was a “Do-ocracy,” where those who choose to do something give the place its character and direction. That’s a Garden of Eastering, a place giving birth to the future.

Before you leave today, we’re going to give you a gift, a symbol of this Eastering spirit, to take home as a reminder. But more about that later.

When you think about it, our annual budget is really just paying the costs of providing that Garden and the staff to tend it, but not the new life that grows in it. We never know what or where that new life will be, because it comes through you. For instance:

I’ve never seen another church with the range of high quality music we have here. Think of the weekly offerings from Brent, Bryan, John, our choir and our many guest musicians. Almost every imaginable style of music is here, from a choir singing Bach to a soloist singing a song by Joni Mitchell or the Beatles, or the wonderful music from “Pieces of East” we have this morning. There’s almost nothing we won’t try, as long as it can carry a spirit that can move us – that’s the key. And that’s why the music program is great: it’s a garden in which the Spirit can grow and flourish. That’s a garden of Eastering.

Or think back a few months and ask why we had such a super Christmas Eve pageant. Why was it so nice? Well, because Vicki Rao, our ministerial intern, took charge of it. Because a few members who had experience in set design and theater direction offered to lend their talents. Because a lot of parents drove a lot of kids to rehearsals, and four or five hundred of you came to be here for it. Eastering doesn’t have a season; it can even happen at Christmas.

Have you walked through the lovely landscaped garden we have in back? Five years ago, it was a playground filled with dangerous junk that had been condemned. Then a few members decided we deserved and needed something beautiful instead. They talked with me and the board, consulted with landscapers, researched top-quality playground equipment, had professional plans drawn, raised money, put in a lot of work, and now a condemned dump has been transformed into a place of beauty for all ages.

And this church has been designated a Natural Habitat by the State of Texas, and a Green Sanctuary by the Unitarian Universalist Association. It’s the only church in Texas with that designation. Why? Because a handful of members who were more sensitive to the grounds than the rest of us felt called to transform it, worked at it and did it. That’s how Eastering works.

Very soon, out in the foyer, we will have a huge twelve-foot long credenza, custom designed and built for us. Why? It wasn’t in the budget. But one member got so sick of the look of the foyer he decided to do something, got some others to help him, talked with me and the board, collected money, and soon there will be a new locus of beauty in our foyer, born of the imagination and care of ordinary people right here in this room. Eastering.

And our new Friday Movie Nights. Several months ago, I thought we needed more opportunities for community that had nothing to do with fundraising, and thought that well-chosen movies might be a way to do it. I solicited donations from several members, who generously contributed a total of over two thousand dollars, and we bought a projector and eight-foot screen. Then some members came forward who wanted to help, decided we should have soda and popcorn for a more complete movie experience, and put it together. We had our very first movie night two days ago, this past Friday night. The members who had put it together told me that if we ever had forty people show up for one of these, they’d call it a success. Friday night, we had eighty-five here. That’s Eastering. New life, appearing where before there had been nothing but a big room, a big garden waiting for something new to be born in it.

This summer, some of our high school kids will be taking part in a Freedom Ride organized by the UUA: a long bus ride retracing some of the steps of the freedom marches in the civil rights movements of forty and fifty years ago. Why? Because one member thought it would be neat to have some such trip, and after more heads got involved, this trip emerged, money was donated, and our kids will have a trip this summer they will never forget, to reconnect them with some terribly important parts of what it means to be an American who cares enough about freedom to make personal sacrifices for it. Eastering.

The church budget, as essential as it is, can’t create the magic that brings new life to this place. All it can do is pay for the garden and hire the staff to tend it. But whether the garden will give rise to new shoots of life – that is really up to you, to the spirit that dwells in you, that makes you aware of little things about this place that need new life, and that moves you to help with the miracle.

And if you think about it, life is like this too. You work to pay the bills, to provide a garden where Eastering might happen, and you work to create a relationship that can give life to you.

Because besides the kinds of institutional Eastering that help make this church so alive and healthy, there are those more down-to-earth, personal gifts of life and grace that come to us.

Last year, a member of this church was diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually awful. She went through tests and the ordeals of treatments. This week, she sent me an e-mail saying there are no signs whatever of any cancer cells, and her prognosis is now for a normal life of another few decades. That’s Eastering.

And just last night, I received an e-mail from Cathy Harrington I want to share with you. Many of you know that Cathy was our ministerial intern two years ago, who is now the settled minister in Ludington, Michigan. And many of you also know that last November, her 26-year-old daughter and youngest of three children was murdered in California. It was about as devastating as anything a parent can ever go through, and it devastated Cathy. Her church gave her time to heal, and even arranged all the Sunday services in December. She spent time with her family, went to Nicaragua for ten days – a place that had some magical healing powers for her. And last week, she went to San Francisco to take part in a four-day street retreat, living, eating and sleeping with some of San Francisco’s homeless people in the Tenderloin area.

Here is her Easter e-mail:

Davidson:

I just returned from a week on the streets of the Tenderloin with the Faithful Fools. I went in search of God and much to my surprise found Her.

I ran into a homeless man named Will, who I met last year. He said the Lord put it into his heart to give me a gift. It was a magnificent silver cross [that had belonged to his mother], a gift of grace that has moved me from despair to the realm of healing and wholeness. It was one of many glimpses of the divine this past week. Finally, grief has released its deadly grip on me and I am able to breathe again. I think I can actually walk through the valley [of the shadow of death now], instead of staying forever in the shadow.

Happy Easter, Cathy.

We all live in the valley of the shadow of death: that valley where death, disease and despair can rear their ugly heads at any time, without rhyme or reason. It can be scary in that valley; it’s no wonder so many people live in fear rather than trust and hope.

But there are more than shadows in this valley of life. There are also gardens: amazing gardens in which new life can and does grow. For us. Here. Now. It may not be supernatural, but it surely feels miraculous. Let us go seeking those miracles, and seeking to be part of those miracles for the world around us.

Happy Eastering!

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© Davidson Loehr

Sally Miculek

20 March 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Miculek

Ten days from now, I’m going to turn 27. Most people would say that 26 isn’t really a major year, as far as growing up goes. It’s not 18, and “adulthood,” or 21. It’s not a decade change. It’s just 26. But, for me, 26 has been a big year. I’ve gone through three important life events, coming-of-age kinds of events, if you will. And their varied nature just reinforces the notion that you never know when or where some new growing up experience is going to come from.

The first event was the most recent – Sunday, January 16, of this year. With two new friends, I signed up to run a 12 mile leg on a relay team for a 50 mile ultrarun through Big Bend National Park. I’m sure many of you have completed marathons or ultramarathons, or had equivalent achievements in other sports, but I hope you will not scoff at me too much. My first 5k, or 3.1 mile race was in April of last year. By November, I was able to run six miles at a go, and that’s when I decided to sign up for the Big Bend run. I put myself on a training regimen more grueling than any exercise plan I’d ever tried before, and within eight weeks of deciding to make the run, I was ready and able to conquer this task I’d set for myself, and I had a great time doing so.

The second event was my wedding. On June 5 of last year, I met my fiance in my parents’ garden, and there we said our vows in the company of many of our friends and our families. The day was the perfect culmination of months of plans, preparations, negotiations, and stress, and I feel lucky to enter the married phase of my life with such an amazing fellow.

The first event was of a more sobering nature. As it happened, the day I was sending my wedding invitations, my OB-GYN called me. He had confirmed that, after follow-up tests, some unwanted cells had returned to my cervix after a procedure 18 months before that had been intended to eradicate the problem. Though he told me many times that this was not cancer, he did refer me to an oncologist, and that fact, coupled with the word “carcinoma,” which was used to describe the wayward, was enough for me. I am happy to report that, after a day surgery a few weeks later, and after many follow up visits throughout this year, the cells have not yet returned. Still, cancer remains a specter for me, and I cannot hear a woman say she is overdue for a routine exam without feeling obliged to tell her some part of my story and then urging her to see her doctor.

So here I am, at the end of my 26th year, embarking on a still new phase in my life. I have a new husband and a new fitness hobby that I hope to keep for a long time, and an ongoing medical concern that will forever color my attitude towards women’s health, and that I hope will never become more than a mere concern for me. As I prepare for my next birthday, I feel confident that whatever growing up experiences 27 brings, I’ll be able to handle them. I’ve got some stuff at the core of my being that I can hold onto when I need it, and that offers comfort, solace, and jubilation through all of my triumphs and challenges. First, I have a family that loves me, and that I love in return. I know I can always go to this group of people to share all of my growing up experiences, for the good or the bad. Also, I have always held the belief that I am a lucky person. To this, I owe my good fortune in having a family I love, finding a mate I love, having a good job, and being able to relish the highs in life, and recover my happiness and joy after things go wrong. No matter what challenges I face, what good or bad decisions I make, I know that I’m lucky enough to be able to come through these growing up experiences stronger. Now I ask you two questions: what have your growing up experiences been this year? I think, if you examine it, you’ll find that maybe you’ve had a more important year than you might have expected. Second, what is at your core that will help you overcome the challenges and embrace the triumphs? I think I did pretty well with the stuff at my core, and I hope that the stuff at your core is just as strong.

PRAYER:

Let us remember who we love and who loves us. for those invisible threads are the ties that bind us together, that help to weave the web of our larger and better selves.

Let us remember and honor those high ideals we have served, and which have served us. They are a part of the image of our greater selves, the image of God.

And let us remember, and draw into our hearts, those most tender mercies that help make us blessings to ourselves and others.

As we make our way through life and life makes its way through us, it is these invisible, slender threads of connection that make up our greatest strength and our most heartfelt hope.

We are not alone. We are never alone, if we can remember those few invisible and precious things that live within us.

And so let us remember who we love and who loves us. Let us remember and honor the high ideals that give us our most noble profiles. And let us remember and pass on to others those most tender mercies that help make us most fully human, and most fully divine.

If we can remember and honor just these few invisible things, these things that form the bedrock of our character, we will be all right. We will be all right.

Amen.

SERMON:

This morning’s service is really about how to deal with change, and the role played for us by those “still, small voices” I was talking with you about last week. When we speak of change, we are usually talking about disposing of something: changing clothes, jobs, cities, partners. Change is usually a kind of “out with the old and in with the new” sort of thing. So it usually means to drop one thing and get a new thing. We speak of it as though we stay unchanged, but just change some of our accessories.

But even with that simple kind of change, we have in mind some image of ourselves, of what doesn’t change. So we change clothes because we are going to a party or a wedding, and want to be dressed right to honor the people and the occasion, because that’s the kind of person we want to be. We change what’s visible to serve what’s invisible.

In the Christian scriptures, there is this famous sentence that says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) “The evidence of things not seen.” Invisible stuff. Important stuff. And Roman Catholics have defined a sacrament as an outward manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s presence. That invisible holy presence is one of the most important things about us, especially when we have to go through hard changes.

With every physical change we make, there is an invisible thing that usually directs or guides the change.

Konrad Lorenz, the great Austrian who created the discipline of comparative animal behavior – humans and other animals, that is – once said that there is one time in our lives when we are so receptive to our environment that it could almost be compared with “imprinting” in young geese. That is that time in our late teens and twenties when we’re struggling to find an adult identity to replace the one assigned to us by our parents. We are so oversensitive to stimuli at that time, he said, that the music that is most powerful for us at that time usually remains the most powerful music for the rest of our lives.

And we may change a whole slew of things in this search, depending on the fads of the day. We want to mark ourselves as individuals, but we want to look like the right kind of individuals – like all those others in the group we run with.

When I was a teen-ager, boys who wanted to look a little wild combed their hair with a duck tail in back. Boy, does that ever not sound wild any more! And I’ve never understood just why we wanted the back of our head to look like a duck’s behind, anyway.

Today, young people get more dramatic changes done: piercings, tattoos, theatrical things done with their hair. Those are the visible changes. but they are driven by the invisible desire to look the part of someone trying to declare independence from an old role, looking for a new one.

Or think of people getting married, and putting wedding rings on. That’s an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual. Though most people who get tattoos will tell you they are also an outward and visible sign of an inward movement.

Almost all of our actions are outward signs of inward dispositions, beliefs or concerns. This is true of social movements as well as individual ones. Something like the civil rights movement or the women’s movement created a lot of outward signs: parades, protests, banners, petitions and the rest. But what gave these movements their power were the invisible and inward changes in attitude that they symbolized.

What’s the point of all this? It is to draw your attention to an irony. And that is the fact that in life, most of our visible actions are really acting out invisible inner or spiritual states that are more important.

This may sound kind of obvious, but it’s one of the most important things in religion and life. I’ve thought for a long time that the biggest reason that religious literalists seem so frightened of change, or those who are different, is because they’re stuck in the visible world, and can’t find that deeper faith that the holy spirit is present everywhere, in everyone.

I’ve had a brief, if strange, e-mail correspondence with a professor from Bob Jones University recently. At one point, I tried to engage him by raising some good scholarly questions that anyone teaching religion should know about. But his response was simply to say that we probably couldn’t communicate, because he was convinced of the absolute depravity of humankind. You know, you can’t say something like that about other people: you don’t know them. But he and many other literalists say that these are confessional statements, they know they are true by looking within. And I don’t think you can argue with that.

But my god, what a sad, miserable kind of faith! Of course we have some original sins – taking our beliefs too seriously is one of them. But we also have many original blessings that are with us still. And we tilt toward the good, not the evil. How dreary to go through life with fear driving you to such horrid beliefs that you miss the gift of so much that makes life rich and good. I think one of the ironies of people stuck in literal religions is that their only answer would be to find a better kind of religion: one with a healthier and more whole picture of our human condition.

This is the kind of thing Sally was talking about with that “stuff” at her core: that invisible center that has sustained her through some of her recent big changes. Things like knowing that your family is stuck with you and you can count on them, or counting on the fact that you’ve always been lucky enough to be able to frame changes in hopeful ways rather than frightening ways.

The supremacy of these invisible things – these still, small voices – has been seen by the greatest thinkers in all times and places. I want to introduce you, or reacquaint you, with a few of them, a few people saying the same thing in different ways.

1. Aristotle wrote, “There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity: [we] will live it not by virtue of [our] humanity, but by virtue of something in [us] that is divine. [and] small though it be, in power and worth it is far above the rest.” All this talk of invisible powers and voices sounds kind of spooky or supernatural. But it isn’t supernatural. It’s natural, and super.

2. In the Bible, when the ancient Hebrews left Egypt and wandered through the wilderness for forty years, all the outward and visible signs were just awful. Those with the shallowest faith even wanted to return to Egyptian slavery because at least it was familiar. But they carried something with them on their wanderings, that gave them a kind of center, a center that moved with them. They called it the Ark of the Covenant. It was a box about three feet long by two feet square, and the Hebrews carried it with them everywhere. It was thought to have great power – you may remember the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark”? That was the outward and visible thing.

But its real power came from the fact that it was a sign to them that their God was with them, that everything holy that gave them significance and purpose was with them, always, even as they wandered through the wilderness. Now don’t just think of this as an old story about people who have been dead for over thirty centuries; it is, as all good myths are, also about us, about a dimension of ourselves we usually haven’t learned to see.

3. There is a stronger version of this business of carrying your god with you, in ancient Greek mythology. It’s one I find both more profound and more useful. It comes from a little-known myth of a little-known god named Proteus. If you read Greek mythology, you won’t find many lines devoted to this god. His chief claim to fame was his ability to change shape.

Sometimes he was a tree, sometimes sea foam, or anything at all. A lot of Western thinkers have attacked this as a sign of people with no soul, no core: “protean” people. But they have missed the point. The god Proteus should be seen as the patron saint of change. Because, while he changed form quite often, he was always a god. Think about this. What was most important, most sacred, about him, had nothing to do with the form he happened to be in at the moment. He was always holy, always a god. You understand that in the language of mythology, this is a story about us, don’t you? It is a story telling us that for us too, when we change form, place, change almost everything, there is still that invisible something about us that is sacred. If there is one single truth I wish more people really believed, it is this. It’s both natural, and super.

4. And a beautiful expression of this same insight comes from the Qu’ran from the religion of Islam, where one of its most famous sayings is that Allah is closer to you than your own jugular vein. Now what can be closer to you than your own jugular vein? Only something that is an inherent part of you. God inside of you: the holy spirit as an invisible but essential part of you that goes with you wherever you go.

5. One last image comes from an old story the Greeks used to tell about Socrates. He was this wonderful and very irritating old philosopher who taught Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle. He was a stonemason by trade, and all the stories about him indicate that he was, that his face was – well, ugly. And this was in a Greek culture that idolized beauty.

Sometimes in the plays the Greeks would put on, an actor would portray Socrates – usually to make fun of him – by wearing a big mask he held up in front of his face, a mask made to look like the face of Socrates. Now the face was so ugly that people laughed, sometimes because they didn’t believe anybody could actually look like that. And when Socrates was in the audience and this happened, he used to stand up and turn around so everyone could see that yes, by golly, someone really can look like that! His heart, his soul, weren’t owned by the visible world, but by something inside of him no one but Socrates could really see.

That may have been the source of the story that compared Socrates to some common little wooden statues Greeks would make that were plain on the outside, but when you opened them they were filled with gods. How else could Socrates be so unconcerned with his looks, unless there was something inside, invisible, that was more powerful than his misshapen face? Plain on the outside, with gods inside. You see, that too is a story about us, if we’ll hear it.

Sally called it the stuff at her core. When I hear a story like Sally’s, I don’t much care what you call this invisible and holy part of you, as long as you can call it forth. Aristotle called it forth by one name, the old Greek mythmakers called it forth by another, the ancient Hebrews called it forth by still another. And for Socrates, like Proteus, it was closer to him than his own jugular vein. But can you see they were all talking about the same thing, the fact that there is something about us that is incorruptible, that is always there, always with us, and that it is the strongest ally we have as we go through the changes that life brings to us.

This invisible, natural, super thing at our core: what is it? I think it’s an ability to frame life as trustworthy, because you know you are supported by a core, anchored in a soil, deep and fertile enough to ground you as you grow through the changes life brings.

This invisible thing, this faith that believes the evidence of things not seen, that believes there is a holy spirit within us, within our core – this is what determines whether in our lives time will bless us, or will just pass; whether we’ll grow up, come of age again and again, or just get older.

You know there’s a story about this, too: about someone who never got it, who was never transformed by life, who never came of age, and whom time simply passed by. It is the story of Rip van Winkle, who fell asleep under a tree for twenty years, and woke up with nothing to show for it but a long beard. We can miss it. Life really can pass us by.

St. Paul once wrote that when he was a child he thought like a child, but when he became a man he put away childish things. That’s what we need to do when things change and we become afraid. We need to put away childish things – like believing that we’re alone, or that our meaning and purpose were tied to a certain form, job, or identity, or that there is nothing we can count on to carry us through. Those things are childish, and are not true. They are profoundly faithless.

For we are not alone. We may look plain on the outside, but we are filled with gods, filled with the holy spirit. The evidence is closer to us than our own jugular vein. You just have to have the eyes to see it, and the faith to believe it. It is not supernatural. It’s natural, and it’s super. It is the truth that can set us free. Try it, for a lifetime, and see.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

Cuileann McKenzie

13 March 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Cuileann McKenzie

We participate in an unending chain of conversations. But despite all this practice talking, I think most of us have trouble finding our true voice, let alone using it. We chatter, but are we really reflected in our words? Often not. Sometimes for necessary reasons – like portraying a particular image for an employer at a conference, or not telling the bride how much you dislike her gown on her wedding day. But holding back or changing our comments to suit the expectations of another can be taken too far. Like too many of us, I have had times in my life when I’ve allowed my true voice to erode to nearly nothing, completely following another’s lead, and all the while continuing to “talk” like there was nothing wrong. It’s a costly trap, for as the voice fades so does the spirit. But I can assure you, from experience, it’s possible to get your voice back.

What about those of us who haven’t found our voices yet, or those who have been categorically dismissed as not having much of value to say? I loved working with one of these groups, high school students, particularly those in alternative education. After some classroom teaching experience, in one of my teacher’s college assignments, I asserted that we should give high school English students an opportunity to write down their personal thoughts and feelings and allow them either to keep the notes or to use a shredder at the end of the class. The intent was to give them a private and safe space to explore their minds, to vent, to ponder, to hope or pray, and through the writing process, to start to find their own unique voices. The idea was received well by the professor, but that was pre-Columbine, pre-911. Things are different now. Today, I doubt there’d be much support for such a suggestion, and I’m not sure I’d chance voicing it. In the current climate of fear, I think we’ve really lost something – without a sense of safety, voices become quieter.

When I first thought of the shredder, I identified more with students and less with adults in the trenches of career and family. But time has a way of shifting perspective. Indeed, it now seems to me that age can bring more restrictions on voice rather than fewer. Before we speak, we consider partners’ feelings, company cultures, and the little ears of children. Perhaps we’re the ones that need some paper and a shredder. Maybe instead of feeding that machine our bank statements, using it to protect our identity, we can use it to help us find one. Writing to purge the mind and heart can be seen as healthy for the spirit as well, for the Dalai Lama ritually writes his concerns down on a sheet of paper each evening and throws it into a fire. Hey, if it’s good enough for him, maybe we should all try it!

A great way not only to begin to find your voice but also practice using it can be found right here at the church. I’ve had the opportunity to be both a participant and a leader of Evensong, and I’ve benefited greatly. I tend to be reserved when it comes to discussing personal matters. That might seem odd since I’m a writer and am also up here speaking right now, but when I’m writing fiction, I get to don a mask and have great fun, and when I’m up here, I fulfill a clearly defined role and follow my script. When on my own, though, in the everyday world, I often become quite shy. In the welcoming atmosphere of Evensong, however, my reservations soon faded away.

The series of eight weekly gatherings is a wonderful place to learn not only how to speak, but how to listen. After having a week to ponder a topic, you are given the chance to set your true voice free and talk without interruptions, without questions, in an accepting atmosphere. Each person has a chance to speak, while the rest of the group silently and supportively listens. And truly listening to another person is valuable — not only is the speaker’s voice strengthened by the acceptance and validation, while listening, we learn that we’re not alone. THE PRECEDING HAS BEEN A PAID PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE FOR EVENSONG AND RELATED just kidding, I’m just a big fan! But seriously, consider joining Evensong. A new group begins on March 23, and you can sign-up in the Gallery after the service.

Of course expressing our voice is not limited to speaking or writing. People caring for those who need their help are saying so much. And expression through music is wonderful – as we hear each Sunday. Some people also show their regard for others by cooking a beautiful meal. Related to that, to the friends I met last fall in Evensong – at our holiday potluck, I swear that my store-bought frozen lasagna was not saying anything! In whatever form of communication we choose, each one of us has the potential to speak with our own unique and valuable voice. Let’s take the time to find it and then, Speak Up!

PRAYER:

Let us listen for voices that bless us, and call us toward a higher kind of humanity.

There are so many voices we do not want to hear. Voices that belittle and demean us. May we let those bitter voices go by like echoes of bad ideas.

Voices that say we can never be enough, or that we are damned, or too sinful ever to be acceptable – these are usually the voices of tormented people. Let us move out of their way, as we move toward the light.

The light has voices, but they bless us, and call us into our fullest humanity. They help us become human religiously rather than fearfully.

The voices coming from the light bless us, because they know we are children of God, children of the universe, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and that we are precious.

Let us know that we are precious: that we are precious people called to share our gifts of life with a world that desperately needs to hear life-blessing, life-giving voices. Let us hear those voices, and let us be those voices of life and love, of challenge and encouragement.

If we must hear voices – and we must – let us listen for the good ones. And let us strive to become some of the voices of blessing, affirmation, challenge and empowerment so that we too, as we pass through life, may bless the world with our own gifts of life and of love.

Amen.

SERMON: Finding Your Own Voice

I have a kind of confession to make: I hear voices. Don’t worry; the voices I hear are a comfort to me. And striving to be in their company gives my life much of its meaning and purpose.

Cuileann spoke of finding your individual voice, and when we talked about this service, I told her I was going to use the old Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus to frame it. Now if you haven’t been coming here for long, you might think a “myth” is just an untrue story. But that’s not right. A myth is something that never happened, but always is. The good myths have insights into the human condition that seem relevant even two or three thousand years after the myth was first told. So the truths contained in myths aren’t like those in science. They’re deeper; they last a lot longer, and they’re always symbolic and metaphorical, never literal.

Little Echo was a nymph who was very pretty but couldn’t shut up. And once after talking to Zeus’s wife Hera to distract her while her husband Zeus escaped from another of his many local affairs, Hera got so angry she put a curse on Echo, and said that from then on she could never have a voice of her own, but could only repeat what others said to her. That story is the source of our word “echo.”

Now Narcissus was a beautiful young man who was unkind and indifferent to all the women who loved him. So one of the avenging goddesses put him under a curse. She decreed that he too would have the experience of deeply loving someone who would never return his love.

So Narcissus and Echo will make an interesting match. Echo sees him lying by a stream, but can’t call out to him. He, in the meantime, has seen his own reflection in the stream, fallen madly in love with it, and cries out “I love you!” “Love you” calls back little Echo. But Narcissus loved no one but himself, and gazed narcissistically at his own reflection until he finally wasted completely away. And little Echo also wasted away, with neither a love nor a voice of her own, until nothing was left of her but her voice, still repeating back whatever is said to her.

Boy, there are a lot of keen psychological insights in that story! Narcissists who, no matter how attractive they may be to others, are capable of loving only themselves. And their partners, who are only permitted to echo back whatever Narcissus says until they too waste away.

We really can lose ourselves if we never find our voice. Haven’t we all experienced this at least once? Not having a voice, playing the role of Echo to someone who really didn’t care?

The role of Echo is one with which a lot of women identify, but it isn’t always the woman who is the echo. Family counselors tell me they’ve seen it both ways, including couples where the woman is the narcissist and the man is assigned the role of echoing back whatever she says.

But however the roles are cast, it’s a plot in which nobody can win. Echo and Narcissus each had half the answer, but only half. Echo could only love others from a distance. But she couldn’t love herself, and wasted away without having a voice of her own. Narcissus could love no one but himself, and wasted away because that’s not enough.

Today we probably wouldn’t call her Echo. Maybe we’d say she’s just doing Karaoke: singing words to somebody else’s tune. But spiritual Karaoke is not satisfying, as you know if you’ve tried it. And when we see someone doing it, we always want to say “Oh, just be yourself, will you!”

But you know it isn’t that simple, either for women or for men. There can be something scary about speaking in our own voice, being known. What if it isn’t enough?

This reminds me of a short comedy skit I saw on television probably twenty years ago. It starred Rich Little, the gifted impersonator. It was sort of the opposite of the Echo and Narcissus story. He played a husband, whose wife was angry because he would never show her his true self. He kept talking to her like Humphrey Bogart. And after doing Bogey, he’d be John Wayne or Sean Connery. Finally, she got so frustrated she said if he didn’t start being himself, she’d leave. Then suddenly this whiney, wimpy, snivelling little voice came out of him. She stopped, looked, and said “Is that the real you?” “Yes,” he whined. She thought about it, then said “Do Bogey again.”

So part of finding our own voice lies in believing that we have a voice that’s worth finding, and that anybody even wants to hear it.

One of the problems is that we all have more than just one voice, and sometimes have to choose which of our voices to use. The Greeks really made it easier for us to understand that we have many voices. They had all these gods and goddesses, and Greeks understood that several of them resided within them, often giving them conflicting advice. Several years ago, I read a book by Arianna Huffington on The Greek Gods, and learned that she also grew up thinking of her competing voices as the voices of goddesses. She has said that her adult life has been a balancing act between following the voice of Demeter the mother to her two daughters, and Artemis, the ambitious and driven woman.

Maybe you think it’s odd, talking about having several voices. But everyone in this room has done it. You’re on a first date, or cruising a bar or party, and meet someone you want to impress. A woman might decide whether she wants to come across as strong Artemis, sexy Aphrodite, mother Demeter or Hera, the archetypal wife. Meanwhile, the man is choosing between being sexy Dionysus, cool and competent Apollo, tricky little Hermes, or Big Daddy Zeus.

We all hear voices. Sometimes our voice needs to be a blend of the several things that are most important to us, and we gain our integrity through integrating our different voices into complementary expressions of our core, or soul. So finding our voice is less like a discovery and more like an achievement.

It is so important for us to do this work, to find our voice and offer it to others, to our world. Because we are the only ones who can do it. And what a shame it would be if the world never got to hear our voice because we forgot about them while we were singing spiritual Karaoke. Finding and using our own best voice is how we are born into our adult roles.

Now let’s take it up a level. Once we find our voice, it’s clear that what really matters is what our voice is serving, what it represents. You know if it’s a whiney sniveling voice, nobody will want to hear it. And if we can only focus on ourselves, nobody wants to hear that, either.

One point of religion is to help us find voices worth serving with our own; to help us find ideals worth following with our lives. That’s what I meant when I said that I hear voices, that they are a comfort to me, and striving to be in their company gives my life much of its meaning and purpose.

You know some of this. In fact, you make judgments on it every week. You don’t really come here to hear me. You come because you hope I’ll be a voice for something beyond me, beyond us, for a perspective big enough to give you something to take home, something you can use in your own life. If you think back on it, I’m betting you have judged every preacher you’ve ever heard on what they served with their voice. Did their words just draw attention to themselves, or were they serving a perspective and a spirit big enough to give some life to you?

Christians say – and I do love this saying – that it isn’t so much who we are that counts, but whose we are. That’s what they mean: what are we serving? What gods are we incarnating, what spirits? Are they spirits that bless our world, or bore it, or even curse it?

Abraham Lincoln once said that we seek “the better angels of our nature.” The word “angel” means “messenger,” a messenger from the “gods.” Any Greek would understand that he means we want to serve the better gods. And like the Greeks, Lincoln knew we have many angels in our nature, both good and bad, and that they all come calling on us from time to time – as you know, too. But we should just listen for the better angels of our nature. They need to be the tune our voice is singing, if we’re to have a voice that blesses us and our world, a voice the world needs to hear.

So spiritual Karaoke is using your voice to sing someone else’s tune, like little Echo. And religion is using it to sing God’s song, to put it poetically. It’s the voice of God we’re seeking. Or if you’d like that put into other words, it’s the voice of wisdom, insight, compassion, love, and connection. That’s what the symbol “God” stands for. That’s the tune we want to sing, the tune that gives our voices the power to give life to us and to others.

Where do you find that voice? The voice that can give grounding to your own voice: the good gods, the better angels – where do you find them? From politicians? Beer ads? Movies? Soap operas? They’re all trying to sell us voices and roles to play, you know. Do you listen for the strongest voice, the loudest voice, the scariest voice? Where do you find the voice that’s most likely to be coming from those better angels of our nature?

This is like asking where do you find the voice of God, isn’t it? So where do you find this “voice of God”? Do you find it in the shouting bible-thumping preachers or the self-righteous politicians or arrogant friends who have made God so simple that they have him all locked up and want to tell you what to believe? No. No, I don’t think you ever find the voice you need in the loud and arrogant places. Listen to this wonderful poetic passage from the Hebrew scriptures:

“And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” (1 Kings 19:11-12)

A “still, small voice.” That’s the kind of voice our better angels have, I think.

I had an experience like this that always comes to mind when I read this passage, and which you might find useful too. I have never liked public spectacles much, and have avoided almost every graduation ceremony of mine that I could. I didn’t attend the ceremony for my undergraduate degree, or for the Master’s Degree, and had no intention of going to the ceremony to get my Ph.D., either.

But a classmate told me I must go. “Why?” I asked him. He just said there was a line there that would be spoken by the president of the university, that I must hear it and would never forget it. All right, that’s pretty seductive.

So for the first time, I rented a gown and hood and bought the hat, and took part in the graduation ceremony. I was sitting right next to my classmate, and kept wondering when and what this great line was. It came near the end.

After all the undergraduate degrees and Master’s degrees had been granted, she called up onto the stage all of us who were receiving our Ph.D.’s. After some brief introductory remarks, she turned to face us, and said – this still chokes me up! – “I welcome you into the ancient and honorable community of scholars.” I’ve never heard such empowering and intimidating words in my life. We weren’t just students who finally got through the grueling degree program. No, we were now and forevermore members of an “ancient and honorable community of scholars.”

I hadn’t even realized that such a community existed. I’ve spoken with others who got their doctorates at the same university, and the line has kept its power for all of us. One woman told me that sometimes, when she’s preparing a lecture, she want sto cut corners because the class is only for freshmen.

Then she’ll hear voices. At least that one voice, reminding her of the ancient and honorable community of which she is a part. And she says it feels like Aristotle is there looking at her, saying “You don’t really intend to cut corners on this lecture, do you?” Like me, she hears voices, and those voices are a comfort to her. And striving to be in their company gives her life, as it gives mine, meaning and purpose. You realize that this is the same message religions give in their different ways. It is like saying “You are a child of God, and God loves you,” or that your soul is part of the whole universe’s soul, or that you are made of stardust.

So when you serve a transcendent ideal, can you really say it’s your voice you have found? Yes, it’s just a voice that you cared enough about to educate, to let it rub up against others who aspired to high ideals. And the ideals we serve with our lives – those ideals bless us. And people around us can tell. They may not know just what inspired us, but they know we are trying to be true to something important, something enduring, perhaps even something eternal. And it makes all the difference.

For we have heard the voices of the better angels of our nature, and they always bless us, by initiating us into that ancient and honorable community of people trying to come into their full humanity. And there is no higher or more ennobling aspiration.

I don’t mean only for us as individuals, but also for groups of people. This was what happened with black people in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: they found their voice and claimed their place at the table of humanity.

It is what happened in the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the gay rights movements since gays fought back against police harassment at the Stonewall bar in 1969.

These moments were among the miracles of the past half century: miracles, because new life was born, as new groups of people found their voices, connected those voices with timeless tunes of freedom, equality and justice, and raised their voices to bless both themselves and the world around them, whether the world was ready for that blessing or not.

Those people heard voices. Not the voices of the loud bigots around them, not the loud voices of abusive policemen, not the voices of everyone telling them to get back in their place and be little Echoes again. They heard the “still, small voice” that contained the voice of God, the voice of the better angels of their and our nature.

This is a sermon that can’t really end, because it’s a sermon about beginning to take ourselves seriously, trying to become fully human, religiously. So here’s how I want to begin. I want to begin by welcoming you, all of you, into the ancient and honorable community of people seeking their full humanity. You are all part of it, and I hope when you leave here, you hear voices too: voices that know your name, know your soul, voices that give you the power to speak, to bless yourselves and to bless your world, our world.

Perhaps nothing in all of life is more sacred than hearing those voices, and knowing how to answer them.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

13 February 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

In many ways, we know so little. Yet we guide our lives, and our actions toward others, based on the little that we know. And sometimes we do harm, because we hadn’t understood, because we hadn’t cared, because we didn’t know the right little things.

Let us try to take an honest inventory of the little things we know, and test them with both head and heart:

When we judge and condemn others, have we understood that they, no less than we, are children of God?

If we are alienated by those who love differently than we do, have we remembered that it is often a gift to the world when we can love at all?

When we see that another’s values would not feed our souls, can we also see that means that our values might not feed theirs?

If the god of understanding were watching the way we treat those with whom we disagree, would that god say that we have really understood them?

If the goddess of love were watching, would she say that we had added to the amount of love in the world, or detracted from it?

And if all the people we most admire, those with the clearest understanding or biggest hearts – if they were watching us, would we feel ashamed, or proud?

We know so little, yet must guide our lives by the little we know. We seek ways of being and living that can make us better people, partners, parents and citizens.

Let us pray that our actions may make us agents of a deeper understanding and a broader love. For the world needs those gifts, far more than it needs our little certainties.

When we can’t respect others enough, when we can’t love them enough to bless their best intentions, let us pray for the character to treat them as we might if only we could understand them better or love them more.

We offer this prayer with honest minds, open hearts, and a grateful reverence for this amazing gift of life.

Amen.

Sermon

This starts and ends with stories.

One day the devil and one of his little helpers were sitting on a cloud looking down at the humans below, when they saw a man walking down a road who stopped, picked up something from the road, put it in his pocket and walked on.

“What did he find?” asked the devil’s helper. “A piece of the truth,” chuckled the devil.

“A piece of the truth? Don’t you want to stop him?”

“Stop him? Oh no,” said the devil. “It’s only a tiny piece of truth. Before long, he’ll turn it into an orthodoxy. And then he’ll be doing my work!”

There are ways in which that story sums up the history of almost all religions. It’s like the ancient Hindu story of the blind people and the elephant, but with a vengeance. In the Hindu story, different blind people came upon different parts of an elephant. The one who had grabbed the ear said “Why, an elephant is like a big leathery leaf!” The one who had hold of the trunk said “You fool! It’s nothing at all like a leaf. It’s like a long, thick snake!” The one who had bumped into a leg said “You’re both crazy! I have a firm hold on this elephant, and it is like a strong, rough, tree trunk!” And from behind, the one who had grabbed the tail called out “You’re all idiots. Either you’ve never experienced an elephant at all, or you’re lying. It is not a large thing at all; it is like a small, stiff rope!” And so on.

Both of these stories are immediately recognizable because they’re both about the human condition and human nature, and that hasn’t hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

One of the original sins of our species is that we will never have more than a few pieces of the truth, but we always want to pretend that we have the whole truth. It gets us into most of our problems with each other, doesn’t it?

I spent several years studying theology back in graduate school. At its best, theology is the study of those deep and abiding truths that can set us free. But mostly, it is the study of how each religious thinker managed to find one tiny piece of truth, then turn it into an idol that became the enemy of honest religion, and too often the enemy of both truth and humanity.

So the question of religious toleration is a tricky one, because there is a lot that should not be tolerated, and part of the art is learning which is which. When I went on the Internet and Googled “religious toleration,” I was drawn to two fairly dramatic sites. The first was the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia. They pointed out that we only tolerate things we think are wrong but don’t want to speak out against. So we tolerate evil. No one will say: “We must show toleration towards courage or love”, for these are both traits that we don’t tolerate, but encourage.

Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church is against “freedom of belief”, which asserts the right of each person to believe what he pleases. And they quote Pope Leo XIII’s writing on this, from 1885, where he wrote: “The gravest obligation requires the acceptance and practice, not of the religion which one may choose, but of that which God prescribes and which is known by certain and indubitable marks to be the only true one.” “In the domain of science and of faith alike,” the Encyclopedia article continues, “truth is the standard, the aim, and the guide of all investigation; but love of truth and truthfulness forbid every honorable investigator to [tolerate] error or falsehood.”

In other words, for the Catholic Encyclopedia, freedom of belief is only freedom to choose the truth, and the only religious truth is, coincidentally, owned by the Catholic Church. Well, there’s that guy picking up the tiny piece of truth, and the devil watching with delight.

Then I also came on a website called biblebelievers.org. The headline read,

“The Cult of Liberty is the Recipe of Moral Breakdown”. Beneath the headline, they said the only thing conservatives can hope for is a moral reawakening of the United States.

They were encouraged by the fact that the conservatives in power are going to “dismantle the welfare state.”

“Bravo,” they wrote. Then they asked, “But what about dismantling abortion? Gay rights? Birth control pills and devices? Sex education? Dirty movies and TV? Women’s liberation? Secular humanism in the schools? These are the true plagues of American society,” they wrote, “not high taxes or welfare, and these diseases are the effect of the general breakdown of the morals of the people. And the problem is that these infections cannot be eradicated legally and logically except by some ‘principle, a principle which restricts human freedom only to those objects which are good’.” (http://www.biblebelievers.org/)

Both these websites are variations on the stories of people grabbing tiny pieces of truth, and the myth of the blind people and the elephant. And they show why the United States of America has had freedom of belief for nearly all of its history. Each of these religious groups has picked up a tiny piece of truth, smothered it in a ton of arrogance, and each has confused truth with their own small biases.

The Catholics would be embarrassed by the hateful bigotries of biblebelievers.org, even though they share many of them. And when biblebelievers.org speaks of goodness or truth, they do not mean the kind the Catholic Church has. Back when we had British colonies here, before the Revolutionary War that gave us the right to make our own laws, almost all the colonies were examples of what can happen when these tiny pieces of truth are given the power of law.

For example, the colony of Maryland published something called An Act Concerning Religion, on 21 April 1649. In that act, they said that anyone who denied that Jesus Christ was the son of God, or denied the trinity, or said anything bad about them, was to be put to death, and their properties would all be seized by the colony.

That’s what it means to say that when people find a tiny piece of truth and turn it into an orthodoxy, they are doing the devil’s work. In fact, I would say that orthodoxies are the devil’s work, because they are always that guy picking up the tiny piece of truth wrapped in reams of arrogance, then turning it all into dogma.

The truth that can set you free

Still, I’m with the biblebelievers.org and the Catholic Church when they say that we should encourage truth but not tolerate untruths masquerading as truth. And I’m with them when they say that liberals have far too often been willing to bless anything, including things that shouldn’t be blessed. Sometimes we liberals have had such open minds that some of our brains have fallen out.

But what is this truth business – especially something like the kind of truth that can set you free?

The short answer is that that’s what all great religious teachings have always been about. The best religious and philosophical thinkers have tried to help us understand what this greater truth is like, the kind that can set you free, the only kind that should really be encouraged. But few read them.

Aristotle, as the Catholic Encyclopedia noted, taught that wisdom consisted in choosing the middle road between extremes, because extremes can be either too permissive or too narrow and brutal. The best religious teachers and prophets have always known this.

In the Qu’ran of the religion of Islam, there were no obligatory doctrines about God: indeed, the Koran is highly suspicious of theological speculation, dismissing it as self-indulgent guesswork about things that nobody can possibly know or prove. (Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p. 143) The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition says there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinitude. Thus the Koran repeatedly points out that it is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims must emphasize their kinship with the older religions. (Armstrong, p.152)

And behind Christianity was the figure of the man Jesus, who would have hated Christianity. Jesus said don’t judge. He said to treat others the way you’d want to be treated. He even said to let the wheat and the weeds grow together – which sounds far more permissive than even the cult of liberty.

The Buddha taught that when we have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the compassionate thing, we should always choose the compassionate thing. Why? Because what we think of as the right thing will almost always happen to coincide with our own biases, the little bits of truth we picked up.

Taoism has an even more subtle kind of teaching. They say everything is always in movement, either coming to be or passing away, either moving from weakness to strength or from strength to weakness. So certainty is a very weak place to be, because your next move has to be down.

And Jews have such a way of taking some lesson that sounds rigid, then soaking it in such human warmth and wit that it melts into understanding and compassion.

One of their many stories about this concerned a small village, which prided itself on enforcing the strictest kind of obedience to the Law – like that 1649 Act of Religion by the Maryland colony. The village was losing so many people it was on the verge of collapse. They couldn’t understand how they could be dying when they were so right.

So one of their elders traveled to a large town nearby, to see a rabbi who was known far and wide for his wisdom. He told the rabbi their strange plight: that they were dead right but nearly dead as a village. The rabbi nodded, and said “Your sin is the sin of ignorance. You see, the Messiah is among you, and you are ignorant of this fact.” The man returned home, hardly willing to believe this. He knew everyone in the village – after all, there were fewer and fewer of them every day – and there wasn’t anybody there who could possibly be pure enough to be the Messiah. When he told the other villagers, they didn’t believe it either.

Still, the old rabbi was famous for his wisdom, and nobody wanted to say he was a fool. So they began wondering if maybe he could be right – if old Goldberg over there could possible be the Messiah, or Mrs. Robbins. Impossible! Still, just in case, they began treating everyone as though they might be the Messiah, which means they began treating them a lot better than they had been.

You can see the end of the story coming: the village flourished, because they had let go of their tiny little truthlet and found the more difficult and more full truth, and it had set them free of their certainty, and free of their smallness.

The truth worth serving, the truth that can set us free, must first set us free from our own narrowest certainties, those certainties that would shrink the world to the size of our biases and habits. That’s the irony of places like biblebelievers.org or those passages in the Catholic Encyclopedia: while willing to fight or even kill for the truth, they don’t realize that they are among its greatest enemies – and that they make the devil laugh with glee at his newest disciples.

I don’t think any church or any religion can be trusted to know the truth when they see it, because that story of the man who picked up a tiny piece of truth and made an orthodoxy out of it – that seems to be a story of human nature.

That’s why the insights of the founding thinkers of great religions are almost always the enemies of the religions founded on them. The religion about Jesus has almost nothing in common with the religion of Jesus. Of all the people who might hate Islamic fundamentalism, none would hate it more than Mohammad. The Buddha would be at least saddened to see the rank superstition that 98% of Buddhists mistake for Buddhism, and on down the line.

You don’t let Budweiser choose the drinks, or all you’ll have is beer. You don’t let Christians define truth or no one else is safe. And when the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It simply takes more and better tools to serve either truth or life.

Yet behind it all, there is still this thing called truth that is still worth pursuing, and can still set us free. But today, it seems that it must first set us free from the religions that identify truth with their beliefs, from the nationalisms that identify it with their borders, and with every other example of people doing the devil’s work by beating others to death with their tiny little truthlets. Their name is legion.

One part of the truth is that none of us will ever have it all. We are all that person who picked up a tiny piece of truth. You could say both the gods and the devils are watching to see what we’ll do with it, whether we will use it to serve the demons of our lower nature or the angels of our better nature.

So another way of looking at which kinds of truth we should encourage, which kinds we should tolerate, and which kinds we should actively oppose is by asking whether the ideals we are following make us a curse or a blessing, whether our presence here has increased or decreased the amount of understanding and compassion in the world.

There is a wonderful story about this, which comes from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Unitarians want to claim him, though he didn’t think much of them, and once called them “corpse-cold.” But I don’t care what club he belonged to; I only care whether the tiny bit of truth he picked up seems worthy of the best we can be. Here is the story he wrote:

“The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travelers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you?” — “Look at our pictures, and books, they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.” Then came in the men, and they said, “What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want gifts?” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?'” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

Here is someone who worshiped something very different from the biblebelievers.org or those who wrote the Catholic Encyclopedia. The wise old rabbi would have smiled, though the devil would not. We become what we worship. If all we will ever have are tiny pieces of the truth, let us choose very carefully what we make of them.