© Davidson Loehr

30 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

This morning will be the first of a series of five sermons that will end with the Thanksgiving service. These are taken from a model of dealing with change and grief developed about 32 years ago by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross whose book on death and dying came out in 1969. She was dealing with terminal patients and what they were trying to come to terms with was the fact of their own death.

But many people have seen that this is a model with many applications outside of chaplaincy where I used it when I worked with terminal patients for a year. It’s a model that deals with the death of any belief system or any worldview. It deals with the death of our comfortable way of seeing things and the stages we tend to go through when trying to find a new way to do it. After September 11th, models like this seem to have an immediate and obvious application as we’re all going to be dealing, individually and as a society, with some stages in trying to come to terms with having to look at life and safety very differently than we did two weeks ago.

What I want to focus on in this sermon series, though, is much much narrower. I want to focus on the death of beliefs, of faiths, of religions that many people have experienced sometimes many years ago and the stages they go through or the troubles they have going through stages to get past it and to find a new kind of faith and trust. It’s surprising to me how many people still talk about faith experiences they had 25 years ago as though they had happened yesterday. They’re still so vivid and the people still feel so angry and so burned about it.

I remember a discussion I had with a fundamentalist friend, probably 15 years ago, a man who had grown up until he was 25 or 26 as a fundamentalist. And then the world cracked and it fell apart for him and this was now 20 years later and he was still furious. I said what are you angry at? You are out of it now. He said “I’m angry because I was betrayed.” He said, “I’m angry because people I trusted lied to me.” He said, “I’m angry because I once had a picture of life that was so whole and so complete, that I had no worries and no questions. And I’ll never have a picture that simple again.” Powerful stuff.

What happens to many people – and it happened to this man too even though he was a professor of religion – is that when they have a bad experience with religion they decide the whole field of religion is no damn good. I tried it once, it stunk, I’m never trying it again.

I can understand the pain but I cannot understand the plan. The plan sounds to me like someone who went to a restaurant and once got a bad case of food poisoning so swore off eating. What they needed was healthy food, not no food. And the same is true with religion.

But this distrust and distaste for religion is part of the reason that the word “religion” is a bad word now in popular speech, and “spirituality” is a good word. Somehow that’s lighter and a little easier and it’s sort of about feeling good, whereas religion is something deep and dark and evil and awful with which we want to have nothing to do. Now if we stay there, if we follow that, we can easily become the character of the eagle from the story of the eagle and the chickens. The eagle didn’t belong there. It wasn’t a chicken and the things the eagle needed to learn the chicken couldn’t teach it, because it needed to learn how to fly and chickens can’t fly.

There are a lot of stories like this and if we pervert them, they give us the same picture. That story I told the kids this morning is a perversion of another version of the story where the eagle does finally realize it’s an eagle and it flies and joins the eagles and protects that little hen house forever and everyone lives happily ever after. That movie’s probably done by Disney. But you can take popular fairy tales and change one item in them and come up with the same perverse plot. This is the story of Cinderella who never went to the ball, who never escaped from the house where she was hated and the kitchen where she was misused and abused. It’s the story of Rapunzel, who never let her hair down and never escaped from the tower that she’d been put into because of her mother’s fears. It’s the story of denial and I think denial is a bad thing, after the first few minutes or days.

Now I’m taking this a little differently than Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did. There are two sides to denial. One is the fact that we are denying that we are carrying with us something that isn’t serving us and doesn’t work anymore. And if you’re stuck in an old religion that has you under its control- whether you love it or whether you hate it, it doesn’t matter, you have to get past it.

It reminds me, since my mind works this way; of a standup comic I saw 10 or 15 years ago, a Canadian comic. He never made it very big but he had one joke I’ve always loved. He’s a master at playing the audience and he played the audience with 3 or 4 very funny jokes in a row. Very quick punch lines, and had the whole audience rolling and then he set them up by telling a joke so bad, so stupid, that they booed. And he’d been waiting for it. He said, “That’s all right, whether you clap or whether you boo, you are under my control!”

That’s true with a religious past too, you know. Whether we love it or whether we hate it, we’re in orbit around it. And denial is a form of faithlessness. It’s just about as faithless as it gets. Because the other half of denial is the fact that we are not seeing that after every significant loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and that it is always worth finding a way to do that. Furthermore, we’re playing the game of denial against a background of life and of the world that, if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, is overwhelmingly positive, life- affirming, and trustworthy.

For instance, 2 weeks ago here in addition to the regular offering that we took, we took, as we are today, a special collection for disaster relief. From our 3 Sunday services we collected over $9,400 to send to New York and Washington for disaster relief. From the 270 people in the 1st service we collected about $3,000. From the 480 people at the 2nd service, we collected just under $6,000, and from the 135 people who were at the evening service we collected $480. $9,400 collected to be sent to people we didn’t know, for uses we’ll never see, simply because they are humans and we are too, and we knew we owed it and we wanted to do it.

You could look on television 2 weeks ago and I don’t know why no one remarked on this. You see all these New Yorkers. Now these are the New Yorkers who have been made the butt of jokes in many churches for decades because they are so secular, so completely secular that the only thing sacred to New Yorkers are work, bagels, coffee and New York City. Here were these secular New Yorkers–firemen and policemen– sacrificing their lives for strangers. Walking up 60 flights of stairs in a burning building and sacrificing their lives for people they didn’t know. If you want to go to another extreme, for an example, I read this week about a prison in Louisiana, called Angola, a horrible prison for serious criminals that deserves a sermon of its own. The lifers in Angola have virtually no benefits. Any money, anything they want for television, for books, for any kind of benefits, they have to earn the money for themselves. And they do it in the Angola prison through only one fund-raiser; they have an annual rodeo that’s become fairly well known.

This year that rodeo raised $30,000. And these lifers, many in there for violent crimes and murder, donated all $30,000 to disaster relief. Now that’s the background against which we are playing games of denial and it should make us feel silly. The message of it is that goodness does not come from religion, goodness comes from our humanity. It’s inside of us. And what we need from religion isn’t an infusion of goodness into people who are originally sinful. That just isn’t true. We need help from religions in recognizing and nourishing the goodness that’s already in us. There’s a creation story from the Kabala, the medieval, mystical Judaism, that talked about how in the beginning there was the great light Ein Sof, and that at the beginning the great light was broken into millions and millions of little sparks of God, and inside of every living thing was a spark of God. And the job of every living thing was to recognize that spark of God and to nourish it, so that it too may burst into a flame to illuminate a dark world.

It’s a wonderful story. It is true; there are religions that don’t do that. We’ve seen a couple of varieties of them, right now, the last few weeks on both sides of the Atlantic. There are religions of narrowness of exclusion and of hate. There are bad religions. The Taliban was one. The Taliban has a list of people it hates and whom it assumes Allah hates. They speak for Allah and say that Allah hates liberated women–women outside of the veil. There are women who have had acid thrown in their face for being unveiled over there. It is a religion of hatred that preaches that. It’s not true to anything about Muslim religion. Not true to anything in it. It’s a perversion of it. They hate homosexuals and hate anyone whose sexual orientation and lifestyle isn’t like they think theirs is. Not counting all of the things they are repressing to say that. They hate foreigners, they hate non-believers, they hate anyone whose truth is bigger or much different from theirs.

That’s a religion of exclusion and narrowness and hate, and that’s a bad religion. It can’t nourish life. And we’ve seen exactly the same religions spring up in this country through that amazingly unguarded interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson when they created exactly the same hateful list of people they thought responsible for the slaughter of over 6000 innocents. There are religions that are hateful and narrow and cannot feed life and should not be supported. It is simply not the case that whatever anyone believes is fine. We believe all kinds of things that are hurtful and hateful. But that isn’t all. We don’t need no religion, like we don’t need no food after we get food poisoning. We need healthy religion and we need honest religion for head and heart that can recognize the Godspark inside of us and help us. Nourish it, so that it too grows into a flame. God knows the world needs more light. And that positive and hopeful religion is all around us too. It is in the poem we used for Centering this morning. I want to read you that poem again:

“The man whispered, God, speak to me, and a meadowlark sang. But the man did not hear. So the man yelled, God, speak to me, and the thunder and lightening rolled across the sky but the man didn’t listen. The man looked around and said, God, let me see you, and the stars shined brightly but he wasn’t watching. Then the man shouted, God, show me a miracle and a life was born, but he was looking elsewhere. So the man cried out in despair, touch me God and let me know you are here, whereupon God reached down and touched the man but he brushed the butterfly away and walked on. He cried God, I need your help, and an e-mail arrived reaching out with good news and encouragement from someone who loved him. But he deleted it and continued crying. He’s crying still.”

Jesus used to talk about people needing the eyes to see and the ears to hear the simple truths in his stories. We need the eyes to see and the ears to hear that we live in a world of blessedness. We have a Godspark inside of us that is the most important thing about us that we need to find and nourish and help burst into flame. And that plot seems to be the most popular plot we have in all of our stories. Religious stories, fairy tales. You can talk about the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel by the river Jabbok. Jacob, this scummy, scurrilous little man who, for the first time in his life, did something that showed some character and courage. He wrestled with this demon angel messenger of god at the river, and he wrestled all night and would not let go until it blessed him. And it blessed him with a new name and this Jacob; this horrible scurrilous little man then became Israel, the father of the twelve tribes of Judaism. This is a wonderful story. All the heroes we need are made out of very common stock. Just like us. We just need to take a moment to recognize a spark inside of us and wrestle with it and hold on until we are blessed by our struggle.

You find this plot in fairy tales. It is the story of Cinderella without the perversion. There is something holy in Cinderella that she believed in and held onto until birth was given to it. It’s the story of Rapunzel who does let down her hair. It’s the story of sleeping beauty. It’s the story of beauty and the beast. It’s the story of so many. And if we stay in denial about this we’re going to miss one of the most important simple truths there is. That’s the realization that “human being” is a verb, not a noun. “Human being” is a verb. It takes a healthy religion to become really human religiously. It isn’t for lazy people. It isn’t just a feeling of feeling good and groovy about yourself. It takes work and it takes focus to become human.

And now I wonder on all these stories, if we’ve read them right yet. Can it really be that in the stories of Cinderella, Rapunzel and all the rest of them, only the main character is meant to become human? I don’t think so. All the other characters – the stepsisters, the stepmother, all the wicked people in the stories – are in denial. They are in denial of the fact that they too have a Godspark that’s so covered over with neglect and dirt and dust that its little flame is on the verge of going out.

What about the story of the eagle and the chickens? What if the chickens are also really supposed to be eagles and what if the story of the eagle and the chickens and all of the rest of these stories aren’t really about eagles and chickens and Cinderella and Rapunzel at all. What if they’re really stories about us? They are, you know. Now what?

© Davidson Loehr

23 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave.

Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

CENTERING: “The Dance of Life”

It was the great Dance of Life: countless people, holding hands, moving and dancing over the fields.” They often didn’t seem to be aware of one another, yet they danced on in that great human circle, as they had been doing since before time counted.” Occasionally, parts of the circle would pass over a deep chasm, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, tornado or lightning would strike, and some dancers would be lost.” But immediately, the loose hands sought each other out, the circle was closed, and the dance went on.” After each loss, the dancers would recite their special stories:” stories to explain why they had been spared.” “It was God,” said some, “looking out for us.”” For others, it was a kind of cosmic energy that safeguarded the enterprise.” Others had their own explanations: guardian angels, Fate, and more exotic plots.” There were disagreements over just what it was that kept the dancers safe ” they seldom spoke of those who were lost from time to time.” And there was no pattern to the periodic losses and accidents.” Still, each time the circle was broken it seemed to heal itself, and the dance went on.” Yet the question hovers: with so many different stories, what should dancers believe?” In what, if anything, should they put their faith?

NOTE: This sermon was delivered without notes, then transcribed from the recording of the 11:15 service on this date, and edited by Dr. Loehr. While the sermons will necessarily vary some between the 9:30, 11:15 and 5:30 Sunday services, this is a fair approximation of the original. This is also why it reads more like an oral presentation than an essay.

SERMON: More Aftermath from September 11, 2001

Every generation, it seems, has its defining moment, the watershed event when we suddenly realize that the world isn’t as we thought, we’re not as safe as we thought, perhaps not as innocent as we thought. In that moment, a new generation is rudely and painfully taken forever out of a world of innocence and naive trust.

There aren’t many of these moments. They stand out in history as dates we’ll never forget:

December 7, 1941, “the day that lived in infamy” was such a moment and the world never felt quite as safe to those who lived through it again.

November 22, 1963 was a moment for people who grew up when I did. We all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard that President Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas. The world never seemed quiet as safe again.

Another moment took me by surprise when I was in graduate school. I was stunned to see how powerfully the events of December 8, 1980 affected people in their 20’s the day that John Lennon was murdered. And I remember how many of them cried, held each other, and talked about not feeling safe anymore.

And now September 11, 2001 has joined the list of world-shattering moments. They almost seem to come in 20-year intervals. For many people it was the first significant time that the world didn’t feel safe. And I can assure you from having been through a couple of such moments, you will never feel as safe again. There’s a loss of innocence and a loss of naive trust in the world that happens at these powerful moments, and it tears us from feeling that life is completely trustworthy and sacred and nourishing.

That’s something we all went through twelve days ago. What comes next is something that many here have not been through and something that many others here have been through and that’s the threat, the noise and probably the reality of war. As one who’s been through a war and been in a war, all of the feelings coming over the airwaves and coming from speeches of leaders are suddenly very familiar. I feel like I know what we’re getting into and what’s next.

When people are threatened, they band together within a common identity, and war offers one of the oldest and deepest and absolutely most powerful senses of reconnection that we can find. You can unite a country of 280 million people with a war against a common enemy, even an invisible enemy without a country, without a religion, without boundaries. Just the idea of a common enemy is enough to unite 280 million of us as one people, with one voice, one God, and one purpose. It is seductive as hell. War makes everything simple and it comes at a time when the complexity of things overwhelmed all of us.

War makes everything simple. It gives us very simple, black and white pictures of everything and it’s so easy to fall into them. A war for infinite justice to end all evil in a world so simple that all countries are either for us or against us. Never mind the fact that British and European newspapers for years have been writing that our country has created the economic and military conditions that foster the hatred. Never mind that in other parts of the world this story has been written only in nuances and grays. It is black and white. It’s cowboy logic. You are for us or against us. It is very simple-minded and seductive. There are, of course, no problems in the real world that are as simple as such solutions.

I thought of this when I began watching the interviews: the people who are carefully chosen to have their interviews aired on the screen. The news is managed and the news is selected for the effect it will have on the viewing audience. And the effect that’s desired on the viewing audience is that it unites us as one people, with one voice, and one God behind one goal, without necessary nuances or quarrelsome questions. “A people” becomes much like “a herd” – if they ever differed at all.

I saw the interview of the blonde wife of that brave man on the fourth plane. The man who was part of a crew who fought with the hijackers and succeeded in crashing the plane into the ground killing all aboard rather than letting them fly the plane into another building — perhaps the capital, perhaps the White House. The man and all aboard were absolutely heroes with no qualification of any kind.

But there were lots of relatives and friend of heroes who wouldn’t have said that what got them through it was their faith in God and their knowledge that their husband was in heaven where they’d see him again. It was that combination of someone with the right religious message, the right picture and the right words to support the speeches that had just been heard in the capital that were chosen to be aired. The “news” was carefully selected to present the picture needed to hunker us masses into a herd.

Every bit of news we see is going to have been chosen for us and carefully selected. There is another way of saying this. The other way of saying this is that there are nuances and there are stories and there are facts and details that will not be printed and will not be aired and which we may not find out about for a year, if ever.

I don’t know what they’ll be in the new war, but I do know what some of carefully avoided facts and stories were in our last war. So I’ll take the Gulf War as an example. That’s emotionally less loaded than the unknown territory that we are getting into now. You could also go back to the Vietnam War and mention the Pentagon Papers, which brought about a tremendous amount of disillusionment in people who discovered how intricate the scheming had been to deceive the American people. But from the Gulf War there are 2 stories I’ll tell you. And I wonder if you knew either of them. If you didn’t know either of them, you need to be very worried.

The first appeared in a one-paragraph story in the inside of the December 3rd, 1990 issue of Newsweek. The Gulf War was declared January 15, 1991. Six weeks earlier in Newsweek there was this little story under the heading “Where Are the Troops?” This followed several months of our being told that the reason that we had to send troops to Kuwait was because several hundred thousand Iraqi troops had crossed over the border into Kuwait and it was a desperate situation that demanded a strong and large military force.

This story said that some independent investigators had bought satellite photos and had hired retired CIA people to interpret them. They were satellite photos taken of the Iraq – Kuwait area in, I think, mid August and in mid November — during the time that several hundred thousand troops were said to have passed on the highway into Kuwait. The photograph in mid August showed the lone highway leading from Iraq to Kuwait. At one point a large sand dune had blown over about two-thirds of the highway, making it barely passable. The photograph in mid November showed the same highway and showed that by now the sand dune had blown all the way across the highway. It was covered completely between August and November. No troops had been driven down that highway.

The satellite photo that was so precise that it showed the make of the aircraft, showed no troop formation or locations anywhere in Kuwait. We think that about 2000 members of the Republican Guard of the elite Iraqi troops were in Kuwait, and that’s a large force. But it’s not 200 to 300 thousand. Where were the troops? Those photographs were published on the front page of the St. Petersburg Florida paper on January 6, 1991. Once war was declared nine days later, to the best of my knowledge, they were not published in any newspaper in the United States for the rest of 1991. At the end of 1991, the Columbia Journalism Review, which does this sort of thing every year as a watchdog, listed that story as one of the 10 most underreported stories of 1991. Can you say “understatement”?

The second story concerns what happened shortly before the vote was taken to declare war on Iraq and to send troops into Kuwait. Some of you will remember it was a very close vote. We voted for war by only five votes. The voting followed not long after some terribly poignant testimony by a young, 15-year-old girl named Naiyira.

Naiyira testified that she had been in the nurseries in the hospitals in Kuwait when the Iraqi soldiers came in and bayoneted babies, threw babies onto the floor and murdered them. It was a repulsive, gut-wrenching, story. After the vote, at least six of our congressmen said publicly that they had changed their vote on the war. All six were going to vote against the war until they heart Naiyira’s testimony, then all six changed to vote for the war. Just in those six votes was the difference in going to war and not going to war.

But the story that Naiyira told was a complete fiction. She was the daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the United States. The Kuwaitis had hired Hill & Knowlton, one of the largest public relations firms in America, to help them prepare a story that would convince America to send our soldiers (almost as mercenaries) to protect their (and, of course, our) oil interests.

The story was completely concocted by Hill & Knowlton, and rehearsed with Naiyira, who had not been anywhere near Kuwait at the time. Now if you didn’t know this, at least know that this story is a measure of how completely and how effectively stories and important facts can be kept from us during the atmosphere of war, because it will certainly happen again. I don’t know what facts or stories will be invented or buried this time, but it will happen again. Because the only way to mobilize people for war is to keep it simple. Make it one people with one voice and one mind against one common enemy. We’ll be pulled in this direction.

The same thing happens in religion that happens in politics. The theology of war is a very different theology from the theology of peace in any religion. The theology of peace — whether it’s Christian, Muslim, or any other — is a theology with a very big God but no army. In a theology of peace we sing hymns and read poems about how we are all brothers and sisters, all the children of the same God. We speak of how there are no significant distinctions between races, nations, sexes or anything else – we are all children of the same God. It’s a very big God. And in the theology of peace there’s no mention of weapons.

The theology of war is the reverse. Churches are expected to, and do, provide a theology for war — or theology for imperialism, however you want to put it. And now it’s a very small God and a very big army. If you want to read the theology of war, there are two places you can read it right now. It’s the same theology in two different religions. One is to read Statements from the Taliban. You’ll read what a theology of war sounds like. Here are people who have taken a noble, broad, powerful, compassionate religion of Islam and found instead only things to hate. They hate liberated women. They hate women whose hair is uncovered. During Khomeni’s regime in 1979 they had some fundamentalist Muslim scholars writing that – this is hard to say with a straight face, because I remember reading it and I couldn’t read it with a straight face – saying that scientific discoveries had proven that there are emanations from a woman’s hair that drive men mad so their hair must be covered.

They hate anything outside of a very straight and narrow path on which you find only people who look just like them. They hate Westerners. They hate American culture. They hate our television; they hate the sexuality of our culture. They hate the range of sexuality in our culture. They hate the range of sexual orientation in that it finds a welcome in America but cannot find a welcome there. This is the theology of war. It’s a very tiny God who’s very angry and willing and eager to strike out against the evil in the world. It’s frightening stuff.

Now if you can’t read Arabic and don’t want to read the Taliban anymore, you can read the same theology of war from the interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Look at the list of things they hate: it’s the same list. The women’s liberation movement is responsible for the attack, gays and lesbians are responsible for the attack, women who had abortions because they don’t think breeding is a high calling for our species are responsible for the attack.

This is the same list of hate objects that you find in the Taliban. And it’s one of the most important things to understand about the theology of war. All religions are reduced to the same theology in the theology of war. It’s a list of a very tiny in-group and a very large out-group and it’s focused to be able to direct anger and hatred and weaponry against the source of evil. This reminds me of a story from Native America that I just heard this week:

A young boy went to see his grandfather because he was angry. He was angry because one of his friends had committed a terrible injustice against him and he wanted revenge and he wanted his grandfather’s advice on how to get revenge. His grandfather sat him down and said “I know these feelings. I’ve had them myself.” I too have had the feelings of hatred and anger and lust for blood and a lust for revenge. It’s as though there were two wolves inside of me fighting to control my soul. One is a good wolf who takes care of its pups and who is a peaceful wolf that only fights when it’s necessary and only as far as it’s necessary. And the other wolf is an angry, angry, angry wolf that strikes out in all directions whenever it’s given a chance. And these two wolves, the grandfather said, “are inside of me all the time fighting to dominate my soul.” The grandson thought about it for a second and he said, “I don’t get it grandfather, which wolf wins?” And the grandfather said, “The one that I feed.”

We have those two wolves now fighting for control of our soul as a nation and fighting for control or our individual souls. And the wolf that wins will be the wolf that we feed. I can’t resolve this problem this morning. But we need to say it out loud. We’re in a time of great pain and hurting. More than six thousand people have been killed. We have no idea of how many people on what will now be called “the other side” will be killed. We may wonder what to do about our hurt and about our deep sense of disconnection.

There’s another story for us here, about a woman who was sad to the core of her soul because she had lost her son. She went to see a wise man and she said, “I’m hurting so much I cannot go on with life because of the sorrow I feel for the loss of my son. There must be some magic potion or spell or something you can do to make all the hurt go away.” The wise man said “You’re very lucky that you came to me.” There is such a magic to make the hurt and the sorrow go away. All you have to do is bring me a mustard seed, a tiny mustard seed, from the home of someone who has never known sorrow.”

So she went around. She went first of course to the palaces, because certainly rich people don’t know any sorrow. And she found at every palace and every castle story after story of people who had lost a daughter, lost a son, people who had been visited by horrible tragedies, by diseases, by all of the woes of humankind. And each time she heard one of these stories from one of these families, she’d stop and stay with them for awhile to help them, because she knew what it was like to feel sorrow and she knew how to help them.

And after six or eight of these visits to families and people who had known sorrow and stopping to help them, the woman finally realized that the sage she consulted had been right. That magical mustard seed was the seed within her that made her reach out her own hand to take the hand of others who suffered. In our days and weeks and perhaps months ahead, I hope that we can find ways to reach out our hands to help those others that are suffering, here and abroad. And if when we reach our hands and take theirs we find that we don’t know how to stop the suffering, then let us hold hands and try to remember together the Dance of Life.

© Davidson Loehr

9 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

NOTE: This sermon was delivered without notes, then transcribed from the recording of the 11:15 service on this date, and edited by Dr. Loehr. While the sermons will necessarily vary some between the 9:30, 11:15 and 5:30 Sunday services, this is a fair approximation of the original. This is also why it reads more like an oral presentation than an essay.

What is truth? Usually when we ask the question, we’re asking it like a grand inquisitor, standing outside of it and treating it as an intellectual thing. We want to know what it is so we can judge it and tell you whether it is right or wrong. When we let it get inside of us, to quote one of America’s current philosophers, Chef Emeril Legasse, “we really kick it up a notch.”

When we let the question “What is truth?” get inside of us it is a whole different kind of question and it’s a lot scarier. Now its like looking at the “mirror mirror on the wall” and asking who really is the fairest of us all, and we might not like the answer we get.

We talk a lot about truth as though it were a dangerous thing to be near. I think a lot of truths are things we try to avoid more than we try to seek. Sometimes we avoid them because the truth that’s offered to us is just too small to qualify as “true.”

There’s an example of that going around the University Baptist Church down on the UT campus right now, where some bigots from Topeka, Kansas have come here to picket outside the church because UBC welcomes gays and lesbians just as Jesus might have. They carry signs with a couple sound bytes from hateful parts of the Bible – you can read it all on their web site, which is – believe this or not – www.godhatesfags.org.

Anything that is so small that it separates life and divides it into little pieces and pits the pieces against each other isn’t truth in the sense that we’re looking for in religion. It’s only a tormented fractured piece that can’t find its way home to the whole. When I hear the salvation story from Christian fundamentalism I’m struck this way. This will be two-sided in a second – I don’t like to throw stones unless I throw them up in the air so that some of them land on us too. But when I hear that least imaginative version of the Christian salvation story, a story primarily of obeying until you die, and then going to heaven, I think this just isn’t an interesting story. It’s too small. I can’t fit into it the parts of me that I have to fit into it if I’m ever going to be whole. The story can’t make me whole. It would just put me in a little compartment. So it won’t do for me.

I had a friend a dozen years ago in the ministry who was a fundamentalist minister, a wonderful man, absolutely as caring a person as I’ve ever met. And I asked him when he became a fundamentalist and he said he used to be mostly a secular humanist and when he was in college he took a biology course.

He talked to his biology professor one day about this notion that we have a special place in the world, that there was something precious about us because we had somehow been created by some loving intelligence. And his biology professor said he was an idiot for thinking like that. There was no God. Nothing had been created. There wasn’t anything special about us at all. We just evolved like slugs and slime mold does. The only rule of evolution is that whatever fits the environment best survives no matter how sleazy or crummy it is. That’s the end of it, his professor told him. Get used to it.

He said you know, my response to that story of indifferent mechanical evolution is about the same as your response to my story of special creation. And I thought you’re right, there is nothing in the story of evolution that gives people a home, gives anyone a special place to be. I think there’s another story that can, a story of which indifferent mechanical evolution is an intrinsic part. But explaining that would take a lot longer, and he’s already found something that gives his heart someplace to live and has helped him be a loving person. It sounds like he’s got the right religion for now. So sometimes we reject the truths that are offered because they are too little for us.

We can take it down another level though and say sometimes we reject the truths because we’re afraid the truth will be bad. And we’ll stay in any kind of denial offered to us rather than moving into a truth that we think will be bad. The place you find this happening most often – you find it everyday, we’ve found it in most all of our lives – is when people have a terminal illness. And you find that in early stages of dealing with their prognosis and the jargon for it is that the prognosis is negative. In ordinary language it means you’re going to die. And almost no one wants to accept this right off.

The truth is bad. Of course they don’t want to accept it. And yet there’s an ironic lesson that comes from working with terminal patients. I spent a year doing this in Chicago while I was writing my dissertation in graduate school. I worked the afternoon and evening shifts in a 900-bed hospital in downtown Chicago. And I worked almost exclusively with terminal patients because that’s where the serious work was to be done.

What you find when you work with people who are dying, and it is quite ironic, is that when they find peace — and everyone I worked with found peace before they died, partly because I was such an activist in this — when people find peace they only find it after accepting the truth that terrified them the first time they heard it. They only find it when they accept the fact that they are going to die. And there’s something about being able to get in harmony with that kind of truth that lets them forgive life, forgive God, forgive the universe, make peace with the people they’ve loved and find peace in their own hearts.

Watching that transformation was not only one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. It was one of the most uplifting because it gives you faith in the fact that we can make a home in the truth if we work at it, and that it pays to do so. I think there’s a third reason that we sometimes choose not to tell the truth or not recognize it. And that’s that even though we know it’s true and we know it’s right, we don’t know how to live in it.

The most famous story of this, my favorite, comes from the ancient Hebrew scriptures. It’s the story of Moses leading his people from slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land and freedom. And my favorite part of the story is the part that says the people didn’t want to go! They wanted to go back to Egypt. It’s true there was suffering there, but they knew how to suffer. They’d done it all their lives. But they didn’t know how to be free. And they’ll pick the familiarity of being in their rut over a freedom they have no idea how to live in.

We’ve seen little pictures of this in some of the communist countries that have flirted with democracy, when all of them seem to be going back toward a form of totalitarianism. It’s what they knew. It’s what they’re comfortable with. So sometimes we don’t choose the truth because we do not know how to live in it.

There’s a five-line poem by Stephen Crane. It’s one of my favorite poems, and it puts all of this more succinctly than any story I know. He wrote:

I was in the darkness.

I could not see my words

nor the wishes of my heart.

Suddenly, there was a great light.

Let me back into the darkness again!

Suddenly, there was a great light and it showed me a world so big, so free, so unconstrained, so open with possibility and hope that I was terrified all the way down to the bottom of my soul. Because I’ve never lived like that once. Let me back into the darkness again. I don’t know how to be free! This poem outlines a tragedy. But it’s a human story to which every one of us can relate in some ways from some times of our life.

So where do you find the courage to tell the truth? While I think we each find our own path to it I’ll tell you part of my path and how I found it and how I still think of it. Maybe some of it will be useful.

When I was in graduate school I read a lot of theologians. That’s what you get when your Ph.D. is in theology, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science. You read a lot of philosophers and scientists and theologians.

One of the theologians I read is regarded really as a fairly conservative theologian of the 20th century (Karl Barth). But like my fundamentalist preacher friend of a dozen or more years ago, he was also someone who was so warm, so full, so alive, that I liked fifty percent of what he wrote very much. And fifty percent isn’t bad. One of his best insights came from a short talk that he gave to a group of young ministers who were in school and were preparing to go out into the ministry. They wanted to know what this world-renowned theologian had to say to them that might help them save souls. And what he told them was this. I memorized it because it was so powerful for me as soon as I read it. He said:

“Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”

I think that’s dead right. And it is a thought that comes to me several times a month. Anytime I’m trying to think how do I serve this congregation of people who are actually giving me your attention for twenty or thirty minutes in a week. You deserve something that I think is worth saying, that I think is worth hearing even though your lives are in many ways so different from mine.

I think I have to try to take you more seriously than you may be taking yourself. And I have to trust that it’s what you want and that you won’t forgive me if I fail to do so either.

There’s a story from Buddhism that I like better that most of the stories of western religions. Buddhism doesn’t start from the idea that we are estranged from God, or that we are sinful and need to somehow make amends. Buddhism starts from the idea that every single person can be a Buddha. In every single person they say there’s a Buddha seed. There’s that within us which can be nourished and turned into a flower of awakening and enlightenment in Buddhahood. And our job, they say, is to act from that seed in us and speak to that part of other people.

Now that’s saying the same thing. That’s saying that the mirror mirror on the wall that we’re talking about is the same mirror that we have to be able to look at ourselves in and live with in the morning. And that means that the mirror mirror is on the wall of our soul, not our hallway. It’s that mirror inside of us that we have to be able to live with.

So the courage to tell the truth, I think, comes from knowing that what we owe one another, perhaps more than anything, is to recognize that each one of us has that kind of a Buddha seed, that kind of a God-spark, and that’s the level that we need to communicate with. We have to take others more seriously than they take themselves and we have to take ourselves more seriously than others may take us.

And those parts of us that dwell there can only live in the truth: nowhere else. There’s also a penalty for not doing it right. If we live in fear, if we live by incorporating the fears of others and if we live by the values of others we may find at the end that we have lived their lives. And that nobody lived ours.

There’s only one person in the world who is able to live your life. What a tragedy it would be if that life weren’t lived! And the kind of truth that makes us whole and connects us with each other and with the world is probably the only route there is or has ever been toward living that kind of life. That truth really can set you free. And for the record, that’s the truth.

© Davidson Loehr

17 June 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Last fall, in a silent auction at church, I agreed to offer the right to name a sermon topic. Ian Forslund was the highest bidder, and asked that I reflect on what I think it means for this church to be a “Welcoming Congregation.” Taken narrowly, that refers to the fact that this church is on record as a church that welcomes gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people into fellowship. But how? As tokens? I have overheard the greeter in a UU church (not this one!) tell a visitor “Oh yes, we have lesbians – there’s one over there!” How welcome would that feel? It’s an important topic, I’ll borrow some wisdom from the man Jesus, as we explore it together on this Father’s Day.

STORY: The Welcoming School

Once there was a small school in a small town somewhere in Texas where everybody was alike. They had all been born in Texas, they all had dark hair and brown eyes. They all got along, and it was a quiet and peaceful place. But times change, and they changed in this sleepy little town. People started moving in, from all over the place, and before long people didn’t all look alike. Some actually had blonde hair; they had never seen a real blonde in person before! And some had blue eyes: what an odd color for eyes! And some had actually moved there from other states, or from Mexico. They weren’t all native Texans any more.

The school principal didn’t know what to do, though he knew they needed to find some way to make all these new kids feel welcome. But he didn’t know what to do, so he decided to pass the problem on to the students. He called a school assembly and told them that people were starting to come to the school who were different from them, and they needed to find some way to make sure and notice them and welcome them to the school.

The kids talked and talked about it. They decided they needed a way to identify all these different sorts of people. And before long, they had one to practice on; a girl named Susan came to town with her family. She had been born in Austin. And though she had brown eyes, she had blonde hair!

Well, they were ready for her. “Oh great!” they said as they gathered around her on her first day in school. “We’ve been waiting for somebody to come who had blonde hair, and you’re it! We need a way to mark you so everybody will know you’re here, so they can all make you feel welcome. Here, wear this!” And they put around her neck a special kind of necklace they had made by tying together about thirty jingle bells. “Now whenever you move, you’ll make noise! Then when you come into a room, the first person who hears you will shout “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” and then everybody in the room will shout “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” and they can gather around you and make you feel welcome!” And that’s what they did.

Within a couple weeks, they had another new student. Stevie moved with his family from Dallas. And his hair was the right color (brown), but he had blue eyes! Amazing!

Again, though, the students were ready. “Here Stevie,” one of them said, “you need to wear this. It’s hard to tell you have blue eyes till we can get up really close to look at your face, so this will make it easier to mark you. Just wear this around your neck.” They gave him a very big capital letter “B” (for “blue”) made out of thick blue paper. “Now whenever you come into a room, the first person who sees the big blue “B” will shout “Woop, woop, woop!” and a signal that you’re here. Then all the other kids will should “Woop, woop, woop!” and gather around you to look at your eyes and make you feel welcome.” And that’s what they did.

Before long, another new family moved to town, and another new kid enrolled in the school. Her name was Maria. She had the right hair and eye color, but she wasn’t from Texas. Her family had just moved up from Mexico.

The kids were ready for this, too. They had learned a new work in their vocabulary-building exercises for people who came from strange places: alien. And here was their chance to use it. So they went up to Maria and explained that they were the welcome team from the school, that they needed to mark her so the other kids would know she was different. But since she had black hair and brown eyes, nobody could tell by looking at her that she was really an alien. So they had made something for her to wear, too. It was a very big capital letter “A” kind of a scarlet color. “Here,” they said, “you need to wear this. Then, whenever you come into a room the first person who sees your big “A” will shout “Alien! Alien!” and then everybody will shout “Alien! Alien!” and we can all gather around to see just what an alien really looks like and make you feel welcome. And that’s what they did.

Well, as more and more new kids moved into town, that became a very noisy school. The kids looked for all the differences they could find in every new kid, and invented new kinds of noises and letters to mark each one with, so the new kids would feel welcome.

But while a few of the new kids just loved all the attention, most did not. And, they told the principal, they didn’t feel one bit welcome there. The principal was stumped. Gosh: what should they do?

SERMON: Welcome!

If you’ve been coming here long, you’ve probably noticed by now that I don’t talk much about Jesus. It’s not that I haven’t heard of him. I’ve studied a fair amount about the man, I’ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar for a decade, so I’m not completely ignorant of the man and his teachings. But for me, he’s never been the most interesting or insightful religious teacher. It’s a personal thing. For me, the teachings of the Buddha and Lao-Tzu were wiser and more useful, and I have quite a few books from quite a few thinkers whose insights seem more relevant and useful. So I’ve just not used Jesus much.

All that is a negative way of saying something positive, which is that this morning I think one of Jesus’s insights is more useful and more on point than others I can think of. That insight was his most important teaching, and the teaching that was also most important to him: his idea of what he called the Kingdom of God.

That phrase “the Kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus, it was used by a lot of people in the first couple centuries. Jews, Christians, Greeks and Romans wrote about the kingdom of God, which they also called the Kingdom of Wisdom. They all used the phrase to mean the ideal world, the kind of world with the best chance of sustaining peace, justice, and love among people who were different. That’s the challenge, of course. It doesn’t take much talent and isn’t much of a victory to get along with people who look, think, and talk like you. That’s more like looking in the mirror and approving of your reflection. The challenge is to do it among people who are not like you. And the ideal world, in which that challenge was met well, was what many called the Kingdom of God.

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was not supernatural. It wasn’t something coming, had nothing to do with any sort of end of the world. It was, at least potentially, here and now, within and among us, and his frustration was that we couldn’t see it.

For Jesus, our deepest human failing – you could almost call it our “original sin,” though he never did – is our destructive but abiding habit of defining ourselves in terms too small to do justice to the idea that the whole world is God’s creation, to put it poetically.

The Jews – and of course Jesus was a Jew – often defined themselves by their differences from others. They defined themselves by their customs of animal sacrifices in the Temple, by their language, their dietary restrictions, and a dozen other ways. These differences made them feel special. They thought of themselves as God’s chosen people.

But to the man Jesus, if I understand him correctly, everyone was a child of God. And the exclusive identity of the Jews was too narrow, too small to serve life. He wanted the walls broken down, he wanted small identities sabotaged. This is the meaning behind his telling his disciples – who begged for their food, as he also did – to eat whatever was put before them.

That didn’t mean “eat your broccoli.” Jesus and his followers were all Jewish, and they all begged for their food. They lived in a world with Romans, Greeks, Samaritans, and a whole array of other ethnic and religious styles, each of which had different food laws. When Jesus told his followers to eat what was put before them, it meant “When you beg from a Roman and they offer you pork, eat it! Eat shellfish, eat whatever is put before you by the Greek, the Samaritan, and the others from whom you will be begging food.”

He was saying “Don’t allow yourself to be defined by your differences from others. Insist on defining yourselves by your similarities to others: you are all brothers and sisters, all children of God. And when people realize this and act this way, the Kingdom of God will be here.” Amen, end of sermon, end of religion, now go do it! This kind of talk is what makes the lives of prophets nasty, brutish and short. After all, nobody would ever have bothered to kill someone who just told you to love one another and have a nice day! That you can get from cheap greeting cards or bumper stickers. No, the most significant prophets and sages are deeply disturbing, because they are rearranging the foundations of our world.

I think Jesus’s teachings here are profound and disturbing. I believe if we could ever understand and act that way, the world would indeed become something that might as well be called the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Wisdom, because I can’t think of a better kind of world, no matter how unlikely it may be.

Now if this were a different kind of church and I were a different kind of preacher, I might get away with saying to you, “There, you’ve heard it, just listen to Jesus and obey, Amen!” Odds are though, it isn’t likely to work here. Most of you wouldn’t care who said it, unless you were persuaded that it was wise and might work. Knowing that I can’t just proclaim to you, but must also try to persuade you, is one of the things I like most about this profession.

So I’ll leave Jesus for awhile, and come at this from a different direction.

Remember: There’s never a problem accepting or welcoming people who are just like us. We know they’re the right kind of people. But how do we accept and welcome people who seem to differ from us in important ways? That’s the test of every personal belief system or religion, I think.

As you may know, the right to name the topic for this morning’s sermon was auctioned off to the highest bidder last fall. It feels a bit odd, being so bought and sold so openly! It’s the first time I’ve ever tried this. Ian Forslund, the lay leader this morning, was the highest bidder, and he asked me to reflect on what I think it should mean for a church to be a “welcoming church” – that is, to welcome into full participation and membership people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.

You know all the liberal platitudes here about how, by golly, just everyone is welcome here because we don’t have a prejudiced bone in our collective body. I’m just not going to say those things. I won’t pretend that it’s easy, because it isn’t. I won’t pretend that it always really happens, even here, because it doesn’t. And if there is blame for this, I think it is shared by everyone. To persuade you of this, I’ll come at this from an odd angle, because the point I want to make runs counter to most of the talk I hear among cultural liberals – of any religion.

I want to look at this through the lens of some of our history as a society. Somewhere around 35 years ago, some time during the civil rights marches and the Vietnam War, we began losing our center as a society, and we haven’t got it back yet. We used to consider ourselves Americans. We were black, white, Hispanic, theistic, atheistic, liberal and conservative, but we were all Americans.

Then it started pulling apart. We began identifying ourselves by smaller and smaller identities, splitting ourselves off from one another by our differences. We became, and remain, Afro-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and the rest. This was a battle that had already been fought and won in the early decades of the 20th century, when we were taught not to hyphenate our identities – the hyphen was defined as a minus sign – but to define ourselves simply as “Americans.” But 35 years ago, it all began coming undone. Drugged by the narcissism of the 1960s and 1970s, we began defining ourselves by what was local, special, or different about us. Freud wrote about what he called “the narcissism of small differences” over 70 years ago, and we are still living it out.

I see our current “victim culture” in the same way: as definitions of one another isolating us through our differences rather than identifying us through our similarities. It’s almost as though we want others to like us because of the ways that we’re not like them. If there is much that’s more naive than that, I don’t know what it is.

Why? Because I don’t think we ever accept or welcome others based on their differences from us. We feel kinship when we feel related. We feel we all belong to the human family when we identify ourselves as brothers and sisters. And we can only feel related when we define ourselves by our similarities, by those things we share that we value more than those things we do not share.

For example:

If someone saves your life at the risk of their own, how much else do you really need to know about them? How much else do you really care? Or if a teacher finds a way to reach your troubled teenager for the first time, and it turns her life around – how much else do you need to know about that teacher who just saved the soul, maybe the life, of your kid? A young athlete scores the winning touchdown for your school, a young woman kicks the winning soccer goal. They just became local heroes. Nobody’s asking anything else about them.

Maybe it’s easiest to make the point I’m trying to make in sports, so let’s take some sports stories.

In the 1930s, a whole generation before the civil rights movement, the status of black people in this country was far worse than most of us could imagine. There were still a few lynchings in the South. Restaurants, restrooms, even drinking fountains were segregated, marked “whites only” or “colored.” I remember as a young boy living in Tulsa, Oklahoma seeing all of those signs. No one would argue that colored people, the negros, as they were called then, were in any sense full citizens of this country.

Also in the 1930s, our country was building a growing antagonism with Germany. Hitler had come into power, and was teaching the German people that their white race was the Master Race, immeasurably superior to blacks, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and others. When Jesse Owens beat the fastest runners in the world – including Germany’s best – to win a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, held in Germany, he was celebrated back here as an American hero. He was black, and he was a hero. And “hero” trumped “black.”

Joe Louis agreed to fight the great German boxer Max Schmelling around the same time, and we called him “America’s Hope.” He lost to Schmelling the first time and the Germans gloated. When Louis fought Schmelling again, and knocked him out in the first round, he was an American hero.

Jesse Owens and Joe Louis were not celebrated because they were black. They were celebrated because they were American, and they were great. The categories of being an American and prizing excellence were categories they shared with about 100 million other Americans. As long as they could be defined by their similarities with us, they were welcomed. When they were defined only by their differences – as they were in other areas of their lives – they were not welcomed.

After World War II, major league baseball – known then as America’s Favorite Pasttime – began to be integrated when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Many people, including many baseball fans, hated him at first, because they just saw him as colored. They identified him by his differences, and they hated him.

But before long, they began to see him, instead, as a baseball player, and a very good one. Then they accepted him. Not as a negro, but as a remarkable athlete who made America’s favorite game better.

Today, it’s hard to believe that a half century ago all major professional sports in this country only allowed white players. Today, white players are a distinct minority in baseball, basketball and football. It has been a big change in the right direction.

Thirty years ago, as some of you will remember, the most famous person in the world, the man recognized by more people than anyone else on the planet, was Muhammed Ali, the loudmouth boxer. He changed his name from Cassius Clay – which he called his “slave name.” He refused to go into the Army to fight in Vietnam, and he converted to become a follower of Elijah Mohammed, the white-hating leader of the Black Muslims. If you’re out after three strikes, that’s at least four. Ali was attacked, reviled, his boxing championship was stripped, and he was forbidden to fight for about three years. But during this time, as he spoke at college campuses and everywhere else, people began to realize that he had a strong sense of integrity and authenticity. When he returned to the ring, he demonstrated both great boxing and great character, and became the best-recognized and one of the most admired people on earth.

Being accepted in all these other and larger categories made his race nearly irrelevant. He is still one of the most admired people alive. When he appeared as the mystery person chosen to light the Olympic torch a few years back, there was hardly a dry eye to be found. Sure he was still black, still a Muslim, still a loudmouth. But he was also a man of great integrity, a man of principle, a man with a great sense of humor, and a champion. And for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, those are far more important facts than the color of his skin.

Today, though we don’t mention it nearly enough, heroes and role models can be any sex, any race, and any sexual orientation. Five years ago the most famous man on the planet, and one of the most admired, was Michael Jordan. His Chicago Bulls basketball jersey, number 23, outsold all other team jersey numbers combined. You saw them on kids of all colors, because color didn’t matter any more. Everybody wanted “to be like Mike.”

If anyone had simply said “love him because he’s black,” we wouldn’t remember his name now. But we were saying we loved or admired him because we had learned to define him in much larger categories. He embodied values we respected but could not demonstrate as dramatically as he did. Jordan was fiercely competitive, he played fair, he was the best player the game had ever seen, he seemed almost to will his Chicago Bulls to six world championships – defeating at least two teams that were better.

And whether you saw him in press conferences, commercials, or funny and satirical comedy skits on “Saturday Night Live,” you saw a quality of character you couldn’t help but admire – and, probably, envy. Michael Jordan, like Muhammed Ali, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis, embodied the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., who hoped we would someday be able to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Slowly but surely, we are making progress in this, the most heterogeneous society on earth. Thirty years ago, interracial marriages were hardly ever seen. Today, 10% of the marriages in this country are between different races or ethnicities. And as it is with race, it is also becoming with sexual orientation, though we have farther to go there.

But Elton John was king of the world as an entertainer, and nobody cared that he was homosexual, and about as garish and flaming as you can get. Today there are many entertainers and actors who are openly gay, lesbian or bisexual, and who draw crowds because, more importantly, they’re talented, and we love talent.

Martina Navratilova was hated by some because she was a lesbian, but she was admired and applauded by far more, because for about a decade she was the greatest women’s tennis player in the world. The bigger categories trumped the smaller ones. She excelled in things we really cared about, and her differences from the sexual norms of the country became secondary, if they were even that important.

The social norms are changing for the better, and I think it is clear how they are changing and what the secret is, the secret of expanding our boundaries and welcoming people who differ from the social norms. We do have work to do, of course.

For one thing, we have to learn to accept a wider range of behaviors and life styles as parts of the social norm. We’re used to seeing couples holding hands. And the more couples we see holding hands who happen to be of the same sex, the more we’ll come to see it is natural that while most love is heterosexual, some love is homosexual, and what is important is that it is love. The more families we see where both parents are of the same sex, the easier it will be to understand that what we really value are loving parents. And if they’re loving parents and loving partners, we’ll be glad those kids have them, and glad those two people found each other.

It happens gradually, the way the rate of interracial marriage moved from almost zero to around ten percent.

But do you see what’s happening here, how and why it works? What’s happening is that when we begin to stop identifying ourselves by small or exclusive identities, it gets easier to feel related to one another. I think it is a self-defeating mistake for blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians – or for that matter religious liberals – to define themselves, or allow themselves to be defined, by the things that make them different from others. We should all want, instead, to be known by the content of our characters and the courage and compassion of our deeds.

So: how do we become welcoming people? The same way we become welcome people: by identifying ourselves and others only under the most important values and categories, the traits we all admire, the traits that can unite rather than divide us.

What are those? There’s no mystery here. We value people of integrity and courage, people of character. We value people who try to love, and try to offer their love out into the world in ways that give the world a blessing as they pass through it. We need and admire people who want to be in committed relationships, whether those relationships are with another person or with the larger human community. We admire and need good parents in our society, honest citizens, good workers and fair employers.

You know this list. You can finish it as well as I can. We admire and welcome people who act like they really are children of God, people with a little spark of divinity in them, folks who try to become better people, partners, parents and citizens: people who make our world better because they are in it. And the more we can identify ourselves and others by those standards rather than by lesser ones, the better our world will be. I do not believe that gay people want to be accepted merely as gay people, or that black people only want to be welcomed as our token blacks. I think they want what we all want: to be recognized and welcomed as our brothers and sisters, as children of a God of love. That’s the better world we need to create together.

How good can it get? Well, Jesus once taught that such a world, where we simply see ourselves as brothers, sisters and children of God, would be a world so perfect it could only be called the Kingdom of God. I can’t improve on that, so I’ll say “Thank you Jesus” – and Amen.

© Davidson Loehr

10 June 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

PUPPET SHOW:

By Julie Irwin, Davidson Loehr, and the creative spirits of the No-Strings Puppetteers.

Characters – Whiney and Eeyore, Ted and Jessie. It’s a wide stage, the hand-puppets appear on center stage (Stage A) or the sides (Stage B).

SCENE I, STAGE A

(Whiney and Eeyore enter together. Whiny talks in a very high and whiny voice, and Eeyore talks very slowly and negatively like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.)

Whiney: People are so STUPID!

Eeyore: Yes, tell me about it. Just like you’d expect in this stupid world.

Whiney: And most people just aren’t that cool, do you know what I mean? We never get to meet any cool people!

Eeyore: Yeah, it just figures.

Whiney: Where are the other cool people? People who are in a good mood and everything and fun.

Eeyore: Maybe they all just DIED. That’s just what you’d expect with all this air pollution and crime and everything.

(Ted and Jessie enter separately, one at each side of the stage. They’re happy, seem friendly. Very different body language than the first two. Looser, more fun somehow. Whiney and Eeyore are together in the center of the stage. One at a time, in turns, they see and approach Whiney and Eeyore)

Ted: Hi! Who are you? What are you doing?

Whiny: I’m just sitting here waiting for some cool people. There are no cool people around here or anything. This place is BORING!

Ted: Well, I don’t know if I’m cool or anything, but do you want to play this game with me? It’s the new Playstation 3.

Whiny: No. I don’t want to just play with anyone who just comes along and asks me. Do you know any cooler people to play with? We never get those here.

Ted: There is that guy way over there, sitting on the Harley Davidson and singing a rap song. I think that’s Jennifer Lopez on the back of his bike. He looks cool.

Whiny: Yeah, but he hates me. He’s never nice to me.

Ted (aside, to the audience): I wonder why!

(long pause while Whiny looks out longingly toward the phantom cool guy, maybe in the church audience)

Whiny: I wish he would want to play with me, instead of you. (pause)

Ted: Ok, well, sorry to bother you. (leaves)

SCENE II, Stage B

Jessie: Hi! What are you doing?

Eeyore: What do you think I’m doing? Sitting here by myself, alone, lonely in the dark.

Jessie: Well, seems pretty bright to me. But do you want me to turn on the light?

Eeyore: What would be the point of that? Just wastes electricity (sigh).

Jessie: Well, we could talk and stuff, or maybe I could tell you a story.

Eeyore: I doubt it would be a funny story. What’s the point?

Jessie: You haven’t even heard it! Let me tell you: Once upon a time, there was a

Eeyore: You know, I need to leave my time free in case anything really fun comes along, even though it’s probably not going to.

(pause while Eeyore mopes)

Jessie: Ok, I guess I’ll go then. (leaves)

Eeyore: I knew it. Everyone always leaves. Why do I even bother?

SCENE III, STAGE A

Ted. Are you with THEM? (pointing down to where Whiny and Eeyore exited)

Jessie. Heck no! Who ARE they?

Ted. I don’t know. I think they moved into the green house last week.

Jessie. Oh. We were on vacation, we just got back last night. I’m Jessie. (extends his hand)

Ted: (Extends his hand) Hi Jessie, it’s nice to finally MEET somebody! I’m Ted, we just moved here from New Jersey. Listen Jessie, I have this new Play Station, and the snowboarder game is for two people. Would you like to play it with me?

Jessie. Cool! I’ve heard about the game, but I’ve never played it. Afterwards, would you like to come over to our house? I just got a copy of the movie Spy Puppets (Ted’gasp, Spy puppets) that I wanted to watch with somebody. I haven’t seen it yet, maybe we could watch it and microwave some popcorn?

Ted: That’s so great! I never saw Spy Puppets when it was in the theaters.

Jessie: It would be so neat if we could be friends, Ted!

Ted. It sure would, Jessie! I miss my friends from New Jersey, and I really want to make some new friends. I’ll show you how to play the game.

Jessie: Then let’s go watch Spy Puppets.

Ted: Great let’s go!

They exit together.

SCENE IV

Eeyore and Whiny enter again, slowly and still in a bad mood.

Whiny: We still don’t have any friends to hang out with!

Eeyore: Yeah, no one ever comes around here.

Shaking their heads, they exit.

SERMON: Walking on Water

What is the power behind miracles? Is it weird science? supernatural deities with nothing better to do than poke around in our lives? Or is the power where Jesus said the Kingdom of God is: within and among us? And even if this mysterious power is within and among us, what on earth does that mean, and what kind of “miracles” are we talking about?

This isn’t a scientific question. It’s more of a poetic or biographical question. It’s about how our attitudes and our courage create our world, whether friendly or unfriendly, and our possibilities, whether pinched or expansive, as in the puppet show.

There must be a hundred different ways to preach on this, and some of the challenge is finding one you haven’t thought of before. So I’ll weave together two stories, one factual and one mythical.

For those of you who don’t know the story of walking on water, it is a Christian story about Jesus walking across the water to his disciples, who are in a boat. The only minister I’ve ever discussed this with was my friend Todd Driskill, about fifteen years ago. Todd was a minister in the Disciples of Christ church – which is much more liberal up north than it is here in Texas. It made him crazy when his parishioners took biblical stories literally, whether it was walking on water or rising from the dead. For Todd, Jesus “rose from the dead” only in the minds of his disciples; and “walking on water” was an imaginative way of saying that Jesus could go places and do things his disciples couldn’t, because he had a faith that they lacked.

A century ago, there was an Austrian writer named Karl Kraus who is among my favorites, and one of his aphorisms reminds me of this kind of power. “I hear noises which others do not hear,” he wrote, “and they reveal to me the music of the spheres – which others don’t hear either.” Something in that is true, I think: “I hear noises which reveal to me the music of the spheres.” Jesus used to tell his parables, then complain that his disciples didn’t have “the eyes to see or the ears to hear” what they were really about. Jesus heard noises others didn’t hear, and he heard a harmony in life that others seldom hear either. So did the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, and so many others. They walked on water. They went places few others go because they were sustained by a kind of faith in the basic goodness and the positive possibilities of life.

In the stories about these and other great sages, you almost always read that they went through hard personal tests and struggles to gain that faith, to be able to hear those noises. Fifteen years ago one of the hottest religion scholars in this country was Joseph Campbell. His six-part television series with Bill Moyers on “The Power of Myth” was seen by hundreds of millions of people. Over 2,000 study groups sprang up spontaneously in this country alone, for people to meet and discuss Campbell’s ideas.

And Campbell’s central idea was that one of the most transformative opportunities in life is the chance to go on what he called the Hero’s Quest. This is the three-step process by which both mythic heroes and exceptional people gained the authenticity, the personal power, that let them become the kind of people we want to keep telling stories about.

But back to my friend Todd.

He was a good minister and a good preacher, but biblical literalism really drove him nuts. His Christianity was too important to him to become something radical like a Unitarian, but he had been a minister about twelve years, and he wasn’t happy. He felt, as many ministers do, that his people wanted him to say he believed these stories literally, and – again like most ministers – he didn’t. Todd didn’t think he could tell the truth and keep his job, and if he couldn’t say what he believed, he thought he would lose his integrity. I can still hear him saying that if only people would read the Bible intelligently, it had enough in it to ground and guide a good life. But now, Todd needed to leave the only world he had ever really lived in – the world of orthodox Christianity – and find some place that could be a home for his spirit. Joseph Campbell used to call this the quest for “the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul,” and it’s certainly what Todd yearned for.

In the Hero’s Quest, this is the first stage, known as The Call. You are called to be something or somewhere else, and it feels like your identity, your authenticity, is at stake. If you answer the call, you will have to leave the comfort of the familiar and risk a great deal.

But this is scary. Most of us can probably remember at least one time that we took a risk, spoke up when we had been afraid to, and did something we’re still proud of. We all have heroic quests, small and large. The great myths explode these experiences into grand stories of heroes slaying dragons or wrestling with God, of Buddha sitting under the Bo Tree and resisting irresistible temptations, Jesus resisting temptations of the Devil.

In the Middle Ages, when most of the world had not yet been explored by Europeans, sailors were afraid if you went too far you’d sail off the edge of the world. And mapmakers would mark unexplored waters with the warning “There be monsters here!” Psychologically, that’s still true. There be monsters in unexplored areas. There are dangers leaving the familiar, even when it doesn’t feel like a home any more. And it takes a lot of energy! Thirty years ago, when we were sending men to the moon, I remember reading that it took more fuel to get the space ship out of the earth’s gravitational pull than it took to go the half million miles from there to the moon and back. It takes a lot of energy to escape the gravitational pull of the familiar.

In 1991, Todd finally sailed into the waters where monsters lived. He resigned from his church and he, Marsha and their son Tyler moved to Summit, New Jersey, where he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Drew University. He studied the bible, theology and philosophy. We had a lot of long and intense conversations about these things, by telephone and e-mail. He really wanted to teach churches, and ministers, how to read the bible in more intelligent ways. But he knew there wasn’t a paying job with that description anywhere, so he hoped to go into teaching at a seminary.

His faith was challenged in graduate school. He lost the rest of his naivete, and six years later his beliefs were much deeper, better informed, and far less orthodox. He came alive in a way I had never seen him. Marsha said he had found faith and hope again, and life had become an exciting possibility.

This is the second stage of the Hero’s Quest: leaving your familiar world, trading security for adventure and risk. This is the stage when storytellers say the hero slays dragons. The dragons, of course, are not really big scaly lizards; they are internal demons, ancient and primitive fire-breathing voices inside us that shout “No!” and want to scare us back into our old ways. Marsha could allow Todd to grow far beyond the boundaries of any kind of Christianity she had ever known. But they both came from big families, and Todd lost big parts of both families when his beliefs no longer seemed to overlap with theirs. Dragons. Monsters. Forces begging you, threatening you, to go back where you were before. These are hard struggles, as many of you know from your own lives.

The final stage of the Hero’s Quest is what Joseph Campbell called The Return. It isn’t just about going off to school or meditating in a cave and getting a private revelation, feeling groovy and being finished. The full spiritual quest can not be played out only within the stage of your mind. It must open out to the world, and find its own gifted way to play there, where it counts for more. There is a necessity, a command, to bring it back to the world and share it. Campbell used to say that “an authentic person rejuvenates the world.” I think it is true. And what the Hero’s Quest is about is gaining a deeper kind of authenticity, and confidence, and power.

Few people would claim, as Karl Kraus did, to be able to hear “the music of the spheres.” But you do hear some new noises, and you do hear some music. The music is the sense of a kind of harmony about life, a kind of safety, a feeling that there really weren’t monsters there, that the dragons can be slain, and a feeling that this news must be shared with others. I felt this way after graduate school. I still do. And so did Todd.

He was teaching in small colleges as an adjunct professor, sorry that the perfect job didn’t exist. I was sorry he couldn’t be in the ministry, because he was so good at it. Then in November of 1997, he got a phone call. It was from the Society for Biblical Literacy, a worldwide organization run by the Disciples of Christ churches. Their longtime director had died, and they had been advertising for a new one. One of Todd’s former district supervisors saw the ad and called them to say he knew the man for whom this job was created. They were already at the third interview stage with two candidates, but they phoned Todd to say they would be willing to fly him to Atlanta for an interview. At the end of that interview, they offered him the job and he accepted.

If this story were being written in a Bible, it would be called a miracle. And perhaps it was. Todd called me with the news, more excited than I had ever heard him. It was the job he had been born to do, but he would never have found it if he hadn’t taken the risks he took six years earlier, because the job required a Ph.D. in theology with a solid grounding in biblical studies.

I was both happy for him and proud of him. “How does it feel?” I asked. And my friend said “It feels like I’m walking on water – and it really is a miracle!” Ten years ago, Todd wasn’t happy. The world didn’t seem friendly, he couldn’t find a home in it, his spirit was starved. He was staying within the boundaries of his family and his friends, and he was losing his soul. Four years ago, the world was a friendly place. Todd was in love with life; he saw a world filled with possibilities and felt empowered in it. Now he heard noises that most others did not hear, and those noises told him of some of the music of the spheres, which most others didn’t hear either.

How can you write about transformations like this without resorting to mythical, magical language? If you leave out the feeling of miracle, you leave out the point of the story. Knowing people who have gone on the Hero’s Quest, having done some bits of it myself, makes it much easier to read the stories in the bible or in fairy tales or other myths and understand the kind of thing the writer was struggling to express. It’s also called being “born again,” being “born of the Holy Spirit.” It happens. I’ve seen it.

I need to tell you the end of Todd’s story. In December 1997, he was preparing to move with Marsha to Atlanta. Tyler was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, so just the two of them were moving, leaving the next day. Todd lifted an air conditioner into the rented truck, fell forward and died of a heart attack. He was 46. Three days later, I delivered the eulogy at his funeral, in the church he had grown up in. He died at the same age his father had died, and is buried next to him.

It wasn’t fair. But I wonder if any of you are tempted to think that Todd lost, after all. Don’t be. He didn’t lose, and he would have been the first to say so. We all die. We win by living with integrity and courage while we’re here. He spent the last six years of his life doing what he needed to do to become authentic the way he needed to. Marsha is remarried, Tyler begins law school this fall, and they both remember Todd as a brave man who took the road less traveled, and for whom taking that road really did make all the difference – both for him and for them. Tyler isn’t afraid of life, of taking chances, or of going on his own Hero’s Quest when the time comes. He knows it must be done, and he knows it can be done, because he saw his father do it. And Marsha also gained confidence and courage, and remembers those six years as transformative for her too. Todd’s life ended in the midst of a miracle that he didn’t live to see through. Maybe Marsha will. Maybe Tyler will. Maybe you will – for Todd’s story is in you too now, and it’s not one you’re likely to forget soon. So some miracle seeds have been planted here today. Perhaps they will sprout.

We’re born into a world of both fear and hope, refusal and possibility, and are asked which we shall serve. Most of the time, we stay on the paths with everyone else. Once in awhile we hear a call, offering us – if we are willing to work at it – the chance to walk on water. One path is safe and commonplace. The other is risky and uncertain. It’s a call from something that seems to know our true name. If we never answer the call, our story may not be either heroic or even very authentic. It may be like the story of Rip Van Winkle, who just went to sleep for twenty years and had nothing to show for the time but a beard. Sometimes in our lives, we come to a place where two roads diverge in the woods. We can follow the crowd, or we can take the road less traveled. It really does make all the difference.

© Davidson Loehr

27 May 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

One way we can get to know ourselves more intimately is by understanding what our sacred stories are. These are the plots, the scripts, the “necessary fictions” through which we find ourselves in the most comforting and compelling ways. We’re probably all living out the plots of some stories. We’ll look at some, and leave you the homework of wondering about your own story, how well you’re serving it, and how well it’s serving you.

STORY: The Great Stone Face

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

That sounded easy enough, but it was not. For the face was in a part of the mountain impossible to climb, and so high up it was almost always obscured by clouds or fog. Furthermore, the face seemed to look differently in different light, and no two people ever saw it exactly the same. But it was important, this face, because if only it could be seen clearly – well, then you would know who you really were, and who you were meant to be. And so the people studied what they could see of the face, as best they could, and they told others what they thought they saw.

Stories even arose, stories about times that the great face had actually spoken to someone, and what the great face had said. People wrote these things down, and tried to make a list of do’s and don’ts for living, but no two lists ever completely agreed. Still the people told their stories, and listened to the stories of others, because after all there was so much at stake, if only they could get it right.

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

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

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

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

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

SERMON: Sacred Stories

There is a wonderful old story about stories; it is the legend of Sheherezade. She was condemned to death by an immature, woman-hating tyrant. To save her life and the lives of others, she began telling the tyrant a story the night before he was going to have her killed, and she ended the story in mid-air, to be finished the next night. He let her live another night because he wanted to hear the ending. But she was no fool, and the story kept going on, for a thousand and one nights, until through her stories she had finally softened his heart, and opened his eyes and ears. She awakened the decent person that was inside of this tyrant. The decent person was waiting like a Sleeping Beauty, for someone who could reach his soul and break the evil spell under which his life was being lived.

I like the Sheherezade legend because it shows some of the power of stories to change our lives. But I also like it because we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live. And we tell them, as well, in order to transform both ourselves and others into the people we think we were meant to be.

We live trying to act the way we think we should, trying to conform to some image of who we are supposed to be, how those we care for want or need us to act, some picture of how life is to be. And when you watch how we live, it’s clear that we are giving those pictures, those mostly unspoken stories, immense power. We’re puppets, they’re the strings. And we move and obey as though our stories were sacred – which, to us, they usually are.

And there’s the rub! If only all our stories were sacred! But they’re not. We all live by some stories that aren’t worthy of us, that don’t cherish us or even affirm our basic worth or honor our spirit, our energy, the things we really love. The more a story can do that, the more sacred it is, and the more it serves life. The less a story does that, the more profane and unworthy it is.

I’ll give you an example of someone living out a very powerful – and famous – story without even being aware of it. About ten years ago I was the theme speaker at the weeklong Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. There were about 600 adults and 400 kids there, from ten or twenty states, so none of us knew many of the people. But since I was more visible than the other ministers there, a lot of folks cornered me during the week to tell me their stories. I spoke with one woman who told me her problem was that she just couldn’t seem to do enough. She was working hard at everything, sacrificing herself to her husband, her children, and nearly anyone else who asked. But her life felt empty, she didn’t seem to be getting anything out of it, didn’t seem to be getting anything back from all this giving she was doing. I recognized her story, and asked her if she thought she was supposed to be getting something out of it. She got a little indignant and said yes, it’s supposed to work that way: you give and you give, but eventually, you get back, too, and that’s what makes it all worth it.

That’s what I mean by a script, a guiding fiction, a myth to live by. There is a story being lived out not only by that woman, but by millions of women and men – though that one is mostly a women’s story. But there is no way to help this woman do well enough to get what she wants, because she is living out a story that is not likely to have a happy ending unless she can change the4 behavior of the other characters in her life. She is living out the story of Cinderella, who works and slaves for others, and whose only hope is that somehow a fairy Godmother will see her pure heart, reward her with a handsome prince, and usher in a kind of Judgement Day, when all who have wronged her will be punished. Probably, the only way she can win is to get out of this story and find a different kind of role to play, because in real life – as you have noticed by now – there is a serious shortage of fairy godmothers.

Cinderella is only a fairy tale. But the best fairy tales have plots that have been told many times in many other ways. This Cinderella script, for example, has been compared to the ancient Greek story of Persephone, the obedient daughter. It’s also a lot like a traditional script for women found in many religions, that says you spend your whole life giving to men, to children, and to all others who ask, you spend your life as a Suffering Servant, and you’ll get your reward in heaven.

To be fair, you have to say that this role is not always, or even necessarily, bad. It depends on the other characters in the story, and what roles they are playing. This is often a very rewarding role for women, because their husband, children, and friends do appreciate and love them not in heaven but here and now for their hard work and their good heart.

Nor do you have to be a woman to find yourself in this story. College students living on no money in crummy apartments can identify with Cinderella too, where the role of the fairy godmother will be played by their eventual employer who makes all of this sacrifice worth it. And that usually happens. So it is not necessarily a bad story. But sometimes, a story like that Cinderella story, that “pay now, fly later” script – sometimes it only makes people perpetual victims. And then the only way out of it is to get out of the story, and find a better myth to live by – a more sacred story that treats you like a more sacred person.

Bad stories enslave us to visions that are profane because they are too small to hold our spirits and serve our destinies. Most Cinderellas are perpetual victims. Little visions demean and degrade us; expansive visions ennoble and honor us, and call us toward greater things. That’s what I mean by looking for and changing to a sacred story.

Changing from a small story to a bigger one can make a huge difference. I had a very simple revelation of this sort just yesterday morning. It isn’t dramatic, but it’s the kind of “Aha!” experience you have had before too. I was riding my new bicycle on the Hike & Bike trail that runs along both sides of Town Lake downtown. As some of you know, that’s about a ten-mile loop, going along the north side of the river, then crossing over several bridges and running back along the south side.

The trail, as the name says, is for both bicycles and people who are walking or running. It isn’t all that wide a trail though, and as I got more exhausted and dehydrated, I noticed that those walkers seemed to think they owned the whole path! They’d just spread out, two or three across, so they could talk, forgetting there were bicyclists trying to get by! While I’m riding the bike, I start thinking to myself “Well, get out of the way, will you? It’s supposed to be a bike path!” Then while I had stopped to rest (and work on this sermon), I saw a bicycle brush by some walkers pretty closely. I knew just how she felt! After she had passed them, one of the walkers turned to the others and said “Damned bicycles!”

I began fantasizing about all the bicyclists getting together, hiring a lawyer, and filing some kind of a class action suit against all the walkers, to establish bikers’ rights. Then I imagined that all the walkers and runners would do the same thing, and sue to have the bicyclists removed from the path. After just a short while I stopped that, because it began feeling too much like the world we’re already living in.

Finally, somewhere around the 6th or 7th mile, I backed off, drank a lot of water, and thought about it again. That’s when the minor revelation came, and I said “Oh wait, I get it; it’s not like a clash of bikers’ rights versus walkers’ rights. It’s supposed to be like a kind of dance, and we’re all supposed to help choreograph it so we can move together.” Suddenly, the bike ride was a lot different, and a lot more fun. I was more aware of the whole pattern of movements of bikers, runners and walkers going both ways, and of trying to blend my movements in among theirs so the dance went more gracefully.

When my story got bigger, my life got better. A bigger and more inclusive story is closer to a sacred story than a smaller one. And it pulls you into a bigger and more positive picture of life with its affirmations, rather than shutting you out with its self-centered walls, the way battles of individual rights and entitlements can. I’ll take my bike back there tonight for another round of dancing.

I’m trying to plant the idea that we have the power to change from a small story to a bigger one, and that change makes a huge difference in the quality of our life and our joy in living it.

Let me give you some more examples, from the field of psychology. I don’t think of psychology the way most psychologists do. Our fields overlap, because the word “psychology” means the structure and understanding of the soul – “psyche” is the Greek word for “sou.” I don’t think psychology is a science. I think that psychology, like religion, is an imaginative art. There are many different kinds of psychology, of course, and each school of psychology adopts a basic story, a basic set of assumptions about people, and use that to interpret the lives of their clients – or even to force life to fit theirstory. I’ll give you two vignettes to let you feel how the same life transition can be seen through several very different stories.

The first is a story about the childhood of Manuel Manoleta. He died in 1947, but many bullfight fans still regard him as the greatest and most courageous bullfighter in Spain’s history. When Manoleta was a child, however, he was neither great nor brave. He was delicate and sickly, interested only in painting and reading. He stayed indoors and clung to his mother’s apron so much that his sisters and other children used to tease him. He rarely joined other boys’ games of soccer or playing at bullfighting. But when he was eleven, all of this suddenly changed, and for the rest of his life, nothing much mattered to him except the bulls. In his first bullfight, while still a young boy, those who were there said he stood his ground without moving an inch. (from The Soul’s Code by James Hillman, pp. 15-16)

What kind of a story could we use to explain this radical transformation? Psychologists who followed Alfred Adler would recognize this as classic compensation, where his adult bravery was just to make up for feeling inadequate as a boy. Freudians would go even farther, seeing this as sublimation, and would describe his adult bravery in the bull ring as just his childhood fears trying to wear masks to fool people. He remains a damaged and frightened boy all his life in this story. It is not a sacred story. It denies both real courage and a nobility of spirit to Spain’s greatest bullfighter, by reducing him to fit a very mechanical kind of story to which some – though not all – psychologists have become addicted. I’ve always thought of Freudian psychology – and most of traditional psychology – as a kind of cousin to the field of hydraulics. They deal with pressures from one part of life that exert pressures on another part of life until they’re released or resolved. Not all Freudians agree with this interpretation, of course.

The second explanation of Manoleta’s transformation comes from the Jungian psychologist James Hillman. Hillman sees the boy hiding behind his mother’s apron as a boy called to great acts of courage for which he is not yet ready. He is scared of his calling, scared of the greater dangers he must prepare himself to face. Something in him drives him toward his personal destiny. At age eleven, he was ready. And from that time on, the “apron” behind which he hid was bright red, meant to attract the danger of thousand-pound bulls. In this story, little Manoleta had a great calling, even as a child, and his life’s destiny was to grow into that calling and become Spain’s greatest bullfighter.

The second story grants Manoleta dignity, and gives him credit for his courage, while the first brushes it all off as the false costume worn by a neurotic and frightened child. The second story is ennobling; the first is demeaning. Let’s do another one. A similar pattern occurred in the childhood of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin. When he was only three, he heard a concert violinist play a stunning solo at a concert. He felt from that moment that he was meant to play the violin, and asked his parents if they would buy him a violin for his fourth birthday. They humored him by buying him a toy violin made of metal. He burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing to do with it. He wanted a real violin, not a toy one. At that time, he wasn’t ready for a real violin. His hands were too small (Hillman, p. 17).

A Freudian psychologist could explain all his later success as compensation or sublimation to cover his childhood humiliation. I don’t think those are good stories because they can’t see the spirit, the calling that Yehudi Menuhin felt even at that young age. (Or, to put more of a point on it, it’s a psychology that has left out the psyche, the soul.) James Hillman suggests instead that he felt a high and noble calling as a three-year-old, and spent the rest of his distinguished life answering and serving that calling as one of the world’s greatest violinists. Hillman’s story is a sacred story because it affirms life, rather than explaining profound and creative drives away as though they were nothing but the neurotic charades of a damaged young boy.

Hillman calls this his “acorn theory” of psychology. He suggests that we carry within us the awareness of the kind of person we are called to be. We are born with a certain distinct style, and need to develop in certain ways to fulfill that style. We are called toward certain things, but not others, and we need to pursue those things toward which we are called. We are driven to certain experiences and adult paths to fulfill real and healthy callings. We’re not driven by neurotic reaction against childhood injuries, but by the sacred calling that wants to connect us with life. That’s a sacred story.

I agree with James Hillman that “We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives,” (p. 33) Another psychologist I’ve always liked is Rollo May, who once defined psychotherapy as “the search for an adequate personal mythology.” That’s what I’m calling a sacred story: an adequate personal mythology, a myth worth living by.

We are the people living in that valley where we look up to see a vague but important face carved in the rock high above. We know there is something terribly significant about that face. Somehow, it calls us toward a noble, even a sacred, destiny. We are not quite sure what that is, for the face seems to change as you move through life, or as you view it from different perspectives.

Or perhaps this is just a myth. Perhaps there is no face up there in the rocks at all. There may have been long ago, but the image seems to be worn away beyond recognition now, and all we have are the stories. They are not much. Children’s stories, fables, old myths, tales and images from our sacred scriptures – these are about all that we have. And so we tell those stories, as Sheherezade did, in order to live. That is why it is so important to know these guiding fictions that shape our lives and to find better myths to live by: because we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live.

What about you? What are your stories? What roles are you playing? What are you serving with your life? And is it worthy of that spark of life inside of you that is only really happy when you are being true to yourself?

What if it is true that your heart, your soul, holds the image of your destiny and calls you to it? Unpacking the image can take a lifetime, because we tend to keep forgetting what we are meant to be. But according to a Jewish legend, the evidence for this forgetting your soul’s calling is pressed right into your upper lip. That little crevice below your nose is where the angel pressed its forefinger to seal your lips. That little indentation is all that is left to remind you of the fact that your guiding angel is a part of you, trying to tell you what to do. That is why, they say, when we are trying to recall an insight or a lost thought, our fingers go up to that spot. Could it be true? Well, it is certainly loving, affirming and life-giving. And if it is that loving, affirming and life-giving, if it leads us into a bigger world and a more authentic life, isn’t that precisely the kind of truth for which you yearn?

© Davidson Loehr

20 May 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

I remember, some years ago, hearing a grand old preacher describe almost all religious literature as “love-talk.” He didn’t elaborate, so it’s been rattling around inside since then. It seems like a way of understanding religious expression that makes it easy to plant fantastic thoughts in a down-to-earth life with integrity.

SERMON: Love Talk

This sermon title comes from an 89-year-old preacher who is a friend of mine. I heard him use it during a sermon on Christmas, in which he spoke of all the miraculous and mythic stuff – the virgin birth, a Son of God, a savior – and said it wasn’t meant to be fact-talk; it was love-talk. That’s all he said about it, but those two words stuck with me. That’s the “key” I want to play this morning’s sermon in: thinking about other kinds of “love-talk,” and how they differ from the way we usually talk. You can find examples everywhere.

I hear a Christian friend say “God has led me in warm and wise paths.” At first, I may think “Well, I’m not sure you were led. You’re looking back on it and finding positive rather than negative patterns according to the stories of your faith.” Then I think, “Well, their words sound a lot more comforting and warm than mine do!” I was talking intellectual talk; they were talking love talk.

Or a young man comes in, wracked with guilt because at 32 he knows he’s a failure. He knows he’s let down everybody he cares about, and that he will never amount to anything. Apparently, there is a story I’m not aware of that says unless you have it all together by 32 you’re worthless. He needs a better story, because that one doesn’t give him many options or any respect. But he doesn’t need scientific data about his “Success Quotient.” He needs a better way of talking to himself, a way that has some warmth and acceptance about it. It can be the difference between saying, “She’s an idiot!” and saying. “She certainly sees things differently than I do!”

It’s easy for 50, 60, or 70-something folks to listen to the wild-eyed scheme of a 30-something, and to think, “Those young people think they can do anything! They haven’t lived long enough to know that life is tough.” A more honest response, though, would usually be something like, “I feel intimidated and old by their optimism and courage, because I remember, years ago, when I had it. I wonder what happened to me? I wonder if I could learn how to trust again if I paid attention to them?”

The first kind of talk is self-centered, exclusive talk that shuts others out because it restricts everyone’s possibilities to the limit of our understanding and trust. The second kind of talk assumes that the other people are our moral equals. Or, to put it poetically, that we are all children of God, all limbs on the body of humanity, that we’re all temporary vehicles of life’s precious gift to itself. There’s a warmth to the second that is not in the first. The first wants to stand on cold hard facts; the second wants to establish warm, living connections. That’s a big difference.

150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a few paragraphs about someone who was led from the first way of talking to the brink of the second. The story has been in my mind since I first read it maybe 15 years ago, though this is the first time I’ve ever used it. But see how it fits here:

“The monk, Friar Bernard, lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind. Rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corrupt [people there]. On his way he encountered many travelers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with [expensive] sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you? [You’re rich Roman pagans, not even Christians! How can you be good people!”]

“Look at our pictures, and books,” they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers spoke [sadly] on what we could save and give to others in the hard times.” Then the men came in, and they said, “[Greetings, good brother!] Does your monastery want gifts? [Let us share with you.]” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he had brought, saying, “Their way of life is wrong – [they are not even poor, and they are not Christians!] Yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

Friar Bernard has a couple choices. He can try to forget what he’s just seen and felt, and return to his comfortable beliefs, or he can realize that his beliefs are too small to hold life, or even to serve it in a way that isn’t a curse to others. What does it take to let go of small certainties and grow toward larger but less certain understandings? How do we learn to trust rather than doubt, to hope rather than fear? Or to put it in terms of another metaphor, how do we shift gears?

I’m thinking about shifting because I just bought a bicycle yesterday, and this thing has 24 gears. Last time I owned a bike, a ten-speed was tops, so 24 sounds like a lot. It means this image of all that gear shifting has become a metaphor that I can’t get out of my mind today. So it’s like shifting gears while bicycling up a hill, and suddenly you’re moving slower but you’re climbing the hill you could never have made it up in your original gear.

For me, that’s a little like changing my way of thinking and talking. When I have moved from an attitude of certainty like the Friar’s, an attitude that shuts out everybody not like me, into a more optimistic and trusting attitude, it’s usually come through something happening that shifts my gears. A couple years ago in Albany, I was impatient and angry with a waitress who wasn’t refilling my coffee, wasn’t around when I needed her, and didn’t pick up the money I left with the bill for five full minutes. So I paid the bill and don’t leave a tip. That felt better. Then as I left I saw her in the hallway back by the kitchen. She was crying, another waitress was holding her, and I learned that her father was dying. I snuck back to the table to leave a tip, with an anonymous note saying, “I overheard you telling the other waitress that your father is dying. I’m so sorry.” The service didn’t get any better after I heard that, but the waitress did. And the tip wasn’t for being a waitress; it was for reminding me that she was a human being.

It seems that stories are the best way to talk about the difference between closed attitudes or open caring, between judgment talk and love talk. Here’s another one:

A preacher is riding the city bus on a Saturday, thinking about his sermon, trying to concentrate. The bus stops in front of a big hospital and several people get on. Among them is a man with two young boys. The man sits down, and the boys begin running up and down the bus, screaming and yelling. The father just sits there, doesn’t even lift a finger to control his bratty kids. The preacher tries to be patient, but my God the kids are brats, their father won’t act like a responsible parent, this is a city bus, the preacher has this sermon to write, and enough is enough! So he walks across the aisle and leans down near the man, then says quietly but with a distinct edge, “Sir, I wish you would control your children!” The man looks up at him, kind of dazed, and says, “Oh yes, yes, I should. My wife, their mother, has just died and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Suddenly, you can hear the sound of about twelve gears shifting at once. The preacher’s first reaction was fair. It was a public space, the kids were out of control, and it is fair to expect parents to teach their children to act respectfully toward others. He wasn’t wrong. But he forgot that in this world sometimes people die and those who loved them don’t know what to do with it. Now he suddenly recognizes that man and his sons as people just like him, who bleed when they’re cut and cry or come unglued when they’re devastated. It can happen as quickly as that, the shift from rejecting to accepting, from judging to empathy and caring. It can happen as quickly as that.

“Love-talk” is a clumsy title for a sermon, I know. I mean by it a warmer and more accepting way of seeing ourselves and others, a way that moves us from being against others to feeling among them, a way that replaces cold hard facts with warm living ones.

To put it in the terms of children’s stories, it’s like shifting from Chicken Little, who lived his life sure that the sky was falling, to The Little Engine That Could, who dissolved his doubt and fear by deciding that he thought he could, he thought he could, and he did.

And the point I am trying to make is that we get caught up in our cold hard factual views so easily and so often that we can completely miss out on the chance to be part of something bigger and warmer. Like Friar Bernard and those noble Romans, or the preacher and the grieving, shattered kids and their dad. It isn’t just that we owe this kinder self to others, it’s that without that genuine regard for others we lose out too.

This reminded me of another story that has been in my head since I read it over a decade ago, but which I had also never seen a way to use in a sermon before. It’s a short piece with a surprise ending, by the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. See if it sticks to you the way it’s stuck to me:

In the humid New England summer the small cooling plant ran all day, making a deep, loud noise. Around the throbbing machinery was a frame of coarse wire net. I thought the bird was outside that wire net, then I hoped it was, then I wished it was. It was moving back and forth with the regularity of the trapped: the zoo animal that paces twelve feet east and twelve feet west, hour after hour; the heartbeat of the prisoner in the cell before the torture; the unending recurrence; the silent, steady panic. Back and forth, steadily fluttering between two wooden uprights just above a beam that supported the wire screen: a sparrow, ordinary, dusty, scrappy. I’ve seen sparrows fighting over territory till the feathers fly, and [flocking] cheerfully on telephone wires, and in winter gathering in trees in crowds like dirty little Christmas ornaments and talking all together like noisy children – chirp, chirp, chirp chirp! But this sparrow was alone, trapped in wire and fear. What could I do? There was a door to the wire cage, but it was padlocked. I went on. I tell you I felt that bird beat its wings right here, here under my breastbone in the hollow of my heart. I said in my mind, Is it my fault? Did I build the cage? Just because I happened to see it, is it my sparrow? But my heart was low already, and I knew now that I would be down, down like a bird whose wings won’t bear it up, a starving bird.

Then on the path I saw the man, one of the campus managers. The bird’s fear gave me courage to speak. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m just visiting here at the librarians” conference – we met the other day in the office. I didn’t know what to do, because there’s a bird that got into the cooling plant there, inside the screen, and it can’t get out. The noise of the machinery, I think the noise confuses it, and I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll have a look,” he said, not smiling, not frowning.

He turned and came with me. He saw the bird beating back and forth, back and forth in silence. He unlocked the padlock. He had the key.

I watched the open door, “I saw the bird fly out and fly away.”

The man and I closed the door. He locked it. “Be getting on,” he said, not smiling, not frowning, and went on his way, a man with a lot on his mind, a hard-working man. But did he have no joy in it? That’s what I think about now. Did he have the key, the power to set free, the will to do it, but no joy in doing it? It is his soul I think about now, if that is the word for it: the spirit: that sparrow. (“The Sparrow” by Ursula K. LeGuin)

That’s a story almost guaranteed to trouble ministers! We try to do what we can to be of service to others. We have to keep checking to make sure that we aren’t doing it mechanically, that it is still giving meaning and joy to us. But of course it isn’t true only for ministers, it’s something we can all fall into. It’s an old commandment; you’ve all heard it, to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” That love needs to go both ways: to the neighbor, and to yourself. Why is that so easy to forget?

At the beginning of all our services, I speak of “questions more profound than answers.” I think that life’s most enduring questions are more profound than answers. They can pry open a door of our awareness, or shift gears for us, so we leave here seeing things a little differently, perhaps asking different questions of ourselves. Today, I’m going to leave you with questions, because I can’t tell you what kind of love-talk you need to hear, what picture of the world you need to live in that brings you life rather than just adding time.

But I do have one more story, to set up the questions. It comes from my favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was trying to respond to someone who thought what was most important was knowing the truth. Wittgenstein gave him this story to think about. Imagine there was this man who lived at a certain time. He was a very religious man, and believed all the teachings of his particular faith. They gave him a sense of living in a blessed world, and through these beliefs, he lived and died at peace, a happy man who loved others and was loved by everyone who met him. Then, just two weeks after he died, one of the sciences suddenly discovered that everything he believed had been false. Very well, his beliefs were false. But could you say his life was false? And if not, then just what is the role of truth in the task of living fully, lovingly and well?

© Davidson Loehr

13 May 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

READING: A Mother’s Day Proclamation

In this country, the Unitarian Julia Ward Howe was the first to try and start a Mother’s Day, back in 1870 – though it would have been a very different kind of Mother’s Day than we now have. She had lived through the Civil War. She even wrote the words for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But she saw some of the worst effects of the war: not only the death and disease, which killed and maimed the soldiers. She worked with the widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war, and realized the effects of war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. She also saw the economic devastation of the Civil War, the economic crises that followed the war. In 1870, she was distressed at the rise of the Franco-Prussian War, distressed that war seemed to be part of the human condition rather than a one-time slip. So she called for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted to organize a Mother’s Day for Peace, and for that she wrote the declaration which appears as responsive reading #573 in our hymnals:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!” The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet firs, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

CENTERING:

Mother’s Day has been a national observance in this country on the second Sunday of May since 1914. And so it is Mothers’ Day:

– For mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them;

– For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.

– For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;

– For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us;

– And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.

It is Mothers’ Day. Let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in gratitude and prayer.

And let us remember in prayer those other names, which we now speak aloud or in the silence of our hearts.

SERMON: Our War On Drugs: A Mothers’ Day Sermon

When President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother’s Day in 1914, it was a very different day than Julia Ward Howe had intended.

Today, Mother’s Day is largely celebrated with trips to a special restaurant, gifts and flowers. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. Mothers — and fathers — deserve all the recognition and all the pampering they can get.

But something was lost when we lost the roots of this day in its gutsy opposition to wars that killed the children of mothers. And it is that spirit I want to honor today, by spending a little time on a war that is doing more violence, creating more crime and draining the economy faster than any other war we have going. This is our war on drugs.

On April 25th, I was invited to attend a luncheon for and speech by Judge James Gray, a Superior Court judge from California with over 20 years on the bench, who has been crusading for a fundamental overhaul of our drug laws for the past nine years. I bought his book, and also read a magazine filled with articles from others with long stints in law enforcement who also argue that, in every way imaginable, our war on drugs is even more ill-conceived and harmful than we can imagine.

America’s widespread use of cocaine began at least 115 years ago, when cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola from 1886 to 1900, and Bayer Pharmaceutical Products introduced heroin in 1898, and sold it over the counter for a year before Bayer offered aspirin. Those are just interesting little facts you may not have known.

But our most famous mistakes – before the mistakes we are making in today’s war against drugs — came with the prohibition of alcohol, from 1920 to 1933. During this fourteen-year period, our country saw a huge increase in crime, violence, police and political corruption, and death from poisoned liquor. It also saw a high consumption per capita of stronger beverages like whiskey instead of weaker beverages like beer, in accordance with a cardinal rule of prohibition: there is always more money to be made in pushing the more concentrated substances. It’s cheaper and easier to transport a fifth of whiskey than a case of beer. We spent a lot of money to make strong alcohol more plentiful, more expensive, and more deadly. It wasn’t the last time we would employ this remarkable tactic.

Federal funding for law enforcement efforts against alcohol was increased over five times in the 1920s; the prison population quadrupled, with two-thirds of inmates incarcerated for alcohol and other drug offenses. However, the national murder rate increased steadily throughout alcohol prohibition. Then it decreased for eleven consecutive years after Prohibition was ended. The only phase of Prohibition that worked was when we ended it, took the federal government out of it, and let each state decide how to handle its local problems.

Marijuana was our next failure, in the 1930s. We treated it in exactly the same way, with exactly the same results, only more devastating.

We now know that one lasting effect of prohibiting marijuana was the growth of drug cartels in countries like Colombia to process and distribute not marijuana but cocaine in this country. The reason was the same as selling whiskey rather than beer: the more concentrated form was easier to conceal and transport, and far more profitable.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon formally declared that America was at war against drugs. A 1984 law increased bail and lengths of sentences for drug offenders, and also increased federal power.

In 1986 we added mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession of drugs. The Crime Bill of 1994 provided for capital punishment for some types of drug selling and for mandatory sentences of 20 years to life.

Every time we have tightened up our drug laws with all of this “get tough” stuff, the harms inflicted on society by the presence of these drugs have just increased. The laws have been successful in filling our prisons with the less organized, less violent, less brilliant offenders, leaving this lucrative market to be filled by those who were more organized, more violent, and smarter. (Judge James P. Gray, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs [Temple University Press, 2001], p. 31)

Two things are really driving this failed drug policy today: our political system, which rewards (by electing) the politicians who posture as being the “toughest on drugs” – like our newly-appointed Drug Czar – and the “runaway freight train” of federal money. The annual budget for our War on Drugs is now about $20 billion, which does not even begin to take into account all of the additional state and federal budgets for the hundreds of other programs.

What has it bought us? Some dramatic statistics, for one thing. Between 1973 and 1983, the number of state and federal prisoners in the US doubled to about 660,800; and then that number more than doubled again by 1993 to 1,408,685. We had 668 inmates for every 100,000 residents. That gave the US a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world except Russia, which reported a rate of 685. (Gray, p. 29)

There are six times more people behind bars in this country than in all twelve of the countries that make up the European Union combined, even though they have 100 million more citizens. More people are behind bars for drug offenses in the US than are incarcerated in England, France, Germany, and Japan for all crimes combined. The state of California has more people incarcerated than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined, even though California has only about one-tenth of their combined populations. In fact, the US, with less than five percent of the world’s population, has one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. (p. 30)

Let’s put the danger posed by illegal drugs in perspective. Over 500,000 people die in the US each year as a result of the use of legal drugs – tobacco and alcohol – while less than 10,000 die per year from the combined use of all illegal drugs. Yet someone is arrested for a marijuana offense somewhere in the US every forty-five seconds. That number is almost as high as the number of total arrests for all murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults combined (695,201 to 717,720). (p. 30)

We have made lifetime prisoners out of a nonviolent underclass of drug-using and addicted people. The average prison term for drug offenders in state prisons has increased – up 22 percent since 1986. But in the same period, average prison terms in state prisons for violent offenders have decreased by 30 percent. (p. 32)

Another result of prison overcrowding is that wardens throughout the country are routinely forced to grant an early release to violent offenders so that nonviolent drug offenders can serve their sentences in full. This is because, for the most part, federal law requires that even nonviolent drug offenders must serve their entire sentences; however, there is no such law for bank robbers, kidnappers, or other violent offenders.

Texas is number one in prison incarceration. Louisiana and Oklahoma are second and third, but we don’t have to worry about losing our Number One status for awhile. It costs taxpayers between $20,000 and $30,000 to keep just one inmate confined for a year. The average cost for a state inmate over the age of fifty-five increases to about $69,000 per year because of increased health costs. (37)

And here’s a statistic that might be interesting. After six years on the job the yearly salary of a California prison guard with a high school diploma was $45,000 in 1994. At the same time, the starting salary of a tenured University of California associate professor with a Ph.D. was $43,100. For prison guards, stiff mandatory sentences mean job security. So you won’t be surprised to learn that in the 1998 election, the association of prison guards (California Correctional Peace Officers Association [CPOA]) was the state’s number one donor to legislative races, with donations to all campaigns totaling $5.3 million. These contributions included a $100,000 donation to a group working for the passage of a tough three-strikes sentencing ballot measure. This $5 million wasn’t spent for the good of the state; it was spent to insure jobs for prison guards. The money we are spending on our drug war – while it has only made the drug problem a thousand times worse – has infected many federal and state agencies, many professions and unions, whose jobs are fueled by this money, and who therefore find reasons to support it. But they are not supporting it for the health of the country. They are supporting it for the security of their jobs and their purpose. They aren’t evil people; they’re just people, with the full helping of self-interest that most of us have.

Police are even better at catching women for drug offenses. Between 1986 and 1996, the number of women imprisoned for drug offenses increased by 888 percent, compared to an increase of 129 percent for non-drug offenses. Typically the women involved are low-level lookouts or “mules” who transport drugs for short distances either as favors for their husbands or boyfriends or for a small fee. (p. 43)

About 75% of these women prisoners are also the single parents of young children; this is Mother’s Day for them, too. But legally, these mothers have abandoned their children, who are sent to child dependency court. Even setting aside the enormous human costs, the expense to the taxpayer of keeping one child in a group home can be $5,000 per month, above and beyond the costs of incarcerating the mother. For a mother with two children, this means that about $145,000 per year of taxpayer money is spent to keep a mother separated from her children. (p. 44)

Then there is the impact of our massive prison program on ethnic minorities. In 1995, 33% of young black men in this country were either in prison, on parole or probation, a total of about 827,440 young black men in one year. The figures for Hispanic males was 12.3 percent, and for white males it was just under 7 percent. (p. 44)

What do they do in prison, besides learn how to be better criminals? Well, a lot of them take drugs. In 1998, 9% of the 1.6 million men and women behind bars tested positive for illegal drugs – drugs they obtained in prison. Even high security prisoners like Charles Manson are testing positive in prison for illicit drugs – in fact, Manson was transferred from one high security prison to another for being caught selling drugs to other inmates. (49)

We can’t keep drugs out of our maximum-security prisons. How would we ever keep them off the streets? It is easier for our children to get illegal drugs than it is for them to get alcohol. (p. 50)

Our drug laws have turned illegal drug pushing into such a high-profit industry that there will always be people willing to take the risks.

For instance, if you bring $100 worth of cocaine from Colombia to any city in the US, it will be worth between $5,000 and $10,000. That’s a return of fifty to one hundred times your investment. Where in the world could you find a cash cow like that? Police and military forces are helpless to counteract economic forces that huge. (p. 57)

According to a United Nations International Drug Council Program report, world trafficking in illegal drugs made up about 8 percent of all world trade as of 1995 – it must be higher today. That was about $440 billion of international drug transactions. Illegal drugs are a bigger business than all exports of automobiles. (p. 80)

Our drug wars guarantee there will be hundreds of millions of dollars to be made selling drugs. When there’s that much money to be made, every time we imprison another drug dealer, all we do is create a new job opportunity.

You don’t have to look to national statistics to see the complete failure of the war on drugs. You can go down to Sixth Street and see it first-hand. Or look on the front page of yesterday’s Metro & State section of the Austin American-Statesman in the story titled “Drug problem loiters near police headquarters.” Since January, our police have arrested 66 people for dealing narcotics in the area and 143 for possession. It’s the area where the 15-year-old boy was stabbed in the throat last week.

Police Commander Harold Platt, who is in charge of the officers paid to patrol the area, says crack dealers have been there as long as he can remember. But with profits like these, you can’t get the dealers off the streets. Even if you do arrest and imprison a dealer, he says, “there are six people waiting in line, trying to take over his business. You arrest somebody, you finally get them put away, and the next day, somebody else shows up.” (Austin American-Statesman, Metro & State, Saturday May 12, 2001, pp. B-1 and B-3) With 30,000 people going into the Sixth Street entertainment district each weekend, there’s just too much money to be made selling drugs that are expensive because they are illegal, are illegal because we made them illegal, because we have still not learned the lessons we had learned 70 years ago when the prohibition of alcohol ended because of exactly the same failures.

Getting “tough” on drugs also inevitably translates into getting “soft” on all other crimes, including the more violent ones. With drugs taking a priority on police, court and prison time, there just aren’t the officers, the prosecutors, the courts, or the prison cells to hold the really violent offenders.

Our drug policy has been increasing crime in our country for decades, to the extent that, according to conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr., “More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from [drug overdoses].” The cure is worse than the disease. (p. 73)

This gives insanity a bad name!

Law enforcement corruption, sparked mostly by illicit drugs, has become so chronic that the number of federal, state, and local police and law enforcement officials serving terms in federal prisons increased fivefold in four years, from 107 in 1994 to 548 in 1998 (p. 74). By now, it’s probably tenfold.  (http://www.uudpr.org)

Today, when Mother’s Day is celebrated with feasts and flowers, it feels out of place to talk about wars, even wars on drugs. But think of these awful facts about our unwise, our disastrous, our murderous drug war, and then listen again to some of the words from Julia Ward Howe’s declaration written in 1870, and see how well they go together:

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies – Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.”

“As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women – meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.”

Today, she speaks to women, men, and children, and I say Amen, Julia Ward Howe,

Amen!

© Davidson Loehr

April 29, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Prayer

We pray not to something, but from something, to which we must give voice;

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

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

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are,

and admit who we are not;

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

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people, those experiences, and those transformations

that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes

with an open heart, an honest soul,

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

AMEN.

SERMON: “The Four Faces of Jesus”

It was a time of terrible fighting. Everywhere people were divided into separate groups, like little clubs. And everywhere they fought against all the people who weren’t in their little club.

They all said they hated the fighting, of course. But they all knew that only the people in their little club were really right – and it is so important, being right. And as long as so many others were wrong – well, they all prayed that God would give them victory so the fighting could stop. But in the meantime, it was a time of terrible fighting.

One day a young magician came to the area. He didn’t belong to any of their clubs, but he was a wonderful magician who did some amazing tricks. And he had that kind of “star quality” about him that drew people to him. Many people loved watching him, though they didn’t much care for listening to him, because of the things he said to them.

What he said to them was that if they weren’t divided into so many little clubs, there wouldn’t be so much fighting. Their clubs, he told them, were the cause of their wars.

To the people, this was about the dumbest thing they had ever heard. Their little clubs gave them a tiny area of peace and friendship among people like themselves, in an otherwise hostile world. They liked their clubs. So they almost never listened when the magician tried to teach them. But they loved his magic, and so kept coming to watch him, and they started telling stories about what a great magician he was.

Years later, after the young magician died, a funny thing happened, though it wouldn’t have seemed funny to the magician. People formed a new club. And to be in this new club, you had to believe all the stories they told about the young magician. They even made pictures and statues of him, and put them up in their meeting-places, so people could remember how great he had been.

The club became very popular, and soon had thousands of members. Before long, they even had an army.

That’s when they finally decided that they could use their army to end the fighting once and for all. Their priests and generals went to their meeting-places – which had become churches – and sort of talked to the pictures and statues of the dead magician, as if to ask his blessing. After all, hadn’t the young magician always talked about bringing peace?

Then they went to war. It was a long war, and many people were killed or wounded. But their army was bigger, so they won. And they forced many, many people to come into their club, because they wanted them to be right – it is just so important to be right.

After the battles, their priests and generals went to church to give thanks. They stood before the pictures and statues of the dead magician, and told him their proud story of the victorious battle.

That’s when the miracle happened. Just as all the priests and all the generals were looking up at the statues telling them about their successful wars, it happened: all the pictures and all the statues began to cry.

The young magician, of course, was Jesus.

There are risks in stripping a man like Jesus of his halo and asking what kind of man he was, and how wise his teachings really were. It offends the popular romantic picture of Jesus as the Son of God and supernatural savior of humankind. Yet for over two centuries, scholars have known that those were mythic attributes invented by his followers long after he died, and that the real Jesus was 100% human – since that’s the only category there is for us. Calling him a “son of God” was poetry, not biology or genetics. We don’t like in a world constructed in such a way that people can receive half their chromosomes from a human and the other half from a sky-god – and neither did they.

I want to respect the truth without worshiping the myth this morning, by suggesting that this man Jesus had at least four different aspects, or “faces.” One aspect was useless, a second – the most “magical” – was real, but not supernatural. A third was just wrong. Then there is that fourth face of Jesus, which still seems to look into our souls with uncomfortable accuracy.

1. Jesus as an Itinerant Cynic Sage

The first face of Jesus concerns his life style, his personal values, the kind of role model he would have been. This is the dimension of Jesus that has hardly even been discussed, because it is so bizarre. For instance, see how many sermons you’ve ever heard preached on these quotations attributed to Jesus:

“Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be a follower of me, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters – will not be worthy of me.” (Gospel of Thomas 55) – Not the text for a “family values” sermon!

On another occasion, a woman from the crowd spoke up and said to Jesus, “How fortunate is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” It was a conventional way of handing a compliment to the mother through the son, like saying “your mother must be very proud of you.” But Jesus replied, “How fortunate, rather, are those who listen to God’s teaching and observe it!” (the Q Gospel, in Luke 11:27-28). – This one would be a bad Mother’s Day text!

And the last quotation is the most extreme and the most famous. It comes from the gospel of Luke, where Jesus says “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Q Gospel in Luke 12: 51-53) – You seldom hear the Christian Right preaching on this one, either!

These sayings don’t fit the traditional picture of a sweet Jesus who preached family values. They show us some of Jesus’ personal values and lifestyle, and make him seem very strange and foreign, not to mention unappealing. For most of the styles of living that Jesus exemplified have never had many takers.

This is the profile of someone on the fringe of any culture at any time. Scholars recognize this profile, however. It was a marginal but well-known style of living in the ancient world. From about the fourth century BCE until the sixth century CE, there was a name for this style of living exemplified by Jesus. These were the people called cynics.

Some scholars describe Jesus as an “itinerant cynic sage.” The name itself is derogatory, given to the “cynics” by their detractors (the way most such names originate). It came from the Greek word for “dog,” and was meant to imply that cynics lived like dogs. They had no home, no property, no spouses, no fixed circle of friends, no jobs, and no love for the society in which they lived. Cynics didn’t offer a correction of society so much as they offered an alternative to society.

The best of the cynics were astute social critics: they were like secular versions of the Old Testament prophets, standing outside the accepted order of things, trying to subvert it.

Someone who could live a life in this manner had to be, among other things, extremely focused and dedicated to his particular vision. For history’s most famous cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, the vision was one of personal autonomy, freedom from the unnecessary demands of society. An old story makes the point:

The king’s messenger came to find Diogenes, who was squatting in the street, eating his simple meal of lentils. “The king invites you to come live in his castle,” said the messenger, “and be one of his court advisors.”

“Why should I?” asked Diogenes.

“Well for one thing,” said the messenger, “if you’d learn to curry favor with the king you wouldn’t have to eat lentils.”

“And if you would learn to like lentils,” replied Diogenes, “you wouldn’t have to curry favor with the king.”

The message of cynics was always extreme, and they were willing to sacrifice everything for it. Furthermore, they generally thought that everyone else would also be better off abandoning the society’s vision of life and adopting their cynic vision. Their message was to individuals. They didn’t belong to or care about a real community. They weren’t social reformers. They thought society was fundamentally wrong, and people should “tune in, turn on and drop out,” to recapture that slogan from the Hippie years.

Jesus fits very neatly into this conception of a cynic sage. He had no home, property or job. He didn’t respect the accepted images of “the good life” or the normal expectations made upon people in a civilized society – the religious and cultural rules that gave people their social identities, for example. His vision of the “Kingdom of God” was, for Jesus, the only thing worth living for. His parables presented the “Kingdom” in this extreme way over and over again: it was a “pearl of great price,” a “treasure buried in a field” for which the lucky finder would sell everything.

What must be noted about cynics, including Jesus, is that their message is never likely to be heard or followed except for the extremely marginal person – another cynic. Husbands, wives, children, the joy of working at a job, making a contribution to society, nationalism, ethnic or religious pride of identity – all these counted as nothing for cynics compared with their singular vision. In Jesus’ case, his entire family was treated as though they counted for nothing compared with his vision of the “Kingdom of God.” This doesn’t make Jesus exceptionally cold or uncaring, it just identifies him as one of history’s great cynics – and a sage whose vision was sometimes too extreme to be either useful or wise to the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, then or now.

And so the first face of Jesus was his cynic lifestyle. It was a huge part of who he was and what he valued. For nearly everyone in history except other cynics, however, it was not a wise road to follow, but a useless aberration.

2. Jesus the Faith-Healer

Virtually all biblical scholars agree that Jesus was a man with great charisma, and a remarkable ability for what we today call “faith healing.” While almost all scholars agree that the stories have been greatly exaggerated, and that scenes like”walking on water,” raising Lazarus from the dead or feeding 5,000 people from a few fish are all Christian mythmaking, the core fact remains that Jesus was primarily known in his time and in the early centuries as a gifted healer. It was this almost magical power that really attracted people to him, even if they didn’t understand, or didn’t want to hear, the things he wanted to teach. His followers also shared this healing power, though not to quite the same extent as did Jesus.

There is nothing here to debunk, except to note that this kind of charismatic power doesn’t necessarily imply that the healer is wise or good. There are still lots of faith healers today, from Oral Roberts to Bennie Han. Furthermore, the principle of faith healing is behind placebos — those sugar pills that can often make your symptoms disappear if you think they can. It is easy to think of other historical figures who also had immense charisma and personal power over other people, who were unwise or evil: Rasputin, Hitler, Jim Jones, Matthew Applewhite, and David Koresh come quickly to mind. Not all wise people are magicians, and not all magicians are wise. Still, Jesus was one of history’s gifted faith healers.

3. Young Idealist Without a Concept of the “Sangha”

The third face of Jesus shows a severe limit to his vision, one that would have almost undoubtedly relegated him to the dustbin of history without the contributions of St. Paul. That statement alone is enough to upset or enrage many who love Jesus and can’t stand Paul.

The ethical teaching most associated with Jesus is the Golden Rule. While he is reported to have said it means to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” it has also been equated for twenty centuries with another of Jesus’ sayings: “turn the other cheek.” Some radical Christian sects, like the 14th Century Cathari group in France or the 16th century Mennonites in Germany, took this literally and refused to resist the violence of others altogether. This led to the slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of Cathari, and the slaughter of most of the first generation of Mennonites.

It wasn’t a new teaching. It had been around at least five hundred years before Jesus came along. We know this because we have the story of one of Confucius’ followers asking him five centuries earlier what he thought of the idea of repaying evil with forgiveness. Confucius thought it was a dumb idea. “With what, then,” he asked, “will you repay goodness?” Instead, Confucius taught that we should repay evil with justice and repay good with good. Confucius lived to be much older than Jesus did; perhaps this just shows the greater wisdom of a much older man.

Others have said that if you want to see a place where people have lived by the rule of turning the other cheek, go to a battered women’s shelter. It was a very idealistic teaching, but not a wise one, unless you are in a community where all are treated with respect.

And that’s the second and more important limitation on the teachings of Jesus. All of his teachings were directed to individuals. He did not come to reform Judaism; he didn’t come to start a new religion or found a new church. He had no home, no job, no community, and he never addressed the necessity for a healthy community in his teachings.

A quick look at Buddhism can help understand what Jesus omitted. Buddhists say you must have three things to become awake, enlightened. You must have Buddha, dharma, and sangha. Buddha means a center, a source of authority and inspiration. Dharma means the personal work that you must do. Jesus, you could say, taught that you must have God and dharma: you must live as God wants you to live. But he had nothing at all to say about the sangha. The sangha is the supportive community devoted to serving these high ideals, like a good church. And the Buddhists are right: we’re not likely to do the growth and awakening we need alone. We need a supportive community, a faith community, a church. Jesus never mentioned this.

It’s ironic Ð especially for people who like Jesus but dislike Paul Ð but the concern for community was what Paul contributed, making it possible to create a religion out of the memories, myths and teachings of Jesus. Without Paul, Jesus was just another teacher who stressed individual duties but neglected to address the necessity of being part of a community of faith.

4. Subverter of Artificial Identities

It’s hard to know what to call the fourth face of Jesus. As all biblical scholars know, Jesus’ primary concern was for what he called the Kingdom of God. What Jesus meant by this Kingdom of God was fundamentally different from what most Christians have meant by the phrase. Properly understood, it was Jesus’ most radical teaching. It was also his most profound and timeless, and his fourth “face.”

The phrase “the kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus. It was a popular phrase in the first two centuries, used by many people. It meant the ideal world, the kind of world that could have the most compassion and justice. John the Baptist, who had been Jesus’ teacher, said the world was too far gone to save, that we should wait for God to destroy it all and start over with the right kind of people — those who believed as John the Baptist did.

After John the Baptist was killed and the end of the world didn’t come, Jesus emerged as a charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him. But Jesus’ message was very different. John’s “kingdom” was to be supernatural; for Jesus, the kingdom of God was existential, here and now, not in a world to come.

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God wasn’t coming. It was already here, at least potentially, within and among us. Or as he said in another place, the kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.

How do you rejuvenate a hostile world? That has almost always been the question to which our greatest sages have offered their different prescriptions. For John the Baptist, as for many apocalyptic preachers today, we have to wait for God to act. For Jesus, God was waiting for us to act. And we act, we create the kingdom of God, or the best possible world, simply by treating all others as our brothers and sisters, as children of God. What Jesus was doing was attacking and subverting exclusive identities, identities that make us feel special or “chosen” at the price of casting others into a second-class status.

This sounds sweet and nice, but it’s a dangerous thing to teach. For instance, the food laws of the Jews set them apart from their neighbors. So Jesus’ instructions to his followers were to eat whatever was set before them: pork, shellfish, goat, whatever the host was serving. The Jews hated the Samaritans, who bordered them to the north, more than they hated almost anyone. So Jesus told a story about a beaten Jew lying by the side of the road, when priests passed him by and the only person who helped him was a Samaritan. During their high holy days, the Jews ate only unleavened bread. So Jesus said the kingdom of God is like leaven that you put in dough to make it rise. Over and over, he spurned the artificial identities that set us apart from others. There was only one identity possible for us in the Kingdom of God: to treat one another as brothers and sisters.

Do you see how subversive this is? This is a message that could threaten any form of government, all ideologies, and all religious or racial identities. The world is in chaos, we’ve lost a shared center, so we create a hundred little artificial centers, or “clubs,” from which we get our identities. The problem is, they’re all too small, all exclude those who believe or live differently than we do, and so they’re precisely the structures that keep the world hostile.

Today, his message might be Stop joining clubs! Stop identifying yourselves with your nation, your race, your religion, your political party or your sex. All of these are ultimately divisive identities that make a peaceful world impossible. You want the Kingdom of God? You want a world of peace and justice? It’s in your hands, and only in your hands. You’ve been given everything you need, now it’s time to act.

This is a message that would still get the messenger killed almost anywhere in the world. Imagine going into Northern Ireland a few years back, telling the fighters that neither side is Christian, both are agents of evil, and they need to stop thinking of themselves as Protestants and Catholics, because those identities are themselves the problem. The only thing the two sides would agree on would be lynching you from the nearest tree.

Imagine trying to sell that message to the Jews and Palestinians, telling them the only way to stop the murderous fighting is to grow beyond thinking of themselves as merely Jews or Palestinians, and begin seeing each other as brothers and sisters, the children of God. You’d be shot!

I don’t want to imply that Jesus was the only person in history to see this vision of a world kept small and hostile by our artificial identities and our territorial impulses. You can find this idea that we are all brothers and sisters in many religions, many cultures. You also find it in cultures that never had contact with any Western civilization. Remember these lines from this morning’s responsive reading by the Lakota Sioux Medicine Man Black Elk:

And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight. And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

These things aren’t true just because Jesus or Black Elk or the others said them. They are true because they have seen to the essence of what it means to be human, with a clarity few people in history have ever had. I don’t know of any way to argue against that insight. It seems deeply, profoundly, eternally correct. Our human or animal tendencies to create artificial identities for ourselves are the original sin of our species. We feel bigger and more worthwhile as parts of a family, a nation, a race, a culture. So naturally we join the little clubs and wave their flags, and we wait for Jesus’ second coming so there might be peace in the world.

The real tragedy of a man like Jesus isn’t that he has had so much silly hokum dumped on him through the ages – though God knows he has. The tragedy is that we elevated him into a man-God, then joined the religion of John the Baptist who expected this man-God to come save the world for us, as we sat silently by reciting whatever creeds our little religious or political or social cult has declared to be the current orthodoxy. We took the man who lived and died preaching against divisive identities, and created a club around his name. It is a cruel and ironic fate for the simple Jew from Galilee.

The tragedy is that this strange man, this marginal Jew without family, friends, property or job, really did have something to offer us, and nobody wants it. It’s too hard. It asks too much of us. So we found a simpler route. We made thousands of mental and physical pictures and statues of this man Jesus, whom we turned into a Son of God. And we pray that he, through his infinite power, will bring peace to this world in which we’re making war by identifying with our tiny religion, nation, party, race or territory. Then we say Amen, go outside, and prepare for the day’s battle against the infidels in the next church, next town, next nation.

And then I imagine the rest of the story. I imagine that all over the world, as people leave their churches, they turn their backs on the pictures and statues of Jesus they’ve made. And after they’ve gone, all over the world, in the cold darkness of the empty churches, all of the pictures and all of the statues begin to cry.

Davidson Loehr

April 21, 2001 

OPENING

Under the cover of war, stories circulate that all is not well with our nation, that serious things are amiss:

• hundreds of billions of dollars siphoned from our economy and given to selected corporations
• civil liberties being curtailed and threatened – some say dangerously
• growing evidence that our government knew of the September 11th attacks in advance, and may even have known specific details, including the targets.

As people of faith who are also proud Americans, these things must both concern and disturb us. If true, they have profound implications for our lives and for the soul of America. This morning and next Sunday, we gather to ask some hard and necessary questions. Our gathering is sanctified by the high and serious purposes that collect us.

And so once more, it is a sacred time, this and a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

PUPPET SHOW:

CHARACTERS:

Two raccoons

Dragon

Baby Dragon (same voice as the 2nd raccoon)

– So only three voices for this one, though four characters.

All three characters appear at the beginning. The dragon is in the middle, with one raccoon on each side of him/her. The sex of the dragon doesn’t matter, whoever you have who’d like to be a good dragon here.

RACOON 1: (Doing a double-take at the dragon, looking around it to the 2nd raccoon, who’s also doing a double-take at the dragon and looking around it to the 1st raccoon). Hey! Like, uh, like you look a lot like a dragon!

DRAGON: (Dragon is always very cool, very in control.) Like, uh, that’s because I am a dragon – dude.

RACCOON 2: Wow! A dragon! I’ve never seen a real dragon before!

DRAGON: Most raccoons haven’t. Say, you’re a really good-looking raccoon!

(RAC2 kind of sashays, blushes, is really flattered.)

RAC1: Hey! Like what about me over here?

DRAGON: You wouldn’t think a dragon would be able to tell the difference between raccoons, would you? You’d think that to a dragon, you’d all look alike. But dragons can see some things very clearly, even though we don’t have good eyesight for big pictures.

RAC1: Well (grumbling) you sure are different from us, that’s for sure!

RAC2: Yes, you’re so very different from raccoons!

DRAGON: (To RAC2) Very different, very different. Tell me, what do raccoons do all day?

RAC1: Well, we work mostly at night.

(Dragon can upstage, turning his head when RAC1 answered his question to RAC2 with kind of condescending body language, then turning avidly, almost warmly, back to pay attention to RAC2 when RAC2 speaks.)

RAC2: Yes. We hunt for food.

DRAGON: Food? You mean like a nice medium-rare steak dinner with asparagus?

RAC1: Hah! No man, more like canned food. You know, like garbage canned food.

(Dragon can again turn his head toward RAC1 to kind of put him down or dismiss him through body language, before turning back to RAC2.)

DRAGON: (To RAC2) Oh, that’s not right, you should be eating steaks.

RAC2: (The flattery is working). Hey, you’re really nice, for a dragon. But what do you do all day?

DRAGON: Well, we guard the gold, mostly.

RAC1: The gold? Hey, gold’s so cool, ya know? Like what gold?

DRAGON: Oh, a whole mountain full of gold. Tons and tons of it. And diamonds and rubies and other jewels, too. (Looking at RAC2) Tons of the stuff. Here, like this. (Hands RAC2 either some gold, or a necklace, or jewels – whatever is easiest to handle that comes under the heading of “loot”).

RAC2: Oh, wow! Is this stuff real?

DRAGON: Is it real? Why, it’s as real as you are, you gorgeous little raccoon.

RAC2: Ooooooh! (Putting it on or looking at it, adoring the loot, whatever works.)

RAC1: (caustically mocking) “Your gorgeous little raccoon.” Argh! Like man, make me barf, why don’t you? Like whose gold is this you’re guarding?

RAC2: Oh, it’s probably the people’s gold, right? And you’re keeping it safe for them, huh?

DRAGON: (The dragon is much too powerful ever to need to lie). The gold belongs to the rich masters who own the people. They own the mountain, too. We work for them. And we get special things for doing it. (Dragon looks over to RAC2 with this last remark, as it’s intended to make RAC2 ask what special things.)

RAC1: What, you guard gold some rich finks have stolen from the workers? Karl Marx wouldn’t like that.

DRAGON: No, neither would Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson. But Milton Friedman does.

RAC2: What special things do you get for guarding all that gold? (RAC2 is getting interested, and starting to take the dragon’s side).

DRAGON: (Dragon turns full toward RAC2, ignoring RAC1) Well, we get to fly, and we can breathe fire whenever we feel like it, and everybody is afraid of us. Here, would you like some more gold/jewels? (Gives more to RAC2).

RAC1: Fly? Hey, I wish I could fly! Can you teach me to fly?

DRAGON: (Slowly, and barely, turning to acknowledge RAC1) Sorry, fuzzbutt. That’s for dragons. (To RAC2) But you might be able to fly!

RAC2: Me? Really? Me fly? Oh like wow, that’s so cool!

RAC1: Hey, how come he might fly but not me? Like, that’s not right, man!

DRAGON: (Ignoring RAC1, talking to RAC2). Here, you need some more gold/jewels. Aren’t they nice?

RAC2: (Loaded down with jewels/gold). Oh, these are just beautiful. And they must be worth a fortune!

DRAGON: They are. Several fortunes. And there’s a lot more where they came from, believe me.

RAC2: Oh, I’d love to see it!

DRAGON: Would you? Then here, have some more (gives a big pile of loot to RAC2. RAC2 starts SINKING under the weight, and as he sinks below the stage, the dragon speaks down to him.) – There you go, there you go! See how easy this was? And look at you! You look marvelous!

RAC1: (Feeling – and being – very ignored and left out). Hey, like I don’t know why we’re bothering with you at all, you scaley old lizard. Come on, you gorgeous little raccoon, let’s go. (Looking over around the dragon, sees that the other raccoon is gone.) Hey! Hey, lizard-face! Where’s my friend? Bring back my friend right now!

DRAGON: (Looks down below stage level.) Ah. Yes. Wonderful. (Turning to RAC1) OK, fuzzbutt. See how beautiful your old friend looks now!

BABY DRAGON: (But with the same voice that RAC2 had – the voice needs to be characteristic enough to be easily identifiable.) Oh my gosh! Look what’s happened to me! Why, I’m not a raccoon at all any more! I’m a ? a?

DRAGON: You’re a baby dragon! Congratulations! Now you really are gorgeous!

RAC1: Hey, hey! This isn’t right! This is all wrong!

BABY DRAGON: Watch your lip, fuzzbutt.

RAC1: Hey, he called me Fuzzbutt! What is this?

DRAGON: This, my dull-witted friend, is what this story was about.

RAC1: What? What? I thought this was a story about how different raccoons are from dragons! DRAGON: Nope. This was a story about how to turn a raccoon into a dragon. (Turning to baby dragon) Let’s fly away, baby, we’ve got a date with a big mountain of gold and jewels! (They start flying away, out of sight.)

RAC1: Hey, that’s not right! That’s not right! The story can’t end this way! I don’t like this! This isn’t the end!

BABY DRAGON: (Either just the voice, or the baby dragon comes back up) Sure it is, Duuude. It’s all over. We win and you lose. (Beats raccoon on the head with the THE END sign, though nobody can read the sign because it’s horizontal while he’s beating raccoon with it. Raccoon disappears from sight, saying “I don’t like this, I don’t like this!”)

After RAC1 disappears, Baby Dragon holds the sign up for the audience to see:

THE END

CENTERING:

500 years ago, Martin Luther said “War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families.

35 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. said “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

I want to talk with you about our nation’s body and soul this morning. Yet I know there are some here who have come with other needs, needs unrelated to this war.

Some come bearing the pain of private, personal wars: hurts and fears that are much with you this morning. Some come needing comfort, or quiet moments, or the hope of finding someone, somehow, with whom you can share your story. Some come for the first time, wondering what kind of church this is, hoping the service will be typical, and an informative introduction to this style of liberal religion, of being human religiously.

Whoever you are, however you have come to us this morning, I welcome you, and am glad you are with us today. If you have a personal matter or would just like someone to listen, please phone the church office and leave a confidential message in the appropriate mail box. We have a listening ministry of trained church members who can meet with you. And I am available to talk or meet with you. Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock, and the doors shall be opened.

For now, let us take some quiet moments to center ourselves. If you like, you can light a candle of memory or hope during the quiet music.

SERMON

How do you turn a raccoon into a dragon? According to the puppet show, you do it by giving them wealth and privilege until they get used to it. In real life, the question and answers are more complex.

The real question is more like “How do you command and control others, to get them to serve your agenda rather than their own? How do you colonize people?”

This sounds like a political coup, so we think of things like armies, guns, loud noises and the smell of gunpowder. But these loud and rude acts only give you the opportunity to win the people’s mind and heart. Really to win them, or to colonize them, takes more subtle means. Still, it can be put simply: To control people, you need to write their story. You need to write the rules of the game that assign them supporting roles in a story that benefits you – and get them to want to do this.

Most religious teaching teaches us that we live in stories. We don’t live in “facts,” but within the stories that assign those “facts” their meanings. These are our life stories, our myths, our necessary fictions. On a personal level, there are many such stories: be pure, be reliable, be hard-working, witty, popular, prove that daddy was right about us, or prove that daddy wasn’t right about us. We have, between us, hundreds of such personal life scripts that assign us some of our life roles.

But I want to talk about larger stories today. I want to back off and look at the stories we live out, and live out of, as a society. This too could get complex, but I want to keep it simple, by looking at our “official” story – that we are a democracy – and the “real” story that has usually controlled our society – that we are some kind of an aristocracy. Democracy, while a high and noble-sounding ideal, is such an unlikely form of government! Even back when our colonies still belonged to England, there were skeptics. Here are some lines from an 18th century English historian that sound very modern. I haven’t been able to shake them, maybe they’ll stick with you too:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always voters for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. (Alexander Tyler)

Let’s not pretend that this is easy, or that all good people are naturally and solely on the side of democracy here. If you could get the government to give you money that came from other people’s taxes, wouldn’t you take it? If it were legal, if you could actually get other people to pay your way, how long would it take you to rationalize it? I could do it in ten seconds. The problem is how to do it. How can you get other people to support you?

You do it, again, by getting others to play roles in your preferred story. So let’s go back to America’s stories. Since the 17th century, there have been two primary stories that have vied with each other for control of our society. Their descendents still do.

In the language of those writers, it was the choice between rule by the “masters of mankind” and “the majority of mankind.” It is the rule of the many by the few, or of all by the many. Or, in just single words, it is the choice between an aristocracy and a democracy.

Which is better? We have all been trained to answer “democracy, of course!” But opinions have always been divided on this, as they are today, and even in this room. John Locke, the English philosopher who influenced many of our own Founding Fathers, thought it must be an aristocracy because he didn’t trust the masses. He said that “day-laborers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids” must be told what to believe: “The greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe,” he said. Many still agree with him.

Thomas Jefferson took the other side. He said aristocrats are “those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.” Jefferson’s “democrats,” on the other hand, “identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as honest and safe?.”

Those who excel, after all, want excellence to rule. The vast majority want the needs of the vast majority to write the laws, so that all citizens can live rich, empowered lives that allow them to become the most that they can become, whatever that is.

The one story seeks government through command and control; the other, through empowerment and trust. You can already hear which one is more vulnerable and less likely to win, can’t you?

Still, there’s a tactical problem. How will the more powerful and wealthy (for example) pull this off, when they are the distinct minority? For all of our history, this battle between aristocrats and democrats has continued. For the first 150 years of our history, it sometimes seemed like a battle between those who had money and power, and everybody else. The courts (sometimes) kept regulating them through laws and statutes that limited their ability to earn profits at the expense of turning the rest of the country into subsistence-level workers or beggars.

The country, when it had a choice, wasn’t buying the story the aristocrats were trying to sell, and people weren’t willing to spend their lives as servants of the few. Here is the long story of labor disputes, monopoly and anti-trust laws, and other rulings designed to protect the rights of the majority from the extra power and skill of those who would be their rulers. If you know much American history, you already know all of this. There’s nothing new here.

But in the 20th century, something new did come along. It was a new invention that could become a tool powerful enough to let a smart few rule an unaware many. It came with mass communication, and was first noticed over 80 years ago, in WWI. It was the invention of propaganda. “Propaganda has only one object,” wrote one of its early masters: “to conquer the masses.” Propaganda is the tool used by a small minority to sell their story to a large majority. With enough slick spin, emotional power, and appeal to elemental yearnings and powerful symbols (as in “God bless America”), a few brilliant visionaries can convert and control an entire nation.

After WWI, people on both sides of the Atlantic wrote about this new invention. Adolph Hitler praised the British, and said the main reason that Germany lost the war was because its propaganda was so inferior to the British. He vowed to learn from the British.

And in this country too, President Woodrow Wilson formed a new group to adapt techniques of using propaganda to influence the American people in desired directions. This was in the 1920s. Let me read you a few quotes from that decade:

The great American journalist Walter Lippman was in President Wilson’s propaganda organization, along with Edward Bernays, who could be called the father of American propaganda. Bernays led the transfer of wartime propaganda skills to business’s peacetime problems of coping with democracy. When the war ended, he wrote, business “realized that the great public could now be harnessed to their cause as it had been harnessed during the war to the national cause, and the same methods could do the job.”

And the payoff? In the words of one of these early propagandists: “If the others let a minority conquer the state, then they must also accept the fact that we will establish a dictatorship.” There is the end of democracy that the 18th century English historian warned about. Once a group learns how to manipulate the masses to its own ends, democracy ends, replaced by a dictatorship, a rule of the few, an aristocracy. This last quote came from Joseph Goebbles, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. It was also Goebbles who said that propaganda’s one object was to conquer the masses, just as he described the masses as “the weak, cowardly, lazy majority of people.”

But the masses – and you realize, I hope, that this means us. We are the masses over whom sly leaders vie for control – the masses weren’t thought of any more highly on this side of the Atlantic. Walter Lippman wrote of the “ignorance and stupidity of the masses.” The general public, he said, were mere “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders,” who must not intrude in the management of public affairs, though they may be permitted to select periodically among the “responsible men” whose task it is to rule them.

Do you see that this is the tool the aristocracy had needed since our country began, a tool to let them write the story for the masses, to put a command and control government in place of a government of empowerment and trust. The invention of propaganda and its immediate use after WWI is one of the most important stories of the 20th century.

Propaganda was talked about pretty openly during its early years, before people realized that wasn’t a very smart thing to do. In 1934, the new president of the American Political Science Association said in his presidential address that government should be in the hands of “an aristocracy of intellect and power,” not directed by “the ignorant, the uninformed.” “The public must be put in its place,” added Walter Lippman, so that the “responsible men” may “live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd” as they rule them.

That “bewildered herd” – that’s us too, you know.

This is a chapter of American history we must know if we are to understand who is running our country and how they run it. But we don’t know it, do we? Why do you suppose that is?

This is a lot of new and probably strange information. Let me try to sum it up in a clear and simple way, borrowing from the writings of Alex Carey (Taking the Risk Out of Democracy):

There were three key developments in the 20th century which have shaped the world we’re living in today: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Corporate propaganda directed outwards toward the public has two main goals: to identify the free-enterprise system in popular consciousness with every cherished value, and to identify interventionist governments and strong unions – the only forces capable of checking the complete domination of society by corporations – with tyranny, oppression and subversion. The techniques used to do this are variously called “public relations,” “corporate communications” and “economic education.”

Corporate propaganda directed inwards to employees has the purpose of weakening the links between union members and their unions. From about 1920 through the present, US business made great progress towards the ideal of a democracy managed through corporate propaganda.

Those who run the best corporations didn’t get where they are by being stupid. They are among the most savvy and quick people in our society; few Ph.D.s would stand a chance against them in their court. Those who were entrusted with corporate power realized that one of the best investments they can make with their money is to invest in buying the politicians who make the laws.

Current struggles to pass meaningful campaign finance reform are attempts to undo this powerful structure of command and control by corporations. But for the past couple decades, many or most of our major political candidates are, like used BMWs, “pre-owned vehicles.” In order to get the money they need to compete in American elections, they must get large investments from large business interests. And for those investments, they owe something once they’re in office. They owe their investors the effort to slant the laws of the land in ways that let their investors “vote themselves money from the public treasure,” as that 18th century historian put it.

What does this mean? It means weakening or eliminating controls on environmental pollution or toxic emissions or burial of radioactive waste, letting chemical companies like Monsanto infect the entire continent’s wheat and corn crops with genetically modified organisms that have not, and can not be, tested.

It means reducing the taxes corporations pay, and shifting that tax burden to the citizens those of us in the bewildered herd, so that they can vote themselves money out of our personal treasuries. It means breaking unions, and redefining the economy as one that revolves around the price of stocks rather than the ability of regular citizens to earn good livings through an honest day’s work.

You can see how corporate investments in political candidates work by looking at NAFTA. NAFTA was carefully crafted as an investor rights agreement. It can’t be considered a worker’s rights agreement. Opening the borders means that America’s higher-paid workers must now compete with the far cheaper labor in Mexico. This threat has been used routinely to break American union demands for decent wages and benefits. If they refuse, the manufacturing is simply moved to northern Mexico, to workers who have low pay and few benefits, but see it as an improvement over abject poverty. NAFTA is an investor rights agreement. It is paying dividends on the financial investment that corporations and wealthy individuals made in our elections. They helped elect their candidate, and they want payback. It is only fair.

Or you can see how the paybacks from investing in elections work by looking at Texas’ own, Enron’s former CEO Kenneth Lay. Lay was the biggest single investor in George W. Bush’s campaign for president. In return for this investment, Lay was able to appoint White House regulators, shape energy policies and block the regulation of offshore tax havens, Enron had “intimate contact with Taliban officials” and the energy giant’s much-reviled Dabhol project in India was set to benefit from a hook-up with the oil pipeline we planned to run through Afghanistan.

These negotiations collapsed in August 2001 – a date that should begin making our ears stick up – when the Taliban asked the US to help reconstruct Afghanistan’s infrastructure and provide a portion of the oil supply for local needs. The US response was reportedly succinct: “We will either carpet you in gold or carpet you in bombs.” The notes of this meeting, which took place only weeks before September 11th, are now the subject of a lawsuit between Congress and the White House. Was the Taliban really destroyed for harboring terrorists? Or was it destroyed for failing to further the ambitions of Texas millionaires?

The London paper The Guardian also reports that US State Department officials in early July of 2001 informed their Russian and Pakistani counterparts of possible plans to invade Afghanistan in the fall.

To put this in the form of a question made famous during the Watergate investigation 30 years ago, we now need to ask “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

Once we began our new war, it provided a cover for other agendas that the administration had been trying to do since the election, to fulfill their promises to their corporate investors.

I read in early March that over $212 billion was transferred from our economy to our larger corporations in the form of retroactive tax refunds sometimes going back fifteen years. Democracy can only exist “until [some] voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure.”

Huge tax refunds were voted in, from which well over 90% went to the richest 1% of Americans. These are some of the returns on their investments in the president’s campaign.

And do you recall Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s recent statement? While requesting an additional $48 billion for defense, much of which will go to corporations closely related to this administration, he casually mentioned that the Pentagon had somehow misplaced $2.3 trillion. This makes me want Lewis Black to do an angry rant! It’s the wrong verb! Nobody “misplaces” $2.3 trillion. Someone took it, moved it to somewhere else, and others else got it. Who? Was it done without the President’s knowledge? If not, again, what did the President know, and when did he know it?

News reports from Der Spiegel to the London Observer, from the Los Angeles Times to MSNBC to CNN indicate that many different warnings were received by the Administration before the 9-11 attacks. It has even been reported that the US government broke bin Laden’s secure communications before September 11. The US government is being sued today by survivors of the Embassy bombings because, from court reports, it appears clear that the US had received prior warnings then too, but did nothing to protect the staffs at our embassies. Did the same thing happen again?

And does it get even worse? Could there be an even darker side to the events of 9-11? Maybe. I read an article in the March/April issue of The Humanist magazine that’s worth sharing. (I’ve since been told by several people at the three services on Sunday 21 April that these things were widely known and discussed back in September. But I don’t have independent verification.)

In the days leading up to 9-11, thousands of “put” options were purchased on companies whose stocks tanked after September 11. “Put” options are bought by investors when they are willing to gamble that a company’s stock prices will go down in the near future. Most prominent among these companies are American and United Airlines, whose planes hit the twin towers, and the investment firms of Morgan Stanley and Merril Lynch, whose offices were destroyed in the towers.

Between September 6 and 7, investors purchased 4,744 “put” options in United Airlines at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. At the same time, only 396 “call” options – where an investor bets on a stock price increasing – were purchased.On September 10, investors bought 4,516 “put” options in American Airlines versus 748 call options. In the three days prior to September 11, investors bought 2,157 “put” options in Morgan Stanley, a company which occupied fifty floors of office at the WTC. Volume during the previous week was a mere 27 “put” options per day. Likewise, investors bought another 12,215 “put” options for WTC tenant Merril Lynch.

Most embarrassing to the government, however, is the fact that many of the mysterious “put” options were purchased through an investment firm that was formally headed by Buzzy Krongard, the current executive director of the CIA.

Next week I want to keep exploring some of these issues. I want to look into propaganda more deeply, and to look at some disturbing developments indicating a new political ideology beginning to take over the religious right in this country – much to the dismay of some of their own Christian ministers. I’ll also want to look at much that is right and promising, and suggest some actions we might take.

But I have asked a lot of you today. I have tried to put some clear patterns to a tremendous amount of what will be new information for most of you. I may be wrong. My patterns and understanding may be wrong. The patterns I see suggest that the aristocracy controlling our election processes and much of our government is not serving, and can not serve, the interests or needs of the vast majority of the American people.

Under the cover of war, I believe there is a good chance that we are losing our American way of life, our civil freedoms, our economy, and the remaining vestiges of our democracy, just as that cynical historian predicted 250 years ago.

Where does this leave us? It reconnects me with some of my strongest and most basic convictions:

• We cannot lose faith. We must continue to appeal to the better angels of our nature, and the better angels of our leaders.
• We cannot lose hope. The future is not yet written, its options are still open.
• And we must try not to become self-righteous or mean-spirited, or attempt to harm our nation. We may and must criticize and chastise its errant ways. But we must struggle to do it in a spirit of love. I struggle mightily with this one, and often lose here.

I hope and I pray that we may indeed add our critical and caring voices to the dialogue. And even though we are few and our efforts may seem meager, they are essential – for us, for our nation, and for the world.

Let us go forth in faith, in hope, and in love.

Amen.

© Davidson Loehr

15 April 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

(This was the Easter service, which is also this church’s annual celebration of the Flower Communion created by Dr. Norbert Capek in 1923. While it doesn’t read like a straight sermon, all the words are reproduced here for those who would like to know more about this unique “communion” and how this particular church celebrates it.)

FLOWER PROCESSIONAL AND STORY OF THE FLOWERS

As the flowers are brought forward, I want to tell you a little about the story of the flowers. This ceremony was created by a Czechoslovakian Unitarian minister named Dr. Norbert Capek in 1923. His church in Prague had 3200 members, and was the largest Unitarian church there has ever been. Today, Unitarians hardly even know how to dream of such numbers and such influence.

Capek had felt the need for some symbolic ritual that could recognize people’s unique gifts, but also bind them more closely together – the idea of diversity within unity with which we still struggle today. The traditional Christian communion service with bread and wine was unacceptable to the members of his congregation, so he turned to the native beauty of the Czech countryside for the elements of a new kind of communion that might speak to them. The Flower Communion we will celebrate today was the result. It was an immediate success, and was held annually. His wife brought it to this country in 1940, and it is now celebrated annually in most Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist churches here.

Dr. Capek was arrested by the Nazis in 1941 because of his liberal religious beliefs, and taken to Dachau. He died in a concentration camp in 1942, so he is also seen as a martyr for the cause of more honest and open religion.

In his service, as in this one, he asked each member to bring a flower to church. This signified that it was by their own free will they joined with the others. And, as we also do here, his church provided a lot of extra flowers, to make sure that everybody would get one. The flowers were arranged in a vase, as we have arranged them in baskets. The baskets represent the united fellowship of the whole church. After the service, as people left the church, they each took a flower other than the one they had brought. The significance of the flower communion is that as no two flowers are alike, so no two people are alike, yet each has a contribution to make. Together the flowers form a beautiful bouquet. Our common bouquet would not be the same without the unique addition of each individual flower, just as our growing church community would not be the same without each of us.

By exchanging flowers, we show our willingness to walk together in our search for truth, rising above all that might divide us. Each person takes home a flower brought by someone else – thus symbolizing our shared celebration in community. This communion of voluntary sharing is essential to a free people in a free religion.

CENTERING: (Adapted from “Prayer Before Birth” by Louis MacNeice)

I am not yet born; O hear me. I am your tomorrows, but I am not yet born.

I am not yet born, console me. Protect me from the doubts that strangle, the fears that stifle, the friends who drain and demean.

I am not yet born; give me dreams of what we may yet become, and nourish me, that I do not starve before I gain the strength to walk, and to fly, and perhaps even to soar with the eagles.

I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the woman who is a beast or the man who thinks he is God come near me. And those who can remain big only by keeping those around them small – guard me from them, for I am yet a fragile thing.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity, who would make me into a thing, a mere thing, who would dissuade and dissipate me until I lose my spirit, and then my soul, and then my hope, and your hope as well.

For I am the greater you who is not yet born, And together we must strive, must strive with the gods if necessary, for so much is at stake, there is so much to be gained. I am the you who is yet to become, and I am not yet born. Help me.

SERMON: New Life for Old

This morning I want to take this sermon title in two directions. The first is to talk a little about the very ancient Easter tradition. It’s message, both in pre-Christian and in Christian cultures, was the message of “new life for old.” Literal religions took it literally, liberal religions took it symbolically, and it always takes some work to relate the old Easter stories to the world as we know it today, and to life as we are living it today.

I have a confession to make that will sound very un-Unitarian to nearly everybody who has been here for a few years or more: this is the first time I have ever been involved in a Flower Communion. I didn’t even know the story, except in the barest outline. It is almost always celebrated in Unitarian churches on the second Sunday in June, which is when Dr. Capek celebrated it, as the last regular church service until fall. We are a full-service church that meets every Sunday of the year, so we don’t have a “last regular church service until fall,” and in this church, the Flower Communion has been celebrated on Easter Sunday.

So the second thing we’ll be doing this morning is becoming acquainted with Dr. Norbert Capek’s invention of the Flower Communion as another kind of “new life for old” – inventing new stories and rituals that may communicate a little more easily with us today, while still connecting us with what Dr. Capek called the “Infinite Spirit of Life.”

But first, let’s begin with Easter. There are several things about our culture’s two favorite holidays – Christmas and Easter – that are very ironic.

One is that both of them are ancient pagan celebrations, with no necessary connection to Christianity or any other modern religion whatever. The symbols for the winter solstice festival, which most of us have learned to call Christmas, are all from the ancient days of nature religions: evergreens, the holly and ivy, mistletoe, and of course light. Whether a Yule log is burned, or Christmas bonfires are lit, or just candles, there is always light. This is also clear in the festival the Jews created for the same time, Chanuka, which is also called the festival of lights.

And the symbols for the vernal equinox, or Easter, are also completely pagan, from nature religions and ancient agricultural societies. Easter is about new life. The two prime symbols of Easter are that timeless symbol of fecundity, the rabbit, and those numberless symbols of fertility, eggs – this isn’t subtle. The other symbols of Easter are signs of spring: bright colors and Easter bonnets.

The name “Easter” probably came from an ancient goddess of spring named Eostre, who also had a special rabbit [hare] who laid eggs for good children to eat. And “Easter lilies” probably began as Eostre’s flower. It was said they were “lily white” because they grew from Eostre’s milk. Later, the Romans said the lilies were Juno’s and were white because they grew from her milk. And still later, the Christians identified “Easter lilies” with the Virgin Mary, and said they were white because they grew from her milk. It’s a story people liked, and told in many cultures.

Another ironic thing about these two holidays is that they are really celebrating the same thing, the power of life over death, or of new life for old. They are our two most optimistic holidays. Many thousands of years ago, people noticed several examples of this. They used the cycles of the moon as a symbol of death and rebirth. Each month there is about a three-day period between the shrinking moon and the expanding moon when it is almost gone. They saw this as a three-day period of death followed by the rebirth of the new moon. Then the moon grows larger into a full moon, then grows smaller again, “dies” again, and is reborn again. This plot of dying for three days then returning to life was woven into many religious stories, including the Christian Easter story, where the man Jesus is said to have died, then three days later risen as God. There is a similar cycle in plants. Seeds look dead, we bury them in the ground, and then new life springs forth through the ground – like all these flowers. So when people were buried in the ground, many hoped they too would rise again into a new kind of life. These are ancient hopes, myths arising from deep in our souls and our past.

I like these stories, but they are so fantastic that it’s hard for us to know just what to do with them. We live in an age of science, but these ancient stories aren’t written in the language of science. They are written in the language of hope, the language of faith.

A friend of mine, a colleague from the Jesus Seminar, retired about six years ago after a forty-year career as a minister in the United Church of Christ. He founded the Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix, Arizona in 1955 with about fifty people, and when he retired in 1995, it had 2500 members. He made a point of telling people who attended the Jesus Seminar — and wondered how you could ever preach the truth from a pulpit — that he had never lied from his pulpit. He began every Easter sermon, he said, by saying that Easter isn’t about corpses walking, it’s about the chance for our lives to be reborn, rejuvenated, here and now, in ways that might seem magical, but were not supernatural. This man, Culver Nelson, had a lot of charisma, and I think he could get away with saying that where thousands of other Christian ministers could not get away with it. Usually, it’s hard work to relate these old stories of death and resurrection to the world as we know it and life as we actually live it. I’ve done an Easter sermon every year of my career, and a lot of times I’ve wished we could just use different stories, stories and symbols that communicated more directly.

Now I want to make a transition to the second part of this short sermon. I couldn’t find a smooth and classy way to do it, because the two halves aren’t very closely related. So I decided to do it in a light-hearted way, maybe even a silly way. This week an e-mail made the rounds of some ministers’ groups where we exchange some ideas and materials. It was a list called “All I need to know about life I learned from the Easter Bunny.” It’s a play on the book title All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Unitarian Minister Robert Fulghum. It’s kind of like some Easter sermons you may have heard, taking an old story and loading it with some funny modern messages. I don’t know who wrote it, but here are some of the life lessons you can learn from the Easter Bunny:

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket

Walk softly and carry a big carrot

Everyone needs a friend who is all ears

There’s no such thing as too much candy

All work and no play can make you a basket case

Everyone is entitled to a bad hare day

Let happy thoughts multiply like rabbits

Keep your paws off other people’s jellybeans

Good things sometimes come in small sugarcoated packages

The grass is always greener in someone else’s basket

An Easter bonnet can tame even the wildest hare

To show your true colors you have to come out of your shell

And – The best things in life are still sweet and gooey

The Flower Communion

That’s one way to give new life to old symbols. But there is another way that is distinctly liberal. And that is to introduce new stories that open us up to some of life’s gifts in more direct ways, so we don’t have to keep working so hard to translate ancient symbols like the symbols of rabbits, eggs, death and resurrection so they don’t mislead people into confusing religion with superstition.

It’s a pretty bold move, inventing a new ritual. Most of the time it will probably bomb, because it’s hard to find new rituals that speak to people easily. But that’s what Dr. Capek (Chah-Peck) did with his Flower Communion when he invented it in 1923. I already told you the story earlier, but it’s worth going into a little more detail about some of Capek’s religious beliefs, which were inspiring both then and now.

He thought that all people were inherently religious, and inherently good, and he taught that religion should, above all, provide that “inner harmony which is the precondition of strong character, good health, joyful moods and victorious creative life. It is my ideal,” he wrote, “that unitarian religion in our country should mean a higher culture – new attitudes toward life. In short, unitarian religion should mean the next advanced cultural level of our people.” The church’s task “must be to place truth above any tradition, spirit above any scripture, freedom above authority, and progress above all reaction.”

He defined religious education as “an endeavor to awaken the inner forces of children and teach them how to organize, harmonize and adapt them to the ever-changing influences which come to them from outside.” He identified a list of feelings and abilities which a modern religious education should elicit from a child. They included, in his terms, the ability to have faith and confidence, the ability to hope, the feeling of worship (like Albert Schweitzer’s reverence for life), charity or selfless love, and conscientiousness. In the 1920s and 1930s, he thought that a person with these qualities was a truly religious person. In 2001, I think so too. You could say it was a very optimistic faith that Capek had, just before the dark days of the Nazi occupation of Czeckoslovakia from 1939 – 1945.

When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Dr. Capek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human being to be – in the words of the Nazi court records – “too dangerous to the Reich [for him] to be allowed to live.” Think about that: believing that people were good made him too dangerous to be allowed to live; what a complete failure of the human spirit that was! Dr. Capek was arrested in 1941 and sent to Dachau. He died in a concentration camp the next year. This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his Flower Communion, which is celebrated in many of our churches today.

Before his life was taken from him, he gave new life for old by creating this beautiful ritual celebrating the interweaving of diversity and community. You will each judge for yourselves this morning where you found more new life for old – in revisiting the Easter stories, or in visiting the Unitarian Flower Communion. But as we prepare for our celebration of Dr. Capek’s Flower Communion, I want to suggest that the Nazi court records, as they often did, had it completely backwards. Because people who believe in, and who teach, the inherent worth and beauty of all people are the only ones whose beliefs equip them to live, and to share in the gifts of life that others bring.

BENEDICTION:

For our benediction this morning, I have adapted some words which Dr. Capek used in his Flower Communions:

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these fragile flowers, which are thy messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and devotion to our most sacred callings. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing with each other. May we cherish friendship as one of the most sacred and precious manifestations of the Infinite Spirit of Life. May we realize that, [as these flowers each contribute their different styles of beauty, every one of us is an embodiment of the gods, and in every one of us the gods struggle for higher expression.

FLOWER COMMUNION:

It is time now for us to share in the Flower Communion. I ask that as you each in turn approach the communion baskets you do so quietly – reverently – with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and one another with gentleness, justice, and love. I ask that you select a flower – different from the one you brought – that particularly appeals to you. If you didn’t bring a flower, don’t worry about it, we have provided plenty of extras for you so that everybody can have one. As you take your chosen flower – noting its particular shape and beauty – please remember to handle it carefully. It is a gift that someone else has brought to you. It represents that person’s unique humanity, and therefore deserves your kindest touch. Let us share quietly in this beautiful ritual of unity, diversity, and love.

As you come up to get your flower, please start with the back row and move row by row from the side aisles to the front. After taking a flower, please exit by the center aisles. We will then leave to recreate this bouquet of harmonized gifts in the world outside these walls, where our diverse gifts are as desperately needed as our ability to blend them into a bouquet. Accompanied by our flowers, let us leave this place of worship with peace, with hope, and with beauty.