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© Jack Harris-Bonham

July 29, 2007

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:

Mystery of many names, and mystery beyond all naming, this morning we wish to think about and discuss the possibility that we are whole and complete right now, right this moment.

This morning we wish to let go of the burden of self-improvement, realizing that all that self-help minutia is but an attempt for authority to tell us once again, that we’re not right, we’ve never been right, and we’d better get with the program to get right.

Hogwash! There isn’t a thing we need that we don’t have right now. Thinking that we lack something is simply the ability of our own minds to imagine that there’s something out there that will be better than whatever it is inside here. The grass is always greener is in fact propaganda of the advertising moguls. The truth is the grass is always grass. Our lives look different to us because we are into judgment and we see in others the chance that their lives are not tangled skeins, but the truth is if we were able to walk in their shoes and really be them, we would be looking back at ourselves thinking how together we seem now that we’re the other.

The problem is we’re looking to be served when in truth we need to be looking for opportunities to serve. Monty Newton traveled to Nicaragua this past week as a birthday present to himself.

No, he did not travel to a remote resort where he sat in wicker rockers with tall drinks garnished with umbrellas. No, Monty traveled to a small village where with a group of other spiritually minded people they dug a well for a village. And the emails that he sent back to Nell, Lulu and Henry although garbled by the non-familiarity of the Spanish keyboards were, none the less, filled with a renewal of spirit that is taking place in Monty because he knows what Gandhi knew to serve is to rule.

Forgive us, Great Spirit, as we seem to spend the majority of our time worried about who’s going to give us our next jolly. Forgive us for stopping at the traffic light and NOT giving that dollar to that homeless person – “Oh, they’re just going to spend it on alcohol,” we think, but what we’re really saying is that if we were homeless we’d take the opportunity to lose ourselves in booze.

Now lift us up Great Spirit and help us realize that the majority of problems in our lives are self-created and can be self-cured. In truth the self that we hope to improve is non-existent. We are all simply witnesses of this life, and all the trauma and drama of our lives, is nothing more than adult temper tantrums that we’re not being pleased, not being fed what we think we need. Wake up! We’ve got it all and always have.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

Reading

James Agee, A Death in the Family

On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than me, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds.

By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me to her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Sermon:

Introduction:

I have been married a total of three times. I jokingly say that my first marriage was a started marriage, but the truth is there is a part of me that still loves, very dearly, the mother of my only son, Ian.The first marriage lasted 5 years, and the second one lasted 12 – six drunken and six sober. The sober ones were great. I have been married a third, and hopefully final time for twenty years so far.

There is a sense in which I have wanted the women I lived with to tell me who I am – but (they) will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but (they) will not ever tell me who I am.

The notion of romantic love that suffuses this culture and many other cultures, clouds our vision when it comes to what love is, what it can be, and who exactly it is that is playing this love game. We are encouraged to imagine that we will find a partner in this life who is a soul mate, someone who will be the other half of us, someone who will complete us in some mystical manner.

I see this in the faces of the young couples who come to talk to me about getting married. I hear this in the vows they write each other, and again I hear it repeated openly to relatives and friends at the ceremony. Yet, I don’t have the heart to even attempt to tell them something that rightfully they can only learn by living it.

Romantic love is not an aberration, it is merely the species guaranteed way to get us to reproduce and keep the species going. Romantic love is part of growing up, and those who don’t get past it, often fall victim to its seductive lure, it’s ability to make us think that the right man, the right woman is right around the next corner, and that we can’t give up on the chance that we will be fulfilled.

Between my second and third marriages I was actually single for a whole two years – hey it beats the two weeks I was single between the first and second marriages! I had moved from Tallahassee, Florida to Dallas, Texas when my plays started being done at Theatre Three in Dallas. I spent the first year in Dallas taking the Greyhound bus back and forth between Dallas and Tallahassee a total of seven times. During the first summer of our divorce I went back to Tallahassee and spent time with my daughter, Isabelle. I was staying with her mother and her girlfriend sleeping on the couch of a very big homemade home at the Tallahassee Land Coop. The founder of Mad Dog Builders had built the home and it was a wood frame that had three stories and a large screen-in porch on the front. Out in the woods west of town, it was serene and beautiful with the Spanish moss hanging from the Live Oaks and small dirt roads that wound around the beginning of the Hippie Culture as it began to acquire money.

One night sleeping on that couch I dreamed that I met my Anima. I’d been reading a lot of Carl Justav Jung and was intrigued by the idea that we each have the male and female parts of the psyche; it’s just that most of us never realize it. I don’t remember what she looked like, but her name was Amanda.

In the morning I found one of those baby-naming books and looked up Amanda. “Worthy of Love,” it said, so that’s what Amanda meant – “worthy of love.”

I thought it was interesting that in a house dominated by women – my second wife’s girlfriend had three daughters and then there was my own daughter Isabelle. I was the only male there in a house of juveniles and lesbians. I imagined on some level that it had been some sort of defense to actually have identified and met my feminine side in such an unbalanced situation. I thought that she had come to the surface of my consciousness to introduce herself, then simply to slip back below into the waters of oblivion. How very mistaken I was.

An irresistible force is a force that impinges upon us without us even being aware of it. Such was the case with Amanda. She had surfaced and she wasn’t going away.

It wasn’t that I changed immediately, that would have brought my attention to her presence, it was more like she insinuated herself into the place where Jack had stood, and now there were two of us, Amanda and Jack – both comfortable in the same body, both with their own agendas, and only so many hours in the day.

Jung said, “The discussion of the sexual problem is the somewhat crude beginning of a far deeper question, namely, that of the psyche of human relationships between the sexes.” It just might be that the relationship between the sexes is something that happens right inside of us.

In Chinese philosophy and especially the I-Ching we have the possibility of representing this relationship between the sexes with the yin/yang principle. Within the Yin/yang design the large part of the yang is supported by the thinner yin element, and the larger part of the yin is being intruded upon by the thin probing line of the yang. Each blending into the other so that the greatest strength of one is actually the beginning of the next. Go too far in the yang direction and you end up in yin territory, too far yin and you’re right back into the yang.

In Jung’s Foreword to the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I-Ching he reminds us that “The Chinese mind – seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspects of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance.”

In a dream I chanced upon a meeting with a hypothetical part of myself known in Jungian terms as the Anima.To sleep, per chance to dream – aye, there lies the rub.

In Italian “anima” means ‘soul’, in musical notation it appears in the phrase ‘con anima,’ meaning that the music should be played ‘with soul.’

It’s a chance occurrence that I should find the meaning of this Italian word, but it would seem to suggest that a man who lives without acknowledging his “anima” or feminine side would, in fact, be a man who was without a soul and what would a life sans anima be, but a life played without soul.

It’s possible that the whole romantic love thing is really the acting out in public of a drama that should be happening on the inside. Men and women are looking for their other halves out there, in the world the very place where their other half only exists in projections of the inner other halves. In the song, Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell sings, “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow its clouds illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all.”

I’m thinking now of the James Agee piece that I read at the beginning of this sermon. I see the family lying on their backs with the summer clouds billowing overhead. Anyone who’s ever done this knows that the next step is seeing the configurations of the clouds as they resemble different animals, objects and shapes. But the shapes are in motion, moving, roiling up there at 30,000 feet and as fast as we can name them they morph into another shape, and yet another.

Believing in romantic love is like having a picture of a cloud that at one point in time assumed a shape that we named “soul mate.” The picture will always resemble the shape we named because within the picture we have stopped the process of the clouds changing, we have frozen time and decided that this is what love always looks like.

In her book, Everyday Zen, Charlotte Joko Beck writes the nonsense of emotion-thought dominates our lives. Particularly in romantic love, emotion-thought gets really out of hand. I expect of my partner that he should fulfill my idealized picture of myself. And when he ceases to do that (as he will before long) then I say, “The honeymoon’s over. What’s wrong with him? He’s doing all the things I can’t stand.”

And I wonder why I am so miserable. My partner no longer suits me, he doesn’t reflect my dream picture of myself, he doesn’t promote my comfort and pleasure. None of that emotional demand has anything to do with love. As the pictures break down – and they always will in a close relationship – such “love” turns into hostility and arguments.

So if we’re in a close relationship, from time to time we’re going to be in pain, because no relationship will ever suit us completely. There’s no one we will ever live with who will please us in all the ways we want to be pleased. So how can we deal with this disappointment? Always we must practice getting close to experiencing our pain, our disappointment, our shattered hopes, our broken pictures. We must observe the thought content until it is neutral enough that we can enter the direct and nonverbal experience of disappointment and suffering. When we experience suffering directly, the melting of the false emotion can begin, and true compassion can emerge.

The way to true love and compassion is through endurance and suffering. We can long for that soul mate, or grieve their passing, but staying stuck in that loop in which we’re sure if we keep looking then we can have all those hyped up feelings that love is supposed to be all about just keeps us in a neurotic cycle. Jung again, Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

“I’ve looked at love from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow its love illusions I recall, I really don’t know love at all.”

LOVE IS PATIENT, LOVE IS KIND. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Loves does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

If that doesn’t sound like the love we’ve been dealing with, then maybe we’ve taken a picture of what we thought love should be, maybe we’re involved in idol worship, maybe, just maybe, we don’t know what the hell love is.

When I was a child, I talked like a child; I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man/ woman I put childish ways behind me.

Perhaps now is the time to begin wooing your real soul mate that half of you that you’ve refused to cultivate.

Shadow selves are called shadow selves not because they are evil or bad and lurk in the dark, but because we have kept them in the shadows and refused to acknowledge them.

“Tear and fears and feeling proud to say I love you right out loud.”

Perhaps the “I love yous” need to be said to the other half of our psyches.”

Sigmund Freud stood on the shoulders of the Hasidic Jews when he suggested that to become whole we must rescue from the darkness that spark of divinity, which lies buried within us.

Sometimes to become whole we must dig a hole and unearth what we find, resurrect that part of us that we have been projecting into the world. Amanda, my dear, I want to say right out loud that I love you and that together Jack and Amanda are truly worthy of love.

Thank you, Amanda, for helping me to stop projecting onto those females about me the mantles of Madonna and whore. Thank you for helping me see that to become whole I must not only be strong, but also supportive and nurturing, that I must not always be aggressive, but that there is time for retreat and regrouping. But mostly thank you for helping me see that the true birth of anything takes a period of gestation – a period in which that which is incumbent and unformed must grow inside me till the moment of its birth and once birthed I must let go and let grow the seeds and plans that I have left behind.

And now I will sit down from this pulpit a last time. From the bottom of both of our hearts which happens to be the same heart Amanda and I thank you for a journey well spent, we give thanks for your gifts of compassion and love and pray that in the years to come this congregation will continue to grow as it has in the past into a loving and nurturing body wherein those so covenanted find solace and grace. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be “congregation without end.”

Amen.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

July 22, 2007

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:

Heavenly Father, Mother God, this morning we name you and hope that those listening are entertained by the metaphor and not caught by it. Language is an odd thing; it seems the more education that someone has the more often they are snagged by the very words that would serve them. Saying precisely what we mean has its place in science and architecture, but the vagueness of metaphor may allow us to journey places that would not be journeyed to if, in fact, we were drawing plans or writing formulae.

The Mystery to which I usually pray is not served by preciseness. The mystery of metaphor is the same as the mystery of story. Suspending disbelief is the crux of journeying into the story of the divine. As we suspend disbelief – and who of us does not have some disbelief – we are then able to engage the right side of our brains and enter into relationship with the character of our imaginations. This morning we imagine a world that does not operate by greed, we imagine a world in which those with power and money search for those in need, this morning we imagine a world in which honor is spread among all peoples, a world in which the hungry are only so because they have not been discovered by those who have more to eat than necessary.

Yes, this is fanciful, and dream-like, but remember now that everything that we see that is made by humans and human culture was at first an intention and an idea. We speak of the naturalness of nature while deriding those things made by humans, but how different is the wasp nest from the home. Both are containers in which those living there find meaning.

If the human species is to continue upon this earth, then the human species must begin to dream dreams that do not include gluttony of greed. The human species must begin to dream dreams that recoil in revulsion at the idea that we would kill one of our own because they had killed. We must begin to dream dreams that spark in us the better angels of our natures, as those better angels turn from the horror, the horror of the world that we now live in.

In 500 million years the sun will go out. In this sense all is for naught. In 500 millions years earth will be like Venus varying in temperature from equator to poles by only 7 degrees and the mean temperature hovering around 690 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point the greatest of what we have created, Shakespearian drama, modern medicine, acupuncture, philosophy, theology, the beauties and wonders of this planet Earth will be gone and forgotten. But is this any more reason for despair than the simple fact that whatever we do personally for our significant others and those children that we raise together, all those things are for naught in the light of our eventual demise?

Death does not erase the love that we share, any more than the red giant of our sun will erase what has transpired on this thin layer of life, our beloved earth, our mother and sustainer. We would and do recoil in horror when we see that there are those who would give their mothers up for a profit, yet we allow the soulless corporations of this our beloved planet to treat our mother as if she were a whore. There will come a time when the heads of major corporations will stand trial as greed criminals, as murderers of our mother.

My prayer today is that these proceedings will occur before mother lies on her deathbed and before we have let our own greed and culpability run rampant just in order for us to get a final slice of the greed pie. We must realize now that any money siphoned from the soulless corporations that now rape the earth is blood money. Help us to see, Divine Spirit that the money that is made from this blood is money that is made from the blood of our own children. In ravaging the earth we are, in essence incesting our own children and their futures.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and sometimes this goes by the name of Jesus, sometimes Buddha, sometimes Allah, sometimes the Great Spirit, sometimes Pan, sometimes I AM THAT I AM, but always the name of everything that is holy is, precisely, everything.

Amen

Sermon:

 Boomers and Stickers-the sustainability of life on planet earth

Wallace Stegner knew, both from his personal experience and from his long study of his region, that the two cultures of the American West are not those of the sciences and arts, but rather those of the two human kinds that he called “boomers” and “stickers,” the boomers being “those who pillage and run,” and the stickers” “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in” (Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p. xxii).

This applies to our country as a whole, and maybe to all of Western civilization in modern times. The first boomers were the oceanic navigators of the European Renaissance. They were gold seekers. All boomers have been gold seekers. They are would-be Midases who want to turn all things into gold: plants and animals, trees, food and drink, soil and water and air, life itself, even the future.

The sticker theme has so far managed to survive, and to preserve in memory and even in practice the ancient human gifts of reverence, fidelity, neighborliness, and stewardship. But unquestionably the dominant theme of modern history has been that of the boomer. It is no surprise that the predominant arts and sciences of the modern era have been boomer arts and boomer sciences.

The collaboration of boomer science with the boomer mentality of the industrial corporations has imposed upon us a state of virtually total economy in which it is the destiny of every creature (humans not excluded) to have a price and to be sold. In a total economy, all materialism creatures, and ideas become commodities interchangeable and disposable. People become commodities along with everything else.

Only such an economy could seek to impose upon the world’s abounding geographic and creaturely diversity the tyranny of technological and genetic monoculture. Only in such an economy could “life forms” be patented, or the renewability of nature and culture be destroyed. Monsanto’s aptly named “terminator gene” – which implanted in seed sold by Monsanto, would cause the next generation of seed to be sterile – is as grave an indicator of totalitarian purpose as a concentration camp.

The second reading is from Henry N. Weiman’s book, The Source of Human Good.

Jesus engaged in intercommunication with a little group of disciples with such depth and potency that the organization of their several personalities was broken down and they were remade. They became new men, and the thought and feeling of each got across to the others. It was not merely the thought and feeling of Jesus that got across. That was not the most important thing. The important thing was that the thought and feeling of the least and lowliest got across to the others and the others to him. Not something handed down to them from Jesus but something rising up out of their midst in creative power was the important thing.

It was not something Jesus did. It was something that happened when he was present like a catalytic agent. It was as if he was a neutron that started a chain reaction of creative transformation. Something about this man Jesus broke the atomic exclusiveness of those individuals so that they were deeply and freely receptive and responsive each to the other. He split the atom of human egoism, not by psychological tricks, not by intelligent understanding, but simply by being the kind of person he was. Thus there arose in this group of disciples a miraculous mutual awareness and responsiveness toward the needs and interests of one another.

But this was not all; Something else followed from it. The thought and feeling, let us say the meanings, thus derived by each from the other, were integrated with what each had previously acquired. Thus each was transformed, lifted to a higher level of human fulfillment. Each became more of a mind and a person, with more capacity to understand to appreciate, to act with power and insight; for this is the way human personality is generated and magnified and life rendered more nobly human.

Introduction:

Perhaps you think that this sort of being lifted to a higher level of human fulfillment by Jesus was something that might have been possible if you lived in the time of Jesus and had been one of his disciples.

Well, let me take you back to October the 2nd of 2006, a Monday to the town of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.

At 9:51AM Eastern Standard Time Charles Carl Roberts IV, entered the West Nickel Mines School, a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Roberts ordered the teacher and three female friends and their children out of the classroom. Then he ordered the male students out. Nine-year-old Emma Fisher, who had just started to learn English hadn’t understood the gunman’s orders and she followed her brother out when he left. He tied the girls up with flexible plastic ties and shot all ten girls – five of them died, and five lived. All of this we know and are accustomed to, in a sense, in this society of senseless violence, but what we were not prepared for, and what points to the fact that the transformation that Henry N. Weiman speaks about in his book, The Source of Human Good, is still with us is what happened next.

When the Amish made their way in one of their funeral processions past the home of the family of Charles Carl Roberts IV, they waved friendly like to the relatives and family of the man that had killed their children.

And then the food started coming. The Amish were taking food to the family, the wife and three children of the man who had killed members of their community.

How can this be explained?

An Amish midwife who had delivered several of the girls who had been murdered and who had taken food herself to the family of the murderer put it this way; “This is possible if you have Christ in your heart.”

In his book, Sustainability and Spirituality, Dr. John Carroll argues that sustainability of necessity is a conversion experience. It can’t be something as simple as recycling; it would have to change not only how we do things, but also why we do things. In order to find models of how this might be accomplished we must look, Dr. Carroll says, “to places, locations, people who put their faith in places other than within the dominant value system.” The Amish in this instance seem to be a perfect example.

This past Wednesday at Noon I was invited to be on KOOP Radio. Along with Host, David Kobierowski, I was on with Diane Miller Of Envision Central Texas, Rosie Salinas of the Austin Police Department and our own First Church member and civil rights lawyer, Tim Mahoney. The topic of discussion was how do you get community out of their air-conditioned homes, away from their computers, televisions and I-pods and into the streets to either protest or celebrate.

For an issue to force of out of ourselves into the public arena it mean that, that issue must touch us vitally. One of the reasons protests against the war in

Iraq haven’t been as effective as they were during the Vietnam War is there is no draft. Most of the people of this country haven’t been affected at all by this war. After all we have a President who after 9/11 advised the nation to do what – go shopping!

I’m about to celebrate 28 years of sobriety. I wouldn’t have quit drinking if I hadn’t finally got to on a cellular level that my life was in the balance. And what was the most startling portion of the experience of getting sober? Seeing that I wasn’t alone in my suffering. Seeing that there was a community of others who suffered just as I did. Alcohol brought me to my knees, but it was the community of sober – once drunk alcoholic sisters and brothers – that lifted me back up to my feet again.

It is my opinion that modern technology, ipods, iphones, the Internet, 150 cable channels these all help to atomize society driving us into our own private world from which we text message and email other islands of existence. Technology in this worldview is supportive of ego and ego is suspicious of community. In John Carroll’s book, Spirituality and Sustainability he says that any talk of sustainability is merely superficial when our society and that of every major industrialized nation in the world is based upon fossil fuels. To become sustainable a conversion experience is needed.

The kind of conversion experience we’re talking about here – basically to change the way the world is run – any and all efforts in such a revolutionary conversion would mean that everything we did, thought, wrote about and planned would, of necessity, be counter-cultural. Find out where the culture is headed and go ye therefore in the opposite direction.

Jesus was a revolutionary catalyst. It wasn’t what Jesus did that was amazing, it’s how he affected the small band of disciples that surrounded him. He listened to them, he heard them with his heart and the least of these got just as much attention as the greatest. From the doubts of Thomas to the rock of Peter they had all been heard. And then an odd thing happened. They started listening to one another. They grew from a band of separate atomized individuals to the Disciple of Jesus. And amazingly their concern for the twelve turned out onto the world. Jesus sent them out into the world to announce the coming of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is here, now, and the vehicle for realizing this is love. The answer to where is the Kingdom of God is in loving, caring and reaching past yourself to those around you. Not waiting for your life to begin, but beginning the life you’ve already been given.

We’ll get back out onto the streets with our joys and concerns when we realize that as the ad once admonished us “to reach out and touch someone” we must, in fact, be standing beside them.

There are a lot of “right” opinions in this church. Many people are on, in my opinion the correct side of many issues. Much talk is done about issues and everyone -well, nearly everyone in Austin knows, that if there’s something radical that’s to be discussed in Austin, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin might just be the place to hold such a meeting. That’s great!

What I don’t see in this church is the church as a body of believers, worshippers, people of faith moving together to do things as a community in this community. I’m sorry if this sounds nebulous, but community acting together builds community. The motto of this church is one church many beliefs. The stress seems to be on the many beliefs, and again, great, but community gets enacted when those who believe many different things work together toward a common goal or goals.

Fellowship isn’t something that can be conjured up on Sunday mornings, and neither is spirituality. Fellowship is something that grows from working together on common goals.

What’s wrong with this church may be exactly what’s wrong with the UUA itself. Ralph Waldo Emerson traded the miracles of the Bible for the miracles of green pastures and falling rain. But subsequent generations of Unitarians and Universalist stepped away completely from any sacred scriptures – be they Hebrew, Pagan or Christian. That stepping away from a center – rather, that center that was stepped away from has not been replaced.

Political agendas can’t replace it; social action can’t replace it, voting for the most liberal candidate can’t replace it.

Dr. Davidson Loehr has been addressing this lack of spiritual center in his efforts to take religion back even further than our Judeo-Christian underpinnings, and I think his efforts to think mythically – as it says on the door to his office – are commendable and laudatory. His derision concerning the seven principles can and must be seen in this light. Prophets decry the present situation in hopes of pointing to something that might be more worthwhile.

Davidson Loehr is pointing in the right direction. First, he’s showing all of us that there is no religious center in the UUA and secondly he’s offering more ancient substitutes. His idea of paideia – the Greek idea that what we do we do with the idea that the ancients are watching. As they watch the better angels of our natures will be more inclined to act so that when we are dead and gone we can be the ancients who look on the present with the hope that the behaviors that are happening in the present would both please us and make admirable those living in the present.

I think this church is strong, and I don’t mean Davidson, or Lara or anyone else who works for this church – I mean the members of this church and the feelings I get when I think of them individually or as a corporate body. This church has a lot to offer Austin, Texas.

Without Spirituality can there be sustainability? Around what do you rally people when you want to talk of how to treat this earth, what to buy, what not to buy, where to shop, where not to shop, how important is recycling – all of these questions and more are difficult in and of themselves, but when they are divorced from a religious/spiritual center they are almost impossible to answer as a community. Once again, if there is no religious/spiritual center to this community it might explain the failure on the part of this community to step up to the plate and make a definitive difference in the city of Austin.

I go back now to a meeting I had when I first got to Austin. Dr. Loehr and I attended a meeting of all churches in the Austin area to deal with the survivors of hurricane Katrina. The Christian Churches in the area were ready and willing to take people into their homes, fed them, clothe them and treat them like family that very night.

Dr. Loehr was amazed at this, but I felt differently. I knew the Scripture. I had had a Christian upbringing, and I remembered this passage in Matthew. “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?” The King will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did for me.” Of course the King is Jesus – so naturally the Christians had made room for the “least of these” because they KNEW that when they helped those people they were helping Jesus. You don’t have to believe in any of this to see the power and empowerment that this kind of Holy Scripture gives those who follow such teachings. And it follows quite naturally that the Unitarian Universalist had not prepared a room for Him or anyone else.

I don’t pretend to know how to circle the wagons in the UUA, but I do know that if they are not circled we will be studying them like to study the Shakers. “An interesting group, we will say, so why didn’t they grow and thrive?” The answer for the Shakers is obvious; they forsook carnal relations and quite naturally died out. The answer for the UUA is yet to be written, but it may be something as simple as they forsook relationship with something greater than themselves. But it’s not too late! It’s never too late!

Rabbi Shoni Labowitz in her book, Miraculous Living says: “Each time you stray from the path, you have the flexibility and courage to return. Return, known in Hebrew as teshuvah, was built into the foundational structure of the universe. The ability to return, to turn around and turn about, existed before you were created and is programmed into your being. It is available for you to choose when it is needed and you so desire. The teshuvah also implies a response: as you select to return or turn about, you need to know what it is you are returning to. You need to respond to the inner call with an intention and focus. As you let go of mistakes, you return to your divine nature, to the uniqueness of who you are, and above all, to reunion with an unconditionally loving God. In returning, you access memory of the void from which you emanated, with a clearer sense of freedom in moving toward the destiny you were born to fulfill.”

The point is this, if someone came into this church and killed a bunch of our members and then killed themselves, would we be willing to take food to the home of that murderer? Would we be willing to feed their family? And if we were able to do that, what would be in our hearts that would allow us to do so? When you find the answer to that question, then you’ll find a religious and spiritual center that is worthy of having the wagons circled about it.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

June 17, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming, this morning we are here in celebration of among other things – fathers. Some of us have negative images of what fathers can be because some of us have had lousy fathers. Others see fatherhood in a positive light because their personal experiences are positive ones. In some sense many of us wish, as my wife, Viv, does that we had Atticus Finch as our father. Harper Lee’s image of fatherhood as portrayed by Gregory Peck in the Oscar winning Christmas Day 1962 release still brings pangs of envy – if only we could have been that way with our kids.

But more than simply parenting we are talking this morning about husbanding – the ability to spend or use economically, or simply the ability to live gracefully without a lot of fuss.

This world and the harbingers of news don’t want us to imagine that anything is easy. The world speaks in the language of labor. Count, if you will, how many times people tell you how hard something is going to be, or with what difficulty something may be accomplished. There’s a bit of self-fulfilling negativity there.

Think instead of the watercourse way – the fact that water effortlessly finds its own level. Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching suggests that we take the watercourse way that we flow into life, giving where giving seems appropriate and receiving when things come our way.

I’m thinking of the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus Finch finds the town drunk harassing Atticus’ children who are waiting in the car. Atticus comes out of the house where he’s been visiting and simply approaches the car. The town drunk spews vitriolic profanities at Atticus, but Atticus never responds, never lashes out at the man. Atticus knows that it is his presence alone that is making the statement that needs to be made. He is his children’s father, and his economy causes the drunk to slither off away from them.

We pray for the good sense and certitude to know when we are doing what needs to be done by simply suiting up and showing up. There’s an art to life that isn’t often taught, and isn’t often recognized. Give us the insight to see those artists of life that don’t fit the mold of society, those pushed toward the periphery because they don’t match definitions of success and worldly honor.

Mostly, this morning we search for an economy of being. May we forgive ourselves when we use a hammer when a thumbtack would have done the trick. Great Spirit give us the power to know that more often than not we know, from the inside, what needs to be done, and what needs to be ignored.

Minding the breath, minding our heartbeats let us move through this life like the guests that we are, honoring the earth and all sentient beings that inhabit it.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen

Affirmation of Faith

Monty Newton

Reading:

(From Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper

He came out on a high bald knoll that looked over the valley and he stopped here and studied it as a man might cresting a hill and seeing a strange landscape for the first time. Pines and cedars in a swatch of dark green piled down the mountain to the left and ceased again where the road cut through. Beyond that a field and a log hogpen, the shakes spilling down the broken roof, looking like some diminutive settler’s cabin in ruins.

Through the leaves of the hardwoods he could see the zinc-colored roof of the church faintly coruscant and a patch of boarded siding weathered the paper-gray of a waspnest. And far in the distance the long purple welts of the Great Smokies. If I was a younger man, he told himself, I would move to them mountains. I would find me a clearwater branch and build me a log house with a fireplace. And my bees would make black mountain honey. And I wouldn’t care for no man. He started down the steep incline – Then I wouldn’t be unneighborly neither, he added.

Sermon: Hermits or Husbands

Introduction:

We heard from Monty Newton our Worship Associate. You may be asking yourself, “What does a seemingly misanthropic old black man have to do with Father’s Day?” Good question. By the end of this sermon that question should be laid to rest.

Something I’ve noticed through the years. Men tend to isolate. You ever notice that? Yes, it’s true, men do have friends, but how many men do you know who have kept in touch with those friends throughout the years? And even if they have what do men have friends for? Do men call each other and complain about their kids? Do men commiserate when they aren’t getting along with their wives? What exactly is the role of friends when it comes to men? I’m not pretending to know the answers to these and other questions about men. After all, I’m a man, and it goes without saying, almost, that I’m writing this sermon in order to learn something about myself and other men.

Recently, I got a questionnaire from a parishioner of this church and the questions concerned my role as a father. The questions were good, but to tell the truth all I could write back to this parishioner was that I felt that I had been a failure as a father. When my son was three years old I left he and his mother, and when the papers came for my son to be adopted by another man, I went down to the lawyer’s office and I signed the papers without thinking twice. When my daughter was ten years old I left her and her mother, my second wife. True, a few years later I had my daughter for a couple of summers, but when the third summer rolled around, my daughter chose a new set of tires for her car rather than coming out to Dallas and spending time with me, and my third wife.

How did I feel about that? First, I thought it was a choice that my daughter shouldn’t have had to make. It was my summer and whether my daughter needed tires on her car or not, she owed me that summer, right? In the end I did nothing more than complain. Viv and I didn’t see Isabelle that summer, and in a way, it was a relief. The first summer Isabelle had come to visit us; I’d spent half the summer running between Viv and Isabelle asking them if everything was all right. Finally, Viv and Isabelle came to me one day and told me to stop trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. Who knew? Certainly not me.

I’m sixty years old and to me women might as well be a different species. Yes, I get along with my wife, my sister and her friends, the female parishioners in this church, but the concerns of women are not the concerns of men. Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars as the book title reads. I haven’t read the book, but the title seems perfectly clear to me.

Lawrence Durrell, the British Novelist and Poet, once said concerning the Mona Lisa that “She has the look of a woman who has just dined off her husband.” Even when reading that quote I’m not sure, “Could that be a good thing?”

Eric Berne the Psychiatrist is reported to have said, “No husband is a hero to his wife’s psychiatrist.”

Since husbands are more often times than not, men, perhaps it would behoove us to take a look at some famous quotes about men.

Mark Twain wrote, “The noblest work of God? Man. Who found this out? Man.”

Twain again, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

And finally, Twain during his Letters From the Earth phase, “Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes today and is gone tomorrow, he begins as dirt and departs as stench.”

Perhaps you think the last a bit too harsh, that perhaps Mark Twain’s closeness to the subject has made it impossible to be objective, after all, familiarity does breed contempt. But Twain added to that old adage; “Familiarity breeds contempt – and children!”

But it’s another definition of husband that I would like us to look at today. We’ve been dealing with the meaning of husband as in a woman’s spouse, the man to whom a woman is married.

But there’s also the transitive verb, to husband. The meaning of that verb is to be thrifty with something: to use something economically and sensibly.

What would it mean in the wedding ceremony if when I pronounced a couple husband and wife, it was this definition of husband that was being thought through? What would marriages be if the job of one of the two partners was the job of making sure that what was used by the couple was used in an economic, sensible and thrifty manner?

And it is these ideas of thrift, sensibility and economy that lead quite easily into our discussion of the hermit.

When we become overwhelmed by the world and our lives seem to be nothing more than one continuous activity, it might just be that it’s time for a retreat. Sometimes these retreats are religious or spiritual in nature.

Gautama Buddha abandoned his family and went on a spiritual quest. His wife didn’t send the county sheriff after him for non- payment of child support. The nature of this quest was the discovery that outside the walls of Buddha’s father’s castle the rest of the world was lost in suffering. In truth, the very foundation of Buddhism is the fact that suffering is universal and that if human kind is to persevere in this life then they must deal with suffering. Suffering is unavoidable and to live this life one must not ignore it, push it out of consciousness, nor pretend that it is not the ultimate fate of all who live.

The solution to this problem is in the very nature of how the Buddha saw the self. If it is true that we all suffer, then who is it that is suffering? Buddha discovered that there is no permanent self, and this discovery led him inexorably to the conclusion that even though suffering happens, it is made worse when this suffering happens to somebody. If, in fact, the lights are on, but nobody’s home, then suffering is still present, but the self that keeps score, the self that knows it’s being wronged, the self that holds grudges, the self that wants revenge this self is an illusion. Suffering is just what is – take note of it and move on. This taking note and moving on is called enlightenment. If there is no self, then scores aren’t kept, wrongs don’t need to be righted, grudges become mote and revenge becomes the boomerang that won’t come back.

The Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching, counsels us thusly; The wise person rises above the inferior man. The wise person is like the sky above the mountain. No matter how high the mountain is, it can never touch the sky. The wise person keeps their distance because the mountain can never reach them, neither in a psychological nor physical sense. The wise person’s retreat is not motivated by hatred or anger but by dignity.

The image of the lake is often used in Asian philosophy. Everything is reflected in the lake, but nothing is held there. The moon in the lake is perfectly reflected, but to jump into the lake in order to get to the moon would gain us nothing but a bath. The forest fire is reflected in the lake, but the water is not burning.

Now we seem to be returning to Monty Newton’s story of Roosevelt the man with a mirror for a front door. Those who live in Abilene might think that it’s quaint for Roosevelt to have a mirror for a front door, and perhaps even Roosevelt thinks nothing more than it’s convenient. But on a deeper philosophical level the person who approaches Roosevelt’s house will see themselves reflected in the entrance to that house.

In much the same way Roosevelt himself is nothing more than a calm lake, a clean mirror. If you approach him with fear and trembling, then it is fear and trembling that you will see reflected there. If, like Monty, you approach him as a man among men, and talk to him like you would anybody else, then miraculously, he responds in kind. Imagine that?

Perhaps then it isn’t a question of either being a husband or a hermit? Perhaps the real deal is in being a husband in the sense of someone who is cautious and economical in their dealings with the world, then it follows quite naturally that drawing back, retreating, abandoning the fight when, and if, it’s really nothing more than a fight between entities that don’t exist, then perhaps the paradox between either being a husband or a hermit is resolved, or held in a state of suspended animation?

The Tarot deck has as one of its Major Arcana the card known as The Hermit. The manner in which this card is displayed in the Waite-Rider deck is much like the manner in which saints are portrayed. He is wearing a monk’s robe. He carries with him a staff and a lantern. He is not a beggar, nor one who seeks only isolation. His long white beard, staff and lantern suggest that he is out and about in the world, not lost in idleness, nor seeking only isolation. The lantern is the light of the world shed precisely for the enlightenment of others. This hermit is a sage, not simply searching for truth and justice but bringing truth and justice to the people. He’s like The Fool in the Major Arcana, he will go to all lengths, walk to the edge, but unlike the Fool he knows his boundaries, will not step over the precipice, is not on an adventure, but rather walking about the world in hope of spreading light to those who need it.

The hermit is an unsettling image for us in Western society. This hermit is outside the context of daily living – he’s not worried about the kids and their soccer game – and he is not subordinated to the authority of the age. He is, in fact, modeling for the rest of the world, and this modeling can lead to his being ostracized and scapegoated by the culture within which he lives, but quite amicably refuses to take part in.

Hence the image of Roosevelt, the black man who lives off the fat of the land, the man who shows the rest of Abilene that the rules and constrictors of the society in which they live may not be as solid as they would like to believe.

On some level we all wish to be comforted by the societal rules by which we play, but the truth is, these rules are arbitrary and potentially meaningless. We are reminded of that when there lives one among us who ignores the rules but not only gets by, but in a deeper sense flourishes.

The morality of the wandering hermit tells us that what is right and what is wrong knows no place and time.

We wish there were answers to life’s big questions. Are men hermits or husbands? What is the truth of our being?

The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote “Try to love the questions themselves – Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing, live your way into the answers.”

And yet we should not expect the world to always understand what we are up to. Even with the best of intentions we who would be husbands – persons who would use judicially those things with which we are entrusted – we husbands must not expect the world or those in it to realize what we may be up to, or accept what we think we have to offer.

I will close with a story that illustrates this perfectly.

There was once a farmer – a man who husbanded the land – who kept his fields completely to himself. His crops were his main interest and he prided himself in keeping the birds and animals away. He built fences around about, and didn’t even like the idea that when he harvested he might be leaving even the least little bit in the fields for the mice or other scavengers. Then, one day he got sick and almost died. When he recovered he was changed. He realized now that he was lonely. He’d been so successful in his efforts to keep those at bay – that he wanted at bay – that although he was a rich man, his riches did not fill the space in the middle of his chest. In a flash he realized he needed other beings. Immediately he when out and took down the fences that surrounded his fields. He walked into the fields and stood there with his arms outstretched to receive in loving kindness all who would now visit him. He stood there night and day his arms opened in love. Much to his surprise no animals came to eat his crops, no birds landed to enjoy his grains. The truth was they were all terrified of the farmer’s new scarecrow.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

May 13, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 7875

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names, mystery beyond all naming, today we wish to speak of misunderstandings. Today we bring before the congregation here gathered the idea that listening may be more of a passive activity than we imagined. When we’re listening there are times in which what we wish to hear stands in the way of what is being said. Empty us, Great Spirit, leech from us the agendas, hidden and open, as we gather here this morning. Make of each of us a receptacle of peace. If we try to put iced tea in our favorite pitcher, it will not fit if the pitcher is already filled with beer. The use of the receptacle is in the vacuity of its space. Make us empty Great Spirit as we gather here this morning. Our monkey minds keep chattering in the background, but we will in this worship space pull away from the distracting voices in our heads, we will gather our minds in the intervals between the noises, between the conflicting voices that call for us to react in a world that’s already rife with reactions. Also in this hour help us examine our intentions on which our road to hell is paved. Help us be aware enough to see that holding out for what seemingly benefits us, excludes us from participating in a salvation that may be disguised as something that we secretly despise, secretly wish would simply go away.

Mothers and fathers gather with their children this day. May they realize that who they are has nothing to do with where they came from or what has come from them. Mothers and fathers, your children are not you, and their actions are their actions. Having a child who is a brain surgeon doesn’t make you a brain surgeon, nor does it reflect well on you. Their glory and honor is theirs not yours. Likewise having a jailbird as a son throws no aspersions in your direction. Their crimes are not your crimes. Yes, we are all connected, but the fruits of one’s actions are one’s own even when pride and shame declare otherwise.

Bring us now to a point of stillness in which we can feel our hearts beating within us, feel our breath as it revolves in and out of us. In the space between the breaths let us pause and ask ourselves who is it that is breathing, since in fact, this breath started without our conscious intervention and continues when we slip into sleep and unconsciousness. As we rely on that hidden source to keep us alive, let us lean back on that hidden source and relax into the hereness of our existence. We are not in control. Hallelujah and Amen. We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is exactly everything.

Amen

SERMON-Funny Church Store

Introduction:

When I moved to New Haven to attend the Yale School of Drama in 1989, I rented a truck and car dolly and moved myself. I saved a bundle. Viv followed me in her 2002 BMW when we went to return the truck. We couldn’t find the place. We kept driving up and down this same stretch of New England back road, but the rental place was nowhere in sight. I stopped at a minit mart and went in to ask directions. The man behind the counter was from somewhere in Asia. I explained my predicament and his eyes lit up. “Yes, Yes, I know where that is. You go this way down the road, and turn right at the Funny Church Store.” He smiled glad that he’d been able to help. “The Funny Church Store?” I asked with a puzzled look on my face. “Yes, the Funny Church Store, you’ll see it on your right, it’s right behind there.” “Behind the Funny Church Store?” “That’s right!” I walked back to the truck and Viv yelled at me from her car window, “Do you know where it is?”

I walked over to her car smiling. “I know exactly, where it is.”

Driving toward the funny church store I was imagining a church whose Pastor would look and sound something like this – Jesus and Moses were playing golf. Moses approached the ball, and Jesus said, “What iron are you using on this shot?” “The four iron,” said Moses. “Well,” said Jesus, “Tiger Woods would use the five iron.” Moses stepped up to the ball and gave it a whack. The ball went pretty far, but then dropped into the lake. Jesus took his five iron and approached his ball. “I told you, Tiger Woods would use the five iron!” Jesus hit the ball well, it went further than Moses’ ball, but also dropped into the lake. Jesus went over and was walking on the water looking for both balls when a group of golfers played through. One of the golfers turned to Moses and asked, “Say, who does that guy think he is, Jesus Christ?” “Well,” said Moses, “he is Jesus Christ, but he thinks he’s Tiger Woods.”

After driving up and down the same stretch of highway I finally saw the Budget Rent a Car Sign. The rental place was directly behind a furniture store. A Funny Church Store.

Every time I retell this story about the funny church store I am reminded of my mother. You’ll get the connection later.

When my mother graduated from teacher’s college in Bluefield West Virginia, she thought her father might help her get a job – he was President of the local School Board. Daddy Jack was, if anything, a fair man who practiced his business like it was his church. He didn’t even want a hint of scandal around his family and to prove that he hadn’t influenced my mother’s position he appointed her to one of the schools in the middle of a coal-mining town. It was literally a one-room schoolhouse with one of the fifth graders that was 15 years old and out weighed my mother by a hundred pounds. My mother was terrified, but since she was her father’s favorite, he called her Queenie; she was determined not to leave this job until it was well done.

By recess, she felt she just about got a hold of the group, but was afraid of the energy that would be infused in the malicious assembly once they went outside to play. She gave them a stern warning before they recessed, “If I see you misbehaving on the playground, I’m gonna tap on the window, and when I do that you’d better get in here immediately or you’ll be late for your whipping.”

It was winter and the janitor of the school had built a fire in an old trash-burning barrel on the playground. The kids who got cold could go over there and stand by the fire. My mother looked up just in time to see the 15 year old 5th grader holding a cat’s face to the fire. She jumped up and tapped angrily on the glass. Retrieving the paddle she walked out into the front of the classroom to await the culprit’s arrival. She waited, but then realized the door to cloakroom was closed and he was probably waiting outside the closed door. When she opened the door, much to her dismay, there was a line of some 16 students, nearly half the class, that was lined up and ready to be paddled. They had all heard the angry tapping, and all were guilty of something. My mother took them on one by one, paddling each until her arm ached and she was nearly laughing. You’d have to know mother to understand that, when she fell and hurt herself, she always laughed. It was her way of dealing with the pain.

Today, my mother’s actions would raise more than eyebrows, she would lose her job, and probably be banded from teaching forever. But then again those that would condemn her today were not back in the coal fields teaching fifth graders who outweighed and towered over them. Mother went on to teach for nearly thirty years, winning award after award. She was tough, she demanded authority and attention and she got it, or else.

Mother’s background and upbringing stayed with her, along with her West Virginia twang, throughout a lifetime of travel when my father who was in the Air Force.

There’s a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals named Mrs. Malaprop. Mrs. Malaprop is known for saying the wrong thing at the funniest times. The word malapropos entered English usage around 1660, derived from the French phrase mal a propos (literally “ill suited to the purpose”).

Here are two examples of malaprops the first from Mrs. Malaprop, “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile” and the second from Curly of Three Stooges fame after he’s been insulted by Mo, “Hey, I resemble that remark!”

There is a sense in which my mother was the West Virginia version of Mrs. Malaprop.

One summer evening after my freshman year at the University of Florida I’d brought some friends home. Late one night these about to be college sophomores, were drinking beer and eagerly talking about the Vietnam War, black power, the hippies, marijuana, free love, we were getting loaded and feeling the power of youth; always young, always strong and with our entire lives before us.

My mother had stayed up after dad had gone to bed, and she was sitting in the dining room with us, listening, and laughing at our jokes. My friends always loved my mother. Finally, she’d had enough white wine that she decided she would chime in when the black power issue came up.

“I read his autobiography, you know. It was fascinating.”

“Whose biography?” one of my friends wanted to know.

Mother was proud, this was her moment. She wasn’t in Bluefield any more, and her hillbilly friends were all forgotten as she smiled and said, “Why, the Autobiography of Moslem X!”

Everyone laughed.

My girlfriend at the time saw my mother leave hurriedly, her head down and embarrassed.

“Is she all right?” she asked concerned.

“She’s fine,” I said knowing I would hear about this later.

It’s weird. You see, the moment my mother had become the bell of the ball, Cinderella with the shoe that fits, the minute she had finally graduated from Hicksville, she took it personally, and declined the honor.

Had she thrown back her head and laughed with the rest of us, she would have risen in our eyes to the heights of Maureen O’Sullivan or Katherine Hepburn.

But she misunderstood; she thought her moment of triumph was her moment of defeat. She thought our laughter was a club to which she could not belong, when in reality she had built that club and christen it with mirth.

Speaking of mothers?

People in different parts of the world celebrate Mother’s Day on different days of the year because that day has different meanings. The ancient Greeks had a festival to Cybele, a great mother of gods, and it was celebrated around the Vernal Equinox. In Rome another holiday, Matronalia, that was dedicated to Juno, a male god, though mothers were usually given gifts on his day.

After the Civil War social activist Julia Ward Howe borrowed Mother’s Day from the English. Julia Ward Howe is best known for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which was set to already-existing music, and first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 and quickly became one of the most popular songs of the Union during the Civil War.

Originally Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day was a call to unite women against war. For that first Mother’s Day in 1870 she wrote this Mother’s Day Proclamation.

Arise, then, women of this day!

 Arise, all women who have breasts,

 Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.

It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,

Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace,

Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,

But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask

That a general congress of women without limit of nationality

May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient

And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,

 To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.

So how was that message turned/deflected from mother’s concerns about their children’s deaths and mutilations – to concern for the mothers themselves? Can you see a parallel between what Jesus came to proclaim – the kingdom, right here, right now – and how they (the church) have taken his message away and made the church about the messenger. As Rudolf Bultmann asked, “How did the Proclaimer become the Proclaimed?”

The Greeks used to have a saying, don’t kill the messenger – well, the church went one step further, not only did they kill the messenger, but they perverted the message. The kingdom is someplace else; the reward is later – this is invaluable propaganda for fat cat churches, and fat cat ministers and priests.

You came here with an anticipation of what you want. Some want serenity, some advice, some spirituality, some the celebration of the human, some reassurance that things will be okay. But when will you understand that these expectations are born from the same desire that changed the original care of mothers for their children into what the National Restaurant Association calls the biggest sales day of the year? And when will you understand that these expectations are born from the same desire that changed the Jesus of Love One Another into the Inquisition?

You come to the funny church store looking for that painting to go with that sofa. You decide in advance exactly what you need, but hey, you’re keeping that a secret – you imagine in your heart of hearts that the funny church store can guess, that I can guess, that a person of the cloth can guess what you refuse to admit even to yourselves.

There is a line in the play, Medicine Men toward the end of the play the black servant of Albert Schweitzer, Paul Subira says, “We can’t pick out those we love “quite unexpectedly they are presented to us.”

It’s time you stepped aside and let your life live itself. It’s time you stop interfering, it’s time to look and see exactly what’s being offered you. This is your life.

My job, Dr. Loehr’s job, it’s not to lead you anywhere – into what – spirituality – a sabe world view – the one-upmanship of liberalism? God? We’re here for one reason and one reason only to define ourselves in public – to articulate existentially what we feel about our lives, our spiritual journeys – why?

It’s an old maxim of good writing. The more specific you get the more general it becomes. The hope is that if you witness this individuation, then you will accept the challenge and articulate who you are. And here’s the “Funny” as in odd/paradoxical part of the funny church store. The more we settle into the real life we are leading, the life we are being offered, the more we speak from within – the more we resonate with one another and the cosmos.

Recently, physicists have become aware of what are called fractals.

The basic concept of fractals is that they contain a large degree of self-similarity. This means that they usually contain little copies of themselves buried deep within the original. (Online source:

http://www.jracademy.com/~jtucek/math/fractals.html)

This notion has often been alluded to in poetry and fiction. But now it seems, it is physically demonstrable.

And that is why somas are, fundamentally, recreations of the organic model of the cosmos itself. (Hanna, 7)

If, we are models of the cosmos itself, according to the recent discoveries of fractals, then it follows that to be created in the image of God is to be created in the image of the cosmos. What exactly is the cosmos?

The cosmos is a continuous explosion of joy. It is sheer release and letting-go of an immense compression and, in a sense, depression. It is a 20 billion-year orgasm. (Hanna, 9)

Awareness is what allowed us to differentiate in the first place. We were a part of a family, but we moved away from home. Then we were part of a college, but we graduated. Then, we were part of a country, but our awareness took us beyond that to the point where we could and can identify with the pain that is suffered by other countries, other peoples.

We need to forget about trying to fix ourselves. There’s nothing to fix. Our lives … the ones we so desperately want to change can only be lived from the inside. First we’ve got to live the life we’re offered, then, and only then, can we possibly think of navigating elsewhere.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

May 6, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names, mystery beyond all naming we come to you this morning with the songs and melodies of one of your chosen people, Leonard Cohen. In that spirit I pray today the lyrics of one of his poems:

Don’t really have the courage to stand where I must stand,

Don’t really have the temperament to lend a helping hand.

Don’t really know who sent me to raise my voice and say:

May the lights in the land of plenty shine on the truth some day.

I don’t know why I come here, knowing as I do what you really think of me, what I really think of you.

For the millions in the prison that wealth has set apart, for the Christ who has not risen from the caverns of the heart, For the innermost decision that we cannot but obey, for what’s left of our religion I lift my voice and pray.

May the lights in the land of plenty shine on the truth some day.

We pray this in the name of everything that’s holy, and that is, precisely everything.

Amen.

Affirmation of Faith by Don Smith

SERMON

In traditional Christianity sin is seen as a determent, a flaw, the fly in the ointment. My now deceased second father-in-law, Linus Hernandez used to say, “Everyone loves Elizabeth’s Taylor’s hair, but nobody wants it in their soup.”

Talking about sin as a determent is counterproductive.

There’s a better way.

In alcoholics anonymous, of which I am a proud anonymous member, it’s common to hear people say that they don’t regret or want to take back any drink or drinking that they did. The idea is simple. Whatever they did, however much they drank, the wreckage of lives that trails behind them – none of this can be regretted for two reasons – first, the guilt itself would kill us, or drive us to drink – poor me, poor me, pour me another drink! And secondly if that drinking got us to AA and we’re sober, and the promises are coming true, then, baby, all that suffering is exactly what it took!

Think of it as a trip in your family car. Yeah, okay, the radiator hose blew the third day, you had two flat tires the next day, and the water pump eventually went out. Regardless, you’re at your vacation spot thanks to the old soccer mom car! It’s hard to hate what’s brought you to a state of grace. It’s hard to hate what’s brought you to a state of grace.

There’s a tradition in some synagogues when members of the synagogue are invited to stand and tell a bad story on themselves. After the first story ends, someone stands and tells a worse than the first. Then another and another. The idea is – the parishioner with the worst story, wins!

And the prize isn’t shame – it’s solidarity! When the last confessor stands and tops all the other stories, then there’s a moment of silence and it that silence, there is a bonding, the human, oh so human, sigh of relief as all in that community know that they are blemished, imperfect. The moral high ground has been relinquished, and in the words of Second Isaiah, the high has been made low, and the crooked places made straight.

Martin Marty, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago tells the story of one of his grandchildren who when Marty had stepped down from the University, turned to Marty and said, “Grandpa, now that you’re retarded?” At first Marty winced because retardation is never a subject for jest, but then Dr. Marty remembered that to be retarded also means to be caused to move or proceed slowly; delayed or impeded. And that’s not always a bad thing. What would music be like if there were no variance in tempo – besides sounding like Philip Glass?

There is a form of enlightenment within Zen Buddhism that’s called a life of one continuous mistake. How can this be, you might ask? Being conscious of who you are, and what you’re capable of, knowing that your feet aren’t on a pedestal, but clay like everyone else’s – these are the things that actually raise all of life up.

When I was eighteen I fell in love with a blond tennis player who played for the University of Florida Gators. Joan and I were deeply in love. I drove up to see her during summer school, and convinced her that we needed to drive into the woods in my father’s Mercury Monterey, with a 357 engine, and four on the floor – to do watercolors of the woods. She either bought that story or wanted exactly what I wanted. We water colored for a bit, we did! Then we fell asleep like the children we were. An hour later lightning awakened us. The rain was coming down so hard that we couldn’t see out. I thought maybe I should move my dad’s car.

I’d driven off the Farm Maintenance Road and into the woods – where the trees were prettier, you understand? Twilight had slipped us on us, too. When I found what I thought was the Farm Maintenance Road it was covered in water. I turned onto it; I was shocked to discover that I’d driven into a stream. The Mercury Monterey sunk down to the axles, and it looked like if it kept raining, the water would be at window height in no time. I got Joan out of the car, but she’d left her shoes behind. I took off my brogans and insisted she walk in them. I went barefoot. We walked through many a tilled field before we caught sight of the lights of passing traffic.

By the time we gotten to the Interstate my brogans had rubbed terrible blisters on her feet while my feet were unscathed from walking through the fields. I thumbed down a semi and worried that this old truck driver would try something with my beautiful Joan, so I got in first and sat right beside him. He was a very nice black man, and without asking a whole lot of questions drove us into town.

My Beta Theta Pi Fraternity Brothers pulled my dad’s car from the river the next day.

The point is, what was then an awful experience is now emblazoned in my memory, and quite frankly it was better than sex.

Reynolds Price, who teaches writing at the University of North Carolina, developed a cancer on his spine. It crippled him.

Two things are important about Reynolds Price’s story. First, the disease and the loss of the use of his legs have actually improved his writing. And the second reason is striking – Price is in pain all the time, but he says that he made of his pain a bonfire and slowly over the years he’s been able to move away from the heat of the fire. He can still see the flames licking into the night air, but now, instead of burning in pain, he’s able to look at himself and his life by the light of that same fire.

We’ll never put out the flames of our critical thinking. Judge not lest ye be judged! What does that mean? The judging will always be there – we’re human beings, and we are suspicious creatures. So, if it’s not going away, and it’s unpleasant to be around, perhaps we should take a walk and expand our horizons. Yes, the jabbering, the crazy monkey mind as the Buddhist call it, it will keep right on jabbering, but maybe if we get enough distance, the rhythm of the unceasing chatter will become a white noise that doesn’t hook us, doesn’t drive us, doesn’t work.

The things you’ve done wrong. Tell someone who loves you what you’ve done. Unload. Unburden. Release yourself from the bondage of self. Uncover the cracks that line you like a raku pot. Open yourself to the idea that reaching out may, in fact, be letting in.

Buckminster Fuller once said that today’s society was too specialized. We have a tendency to want to focus our energies, put the heat on where we think the heat needs to be applied, to push forward in the direction we intend.

Fuller suggests, instead, that we should take our light and defocus – place it in the middle of a field and let that light shine out in all 365 degrees of the circle, then wait to see what’s attracted to that light.

Yes, there is a crack in everything, and yes, that is how the light gets in, but it’s also how the light gets out. Let’s drop our guard. Let’s shine out to those who walk among us. Perhaps if we all shine together the path of a common life will be uncovered.

Amen.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

April 22, 2007

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

Mystery of many names, and mystery beyond all naming, we contemplate this past week and our hearts are heavy. We are frightened, worried, anxious, and uneasy. We find ourselves echoing the words of the character played by Sir Lawrence Olivier in Marathon Man, “Is it safe?” That maddening question was asked over and over again to Dustin Hoffman’s character as he was strapped in a dental chair and tortured with a high speed drill. Is it safe? Is it safe?

It used to be said that there was safety in numbers, but the Holocaust, the Gulags, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, and bucolic rolling hills surrounding Virginia Tech seems to nullify such naive notions. It is not safe. It will never be safe, and we’d best get used to it. In the late 1940’s I was taught a prayer that I said each night as I kneeled beside my bed, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep and if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I used to think that, that was a terrible thing to teach a child to say right before turning out the lights, but now, I’m not so sure. Perhaps, there was some wisdom in that prayer. Perhaps, it let me in on the adult secret that I hadn’t always been here, and there’d come a time when I’d be here no more. Perhaps, just perhaps, that was a good thing for me to know at the age of 4.

This past week’s massacre holds for me a bright and shining moment. Holocaust survivor Dr. Librescu stood in the doorway to his classroom, Room #204, Norris Hall and was shot five times as he yelled for his students to escape out the windows. The image of this man who had survived the worst that Nazi Germany could throw at him, the image of this man staving off death as his young pupils jumped to their freedom, this is the image that I wish to hold in my heart when I think of Virginia Tech. There was a massacre that day, but there was also an active demonstration of the power of love.

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention once recorded a song entitled, It Can’t Happen Here. It was a parody and ironic because Zappa, whose favorite vegetable was tobacco, knew anything can happen anywhere, and more precisely, whenever something happens to one of us, it happens to all of us.

May we in the coming weeks not demonize the young Korean man who perpetrated those acts of violence. All efforts to scapegoat and marginalize him now are beside the point. He is one of us, and whatever his crimes we ourselves are capable of the same. To deny this is to invite disaster upon ourselves. Yes, it’s good to remember the noble acts, those done by the better angels of our natures, but we must never forget that other angels attend us and those lesser angels of our natures will, if ignored, act out when we least expect it.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON: Gangster State (Enemy Combatants All)

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.

(Martin Niemoeller)

Fear can make people do odd things, and it is the fear generated by the events of 9/11 and the events following that which have created an atmosphere of terror in this country. In this atmosphere the present regime has co-opted the rights of the people and is going about the business of greedy business in the name of our country. I don’t much like that. And I’m not alone in that dislike.

In an article copyrighted by the New York Times in 2004 Anthony Lewis has this to say;

“Fear of terrorism – a quite understandable fear after 9/11 – has led to harsh departures from normal legal practice at home. Aliens swept off the streets by the Justice Department as possible terrorists after 9/11 were subjected to physical abuse and humiliation by prison guards. Then, Attorney General, John Ashcroft, did not apologize – a posture that sent a message”

Anthony Lewis continues, “Inside the United States, the most radical departure from law, as we have know it, is President Bush’s claim that he can designate any American citizen as an “enemy combatant” – thereupon detain that person in solitary confinement indefinitely, without charges, without a trial, with a right to counsel. There was a stunning moment in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address when he said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists (quote) have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States.” (End quote)

In all these matters, there is a pervasive attitude: that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. But commitment to law is not weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis expressed 75 years ago.

“Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes lawbreakers, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.”

Senator Edward Kennedy just this past month on the 29th of March 2007 stated at an event organized by the Alliance for Justice, “At the heart of many of the serious challenges we face is the Bush Administration’s lack of respect for the rule of law.”

What I present to you today is not meant to convince you that the political right is wrong, or that the political left is correct. All I really want to do is pull back from this lawless situation that we find ourselves in, and ruminate upon what others have done in similar situations. And within that rumination I hope that we can find the room to understand what is happening to us as a people and a nation. The murder rate in big cities in this country has gone up since the inception of the war in Iraq, and need I mention the events at Virginia Tech this past Monday? Perhaps if we can get a perspective upon what is happening, then we can more readily go out and act, and stop simply reacting.

If you think that there is no chance that you are in danger from this government and that there is no way in hell that you would ever be considered an enemy combatant then I’m afraid that you are in the gravest danger.

The trouble starts with a State that wants all the attention. They’re jealous of life and as an institution, just like a cooperation, it, the government, the state, really has no life. As the former Yale Chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, remarked, “To die for one’s own country is on the same level as dying for the Post Office.”

During the initial stages of the Iraqi War the New York Times had a picture of an Iraqi man carrying the wrapped body of his sixth month old son. He’s walking into a cemetery where the article says the gravediggers have all run away because of the bombing. Down from where the man digs a hole for his little boy, another man stands waist deep in a grave. The black flies are everywhere. They cover the ground before he thrusts the blade of the shovel in. He is standing among the remains of his brother who died in the last Gulf War. There isn’t much there. In a hefty garbage bag hanging over an adjacent headstone are what remains of his sister-in-law and her two daughters. Remains is so apt a word here. I turn the page quickly I simply can’t read any more of this. Staring back at me is a young Iraqi who has bandaged leg stumps holding him upright in his bed. I can see the Broadway billboards now, “Collateral damage does Porgy and Bess.”

This, from my former teacher and head of the philosophy department at the University of Florida from 1965-1971:

Authoritarianism is the long shadow which the human species has dragged after itself during its historical pilgrimage toward the light. No one knows whether, during our immensely long trek, we have made any lasting advance in the direction of that light; but everyone knows that the only way of having a direction in which to advance is by facing toward that light and intending that direction. (Dr. Thomas Hanna, End of Tyranny 35)

Now let’s consider the long shadows of political leadership and what those shadows can cover up, and where eventually we end up when so led.

The 20th Century theologian Karl Barth says this about Pontius Pilate:

He was bound to act according to strict law, but does not do so and lets himself be determined by “political considerations.” (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 108)

Pontius Pilate, a man who essentially disappears from history, evaporating like the water that dripped on the floor after he washed his hands of the whole ordeal, broke a covenant that existed between himself and Rome. As an administrator and agent of the Roman Emperor, Pilate was expected to carry out the Roman law. But, Pontius Pilate did what was expedient. Expedient – politic though perhaps unprincipled.

Karl Barth gives me the title to my sermon here:

In the person of Pilate the state withdraws from the basis of its own existence and becomes a den of robbers, a gangster state, the ordering of an irresponsible clique. (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 111)

And what does this mean that Pilate broke the Roman covenant – what does it mean that he would not uphold the Roman law?

Covenant is relationship and relationship presumes personhood. As long as Pilate acts according to what he knows to be Roman Law he occupies the personhood of his life. Yet, when he breaks covenant, even the pagan covenant of Roman law – he breaks with relationship, personhood and becomes a loose cannon.

What does Pilate do? He does what politicians have more or less always done and what has always belonged to the actual achievement of politics in all times: he attempts to rescue and maintain order in Jerusalem and thereby at the same time to preserve his own position of power, by surrendering the clear law, for the protection of which he was actually installed. Remarkable contradiction! (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 111)

What I’m saying is this; in a post-modern world where we have lost the myth of reason’s ability to explain the universe or God, when the metanarrative seems to have lost its foothold, where ambiguity reins downs upon us until we are soaked in the showers of impotency, perhaps it is time to rejoice! Rejoice that we live in a time when the State is a negative format. Rejoice that we live in a time in which we can understand the developing scenarios. Rejoice that we live in a time when we can see in the dark room of our souls that the polarities have been reversed. Everything we know to be light is seen now by the state as darkness and everything that shines forth from the state is nothing but bright midnight.

Are you confused as to what to believe, what to act upon, what next to do – take a look at this country under its present regime and go ye therefore in the opposite direction.

Yet, unfortunately, the imagination of the people in this country is produced, coddled and prodded by sound bites & wars that look like super-bowls. Smart bombs, and shock and awe are Reality Television at its ultimate destination – we sit and watch as other people die.

As Rome degenerated and eventually fell the emperors gave the people bread and circuses to fill their stomachs and amuse their spirits. We watch as the covenant is being broken and we cheer as the pieces fall down around us. We fail to see that those maimed, starved and blown up are, in fact, ourselves.

In the immortal and unforgettable words of the cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The reason we are the enemy is we are out of covenant and communion – even with ourselves.

As Thomas Paine expressed it – “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives (in) to a superficial appearance of (its) being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.” (Hanna, The End of Tyranny 13)

As time goes by and more and more original wrongs slide into the category of the right we begin to be able to witness horror and turn away with a shrug. How long will it be before Virginia Tech becomes a documentary, is given an award, and we forget about it? But even though these meteorites of injustice do not annihilate us they do alienate us.

Susan Sontag recently wrote in The Nation;

It will always be unpopular – it will always be deemed unpatriotic – to say that the lives of the members of the other tribe are as valuable as one’s own tribe. (Sontag, The Nation 11)

If freedom cannot be found in the Gangster State, then there’s even less hope for the dominant culture’s churches. Since the time of the early Levites when the high temple positions were up for the highest bid, churches have been tainted by the State. There have always been and always will be gangster churches mirroring gangster states. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his feelings about the German Church’s actions during World War Two would be a good witness here.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Cassius says, “And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the Romans are but sheep.”

The truth be told we are not comfortable in this society with the gray areas of life. Reason and its metanarrative have brought us to a place that appears to be a crossroads. One road leads to truth, life and justice – the other to destruction. Unfortunately, the roads are marked with a sign that spins freely in the ground at one moment announcing the road to the right being the road to perdition, then a change in the wind declares it to be the road to the left.

Left or right, it simply makes little difference at this point in our country’s history. “For nearly 800 years since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, our laws have insisted that every single human being is entitled to some kind of judicial process before he or she can be thrown into jail – We have gone back to a pre-Magna Carta medieval system, not a system of laws, but of executive fiat, where the king – or in this case the president simply decides, on any particular day, I’m going to throw you into prison.”

And that prison is a small “Devil’s Island” comprising 45 square miles at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Guantanamo is, in fact, at this point in time, an interrogation camp – the kind outlawed after the Nazi Holocaust in the Geneva Convention of 1949. It is an interrogation camp that is totally and flatly illegal. During the 17th Century the English Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act to keep political prisoners from being sent to remote islands and never seen again. This practice is precisely what the Bush Regime has revived.

George W. Bush mirroring Pontius Pilate has broken covenant with the law of our land. Covenant is relationship and relationship presumes personhood. As long as George W. Bush follows the law of the United States and the Magna Carta he can be said to occupy the personhood of his life. Yet when George W. Bush breaks that covenant as he has done by ruling by presidential fiat, then he breaks relationship with the law of the land, he breaks relationship with the personhood of his life, and be becomes nothing more than a loose cannon, a man beyond the law – there is a name for this. George W. Bush is, in fact, in sheer opposition to; the Constitution of the United States, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the will of the people and the Kingdom of God whatever you perceive that Kingdom to be.

We can blame it on 9/11. We can blame it on the President. The President can blame it on Osama Ben Laden and the terrorists can blame it on fate, but “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

April 8, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming, we gather here today to celebrate the resurrection of life. What this resurrection means can be, and is, as varied as the people who go to make up this community. But encompassing them all is the notion that what was dead and useless has been sloughed off and a rebirth has begun. Let us be gentle with ourselves when we are rebirthing, bringing forth that which is new and different from ourselves. Let us find the wisdom to treat ourselves in these moments as we would treat a newborn child. Holding our newness gently let us rock back and forth and sing lullabies – songs that sooth the soul. And help us, Great Spirit within, to recognize when others are so engaged, when others are bringing forth from themselves a new way of being, a new way to amplify the glory of the Light that surrounds us all.

Some of us have figuratively been entombed in the rock hardness of our hearts. May that hardness melt away and may we emerge from our self-made tombs renewed with no sense of remorse, or regret. The harden-hearts of our past are past. We are new creatures in this moment and in this moment we celebrate the quite human ability to take to flights of fancy and return to earth changed creatures.

Bless all those here with the ability to see themselves new again. Give us all the willingness to let go of others so that they may change and grow, and above all forgive us for thinking that we’ve had it figured out years ago.

In the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything. Amen.

SERMON: Your Heart Will Live Forever

A Resurrection Twist

There is a Shinto temple in the southern end of Honshu Island – the biggest of the islands that go to make up Japan. Legend has it that it was first built in 4 BC, but probably the 7th Century is more like it. I say “first” built because when ever it was first built over 2000 years ago, or 1400 years ago it has been rebuilt every 20 years since that time. They don’t tear down the 20 year old shrine and build another one, they ritualistically dismantle it, then on an adjacent site it is rebuilt from entirely new materials, but following exactly the same ancient plans.

Is it the same shrine – the Ise Shrine or more commonly know in Japan as Jingu – “The Shrine” – is it the same shrine that exists today first built in the 7th Century? Or is it only a reproduction of the long-lost original building – oh, an exact reproduction no doubt – last rebuilt in 1993 – but still a reproduction?

In a similar manner each and every cell in our bodies is replaced every seven years. If you’re 49 years old – you’ve inhabited 7 totally different bodies, oh, each was an exact reproduction, but each was still a reproduction.

If at the age of 49 you’re fortunate enough to have your grandmother around like my wife, Viv, did when she was 49, then what exactly is it about you that your grandmother loves? In other words, what is it that’s stayed constant during those seven reproductions?

For the people of Japan the soul of the Ise Shrine centers around the fact that each time the Shrine is rebuilt it is built and used as a Shinto Shrine, the Shrine – Jingu!

No rich person bought it and lived in it, held dinner parties in it, raised children in it, died in it.

It was never used as a stable for a nobleman’s horses.

It was never used as an amusement park centering on the quaint past.

It is a shrine, a holy temple, and it always has been.

And what makes it a shrine is that Shinto priests maintain it, hold Shinto rites in it, clean it, protect it, and every 20 years lovingly dismantle it and build it anew; fresh, raw, pristine. Trees grown in the generation of its parent temple – trees nourished on rain that fell on the former temple, nourished by sunshine that also graced the former temple – these trees are used to rebuild the shrine. And then, somewhere between the dismantling and the completed reconstruction the soul of Ise, Jingu, is passed on.

So – what is it that your grandmother loved in you? What is it that makes you lovable? It’s probably not because you tripped grandma at the escalator, or took the biggest piece of her birthday cake, or kicked her cat.

Yes, you were grandma’s little girl, but even genes can’t force someone to love a brat!

You were grandma’s nice little girl.

When I was Pastor at the First Christian Church in Big Sandy, Texas for two years I attended a spring birthday party at the city park.

Lois Davis was there. She was my eldest parishioner at 86. When I was leaving the party she was sitting at a picnic table with a young lady in her mid-twenties. Lois introduced me to this young lady like she was the Queen of England – the young lady, not Lois. I could see the love that Lois held for her granddaughter and I could see the concern, love and affection that were coming from the granddaughter.

Buddhists do no believe in a permanent self. They see the apparition we call self as the mere resemblance of outward form recognized by memory.

The Buddhists see themselves as the Ise Shrine, rebuilt moment to moment.

Each time we identify with the appearance of self and turn inward as if there were a boundary between us and them – each occurrence of that diminishes our opportunities to join the stream of life that never ceases to flow and change around us.

Our clutching is like the desperate flailing of a drowning victim – demonstration of self – true!, but totally ineffective.

For the Buddhists making a splash is not what it’s all about. What matters is noiselessly entering the stream and being in flow.

This reminds me of a story that is told by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen in her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom. This is the story.

As an adolescent, I had a summer job working as a volunteer companion in a nursing home for the aged. The job began with a two-week intensive training about communication with the elderly. There seemed to be a great deal to remember and what had begun as a rather heartfelt way to spend a teenage summer quickly became a regimented set of techniques and skills for which I would be evaluated by the nursing staff. By the first day of actual contact, I was very anxious.

My first assignment was to visit a ninety-six-year-old woman who had not spoken for more than a year. A psychiatrist had diagnosed her as having senile dementia, but she had not responded to medication. The nurses doubted that she would talk to me, but hoped I could engage her in a mutual activity. I was given a large basket with glass beads of every imaginable size and color. We would string beads together. I was to report back to the nursing station in an hour.

I did not want to see this patient. Her great age frightened me and the words “senile dementia” suggested that not only was she older by far than anyone I had ever met, she was crazy, too. Filled with foreboding, I knocked on the closed door of her room. There was no answer. Opening the door, I found myself in a small room lit by a single window, which faced the morning sun. Two chairs had been placed in front of the window; in one sat a very old lady, looking out. The other was empty. I stood just inside the door for a time, but she did not acknowledge my presence in any way. Uncertain of what to do next, I went to the empty chair and sat down, the basket of beads on my lap. She did not seem to notice that I had come.

For a while I tried to find some way to open a conversation. I was painfully shy at this time, which was one of the reasons my parents had suggested I take this job, and I would have had a hard time even in less difficult circumstances. The silence in the room was absolute. Somehow it almost seemed rude to speak; yet I desperately wanted to succeed in my task. I considered and discarded all the ways of making conversation suggested in the training. None of them seemed possible. The old woman continued to look toward the window, her face half hidden from me, barely breathing. Finally, I simply gave up and sat with the basket of glass beads in my lap for the full hour. It was quite peaceful.

The silence was broken at last by the little bell, which signified the end of the morning activity. Taking hold of the basket again, I prepared to leave. But I was only fourteen and curiosity overcame me. Turning to the old woman, I asked, “What are you looking at?” I immediately flushed. Prying into the lives of the residents was strictly forbidden. Perhaps she had not heard. But she had. Slowly she turned toward me and I could see her face for the first time. It was radiant. In a voice filled with joy she said, “Why, child, I am looking at the Light.”

Many years later, as a pediatrician, I would watch newborns look at the light with that same rapt expression, almost as if they were listening for something.

A ninety-six-year-old woman may stop speaking because arterioscloerosius has damaged her brain, or she has become psychotic and she is not longer able to speak. But she may also have withdrawn into a space between the worlds, to contemplate what is next, to spread her sails and patiently wait to catch the light.

The heart that can catch the Light and live forever is equal to the soul of the Ise Shrine.

But it must be practiced. The shrine never stops being a shrine because it is filled with shrine activities.

The heart that never dies is the heart that is turned outward not towards the other as opposed to one’s self, but toward the other as one’s self.

In the 2nd Century AD the Catholic Church almost elected Valentinus as Pope. He came in second. Too bad, the Catholic Church and perhaps the face of Christianity itself would have been changed forever if the Gnostic Valentinus had filled the shoes of the fisherman.

Valentinus believed in resurrection from the dead, but it was a resurrection from the death of self-interest, selfishness, egoism. Those grasping around us – thieves, robbers, politicians, generals, presidents – they are the dead. They gather around themselves wealth, power and imagine that, that will keep death or anonymity at arm’s length or ease somehow the pain of their eventual disappearance.

How much better would it be to simply disappear each moment – disappear into breath, disappear into watchfulness, disappear into the non-anxious presence, disappear and be reborn as passers-by, reborn with the heart that never dies.

How can one fear a thing that will change nothing? How can death take from us that which we have already surrendered?

In the movie, The Last Samurai, Ken Watanabe plays a samurai who teaches a Union Officer, played by Tom Cruise, what Bushido – the way of the samurai warrior – is all about.

The movie is worth the ending of the film alone.

Watanabe is mortally wounded and dying on the battlefield. As he slumps into Tom Cruise’s arms he sees his life as one perfect moment after another perfect moment, fully lived, fully realized – the scene switches to cherry blossoms blowing from an orchard and the dying samurai whispers, “Each moment perfect – it’s – all – perfect.”

The 20th Century’s greatest Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, summed up all his theology in one statement, “Ultimately, everything’s okay.”

The apostle Paul echoes similar thoughts when he says,

I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me – (Galatians 2:20a)

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (1st Corinthians 15:55 KJV)

So why did your grandmother love you? Yeah, she saw a nice kid there, but also she saw herself there in you – the rebuilt temple – the home of the heart that never dies.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Jack Harris Bonham

April 1, 2007

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

Mystery of many names, and mystery beyond all naming, today we’re going to talk about you – the mystery. Wanting to speak about profound secrets, and enigmas – things beyond human comprehension puts us in the rather embarrassing spot of having to wing it! May our wings be sturdy enough to buffet the winds of doubt, may we journey over the sea of profound inexplicability, and resting upon the mast of a fishing boat may we watch as odd forms are brought from the depths. May our spirits be like those in dreams as we watch, marvel, and do not fear that which is beyond reason.

It’s not knowledge that we seek this morning. We have knowledge, and ways of getting more. But rather it is an understanding of our place in the scheme of things that we intuit this morning. Give us the wisdom that goes beyond mere knowledge to that place in our hearts where we comprehend a peace that passes all understanding. It is that peace we look for, it is that peace that we desire, it is that peace that lures us into the unknown.

May we forgive ourselves for not being totally human. May our compassion override our sense and may we reach out even when we fear to do so. Franklin Delanor Roosevelt once said that all we have to fear is fear itself. But we fear love, we fear acceptance and rejection, we fear poverty, we fear the shame of growing old and out of control – the real question is what is it that we do not fear?

Sitting quietly, and letting our breath slow down may we land in a spot where the good and the bad are but names for preferences, may we sit as the rocks, immovable, constant, and always present. May our hearts grow to accept whatever it is that comes our way, and may we see in each instance a chance to simply be there.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

The Great Escape: The Baptism of Jesus

as Seen From the Viewpoint of Jesus, Himself

Matthew 4:1-11(NIV) Gospel of Judas 2:16-20

(Jesus said) “Let whoever is strong among you humans bring forth the perfect human and stand up and face me.” And they said, “We are strong!” But their spirits did not have the courage to stand up to face him – except Judas Iscariot. He was able to stand up to face him, even though he was not able to look him in the eyes, but turned his face aside.

(Translated by Karen L. King)

Introduction:

(Go out into the congregation and walk up and down looking at as many who will let you – return to the pulpit.)

I’m very happy to be here today.

I saw many things as I walked among you. The eyes are, after all, the windows of the soul.

My name is Judas Iscariot – and no, I am not the warm up act for Jesus. Jesus chose not to come here today. More of that later. Why, you might be wondering, am I here? Good question! I’m here because I was the favorite disciple, and I remain the favorite. It’s a long story.

Jesus knew and he still knows that he can count on me to tell the story, set the record straight, lay it out for you so that – perhaps – you’ll understand? There’s always the chance that you will not understand, or choose not to want to understand. That’s okay, many have not understood, many have gotten it wrong.

I know that I am expected to speak of Jesus? Baptism. Jesus, and I, we have spoken of this event many times. Each time, we seem to learn more. It’s as if the baptism itself were still going on, in some bizarre and timeless way. Like the baptism was a marriage and funeral of sorts, a ceremony of union with death and life that has lasted to this very day, this very hour, this very moment.

I’m very happy to be here today!

Once Jesus said to me, “Come and I will teach you about the things that no human will see. For there exists a great realm and a boundlessness whose measure no angelic race has comprehended.” [Jesus loved to speak in hyperbole.) He continued, “In it (the boundlessness) is the great invisible Spirit – the one whom no angelic eye has seen nor any inner thought of heart contained, nor has anyone called it by any name.”

(Gospel of Judas 10:1-4)

It’s like a Koan. The Great Invisible Spirit that no angelic eye has seen, so obviously, it’s not in heaven. The Great Invisible Spirit that no one’s heart has been able to imagine, so that it’s not of human origins. The Great Invisible Spirit that is beyond naming – mystery of many names, mystery beyond all naming.

I’m very, very happy to be here today!

When I was a boy, my friends and I used to play near the dunes where the Goat Lady lived. The Goat Lady was old, real old. There was a wrecked chariot in those dunes, and we boys imagined that the Goat Lady had once been the lover of the Roman Centurion who had wrecked the chariot and lost his life. She stayed now in the dunes, because it was the only place that had anything that still could remind the old woman of her lover, when he was in his prime, healthy, strong, vibrant, tanned and delicious. We, too, dreamed of a time when the Goat Lady had been young and beautiful.

Now, she herded a scrawny bunch of goats over these dunes, drank their milk and occasionally they said when a goat would meet with an accident and die, she’d cook its meat and eat its strength. Yet – no one could remember ever smelling the smoke of a goat meal. We boys knew why! She lived off the bodies of boys who had disappeared from their villages, and we were thrilled that in those dunes, we faced more than simply an old woman. We faced a fierce enemy – an old, evil one who lived off the flesh of young boys.

One afternoon we took some apples out into the dunes and ate them there. I grew sleepy and napped. I was awakened by the sound of laugher. Opening my eyes I expected to join in the fun, but instead I couldn’t move. I’d been buried up to my neck in the sand. My friends circled me chanting, “The Goat Lady’s coming! The Goat Lady’s coming!”

One of the boys keeping watch came running from the top of the dunes. His expression told everyone that what they chanted was true. She – was – coming.

They were gone before I could beg them to stay. I could hear the belled lead goat as it made its way toward me. I squirmed, I wriggled, nothing. My bowels moved and – I passed out.

When I awakened the sun was setting. I had been pulled from my grave. I had been cleaned up and was wearing a rough white robe. I remember wondering if I had died and gone to heaven, yet the hole was still beside me – the empty tomb!

I want you to know – from that day till this one – I have never been afraid – ever – well, almost never! I had been reborn, recast, remolded into something very much like me, but not quite me. It was as if I was this big energy – The Great Invisible Spirit – that now simply went by the name of Judas Iscariot.

The feeling didn’t last. You notice that. You feel great and think, this is the way it will always be – in love, fully invested, made in the shade, got your swerve on – but no, things change.

The mind that stops is the mind that dies. Latching onto something in our life, in our presence – stopping the mind to rest in the shade of good feeling – these are the things that rob us of our ability to simply – keep – going.

I’m so very happy to be here today!

Jesus, now, he had the mind of someone who could simply keep going. They stood around him, and they all had stones. There was that beautiful woman, still smelling of the bedchamber, and the eyes of the men – those eyes. They were looking for a victim, hell, they had found a victim, but they were feeling generous, hey, let’s share this adulterer with the new prophet – that weird one from Galilee – he won’t know what to do!

What would you do? The leaders of your community standing against a law breaker – an outsider – wanting you to light them up so that the disenfranchised can get what they deserve. It’s a lot of pressure.

But that Jesus, hey, man, what can I say? Never knew a man who knew human nature like that man. There they were with all those – rocks! The sheer enormity of them – a crowd full of rocks and strong arms, working arms, killing arms.

You know that saying “Can’t see the forest for the trees!” Well, they got it backwards; it’s really “Can’t see the tree for the forest.”

Jesus wasn’t worried about an arsenal of rocks, no; he was just worried about that first rock. Yeah. He knew, that’s the one that would be the hardest to throw, that first rock was more than simply a rock – that was a modeling rock, an expression of a throwing behavior and my friends, that’s all a mob wants is a model, give ’em a model – Sieg Heil! – and you can get them to do anything.

The blood of the genocides of every generation scream now from the rocks themselves, “We are innocent! We are innocent!”

Jesus? mind didn’t stop, you see, he bent down and drew on the ground. He doodled!

The fate of a young, healthy, sexy woman was at stake – she was so close he could smell her – and he doodled on the ground! You can’t fake that. That’s the stuff of legend. I was there, and I was armed and ready. Jesus, what a party pooper!

(Mocking voice) Let he who is without sin throw the first stone! Man, this guy could mess up a wet dream!

That one little sentence – Let he would is without sin throw the first stone – and all of a sudden it’s a rock dropping contest!

When I was a boy I used to pester the blacksmith in my village. Well, all we boys did. Fire and smoke – name me a boy who doesn’t want to play with fire and smoke. The blacksmith was always warning us, “You’re going to burn yourself. Be careful!”

One day I saw the most beautiful horseshoe, pretty and new, I picked it and dropped it.

“Burned yourself, didn’t you!?” came the blacksmith’s laughing retort.

“No,” I said, “it just don’t take me long to look at a horseshoe.”

Yeah, my mind bounces, too. Maybe that’s what attracted us to one another in the first place. Jesus and me.

He gave me power over the purse cause I could figure things in my head, and was good at business. He mocked me sometimes for thinking too much about money, and then that jerk Michael Angelo paints me clutching my purse and spilling the salt. Salt and money they were equals back then – one as precious as the other.

But Jesus knew. When the chips were down, when there was no one else to turn to, then he could turn to me. My mind could follow his, we could move together and I could see what he was driving at – at least part of it.

I did stand up to him. True, I couldn’t always look him in the eye, but I stood up when he needed someone to stand up. “Stand up, stand up, for Jesus you soldiers of the cross, lift high his royal banner, it must not suffer loss.”

He told me I’d be cursed for all time, and jokingly referred to me as, “The Thirteenth God of the Thirteenth Realm.” What a sense of humor, what a weird sense of humor. Jesus would have liked Austin – probably lived south of the river.

“Keep Jesus Weird!” That’s the bumper sticker I’m waiting to see.

I am so very, very happy to be here today.

Jesus knew the holy books and the holy stories. We didn’t call him Rabbi for nothing, ya know!

He talked of Ezekiel and the contest he had with the priest of Baal. Ezekiel challenged the priest of Baal to a sacrificing contest. The priests of Baal went first and to tell you the truth, I can’t remember how good their sacrifice was, cause no matter how good theirs was, that wasn’t the point.

The point was old Ezekiel was the man when it came to sacrifice and he had a deep and abiding faith in the one whose name we do not speak.

When the priests of Baal had finished with their meager sacrifice Ezekiel – what a showman! Ezekiel has buckets and buckets of water poured on the wood of the sacrifice, drenches it! Then, he calls down fire from heaven and wham-o! The altar is burned so completely, that there is nothing left of the sacrifice. Nothing! The crowd went wild! (Cheer into microphone)

But old Ezekiel he was just getting warmed up. He showed the crowd that there was absolutely nothing up his sleeves, and then – he called down fire upon the 400 priests of Baal – wham-o! – and it was like Hiroshima.

You’d think that Ezekiel would be pretty happy at this point – sort of like Evil Kenevil jumping the Grand Canyon and not getting hurt.

But no, Ezekiel went away by himself right after that. He went into the wilderness and hid in a cave, and didn’t eat for days. He sat there listening for the voice of the one whose name we do not speak, waiting for a comforting word from his Lord and Master.

The wind blew mightily outside the cave and at first Ezekiel thought he heard the voice of Lord in the wind, but then realized you could hear whatever you wanted to hear in the wind. A storm came along, and there was lightning and thunder and Ezekiel listened carefully for the voice of the Lord. But the voice of the Lord was not in the wind; not in the storm. But after the storm, when the quietness of evening settled on the cave and the dancing firelight images made their way across the cave walls that’s when Ezekiel heard the voice of the Lord. The still small voice.

The still small voice – is still small. It’s not in the stock market – not on the World Wide Web – not on your cell phone. It’s in the quiet. It’s in the silence. It’s in the gaps.

Jesus heard the voice of the wind, but it wasn’t the voice of God. Satan has been called the Prince of the Power of the Air. The Prince of the Power of the Air what a nice way to call someone a bullshitter!

And what did Satan say? “Hungry Jesus, well, you’re the son of God, command these stones to become bread!” But the voice of the Lord was not in the wind, not in the air, not in the prince of the power of the air. Jesus said, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Then Satan took Jesus up to the highest point of the temple in Jerusalem – now Jesus swears he didn’t eat for forty days, but it sound to me like he might have stumbled onto some mushrooms! What do you think? So there he is with Satan standing on the pinnacle of the Temple, and Satan says, “Throw yourself down, for it is written he will give his angels charge over him, and will not allow him to strike his foot against a stone.”

Jesus felt the adrenaline. Sure. Standing way up there his feet itching, he could feel the wind tugging at his clothes, as he did a swan dive into the hands of God.

But the Lord wasn’t in the adrenaline, and Jesus said, “Do not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”

So now Satan took Jesus to door number three; the highest mountain in all the world and showed him all the storming activity of mankind, the hustle and the bustle, the moving and the shaking, the glitter and the gold, Jesus could have it all for a simple nod in Satan’s direction.

But the voice of the one whose name we do not speak – the Great Invisible Spirit – was not in the storming of humankind

And Jesus said, “You don’t hook me, Satan. My mind sees you, acknowledges the power of evil in the world, and moves on. I’m not stuck in evil.” We are here to serve the still small voice. If you can’t hear it, how can you serve it?

Listen. (pause) The still small voice is still small.

I am so very happy to be here today.

The Romans were getting tired of the trouble Jesus was causing. They and the Jewish leaders. It was Passover and they just wanted the festivals to go on without a hitch. Tempers were high and the crowd was involved.

They hallelujahed when Jesus entered Jerusalem and now their voices were vicious, rapacious, sanguine.

Pilate offered Barbaras, but the crowd would have none of that. They had raised him up and they could take him down.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Jesus knew that if he weren’t careful, the group he’d gathered about him, those called his disciples, would be dispersed before he could show them his best prophetic trick. We all need our audience – his twelve and the others who are rarely mentioned. Perhaps they gathered for the last time there in Jerusalem?

He pulled me aside. He told me what to do. I was to tell them – the authorities – where he would be that night – in the Garden – surrounded by sleeping followers.

He told me, he said, “As for you, you will surpass them all. For you will sacrifice the human being who bears me. Already your horn is raised up, your anger is full, your star has passed by, and your heart has prevailed.”

(Judas 15: 4-8)

I turned him in. It was a betrayal – of sorts. Without me, there would have been no Road to Emmaus. Without me, there would have been no surprises in the Upper Room! Without me he couldn’t have shown them the trick – the secret behind it all. “Pay no attention to the Spirit behind the curtain.”

Conclusion:

You know my reward. It has been written that I hanged myself, but the truth is, they stoned me. And I don’t mean they took me behind the stable and shared a Doobie with me. No, they picked up stones – maybe the same ones that had been dropped earlier, ya think? And the modeling came easy. They’d run off and not seen Jesus crucified, but they’d seen others crucified. The modeling came compliments of the state, and their anger turned those stones into a which stone can be thrown first contest. They sent me into the Spirit world.

And it is from the Spirit world with the breath of Spirit that I speak today.

Jesus has left the building!

In other words?

“You can kill the protestors, but you can’t kill the protest!”

I’m so very glad to be here today.

As I walked around among you this morning I found what I was looking for. I saw it there in the meeting of our eyes. Spirit recognizing Spirit. And the still small voice though still small, has many listening and some even understanding.

You don’t need to believe this. It’s not demanded. Really nothing is demanded. It’s all quite all right, just like it is.

Some day the human being who bears you will be sacrificed. It’s true. Already your horn has been raised up, your anger full, your star has passed by, and your heart – your heart will prevail. I just know it.

Amen, and again, I say, Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Jack Harris-Bonham

March 4, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, we come here this morning with smiles on our faces. If you’re not smiling then at least grin, or place your tongue firmly in your cheek.

The world is a serious place – we know this! People get blown to bits in it everyday. Children are molested, women are beaten, soldiers die horrible deaths, or they survive with terrible life-altering wounds, lovers are betrayed, dogs are run over, cats are drowned, and the trash is not taken out. And no, we are not equating any of these actions with the others!! We know violence is the foundation of cultures worldwide, but what is the point of dwelling on simply the negative?

There is a balance that struck in the body between sodium and potassium and without that balance our electrolytes – made up of positive and negative charges – would be out of whack and we would die.

So admitting the terrible we pass on today to dwell on other matters. Or maybe we simply wish to nod in the direction of the world’s failings – if the negatives of life can be said to be failings – and look upon the jewels that sparkle on the river as the sun reflects off its surface.

Sure, we know they aren’t real jewels, but that doesn’t stop our imaginations from seeing something where it really doesn’t exist and telling a story about it. Tell a child that those sparkling jewels on the river don’t exist, go ahead, explain about the sun’s rays and the reflexive properties of water – the only reaction you’ll get from a child is that look of boredom as they realize you’re trying to kill their imagination. Besides, everything manmade was once something simply imagined.

Sure imaginings are nothing more than mental notions, creations, or conceptions of a poetic mind,

– but wasn’t it Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Harvard Divinity School Address who imagined that a time would come when the miracles of the Bible would be replaced by the miracles of green meadows and falling rain,

– wasn’t it the Plains Indians who imagined that their Ghost Dancing would bring back the buffalo and make the white man disappear,

– wasn’t the imaginings of Holocaust survivors – making plans for a seemingly non-existent future – that kept them alive when others around them were dropping like flies,

– wasn’t it the imaginings of the boy Sam Clemens while rafting on the mighty Mississipp that gave birth to the man Mark Twain,

– wasn’t the imaginings of Jan Hus, as he passed the cup of the Eucharist over the railing to the common people, that led to the flaming chalice of this denomination,

– wasn’t the imaginings of a poor Galilean that all God’s children could live in peace that created a world religion that went on to pervert that poor Galilean’s message to the point of total non-recognition,

– isn’t our own imaginings that someday our lives will fall in place that keeps us going, supplies us with the energy that pushes our lives forward in spite of the entropy that leads us toward the grave?

This morning we’re here to celebrate imagination, story and the inherent silliness of all sentient beings.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON: The Baptism of Jesus

as seen from the vantage point of the Jordan River – Israel’s Mississip

“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” So begins Hal Holbrook’s one-man show concerning the life of Mark Twain. Where would Samuel Clemens have been if there were no Mississippi River. The young writer knew the lesson of a prophet not being accepted in his own homeland, so he dropped the name, the tag that had followed him thus far, and took another. There on the mighty Mississipp Clemens first heard the call of the boatswain as he swung the leaded line that gave safety and security to River Boat Captains as they navigated a river whose muddy bottom was changing daily.

Without the mighty Mississipp Twain would have been traveling by stagecoach, wagon train, cattle drive, railroad, or even possibly on foot. And what daring-do name would he have sifted from those experiences? He could have called himself, “Westward Ho!” But the later generations of freed slaves would have had a field day with that one! He might have gone under the nom-de-plume of, G. Haw, or maybe, All Aboard! – now there’s a name that gets everybody on the same track – the point is, who’s to say whether Samuel Clemens would have made it without the river, that old man river, it’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud river, that artery of America that carried what the north made to the south, and what the south grew to the north, that equalizer of society where well-healed gentlemen, loose ladies, and cards combine to make fortunes for some, and some paupers forever!

I am the River Jordan. I know. It inspires nothing nowadays. There was a time when simply that pronouncement, I am the River Jordan, would have sent a chill of panic, pride and purpose through the listening world. But the world was smaller then. In that part of the now spacious world where I still flow, I still hold sway. There are those who remember, those who cow-tow, those who covet, those who wail as they are immersed beneath my murky waters. Yes, I make a difference to some, and am grateful for the work, but the world at large, the movers, the shakers, the prophets, the healers, the wise men, the fools, their lives still fabric the world, but their connection to me has all but ceased.

In the interest of world economy the world is being destroyed. Global warming, no longer the hex of Green Peace, but a front page New York Times reality, pollution, acid rain, raw sewage and neglect have created a disconnect between those who are two thirds water, but no longer consider the source and that disconnect is about to take its revenge.

“Now you say you love me, and if it’s true – well, you can cry me a river, cry me a river, I cried a river over you!”

You may think that my time has come and gone, and that being a river I am nothing more than a way through which water passes, but I could say the same about you.

Rather I will tell you of my life, what I have seen, those that I have touched, blessed, baptized, and when I’m through you can babble like that Greek idiot Heraclites and swear that you never stepped into the same stream twice, but in the end you’re still all wet. You do not understand that my touch can heal, my touch can aid armies, my touch can bring the dove of God descending upon the head of one of his sons – my touch can confer the crown of eternity – not knowing this, you turn aside, uninterested.

But who am I to boast? I’m just babbling on here, running on as it were, seeking my own level, so much water under the bridge, a stream of consciousness, if you will.

They say that there are no more great ones. They say that those who rule now, both politically, and economically are but the midget children of a race of giants.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:1&2 NIV)

Imagine if you can, maybe you’ve felt this in a dream, or maybe someone you really loved delivered this feeling to you with the intimate touch of their body to yours, or maybe you just have a good imagination, but think of it – the Spirit of God hovering over you, close as a breath, caressing the wetness of oblivion – oh yes, darkness was over the surface of the deep – imagine you and God like this! (Show them your crossed fingers)

I know. I know. I’m in a Unitarian Universalist Church, okay, okay so most of you could care less about God and you being like this (show them the crossed fingers again). Yeah, yeah, I get it. There’s a tendency among liberal religionist to take those two fingers and have the index bow to center, but you’ve forgotten something when you raise those contorted fingers to God, you have forgotten that an index is something that serves to guide, point out, or otherwise facilitate reference. When you flip off God, all you’re really doing is bowing to the center – and you call yourselves leftists, liberals!?

The point is God exists whether you like it or not. If you have the word in your vocabulary, if you know what the word God means, then the existence of God cannot be denied. To say that you don’t believe in God, well, that’s tantamount to saying you don’t believe in words, and you do, you do believe in words. Even atheists define themselves as being “without God.” UU’s may not have creeds, at least not ones that they have written down and repeat religiously, excuse the pun, but UU’s do have patterns of thinking and those patterns are represented in catch phrases – the seven banalities – and those phrases repeated often enough become a liturgy – ceremonial rites that invoke, remember, give thanks, bless, praise and present offerings. Within traditional liturgy these rites center on God – if not God, then what do these rites center on in this church?

In the 19th Century one, John William McGarvey, preached a sermon entitled The River Jordan. In that sermon he noted several wonderful things about me that makes me stand head and shoulders, or should I say headwater and banks, above all other rivers in the world. And if you were thinking that this man was exaggerating then I would draw your attention to one of his biographers who said concerning Reverend McGarvey, He relies almost exclusively on facts and has very little imagination.

I, the Jordan River, am mentioned approximately 175 times in the Old Testament, and about 15 times in the New Testament. You can see a pattern there, I’m sure. Interest in me waned as time went by. For example, how many of you can tell me which direction I flow in? Where do I begin, and where do I end?

I begin in the heights of Mount Hermon north of Galilee and from multiple sources I flow south to Lake Huleh. From there I flow into the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus is reported to have preached, calmed storms and walked on my waters. From the Sea of Galilee I descend 65 miles to the Dead Sea, which is so called because it has no outlet.

From my beginnings in the north around the heights of Mount Hermon to my terminus in the Dead Sea I drop 2,380 feet and I have a winding course, making its way nearly 200 miles, approximately twice the actual distance between Mount Hermon and the Dead Sea. Unlike every other river in the world, the majority of my navigation lies below sea level and ends in a body of water, the Dead Sea, which is the lowest lying body of water, other than the oceans, on the face of the earth.

There are four miracles that are associated with my waters that I will speak about today. Please don’t flinch when I say the word, miracles. Miracles don’t have to be acts of God; they can also be events or circumstances that give one a sense of admiring awe, or maybe even a literary devise?

The first incident is found in the book of Second Kings. A man named Naaman, a Captain in the Syrian Army, and a mighty warrior who fought and won many battles was also a leper. Now, a young girl who worked in Naaman’s house was an Israeli slave who spoke of a prophet, one Elisha, who could cure Naaman of his leprosy.

So Naaman went to Samaria where Elisha lived to ask him to rid him of his leprosy. And Elisha wouldn’t even leave his home to see Naaman, he simply sent a servant to tell Naaman to go to the River Jordan and bathe there.

Naaman got angry when he heard this because he knew there were plenty of nice rivers in Syria where he might have bathed, and besides he had traveled far to see this prophet, and he was looking forward to the prophet’s efforts to cleanse him, even if they didn’t work.

Naaman’s own servants had to convince Naaman that since they were already in Israel and the River Jordan was there, what harm would it do him to have a bath.

He dipped himself 7 times into my waters and when he emerged his flesh was again like the flesh of a little child.

The second incident that concerns my holy waters, was recorded in the book of Joshua. After Moses had wandered with the people of Israel in the desert for forty years. Every woman knows why it took them forty years – just like any man Moses wouldn’t stop and ask directions.

Moses died before he could enter the Promised Land, so Joshua was chosen to lead the people across the Jordan River and into the land of milk and honey. But it was the time of harvest, and the banks of the River Jordan were overflowing as they always did at harvest time, so Joshua had the ark of the covenant brought down to the river side and when the ark was carried into my waters, it is reported that I stopped flowing and the people of Israel were allowed to pass over into the land promised them.

The third miraculous thing reported in the Bible concerning me was when Elijah and Elisha were in need of getting on the other side of the River Jordan and Elijah took his cloak from his shoulders and hit my waters with it and again, I dried up, and the two prophets were able to pass on dry land. Shortly after that Elijah was taken up into heaven in a fiery chariot. Conveniently, the good prophet dropped his cloak and Elisha picked it up and was able to smite my waters with it again, and pass back over the

Jordan on his way home.

The fourth incident that happened of great spiritual significance was, of course, Jesus’ baptism in my holy waters.

I understand that you’ve heard from John – the one they called the Baptist – in an earlier sermon and it was John who baptized Jesus.

A word about John. He not only baptized his followers in my waters, but he also bathed there, drank my water, and when there was a crowd for baptisms and he couldn’t take a break he relieved himself in those self-same waters. He was not a man of clean habits, but what can you expect from a man who insults his visitors, “You brood of vipers, who warned you of the wrath to come?” and eats bugs, and steals honey from bees?

There has been a great deal written about Jesus? baptism. It has been reported that a dove descended from heaven and lighted on Jesus? head. It has been reported that John declared that this was the one he’d been talking about all along, the one whose sandal he was not worthy to tie. It has been reported that the heavens opened and a the very voice of God spoke saying, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”

I can’t verify any of these happenings because I’m just a river, just passing through, just hurrying on my way, and besides, you know the way things sound to you underwater, that’s the way things sound to me above water.

What I can tell you is that when John baptized Jesus he held him under for an ungodly amount of time. To the eyes of the world it may have looked like a baptism, but to me, the River Jordan, it looked a great deal like John the Baptist was trying to drown Jesus. That would have made sense, Jesus was the new kid on the block when it came to prophets, John’s popularity was waning, surely John knew that Jesus would take his place, and that the followers he’d gathered would eventually go over to the Nazarene. Why do you think that Jesus ran off into the desert right after his baptism? He wanted to get as far away from water, as far away from me, as he possibly could!

Conclusion: Now, I wish to comment on all these extraordinary things that have been recorded in the Bible and that supposedly happened along my banks and in my waters.

First of all those who do not understand story have difficulty with elements of story. Mark Twain was absolutely right when he said, “Why mess up a good story by sticking to the facts?”

Stories are not about facts. Stories are about the weaving of meaning into this life. Stories take what happened and ask, “What if?” Besides as has been proven time and again, even when there are eyewitnesses, their accounts of what happened are varied to the point of seeming to be about different events.

Within psychological circles this is known as the Rashomon Effect. This psychological effect is named after the first Japanese film to bring Akira Kurosawa to the attention of the viewing public of this country. Rashomon, the film, was released in 1950 and received an Oscar for Best Foreign language film in 1951.

Rashomon presents a morally complex and multifacitited story in which different characters tell their versions of the same “factual” events, and although each sounds plausible, and possible, none are the definitive take on what happened that afternoon in the grove of trees as a Samurai and his new wife are accosted by a bandit and the entire affair is witnessed by a woodcutter who is hiding in a grove of trees.

Now, some of you may wonder why I would know of Akira Kurosawa, so I will explain. He was known as “Emperor” for his dictatorial directing style. At one point while directing a film he demanded that a stream that was to be in a shot be redirected to flow in the opposite direction – and so it was!

In the process of telling a visual story, Kurosawa thought the story would best be told if nature were reversed, and for the story he was telling it was reversed. And you say you don’t believe in miracles!?

Things happen in this world, and it is up to us to make sense of them. Meaning is the function of story telling. For the culture and time of Naaman the Syrian it was important for me, River Jordan, to be a place where miracles could happen, even to non-Israelites and so they did.

When Joshua and the Israelites entered the Promised Land that so-called Promised Land belonged to other peoples from other cultures. The Israelites supposedly murdered those people and took their lands. It was important for that particular Israelite culture to know that God was on their side and it was God’s will not their avarice, which was the cause of those supposed genocides. Truth is, they probably intermarried and told these genocidal stories to pretend ethic purity. Hence, the story is told that God dried up the River Jordan so that the battle of Jericho could begin. We all need signs, and stories are places where signs can be inserted.

Sometimes when one prophet takes over the work of another prophet, it seems appropriate that the new prophet should have equal powers with the old, hence the tale of Elijah’s cloak being passed on to Elisha.

And Jesus? baptism what of that? I played such an important part in the story of Israel, that for a prophet to be properly introduced that prophet must come to terms with my holy waters. Besides, Jesus was to be the new Moses, and if Moses had water miracles, then it was paramount that Jesus have water miracles, too, and even better ones. Moses parted the waters, but Jesus walked on water. Did he really walk on water, or was it simply a metaphor of power explained in hyperbole? I think you know the answer.

And do rivers talk? Can the River Jordan preach?

I suggest that the next time you’re near a body of moving water, you sit facing the water and listen. Sit long and quiet, and you will hear the whispers, the overtones, the shouts and the murmurs of the stream that you are making conscious. Listen carefully, for it is up to you to tell the story of what the river of your life is disclosing.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

December 10, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming, this morning we wish to talk about the elephant in the church. The elephant’s been here for some time, and behind closed doors it’s being talked about.

Some say the elephant is the senior minister’s fault. He brought the elephant into the church. It’s remembered by others that he did, as a child, bring a horse into his mother’s house, so it seems likely he would bring an elephant into the church.

Others think the elephant is the figment of a collective imagination, and if they ignore it long enough, the imagined elephant will go away. Elephants traditionally work for peanuts, so it’s easy for them to stick around, they don’t leave on their own, they have to be invited to leave. But before they can be invited to leave, all those involved must note their existence.

Today the elephant will be paraded, it will stand on its hind legs and curl its truck, it will balance itself on a large rubber ball. Today, the elephant will do all its tricks. It will be hard to ignore the elephant after this. Those who see it, and those who wish they didn’t see it, will have to talk about the fact that its presence has been noted among us.

Elephants aside, we do come here to worship, to find a peaceful haven from the weariness of life’s treadmill. In this hour of contemplation and celebration, help us to band together as brothers and sisters in search of consolation, and comfort.

The world is a hard place, and sometimes when the world is brought into the sanctuary, we feel the sanctuary becomes a hard place. Help us to remember that we bring the world into this sacred space so that we might judge it against eternity, so that we might hold up the transient, the ephemeral, the fleeting images that we are assailed with everyday of our lives, so that we might give up on these images as producing anything in us but fear and trembling. The world is a scary place; do we really need to know all the bleeding wounds from all over the world, wrapped up into one half hour newscast?

Help us to learn to protect ourselves – to turn off that newscast, to set aside that news magazine, to be less frequent surfers on the Internet. Much of what we are exposed to we can, in no way, do anything about. If this were simply a lesson in powerlessness, that would be one thing, but as presented by the actors and actresses of news, there’s an implied responsibility in reporting these bleeding wounds, and an inferred transference of responsibility from the teller to those told.

Help us remember that prayer first penned by Reinhold Neibuhr, God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

Readings

Psalm 126 (Stephen Mitchell’s Adaptation)

Luke 3: 3-7 (NIV)

SERMON

The Lord of this Unitarian Universalist Church is about to return. As a matter of fact the Reverend Dr. Howard Davidson Loehr will be filling this very pulpit one week from today. When I call Davidson Lord I am relying on the archaic definition of the word as in the head of a household, a husband, a man of renowned power, a man who has mastery in some field or activity.

The passage in Luke read this morning is actually from the 40 th Chapter of Isaiah. In that part of Isaiah the prophet foretold the day when everything that was within the land of Judah would be carried off to Babylon – nothing shall be left, said the prophet Isaiah.

We have our own prophet here at First Church Austin. He was voted the Best Minister/Spiritual Leader in Austin for 2005 – just last year. His sermon “Living Under Fascism,” delivered on the 7 th of November 2004, woke up a whole lot of people in this church, and within two weeks of its appearance on our Internet site it was reproduced on the Website for al jazeera in the Arabic world. It was a prophetic shot that was heard around the world. Within a year Dr. Loehr was offered a book contract. The book, America, Fascism + God – sermons from a heretical Preacher – got Dr. Loehr interviews on radio, guest speaking engagements and eventually ended up landing him a friendship with, the television producer, Norman Lear.

I’m not sure that Dr. Loehr knew that his voice and his message would reach as far as it has, as far as it continues to reach. You were, rightfully so, a proud congregation as the message of warning that Dr. Loehr was delivering to this congregation actually reached a worldwide audience. After all, you were privy to this warning – this information – long before the rest of the world and there’s something wonderful about being in with the in crowd . First UU Austin was holding its head high – damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.

But prophetic preachers, like our beloved Dr. Loehr, do not rest well on their laurels. For to rest on one’s laurels means that one is content with past achievements and ceases new efforts. Nor is Dr. Loehr one to look to one’s laurels that is he is not interested in protecting his position of eminence against rivals. Why is that? Fundamentally it is because the Rev. Dr. Howard Davidson Loehr did not even wish to reap laurels . He did not write his sermon, which was soon to become the world’s sermon, Living Under Fascism , in order to receive honors and acquire glory.

He wrote it because he is an extremely religious man, in the sense that he believes in paideia, the Greek word that means honor, the word that means that you do what you must do with the idea that all those who have come before you, all those who have chosen the path of honor and truth, are watching you, seeing if, in fact, you will fold under the pressure of the dominant society, or whether you will stand up and act, speak and live in the best interests of all those living and dead who cherished the higher, holier, more noble values.

The first time I visited this church I sat out there on the bench across from the office and Paula Wiesner, from the Internship Search Committee joined me with her writing tablet and pen. When the first service was over I wandered with Paula into the foyer and Dr. Loehr was busy shaking hands, and these are the first words I heard from Dr. Loehr at this church. He was talking to a parishioner and something that parishioner had said invoked this response from Dr. Loehr. “That’s a load of crap!” or words to that effect! Dr. Loehr said those words loud. I heard them on the other side of the foyer. Dr. Loehr agrees with another noble one who said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

When I call Davidson Lord, perhaps you know that I am relying on the archaic definition of the word as in the head of a household, a husband, a man of renowned power, a man who has mastery in some field or activity.

I think it’s obvious, that since Dr. Howard Davidson Loehr has been the senior and only preacher here at First Church Austin for the past six years that he is the head of this household, if you can take the leap to consider this church a household of faith. As the motto of this church says, One Church – Many beliefs. Is there any doubt that Dr. Loehr is the head of this church where there are many beliefs? I think not.

But what of his being a husband? The archaic definition of husband is to be a manager or steward. I like the word, Steward. After all we here at First Church Austin have a stewardship campaign. A steward is one who is in charge of the household affairs. This house of faith, or if you chose, this house of reason, must have someone who can articulate for this house what it means to be a part of a religious tradition – as in the Unitarian Universalist tradition – which as Dr. Loehr is apt to proclaim in his prophetic way about the UUA – “There is no there, there.” And what does Dr. Loehr mean by that? “There is no there, there.” He’s not being snide, or uppity, well, maybe he’s being a little uppity, but what he’s getting at is, if a household of faith built around this tradition is to survive there must be offered a religious center around which it can revolve, a center that is solid and firm, a conviction that the search for truth, however horrible, however upsetting, however controversial, the search for truth is, in and of itself, a noble and holy undertaking. As it says in the words for the lighting of the chalice, “To seek, to find and to share.” In this sense, then Dr. Loehr is the husband of this household who seeks, finds and, then shares.

The head of a household, a husband, a man of renowned power, a man who has mastery in some field or activity.

Dr. Loehr is the head of this household of faith/reason, he is the husband in the sense of being the steward who is in charge of the household affairs. These affairs right now center around the transition this church is undergoing from the smallish family style church that it once was and is fondly remembered by the older members and the newer, bigger, more outward reaching larger church that finds its concerns turned from internal maintenance to true, active involvement in the outside world with all its political and corporate messes.

But is he a man of renowned power, a man who has mastery in some field or activity?

You who have witnessed his preaching know, don’t you? And yet, some of you have lost faith because his prophetic vision, his ability to be one who speaks beforehand, his mental acumen that allows him to ingest and digest enormous amounts of materials and to see within those materials patterns that give him advanced warnings, or the anticipatory grace to see what is about to happen, or what is happening behind the smokescreens of commerce and the military/industrial complex, these prophetic powers have, to some of your thinking, put you, him and this church in the embarrassing position of being considered conspiracy nuts. “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t!”

Perhaps we really don’t know what prophets do, and how they are received in their own homeland?

Prophecy may be in words, signs, actions, ways of life, or sacrifices of life. Prophesy may be delivered by men, women, children, groups, or individuals, and in the case of Balaam’s ass by a jackass. Prophecy cannot however be delivered ex officio or in layman’s terms, prophecies cannot be authenticated in advance, since if they were they wouldn’t be prophesies, would they? All prophesies require investigation and evaluation, and if they are to be accepted, recognition by the community to which they are addressed.

The Biblical tradition represents God as commanding people to form religious institutions, and as calling individuals to criticize and challenge these religious institutions. Why are those who considered themselves Unitarian Universalists upset by Dr. Loehr’s criticism of the UUA? Prophets offer challenges so that institutions – religious or otherwise – might learn and grow in positive directions. Those who fear criticism may, in fact, be in lock step with those that both the Unitarians and the Universalists fought against as they were branded heretics, non-believers and unorthodox. You can’t be a member of a rebellious religious institution and decry rebellion in the ranks. It simply doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work.

It is true that the religious institution may try to silence the prophet – why is it, you suppose that the UUA magazine refuses to publish Dr. Loehr’s articles? Can you say “gag order?”

However, if the prophet wins, then the religious institution will incorporate the prophet’s message within its system and, more importantly, come to represent the prophetic tradition within its functioning. Who are the prophets within the UUA? Has the UUA come to represent the prophetic tradition within its functioning? Or has the UUA simply unearthed the mess of two thousand years of heresy and sat back to admire an edifice it did not erect, but only uncovered, forgetting in the process that the job of internal criticism continues, especially once a denomination has become established?

In a sermon by another prophetic preacher here in Austin, Rev. Tom VandeStadt, of the Congregational Church of Austin, he explores the book of Revelation and says, In the Book of Revelation, a man named John, has a series of visions – In his climatic vision, he witnesses the fall of Babylon and the heavenly city of Jerusalem descending from heaven.

In Revelation Babylon refers specifically to Rome. John envisions the fall of Rome and the manifestation of God’s heavenly realm on earth. But Babylon refers to more than Rome. After the Jewish exile, Babylon came to symbolize all empires. Babylon symbolizes all concentrations of political, economic, and military power organized for the express purpose of making one group of people dominant over (another). Babylon(s have always) existed for the express purpose of maintaining the ascendancy of some people over other people.

In the Book of Revelation, the counterpoint to Babylon is Jerusalem. These two realities – Babylon and Jerusalem – are opposing realities. They are realities that contradict one another. They are realities that, to use apocalyptic imagery, are engaged in a spiritual battle with one another for the hearts, and souls, and very lives of human beings – they are realities that existed simultaneously when Revelation was written and they are realities that exist simultaneously today – in this reading (of Revelation) we don’t simply wait for Jerusalem to arrive from some heavenly, otherworldly realm in the future, (no), we undergo a transformation of mind, heart and lifestyle and enter into and begin to manifest the Jerusalem reality in our own lives.

Rev. Tom VandeStadt is a prophetic preacher of the Christian tradition. Does his congregation agree with him totally? No. Yet, they have chosen to remember that what counts is not the opposition within their religious community, but the greater opposition that they pose as they face the empires of Babylon. They have chosen to remember that they are in covenant with Rev. Tom VandeStadt and that covenant allows each to both err and be corrected through love. Their adherence to what Rev. Tom has to say, may vacillate between complete agreement to utter disbelief, but they honor his noble position as prophet. They cherish his occupation as one who is the head of a household of faith, a husband or steward who is in charge of the affairs of that household of faith, and as a man of renowned power, and a man who has mastery in his field. They give Rev. Tom the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of his long vision, the benefit of, if nothing else, being simply an interesting point of departure in a discussion centering on covenant.

Conclusion:

I want to read something that Carl Jung wrote in 1954.

The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing – He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths – There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the choice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. “You are no different from anybody else,” they will chorus, or, “there’s no such thing,” and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as “morbid.” – He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. “His own law!” everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law – the only meaningful life that strives for the individual Realization – absolute and unconditional – of its own particular law – To the extent that man is untrue to the law of his being – he has failed to realize his life’s meaning.”

So – this morning I am that voice crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way for Lord Davidson, make straight paths for him, every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low, The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth.

And you, you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee the coming wrath? I think you know who warned you. Now, it is up to you to set yourselves free. When you are free then your mouths will be filled of laughter and your tongues with singing. And even though you may have sowed in tears you shall reap in joy. For those who go forth weeping with precious seeds shall doubtless come again rejoicing, bringing with them the sheaves of harvest.

The weather report on television isn’t always right, but it doesn’t hurt to have that umbrella with you, does it? Do you stop watching the weather report when the sun shines all day long and you’ve had to tote around that old umbrella, or do you simply put the umbrella back in the closet and tune in to see what the predicted weather will be tomorrow?

Is there a prophet in the house?

You purport to be Unitarian Universalists. You think for yourselves. Well, guess what? Even if the good Reverend Doctor is prophetically wrong half of the time, he’s still batting 500. That puts Dr. Loehr at least 134 points ahead of the lifetime batting averages of Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. Hey, either give the man a break or step up to the plate.

Perhaps someday many years from now you will be sitting around with friends after dinner and you will remember the famous – the infamous – Dr. Loehr. And faces will light up and stories will be told and finally someone beaming a big smile will tell how one day after church Dr. Loehr told them personally, right to their face, that what they had just said was “a load of crap!”

Amen.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

November 26, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, this morning we come here after our individual and some our communal thanksgiving day celebrations. Lots of food, lots of football. We may, in fact, be suffering from a Thanksgiving hangover. Those of us who braved shopping malls, and department stores the day after Thanksgiving may literally be suffering from shopping wounds.

Calm us now as we contemplate life without all this abundance, restore us to a state in which we drink only when thirsty and eat only when hungry.

May our hearts be havens for the fullness of life that includes those who suffer, not simply from lack of our obvious abundance, but suffer unto death, suffer through torture, suffer through the separations of families and the untimely death of children in war-ravaged lands.

Raise in us righteous indignation at the prospect that a good deal of the terror occurring in this world is probably directly and indirectly sponsored by the United States of America.

Let us remember the words of Lao Tzu’s;

When the great Tao is abandoned,

 charity and righteousness appear.

 When intellectualism arises,

 hypocrisy is close behind.

When there is strife in the family unit,

people talk about ‘brotherly love’.

When the country falls into chaos,

politicians talk about ‘patriotism’.

As this holiday season continues help us to not be distracted by the bread and circuses. Let us return to simplicity finding there a part of ourselves that we thought we had abandoned. Happy in the moment, confident in the journey, let us be the peace that the world is searching for, let us give the love that would save a life, let us participate in what life offers, not what we imagine we might desire.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen

The War Prayer,

by Mark Twain

(Mark Twain apparently dictated this prayer around 1904-05; it was rejected by his publisher, and was found after his death among his unpublished manuscripts. It was first published in 1923 in Albert Bigelow Paine’s anthology, Europe and Elsewhere. The story is in response to a particular war, namely the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, which Twain opposed.)

Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!*

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory.

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think.

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory–*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

SERMON

Introduction: When the forefathers and foremothers of this country began looking at models to use, paradigms to facilitate the wording of the constitution, they had two negative examples of paradigms that they did not want to use when it came to the practice of religion.

In New England they had the example of the Massachusetts colony in which one could not be a member of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts without also being a member of the Puritan faith.

It didn’t make sense, but the Pilgrims who had fled religious persecution in England and Holland came to this country and immediately made laws that guaranteed that the very prejudices that they had suffered under would be perpetrated in the names of the Pilgrims in their new land – New England.

In the southern colonies they had the negative example of the Church of England, the church of Great Britain, the church of their overlords.

In an effort not to commit either of these crimes of prejudice the forefathers and foremothers looked to the middle colonies. And what did they find?

They found sandwiched between the southern most colonies and those of New England three distinct, yet similar colonies – colonies organized by men who sought nothing more than to worship in the manner in which they saw fit, compelling no other men or women to worship as they worshipped.

Roger Williams founded one of the colonies so designated. He had been educated at Cambridge and become a Chaplain to a rich family, but shortly before 1630 decided he could no longer labor under the Archbishop of Canterbury. When he arrived in Boston he was asked to replace the Pastor that was going back to England. He declined the offer because he saw no separation of church and state in the Massachusetts colony. That was the first of Roger Williams emancipating ideas. The second was what he called soul-liberty, he believed people should have the freedom to choose and practice their own religion. Roger Williams was quite a linguist and learned the native tongues around the colonies. He was called on often to mediate troubles between the colonies and the Native Americans. He thought that the Indians should be treated equally as men, and this feeling alone won him great respect among the native populations. He also felt that any lands settled by Europeans should be bought from the Indians at a fair price.

These views got him in trouble with the rulers of the colonies so he secured lands from the natives, which occupied what is now Providence, Rhode Island. At this colony Williams established, with the help of the others who moved there, a government unique to its day – a government that provided religious liberty and a true separation of church and state.

And as Gomer Pyle used to say, “Surprise, surprise, surprise!” Roger Williams was a Baptist.

Rhode Island became a haven for those who were persecuted for their beliefs – Jews, Quakers and Baptists worshipped their own way in harmony with one another.

The second colony, which served as an example for our forefathers and mothers, was the colony of Maryland founded by Lord Baltimore. Lord Baltimore was an Anglican but came under the influence of the Catholic Church and converted. In an effort to find a place where he and his family could worship in the Catholic manner, he obtained from King James a colony. King James died before the colony could be named, and when Lord Baltimore asked King Charles what he wished to call the colony King Charles suggested Terra Maria – Mary Land in honor of Queen Henrietta Mary. Lord Baltimore agreed not unhappy, I’m sure; that another queen named Mary played an important part in the Catholic worship of God. Maryland was conceived as a land where there was religious freedom and a separation of church and state.

The third colony that influenced the writers of the Constitution was Pennsylvania – founded by William Penn. William Penn had been born an Anglican but joined the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, when he was 22 years old. Penn was a personal friend of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers and accompanied Fox throughout Europe and England convincing many that they should obey their inner light which came directly from God, and that they should neither take their hats off, nor differ, to any man nor take up arms against any men.

At one point William Penn was jailed for publishing his beliefs, which attacked the idea of the Trinity – Unitarians are you listening?

The persecution of the Quakers became so volatile that finally Penn decided it would be better if the Quakers established a new, freer Quaker settlement in the New World. Some Quakers had already moved to New England, but they received the same prejudicial treatment from the Puritans as they did from the people back in England.

Penn and the Quakers chance came for a freer settlement in the New World when a group of prominent Quakers were granted what is now the western half of New Jersey.

Penn immediately went to work on the charter for that colony guaranteeing free and fair trials by jury, freedom of religion and freedom from unjust imprisonments and free elections.

Penn’s father had been owed a large sum of money from the monarchy of England and that debt was settled by giving William Penn an even larger area west and south of New Jersey. Penn called the area Sylvania – Latin for woods – but King Charles, wanting to honor William Penn’s father, named it Pennsylvania.

Conclusion: So – when the constitution was drawn up the shining examples of religious freedom offered by Roger Williams of Rhode Island, Lord Baltimore of Mary Land, and William Penn of Pennsylvania outweighed the noxious and fettered examples of the commingling of church and state and the suppression of religious freedom offered by our Puritan forbearers and similar examples offered by the Church of England loyalists to the south.

Modern examples of the confluence of church and state abound. Think back to Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship and Hitler’s Chancellorship and the silence of the Catholic Church. In the contrary, modern day examples are evident when liberation theology literally invaded Central and South America. The Catholic Church was deploring the lack of priests in the small towns and villages of Central and South America and they made the quite obvious mistake of teaching the poor to read the Gospels. Hello? Jesus? message is, if anything, a contraindication to Fascism and Despotism and when those peasants and the disenfranchised read what Jesus had said and how he stood up to the Roman Empire, well, enter Archbishop Oscar Romero and thousands of other priests who sided with the people over the state.

What we have witnessed in this country in the past two elections and perhaps beyond is also a confluence of church and state. It hasn’t gotten to the point where one must be a Christian and a Republican in order to be a citizen of this country, but voter fraud and intimidation by a strong central government have left some like Nom Chomsky saying that any centralized state is a violent proposition which necessarily sides with special interest groups as opposed to representing those who elected the officials of that same state.

Unitarians Universalists are in a unique position to be watchdogs for the rest of society. I would plead with you not to let your guard down, and to question authority before it questions you!

And finally, to those who have fled religious traditions that were constricting and/or despotic, I would warn all Unitarian Universalists not to follow the example of the Puritans. Just because a religious group persecuted you personally does not give you permission to turn the persecution around. Religious tolerance is precisely that – the tolerance of all religions.

Let us never forget that the paradigm for religious freedom granted in our Constitution comes from the Quakers, the Catholics and the Baptists.

Remember what it says in, The Book of Tea, “The secret to the mundane drama of life is to hold your position while allowing others to hold theirs.”