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© Davidson Loehr

 9 November 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Video clips at Ustream

PRAYER:

(Ask veterans to stand, thank them.)

We pray for the bodies, minds and spirits of our soldiers on active duty now, that they may return home and may get the care they need.

And we remind ourselves – because we too easily forget – of the gratitude we owe to all veterans, past, present and future, for being willing to play that game of Russian Roulette we call military service. Any of them could have been sent into combat, and any of them could have been maimed or killed. No one else in our country is asked to offer that degree of sacrifice on behalf of political and military ambitions soldiers never fully understand, even as they are being shot at.

We pray, as people have prayed throughout history, for a time when soldiers and wars will not be necessary. But we don’t live in that world. And so we pray for the safety of our soldiers, and offer our heartfelt gratitude to all our veterans for their service.

Amen.

SERMON: The Audacity of Hope

Part A: Excited utterances

Tuesday’s presidential election was both a historic and exciting election. I want to talk about it, to look into this winning message of hope and change that carried Barack Obama to such a stunning victory of more than a two-to-one electoral vote. I want to wonder what it would take to make his hopes real, and whether it’s realistic to believe such change is possible.

But first, I just want to share, even to wallow in, some of the many excited utterances of this week. Here’s one:

“Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is a date that will live in fame (the opposite of infamy) forever. If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.” Those words came from the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a column he wrote for the New York Times two days ago, and they are a measure of the excitement that many people in our country and around the world feel this week.

Just consider the biography of the man we’ve elected President, against the whole history of the United States of America, and ask if it feels like you must be dreaming:

His father was born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father – our new President’s grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

But as Obama tells the story, “My grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.

“My parents imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.

“I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

This is as perfect a Horatio Alger American Dream story as anyone is ever likely to have: the hard-working and determined person who succeeds despite overwhelming odds simply through what Martin Luther King called the content of his character. This is the American dream: from poor, powerless boy – or girl! – to the White House. He’s right: his story wouldn’t be possible in no other country on Earth.

Here are some more excited utterances, from this morning’s paper:

Maureen Dowd writes:

“I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week. Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel. I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.” (Maureen Dowd, “The Tracks of Our Tears,” 9 November 2008, The New York Times)

And Frank Rich writes with his edge, but also with some good insights:

“On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place – in cities all over America.

“For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid – easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included.

“So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.” (Frank Rich, It Still Felt Good the Morning After, 9 November 2008, The NY Times)

Warm and hopeful messages came from countries all over the world, too many to read here. But I don’t want to leave our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson’s home country out, so here’s another excited utterance from Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond. He sent a message to Mr. Obama, in which he said, “It ushers in a new era of hope for the United States and its role in the world. This was a victory for optimism over pessimism, for hope over fear.” There’s that word, Hope.

Here’s how Obama put it Tuesday night at the start of his speech as the new President-elect of the United States of America:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

“Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”

My God – how long has it been since we have turned for a poetic and inspiring reading to one of our Presidents? Barack Obama may go down as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history. But it wasn’t just the excitement of election night that lifted him to that kind of eloquence. Here are just a few famous words he wrote about hope four years ago:

“Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”

Those words came from his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention, the speech that made him an instant national political figure – and helped get him a $2 million deal for three books. And that magical phrase, “The audacity of hope,” was the title of his best-selling 2006 book. But he got the message from his minister of twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It was a sentiment that resonated with his whole life experience. It is that audacious hope with which he wants to infect us, all of us.

Part B: the Manger of Hope

I like etymology, the origin of word meanings, so I looked these two words up. An archaic meaning of Hope is “to have trust, confidence”.

And to be audacious means “to dare” – to dare something that others lack the hope, confidence and courage to dare.

But there’s something special about a message of hope. In his first book, Dreams from my Father, he wrote some very telling and very poignant words about it, reflecting on the powerful emotional effect that his first visit to Jeremiah Wright’s church more than twenty years ago had on him. The preacher, choir and congregation had taken up the word “Hope” in chants and shouts, and it had a transformative effect on a young Barack Obama:

“In that single [word] ‘hope’ I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black;…” He also compared them to the hopeful songs that slaves used to sing at night around the fire. Obama’s sentiments of hope have profoundly religious roots.

Voices of hope don’t come from the same place as voices of privilege, power and entitlement. Voices of hope are usually pretty powerless. I think this voice of hope that President-elect Obama has made his centerpiece could only come from someone outside the circles of those accustomed to privilege. Those who already own the country don’t need hope. They just need more power, more protection from those who have been disempowered, a few more politicians in their pockets, to pass a few more laws in their favor – which they don’t seem to have much trouble getting from either political party.

This is not to say that Barack Obama is powerless, without privileges, or even that he’s just an ordinary guy. He’s not. He is very, very bright and focused – remember that he has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, graduated from Harvard Law School as president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I’m not sure we could over-state just how bright, focused and privileged our 44th President is.

But his privilege was earned, not bestowed. It came from his own achievements, not from his family or their entitlements. Our current president also attended elite schools. But he didn’t get into any of them on his own merit, and he did poorly at all of them. George W. Bush was pushed to the top by the financial and political ties of his family, in spite of his unimpressive personal achievements. Barack Obama rose to the top because of his personal achievements, but in spite of the complete lack of wealth or political power of anyone in his family.

As the son of a goat-herder from Kenya and a poor woman from Kansas, both dead now, Obama inherited both the right and the need to hope.

Here’s another kind of metaphor. Think of the different view of food that you can get from a gourmet, and from a man who has been hungry and poor for a long time. The gourmet can tutor you on the nuances of fine sauces and rare wines. She knows more about the subtle flavors of the most exquisite foods than anybody. But in some deeper ways, the hungry man can tell you even more important things about food, because he knows what he needs in order to live, and how much he needs it. That’s like the difference between the voice of power and privilege, and the voice of hope, too.

But Obama is hoping for something very different from Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists of the 1970s. Here’s a line from his justly famous speech on race back on March 18th:

“…we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”

Those are strong words! Obama is not an affirmative action candidate, nor a token played in the disingenuous game of racial reconciliation.

Some have talked about how he stands on the shoulders of people like Jesse Jackson and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and there is certainly something absolutely true about that. But he also represents a profoundly different political ideology than the talk about race or sex thirty years ago. Then, liberals would often favor someone simply because they were black or female. Had Jesse Jackson been elected, we all knew that he would make a point of choosing black people for his key positions, as we expected that Geraldine Ferraro would have chosen women if she had been elected Vice President, using their political power to reward Their Kind with entitlements. But that’s just reverse racism and sexism, and morally it is no better than the original versions that have done so much damage.

Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin continued to play on that reverse sexism this year in their very different campaigns, and many women were willing to vote for them largely because they were women, especially in the case of Hillary. As women, they belonged to a majority containing slightly more than half of the voting population and over half the general population.

But Obama had to be, and was, far more pragmatic. As the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, raised by a white grandmother in Hawaii, rising high into the intellectual and political elite through his own exceptional gifts – he didn’t belong to any majorities. Kenyans aren’t a majority in America, nor people born to parents of two different races, nor Hawaiians. The only majority Obama could appeal to was the majority of Americans. And as he said throughout his speeches over the past four years, he wasn’t appealing to red states or blue states, but to the United States. He wasn’t appealing to black America or white America, or to liberal America or conservative America, but just to the United States of America.

Think of it: a message of hope, spoken to and on behalf of the majority of our citizens, regardless of their political party, race or sex: that is a definition of post-partisan politics, which will be revolutionary if he means it and can pull it off.

If Obama is telling the truth, he is bringing a peaceful, profound, revolution. He says he’s looking for more than just a change of parties in the White House. Obama’s message isn’t about black empowerment. It’s about American empowerment, and human empowerment. This seemed to be the singular voice he brought, a voice that could have come only from outside all the majority groups.

Part C: My Own Audacious Hopes

We don’t know what kind of a president Barack Obama will make. If he plays the race card as Jesse Jackson did, he may become no more than a sensationalist President, notable only because he was black and brilliant, rather than becoming a truly sensational President because he was one of our very best.

I want to share some of my own audacious hopes for the next four years with you. You won’t agree with all of them, but you don’t come here only to have your biases confirmed, but also to hear things that might irritate you enough to make you think about your biases, and be more clear about why you’re going to stick with them, or change them.

I hope this wasn’t just a victory for the Democratic party, because the Democratic Party can not save us. I hope we won’t see four or eight more years of tit for tat, of vengeance on Republicans, and of liberal pork-barrel politics operating at the same low level as the Republican pork-barrel politics of the past eight years.

I hope I don’t like all of Obama’s appointments, and hope neither the Democrats nor the Republicans like them all either.

This has already started, as some prominent liberal voices have spoken out. Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine and a longtime progressive activist, railed against Rahm Emanual as Obama’s choice for Chief of Staff, characterizing him as a right-wing Zionist ideologue. And Ralph Nader wasted no time saying that Obama is already too beholden to giant corporations for us to hope for any significant change. But if Obama is serious about post-partisan politics, then he will appoint a fair number of brilliant Republicans to key posts – people who won’t always agree with him, but who will be open and informed enough in their criticism to keep the possibility of meaningful change alive – and I hope he does that.

I hope he truly puts together a post-partisan cabinet that might help move us all beyond the partisan politics that have proven to be so petty and immature for the past few decades.

I don’t know what that would look like. I don’t even know what it should look like, because in politics as in all other areas, I can’t see very far beyond my own biases, and my biases aren’t good enough. We need to empower meaningful dialogue between many different biases if this is to become – as Obama has also promised – a government of the people, by the people and for the people. I hope he can empower meaningful and influential dialogue between whose biases go beyond mine, no matter how much in love with my own biases I can be.

So I hope we are all surprised and educated in the coming years, to find a president who actually keeps some of his major campaign promises, and moves our country ahead into brave new places it has never been before.

PART D. A Reality Check

Now, does any of this hope for radical change really make any real-world sense? Or is it just that it’s Sunday, so we huddle together in church to be anesthetized with swell-sounding bromides of neither depth nor breadth, to numb us until we can get outside in the actual world again? That sort of thing does happen, as you know. Are we just kidding ourselves, like a herd of little Pollyannas, or can such radical, hopeful, change really happen?

Well, several things suggest that it can. Proposition 8 in California, forbidding the marriage of gay people, won only by a slim margin. That was the one dramatic setback for many people. But let’s back off and see this through a longer lens. In the past eight years, the percentage of people who voted against the rights of gays to marry in California decreased from 61% to 52%. In four more years, it is almost certain to be the minority view. Massachusetts has already extended the right of marriage to all people. New York recognizes those marriages as legal, and soon Connecticut will join them. And on another front, in all three states where regressive abortion propositions were on the ballot, they failed. As I think we’ll see in the coming years, the coming defeat of racial and sexual regression will also be a significant defeat for conservative Christianity – normative Christianity – which has supported them. Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, has an essay from 6 November on the Huffington Post in which she talks about “the Jesus that lost this election,” and it is the angry, bigoted, hateful Jesus who many of us have learned to accept as the normative Jesus over the past couple decades (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/the-victorious-jesus_b_141701.html). Twenty years ago, all of this would have been as unbelievable as a black president, but it’s happening, and the momentum seems both clear and strong.

Two days ago, a man named Benedict Carey reported on the op-ed pages of the New York Times about a study showing that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion and hatred can, and that mutual trust, once developed, travels like what he called a benign virus through an entire peer group. Radical change is possible, and it is happening. The fact that this report – which doesn’t contain much more than common sense to anyone who has made friends in racially mixed places – only came out this week rather than years ago is a sign of the role our media have played in helping to keep us at one another’s throats. Perhaps even the media can return to the days when they were actually the Fourth Estate, and took it as a sacred mission to keep us informed and educated. (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A20 of the New York edition.)

Paul Krugman the economist also wrote on Friday, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

“And right now,” he says, “happens to be one of those times when the converse is also true, and good morals are good economics. Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.

“So,” Krugman concludes, “a new New Deal isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.” (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A35 of the New York edition.)

I agree with our next President, that if we do this right, we have a righteous wind at our backs and that we stand on the crossroads of history. But the final quote this morning will come from Barack Obama, as he reveals what is at the core of his whole vision, the spirit that he actually says he will serve:

“In the end, then,” he says, “what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” (from the 18 March speech on race).

I don’t always know what to say when politicians talk politics, but I hope many of these audacious dreams come true. I hope we here can find ways to move beyond both partisan and Unitarian biases to become agents of change in the broader kind of coalition that now calls us out.

And finally, I hope that if the new President of the United States asks us if we can grow beyond mere politics and ground our behavior instead in the highest teachings of the world’s great religions – to do unto others only as we would have them do unto us – I hope if he asks us whether we can do that, that as individuals and as a nation, we are able to rise up and shout YES WE CAN!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 26 October 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Online TV Shows by Ustream

PRAYER:

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

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

SERMON: How You Should Vote

So many conservative preachers have been telling their people how to vote for so long that I began to wonder if I was being derelict in my duty. After all, we’re trying to do honest religion here. And surely honest religion also has some light to shed on the upcoming election.

So that’s what I want to do this morning. I want to bring this election – and I mean this presidential election – home to you in a way that might make it more clear just how you should vote on November 4th.

It’s a complex subject, and I first need to sketch a much bigger picture before I can then bring this election – or any- important election – into it.

Many of you know the story about two wolves that comes from our Native American tradition. A young boy who was the strongest and most popular boy in the tribe went to see his grandfather for some wisdom. He was strong and clever enough to take whatever he wanted from others, and one voice within him said he should do it. On the other hand, he felt it wasn’t fair, taking things from others that they needed, just because he could get away with it. His grandfather nodded, and said yes, he had the same two voices within him. He thought of them as two wolves. One always urged him to take what he could get away with, to use his advantages over others to his own advantage, not theirs. The other wolf always wanted him to be decent, compassionate, someone who was a blessing to all around him rather than just to himself.

I want to talk about these two wolves this morning, because they are in all of us. We are not all the strongest, cleverest and most popular, but we have other advantages. Maybe we have more education than the majority of others, or we attended elite schools, and both expect and know that just the fact that we attended an elite school will open doors for us that aren’t opened for others, and we like it. It seems only fair. Or perhaps we’ve made or inherited more money than most others – I’m convinced that the ability to make money is a gift that a few have but most don’t – and righteously cling to the advantages and security that brings. Or we’re more attractive than most, and have learned how to use that to our advantage. But let’s not get so fuzzy that we fail to see the obvious. And what’s obvious is that, while we have lots of individual traits that give us an advantage over others, the differences that really make the most difference in the world have always been differences in power: the ability to get and keep power.

The wolf with power has a different view of power and its privileges than the wolves without power have, and a different plan for How Things Should Work. I’m going to call this Plan A, or Plan Alpha, for it is the scheme of things as designed by the Alpha males and females.

The other wolf favors Plan Beta, or Plan B. It’s about weaker, squishier things, like empathy, compassion, reciprocity, caring almost as much for others as for ourselves, and so on. It is certainly the weaker wolf.

Plan B serves the people who aren’t an alpha. They are, in every species, the overwhelming majority, yet throughout history they have almost always been successfully subdued, disempowered and ruled by the alphas. It may seem amazing that so few can rule over so many for so long – but it looks like Nature’s Way. And in fact, we have millions of years of history showing that is Nature’s Way. Alphas have always written the rules for their groups – in dolphins, dogs, elephants and apes, including human apes.

The strongest take what they want, the weaker submit as they must, or they will be put in their place through violence or threats of violence. You can see it in a hundred nature films, or read about it in the daily news.

In at least two species, the art of politics has developed as a more subtle and effective expression and transmission of power. I’ve brought you some descriptions from a well-known book on politics. They are pretty blunt, but see if you can’t recognize them:

“… politics is all about getting and keeping power, by the few over the many, and by any means necessary. Alpha males form alliances with influential males and females – or subordinate males form coalitions to overpower the alpha male, and then consolidate their power by forming alliances with influential females. Males seldom maintain the alpha rank for more than four years.” Then there’s another round of opportunistic alliances and vicious fighting to crown a new leader – or as we call them, elections.

The two mottoes of politics are “One good turn deserves another,” and “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 202)

And political alliances are not personal, but functional – not with friends, but with those who can, at the moment, be useful. Yesterday’s enemy may be today’s ally, and we may attack today’s friend tomorrow.

Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 43)

As I said, that’s a little blunt, but most of us would say yes, that’s our species, and it is. However, most of these observations came from a book called Chimpanzee Politics, written in 1982 and now a minor classic. The author, who has spent his life studying apes, was describing chimpanzees. And he says humans and chimpanzees are the only two species who do politics this way.

So you can understand why Newt Gingrich put the book Chimpanzee Politics on the recommended reading list for freshmen representatives, back in 1994. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 307)

It’s another way of saying our political style evolved by three million years ago, and perhaps the only major way in which our species has advanced beyond chimpanzees since then is through our invention of money, media and lobbyists. Not everyone would consider that an advance.

Why seek power? In any species, why seek power? It’s not for the sake of power, but for the entitlement that power brings – entitlement to food, mates and pretty much whatever else the top dogs want.

The alpha male chimpanzees, who do about 95% of the breeding in their troops, would think our alpha males have a severe testosterone deficiency, but we know that isn’t always true either. There are stories going all the way back to George Washington, saying he was father of this country in more ways than one – though you only have to turn on the news to see that we do have some modern politicians trying to uphold that ancient tradition.

The observation that Rank Hath Its Privileges didn’t originate with our species. Thousands of species had been playing that out for tens of millions of years before we came along. And maybe if chimpanzees had invented boats or learned to ride horses and make really destructive weapons, they would have invented the idea of empire.

I don’t have to sketch out any more of this. You all know this movie because we’re in it. You can even take a half hour drive and go up the dominance alphabet from omega to alpha here in Austin just by starting out east of I-35 and driving west.

Power and Privilege for the Alphas and Obedience for the masses are the holy trinity of Plan A in thousands of species, always underwritten by violence and threats of violence. The benefits of Plan A are very appealing, at least if you’re up near the top of the alphabet.

In Plan B, the Betas, Gammas, Deltas on down the dominance alphabet are also concerned primarily with their own interests, and the political structure that would serve them best. Of course, they are the vast majority. But they have been subjugated and ruled in almost every species for tens of millions of years. They are the underdogs.

Plan B is certainly the weaker and less likely plan. And not surprisingly, most of those in favor of Plan B are those without much power or wealth.

Yet as powerful as the history and logic of Plan Alpha are, Plan B has also had many profound and enduring champions, including the key prophets and sages of almost every religion and philosophy in human history.

For starters, just think of the words “Do unto others as you would have them to unto you.” It’s called the Golden Rule because you can find a version of it in almost every religion. It is saying that the only Alpha people God recognizes are the moral Alpha people who show more empathy, compassion and courage than most around them – not those with more money or power. Jesus was even clear that those who get their rewards here will not get them in heaven, where things run according to God’s values.

The Plan B sentiments may be terribly unlikely, but they are among the most famous and endearing teachings of almost every religion on earth.

The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu, written five centuries before Jesus lived, is so explicit it sounds like an op-ed piece from yesterday’s news. It says, “When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn – all this is robbery and chaos. It is not in keeping with the Tao.” (#53, Stephen Mitchell translation)

A quick Google search will show you unambiguous quotations supporting Plan B from Bahá’í, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Native American Spirituality, Shinto, Sikhism, Sufism, Taoism, and dozens of others. All the religions seem to agree that the fundamental law that helps us become most fully human is reciprocity: not doing things to others that we wouldn’t want them to do to us. Most people would see this as the polar opposite of Plan Alpha, Nature’s Plan that has dominated biological evolution forever.

These two plans, these two wolves, are the diametrically opposed philosophies of life that have polarized us throughout human history. Even in this country, they go all the way back to our founding fathers.

Alexander Hamilton declared that the people are “a great beast” that must be tamed. Rebellious and independent farmers had to be taught, sometimes by force, that the ideals of the revolutionary pamphlets were not to be taken too seriously. (Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People, p. 46).

Or as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, put it, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” (Chomsky, 46) Others among the founding fathers agreed wholeheartedly. The primary responsibility of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” said James Madison. (Chomsky, 47) Those “without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights,” Madison explained. His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who “come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable set of men.” (Chomsky, 48) That’s Nature’s Way, expressed in a language of our species.

Now let’s bring the picture into a little sharper focus. Here’s where the differences between the Alpha and Beta plans shape and misshape our nation today.

Plan A: For Plan Alpha, if privilege and empowerment rightfully belong only to the winners, to those with a lot of money and power – as Mother Nature seems to say it does – then if you are poor or powerless, it’s probably because you deserve to be. You lack discipline, haven’t worked as hard or as smart as the Alphas. You don’t deserve things like health care or a good education if you can’t afford them, because health care and education are commodities like other commodities, and you’re being not only out of line but also selfish pretending you have a right to things you can’t pay for.

By the same logic, worker unions are against Nature’s Plan – Plan A. It doesn’t matter that there are twenty to forty times more non-Alphas. They don’t have, haven’t earned or bought effective power, and this is about power and its privileges. Asking the powerful to share their money – through higher taxes and fewer privileges – just to keep the weak alive, or even to strengthen them so they might actually become able to threaten the privileged position to which the Alphas feel entitled – well, as you can hear, it’s unnatural and immoral. And if God is the voice of the natural and moral order, then God is also against it.

The free market also has a moral imperative, because it enables those with power to keep it. It isn’t a fair fight, but it’s not supposed to be. The fight’s over. It’s about maintaining privilege. Even chimpanzees know that.

Plan B. Plan B people see these things very differently. They want to measure society by different currencies – by compassion, empathy, empowerment of the many rather than what they see as the unholy trinity of power and privilege for the few and fearful obedience for the rest.

They look at data saying that 18,000 Americans die every year because of inadequate health care, and they see health care as protection, just as police and fire protection, food safety, and adequately tested drugs are protection of our citizens. And this changes it from a mere individual commodity to part of the moral mission of government, part of the compassion we owe one another, even to what God demands of us.

(NOTE: I’m grateful to George Lakoff for the understanding of healthcare as protection rather than commodity. See his book The Political Mind.)

If they’re Christian, they may quote Jesus’ saying “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me,” then connect it not only to the 18,000 of us dying each year, but also to the more than 40 million of us without health care, and they say “Jesus would hate this.”

They can see worker unions in the same way, as necessary protection of the weaker many against the powerful few, who seem so easily tempted to a kind of greed that Plan B folks see as selfish and brutal.

The “free market” looks very different, too. For one thing, it isn’t free. Without government protection, our lawmakers have allowed or encouraged rapacious people to rob us of well over a trillion dollars, while making huge personal profits. Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Weil figures that since the start of fiscal year 2004, the once Mighty Five of Wall Street – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns – lost around $83 billion in stock market value. But they reported employee compensation of around $239 billion. In other words, the engineers who dug this disastrous hole paid themselves almost three dollars for every dollar they lost. To the Betas, this looks like socialism for the rich and a vicious kind of capitalism for the rest of us. (Taken from “For Whom the Bailout Tolls,” Saturday 25 October 2008, by Michael Winship, Truthout/Perspective.)

This latest trillion-dollar bailout will cost every U.S. household close to $9,000. (As calculated by the Internet investigative newsroom ProPublica.org) It has transferred the private debt of a few to all of us by making us pay for it with our taxes.

“The ‘free market’ doesn’t free us from government; it just gives us unaccountable government without a moral mission.” (George Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 63)

You could say this is just a reminder of the real-world power of the Alpha Plan, and that the rest of us need to grow up and accept our natural place. But to the majority of humans, even if they are afraid to speak up, it just sounds greedy and brutal, lacking even the most basic compassion all of our religions have always taught.

This brings me to the coming election. As citizens, we need to practice speaking up. Voting is practice in speaking up. It’s not much, and it’s certainly not enough, but it’s practice.

Here’s one more fact that can be seen in at least a couple ways. Three years ago, the ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers in Washington D.C. was 65:1. I couldn’t find more recent statistics online, though did find one other seeker making the same complaint. While that can sound hopelessly lopsided, there’s another way to see it. It is also saying that elected politicians’ inclinations to serve the majority of people who elected them may be so deep and strong that it can take up to sixty-five times as much energy to persuade them to betray us. Though here in Texas, the ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers is only 8:1, so the lawmakers in Washington can also just look like higher-priced rentals.

I began with a story of the two wolves, but I didn’t finish it. The boy was frustrated by his grandfather’s admission that he too had always had these two wolves fighting to control his soul. “But grandfather,” he finally said, “which wolf wins?” His grandfather looked deep into his eyes – one of those looks that can connect two souls – and said, “The one that I feed, grandson, the one that I feed.”

Voting is throwing food to these wolves. Plan A has been and will probably always be the dominant plan for almost every animal species on earth. And as much as prophets like Jesus, Mohammad, Lao Tzu and the rest preach about Plan B as the highest human path, or as Jesus’ definition of the kingdom of God, I don’t know that Plan B has ever defined a U.S. government, though some have been much closer to it than others.

There has probably never been a presidential candidate who was a pure example of either Plan Alpha or Plan Beta. All are mixtures; there are no unadulterated angels or demons here. But they all lean more toward one than the other, and the direction of their leaning is important.

I started to tell you how you should vote, and I want to finish that. To me as a minister, voting is above all else a spiritual activity, where we can speak up for our deepest and most cherished values and beliefs. When we vote, we are standing before our God, before all that is holy to us.

When you stand before that little touch-screen voting machine, I want you to know that you are not alone. There are two wolves there with you, each singing “Stand by Me”. Don’t try to face them alone. Take with you the image of those whose love has meant the most of you, those for whom you have the deepest respect. Take the spiritual teachings that have most deeply touched your soul. Take the mental image of all the people in your whole life who expected only the very best from you, and who knew you were capable of it. Look at them, and let them look you straight in the eye – that look that connects your souls. Then, in front of that audience, push only the buttons that you can be most proud to have pushed.

That’s how you should vote.

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© Davidson Loehr

 19 October 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Streaming live video by Ustream

PRAYER:

Let us trust in the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit within that implores us to seek life, truth and wholeness – let us trust that spirit.

When the voices within or around us say to do something wrong because everybody’s doing it and we can get away with it, let us answer that we can not get away with it, because the angels of our better nature are watching, and because we know better.

When we are in a moral dilemma and are urged to take the path of least resistance, let us remember that in the mor world and the world of character, resistance builds strength.

When tempted to cheat on life, or on those we love, let us remember that you can’t score points by cheating in life and love, because there is a spirit within us that knows better, and it may not give our soul back to us until we make it right.

And all of this is good news – the good news that we are more decent, more loving and more just than we often believe.

The saving truth is that we are being watched by something we can trust, and that something is the person we are meant to become. The person we are meant to become is inviting us into a larger life, a more healing truth, and a better world. That invitation may be our salvation. Let us take it.

Amen.

SERMON: The Holy Heretical Spirit

This morning, I’d like to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Tao te Ching, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. I’ll try to be brief.

I’m doing a series of sermons this fall on the three most significant Unitarian thinkers and preachers of the past 200 years. Almost everyone here will feel a deep kinship with them at that level, I think, whether you care about Unitarians or not.

Mostly today I want to talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson, easily the best known of the people we claim, rightly or wrongly, as Unitarian. He spoke to the general audience of inquiring liberal minds who wanted to know how to think about Jesus, God, the Bible, religion and salvation in the 19th century.

He also has a connection to this church. In 1892, the first incarnation of this church was founded by a student of Emerson’s. And when the church reformed in the 1950s, Rev. Wheelock’s granddaughter Emily Howson was a member, and donated the seed money to let us build our social hall, which is named after her.

We need to see this complex man Emerson against the background of his even more complex times, for they were times that shaped our world today in many ways.

When the seven-member graduating class of Harvard Divinity School invited Emerson to speak in 1838, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of our country’s founding fathers, had been dead for 12 years, both dying on the 4th of July 1826, 50 years after they had signed our Declaration of Independence.

The scientific revolution was under way, and already threatening a view of the world that Christians had held for about 1800 years. Many people still believed the world was only six thousand years old, created by God in six days, and that – as Thomas Jefferson had also believed – no species had ever become extinct. But by 1803 – the year Emerson was born – a brilliant French paleontologist had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct species of animals, and that collection had toured all over Europe, and then through the U.S. with P.T. Barnum’s circuses.

And two geologists had shown that the world was much, much older than six thousand years. Millions and millions of years, they thought, which we now believe to be billions of years. The most influential of these geologists, Charles Lyell, had just published his first volume eight years before Emerson’s address, and among the many who read it and had their worldview forever changed by it was a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Darwin had the second volume shipped to him while he was on his voyage aboard The Beagle, where he made his detailed observations on the Galapagos Islands that led to the publication of his book Origin of the Species, 21 years after Emerson’s address.

This was the broader stage on which Emerson spoke on that hot July day. What were we to make of religion, or of Jesus, God, and all the stories in the Bible? Where were we to stand? Where was the new truth that could set us free and make us come more alive? These were Emerson’s questions, and they’re still our questions today, 170 years later.

The Unitarians of the 1830s – including William Ellery Channing, whom I talked about last month – still believed in a supernatural religion, a supernatural God and the literalness of the biblical miracles. Emerson didn’t. He took all of this psychologically. He saw religion as the development of our innate senses of the good, the true and the beautiful, and said that these senses were like a divine presence within us, or that we were all a part of God.

This is a lot like the Hindu notion that our individual soul, or atman, is part of the universal soul, or Brahman, and within a few years, the Bhagavad Gita would be the favorite religious scripture of both Emerson and his younger friend, Henry David Thoreau.

The way Emerson saw it, salvation would mean getting in touch with these deep sensitivities we have, and living out of them – living lives of truth, justice and compassion. Heaven and hell are here and now for Emerson, not elsewhere and later.

While his attacks were against Christianity, their arguments work against every Western religion. The capacity for a noble, even a holy life is born within us. It’s part of human nature, not something put in from elsewhere. That’s shown by the fact that we know the difference between good and evil, kindness and cruelty, truth and pretense, and we are, at our best, drawn to the better options. This shows the presence within us of what theologians like to call God. Emerson put it this way: “The notion of God is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 61).” “The highest revelation is that God is in every [one of us].” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001]), p. 62)

But if that’s so, then what’s the use of figures like Jesus, Mohammad or Allah, or books like the Bible or the Koran? Well for Emerson, when these people or books can show us some wisdom that helps us come more alive, then they’re useful and probably even true for us for now. But not because Jesus or a holy scripture said them – only because these figures or books happened, in this case, to say something that also seems to be true.

It’s like saying that science books are only correct if what they say happens to be true – but it’s not true just because a science book says so. The books can be wrong. So can the prophets, so can all holy scriptures. And the way we check it out is in the real world, with our own mind and in our own heart.

In intellectual terms, what Emerson did was to convert theology into a kind of depth psychology. Religion is about our becoming all that we can be. All religions are about being all that we can be – it’s such a timeless religious truth, it’s really a pity that some advertising agency stole it for the Army. People like Jesus are examples of what all of us can become: they’re examples of our deepest human nature, not exceptions to it. Emerson said that Jesus was true to what is in you and me, and that if we are compassionate and just, then to that extent we are God. The gods are our best traits, writ large. We are the projector, they are the screen.

These were the sorts of things he said in that commencement address to the students, faculty and guest ministers at Harvard Divinity School when he was just 35 years old. He was attacked viciously for his remarks – especially by the Unitarians. The Unitarian paper called The Christian Examiner said that Emerson’s Divinity School address contained “neither good divinity nor good sense (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).” And a man named Andrews Norton, who was regarded as the most liberal Unitarian scholar alive at the time, said Emerson’s beliefs threatened civilization itself (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).

His address made him an outsider to the Unitarians. They denounced him, and closed ranks against him (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 74). It also set off a firestorm that lasted for decades. It was almost thirty years before he was invited to speak at Harvard again.

He was ordained and served as a Unitarian minister for about three years, but it didn’t agree with him, and he resigned from it. After that, he liked to say things like “Unitarianism is corpse-cold.”

He was a scathing critic of all the religion of his time. He said, “I think no [one] can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on [people] is gone, or going.”

He puzzled over people who went to church, and said “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church.'” (In fact, that person was him. It was something he wrote to his wife.)

Emerson’s vision carried him far beyond the boundaries not only of Christianity, but of theism and all religions. He had faith that we had a divine impulse within us that we could trust. He saw all gods and religions as projections of our own sense of being part of something larger than ourselves. Not all teachings of religions or about gods are good, of course. Some are foolish, or evil. But he trusted that we could generally tell the difference.

You can think of the Bible’s command, for example, that disobedient teen-agers or women who were not virgins when they married should be stoned to death.

You may have seen the YouTube videos of women being stoned to death by Muslim clerics, or read about fundamentalist cults in our country today where disobedient children were beaten to death. Jon Krakauer, the author of the book and movie Into the Wild, also wrote a powerful expose of fundamentalist Mormons called Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (on which I preached here a few years ago), in which he recounted the story of a Mormon father murdering his daughter because she was disobedient. That father later died in a Mexican prison for other violent crimes he believed God commanded him to commit. I happen to know one of that man’s daughters, a sister of the girl who was murdered. She lives in Austin. These things aren’t just happening “elsewhere” – they’re right here among us, too.

All of these punitive teachings, Emerson believed, are evil. And I agree with him. There is nothing about any real God in any of them. And we can all see this. When we’re being honest with ourselves, we can and should trust our own heads and hearts more than we trust theologians, preachers, churches or scriptures.

All of this means that the role of churches and preachers is to offer us insights, stories and teachings that can help us become more alive and whole. And the churches and preachers are to be judged by how well they do that. If they don’t, we need to keep looking for a church and minister who meet our own deepest needs, which may not be quite the same as those of the person in the next row.

You have to take the best urgings of your head and heart seriously – what Abraham Lincoln called the angels of our better nature. Then you have to find people, places and experiences that also take you seriously – where you don’t have to check your head or your heart at the door. But don’t think the real authority lies with a church or a bible or a god. All those, including the gods, are human creations. The best of them are good, in the same way the best philosophies, psychologies or literature are. But the fundamental revelation for Emerson was that we already have the spirit – a spirit that even transcends God – within us, and need to live out of that.

The Unitarians and others of the day called all this The Transcendentalist Revolt. Do you see how radical it is? Whether or not Emerson can be seen as a Unitarian – and the leading Unitarians of his time denied that he could be – he was definitely a religious liberal, and a courageous preacher of honest religion.

But honest religion is a style, not a position. When it becomes a position, a belief, a creed or orthodoxy, we need to hold lightly to it. Yesterday’s beliefs and other people’s creeds may not do it. Second-hand religion isn’t likely to give us a first-hand life. The spirit that honestly seeks truth can’t be fenced in. “Time makes ancient good uncouth,” as the poet says (James Russell Lowell) – not just out of date, but uncouth.

The movement Emerson started was called Transcendentalism. And for the Transcendentalists, time made the ancient teachings about Jesus, God and the Bible uncouth. Uncouth, because they no longer led reasonable and informed minds to truth that helped them come alive, no longer led to truth that could heal them or their world and help make them more authentic and whole.

When we look back to people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, it’s not too important to focus on their beliefs, because those may be out of date by now. But it is important to look back to that spirit that drove them beyond the comfort zone of those around them. St. Paul once said that “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (II Cor. 3:6), and this is what I think he was getting at. The spirit always moves on beyond all creeds and orthodoxies, beyond the beliefs of any person or any time and place.

This life-giving spirit is called many things. One name for it is the spirit of life; another is the spirit of heresy. People engaging in honest religion were, are and always will be heretics. Now don’t get queasy; that’s a good thing. The word heretic comes from a Greek verb meaning “to choose.” Heretics are those who choose when some small orthodoxy declares the choices closed because they – only they – have found the truth. So yet another name for the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of heresy, is the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that may never be fenced in, the Holy Spirit that is larger than all creeds, all gods, and all religions. Emerson believed it is within us all, and I think he was right.

It’s that sense of being really alive that we’ve all felt. It drives us to seek more life, and to shun things that don’t give us life. And as Emerson saw and said, it is bigger than all our religions.

You can see this spirit at every level of life. It is what makes plants turn toward the sun. It is what makes kittens, puppies and children run toward things that welcome them and run away from things that frighten them. I once saw an amoeba through a microscope, and even it was moving into the open places, moving toward food, and moving away from impurities or negative things in its environment. That’s the same spirit of life we call the Holy Spirit, operating even in puppies, plants, and amoeba.

There is a famous passage from the ancient Chinese classic the Tao te Ching that says it this way:

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

And the reason it’s older than God is because it’s part of life, and part of us. It’s the energy that helps us come more alive. We want to be a part of that Tao, that way, to let it help us get around impurities and obstacles in our own lives. In our Western religions where time has indeed made much of their ancient good uncouth, many of the obstacles today are the very creeds and orthodoxies which theologians, priests and churches have frozen into little outdated idols. And the Holy Spirit hates those little linguistic idols, so it keeps bringing us these heretics, these prophets of honest religion, who will let the questions more profound than answers challenge and shatter those answers when they can no longer help us come alive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the servants of those questions more profound than answers, a servant of that spirit of life. I used the Army’s slogan earlier about being all that you can be. So I want to use the slogan from another branch of the service to close, so they won’t feel slighted. And that’s to say that this ancient and holy spirit, like a Marine Corps recruiter, is looking for a few good men and women – or a lot of them. It’s looking for us. And this is a kind of hide-and-seek where the best part of the game is definitely being found.

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Davidson Loehr

28 September 2008

PRAYER:

Let us be pulled into spiritual paths that leave us with a good aftertaste. There is so much religious advice around telling us how we had better get in line with this or that set of beliefs being hawked by churches and preachers who sometimes just feel too slick or mean. But their certainty is too simple, doesn?t have a good smell to it and leaves a bad aftertaste.

Let us instead be lured into paths of loving others as we love ourselves, and loving ourselves as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life?s longing for itself, stewards of only the highest ideals. Such spiritual paths are very simple, but they have an aroma and an aftertaste that is still pleasing even years later.

So much in life can be identified by the lasting taste, smell and feel it leaves with us. Let us learn to be drawn to the places that smell good – that smell like ambrosia, or the subtle scent of those angels of our better nature.

Amen.

READING:

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

SERMON: What Do You People Believe, Anyway?

Every religious liberal has heard some version of this question from their family or friends. It?s hard to answer questions of belief in ways that are both honest and interesting. Maybe all I can do here is let you hear how I grapple with this, hoping it might help you grapple with it too.

One way of getting into the complexities of belief today is through understanding the complexities of families today. For a couple decades at least, we’ve been used to the phrase “His, hers and ours” to describe what we learned to call “blended families.” Other siblings, parents or other relatives often become at least temporary parts of our families too, as with the family who lit our candles this morning, and as with some of your families.

And what is true of our blended families is also true of the blend of beliefs we each have. Honest religious belief can never again be the simplistic kind of white-bread thing we thought it was fifty years ago.

The things we cling to today are blended families of beliefs, borrowing from all over the world map.

In old-time religion, it might have seemed enough to recite a creed cobbled together many centuries earlier by people living in a very different world, as though that could do more than make us uncritical members of a very old club with no necessary wisdom for the modern world.

Now the lights from which we find enlightenment come in many different sizes, shapes and genders, like the lights upon our altar. Men, women, children, experiences we never expected to change our life, but did. Wisdom we’ve read in self-help books, business books, snippets of Buddhist or Christian or philosophical thought, lines from movies or songs, readings from astrology, things we heard on Oprah, comments from family, friends, therapists or preachers that stick with us – all these things are blended together into our traveling carnival family of practical wisdom, using this bit today, another tomorrow, seldom noticing that this bit and that bit may even contradict each other.

We’ve been trained to think that religion is primarily about what we believe, but defining ourselves by beliefs really doesn’t work well today.

In this more complex world of spirituality, orthodoxy is always too small for real life. It creates too many theological fights, some of them deadly, that amount to a church or preacher restricting God and life to the limits of their tastes and biases, exalting a creed written centuries ago, and sometimes getting hateful toward those in the church across the street, who don’t share the beliefs.

To exalt beliefs is to give way too much credit to theologians! I’m a theologian – I got my Ph.D. in theology – and I can tell you as an insider that you don’t want to invest too much in the spoutings of theologians. You might think that there must be some secret knowledge that theologians learn, that gives them a special kind of authority not available to normal people. But I spent seven years in graduate school, and if there had been that kind of secret knowledge, I would have found it. The truth is, theologians have no secret knowledge about life, because their courses aren’t about life. Theologians are academics, and their courses are restricted to thinking about life from the perspective of their religion. But wisdom comes from living through life experiences and being able to reflect on them in ways that shed light – and that’s not what theologians do.

Here’s an analogy. Talking to a theologian is like talking to a Buick salesman. He can tell you a lot about Buicks, but don’t trust him to tell you what the best car is, because he may not know much more about that than you do. And don’t trust him to tell you whether you need a Buick, some other kind of car, or no car at all, because he has a conflict of interest. The same is true with theologians. They can tell you about their personal religion, but not whether you need it, or whether it’s better for you than other religions or no religion. They also have a conflict of interest.

So as a theologian, I want to tell you not to worry too much about gods you can’t see, and don’t trust theologians trying to tell you about those invisible gods they can’t see either. If we live like that Roman family in the reading, we’ll have a pretty sweet-smelling religion and life.

Orthodoxies and polished belief statements are mostly like advertising brochures that often have very little to do with the lives led by the believers.

Think of the Roman family in that reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson. They were completely outside the acceptable boundaries of belief that Friar Bernard had learned, so he prayed for his God to destroy these Romans. Now that alone is incredible, disgusting, and not terribly surprising. His beliefs were making him small and dangerous, in a world that went way beyond them, the way the world usually goes way beyond the boundaries of beliefs. He was just one priest, so he didn’t have much power. But if he’d had much power, he could have been very dangerous. As we heard his disgust beginning to unfold for this generous family, he was starting to smell bad. But then his humanity trumped his theology, he realized these were cultured and caring people – lovers, even! – and his comfortable little world of beliefs was thrown out of order.

His beliefs no longer seemed so valid, because life had trumped belief. That’s how it should work. Life should always be able to trump beliefs. The Romans had a saying that we should behave as though all the truly decent people who had ever lived were watching us, and then do only what we could proudly do in front of that audience. And in this story they certainly behaved that way. Their beliefs served them and others because their religion wasn’t about beliefs – it was about behavior. If Friar Bernard’s god was watching him as the Romans believed their gods were watching them, he would have been pleased at Friar Bernard’s final frustrated wail, but not at his early arrogance of wanting those whose beliefs were outside his understanding to be destroyed.

So what do we believe, anyway? Usually when we are asked what we believe, we try to think of some polished belief statements somebody taught us, because they sound more impressive than something we could just make up. If we just make up our own words for what we believe, it seldom sounds very dramatic.

When conservatives do it, we liberals often love to pick them apart. It’s one of our favorite sports.

Someone says, “I believe in this God who created the whole universe and who loves little old me!” That’s dramatic, but pretty easy to pick apart. We can’t even imagine how vast the universe is. Billions of galaxies. We probably can’t even imagine what a billion would look like. And three thousand years ago, when the god of the Bible was first exalted by a small tribe of Hebrew people in the Middle East, they thought the whole universe was smaller than the state of Texas. I think some Texans still do.

So it’s easy fun, showing that the most dramatic conservative beliefs fall apart at second glance. On the other hand, if we try to use our own words, or slogans we hear in our highly evolved liberal groups to define ourselves by beliefs, it can get just as arrogant, and may not be very truthful. If we say we believe in deeds not creeds – what deeds can we point to that we’ve actually done, that aren’t really kind of ho-hum in the grand scheme of things?

If we say we celebrate freedom of belief – and we love the sound of that one! – how many examples can we think of involving our children, family or partner choosing beliefs that contradict ours, and actually celebrating that rather than just tolerating it? If we say we believe in fighting for justice, what examples can we think of that we’ve done that don’t just sound trivial – and justice, not just the biases of generic social or political liberals?

The trouble with using polished and rehearsed little bromides is that they will usually sound more impressive than our lives look. And religion isn’t about putting on a pious front or trying to impress anyone with our purity and righteousness. That doesnt really fool anybody, and it has a bad aroma.

When I hold myself against the highest ideals, I have to admit that I don’t look very good. I’m not out there saving the world. I don’t give a lot of time or money to really noble causes, I haven’t risked my life like soldiers have, at least not since I was a soldier many years ago. I haven’t sold everything I own and given it to the poor as Jesus asked. I can resonate with platitudes like “As long as one person isn’t free, no one is free.” They feel stirring, but I can’t think of anything I’m really doing to walk that talk that costs me much – and when I actually think about it, I don’t even agree with the statement.

You can say things like “I believe in Reason, Science, Justice, Truth, Goodness, America, Mom and apple pie,” and that sounds pretty darned swell. But how much of this has been evident in the way you lived your life during the last couple weeks?

And it gets worse. When we do something really charitable, we usually want credit for it. So then were our motives altruistic, or mostly self-centered? Jesus said to give in secret, not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and we probably all admire that degree of humility, but we seldom have it. We hope somebody notices what we’ve done, and are not above finding some sneaky way to tell them. Now maybe I’m the only one here who’s like this, but I don’t think so.

I think there may be a lot of people here who feel that it’s about all you can do to do your work, try your best to raise your children well, and have more than a few minutes a day for quality time with your partner while keeping in touch with the people you love. You might like high-sounding rhetoric, like hearing good sermons that lift up really noble aspirations, and somewhere in both your head and heart you really mean all this as much as you know how to mean anything. But your life doesn’t look like the picture of the perfect life from a spiritual advertising brochure any more than the lives of religious conservatives do.

So maybe the question is, how do you express yourself in an authentic way?

One answer is to define ourselves not by beliefs but by behaviors, and to try and act like all the most decent people in the world were watching us.

There’s a big difference between identifying ourselves with beliefs and identifying ourselves by our behaviors. The history of religions has plenty of both, and almost all the really bad ones were those who exalted rigid beliefs above decent behavior toward those who didn’t share their beliefs, as Friar Bernard did at first.

I’ll just pick two famous examples from history, from two different religions. John Calvin was the 16th century theologian who preached the gospel of original sin and human depravity, and taught it to tens of millions of Christians who followed his Calvinist theology. It’s a horrid doctrine and terrible theology, but if anything, he was a living example of moral depravity in some of his behavior. When a brilliant and impertinent Spanish physician named Michael Servetus – this was the physician who first discovered the circulation of blood – wrote an essay on the errors of the Trinity, and sent a copy to Calvin, Calvin seethed. When Servetus then had the nerve – and bad judgment – to show up one Sunday in Calvin’s church in Geneva, Calvin had him arrested, and burned alive. Worse than that, Calvin instructed the executioners to tie Servetus in a chair, lower him into the flames, then raise him up, lower him again, so in all it took half an hour before Servetus died.

And the Ayatollah Khomeini, among other hateful acts, ordered the murder of the novelist Salman Rushdie because one of Rushdie’s novels made fun of a fundamentalist Islamic belief. These were both powerful and charismatic men, regarded by their followers as God’s agents – though not, I think, regarded so by any God worthy of the name. But their behavior put the lie to their professed beliefs, and left a terrible stench in the annals of history. There was nothing of God about either of them in these actions. Genuine gods don’t care whether people buy the stories of this or that church or charismatic preacher. They care whether you are coming more alive, finding the kind of truth that makes you more whole, how you treat others, whether you’re a blessing or a curse to the world.

The goal is authenticity, not orthodoxy. And orthodoxies often offer little more than an anesthetic for those who are afraid or unsure how to be authentic.

It’s worth believing not in slick-sounding creeds but in a sweet-smelling life. And the clues to this are all around us:

1. They’re in that Roman story. The priest defined himself by beliefs and we all knew he was too small. The Romans never even mentioned beliefs, and even in the story they smelled sweet.

2. A bigger clue, and better news, is the fact that we all knew that. We could all tell the difference between the feel and the smell of Friar Bernard’s smallness and the largesse of the Roman family as soon as we heard the story.

3. And the best news is that we act on it, and act on it naturally, easily, and often. We just ordained Jack Harris-Bonham here this morning. We didn’t do it because of his beliefs. I’m not sure what they all are, and I don’t much care. We did it because he was here for two years, as an intern then as the contract minister during my sabbatical, and we came to know his heart and mind through his actions toward others. And like the Roman family, we knew this was a decent person and a blessing to the world, whatever beliefs get him there.

So what can we say about honest religion that might be useful? One thing is that there is no secret knowledge: nothing that is necessary to us is really hidden. We can hear stories like the reading by Emerson, awful stories of arrogant men like John Calvin and the Ayatollah Khomeini, we can delight in recognizing the promise of someone like Jack Harris-Bonham and ordain him to whatever kinds of ministry his heart and the whims of the world may lead him to, and we have already shown that we have almost all the spiritual knowledge we need to be saved, and to help heal the world around us. We know the difference between the stench of bad faith inflicted on ourselves and others, and the sweet smell of a life lived pretty fully and well here and now, among one another.

Religious instruction is important, to help train the moral sense that is already a part of us. But by the time we’re in our teens or earlier, the question of what’s really worth believing and how we should behave toward one another can be distilled into one very simple piece of advice: just follow your nose.

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Davidson Loehr

21 September 2008

PRAYER:

When people or experiences become doorways or windows, let us learn to look through them.

When someone or something in life opens us to the possibility of a life with more understanding, compassion or wholeness, let us gather our courage and step through that opening, from a world of the habitual into a world of the possible.

When we feel the pull of authenticity, let us bend toward it, that it may draw us into lives of greater integrity, love and joy.

Life is a series of pushes and pulls, too many trying to push us toward selling out, settling for too little from ourselves, pushing us toward the dissipation of our spirits.

But not all of life is against us. If we live among angels and demons, and have been frightened by the demons, let us remember there are angels as well: messengers from Life, from places of trust and empowerment, from a healing kind of truth and hope.

Those angels. Let us walk with those angels, in whatever guise they appear. Sometimes they even appear among those who love us. We hunger for messages of wholeness and hope. Let us listen for them, answer them, and be prepared to be transformed.

Amen.

SERMON: Unitarian Christianity

I want to spend some time this fall making us more aware of the rich history of honest religion. By “honest religion” I mean a religion that is open to all critical questions and doubts, and whose truths must be grounded in life itself, not merely the dogmas and ideologies of this or that church or cult. Last month, I talked about that spirit in the story of Gilgamesh, which is the world’s oldest story, going back 4700 years. Today I want to jump 4500 years and talk about Rev. William Ellery Channing. Most of you may never have heard of him, but he was the man most responsible for making Unitarianism into a separate American faith, nearly two hundred years ago. He did it through a very influential sermon delivered in 1819 called “Unitarian Christianity.” It’s ironic that the seeds he planted were neither Unitarian nor Christian, and would eat away at the foundation of theism and Biblical religions.

It’s a little tricky when we look back to an outstanding person who happens to have some connection with a label we also claim. Is it just mindless hero-worship? Worse, is it a kind of slobbering narcissism? “Well, they were spectacular and Unitarian. And I’m a Unitarian, so I must also be spectacular!”? That’s kind of like wearing a Longhorns t-shirt and thinking we must therefore be a nationally-ranked athlete. I have a Longhorns t-shirt that I wear to the gym, but I’m a rank athlete, not a ranked one. It’s a big difference.

Another approach to history’s gifted thinkers is to say, “Here was someone faced with the same kinds of life questions that face me, who found a way to look beyond the habits of their time, and respond to them by tapping into something timeless and life-giving. I want that too; maybe I can learn something here!” That’s what I want to do this morning.

So I want to start by backing off and describing what the spirit of honest religion is about, so we can see this William Ellery Channing fellow in the right context, so we can see how any of this might be useful in our own search for honest religion. Some historians have said it’s too bad that American Unitarianism was ever called Unitarian because it’s the wrong name – and I agree with them. “Unitarian” was the insult name assigned it by those who hated it two hundred years ago. But it was never about how many gods we should count. It was about a style of seeking honest religion, and it was the same style that has been there in all times and places, whenever the spirit of honest religion appears.

There are many ways to put this primal spirit of honest religion. One is that it is about coming alive, seeking the truth and healing our world. Another is summed up in ten magnificent words from the Christian scriptures: “Examine everything carefully, hold fast to that which is good.” (I Thessalonians 5:21, NASB). Those ten words are also a pretty good summary of the scientific method, and of how we all try to make sense of things in our lives. We all try to examine everything carefully, holding fast only to what looks good, don’t we? We could say it’s just about waking up, as the Buddhists do: that we are mostly trapped within illusions we create through our odd ways of putting things, and there is a freedom in facing ourselves and our world as we really are, and finding the kind of real-world happiness that is there only for those awake enough to see it.

In every flowering of the spirit of honest religion, there is a kind of trinity that underlies their faith. And that trinity is there in the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing as well, which is another reason it’s too bad what he was doing was called Unitarian. This trinity isn’t about gods, and it can’t be fit inside of Christianity or any other religion. It’s much bigger. It’s the enduring method of doing honest religion, a kind of three-legged stool on which the business of trying to take ourselves and life seriously always stands.

1. The first leg is grounded in our experience here and now. Religion has to relate to you and your actual life, or it can’t be your religion. And we’re seldom served very well by living someone else’s religion. Religion isn’t top-down. We don’t learn the truths we need from someone with a loud voice and a lot of arrogance. We learn it from the inside out. Our inside out.

2. The second part of honest religion’s trinity is that our reason and intuition are to be trusted, and no religious teaching should ever be accepted if it doesn’t make sense to us. There is a kind of mysticism about this, because we believe that the reality inside our hearts and minds can be trusted to have something to do with the reality outside of us. When you think about it, if that weren’t true, all our knowledge would be useless in the real world.

3. The third leg of this method is the belief that we need to find a center, a focus, that we believe can guide us toward living more wisely and well, because this is about the quality of our life. We want a way to live that will let us look in the mirror in five or fifty years and be able at least to say, “You know, if I only get one shot at this, I’m glad I lived the way I did.” If you can say that, you have won. It can take many forms, this center. It can be gods and saviors, rituals and civic duties, relationships, the psychological experience of conversion, or just waking up, as the Buddhists say. But we will worship something, and we will tend to take the shape of what we worship, so what we put at the center of our lives is most important.

The timeless quality of this spirit of honest religion is what’s behind the experience of so many visitors to churches like this. People will come for the first time and say, “My God, I’m home! This is what I was before I knew it existed. It’s what I’ve been looking for all my life. I didn’t know churches like this existed! My head and heart are at home here.” That powerful thing you’re relating to is not Unitarian Universalism, which was only turned into a religion during the 1980s – and what a sad mistake that was! It is also not Unitarianism (which is less than 200 years old in the U.S., and less than 500 years old in any form). It is not Christianity or even theism, but something far deeper and older: something primal. It’s that primal power, that primal and honest connection between ourselves and the world around us that life-giving religion is about.

Now I don’t want to get too spiritually precious about this, because you can find this spirit lots of places besides religion – there are plenty of people who’ll say you’re only likely to find it places other than religion. It comes from our yearnings, just as our gods and religions do.

I just finished reading a trilogy called His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, the British writer who wrote these teen fantasies for an audience of young people from maybe age 12-18 or so. When the first volume, “The Golden Compass,” was made into a high-budget movie last year, I read about some evangelical groups protesting because he was an atheist. At the time, I thought, “Oh, evangelical groups are always saying things like that!” But after reading the books, I think they grossly understated the power of his assault on religion. It is subtle, brilliant, deep and complete. I think the books can plant seeds of healthy skepticism about religion in many of the young people who read them – in older people, too. It’s an attack on authoritarian religion in the name of our deep human need to seek the kind of truth that makes us come more alive and become more whole.

Now this garden of the spirit of life is the garden from which the spirit of William Ellery Channing grew. His vision was not as deep or broad or ambitious as that of Philip Pullman, who had the advantage of writing a century and a half later. And Channing was no revolutionary; he disliked controversy, though he was drawn into much of it through his writing and preaching. But Channing was brilliant. He graduated from Harvard at the top of his class at age 18, in 1798. In the early 1800s, he was regarded as the best preacher in America, and was one of the people interviewed by Alexis de Tocqueville for his classic work on Democracy in America.

Channing was not a pioneer. He followed several generations of American Congregationalist preachers who taught that Jesus was just a human, that we all had a “likeness to God,” and that the creeds and rigid beliefs of the churches distracted us from the deeper message that was concerned with changing our lives here and now.

And Channing, no less than the Christians, had a trinity. But his trinity was that trinity of honest religion in all times and places:

1. He had faith in our dignity rather than our damnation. That faith in our inherent goodness rather than a crippling sinfulness is at the heart of the impulse toward honest religion in all times and places.

2. He trusted Reason, and exalted it above scriptures and religious teachings. He said if we couldn’t trust reason, then we also couldn’t trust the reason of those who try to teach us what is true.

You can shatter the creeds and orthodoxies of every religion in the world just through these first two methods.

Here are some of his words on this, so you can get a feel for his style:

“It is always best to think first for ourselves on any subject, and then [to look] to others for the correction or improvement of our own sentiments. . . . The quantity of knowledge thus gained may be less, but the quality will be superior. Truth received on authority, or acquired without labor, makes but a feeble impression.”

“Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.”

“And we therefore distrust every interpretation, which, after deliberate attention, seems repugnant to any established truth.”

He objected to the Christian trinity both because it was irrational and because it never appeared in the Bible. Like Jesus, he said, he worshiped only God.

He also found irrational and insulting the idea that Jesus came to save us from God’s wrath, or that his death would somehow change God’s mind. No, he said, Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind – think what a juvenile concept of God that involves – Jesus came to change our minds.

He granted that reason can be used badly in religion as in all other areas, but asked people to look back through history and decide whether more harm has been done by trusting reason, or by forbidding it. The historical record is dramatic and clear on this point.

3. The third part of his trinity was God, but even here he meant something very different from orthodox Christians. Here are some of his words. You can hear that spirit of honest and timeless religious inquiry coming through, and that he’s talking about something much more primal than any god:

“We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence, whether on earth or in heaven. We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established.”

“By these remarks, we do not mean to deny the importance of God’s aid or Spirit; but by his Spirit, we mean a moral, illuminating, and persuasive influence, not physical, not compulsory?.”

Can you hear that these words take him completely beyond the God of the Bible? He’s talking about high ideals and noble moral qualities, and his ideal version of them is called, by habit and convention, “God.” That’s fundamentally different from “believing in God,” as you can feel.

He spoke of a “zeal for truth,” but didn’t think it showed up often enough in religion, and wrote that “On no subject have people injected so many strange conceits, wild theories, and fictions of fancy, as on religion.” The kind of truth he sought was what he called “purifying truth” that could make us more godlike.

He also said, “In my view, religion is another name for happiness, and I am most cheerful when I am most religious.” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900 [Wesminister John Knox Press, 2001], p. 15) He is not speaking as a Unitarian or a liberal Christian here. He is speaking from a far deeper and more primal place, as you can feel.

Was Channing a Unitarian? That’s hard to answer. He called his sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” though what he really brought to his liberal Christians on that 5th of May in 1819 was a kind of Trojan Horse: a gift containing forces that would eventually destroy the foundations of Christianity, theism, and Biblical religion for many. His sermon contained ideas whose logical implications would lead beyond Unitarian Christianity, the Bible and theism. That’s the sermon that all students for the UU ministry are required to read. And he later wrote other pieces defending his Unitarian Christianity against the orthodox versions, saying it was more honest, and helped form better people. But what he meant was the method of honoring reason and experience, examing everything carefully, discarding what doesn’t hold up, and holding fast only to what is good. And then, when the American Unitarian Association first began in 1825, he would not join it, and never supported it. He thought people should seek to develop themselves within local churches, but that an organization like the Unitarian Association would probably just be an agent of unneeded mischief. He said there is “no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd, even towards the best objects.”

(http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/williamellerychanning.html) “An established church,” he said, “is the grave of intellect.” (Dorrien, p. 17)

When he used the word “God”, it meant excellence that made rational and moral sense – anyone must believe in that! To put it in his language, he believed we were created in the image of God, that God gave us reason and expected us to use it, and that any faith that denied this, or that could not stand up to the critiques of informed reason, was unworthy of us, and of God. In the language of our time, he was very close to what we would call religious humanism, as all varieties of liberal religion through the ages have been.

I’ve always identified with a lot about Channing, including his deep distrust and rejection of any national organization that was bound to become a kind of club, offering a kind of second-hand religion, as our modern UUA does. But I like him mostly because he was one of the people whose vision transcended the beliefs of his time and place, of the vast majority of his colleagues and parishioners, and caught a glimpse of the kind of honest religion that really does seem to be timeless.

The insights of honest religion transcend all the gods and religions. Not because we’re bigger than the gods, but because Life is, and it is Life’s longing for itself that comes alive in us and drives us to examine everything carefully and hold fast only to that which is good.

If you’ve never heard of this preacher from the early 19th century and wonder if you should be writing his name down in case there’s a test, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to care about William Ellery Channing. And while we’re at it, you don’t have to care about Jesus or the Buddha, either. Don’t let mean and arrogant preachers scare you: religion isn’t about the gods, the teachers or the preachers. The best of them are all windows opening us to visions of life so honest and big that they might beckon to us, might lure us into following them down a richer path. To use one metaphor, they are like rainbows, suggesting that if we could only follow them, there could be a pot of gold at their end. Or in another metaphor, they’re like recipes, saying if we can add our ingredients, figure out the missing instructions and imagine how to cook them up about right, they could help us make a better life. It shouldn’t be so hard. There are just the three known ingredients, at least they don’t change much. First, we must bring our life and our experiences, the happy ones, the proud ones, the raw ones, and those times we went off the road. All of them. They’re the stuff we need to wrap into our life. Then we need to trust our reason and intuition, how it sounds and feels, whether it feels like there’s a harmony of thought and action. And then the Center. What do we tune to? What will we serve? Where’s the focus around which we want to be in a kind of orbit; the kind of center that gives us a calling and an integrity that keep life from just becom-ing one damned thing after another?

We’re going to end here before it’s cooked, because finishing the recipe is our job in our own lives. And so we leave here, as we often do, half-baked. We leave carrying some of our parts in bags or buckets, still unassembled. But we kind of know how they should go, how they need to be put together to make a whole being, our whole being.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be that? A whole being? The essential parts put together with integrity and feeling, serving a Center of Life that gives us life, learning how to walk, to dance, maybe to sing?

That wild, enticing, nearly impossible-feeling task is what we’ve always been about in honest religion. There are no secrets, we have good materials to work with in ourselves, and it can be done, step by step by step. But it can’t be done in just one week. That’s why we meet like this, every Sunday.