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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.”

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

November 12, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming we are here, and wondering where happiness has gotten off to. Most of us can remember moments in our lives that we consider happy, yet each time to try to reproduce those moments the reproductions are faded replicas of the original.

As we chase after happiness it seems only glimpses of it are managed as we race through our hectic schedules. We see it and it’s gone! Thoughts of happiness and sadness are images that arise in the mind and attaching to, or rejecting those images has contrary effects. Attaching to happiness pushes happiness out so fast, we’re not even sure that’s what we were feeling. Rejecting sadness brings sadness closer with every push.

This morning our prayer is to finally let go of the idea of happiness. It’s time to stop eating the menu and start enjoying the meal. It’s time to let go and let it be – whatever it is! Time to stop and watch.

We remember those this morning that because of war, famine, pestilence or circumstances are thrown into situations not of their own making, and are not allowed the luxury of watching their lives. May we attempt in however a halting manner to reach out to them, if not physically, then may we reach out in our thoughts – sometimes referred to as our prayers.

May the peace that surpasses all understanding find in our hearts a place to rest? May we realize that this peaceful happiness is a guest, temporary, but still to be honored.

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

Amen.

SERMON

Behold, we count them happy which endure.

(James 5:11a (KJV)

Suddenly people were stripped before one another and behold! as we looked on, we all made a great discovery: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than that shining nightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us. We joined hands and danced barefoot amongst the rubble. We had been cleansed, liberated! We would never don the old armors again.

(Ken Kesey, Garage Sale)

You must know beyond any doubt that if a teacher tells you that he or she has something to give you, it is time to run for your life. You’re dealing with a charlatan. The truth is that you lack nothing. Everything you seek you were born with and you’ll go to your grave with. En route, you may realize it or you may not, but the fact remains – it’s with you.

(John Daido Loori, Abbot, Zen Mountain Monastery, Mt. Tremper, New York)

Introduction:

There was a man who loved animals. He traveled to Alaska every summer and hung out with the grizzly bears in remote areas. He took miles of videos of those bears and when he wasn’t with the bears he was traveling to schools and sharing his videos and his knowledge of grizzlies with children of all ages. Perhaps you saw the Werner Herzog documentary concerning Timothy Treadwell entitled, Grizzly Man.

As we humans have a tendency to do this man pushed the envelope with the grizzlies and toward the end of one summer a rogue grizzly ate him and his girlfriend. Still we must imagine Timothy Treadwell happy. He kept trying to erase the distance between himself and the bears and the final margin was eradicated by the bears themselves.

But how can a man who is eaten by a grizzly bear be considered happy?

Not too long ago I preached a sermon that centered on Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a rather large rock to the top of the hill, and of it own weight it rolled back down again, and then Sisyphus would descend the hill in contemplation and begin his efforts all over again. And as Albert Camus writes – we must imagine Sisyphus happy.

If these two statements are true, if Timothy Treadwell and Sisyphus are both to be considered happy, what is there about happiness that allows this to be said, or better yet, if these two statements are true – Sisyphus is happy – Timothy Treadwell is happy, then perhaps we need to think twice about whether happiness is something we’d like to let in the front door?

In all the Dracula movies there is a particular way a vampire is allowed to enter your home. You must in fact invite the vampire inside.

Have you been having some problems in your life? Are things cropping up that seem to be difficulties you didn’t ask for? Are there annoyances that simply seem to be a part of every day?

Then, consider this – perhaps you have inadvertently invited happiness into your life?

I loved Cub Scouts. In Cub Scouts you had a den mother, and the process of getting badges was arranged around the family, the mother, the home. Cub Scouts was an extension of family life. Then, came the Boy Scouts. The meetings were arranged around the men, not the families. I remember my first Boy Scout meeting. There must have been 150 of us there my first night. We were to be initiated into the Boy Scouts. Up on the stage in front of everyone fifteen of us bowing and chanting three words, foreign words – of course – “Owa,” “Tagu,” and “Siam.” Owa – Tagu – Siam! Owa – Tagu – Siam!

The other Scouts laughed like hyenas, pointing at the stage, holding their bellies, they really letting it out.

We were to chant until we understood. One by one we got up laughing and joined the older Scouts.

What we were saying was, “Oh what a goose I am! Oh what a goose I am! Oh what a goose I am!”

And one other thing I couldn’t understand – why was it bad or funny to be a goose?

Speaking of birds, when it comes time for their fledglings to fly Mother birds bring their customary worm to the nest, but sit too far from the nest for the fledglings to reach the worm. She sits there dangling the worm as if she didn’t have a heart. They screech and cry, they chirp and wail, but to no avail, the mother comes no closer, she sits there out of reach dangling that worm. Then a strange thing happens. The tiny little birds that have been totally dependent reach a fever pitch of excitement and leap to their deaths. Voila! Flight happens. And they didn’t even know they had wings! And they didn’t even know they had wings!

Does this mean that grace is a lie? That the universe never gives you anything? No, I don’t think it means that. I think it means that grace is what’s dangling in front of you – grace is what you’ve been hoping for, wishing for, grace is the possibility that you may, in fact, deserve happiness.

But the grace of happiness is like that damned worm, dangling there on television every night, the sex is there, the food is there, the cars and girls and guys are there, the clothes are there, the money is there, it’s all there dangling!

The problem may be that happiness is not what we expect it to be – we’re thinking Owa – Tagu – Siam! when in reality it’s Oh what a goose I am!

Zen Master Soen was meeting a group of students at Kennedy International Airport. All the students were there except one! The last student showed up late, harried, sweating and not at all at peace. Soen Roshi said to him, “Oh it’s too bad you’re late you missed the Tea Ceremony.” “Tea Ceremony,” replied the student, “here at Kennedy Airport?”

“Well,” continued Soen Roshi, “perhaps you’re not too late.” Taking the student by the arm Soen Roshi pulled him into a nearby doorway. People were rushing by dragging their heavy suitcases; couples were embracing fond goodbyes, or fond helloes. Soen Roshi took a small porcelain container from the flowing sleeve of his robe, and opened it. Inside there was powdered green tea. Producing a small bamboo spoon, Soen scooped some powdered tea up and placed it into the student’s mouth. “Now,” said the Zen Master, as he closed the student’s gaping jaw, “make water!”

In the Regular Army and undergoing Basic Training we were taken to the firing range at sunset. They passed out clips of ammunition. The senior drill sergeant locked and loaded and for the first time we saw in person tracer bullets – beautiful arcs of light flying into the Carolina night.

What we learned there that night was how to shoot someone when it’s dark. Well, you know the enemy doesn’t always attack in the daytime.

The retina contains two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. The rods are more numerous and sensitive than the cones. However, they cannot see color. The cones provide the eye’s color and are concentrated in the center – the spot known as the macula. To see something at night one must look to the side of what one wishes to see.

A more common way to experience this is when you’ve let your black dog out at night and she’s running around the yard the only time you see her is when she runs out of the center field of your vision, and the minute you turn your head she disappears.

Happiness is the night vision of our souls. Happiness isn’t direct. It’s the Medusa of feelings; jealous, protective and perhaps not immediately discernable; not a product – nearly always a process.

Happiness the by-product of behaviors. That’s why Timothy Treadwell and Sisyphus must be imagined as happy. That’s why George and Martha, the characters of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf – the characters in our Sunday short must be imagined as happy.

The Great Way is gateless, yet –

There are a thousand roads to it.

The shakuhachi playing Zen Master, Doso, came to visit Zen Mountain Monastery. The shakuhachi is the traditional Japanese bamboo flute. Loori Roshi writes;

“When Watazumi Doso came to visit Zen Mountain Monastery, I gave him a tour of the grounds. We came upon a plumber who was working on our new bathhouse. Cast-iron piping lay outside the building. Doso playfully picked up a three-foot-long piece and began to play it as though it was a shakuhachi flute. Although the pipe had not holes in it, he was able to create a surprisingly wide range of sounds and haunting melodies.

At another time Doso gave a concert at the Zen Center of Los Angeles and soon after the performance started, a LAPD helicopter flew into the area and hovered overhead. TUM! TUM! TUM! TUM! Doso’s flute immediately picked up the rhythm and developed a counterpoint. An infant cried. Doso’s flute responded. A car drove by at high speed. The flute whizzed with it. Doso’s concert included the totality of all the sounds that were happening around us. He blended, merged, answered everything he heard, incorporating it into his experience and expression, rather than being distracted by it.”

Conclusion:

We are on the launch pad. Our vehicle of happiness fueled and ready to go. The count down began years ago. Will we die on the launch pad, gussied up in our earth suits, not sure we can fly? Or will we allow ourselves to enter the way, to travel the path!

Take time to show who you are. Don’t worry that you won’t be liked, or that people will run away when you unmask. That fear is nothing more than our own heart’s racing with the possibility of our own freedom. Do the world and yourself a favor and show us who you really are! That feeling you have when you’re real, when you show and tell others what makes you tick, when you own it and tell your story – that feeling – it’s happiness.

Owa! Tagu! Siam!

Amen.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

November 5, 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 remember the words of Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.” Too often we make grandiose plans about how our lives would/could or will be. We map strategies, we enlist the help of others, we ignore warning signs and push ahead with our plans.

There’s an old saying, updated a bit which runs when human beings makes plans, God, the ground of our Being, the mystery beyond all mysteries laughs out loud. No one likes the idea of their plans not working out, but if laughter is added to disappointment it is possible to engender scorn. Fritz Pearl, the famous Gestalt therapist had a book entitled, Don’t Push the River.”

The problem is we sometimes forget there is a river whose streams make glad the city of humankind. We forget that we are not separate from the Cosmos that surrounds us that as surely as flowers follow the sun, we rise each morning following that same life-giving light.

We seek more consciousness, more awareness. If a man in a rowboat sees another empty row boat drifting toward him he takes an oar and gently pushes the empty rowboat aside. But if the rowboat drifting toward him is occupied, voices are raised, shouts of warning arise and before we know it two men are battling each other in the middle of the stream.

Let us be empty rowboats as we go through our hectic days. Let us see others as empty rowboats, also. Let us feel the currents of life and flow with them – remembering that rich or poor, black or white, Republican or Democrat our ultimate destination is universally the same.

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

Amen.

SERMON: Fortunate Blessings

Introduction:

A Chinese farmer came out one morning to find a fine stallion grazing in his pasture. His neighbors came by and congratulated him on his good luck. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

Shortly thereafter the horse ran off. The neighbors gave their sympathy for losing such a fine horse. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

The following week, the stallion returned and brought with him four wild and beautiful horses. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on his extraordinary good luck. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

The farmer’s only son was good with horses. He had three of them trained when he was bucked off the fourth. He landed on his leg and it broke at both the hip and the knee. He would walk with a terrible limp the rest of his life. The neighbors brought food and sympathy. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

The War Lords of the region were fighting the War Lords of another region. They traveled throughout the region conscripting the young men. All the young men from the farmer’s village were taken except the farmer’s son who was unfit for military service. The neighbors came over to sympathize. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

In the War all the young men of the farmer’s village were killed. No one came to the farmer’s house to commiserate or congratulate.

I recently spent two days and three nights in the Berkshires. The foliage was at its peak. This section of the Berkshires is known as the lung of Connecticut. The majority of the wooded hills and meadows belong to the people of Connecticut and are held in trust. No one can cut the timber, plow up the undergrowth or otherwise disturb these nearly pristine forests.

I was there to visit with William Spear. I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of Bill Spear, but he’s a mover and a shaker in the world of disaster relief – especially disaster relief for children. Back when I was studying at the Yale School of Drama in 1990, Bill called me from Chelyabinsk, Russia. There was a great need for blood since the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor and Bill had made arrangements with the Yale/New Haven Hospital for blood. He called me to transport the blood from the Yale/New Haven Hospital to the New Haven airport where it would be flown to Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains of Siberia, considered, at the time, to be the most polluted and ravaged city on the planet.

Bill went there to work with thousands of children dying from leukemia. He went without a visa (it was then a closed city) and was the first American to enter the city. There he spoke with hundreds of physicians and nurses throughout the region and established an extraordinary program, still in existence today, which feeds and supports 300 people a day, all through volunteer work. He was received by the Mayor of Chelyabinsk and given a key to the city as well as being acknowledged as an honorary staff member of the hospital where the program takes place. To this day Bill continues to work with the medical staff that attends to thousands of children dying from leukemia and the effects of radiation poisoning.

I had gone to the Berkshires to see Bill to convince him that he should come to First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin and be our Distinguished Speaker for the spring of 2008. I am here to report that he has agreed to come – as he put it in an email to me – “I’m happy to have you back in my life and as for spring of 2008, sure — I’m in. I’ll just change that appointment I had to get my teeth cleaned, and we’re all set. Bill?

The man is not only a great humanitarian but also has a droll sense of humor.

While I was there I went ahead and had Bill Spear, the health expert, give me a check up.

I had been concerned when I went to see Bill that there were life-threatening issues and there weren’t. That’s good. Bill was surprised to hear from me after 15 years and he said, people didn’t usually drop back into his life unless they were in a crisis situation in their lives. So – if my crisis wasn’t physical, then it must be spiritual, right?

Bill Spear is the head of the Fortunate Blessings Foundation.

The term “fortunate blessings? is associated with the symbol for “wind? in the Asian art of feng shui, based on the I Ching, the ancient oracle. The I Ching identifies the primal qualities present in the universe and all beings; the quality of “wind? signifies the blossoming of energy, prosperity, expansiveness and potential transformation. In the name of Bill’s organization, “fortunate blessings? symbolizes an openness to the experience of gratitude for whatever life brings. (Repeat this line)

Bill was with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross when she was dying. Opra did a program on the famous psychologist and innovator in the field of death and dying. The television crew traveled to Elizabeth’s house and many people were on the program to thank her for all the work she had done in the area of our mortality.

Bill said that when the program was over and the lights had been taken down, and the television personalities had departed and it was just he sitting there by her deathbed she looked around the room and said, “I failed.”

Bill looked at her and asked what she could possibly mean by that statement?

She replied that there were two courses in death and dying – one was the course on how to help people through their impending deaths, that course she had designed and completed with an A+. The other course was on being able to receive the love and affection of those who wished to help you when you were dying. In that course, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had failed miserably.

This isn’t surprising. People who give are giving because that’s what they know how to do, but this doesn’t mean that they are also able to receive.

I’m a person that has trouble receiving. Jesus said, it is more blessed to give than to receive. Jesus knew.

What I want is to tell you a story. It’s one of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen’s stories and it’s called “The Final Lesson.”

“When I first met Thomas, he was over seventy, a family-practice physician who had been in solo practice for almost fifty years. Whole families, from grandparents to grandchildren, looked to him for help in their trouble, counted on his counsel, and called him their friend. He looked the part too, gray-headed, kindly, his body as spare and gnarled as an ancient oak tree.

At the time that we met, he proposed that we open a series of conversations about his life. He had done some reflection in recent years but felt that sharing the process at this point might be helpful in readying himself for death.

Thomas felt death to be an unqualified ending to life. Raised a Catholic, he had left the church early and embraced science as a way to bring order to the chaos of life. It had not failed him.

It surprised me that a man this altruistic, compassionate and reverent toward the life in others, this man awed by the beauty of anatomy and physiology, held no religious or spiritual beliefs. Curious, I asked him about the circumstances under which he had decided to leave the church. Open and frank about other details of his long life, he was reticent in the extreme about this. He had left at sixteen over a specific happening. I never found out what it was.

Very early on in our discussions, I asked him how he saw his relationship to his patients. Looking at a small figurine of a shepherd with his flock that a patient of mine had given me, he smiled and said, “Like that.” The shepherd was a steward of the life in the flock, he protected them from danger, helped them to find nurture and fulfill themselves. He delivered their young. He found strays and brought them back to the others.

Thomas told me many stories of his shepherding and the life of his flock. We examined these stories together, sharing our thoughts and perspectives. In the telling and the reflection, he seemed to be unfolding a much deeper sense of what his life had meant to others and what he had stood for. In these discussions, he often used the odd Victorian word: they “sheltered” with him. He was their safety, their support, their friend. He was there for them, constant, vigilant, and trustworthy. The person of a shepherd emerged as a symbol for wholeness.

Who did he shelter with, who was the shepherd’s shepherd? “No one,” he said, the words holding more pain than he had expressed before. It became clear that he did not believe that there was a place of sheltering for himself. Shepherd though he was professionally, personally he had become separated from the flock, a nonparticipant, a lost person. He seemed unwilling to go much further with this.

Puzzled, I asked him to make up a story about a lost lamb, and haltingly he described a lamb that had been lost for so long that he could not even remember there was a flock. He had learned to survive by himself, to eat what was available, to hide from predators. “Does this lamb know that his shepherd is looking for him?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the lamb had done something very bad and the shepherd had forgotten him.”

“As a shepherd yourself, would you look for a lost lamb who had done something bad?” He seemed puzzled. I reminded him of the young patient from the projects he had told me about, the one he had taken on as a guardian from the juvenile courts, the girl who eventually went on to college. I asked him why he had gone after her and brought her home. “Why,” he said, “she was one of mine.” On Christmas Eve I received a call from his hospice nurse. Thomas had been in a coma all day. Would I come? As soon as I saw Thomas, I realized that he was dying. His breathing, always labored, had become shallow and intermittent. The nurse with him was young and seemed a little uncertain and so I invited her to stay as I talked to him. He did not respond in any way. We changed his sheets and made him more comfortable. Then we sat down together to wait. Gradually the space between his breaths lengthened and after a while his breathing stopped.

There seemed nothing more to do. I stood for a time at the foot of Thomas? bed, thinking about him and wishing him well. Then I left.

It was dark and cold Christmas Eve night. Holding my keys in my pocket, I huddled into my coat and walked a little faster. I had almost reached my car when church bells throughout the city began ringing. For a moment I stopped, confused. Could the bells be ringing for Thomas? And then I remembered. It was midnight. The Shepherd had come.”

On the website for Fortunate Blessings.org there is a quote from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. It reads, “Should we shield the canyons from the windstorms, we would never see the beauty of their carvings.”

Life has a way of carving us into shapes that are appropriate for who we are and the pressures that were put under.

As some of you know I traveled to Washington, DC recently to have a meeting with the Regional Subcommittee of Candidacy. I wasn’t worried about this meeting. Don’t forget I’ve been before Grace Presbytery when I was a Presbyterian and Grace Presbytery’s name is ironic to say the least. Those people were just about anything but full of grace. Yet, I had passed that committee and began the process of becoming a Minister of Word and Scrament. Then, when I had switched to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) I had had three meetings with folks from the Brazos Region. True, the head of the region committed suicide a month after I had my meeting with him, but since I don’t suffer from magical thinking I was sure that our meeting had had nothing to do with his demise. My two other meetings with committees from the Brazos Region had produced no more suicides and as a matter of fact, I had rather enjoyed those committees. They had always given me good feedback as to what my strengths seemed to be, and areas of weakness that I might work on. When I decided to come over to the UUA I had only one meeting with the Brazos Region left – my ordination interview.

So on my way to Washington DC I wasn’t as worried about the subcommittee on candidacy as I was about flying on Friday the 13th. Yeah, I’m a little superstitious.

I got to All Souls Church in Washington DC early. I knew I didn’t want to rush into a meeting out of breath and harried. I sat in the Thomas Jefferson bench in the main sanctuary at All Souls and wrote my thoughts about what questions are – if you were here last week you heard those thoughts. I had so much time I practiced my Tai Chi for 20 minutes. Believe me when I tell you that when I entered that meeting room my feet were grounded and I was not afraid. They asked me if I’d like to say some words before they lit the chalice. I did. I quoted something from The Death of Empedocles by Holderlin.

And openly I pledged my heart to the grave and suffering land, and often in the consecrated night I promised to love her faithfully, until death unafraid. With her heavy burden of fatality and never to despise a single one of her enigmas, thus did I join myself to her with a mortal chord.

The committee started out by asking me two questions about someone who wasn’t in the meeting. I thought this strange, but decided to answer. The questioning continued and I thought all in all it was going rather well. At one point someone asked me something I didn’t know, so I simply said, “I don’t know.” I figured honesty was better than BSing my way through a non-answer.

When they called me back into the room I was shocked to find out that they were not going to offer me candidacy. They considered me inauthentic, poetical and seething with an undercurrent of anger. I looked around the room, not sure who in the room they might be talking about.

The odd thing about these declarations was the fact that only two people out of ten at the table were looking at me while they were being read. The man who was reading them to me, he was looking at me, and a young black woman two seats from my left was able to make contact with me from time to time. The others sat with their eyes cast into their laps. They honestly seemed ashamed.

When the meeting was over I walked around and shook each person’s hand. I thanked the two who had been able to look me in the eyes for being able to do that, and yes, I thanked them loud enough for the others to hear.

The upshot of all this is much to my surprise the Regional Subcommittee on Candidacy had handed me a fortunate blessing in disguise. “Could be good news, could be bad news.” And like Jacob in the Hebrew Bible lesson this morning, I have wrestled with men, I have wrestled with God, I have wrestled with Satan, also known as my shadow self, and in the process I have been mightily blessed.

They recommended a year’s worth of counseling and told me that I needed to get an authentic view of the UUA since, obviously my view had been tainted by – and these are their words – by being paid more than over half the members of the RSCC had ever been paid and by serving the third largest congregation in our region – a congregation larger than most of them had ever served.

My mother told me that when God closes a door he opens a window. My mom had a tendency to get those sayings confused. But I knew what she meant. The window that’s been opened for me will be gently stepped through rather than jumped out of.

It is a privilege to serve this congregation as your shepherd and it looks very much like I will return to more familiar pastures where the majority of the sheep look to the great Shepherd. And, you know what, that’s just fine by me.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

October 29, 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, today we bring with us thoughts of those who have come before us. In dealing with the dead the first thing that’s obvious is they sure are a lot easier to get along with than the living.

The living have a tendency to protest when you say something negative about them, while the dead seem just fine with whatever is said. Perhaps the dead are grateful for the release from taking things personally? Perhaps, it’s time to start living our lives with the same sort of abandon that’s enjoyed by those who have passed on?

There are many ways in which we honor the dead in this society but forgetting about their shadow sides isn’t one of them. We must remember that those who have gone before us are no nobler than we are, nor are they less human for simply being dead. We can learn some lessons from the dead.

One, we could start taking things a bit less personally ourselves, we could even imagine that we are already dead and see how that feels, if it changes the way we live, if it lessens our burdens, if it allows us a certain freedom that we wouldn’t have when we thought we were going to live forever.

Lastly, we hope that those who brought memorabilia and pictures of their dearly departed ones for the Day of the Dead Altar will be comforted by their act. Simply putting my mom and dad’s picture up there on that altar made a difference for me and moved me strangely.

I also put a picture of Hawthorne my best dog friend up there. I wear his dog tag around my neck even today. The sound of it makes me think of him bouncing up beside me, his toothy grin and the way he twisted his body when he had a strong wag on.

We need to remember those sentient beings that have gone before, that have offered us comfort, that have offered us pain, that were there for us to the best of their abilities, but then we must turn back out to life, to living, to love because that’s what’s demanded of us by life itself.

We must return the compliment of life by living fully in the moment, giving regardless of what’s returned, stepping out when the moment presents itself, never fearing, or at least not letting fear stop us, always ready to go that extra mile, and own all that comes our way.

We give thanks this morning that death is there for us, that we carry our own deaths with us, and we would hope that death will be the good companion, the friend that never lies, the friend that never leaves, the lover who will embrace us even and most especially when we appear unembraceable.

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

Amen.

Readings:

Luke 24:1-5 (NIV)

First Lesson

Phillip Booth

Lie back, daughter,

let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand.

Gently, and I will hold you.

Spread your arms wide,

lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls.

A dead-man’s float is face down.

You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater

ebbs to the sea.

Daughter, believe me, when you tire on the long thrash to your island,

lie up, and survive.

As you float now,

where I held you and let go,

remember when fear cramps your heart what I told you:

lie gently back and wide to the light-year stars,

lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Cru-ci fy – from the Latin crux, crucis for cross + figere, to fix

SERMON: Cocooned

This will be a short sermon. Aren’t those comforting words? Perhaps in today’s society those six words may be the most comforting words you can hear in church. This will be a short sermon. Today we are to talk about different kinds of deaths, and maybe even a little resurrection. Perhaps you think speaking of a little resurrection is like speaking of being a little bit pregnant. Perhaps you’re right. What we want to do is inquire about death and resurrection, and to do that, we first have to ask questions.

What are questions? A question is perhaps one of the only ways to open ourselves up. To ask questions is to reach out – to seek – to explore our environment.

I’m thinking now of Dr. Loehr’s invocation in which he says, “Questions more profound than answers!” Why is it, questions can be more profound than answers? It has something to do with the fact that our questioning is the edge of our life – the fingers of our growth, if you will – reaching out into the world and into ourselves. What would existence be like without questions?

Once a man entered a cave in Roquefort, France and discovered a rotten cheese that someone had obviously forgotten. There were green veins of spoilage running throughout the cheese. Anyone in his right mind – and who was not French – would have covered that cave entrance with a stone and left it there. But this man by asking a simple question, “I wonder what those green, moldy lines taste like?” – this man resurrected what was thought to be spoiled. Without this man Roquefort Cheese would never have been discovered.

Who and what are we? These questions have baffled philosophers and theologians from the start. To ask these questions assumes that we were at one time, or can be in the future, or are right now something – some thing – an object among other objects.

As a practicing Buddhist I do not believe in a permanent self. In other words, there is no – thing in me that can purport to be anything substantial. I am, in essence, without substance and some of you have known that for some time.

The minute we have an answer for who we are, we have, in all probability, died. The only answer to whom or what we are is a eulogy. In the moment of death the sentence, which is each of us, can finally have a period.

Short of a eulogy we are incomplete, in process, always flowing. Hence the importance of the moment, the only place that we existentially belong. This flowing into each moment is for me a form of enlightenment, a form of resurrection. When I am reborn into each moment my eyes see what there is to see, my ears hear what there is to be heard.

On the 2nd of November, El Dia de los Muertos is celebrated in Mexico and Latin America. On this auspicious day we will dedicate the oak memorial sculpture in the foyer. The memorial tokens to be placed on the oak tree will be butterflies.

How’s your insectology – I know that’s not a word – but who here remember the stages that lead to the butterfly? The butterfly larva is called a caterpillar and it becomes a pupa and resides within the cocoon where it undergoes metamorphosis and emerges a butterfly. The reason Sterling Heraty chose this image is its use in the Mayan culture as a symbol for resurrection.

Scientifically, metamorphosis is considered complete when there is no suggestion of the adult in the larva stage. In other words, no caterpillar would consider itself a future butterfly.

We human beings, we Homo sapiens, undergo a metamorphosis similar to the butterfly and the frog. For in the womb we are swimmers, not walkers on land, our lungs are dormant for we receive all our nourishment and our oxygen through the umbilical cord compliments of our host animal generally referred to as mama. One of the clues of complete metamorphosis is the habitat change between the larval and adult stages of life. Tadpoles live in water, frogs live on the land, caterpillars crawl the earth, butterflies flutter above it dining on the nectar of flowers.

In the passage from Luke the women go to the tomb with spices and ointment to complete the burial preparation of Jesus’ body. They discover the stone has been rolled back and instead of Jesus inside there are two men dressed in shiny white garments. What these men say is in the form of a question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

A wise man once said, “To become free we must see all of our past as a mere preface to this present moment.” (Repeat this line)

All our degrees, our PhD’s, our honors, our medals, our six figure salaries, our pedigrees all the way back to the Mayflower, our DNA, our IRA’s, our adventures and misadventures, all are MERE preface to this present moment.

There are cocoons that we must break through in order to become adults. The cocoon of the family defines you in the order in which you arrived and the manner in which you reacted to and acted in the world. This cocoon of childhood is a tough nut to crack, but leaving mama, letting daddy go, dropping the hands of brothers and sisters and venturing forth into the world is the way out from the familial cocoon. It isn’t fun, it can cause problems within families of origin, and many times when we venture back into those families of origin we literally have to fight not being placed back into our childhood cocoon. How many of us have made trips home as adults and lying in that bed that we grew up in we sense something stagnant and death-like about the tombs, I mean, rooms of our youth? Ask yourself this; Does a butterfly ever hang out with caterpillars?

Where do we belong? We create other homes, don’t we? The place where our kids are cocooned, the place that eventually they must break from if they are to be free – we create these homes. When they leave will we, then, be dusting their cocoons hoping for that weekend in which we will be pretending that the family is back together again?

Our lives are not the glittering trail left behind us any more than the glistening trail of the snail is the snail itself. Our lives are not what has past, but rather what lies ahead – complete and total possibility. This is true when we’re ten years old. This is true when we’re ninety.

Another cocoon awaits us, and that is the cocoon of the community of agreement. This cocoon is cultural, societal, national. For those who break free here there awaits a reality of our own choosing, a reality stemming from within, a reality which evolves – a reality we choose, by freely intending it.

Freedom finally is not something we can sell to other countries, or import to other cultures. Freedom is like our dead, it haunts us, provokes us, causes us to dream dreams – dreams that reach far into the future, dreams that have us gazing with great awareness until our last breath.

So on this Dia de los muertos Sunday – this day that we have erected an altar to the dead and placed our pictures and memorabilia there I would ask that we remember the words of the glowing strangers in Jesus’ tomb, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Remember we’re not being rebuked for looking – we’re only asked to consider why we look there.

In complete metamorphosis the word imago refers to an insect in its final adult, sexually mature and usually winged state. The imago of the caterpillar is the butterfly; the imago of the tadpole is the frog. The imago of human beings is the imago dei – the image of God. We are the image of God; we have projected this image into the heavens. The source of that projection is something within us. This knowledge leads us to none other than our winged state, free; free from the prejudice of others, free from our own limitations, free to dream, free to think, free to be whatever we imagine we might be – free, great God Almighty, free at last.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

October 6, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Is there any among you, who, if your child asked for bread would give a stone, or if your child ask for a fish would give a snake instead of a fish?

(Luke 11:11 NRSV)

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, today we’re sitting here celebrating a man’s music and a man’s life. It’s important to remember that this man was full of human foibles and wasn’t exactly in the business of hiding them. We may not agree with his theological assumptions, or like his music, or even think that such a service is appropriate. Doesn’t matter.

This morning we celebrate a man who was willing to stand up for those who have lost their ability to stand for themselves. Our jail populations keep growing each year – more and more of those who should be receiving attention for their mental health problems are ending up in our prisons, our jails, the places we put folks that we’re just not quite sure what to do with them.

In a world where notoriety leads those in the public eye to aggrandize themselves and walk on their fans we give thanks this morning that there are men and women whose fame raises up others besides themselves. No, fame does not legitimize a perspective, but whenever anyone within the public’s attention draws that attention from themselves and to those less fortunate, let us all say a silent, Amen!

And just because it is Johnny Cash Sunday I want to say something for Johnny. Johnny Cash believed that Jesus Christ was his Savior, and I don’t know about you, but that’s just fine with me.

As a matter of fact, it’s fine with me that a whole bunch of folks believe that same thing. As far as I’m concerned there’s simply nothing wrong with that notion. If it serves you, then by all means be served by it.

If it’s minorities and those out of public favor that need to be held up, then I’m holding up all UU’s today. We’re a minority. As Dr. Loehr reminded us not four months ago, more people believe that they have been abducted by aliens then are actually members of the UUA. If we’re not in a minority, I don’t know who is.

And I’m also reminded of Don Smith and what he has to say about diversity. The word diversity means what it says, various in form or quality. I challenge anyone in this congregation to find me another congregation – that is not a UU congregation – that is more diverse, more varied in form and quality than we are.

We’re a bunch of people who are so unlike each other that to know one of us is certainly not to know us all.

And I say, congratulations to us! I’m glad I’m not like you, and you should be thrilled you’re not like me. The thing that we do have in common is our uncommon ability to rest easy with this diversity.

Easy Does It as the bumper sticker used to say. So maybe you don’t like Johnny Cash, maybe he’s Mr. Monotone to you, well, rest easy, the Mozart and the Chopin will return, in the mean time, there’s somebody on your aisle that tapping a foot and sporting a grin.

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

Amen.

SERMON

Introduction: This is an absent Father’s Sermon. This is a sermon about parenting – both present and absent. How present can anyone be in today’s society? And then, there’s the disturbing notion that we are the only Industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t openly support parenting.

There was a time in our culture, and the older members of this congregation can remember it, and some of the younger ones have heard stories about it, when parenting wasn’t the job of simply the mother and the father of the child. There was a time in this culture when parenting was a town’s job, a community’s job and an extended families? job.

But times, sadly, have changed. We are one of the most mobile societies on record. We have computers that we carry with us, phones that we carry with us, electronic appointment books, and we are on the go constantly. The Interstate Road System passed small towns by, Agricultural Mega Farms bought up small farms, churches fell to leisure time and family values have become a weapon to be wielded by politicians.

We pretend that we are in control and that all this technology has opened up new horizons for us, while in truth we are powerless. We scream that we are the most powerful nation on this earth, but this is a scam, a sham – we are dependent, a part of a web that makes the world-wide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

So this morning I want to tell you a story, a parable if you will. It’s important to remember that “While parables, like fables, allegories and myths, are stories with hidden significance, they are clearly distinguished from these other kinds of stories because of their peculiar characteristics.” (C.H. Dodd suggests) “At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” So here’s my parable. I call it the “Parable of the Mismatched Deck.”

Once upon a time there was a man who liked to take evening walks in New York City. He was a big man so he wasn’t afraid of walking while it was getting dark and late. Sometimes he’d walk for hours. He walked every day, but some days when he was troubled or thoughtful, his walk would take him into the night. His wife understood.

Before he started walking he was a worrier and at times not easy to get along with. So – she never said anything about his habit of walking, and she didn’t ask to go along. If he wanted her along surely he would have asked her. About twice a year – when the colors of fall were coming in and after the first snow fall they would take a walk around the neighborhood together.

The first playing card he found was the three of hearts. He saw it lying there on the sidewalk and he walked passed it, but then he stopped, turned around and picked it up. Yep, it was the three of hearts that’s what it was. He put it in his left shirt pocket and thought no more about it.

When his wife was doing the laundry she found it in his shirt pocket and placed on his dresser, right where he put his change and other stuff from his pants.

The next morning he saw it again. There it was the three of hearts. He smiled remembering the walk he’d found it on. He picked it up and kissed it. He didn’t know why he did that. Then he placed it back in his left shirt pocket – right over his heart.

The years went by. The man walked hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. Once he started looking for playing cards, they seemed to be everywhere. He’d memorized the ones he had and he remembered the walk he found each one on. Sometimes, he’d see another three of hearts, but he’d smile and think about how it had started his collection of the 52-card deck.

When the man died his wife came home from the funeral and took the elevator to the 8th floor. She walked down the hall to their apartment, walked in, closed and locked the door behind her. She took off her coat and hat and turned the kettle on for tea. Then, she went into their bedroom and opened the top right drawer of his dresser.

There it was the mismatched deck of 52 that he’d found over the years. Once he’d found all 52, he shuffled the deck a couple of times and placed it in the drawer, and on the evenings after that, when he did walk, odd, even though he looked, he never saw another playing card – not a one.

She took the deck from the drawer, sat down on the bed, and thumbed through them. Once before he died when he was sick, he took the deck and went through each card for her, where he’d found it, what the weather was like, and where he’d walked that day.

She opened the window that overlooked the street below. She threw the cards out with a fanning motion. Some of them caught the updraft from the street below and blew higher than the building next door; some of them went down to the street fast like they had been waiting to escape. The rest were scattered to the wind.

She was smiling when she heard the kettle whistling. She shut the window, shuddered with the cold, put on her sweater and went into the kitchen to call a friend over to have some tea.

I got a letter from my son, Ian, recently. He was worried about his neighborhood. It’s pretty violent. On the day he wrote me someone was scrubbing blood off the walkway in front of where he lives.

There are loads of police-types in the neighborhood, but it seems they are beating up on the people in the neighborhood just about as much as the so-called criminal element.

He starts his letter with, “What’s up, Preacher?!” He then says he hopes everything is fine with me and I know that this is a lead in to things aren’t great with him. And they aren’t. There’s also an element in his neighborhood that’s simply crazy – they maim themselves and wear their scars like metals. My son, Ian, only gets to see his daughter, Emily, once every two months. He and his common-law wife don’t live in the same city. It’s tough on him. She was three years old when this separation happened. The same age he was when I left him with his mother and the friend who wouldn’t go away.

You see, he’s always held it against me that when he was three years old I walked out on his mom and him. He doesn’t know the stories and they weren’t his stories anyway. His story he’s got down. His father walked out of the house when he was three and he never came back. Well, he never came back to stay. His mother married a honest to God Marxist political science professor who quit his job to drive a cab, who then quit the cab business to run a bait shop. I think he was demonstrating Capitalism in reverse. It worked for me.

The Political Science Professor wasn’t even the reason I left. His mother had fallen in love with one of my friends and she wouldn’t tell this friend to go away. It was as simple as that. My whole writing career started out by me writing a story in which I was going to kill this SOB and be done with it. That’s when I discovered the power of story and writing, how you only imagine you’re in charge and when it came time for my character to kill his character it got twisted around and my character ended up dying.

We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

In the story I tried to change it back the way I wanted it to be. Me killing him, but it didn’t read right that way. The story had its own logic and reason. The story only made sense when my character died. That’s when I realized that if a writer can’t even control his imaginary characters how in God’s name are we as fathers, mothers, sons and daughters supposed to control any of this stuff we call life.

She opened the window that overlooked the street below. She threw the cards out with a fanning motion. Some of them caught the updraft from the street below and blew higher than the building next door; some of them went down to the street fast like they had been waiting to escape. The rest were scattered to the wind.

My son admits to me that he’s told his wife, Jennifer, not to let Emily be with me. He’s told her that because he believes that I have called him a bad father for moving away like he did. In all honesty I never said anything like that. I think it must have gotten back to him that I found it ironic that he thinks I’m a bad father for leaving when he was three and here his daughter, Emily, is three and he moves away from her. Irony appeals to me because it is literally words, deeds and acts meaning the opposite of what they obviously are. In other words when I say I love George Bush, you know that’s irony.

It’s irony that on October 23rd 1883, when Sarah Bernhardt was on her way to America for the first time that she and an older woman were knocked down by a wave that rocked the French ship L’Amerique and it was only through the strength of being an actress trained in the theatrical arts, juggling, dance, fencing, and stage fighting that the divine Miss Sarah was able to jump for that secured deck chair and grab hold for dear life, and it was only because she was a strong and agile actor that Miss Bernhardt was able to reach out then and save the older woman. And was the older woman dressed in her widow’s weeds – as formal mourning wear was called in the 19th Century – was she in the least bit grateful that her life had been saved? No, she wasn’t because she did appreciate irony. For it was ironical that an actor had taken her husband away from her and now it was an actor who was keeping her from going and joining him in his heavenly rest.

After that morning onboard the L’Amerique, Sarah Bernhardt suffered the loss of one of her more famous fans, Mary Todd Lincoln.

She opened the window that overlooked the street below. She threw the cards out with a fanning motion. Some of them caught the updraft from the street below and blew higher than the building next door; some of them went down to the street fast like they had been waiting to escape. The rest were scattered to the wind.

My son goes on in the letter to tell me how bad the food is that he’s served. He’s got a room and board type arrangement. He’s lost down to 190 pounds. He probably looks better – he was a little heavy the last weekend I spent with him.

It was the first time I ever saw my granddaughter. He had warned me that she wouldn’t go to strangers and that if I tried to pick her up she would scream bloody murder.

Her mother drove into the driveway and stopped the car. Emily Rose got out and took off running toward her father, Ian. She ran and jumped into her daddy’s arms and he hugged her real good and she kissed his neck.

The first card he found was the three of hearts. He saw it lying there on the sidewalk and he walked passed it, but then he stopped, turned around and picked it up. Yep, it was the three of hearts that’s what it was. He put it in his left shirt pocket and thought no more about it.

Ian, my son, then told his daughter that the guy standing at the end of the driveway was his daddy. Emily put her little hand up to shield the Florida sun from her eyes. We looked into each other’s eyes. She said something to her dad and he put her down.

I didn’t know what to do, so I bent down and held out my arms.

She never hesitated. She ran from her dad to her granddad and she jumped in an arc into my arms and her little arm went around my neck and she gave me a neck squeeze. I can still feel that little arm around my neck.

We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

My son, Ian, tells me he could sure use a couple of extra bucks a month – with that money he could buy some better food at the cantina – at least better than they serve at the boarding place. I make a mental note to send him a Western Union Money Gram once a month. He may be 36 – but he’s still my boy, right?

I remember when Serhan B. Serhan’s father was interview by one of the networks shortly after Bobby Kennedy had been killed in that hotel kitchen in Los Angeles. They asked him why his son would do such a thing. The old Arab just looked at the camera and said, “How should I know?”

A father and a son; a father and a daughter. They’re not the same people. One affects the other. The other affects the one. But the one doesn’t cause the other to do anything that the one doesn’t choose to do. Isn’t that right?

There it was the three of hearts. He smiled remembering the walk he’d found it on. He picked it up and kissed it. He didn’t know why he did that. Then he placed it back in his left shirt pocket – right over his heart.

The rest of the letter from my son, Ian, concerns his appeal. He’s appealing to a court system that put him somewhere that he doesn’t want to be. He’s saying what we nearly all say from time to time, “This isn’t fair, I don’t deserve this, Many have done more and are not punished.” He sees his crime as nothing, it’s nothing, I’m in here for nothing. Then he howls as we all have howled from time to time, “Do all you people really feel I deserve this – that I did something to deserve this!”?

Is there any among you, who, if your child asked for bread would give a stone, or if your child ask for a fish would give a snake instead of a fish?

We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

Conclusion: The last words in his letter are words of love. He is in the penitentiary, my son is locked up like an animal and from this place of incarceration he sends me love. He puts it just like this; “I will always love you for you are my father! But I don’t understand you! Ditto probably! Take care of yourself! Your Son, Ian. Then he adds an “X? and an “O? an “X? and an “O.”

Getting back to the Parable of the Mismatched Deck, how many of you didn’t like the wife when she threw the cards out the window? Maybe she resented all those walks her husband took without her? Maybe she thought he’d had girlfriends and simply collected the cards to remember them by.

So – when she did this, when she scattered his cards of the heart to the wind what did that mean? Was she simply destroying an accidental life’s work, or was she sending 52 other persons, the rest of the neighborhood, out on their quests for completion?

She was smiling when she heard the kettle whistling. She shut the window, shuddered with the cold, put on her sweater and went into the kitchen to call a friend over to have some tea.

The old days are gone. We can’t go back, and we may not be in control, but we are still dependent upon community. That’s what you’re doing here this morning. You are a portion of the lucky few that share community. This is your extended family and it validates your children and it connects them to something greater than the parental unit – something sacred and holy, yes, a web of life that’s vibrant, growing and trustworthy.

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Jack Harris-Bonham

October 1, 2006

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

September 24, 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 Sunday we are contemplating the world – both the world of this church and the world that surrounds this blue marble of our planet.

When we see the devastation of war and the complexities of a world that is supposedly going global in its economics we are struck by the fact that it seems no matter how many countries we get involved in commerce it is nearly always the poor and the disenfranchised that suffer.

China is moving into the foreground of those countries where jobs are being outsourced and their factories are surrounded by razor wire and have armed guards posted twenty-four hours a day.

The workers are told that the wire and guards are there to protect them, but there is a sense in which these wage-slaves are being held captive by the simple fact that their children – like all children everywhere – cry when they are hungry.

Help us to remember these crying children when we go to places that sell cheap because the manufacturing has been cheap. Cheap products are one thing, but life itself should never be sold short, and if cheap means suffering for men, women and children 10,000 miles away perhaps we should reconsidered the purchase.

It’s inescapable that during this Social Action Sunday that we remember the Serenity Prayer used by so many twelve-step programs.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

May the words of our mouths be written on our hearts and may our hearts lead us to clothe the poor, feed the hungry and give succor to those who are in need.

This morning, too, we remember how blessed we are. Before we complain this week about anything may we search our hearts and see that even though we may be in pain, there are roofs over our heads, food on our tables, and hot water in our baths.

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

Amen.

READINGS

The Parable of the Great Banquet,

Luke 14:16-24 (NIV)

from Through the Looking Glass,

Lewis Carroll

“Oh Kitty! How nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! Such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through.” And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. “So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room, – thought Alice: “warmer, in fact, because there’ll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it’ll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can’t get at me!”

SERMON

Introduction:

This morning we have readings from the New Testament and a children’s story by Lewis Carroll. Both are children’s stories in that the Bible comes from a time when Humankind looked upon the world as if it’s author stood afar in heaven and after having created everything looked down upon us. We may no longer believe that there is an old man with a white bread whom we might know as God beneficently looking down and gauging how the world is going any more than we believe that it is possible to walk through a mirror and be in the room that is reflected there in the mirror. Nevertheless, both are parables – both are short fictitious narratives from which morals or spiritual truths can be derived.

When my daughter, Isabelle was little she used to walk through the house with a good-sized mirror in her hand. I would see her stepping over the lentils above the doors as she made her way into the different rooms of the house. I had not realized up until the time I’m writing this sermon that my daughter was doing something that probably all children have done since the invention of the mirror. Her world was not literally through the looking glass but it was interpreted through the looking glass as she navigated our house as if it had been turned upside down. The floors were now the ceilings and the ceiling was now the floor.

It must be gratifying for a child to turn the adult world upside down. To take that which they do not completely understand, a world that they do not make the rules for, and do not control and flip it so that the new world, the one they have created, is known only to them and they are the only ones who know that one should step around the light fixture on the ceiling.

As Alice put it, “Oh what fun it’ll be , when they see me through the glass in here, and can’t get at me!”

Today we will be turning worlds inside out and upside down so that we might glimpse through a rearrangement of life the possibilities that may have escaped us – escaped us because we have grown too accustomed to the manner in which our world is arranged – so accustomed, in fact, that we now take this arrangement as the status quo, or the state in which everything has always been.

Today is Social Action Sunday, and that doesn’t mean we’re going to take to the streets with banners and bullhorns, it also doesn’t mean that today you put two cans of tuna in the Caritas baskets instead of your usual one.

It’s interesting, to say the least, that during times of great economic boon people are less likely to get involved in social action projects. In fact, it was during the great depression of the 1930’s that the per capita charitable giving was at its highest in these United States of America. Think on that. During times of great economic boon – charitable giving reaches all time lows.

There’s an analogy going around about churches. In this analogy it’s stated that churches either have windows through which the parishioners can see and engage with the world, or there’s the flip side – churches whose windows are more like mirrors where the parishioners mainly see themselves and the focus is on their needs. We have windows, don’t we? But they look out on a peaceful garden with a gurgling fountain – not every much like the real, is it?

It has also been said that social action is the true measure of a congregation. Based on its social action agenda what sort of grade do you think this congregation deserves?

In a recent newsletter that I received from my home church, 1st Church Dallas they had two boxes separated in the newsletter from all the other articles. In one of those boxes it proclaimed – “The Power of Commitment – 1st Church Dallas raised $138,952 in 2005 to aid the survivors of Katrina, Rita and the Asian tsunami.” In the other box further on into the newsletter it proclaimed – “The Power of Commitment – 1st Church Dallas inspired over 100 volunteers to adopt 21 families during the Katrina evacuation.” Yes, 1st Church Dallas is larger than we are. To be exact they have precisely 1,067 members.

But it isn’t the numbers that put them ahead of us. It’s the level of commitment. It’s been said that in any given congregation less than 10% (Raising Money for Social Action, Michael Durall, 1999) may be truly interested in social action. Again, it’s not the numbers that are as significant as the level of commitment within those numbered.

So what are the benefits of a church that has a high level of commitment within the social action area?

When I was a member of 1st Presbyterian Church of Dallas I traveled with a group of 35-40 people who went down from several different churches to Cuidad Juarez. We had a sister church – also Presbyterian – down in Juarez and we stayed in their community center. A Community Center that was built with monies from donations from many churches in Texas, and also built with the labor of many Texas Christian Churches. The accommodations were minimal – there was a men’s dormitory and a woman’s dormitory – bunk beds in each – with dormitory style shared bathrooms, and a communal dining hall. The food was incredible. We paid the Mexican woman who cooked for the community center to go out and buy groceries and we ate Mexican style the whole time we were there! Yum!

The projects varied, but first and foremost was the building of a new house for a destitute family. Now, when I say house, I mean a square about 40 feet by 40 feet with two small bedrooms and a kitchen half walled off from a very small living room. There was electricity and running water, but no bathroom. The community in which we built this home shared outhouses that were scattered throughout the community.

We gather on the first morning of our project with the family – all except the father who was at work – we made a sacred circle, prayed with the family, and then dedicated the project and our work to the greater glory of God. You can think what you like about that – suffice it to say that we made a conscious choice to be deliberative about what we were doing. We built that home in less than four days, and then the majority of the workers went on to other projects while the skilled carpenters, and the electricians finished out the inside of the house.

Toward the end of the week we gathered once again with the family and the father was there this time. There they were, father, mother, and three children, two girls and a little boy. Once again we circled the house, prayed, and then we planted a tree in the front yard in hopes that their lives like this tree would take root there and that they would prosper and grow. I don? t think there was a dry eye when we got through.

The point isn’t about what we did for that Mexican couple and their children. No, the point is that by working together as a congregation, through the sweat and tears that we shed on that project something strange happened to all of us. We didn’t exactly know what it was that happened until the first Sunday after we had returned to Dallas.

That morning all those who had participated in the Cuidad Juarez project were asked to sit down front and before the sermon was given we were asked to stand. There was thunderous applause as all those in the congregation leapt to their feet to congratulate the congregation at large for 1) putting together the resources necessary for such a project to happen and 2) to recognize that within that congregation there were those – about 10% who were willing to go out and get their hands dirty doing the work.

But the real payoff occurred on another level. You see those 15-20 of us who were on that project from First Church Dallas; we never saw each other quite in the same way ever again. Running into each other in the hallways we didn’t simply say hello, we stopped and hugged and genuinely inquired into each other’s lives.

You see we thought that we had gone down to Mexico to help them build up their community, but in truth it was our community that had been enlarged and built up.

There’s a short story written by Albert Camus entitled, The Artist at Work. In this short story, which is more like a novella, Jonas, is one of those people who grows up believing in his star. That’s a metaphorical way of saying he believed that something good was always on the horizon for him, and all he had to do was wait and it would arrive.

In the story he goes from working in his father’s publishing house to painting. He falls into painting really and before he knows it he’s married has several kids and art critics all over the world are vying for the right to say that they discovered him. The problem with Jonas is, like the Biblical character he’s named after, Jonah, the fame that comes to him swallows him much like the whale swallowed Jonah in the biblical narrative. Jonas has no boundaries and before he knows it the fame and the money has filled his house with admirers and well-wishers to the extent that fairly soon, he can no longer find a private place to paint. But never being one of those people who despair of their situation, Jonas makes the most of being swallowed by fame. He builds in one corner of a large room with enormously tall ceilings he builds a cubicle where he can climb up to and paint in peace.

Jonas begins staying up in his cubicle in the corner of that immense room longer and longer. Pretty soon there are parties going on below him well into the night, and at meal times his dinner is passed up to him on a hoist while those down below sing his praises and enjoy the food that his painting has brought in.

Finally, one night Jonas collapses and falls from his loft. And this is how the story ends.

“It’s nothing,” the doctor they had called declared a little later. “He is working too much. In a week he will be on his feet again.” “You are sure he will get well?” asked his wife Louise with distorted face. “He will get well,” said the doctor. In the other room, his old friend, Rateau, was looking at the canvas Jonas had been working on in the loft. It was completely blank, but in the center of it Jonas had written in very small letters a word that could be made out, but without any certainty as to whether it should be read solitary or solidary.

Conclusion:

It is suggested in the article I read that churches either have all windows or all mirrors. In other words, the author of that article fell into the commonplace error of seeing things either one way or the other way. The final word in the above story – the word that could not quite be deciphered – it’s either solitary (as in solitude) or solidary (the root for solidarity). I used to think when I was younger that there was an obvious answer to this quandary. It had to be solidarity.

Camus was conveying that people had to stick together and without this cohesiveness society would degenerate into the chaos of narcissism. But I am older now. And now I see that there must be time alone, and time together, and to be exclusive in either is to be sick in one-way or another. A church with only windows – a church which is constantly reaching out to the world and not taking care of its own is a church that is co-dependent upon reaching out to the world. A church that only has mirrors is obviously a social club and what they need to raise money for is a golf course, and a clubhouse.

Real churches like real people use both windows and mirrors. Yes, we must reach out to the world at large, but we must also be self-reflective on how we do this. Are we doing this in consideration for those that are being helped? Are those being helped actually being reduced to children and are we playing the patron? Social Action can degenerate into noblesse oblige. And noblesse oblige is nothing more than social Darwinism. We reach out to help others because obviously our cultural, our way of life is so superior that these poor, ignorant bastards would be nowhere without us.

Yet, too much self-reflection can put us in the same situation that Alice found herself in. In the looking-glass house everything was backwards.

There is a tale told about an off Broadway revival of The Anne Frank Story. Now here is a play that if done right will elicit sympathy for the Jews during the Holocaust. But there were troubles within this production, as a matter of fact, the actress that was playing Anne simply wasn’t up to snuff. When the Gestapo showed up at the house in which Anne was hiding, someone from the balcony yelled out, “She’s in the attic!”

There are times in which social action work done poorly is worse than no social action work done at all.

Real churches have both windows and mirrors. Real churches look out upon the world and realize that they must step into the fray and help. Real churches are able through their self-reflective abilities to judge how best to help those who are in need. In these situations so-called victims become survivors and one’s position in a class structure does not determine the genuine quality of one’s life.

The banquet alluded to in the passage in Luke this morning points out the fact that there is a feast taking place on this earth. This feast is open to all, but there are some who are invited that have an opportunity to serve the others. Within this feast, we have the blessing of having enough that we might actually share what we have with those who have not been sufficiently blessed. The point of Jesus? parable is that if we don’t share, if we don’t partake there will come a time when even the bread on our table will lose its taste, life itself will lose its zest and when that happens then we know we have been essentially excluded from the banquet.

On this social action Sunday let us covenant together that we will be that church that has both windows and mirrors. Let us covenant together that we will reach out when there are those in need, that we will write that extra large check when disasters strike, that we will investigate our motives and our intentions so that as caring, loving and responsible sentient beings we can make a church where we will be proud of the action we take in the world and equally proud of the reflection that, that action makes upon this church.

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

September 17, 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 an mystery beyond all naming, as we gather here this morning our hopes are that the detritus of the week – the flotsam and jetsam of time will wash on by us. We commune together in this hour in hopes that we may draw closer to that, which is the essence of life.

That essence at times seems erratic and fleeting. Let us settle into this moment – breathing deep into our bellies, let the anxieties of life be lifted up with our breath and exhaled into the world at large.

Our foundation – the place that’s firm and unmoving – that place is nowhere outside of us. Going inside now as we are we feel that the cosmos is reflected in the darkness of our inner being. The moment that we are told is fleeting that moment upon which we ride like the second hand of the clock, once inside that evanescent moment evaporates and we come face to face with eternity which is now and now and again now. We are the world, the universe, the cosmos experiencing itself.

Our consciousness is the mirror upon which time seemingly flies. Yet the mirror remains constant and letting our minds go blank we finally understand that we are nothing more than that mirror and also nothing less. No image sticks to a mirror. Fear, anger, anticipation, expectation, anxiety these we finally see as ghosts in that mirror.

Thinking we see them brings life to them again and so we let go – we relax and in that relaxation we finally see that even who we think we are is a ghost in that mirror. There is freedom in that disappearance. The past, the present, the future – all right here, right now.

Knowing that there is no true reflection of who we are we accept all reflections and hold onto none. That which once scared us is nothing more than that which once scared us. That which brought joy simply that which brought joy. Not pushing away or resisting, not holding on or clinging we awake – the inner world – the outer worlds – the same and we – the swinging door of our breath connects them both.

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

Amen.

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

SERMON

Introduction:

In the Gospel according to the good doctor, Luke, Jesus says in this part of the narrative, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or your body, what you will wear” – I can tell by looking out upon this congregation that you’ve obviously heeded Jesus’ fashion statement! – for “Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.”

And then Jesus goes on “Consider the ravens. They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them? – in other words – they don’t make a whole lot of plans but the natural cycle of life supplies them with their needs.

“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?”

We’re given similar messages in other religious traditions.

There is the Zen story of an older monk and a young monk traveling between monasteries. They come to a stream where a beautiful young geisha is unable to cross. The old monk ties up his robe, and offers the geisha a ride on his back. She accepts and he carries her across the stream. Three miles down the road from the stream the young monk can stand it no longer when he blurts out, “I can’t believe you actually touched that woman back at the stream!”

The older monk stops, looks at the younger monk and pats him on the shoulder. “You must be tired,” he said, “I carried her across the stream, but you have carried her ever since!”

Being in the moment allows you to let go of the past!

The point is to be in the moment. The point is to be in the moment.

Still we are Westerners and we have a built-in desire to improve our life, our surroundings, and our world. How can things be as they are at this moment and be perfect? How can we look upon the journey of life and not be concerned about reaching the destination? If we are for peace in the world, then we must be concerned with when and how peace will arrive, yes? If we wish to abolish the death penalty then we had better be prepared to work long and hard in a society that does not believe in restorative justice to help bring about the end of vindictive punishments.

In his book, Lateral Thinking, Edward De Bono suggests that we in the western world are concerned mainly with product and goals. Once we have decided what our goal is, we have a tendency to put the petal to the metal and scream down the street of life toward the object worth winning – the goal. De Bono suggests that it is this sort of practicality that has gotten the western world in the most trouble. For when we race toward our goal we are blind to the alleyways and detours along the path. With our eyes is on the prize everything else dwindles in the background as we become obsessed with the end product.

What was it that we always used to give the Communists a hard time about? Do you remember? Marxist philosophy suggests as we approach the transition from the exploitation of the capitalist workers and begin the rise of the proletariat between the exploitation and true communism, what is it the Marxist say, the end will justify the means.

Hasn’t there been something in the papers and news recently about the torture of terrorists – the information that those terrorists may have being so important that we will go to any length to get that information even if it means torturing them? The end it seems again will justify the means.

Lateral thinking suggests that what looks like a goal in the beginning of an inquiry may in fact not be the goal once we have begun the process of attaining it. How does this come about? It comes about because as we pay attention on a moment-to-moment basis, we do discover the alleyways and side paths and in those detours we discover meanings that we never knew existed. Those meanings change us and our goals thereby rendering the original goal obsolete, and its attainment unnecessary.

Two of the most famous Civil War Confederate Generals, Major General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, and General Robert Edward Lee, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, both held onto their roles in the Civil War up until the very last moments of their lives. After Stonewall Jackson had been mortally wounded at Chancellorsville and moved to the railway spur at Guinea Station, Jackson’s arm was amputated and he seemed to be recovering. But a fever set in and after having said goodbyes to his wife, Anna Morrison Jackson, and his daughter, Julia Jackson, Stonewall lapsed into a fevered sleep. When he awakened from that sleep around 3PM, he called out, “Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front. Tell Major Hawks?” He left that sentence unfinished and in the midst of the Civil War on May the 10th 1863, his last words were, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Robert Edward Lee survived the Civil War and was President of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia when he was struck down by the heart disease that had perused him since Gettysburg. As would seem normal for a Civil War General, Lee’s last thoughts centered on the war, but bizarrely enough Lee’s last words also ordered A.P. Hill into battle, “Tell Hill he must come up!” Lee said before letting go of the battle and ending his life with a soldier’s eulogy, his last words were, “Strike the tent.”

Death had taken both men back to their previous goals – the winning of the war between the states, and yet, in the end, when death made its final claim, both Generals, obsessed as they had been with a Confederate victory, both Generals, let go of that struggle and ordered themselves a rest.

I am reminded here of the character in Caddy Shack, played by Bill Murray. He tells the story of the summer that he worked in an Ashram and was the personal servant of the His Holiness the Dalai Lama. When the summer was over and all the other waiters/attendants had gathered together, Bill Murray’s character realizes that they have all received large sums of money for their duties while he has received nothing but a promise. In his own words, he says, “The Dali Lama pulled me aside and told me that for my services that summer I would receive full, complete enlightenment on my deathbed – so, I got that going for me!”

The point in living life isn’t to find the solution for our woes on our deathbeds. I mean, that wouldn’t be terrible, but wouldn’t it be a bit more enlightening to understand life before life’s door is slamming shut in our face?

There is a Zen Buddhist saying when one is looking for enlightenment. “Look under your feet!”

There was an Air Force Pilot who was shot down over Vietnam and spent many years as a prisoner of war. He lost 80 pounds and a great deal of his health. When he was finally released the first thing he wanted to do was play a game of golf. Some buddies of his took him to a golf course and had pretty much decided that he’d be lucky to make it through 9 holes of golf – much less 18. To their great surprise he finished all 18 holes and played a superb game – beating every one of them.

When questioned about his superb play he admitted that during his imprisonment he had played 18 holes of golf everyday. He played on courses he knew well from memory, but eventually he designed new courses that better stimulated his skill and kept his game sharp.

This Air Force Pilot is a perfect example of someone who looked under his feet for his treasure. Unable to do anything inside a confined space, not offered much food or distraction, the Air Force Pilot decided that his feet were not bare, but clad in golf spikes, and that what lay before him was not a bamboo wall but the expanse of a 400 yard fairway.

There are those who say that one must be born into a family that will teach one to be this ingenious in trying situations, or if not taught then one must be born with the genes that will allow such creativity.

It is true children who have parents that set boundaries, are interested in what their children do regardless of whether it reflects well on the parents or not, children who feel as if they have choices in life, including the choice of disobeying the parents, children who are able to commit to what their doing unselfconsciously, and who feel challenged with increasingly complex opportunities for action – these children tend to be those who are able to cope with whatever life has to offer them.

The Air Force pilot was probably one of those lucky children.

Yet, even if we weren’t raised in such an optimum family situation it is possible to learn to be a person who sees a challenge not a threat, a person who sees an opportunity for learning and action.

Such a person is said to be in flow. A person who is in flow is a person whose consciousness is not disordered. This type of person moves easily through life knowing that whatever is presented it can be incorporated into their consciousness and those things which are not helpful will be discarded, those things that can be processed will be processed easily and readily. And when this person hears voices – the voices are congratulatory and encouraging.

The battle to remain in flow is not a battle between the world and oneself, it is rather a battle for the control over our own consciousness.

There is a Buddhist saying that the fool sees himself in others, while the wise man sees others in himself. And there is a difference. A fool projects his fears and prejudices onto those around him, while a wise person is able to see the foibles of others easily in himself.

There are two obstacles to remaining in flow and they are anomie and alienation.

Anomie means literally – a lack of rules – no boundaries! If there’s one thing I’m learning in this Interim Preaching experience it’s a reaffirmation of my own boundaries.

What’s lacking when we feel there are no boundaries is a lack of propriety. The poet and essayist, Wendell Berry, says, “The idea of propriety makes an issue of the fittingness of our conduct to our place and circumstances, even to our hopes. It acknowledges the always-pressing realities of context and of influence; we cannot speak or act or live out of context. Our life inescapably affects other lives, which inescapably affect our life. We are being measured, in other words, by a standard that we did not make and cannot destroy.” We are being measured, in other words, by a standard that we did not make and cannot destroy.

There is a sense in which propriety is the opposite of individuality, but a self in flow does seemingly contradictory things at the same time.

When we are in flow we have a tendency to stick out from the crowd because the crowd does not know what is proper and is basically alienated from their own lives. That’s why the crowd looks to the crowd to see what the crowd wants! Yet this tendency of a person in flow to differentiate themselves from the crowd and stand out as unique is counterbalanced by the ability of those people in flow to feel in union with others and other’s ideas.

A leader is a person who can and does define themselves – self-differentiates – and at the same time stays in contact with those who are looking to them for leadership.

The second obstacle to staying in flow is alienation. Karl Marx knew that alienation would be one of the main problems of the industrialized world and he was dead right.

Alienation is a social problem in that we are constrained by society to do things that go against our own happiness and our own goals. The constraint is usually an economic one. We do a job not for the sake of the job, but for the money so that we might have a roof over our heads and food on our tables. It’s important to know that our children will be dry and fed.

Alienation has all kinds of effects, but the main one I see today is to lead people to the point of killing others without thinking about what they are doing. Children are taught to play video games in which they kill or eliminate the “enemy? and they win when they are not killed and the enemy is decimated.

It’s a short jump from this sort of computer warfare to the smart bombs of both the Gulf War and the War of Iraqi Freedom.

In the film, The Ground Truth, shown last Monday night in this very sanctuary digitalized computer images of a group of people were shown walking down a street in Iraq. The images were grainy and broken up and it was impossible to tell, whether these were women, children, goats, Iraqi fighters – impossible to tell! But the audio accompanying these images simply reported the movement and it was relayed back that, that movement was to be eliminated. “Roger that,” came a voice, then he voice said, “ten seconds to impact.” Ten seconds later a horrific explosion and the images were obliterated.

There’s a disconnect here. A disconnect between pushing a button and total annihilation. Those were more than blips on a screen – more than grainy digitalized images – these were sentient beings.

The story I am about to tell you was told to me in parts and pieces over many a drunken evening. For it was only drunk that my father could talk about his war. His sober mind had put the experiences out of reach, tucked away, buried. This is my father’s story.

Before I was shot down I flew seven combat missions – seven. Always thought seven was a lucky number, you know – “seven come eleven,” huh? Seven come eight would have been all right with me. I was shot down. Didn’t bail out – rode the plane down – nobody was killed – one guy lost an eye. I kept both of mine – so still kinda lucky. Not a whole lot to do with your eyes in a prisoner of war camp – watch the guards watch you! So, I read a lot. The Bible mostly. My Dad’s Bible – he’d given it to me the day I left for the war.

He was sitting on the porch, sort of lying back in the porch swing, the way he always did. A lemonade in one hand and his Bible resting on the seat. He closed the Bible – got up – gave me a hug and kissed me – right on the mouth – couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that, then, he tucked the Bible in the pocket of my B-4 bag. “Bring that back to me,” he said, “you mother gave me that – she’d raise hell if I lost it.”

I carried it in my navigation bag, didn’t have any intention of reading it, really, just thought it would be good luck to have.

As you can see, I didn’t lose it. Pop had these pieces of paper, little corners of paper stuck in special places – each had two numbers on them: Chapter and Verse – Chapter and Verse.

This is the one in Proverbs. “These six things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven are an abomination unto him.” I guess “seven” had never been the Lord’s lucky number, either. “A proud look, a lying tongue and – hands that shed innocent blood.” Sorry, I can never get any further than that part.

No, really it’s okay. I did what I had to do, right? I made the world safe for democracy! But whose world am I talking about? I mean, how many worlds are there? What about their world? You know, them – the enemy.

Oh yeah, yeah, sure, sure – they’re just targets – little blips on a screen, right? But just because you put yourself miles above them, and even though they appear like ants – people are still people.

And those abominations, oh my God, those abominations!

They blew those people to bits, tore them to shreds, burned them alive. I didn’t even know those people, I could never have done those things in person, never! And all I did was push a button.

Sooner or later, we all get our buttons pushed, I guess.

But that’s not the end of it. Oh no, if you’re with the aircraft, and you are, cause you’re flying it with the bomb sight – if you follow the armament down, and you do – it’s simple follow through – then you’re right there when they flash out.

That’s the thing about technology – it gives you an illusion of separation – but you can never be separated from what you’ve started.

Never. Ever.

Push a button, pull a trigger and you release a part of yourself, the projectile, the armament, it’s you – otherwise you couldn’t hit squat!

It’s when that idea hits home you realize how destructive intention can be – the best – the worst – makes no difference – paving stones to hell. Part of you has left – gone out, done what it will do. That part – it never returns, ever.

Conclusion:

In conclusion I’d like you to stop thinking that what you’re doing now is preparing for something else. Don’t buy into that retirement illusion. The way you are now is the way you will be then. As my wife is fond of saying – wherever you go you take your head with you.

In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “This is it!”

The way you treat the least of those in your life is the way you will be treated.

In the words of the John Lennon song,

Instant Karma’s gonna get you

Gonna knock you right on the head

You better get yourself together

Pretty soon, you’re gonna be dead

What in the world you thinking of

Laughing in the face of love

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

August 27, 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, we’re here today in our herky-jerky manner. We’ve raced here to find peace, and tranquility. We’re caught up in our contradictory thoughts that scold us worse than any parent ever could have – we are, in truth, our own worst taskmasters. What can we do about it?

It’s time to realize that we are not alone in this business of having a life that seems ordered on the outside, but on the inside is a web of tangled skeins. Trying to separate the threads of the skein internally only pulls the knots tighter and we long for release from this mind that will not let us be.

It’s time to start to show the cracks in our lives, time to let others in on our big secret, which, once we do it, we find out it’s their big secret, too. We’re lost and lonely, and there isn’t a prayer in the world that can change that. But we do have each other.

Help us to realize that what separates us from our neighbor is our inability to simply open up and let out our secrets. We are individuals, that’s true, but defining ourselves takes community, and the only way to define yourself inside community is to share with others what’s on your mind. You might be surprised.

It may very well be that collectively we hold things that we are not proud of, and yet, we are not alone in this shame. There’s an old tradition in Jewish synagogues, one person stands up and tells a bad story about themselves, and then another stands and tries to top that bad story by a worse story. The winner is the congregant who can tell a horrible story about themselves that no one else can top! What a turning of the tables that would be for us all – to admit our foibles and be rewarded.

May we have the strength today to admit that we are human, not perfect, a marble cake of contradictory feelings, and may this admission be greeted with the loosening of others as they decide to leave the conspiracy of silence and let it all hang out. In a popular song we are reminded that there is a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. Let’s open up and let in the light of love and friendship. Let’s embody our humanity and be proud of it. We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

Song of the Open Road

Blaise Pascal, Pensees 434

“What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe? These foundations solidly established – make us know that there are two truths of faith equally certain: the one, that man, in the state of creation, or in that of grace is raised above all nature, made like unto God and sharing in His divinity; the other, that in the state of corruption and sin, he is fallen from this state and made like unto the beasts.”

Here’s the same thought expressed by Kris Kristofferson in his song from the early 70’s, entitled, The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.

The Pilgrim; Chapter 33,

Kris Kristofferson

“He’s a poet, he’s a picker?

He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher?

He’s a pilgrim, and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned?

He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,

Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”

SERMON

There was a professor at the University of Florida in the Psychology Department by the name of Sydney Jourard when I was attending that university from 1965-1969. The first book I read that Dr. Jourard wrote was Disclosing Man to Himself. It is a study in self-disclosure and how telling others about ourselves not only informs them who we are, but also keeps authentic the notion that there is something about us that is real and perhaps the best way to discover what is real is in dialogue with another human being.

Also, at the University of Florida in 1965 was Dr. Thomas Louis Hanna, Head of the Philosophy Department, a graduate of Texas Christian University, where he played football and was also a collegiate middle-weight boxing champ in the late forties. He graduated from TCU with a BA in Philosophy, and a minor in Music. Dr. Hanna went on to the University of Chicago where he earned a Bachelors of Divinity degree, and then his PhD in Philosophy.

I first met Dr. Hanna in Hume Hall, the dormitory I lived in during my freshman year at Florida. I saw a poster on the bulletin board of Hume Hall and it advertised that a Dr. Hanna, Head of the Philosophy Department, would be speaking on the Playboy philosophy in the Recreation Room that night.

I wandered down there expecting to see a few people, but the Rec Room was packed. It was standing room only, and I was one of the ones that were standing. Dr. Hanna went on to explain to his audience, who were, if not subscribers to Playboy Magazine, certainly borrowers of that same magazine, what he saw to be the implications of the Playboy philosophy. We were all anxious to hear about this because we all wanted to be the BMOC. Does anyone remember what the BMOC was? The Big Man on Campus. And although we knew that the BMOC was popular, wore the right clothes, drove a cool car, we also suspected that an explanation of the Playboy philosophy might give all us geeky freshmen a leg up on how to woo the girls and get them where we all wanted them – nudge, nudge, wink, wink!

Dr. Hanna was smooth. He explained the Playboy philosophy from Hugh Hefner’s viewpoint, and really I can’t remember what that entailed, but then he went on to do a critique of this same Playboy philosophy as being mainly masturbatory and definitely non-personal.

This, I shall never forget. He, in fact, wasn’t saying anything bad about masturbation, but he was saying that a magazine whose literary merits were sublimated by the pictures of naked co-eds, or at least young women old enough to be co-eds whether they were or not, a magazine of that type lent itself chiefly to the masturbatory process.

And the final question he asked all these very young men was, What kind of relationship and philosophy can you expect to have with and toward women, when the majority of the time spent with the magazine is practicing sex with an air-brushed symbol totally removed from any personal interaction, and hermetically sealed from the sights, sounds and smells of a real woman?

We may have been freshmen but we understood the answer to this merely rhetorical question, and further more, we understood the implications of a philosophy so implemented. More interesting to me than the Playboy philosophy is how Dr. Hanna had played a sort of bait and switch with us, we had expected to learn how to be the BMOC, but what we had really learned was that such a person would be a hollow man, a straw man whose attitude toward women was based upon only one of the attributes of femininity and lacking all basis in the real world.

But what does this have to do with the corruption of grace and the grace of corruption? Perhaps you can see parallels already, perhaps not? There is a connection, and as we go along, it will become clearer, I promise.

I remember very clearly one afternoon in spring as I was leaving another dormitory, Murphy Hall, I saw Dr. Jourard and Dr. Hanna playing handball on one of the outside courts that lined University Avenue. I stopped and watched as these two youthful full-grown men played a difficult game at top speed. I didn’t stay to see who won, but I can tell you that they could have played against much younger men and held their own.

This image of these two men playing handball is especially poignant for me, because both of these men are now dead. Dr. Sidney Jourard was working on his sports car when the jack he was using collapsed and the car landed on his head. Dr. Thomas L. Hanna, at the age of 62, and with the physical reflexes of a man in his 30’s swerved to miss, it is conjectured – since no one saw the one-car accident – swerved to miss a dog, cat, squirrel or other sentient being and left the roadway and collided with a telephone pole.

Two years before Dr. Hanna died (when he was 60) he realized that he had to tell everything he knew about our bodies and their inherent dignity, divinity and grace, he had to tell all this to the world at large.

He and Sidney Jourard were buddies, and Tom Hanna knew that not to disclose fully everything that he had learned about himself and his body would be in essence hiding from his fellow human beings and ultimately hiding from himself.

The point is most people are taught to hide their true feelings. In polite society it is not considered kosher to be frank, it is not considered a part of everyone getting along to disclose that you do not agree with the dominant cultural position, no matter what the issue is.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see that this same sort of suppression, this same kind of domination is at work today when it comes to the war in Iraq, the proper treatment of prisoners of war, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the erosion of our democratic processes, global warming – the list goes on and on. In some circles it is still considered unpatriotic to voice an opinion counter to the dominant culture.

Shifting back in time.

In 1799 Frederick Schleiermacher, who is sometimes called the “father of liberalism? published his first work. Schleiermacher maintained that religion was not a form of knowledge (as the rationalists and orthodox believed) nor was it a system of morality, as Immanuel Kant put forth.

For Schleiermacher religion was not grounded in pure or practical reason, but in Gefuhl – the German word for “feeling.” This is not sentimentalism, nor sudden conversion experiences, but a profound experience of our “dependence? upon the ONE on which all existence depends.

In other words an absolute dependence upon God, or the ground of Being. The purpose of the church for Schleiermacher is to relate these absolute feelings of dependency within the church and to future generations. The emphasis is on sharing these feelings with one another – disclosure.

These feelings of dependency occur on three levels; the self, the self’s relation to the world and the self’s relation to the ground of being. For Schleiermacher anything that doesn’t deal with these three levels of feeling is not theology, period.

For theology to deal with the feelings of the self, and its relationship to the world and the ground of our being is as close to existentialism as one can get without calling it that. And the kind of philosophy that Dr. Hanna was doing back in the sixties and seventies, and the kind of psychology that Dr. Jourard was practicing – both of these were existential in nature. Existentialism is concerned with the feelings that one has within one’s body – feelings of grandeur, feelings of passion, anxiety, despair – all heavy internal emotional states.

Within the world of theology I come down with the existentialists and with Schleiermacher. Religion is about my relationships with myself, my relationship with my world and my relationship with that which I am totally dependent upon for my well being.

Most of us come from religious traditions that claim that we were born into sin. That is, we were raised within an environment that saw human life as basically tainted from the word go! Obviously, this is a way of thinking about life that is basically pessimistic.

Buddhists do not believe in the notion of original sin, and their quests through meditation and sutra readings are bent in the direction of rediscovering our original face before we were born, or in other words, finding out what the world and we looked like before we were told by the world what they’re supposed to look like.

In his work Sidney Jourard was stressing that if we successfully hide from others, we will end up hiding from ourselves and there will come a time in which we do not know who we are simply because we have not shared who we are. We are individuals, true, but we define ourselves through community.

In the vein of liberal religion, via Schleiermacher, our first responsibility is our responsibility to our selves. If we are to have adequate relationships with the world and with eventually the ground of our being, then we had better be in communication with ourselves. Who are we?

Quite simply, we are this body. We live our lives within the framework of this physical entity and we receive impressions of what the world is like both from outside our skins and from within. To not honor the communications that we receive from within our bodies is to short-circuit our understanding of who we are and what our place is in the world.

Thich Nhat Han said world peace begins within the human heart. For the world to be at peace we must first be at peace inside ourselves.

In like manner, if we are to be autonomous and free individuals, who can make responsible decisions about who we are and how we ought to operate in the world, then we must honor the first relationship – the relationship we have with ourselves. Jesus said, and he was merely quoting older Jewish scriptures, You must love your neighbor as yourself. Yet, if there is no love of the self, there can be no neighborly love.

We can no longer speak of a mind body split. Dr. Hanna retooled a Greek word to stand for both the body and the mind, because he saw no separation between them. He called human beings somas. The Greek word “Soma” is used in science and medicine to refer to a cell body, but Dr. Hanna’s contemporary definition sees somas – sees us – as much more than simply bodies acted upon by outside forces. We are at one and the same time, somatic beings that have internal perceptions about the world and ourselves and we are capable of controlling how we function.

But how do we regain control in a world, which seems to be spinning out of control. The first thing we do is to take charge of our bodies.

In Dr. Hanna’s terms about 85% of the Industrial populations of the world suffer from SMA – “sensory-motor amnesia.” That is, we have lost contact with our bodies and forgotten how certain muscle groups are supposed to feel when relaxed. SMA describes the effects that a lifetime of daily stresses has upon our bodies.

There are basically two disorders that demonstrate this sensory-motor amnesia.

The first is the “red light? reflex and is best demonstrated when someone fires a gun behind you and you didn’t even know they had a gun. And it looks like this. (Demonstrate)

There’s nothing wrong with this reflect, it has saved many a soldier’s life. What’s wrong is when these responses are continually involved in our daily stressful lives. Worry brings the shoulders up because it’s part of this same withdrawal response. In fact, it’s impossible to say, “Oi Veh!” without lifting the shoulders.

The second is the green-light reflex. This is very prevalent in industrialized societies. It’s that get-up and go quality that typifies the North American consciousness.

This is what the Green Light response looks like. (Demonstrate)

If we are to typify these two responses – the red and green light responses – we have to say that while the red light reflex is negative distress, the green light reflex is a positive response.

This response is awakened in us when we are just babies. The ability of a baby to finally hold its head up, to flex its legs out at the age of six months, and finally with its head lifted and straightening out its knees, the child begins to crawl and that is the culmination and full discovery of the Green Lights reflex.

But what happens in an industrialized world when we are perpetually put into a Green Light reflex? What happens if the stimulus for the Green Light reflex is constant in such a society? Continual repetition guarantees that the reflex will be constant, habitual, and eventually unnoticed. When this happens we are in sensory motor amnesia (SMA) and what we feel after a day of this Go! Go! Go! is tired, sore, and worn out. After a lifetime of such stress we feel sick and tired, and ready to die!

In older people we often see combinations of these two – the red light reflex and the green light response. (Demonstrate.)

Again, what does this have to do with the corruption of grace or the grace of corruption? How does this talk of bodies and green /red light responses inform any discussion about whether we are like unto the Gods, or bestial?

It’s very simple, really. Life is a marble cake. You ever notice that? It’s never all chocolate, or all vanilla. It’s a swirl of this and a blending of that. Those who wish to see life as black or white, right or wrong are disappointed when confronted with this swirling inconsistency.

In order to maintain a philosophy of life that does not admit the marblecakeness of life children are taught not to touch themselves, that they do not feel what they feel, women are told that they are not equal to men, men are taught that boys don’t cry and older people are taught that they are misshapen because that’s what old age looks like. Lies! Lies! All lies!

It’s time to stop trying to get our bodies to fit inside philosophies and theologies that are anti-life. It’s time for the body to assert itself and say what it feels and how what it feels translates into relationship and community. It’s time for embodied spirituality.

Let’s face it; we are many things that do not go together “

“We’re poets, we’re pickers?

We’re prophets, we’re pushers?

We’re pilgrims, and preachers, and problems when we’re stoned?

We’re walkin’ contradictions, partly truth and partly fiction,

Takin? ev’ry wrong direction on our lonely way back home.”

I feel, like my mentor, Dr. Hanna, that I, too, will die before long. Let’s face it, if I live 30 more years I’ll be 90 and what are the chances of that? I do not wish to leave this world, or this congregation before I have given to you everything I know about how to be a non-anxious presence in your bodies and in this world. In an effort to do just that this sermon has been, and is, a preamble to a course that I will be offering in Adult Religious Education this fall. This sermon is the spiel of a snake-oil salesman.

This course will begin on Saturday the 2nd of September from 9-11AM and continue every Saturday after that for six weeks – ending on Saturday October the 7th.

Those who wish to explore the idea that they may be suffering from Sensory-motor amnesia are more than welcomed to attend. What I can promise you is – even if you do the movements poorly and don’t practice them everyday, you will still see a noted difference in how you feel, and how you get about in this world.

Every good sermon has a prescription for the congregation; this is my prescription for you. Come to the classes, buy the book (it will cost you exactly $16.52 if you buy the book from me), do the movements suggested, and learn to live free inside your own skin. Freedom, independence and autonomy – these qualities – are what human life is all about. And who among us could not use a means of becoming more self-responsible?

At the end of this service the ushers will have clipboards in the foyer. Please stop, sign up and together we can learn to be free and self-regulating human beings. Caution: there is a limit of 20 people in this beginning class.

Conclusion: Dr. Hanna saw over 3000 patients. He taught them the necessary information so they did not have to keep coming back to see him. He taught them that the sensory-motor system is a closed loop in the cerebral cortex and that by daily movements that take no more than 10 minutes one can retrain the brain to recognize what the relaxed state of our bodies feels like.

What is the relationship between corruption and grace, grace and corruption? Redemption comes not through ascending to the Gods, but descending into our bodies. Being totally present and taking back control on the physical level is my definition of grace. God, enlightenment, health do not reside outside our bodies, but within – come join in the journey to the center of our selves.

The true relationship between our corruption and our grace is like a Texan standing in his pasture. His feet may be in the cow manure, but his hat is in the stars. We are that consciousness that spans this great divide. The fallen state of human kind – the bestial, and the raised state made like unto God are but the warp and woof of life’s material, but as it passes through our hands and bodies surely we feel the difference, yet know it to be of one skein.

Remember the ending I give to everyone of my prayers, In the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.