Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 August 31, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

When we are tempted to get carried away with how special we are – so much more special than everyone else – let us remember that the words “humanity” and “humility” have the same root.

If a self-absorbed arrogance blocks us from growing into our fuller humanity, we may have better luck along the path of a more selfless humility that leaves room for the larger world to find its way into us.

Wherever we build walls of self-righteousness, we exclude ourselves from participating in a world that is larger and usually more blessed than all our little fossilized certainties.

One of the most profound ironies of life is the fact that we don’t become bigger by exalting ourselves, but by finding our calling as small parts of a much larger reality.

Another of life’s delicious ironies is that humility enlarges us more than hubris, embracing differences makes us better people than demanding similarity, just as the willingness to understand another shows that we are more highly evolved than the eagerness to judge them.

We pray for greater humility, understanding and compassion. For those are among the spiritual vulnerabilities that truly are more powerful than tight little strengths.

Our world desperately needs people who can become more fully human. We pray for the humility to become one of them. Amen.

SERMON: To Come Alive

We gather here to pursue the promises of honest religion: to come alive, to seek truth, and to heal our world. We’re here in search of that special kind of light that has always been at the center of nearly all religions. It is the light that lives in words like enlightenment, spiritual illumination, and that halo that medieval painters used to put around the heads of all the saints. One of religion’s two most enduring questions is “Where are you hurting?” The other is who and what is that religious light, that religious truth, meant to serve? And those two questions are deeply intertwined.

Most of the sermons this fall are planned to help us all find a more informed and more commanding connection to our several religious traditions. We are religious liberals, our style of worship here has been heavily influenced by the Protestant Reformation (whether we’re Christians or not), and some of our most important beliefs – of which you may not even be aware – have been shaped by the best Unitarian thinkers of the early 19th century. Our religious heritage has several levels, and I think you will resonate with each of them. They are all like successive incarnations of the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of liberal and liberating religion, the search for the kind of truth that makes us come more alive, that helps us make ourselves and our world more integrated and authentic. That’s the gift of life that all religions are meant to offer, and at its best I think liberal religion does it best of all.

I’ve always like etymology, the study of the origin of words, because it can show us deeper meanings of ordinary words that we might otherwise overlook. For instance, the root of the word “liberal” is also the root of words like liberation and liberty, and it means “free.” In religion, it means free from the constraints of anyone’s orthodoxies, creeds, or salvation schemes that include them but not you. I”m not knocking salvation. It comes from Latin words meaning “to save,” but it’s also the root of our word “salve” – it’s about a healthy kind of wholeness. There is a salvation scheme that transcends all religions, that most of the wisdom literature in the world points to, that is as true and life-giving today as it was 4,000 years ago, in the first incarnation of the liberal spirit that we know of.

Today, I want to give you one kind of introduction to honest religion, liberal religion, and what it has involved since its first known appearance at the dawn of history. This is very broad, like flying over a continent pointing out what shows from six miles up. We’ll revisit some of these themes throughout the fall, both in sermons and in the adult education class our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson will be leading on Monday nights starting September 22nd. This is a class where you can read and hear what the influential Unitarian and Universalist thinkers wrote in the early 19th century. It’s a little sobering to realize that students preparing for the Unitarian ministry only have to read one essay each by a total of just three Unitarian writers, the most recent one dating to 1841. That sounds pretty paltry, and in some ways it is. But Unitarian thinkers have not contributed much of anything to mainstream Christian thought since then, because they have not been interested in mainstream Christian thought since then. But the new perspectives they brought in a century and a half ago are still profound, still life-giving, and still absolutely essential parts of how almost everyone here understands religion. This may surprise you, like that Voltaire character who was surprised late in life to learn that all his life he had been speaking prose, but it’s true. So one theme for this fall will be learning what it means to be both a liberal and a religious liberal.

How old is this spirit of honest religion, this spirit of liberal religion? It’s at least 4,700 years old, which makes it almost prehistoric. It is found in the oldest story in the world, the story of Gilgamesh, a real-life ruler who lived about 2750 BC, which makes it older than the Bible, older than the earliest Hindu writings, and more than 1500 years older than the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Gilgamesh story is also the source of the Flood story in the Bible, and the source of the myth about Noah and his ark. I’ve done a whole sermon on the Gilgamesh epic, and don’t want to repeat it except to show how powerfully it illustrates the spirit of liberal religion, that quest for the kind of light that is at the heart of spiritual illumination and religious enlightenment.

Those who wrote the story more than four millennia ago described their age as the “modern” age, which sounds impossible, when they didn’t even have wi-fi or TV dinners. But writing had just been invented right there in Sumeria, a hundred years earlier, so they saw all the pre-literate people as ancient, and themselves as modern. They knew writing had changed the world forever, for now history was born, and the past could always be present as never before. It gave them a kind of synoptic view of history that pre-literate people couldn’t have, so they saw themselves – rightly – as modern. And as modern people, they had the audacity to ask whether the gods were still useful, and they decided the gods were no longer relevant. This didn’t frighten or depress them. Instead, Gilgamesh decided that the purpose of life is right here among us. It is about living well, loving friends and family, building and contributing things to the future, and being enlarged by the joy and fullness brought through music and the other arts, and the enthusiastic participation in life.

In other words, they decided, more than 4700 years ago, that the purpose of life is to seek the kind of truth that makes you come more fully alive, and to participate passionately in the many opportunities and blessings life offers. Even that long ago, they grew beyond being interested in some tricky way to live on, whether through an afterlife or a reincarnation. The Buddhists, who wouldn’t appear for another 2200 years, would have said it was the kind of truth that could awaken us from our illusions.

That’s the liberal spirit in its earliest known incarnation: the spirit that will question and challenge and shrug off anything that no longer gives us the kind of truth that makes us come more alive. It is a very courageous spirit. It is also very disturbing. Imagine that – simply deciding the gods are no longer useful, and shrugging them off! I think the Gilgamesh story went farther and more boldly than all of the Bible-based religions that hadn’t even evolved yet.

When they did evolve, when the ancient Hebrew tribes put together their notion of God by combining Yahweh and the Elohim gods (“Elohim” is plural), and borrowing from other religions, they put together a God from which, in some important ways, we are still suffering. What I mean by that is that biblical scholars are clear that Yahweh evolved originally from a tribal chief, and has always kept much of the authoritarian character of that ancient tribal chief. The covenant between that God and his people was based on an earlier Hittite treaty between a ruler and his subjects. That’s the covenant – which I’ll talk more about next week – that says “I’ll be your ruler and you will be my people. I’ll protect you if you obey, and punish you if you disobey.” That’s the attitude that still lets Western believers move way too effortlessly to persecuting or murdering those who believe differently. It’s been harder to shrug that God off as irrelevant, because its followers may kill you for it – as many martyrs throughout history have discovered the hard and painful way.

But this liberal spirit that ranks getting right with truth higher than getting right with God, and coming alive higher than coming to Jesus – this is a dangerous spirit in all times and places. It believes that “New occasions teach new duties,” and that “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” Those are the words of 19th century poet James Russell Lowell, but Gilgamesh walked that talk more than four thousand years before him.

When Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Reformation nearly five hundred years ago, reincarnated that ancient liberal spirit, he threw out five of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, and said that informed believers trumped uninformed popes. So you can’t be too surprised to learn that he had to hide out for over a year because the Church had a contract out on him – the same kind of contract that the Ayatollah Khomeini had out on the novelist Salman Rushdie when Khomeini said it was the religious duty of Muslims to kill Rushdie because he had insulted old beliefs.

The liberal spirit is about freeing the light, liberating the light from the little cages we keep building for it through our creeds, orthodoxies and rituals. The Unitarian church I served before coming here, in St. Paul, MN, has a wonderful version of this message engraved on the outside of their building, with a picture of birds flying – the bird is a nearly universal symbol of the spirit. The words were by one of their ministers from half a century ago (Wallace Robbins) and say, “We dare not fence the spirit”. We dare not fence the spirit! There is the spirit of liberal religion in six short words.

There is a kind of eternal game in religions, between the liberal spirit and the conservative enclosures that keep trying to limit the light to only their own comfort, to fence the boundless energy of the Holy Spirit into the confines of their parochial certainties, the limits of their current orthodoxies and creeds.

Now I”m not going to keep singing the praises of that liberal spirit without stopping to attack it – well, if you believe in the liberal spirit, you have to attack it. Because here we come up against the catch in all of this wonderful and arrogant talk about freedom. Because when you read it this way, this liberal stuff can sound misleadingly heroic. It can sound like the point of criticism and inquiry is simply to shatter whatever beliefs people have erected to help them through their lives, as though destroying is a higher calling than creating, as though merely knowing some truths is more important than coming alive. That’s the seduction that liberals must avoid if they’re to be religious liberals. For finally, religion isn’t about knowing the right facts; it’s about coming alive. It isn’t about knowing truths; it’s about living them. It isn’t about preaching peace; it is, as the Buddhists say, about becoming the peace that we want. And that is so much harder!

The liberal spirit says that if we mouth second-hand beliefs, we’re living someone else’s life, which means there’s nobody left to live our life. But the spirit of religion says that if our beliefs are only about us, only serve us and our kind of people, then we’re serving something too small to give us life, too partial to be a truth that can help us become more whole, too limited to heal either ourselves or our world.

Another way of putting this is to return to the words I used in the first paragraph of this sermon. All of religion – meaning all of healthy, honest and adequate religion – can be boiled down to two questions. Yes, this is sort of the Cliff Notes version of Religion 101, but at one level it really is this simple and clear.

The first question is, “Where are you hurting?” Half of honest religion is seeking a path to lead us beyond our existential discomfort, our spiritual ennui, the sense that our lives could somehow be “more” and the longing for that “more”. We don’t need a flashlight for this; we need the kind of light that lives within illumination and enlightenment: that kind of light, that big. And absolutely nothing may stand in the way of our search for it. No orthodoxy, no creed, no belligerent beliefs forced on us by those who stopped their own search before they should have, and who are threatened by voices like old Gilgamesh’s that say their precious gods, creeds and rituals are irrelevant and useless. These are the voices that say time really can make ancient good uncouth. Not just wrong, but uncouth. The liberal spirit empowers us to barge through all obstacles in the way of finding the kind of truth that can set us free, make us feel more alive, and help us heal ourselves and our world.

But the second question – and I think this is the deepest and most easily overlooked question in all of religion – is “Who and what does the Light serve?” This truth we seek: what must it serve? To what must it bind us in order to be the kind of truth that can really grant us the kind of wholeness, aliveness and health we seek? The word “religion” means “reconnection.” It is about binding us to life-giving truths through a personal covenant – which is the subject of next week’s sermon.

But when we move to this second question, we are no longer in the realm of simplistic scientific or rational answers. Now we are in the realm of poetry, metaphor, and love-talk. And in love-talk, the answer is that the truth and the light must serve God. Even more than God. It must serve Life: all of life. The kind of truth that can help us come more fully alive originates within the life force – not within religious scriptures or communities – and must return us to that life force to complete the circle, and to bring us home again.

If it builds fences at the edges of our own comfortable beliefs, and excludes or damns those who believe differently, than we have found something too small to be worthy of our yearnings. If it divides the world into the saved and the damned – where we and those who think like us just happen to be among the saved – then we have hitched our wagon to a lie, rather than to a star. If the light we find starts becoming a little spotlight shining just on our face and telling us we – just we – are special, special, special, then we have been duped and seduced, and need to be awakened from our illusions.

There is a little passage in the Christian scriptures that sums this up in just ten words: “Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

Examine everything carefully – that’s the liberal spirit. Hold fast to that which is good – that’s the spirit of religion. And what is good – the light that is truly a light unto the world – is what connects us with truths that make us come alive, that help us heal ourselves and our world. You can call it what is good, what is of God, or what is sacred. We can only get at this sort of thing through symbols, metaphors, and love-talk.

That kind of light is the most ancient symbol of religion. We’ll light the light up here on our little ledge every week, as a symbol of that transcendence, illumination and enlightenment, to lift up and liberate the light that is the promise of honest religion. We’ll light a light every week. But it won’t always be the same. Today it’s just one flame. Next week there will be three flames, and three banners hanging above them. Then in a few weeks there will be some more feminine shapes for the candle bases instead of just these X shapes. At the end of September, there will be a family of five candles of different sizes and shapes, lit by a family of five of our church members. On the 12th of October there will be seven lights arranged like a four-foot wide menorah for a service on Atonement in harmony with the Jewish high holy days. A church member who is a rabbi will blow the shofar, the traditional ram’s horn – you don’t want to miss this – and I’ll try to find seven church members with Jewish backgrounds who would like to come up and light the seven flames. You get the idea. We want to liberate the light, to let it point in many directions, not just toward us. We dare not limit the light or fence the spirit, because in order to serve us well, that light and that spirit must serve all of life. We are cups of water from the ocean of life; we need to be reconnected with the ocean.

There is an aliveness in us that wants us to become whole and fulfilled. Call it our spirit, or the spirit of life within us, our Buddha-seed or our God-seed. It’s that spark of the infinite within us, the stardust that resides in every atom of our being. Sometimes we get frightened, or seduced, or bribed, or numbed by habit and conformity. We settle for smaller, second-hand identities. We become merely a man or a woman or an American or a Christian or a Muslim, merely a Unitarian or a University of Texas booster. You’ll find that distinction between small and large, first- and second-hand identities, preached by almost every good religious thinker in history, including the three 19th Century Unitarian preachers we’ll talk about later this fall.

To some extent, the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus is all of our stories – that’s why myths last for centuries, after all. He fell in love with his own reflection and was so entranced by it that he could no longer experience the huge world around him. We so easily go to sleep.

That’s why we gather here: to call forth the better angels of our nature, that they may kindly or rudely awaken us and beckon us back to the spirit of life, where we belong, where we can examine everything carefully, and hold fast to what is good. It’s that challenging combination that makes us both liberal, and religious. It’s a very good place to be.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 June 15, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us give thanks for this amazing and miraculous gift of life, and let us work to complete it. Life comes to us in kit form, with some assembly required. But most of the pieces are blessed indeed – far more than are not.

Let us never doubt that we are a gift to this world, and let us pray that our world will be a blessing to us as well.

So much is uncertain in life: how long we will live, how well we will live, the balance of our happy and our sad days, how we will love and be loved. So much is uncertain.

But all the uncertainties take place within the larger miracle of life itself. The miracle and the gift is the fact that we are here at all. Let us not become so confused or jaded that we let ourselves become numb to that most important of facts.

If the only prayer we ever uttered was simply “Thank you,” it would be sufficient. Thank you to Life, the universe, God, the unnameable mystery by whatever names we call it forth. Thank you.

Let us give thanks for this amazing and miraculous gift of life, and let us show our gratitude by becoming a gift to ourselves, and to others. For we are not only gifts, but the bearers of gifts, and the world would not be as complete without us. So let us, above all else, remember to give thanks for the sheer gift of just being alive. Just being alive.

Amen.

SERMON: Brokenness

I’ve never preached on “brokenness” before. When I Googled it, I found it is a very popular word among many Christian writers. I love good and insightful thinking from all religious traditions, but the things I read on this word “brokenness” have an odd, even morbid, undertone. Let me read you the comments of six different authors who were among the first dozen or so to come up on the Google search, and you’ll see what I mean:

One says, “An unbroken person cannot be trusted.” (Gary Rosberg)

Reknowned Catholic priest Henri Nouwen wrote (in his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son) that “it is often difficult to believe that there is much to think, speak or write about other than brokenness”.

Another author (Mark Buchanan) wrote that brokenness “molds our character closer to the character of God than anything else. To experience defeat, disappointment, loss”the raw ingredients of brokenness”moves us closer to being like God than victory and gain and fulfillment ever can.” This sounds like some of the teaching of 12-step programs, and it’s true that sometimes we have to hit the bottom before we’re willing to wake up. But as a model for living our lives? We can do better.

Another (Alan Redpath) says, God will only plant the seed of his life “where the conviction of His Spirit has brought brokenness.”

A fifth author (Charles Brent) says that every call to Christ is a call to suffering, and every call to suffering is a call to Christ.

And a sixth says that “Worship starts with a broken heart.” (Calvin Miller)

I want to say that these voices are coming from another world, but not the one most of us are living in or would want to live in. They are speaking from within only one vehicle of insight and wholeness, the vehicle of one popular version of modern Christianity, and I want to suggest that what’s broken is not us, but that vehicle. I want to bring in a couple evangelical writers who speak to that, and then offer you some wisdom from a very different, perhaps unexpected, source.

A couple weeks ago, I talked about a new book by Christine Wicker called The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church. She was raised in the evangelical Baptist church, came to Jesus at age nine, then grew away from the church, but kept a soft and warm spot in her heart for it. A major publisher asked her to write a book about what great successes the megachurches were as the spearheads of the evangelical movement. But after more than a year of research, the leaders within the churches convinced her that she was writing the wrong book. She went back to her publisher and took another year to write, instead, about the unreported fact that evangelical churches and numbers are declining, have not kept up with population growth for the past hundred years, and that we”ve been duped into thinking they were strong because they learned to manipulate the media very cleverly. They represent perhaps 7% of Americans, not the 25% we”ve been told – and the churches know this. She includes herself among the duped, as she was a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News for seventeen years.

The reason for the decline is the same as the reason for the decline of almost all traditional churches: our world has changed, our minds and hearts have changed, we no longer need the kind of God traditional religion has to offer, and we need other important things that it can’t offer. If you think about it, that’s a revolutionary statement. On Father”s Day, this stands out to me more, because this sounds like the data that say far more women attend church than men, because men want more hard-nosed empirical stuff than all the airy-fairy poetry of religions. I don’t think it’s quite that simple, though there’s something to it. But I think it is more about parents than just fathers.

In the world today, we need to be able to act, to adapt quickly, to think on our own, rather than blindly following authority. We feel a visceral imperative to be more open and flexible than humans have been in the past, which is another reason we may see the blind obedience taught by evangelical parents as dangerous thinking that will not prepare their children to live in the real world after they leave home (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 171).

It’s in families, raising children, where the real world and the world of religious dogma are most incompatible. Evangelical children, says Christine, are learning to obey authority while other American children are learning to question authority, to voice strong disagreement, to follow their own ideas. While evangelical parents may protect their children from growing up too fast, other American parents – both fathers and mothers – begin preparing their children to make decisions at earlier ages. These deep-seated differences in what parents believe their children must have and in how children are being formed as a result are the greatest reasons Americans will never, and cannot ever, return to the old-time religion. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 173)

The idea that a happy, self-reliant person with adequate self-esteem is more likely to be a moral, good citizen has replaced the Christian image of humans as sinful, broken creatures in need of outside salvation. What was once called sin is now considered sickness. So health rather than holiness is the modern parent’s goal. And I want to say, that’s a good thing. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 185)

It seems that a new way of judging what’s moral and what’s not is coming into being. It means people don’t feel the same need for the kind of God traditional religion supplies. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 187)

This kind of thinking makes our children flexible, thinking, reasoning, searching, very unorthodox people. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 187)

It leads to deeper, more aware, honest, nuanced and integrated kids. This state of hopeful wholeness was once called “salvation,” but today we call it health. So one point is that traditional religion has lost its roots in, and lost the ability to prepare us for, the real world outside the walls of the church and many fathers and mothers don’t trust their kids to it.

Let’s hear from one more evangelical who”s writing from inside that faith, rather than having left it as Christine Wicker did. Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College , and wrote this for the Wall Street Journal just over a week ago. (“Too Much Faith in Faith”, 6 June 2008, p. W11). Here’s some of what he wrote:

“If there is one agreed-upon point in the current war of words about religion, it is that religion is a very powerful force. Is it, though? I have my doubts, and they begin with personal experience. I am by most measures a pretty deeply committed Christian. I am quite active in my church; I teach at a Christian college; I have written extensively in support of Christian ideas and belief. Yet when I ask myself how much of what I do and think is driven by my religious beliefs, the honest answer is “not so much.” The books I read, the food I eat, the music I listen to, my hobbies and interests, the thoughts that occupy my mind throughout the greater part of every day – these are, if truth be told, far less indebted to my Christianity than to my status as a middle-aged, middle-class American man.

“When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they’re not acting as I usually do, out of motives and impulses over which I could paint a thin religious veneer but which are really not religious at all.”

Now this man isn’t a Christ-hating savage. He teaches at Wheaton College in Illinois , the alma mater of Billy Graham, which has never been known as a bastion of liberal thought.

So one former evangelical author says the membership in the churches is declining, that they can’t convert enough new people to keep from shrinking because they’re too out of touch with the world we’re really living in. And a current professor at evangelical Wheaton College says that even within the religion, the truth is that the religion has very little to do with what we think, read, feel or do. This is a measure of a religion that has become a broken vehicle for helping us find more meaning and purpose in life. Its wheels have come off.

So I began with the idea of brokenness, which is a concept deeply embedded in a lot of modern religious thinking in our culture. I shared some of the research by a former evangelical who now, as an outsider to that worldview, reports that even the churches know they are losing more members and more appeal every year. She suggests it’s because their message is grounded in biases that have lost their roots in the world we’re really living in, and a growing number of us prefer the real world. Then Alan Jacobs, who is not only still an evangelical, but teaches at one of the flagship conservative colleges, says that even as a believer, he has to admit that his religious beliefs actually play almost no role in how he thinks, feels, or lives. I think there’s good evidence that many of the loudest religious voices telling us we’re broken and need their special salvation are, in fact, themselves broken, and failing as useful vehicles for our most important hopes, fears, dreams and yearnings.

So what if, instead, we were to seek out some wise figures who live in the real world, are at home in it, and are also asking questions about life, meaning and purpose? How different would their advice sound than these messages insisting that God only cares for broken souls?

Well, it just so happens that we have some of these voices among us. So I want to read you a few things from their wisdom, so you can hear and feel the difference. Remember, the question guiding us this morning is the question of brokenness: are we broken, is brokenness really a healthy and useful way of looking at our lives, or is there a way of understanding ourselves that is not broken, and is better for us? Some of you have already heard these voices, because they are four of our own high school students, who presented short homilies during their Youth Service last Sunday. If you missed it, you missed something very special. Listen to a few insights from four teen-agers who live in the modern world, are creatures of that world, and believe what they’ve learned in this church – and I hope could learn in any good liberal church – that their questions and feelings matter, that they can trust their minds, and can find their own healthy and whole path through life if they choose to.

Now as you listen, don’t mentally patronize these young people. Don’t think “Oh, that’s so good for a kid, it’s just swell.” Don’t mentally pat them on the heads. Be tough. Listen to them as you would listen to anyone offering wisdom, and see how it stacks up. See, especially, how it stacks up against advice about how we’re broken or sinful. They didn’t come here to show off; they came here to try and offer something that might be both true and useful for you, so hold them to the high standards they’ve requested.

Josh is one of our students, and says, “As our lives change, we lose and discover things about ourselves. We change from what we were, to what we are, to what we could be. Sometimes we also find friendships we thought we could never have, without even trying. In my short 16 years I have moved a total of 10 times and every time I seem to find these wonderful and amazing people without even looking. They seem to pop out of nowhere and change my life. That I think is the greatest thing anyone could find: the love and joy of friends.” He doesn’t sound broken.

Listen to the trust here. He has found a way to back off and see life as a moving picture. He isn’t trying to cling to a dogmatic truth, he knows already that life is about change. He isn’t looking for water wings, but for swimming lessons, and he’s swimming pretty well.

One youth reflected on a Rolling Stones song from her parents” generation, about how “You can’t always get what you want”but if you try sometimes, you can get what you need.” She says, “No matter how much we want something or how much we think we must have something, or how hard we try to get it, sometimes the universe just won’t let it happen. But, if you try sometimes, if you try new things and expand your world, you can get what you need,” even if you hadn’t known you needed it.

She told a story to illustrate this, about a time she was digging through the family couch, looking for loose change to buy candy at the movie. I imagine nearly everyone here remembers doing that. She didn’t find enough change to get the candy, but she did find something without which many teenagers might not be able to survive for even one day – her cell phone. She didn’t even know she’d lost it. And so the world, she said, is like a big couch, “littered with all sorts of random objects, and waiting for us to dig around in it. Maybe we will find what we want. Maybe we will find what we haven’t been looking for, but need more than we thought. Nevertheless, the choice is ours whether or not to look in the first place.” And she thinks we should be out there digging around in the couch of life. She doesn’t sound broken.

Our third student, Shane, thought about the whole idea of gaining experiences. He said that unless you live under a rock, you’re experiencing things every day. And that even if you do live under a rock, you’re probably experiencing things too, like pain and boredom. But it’s not like you can go to the movie store and pick out which experiences you want, and skip the bad ones. If you want to have really valuable experiences, you have to be patient, because not all experiences are either valuable or pleasant. And when the really valuable experiences do happen, it may not be when or where you expect. Does this sound like a modern teenager, or an ancient sage?

Then Sierra talked about happiness. She’s already learned that you can’t buy it – even with money from the couch. “You have to know where to find it. And this is the tricky part. How can we get it? You can try as hard as you possibly can to reach this happiness, and still not get it. You can’t control it. You can alter your mood and surround yourselves with things that supposedly “make you happy”, and some days the happiness just won’t come.”

She decides that maybe happiness is more complex than we think. Maybe it has to include the sadness, the fear, the satisfaction, the contentment, the surprise, and the regrets. Like Natalie, she invents an analogy for us. She says maybe happiness is like white light. White light is made up of all the colors, and if one color were missing, it wouldn’t be pure white, just like if one of our experiences was missing or an emotion was suppressed for a lifetime, it wouldn’t be as full, as complete a life. It isn’t about pretending we can only have happy, fun experiences. I”d say that’s not the real world; that’s Disneyworld . She says, at age 15, that in our real-world pursuit of happiness, we are gathering experiences that at the end of our lifetime might just combine and finally give us our greatest happiness – the most full and satisfying life – the way all the different colors combine to make pure white light.

These young people are not finished growing, but they’re not broken. They see the good and bad as inherent parts of life, and see happiness as living in a way that can let them integrate all of our experiences, and weave them into a character with depth and nuance.

We are completely at home in the real world. Whatever is sacred, is there – which means that whatever is sacred is already within us, too. We are linked with all other life on earth. We are part of this world, all the way down. We are at home here, all the way down. And our salvation, our wholeness, must be rooted deeply in the real world around us to its most profound and life-giving parts, all the way down.

That’s the voice you hear coming from our own high school students. Not because they were taught a doctrine or dogma, but because they were taught that they must think, they must interact with the world and that it can mostly be trusted, and so can their own powers of reasoning and meaning-making. We are saved, today, not by dogmas or orthodoxies, but by an empowered imagination, and our ability to imagine our own most fulfilling paths through life.

we’re not broken. we’re unfinished. We don’t need to be made holy; we need to be made whole. And that has changed everything. We can trust life. We can trust ourselves, we can trust in the best of human relationships, and it’s ok when we occasionally fail, because failing is part of living, just as succeeding is part of living.

Let me sum this up in the words of some local sages. As we go digging through the big couch of life, we can find things we want, and things we need, as we change from what we were, to what we are, to what we could be. If we want to have really valuable experiences, we have to be patient, because not all experiences are either valuable or pleasant. And when the really valuable experiences do happen, it may not be when or where we expect. But don’t be afraid of the wide range of life’s experiences, because in the end they can all go together like rays of different colored lights to create a kind of white light so complete we can call it by its ancient religious name: Enlightenment.

That isn’t broken. It’s whole. It’s blessed. And it’s very, very good.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 1 June 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not confuse hype with hope. We know all that glitters is not gold, but let us not be misled when the glitter looks good anyway. Let us not be taken in by someone else’s excited messages that don’t feed our enduring hungers.

We are here to grow into our highest callings as children of the universe, children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. Let us not accept messages that don’t bless us.

May we learn to shun voices that say, “You’re nothing without me. You’re nothing without Jesus. You’re nothing without God.” These messages don’t come from Jesus or God, but from those acting like “used God” salesmen who hawk them for personal profit or power.

Our good news – the kind of truth that can set us free – may indeed be a truth that passes all understanding, but not a truth that bypasses understanding.

We are all looking for good news. We need truth that makes us feel more cherished, more alive and whole, a truth that commands us to serve higher ideals than we might otherwise have done, and live a life of greater integrity and courage than we might have stumbled into. And it must bless us and make us feel beloved of this place. Without these things, it isn’t our good news, and we need to keep listening. For it will come, our good news. Let us keep listening for words of truth and empowerment, the good news that can make us free. For it will come. Amen.

SERMON: Can Evangelicalism be (Gasp!) Dying?

We’ve been told, for years, that Christian evangelicals make up 25% of the U.S. population and are growing, that evangelicals and “values voters” delivered the last two presidential elections – rather than that both elections were stolen. We’ve read that atheists are the most distrusted group of people in the country, and that they are at any rate far less moral than the kind of evangelicals who have given the Religious Right so much political power since 1980. Now I like evangelism, and even think of myself as an evangelist. The word means spreading the good news, and I think that’s what honest religion should be about: spreading the good news. But when evangelism isn’t done honestly, when it’s more about deceit than delivery, then it’s a bad thing, the good news lies elsewhere, and we need to know about it.

An author named Christine Wicker has written a new book called The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church. She was in town for a presentation last week, and I had several hours to talk with her over a long dinner and longer lunch. I’ll draw on some of her work for the sermon in two weeks. But I want to introduce you to it today in the time we have left, and talk about why she sees the evangelical movement dying, how she says we”ve been duped about the strength of the movement for almost 30 years, and what it might all mean for us: what the good news really is.

Christine was raised an evangelical Baptist, came to Jesus in an altar call when she was nine years old, left the church some time later, and still has a warm place in her heart for evangelicals, though she says she can’t imagine ever wanting to go to church again. She was a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News for seventeen years, and understands how to find good sources. She quotes a lot of figures that are quite damning to that picture of evangelicals in America, but all the figures come from inside the churches themselves. Here are a few of the things she says.

Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. ix)

The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. xiii). As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 123) The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four. The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals. And since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, I suspect the real figures are higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no powerful groups pushing the story.

And as far as respect goes, when asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-Christians rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower. In an almost comic side note, I wonder how the prostitutes feel about that. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 143) Atheists and nonbelievers are looking pretty good.

Misbehavior is so widespread among evangelicals that one evangelical author (Ronald Sider) calls the statistics devastating. When pollster George Barna, himself an evangelical, looked at seventy moral behaviors, he didn’t find any difference between the actions of those who were born-again Christians and those who weren’t. His studies and other indicators show that divorce among born-agains is as common as, or more common than, among other groups. One study showed that wives in traditional, male-dominated marriages were 300 percent more likely to be beaten than wives in egalitarian marriages. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 80) Evangelicals make up only seven percent of the population, but about twenty percent of the women who get abortions (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 81).

Every day the percentage of evangelicals in America decreases, a loss that began more than one hundred years ago (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 198). This is part of the bigger picture of the continual decline of Christianity in our culture, which is another story that’s been underreported.

These are just some of the headlines. I’ll go into more facets of this in two weeks, because they have deep and compelling implications for us and for all liberal churches.

Who’s to blame for all this? Not the bible, not God, and not the churches. Modern life, changed circumstances, the new realities that we live among are to blame (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 4). Evangelicals tried to fight the modern world and the world won.

What’s eroding Christianity is the rise and victory of the more scientific and humane worldview we’re a part of: a worldview that incorporates almost all the basic assumptions of liberalism. It affects all religions, but in different ways.

I’ve heard for 25 years that 95% of Unitarian kids leave the church after high school. I don’t think anyone has actually done a methodical study that could produce reliable numbers like that, but I suspect that it’s probably in the ballpark. Why? Because evangelical youth are leaving at about the same rate. Josh McDowell, who has worked for Campus Crusade for Christ since 1964, says that 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years. The Southern Baptists estimate that 88% of their kids leave the church after high school. So this is not an indictment of liberal religion; it’s a description of American 18-to-20-year-olds. On the surface, it looks like we’re all in the same situation.

But when you look at why evangelicals or religious liberals leave their church, it gets more interesting, and suddenly we’re not all in the same situation.

The world evangelical kids enter when they leave the control of the church isn’t much like the world the church has offered them. There’s more freedom to question, no subjects declared off-limits, less self-righteousness, more science, more independence. And nineteen out of twenty of them find the real world more appealing than the world the church had given them. Evangelicals lose their kids to the modern world. But we don’t lose our kids to the modern world, because we”ve worked to prepare them for it. It’s the worldview they learn in churches like this. We just want them to find more depth of fulfilling meaning and purpose within it than the soul-killing “market value” idols offer.

During the past century, evangelicals have never kept up with the population growth in this country. Not for a century. They don’t have anywhere near the real power they have claimed. They have fought to make abortion illegal for 35 years. It’s still legal. They have fought for a Constitutional amendment to outlaw homosexuality. Nobody’s buying it. And though they have done harm to and through the Republican Party, they don’t have anything like control there either. Remember that the recent court decisions permitting homosexual marriages in Massachusetts, California and New York all came from Republican judges. They have censored some school textbooks, but one result is that American students now lag far behind students in Europe and Asia, especially in science education, which will make us less competitive. Eventually, even market forces will have to improve the quality of our public education, because we need independent thinking workers, not just obedient ones. They are training for the world of yesteryear, but we and our children are learning to live with imagination and hope in the world of tomorrow. We and the modern world are winning, and will win.

What is at stake is whether children must become independent minded and able to reason through tough decisions on their own at early ages or whether they will be sheltered from such decisions until adulthood by families in which obedience to parental and allegedly godly authority is more highly valued. Parents who”ve changed their parenting style have come to believe that their children need new strengths as they face a rapidly changing world, and those strengths need to be developed early. For these parents, physical punishment encourages violence in later life. Bolstering the child’s self-respect and autonomy is important. The idea that a happy, self-reliant person with adequate self-esteem is more likely to be a moral, good citizen has replaced the Christian image of humans as sinful creatures in need of outside salvation. What was once called sin is now considered sickness. So health rather than holiness is the modern parent’s goal for their children and for themselves (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 185). This is the way you’ve raised your own children, but so have a growing army of more conservative parents. As Christine says, when was the last time you saw a child being beaten in public? Public standards have changed, and have become more humane and civil than those of the conservative churches. That’s one way to lose parents and children by the drove.

Trying to hold back the modern world and our sciences and our intellectual freedoms is not like the old picture of the Dutch boy with his finger in the hole in a dam trying to keep the water from squirting through. It’s more like a crowd of believers standing side by side in a river, imagining they can stop it. But the water just goes between, around and through them, and the river goes on as if they weren’t there.

The saving message here, the good news, is that America is a very different place than many of us have been led to believe it is. And Americans themselves are a very different kind of people. More thoughtful. More reasoning. Less doctrinaire. More changeable. More flexible. Less religious. This is news of a new and powerful form of salvation that comes from knowing the truth, being aware, and acting in fair and compassionate ways. And growing numbers of people are finding it offers better salvation than the traditional Christian stories (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 56). Sometimes they find it in more liberal churches like this one. Sometimes they just find it on their own. But more and more, they know where they’re not going to find it.

Another way of putting this is that repressive and regressive religions tried to fight the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is winning. The spirit of truth, freedom and empowerment is winning, and religions that can’t embrace that spirit cannot make their people whole. Any way you cut it, from any informed religious, ethical or moral perspective, that’s good news. It’s the kind of good news that can save you – It’s the kind of good news that can save your mind, save your souls and save your children. It’s the kind of good news that can save the world. You can get that good news at a lot of liberal churches. You can get it here. That’s not just good news. That’s Halleluja news! And that’s worth an Amen!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 18 May 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not tell paltry stories about ourselves. We don’t just work at a job, we have a mission that is part of the cosmic effort to improve and perfect the world.

We’re not just sweeping the floor, throwing out stuff and trying to get this place cleaned up before guests arrive. We are a modern incarnation of the goddess Hestia, the one whose sacred gift is to transform a house into a homey place, to let those who enter feel cared for. We’re not just a doctor sewing stitches into the fourth patient to cut himself this hour. We’re healing the sick, caring for them in the spirit of old Aesclepius, the patron saint of physicians. We’re not just taking a lawsuit to court so we can stick it to whoever we have in our sights. we’re agents of fairness and social trust, working to help the powerless balance the scales of justice. We’re not here just to whistle little ditties, but to sing small spiritual symphonies with our lives.

We are, whatever we are, so very much more than we have given ourselves credit for being. Our biggest failures are failures of imagination. We need a story worthy of us. We need the largest story that wraps us in the most imaginative tapestry of life lived skillfully, caringly.

Let us find a story worthy of our spirit, and tell it. Salvation can come through telling and believing the right stories about ourselves. It may be the only way it does come. Let us become spirited parts of stories that are worthy of us.

Amen.

SERMON: Life as a work of art

Life as a work of art: what does that mean? I want to begin with a quotation that Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote over eighty years ago:

“Every person, in the course of his life, must build – starting with the natural territory of his own self – a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. [She] makes [her] own soul throughout all [her] earthly days; and at the same time [she] collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of [her] individual achievement: [that greater work is] the completing of the world.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1927)

He used the word opus for the work of a life. That word opus is also used for a musical composition or an artist’s total production. We are also works of art. We are partly the artistic designers of our own life, and it is the most important work we will ever do. (Thomas Moore, A Life at Work, p. 2)

Boy, does that sound easier said than done! How to make a life? When most people hear this, their first thoughts are probably more economic, like how to make a living.

Some of the older folks here will remember how much this has changed in the last half century. In the 1950s, the object was to get a job with a good company, work for them your whole life and they’d take care of you. You”d have health care and a good retirement. For women, the work options were severely limited – most were steered to becoming nurses or teachers or stewardesses (and in the 50s only young women could be stewardesses, and there were no male flight attendants). For all, the goal was to get married (heterosexual only – nobody was “out” in the 1950s), have kids, raise them to be good Americans. America was the most respected nation in the world after WWII and its Marshall Plan to help Europe recover. We were generous and just, trusted by almost everyone.

It’s amazing how much of that has changed now. Our nation is no longer respected by many. There’s little or no job security – I think I read that people entering the work force today should expect to have eight different jobs in five different fields during their career. Job benefits keep getting cut, unions have largely been disempowered, and it’s been widely reported that this is the first generation that can’t look forward to a higher life style than their parents. The divorce rate is about 50% – so many people have neither a job nor a partner for life.

There is a lot more competition for good schools and jobs, school loans put people into far greater debt. Twenty-five years ago, I spent seven years in a very expensive graduate school and graduated owing a total of $17,500. Today, Unitarian ministers leave a three-year seminary owing between $50,000 and $80,000 or more, and I’ve talked with at least one student here at UT who’ll owe $100,000 for a four-year Ph.D. program in Latin American studies. And it can get much worse. I have a niece attending medical school in Israel through a Columbia University world medicine program, who”s also getting a Master”s in public health from Johns Hopkins. When she’s done in two more years, she’ll owe about $300,000. She had wanted to be the next Albert Schweitzer, devoting her life to helping needy people in Africa – but not with student loans like that.

So it’s harder to make a living today than it was fifty years ago.

It’s easy to get depressed, or go into a rant.

But the job of making a life – as opposed to the job of making a living – really isn’t fundamentally different now. It’s still a religious task, though today we use the word “spiritual” more, and it doesn’t need to involve churches or even gods.

Many churches still talk about this life as though it were just a meaningless prelude to some life in heaven forever – if we obey a certain concept of God or church. But I don’t believe the world is built that way. I think we do it here and now. So in many ways, it matters even more, to try and make a good life. What’s it mean?

By a good life, I really mean something as simple as a life that lets you stand in front of a mirror in ten or fifty years and be able to say, “If I only get one shot at this, I’m glad I lived the life I’ve lived.” In your whole life, there’s hardly anything you could say that’s more important. It may not be the life someone else would choose, but you’re not supposed to live other people’s lives. You’re supposed to live your own. And to some extent that involves making it, crafting it, like a work of art. And while I think that’s a little more complex than it used to be, it isn’t fundamentally different.

We need the sense that we are here for a reason, that life wants something from us, that life grants us honor, and a task. Being part of a larger purpose can give meaning to our smallest acts and helps create a strong identity. (Thomas Moore, A Life at Work, p. 17)

If I were an old-fashioned preacher talking in old-fashioned ways, this is when I could say, “Come to Jesus! Come to Jesus and be saved!” I think very few people here think or talk that way, but there can be a powerful kind of truth to that Come-to-Jesus invitation. It means, “Recast your life as a beloved part of a larger reality, as a child of God rather than just one more lost person stumbling through life. Then it can be about the larger you precisely because it’s no longer primarily about you, but about your part in a bigger story, a transcendent scheme. You’re no longer just doing the kind of fairly menial work we all do; your work has now become part of the plan of the creator of the universe. So come to Jesus, and be saved!” There’s both poetry and power there.

What’s right about it is that we need to be able to cast our lives as parts of a bigger and more enduring story than just making it through another day.

But we have to try to say it in less parochial terms today. Fewer and fewer people are learning to talk about their lives as though they were about Jesus or God. The fastest-growing “faith groups” in the country are not evangelicals, but non-believers, even atheists, as I’ll talk about more in two weeks. But no matter how we put it or what we call it, we need to call forth this image of our life as part of something greater. And it isn’t hard, though we’re not taught how to do it. I want to give you some examples of recasting life as part of a bigger story, in a few different styles, both with and without gods.

One is a story that Rev. David Bumbaugh read to you three weeks ago, and it’s worth repeating.

In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a visitor went into one of these huge buildings. Over to the right were carpenters, and he said to them, “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? we’re carpenters. we’re building pews!” Then he went to some stone masons. Again he asked, “What are you doing?” They laughed, and said they were members of the masons’ guild, the finest of all the guilds. They acted like just belonging to that group meant they didn’t actually need to be doing anything at all.

On the other side of the room there was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters, the masons and the others. Of her too, he asked, “What are you doing?” This woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him, “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!”

We could look at her job and say it was the least important of the three, just sweeping, cleaning up. But it gave more to her than the jobs of the carpenters and stone masons seemed to give to them, because she had made her life part of a much larger story, in which even cleaning up was helping to build not only a magnificent cathedral, but a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God! It’s hard to beat that. There’s a simple life transformed into a work of art through an imaginative story. We all have simple lives, and we all need that kind of transformation.

Many Hindus can still do this through their belief that their soul is part of the soul of the universe, their spirit is part of the creative spirit of everything. And that’s not just a belief; it’s true. All of our lives are parts of that bigger picture. But it’s so hard to see them that way. I think that’s why “Come to Jesus” is so appealing. It sounds so simple, so quick. No waiting in line, Just BAM! You’re saved!

I often envy the ancient Greeks, who knew these spirits were eternal, and turned most of them into gods. And so craftspeople and artists weren’t just making pews or doing stonework; they were serving the gods of art, music and beauty: Hephaestus, Apollo, Athena. They were doing sacred duty in their work. Parents planted seeds of tomorrow, and nurtured them, as part of the creative force of the universe. They were the current incarnations of the spirits of Zeus, Hera and Demeter, as the Greeks would say. Homemakers, those with gifts for making a house feel like a home, or making a church service feel like a worship service, were serving the invisible goddess Hestia, the goddess of that feeling of being deeply at home.

Thinkers weren’t just ivory-tower eggheads, overeducated chatterers – look at some of the ways we describe ourselves! Mechanical, cold, condemning, not loving. But in Greece, thinkers were those who helped bring fire, bring light into the darkness, modern incarnations of Prometheus. Soldiers weren’t just murdering foreigners. They were serving the dangerous but sometimes necessary god Ares. Even politics could be transformed – even today”s politics. A Hillary Clinton could be recognized as the spirit of the goddess Athena, and maybe Artemis, and Obama could be seen in the role of Hermes, the messenger of the gods who carried the message beyond comfortable boundaries, because the message was more holy than the boundaries. Heraclitus once said that everything is filled with gods, and in his world it was. You didn’t have to come to Jesus. You didn’t have to go anywhere because the gods were everywhere. You just had to understand your gifts and your passions as gifts from the gods, callings, duties – because they were.

Look how this could transform human lives! It still can. Arianna Huffington is a Greek, born in Athens and educated at Cambridge, and the ancient Greek gods still help frame her life. She wrote that as an ambitious single mother of two daughters, she saw her life as a constant dialogue between the demands of Artemis and Demeter. How much more dignifying, and also descriptive, that is than just calling herself an ambitious single working mother with two girls. It’s so much easier to view our life as a work of art when we think of ourselves as incarnating eternal spirits. But today, our spiritual vocabulary is so sparse, we hardly know how to talk about it. Talking about gods leaves many people cold today – even ancient Greek gods. It sounds so “otherworldly,” in a bad way.

So let me share part of my own story with you, two of my own “Come to Jesus”-type moments that transformed how I defined myself and my job as a minister, as your minister. I’ve told parts of this before, and I’m not doing it to talk about myself, but to offer you more ways to talk about your own life.

I went to one of those elite graduate schools, worked as hard as the others there, and earned my Master”s and Ph.D. degrees. I saw it as a pretty solitary adventure. You go to seminars, you read, you read some more, you discuss, you read, you write, eventually you graduate. Graduation ceremonies have never meant much to me, and I’ve avoided them. But a classmate told me I had to go to the ceremony to be given my Ph.D. “Why?” I asked. “They can mail it.” “You don’t understand,” he said, “You have to hear what President Gray says to all the Ph.D. graduates.” Hannah Gray, who was then president of the University of Chicago, was the first woman president of what they called an elite university. I admired her, and was on a committee with her. But come on – commencement addresses are like political speeches: all predictable rhetoric, no significant substance. My classmate assured me I was wrong and I trusted him, so I bought the cap, rented the gown, and went.

It was a come-to-Jesus moment. I’ve never been the same since that day. When the other degrees had been awarded, she called the doctoral students forward, and she said those magical words which were burned into my memory instantly. She said, “I welcome you into the ancient and honorable community of scholars.” It was transformative. Suddenly, we were no longer just a few more unkempt graduate students hiding out in libraries working on papers and dissertations nobody but our three readers would ever be likely to read. No, now we were part of something grand: an ancient and honorable community of scholars, of which I hadn’t even been aware until then. Plato, Aristotle, and us! You try not to dwell too long on Plato, Aristotle and those at their level, or the magic would wear off and it would just feel really embarrassing. But for the first time, I believed I was part of an ancient tradition of millions of people who had been so curious and passionate about something that we wanted to devote years to its study, and lives to its service. I knew it was obsessive – but I didn’t know it was also sacred.

The other come-to-Jesus moment had happened a few years earlier, during some of that reading. I read a book by a very influential 20th century conservative theologian (Karl Barth), where he was addressing a group of young ministers. David Bumbaugh and I talked about this when he was here, and he said he also memorized this the first time he read it over forty years ago, and also took it as a sacred commandment. The theologian had said, “Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”

I think of this every Sunday, every week when I’m preparing a sermon. It isn’t about me, it’s about that ancient and honorable community, that sacred duty to take people perhaps even more seriously than they take themselves. In my mind, those ancient and honorable people are watching me; I can feel their eyes. That isn’t always a good thing. I don’t always succeed at this, as you know. Nobody does. But those two statements transformed my life from the life of a single fairly unimportant Unitarian minister to someone who feels empowered and commanded by an ancient tradition far larger and more enduring than I am. These are the same feelings as coming to Jesus, but without the Jesus, the gods, or the dogma.

Now this isn’t your story, so you might say, “Oh, come off it. You’re just a preacher at a church most people in Austin have never even heard of, preaching to less than one-tenth of a percent of the population!” And that’s true. Just as it’s true that the peasant woman was only sweeping the floor, or Arianna Huffington is just a driven woman with two kids. But these larger callings – whether her seeing herself as incarnations of the spirits of Artemis and Demeter or my believing I’m part of an ancient and honorable community of scholars charged with helping people take their lives more seriously – these larger callings transform solitary lives into little works of art, because they reconnect us with those enduring, perhaps eternal spirits that we serve.

And what about you? After all, that’s the point of all this. How would you describe your life? In ways that make you seem isolated and small, or in ways that connect you with a life force that transcends, empowers, and commands you? Are you just insignificant little you, or are you one of the masks of God, an incarnation of holy spirits, a small but significant part of a cause, a belief, an ideal that is timeless and incredibly necessary? Sweeping the floor, or building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God? Putting a few bucks in the collection plate here, or becoming the church rather than merely attending it? It’s your choice. I”d like you to discuss these things this week with your friends, your family, somewhere you can feel safe and won’t get put down for dreaming. You can choose the story of which your life is a part, whether small or large, and that choice makes all the difference in recasting your life as a work of art.

And so. What about you? As happens so often in this church, it’s your move.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 11 May 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not be so filled with ourselves that we cannot forgive others their sins and foibles when we knew they meant better. And let us not be so empty of ourselves that we let others use our forgiveness as a license to behave badly.

The balance between justice and mercy is always a dynamic balance, meant to empower the best kind of life within and around us. If our sense of justice is no more than punishment, it is a poor justice. And if our sense of forgiveness does no more than enable bad behavior, it is a poor forgiveness.

Let us try to balance a rich sense of justice and an empowering kind of forgiveness, as though the quality of life both within and among us were shaped by them.

Amen.

SERMON: Forgiveness

This is the third sermon I’ve done on a one-word theme. I’m planning to do one a month, and am developing a list of 36 themes, so we’ll revisit each theme once every three years. The themes may be only one word, but they don’t seem to be simple. Forgiveness – perhaps especially within Western religions – is very complicated. In fact, I’d start by saying that “Forgiveness isn’t always a good thing.” And the reason is that forgiveness suffers from a deep imbalance in Western religions, and when it’s unbalanced, it can be a very dangerous and bad thing.

The best-known story about forgiveness in the Bible is probably the Prodigal Son story. You know the story. A father had two sons – their mother is never mentioned – and one of them demanded his full inheritance in advance. That was permitted within Jewish law at the time, but if a son did it, he had no more claims on his family, ever. The father had to come up with cash for half of all his property was worth. It probably meant he would have had to sell things, and it also meant that after the younger brother left with the money, both the father and the older brother would have had to work much harder to get the work done. The young brother squandered all the money on wine, women and song, and returned home to ask if his father would take him back – this time, just as a servant, since he had forfeited all right to be taken back as a son. To the older brother’s disgust, the father welcomed him home and threw a great feast to celebrate.

Most adults who hear the story side with the older brother, and don’t think it was right of the father to forgive the young brother.

To see and feel how sex-linked notions of forgiveness are, all you have to do – especially on Mother’s Day! – is change the story to one about two sons and a mother. Suddenly, it changes everything. We would expect the mother to forgive him!

We expect the father to stand up for justice, but the mother to offer forgiveness, don’t we? Forgiveness seems closer to a feminine trait than a masculine one. It might be interesting to ask trial lawyers whether, if they were defending the younger brother, they’d rather have a jury of men or of women.

Forgiveness does seem to be a feminine trait, especially in our Western religions. In Hinduism, the goddess Kali is a fierce and judging and punishing presence, and in Greek mythology, the goddess Dike is the goddess of justice, and is equally fearsome. So in other religions, goddesses can be fierce. But not in Western religions. It’s hard to think of stories from the Bible or in Christian history of women who are that fearsome, or men who are terribly forgiving. In the Bible, the traits seem deeply sex-linked. It’s worth asking why, and the answer goes all the way back to the birth of the God of the Bible. There is no story of the birth of God in the Bible. I mean the story that biblical scholars have discovered about where the ancient Hebrews got the idea for their God.

The Hebrew tribes were surrounded by people whose gods were nature deities, and almost always that means that the main deities will be female, as it’s females who give birth, nurse and nurture. But the ancient Hebrews’ god wasn’t a nature god. He grew out of the idea of a tribal chief. He didn’t want to put you in touch with nature. He wanted to be obeyed, and could be ferocious when he was disobeyed. Scholars have found that the Biblical covenant between God and his chosen people was modeled on an ancient Hittite sovereignty treaty between a ruler and the people he ruled. If they obey him, he will protect him. If they disobey, he may destroy them. It isn’t about understanding or forgiveness. It’s about obedience. It’s hard to think of many good stories about forgiveness – as opposed to favors shown to obedient believers – because there aren’t many.

Maybe that’s why so many people find it odd or even wrong for the Prodigal Son’s father to forgive him, but would expect his mother to forgive him.

The psychologist Carl Jung talked about the human psyche, or soul, as divided into a masculine style, which he called the animus, and a feminine style, the anima, and that framework seems helpful here.

They act in different ways, and in different directions. The animus, or masculine style, acts outward. It can be a fierce protector of things like duty, obedience and justice, and when it is unbalanced it can be quite dangerous to others, because it will insist on a kind of obedience and justice without any rounded appreciation for our human frailties. Even the word animus is the root of the word animosity.

The anima or feminine style is inward, and seems to be the key in which a forgiving kind of understanding is played. But it also needs to be balanced with a concern for what’s fair: for justice. Unbalanced, it can be dangerous to us, by endorsing abuse without insisting on justice or respect.

I’d say that great religions are all trying to develop our animus for its sensitivity to justice, and our anima for its sensitivity to forgiveness and mercy. Justice and mercy. The conflict is between “mercy that negates justice” and “justice that negates mercy.” For either of them to be humane and safe, they have to be balanced. And in Western religions, because of the nature of their God who evolved from, and in most ways has remained, a tribal chief, we are raised with both justice and forgiveness out of balance.

Now many Christian scholars like to jump on this and say “Oh yes, the Jewish God was a God of judgment, but you see that’s what Jesus brought: a god of forgiveness rather than judgment.”

For example, whereas it’s hard to find clear stories teaching forgiveness in the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus once told people that he didn’t expect them to forgive just seven times, but seventy times seven. He also said you shouldn’t judge, so you won’t be judged. So it sounds like he is emphasizing forgiveness over judgment. But now it is an unbalanced kind of forgiveness. In Christianity, forgiveness too often has no component of justice in it, no holding others accountable to a social contract. And without that balance, forgiveness can be dangerous to us, just as an unbalanced sense of justice can be dangerous to others.

Jesus’ saying we should forgive seventy times seven has inspired at least one book by that name, with hundreds of short tales of people who forgave all manner of things, with no concern for justice at all. There’s even the story of a man who had been badly physically abused by his father – sometimes beaten unconscious – until he finally ran away from home in his teens. A few years later when he joined a church and told his story to the minister, the minister insisted that he write his father and beg his forgiveness for running away! That’s as unbalanced and dangerous as the passages in the Hebrew scriptures listing all the disobediences for which your children, wives and neighbors should be stoned to death. This is the kind of forgiveness that can be demanded by a tribal chief who can do what he likes without accountability. It’s unhealthy and wrong. And it’s not rare in Christian history. We have been taught to transfer the obedience owed to the tribal-chief-god to those who dress up in his clothes, or just those with money and power, however obtained.

Mother Teresa provided a memorable example of an unbalanced and dangerous forgiveness, when Union Carbide essentially hired her to do their PR after their chemical spill in Bhopal, India which killed 3,800 people. They made a donation to her Sisters of Mercy charity, then flew her to Bhopal. When she landed, the media were there, wanting to know what she advised following this horrible tragedy. She said, “Just forgive, forgive, forgive.” That’s not enough. This is a forgiveness that becomes an accomplice to corporate irresponsibility, a forgiveness that is the active enemy of justice – especially when the company had hired her. I think Mother Teresa only meant the inward kind of forgiveness, but she had been bribed by a large corporation, and her message suited their non-religious agenda perfectly. Nor do I think she was unaware of this.

Other examples of forgiveness so unbalanced that it becomes dangerous to the ones doing the forgiving are the many battered women’s shelters in our country. A majority of the battered women return to the men who beat them – probably not for the first time, nor for the last. This license to abuse seems granted only to husbands, not wives, as St. Paul taught the early Christians that men are made in the image of God, while women are made in the image of men. (As ridiculous as this sounds, it comes from a literal reading of one of the two creation stories in Genesis, where the male God first created the male – in his image – then created the female to be like the male, as his helpmate.) Once again, these are the ethics of deference to a powerful male tribal chief. The biblical God’s birth story has colored almost all the ethics of Western religion.

My dictionary offers two definitions of forgiveness that might be helpful ways to understand it. American Heritage Dictionary (1969) defines forgiveness:

1. To excuse for a fault or offense; to pardon.

2. To renounce anger or resentment against [someone].

The first definition is forgiveness that goes outward, pardoning someone for their behavior. The second goes inward, releasing their psychological hold on you so you can move on. Ideally, both kinds are possible. But they often aren’t.

The first kind of forgiveness is only safe if the other person is in a mutually respectful relationship with you. If an abuser can’t or won’t come into respectful relationship, it’s unwise and probably unsafe to forgive them, because it won’t be much more than permission for them to do it again, as tens of thousands of battered women have discovered the hard way.

There has to be a social contract in order to forgive someone for bad behavior against you. Then it’s a restorative kind of forgiveness, meant to restore a good relationship. There is a Proverb from the Hebrew scriptures that shows how important the social contract is. It’s one of my favorite Proverbs from the Bible – and on the surface, one of the strangest.

Proverbs 25:21-22 – “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; so you will heap glowing coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.” Now there is something weirdly delicious about this image of being kind to those who have abused you because it dumps hot coals on their head as God applauds, but the real meaning is less bizarre. A note says that these “hot coals” really mean deep shame and remorse. So acting in a forgiving way will shame them back into behaving well. This is restorative forgiveness, meant to restore a respectful and healthy social contract. If they can’t or won’t feel shame, however, forgiving them will only give them permission to abuse you again, because you’re an easy mark.

Without the mutual relationship, the first kind of forgiveness can’t be done. Sometimes, people just aren’t capable of or interested in a mutual relationship. But sometimes, they’re dead or gone, and you have to move on because you can never restore the relationship with them, and so have to settle for resolving it within yourself. Then it’s more of a rejuvenative forgiveness, meant to rejuvenate your spirit, to reconnect you with your life force and your sense of optimism and hope.

I have a story about this that I’ve told before, but is worth telling again. About fifteen years ago, I was the Theme Speaker at a Unitarian summer camp in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. There were about five hundred adults there for the week, and while I didn’t know any of them, I conducted the worship services every morning, so everyone sort of knew who I was, and would come up to talk, or to confess something, during the week. The most memorable was a woman who asked me, after lunch, whether she could talk to me about something very painful and awful she was going through. We sat on a bench under a tree outside, and she told me about what sounded like an absolutely horrible divorce she had been through. It was so painful, it hurt to listen to it. It was like a wound still completely raw. I felt very sorry for her. “When did this happen?” I asked. She looked at me sadly, and said, “Ten years ago.”

Ten years ago, and she was still bleeding from it! Of course, I don’t know any of the facts of the story for sure. Maybe he’s a jerk, maybe he just fell out of love with her, maybe it wasn’t as good a marriage as she thought, maybe she didn’t even notice whether he was happy, maybe she was the jerk. I don’t know. But it really didn’t matter any more. There can be no restorative forgiveness, because the relationship can’t be restored. The only kind of forgiveness she can hope for is the second kind, where she lets go of the hurt and the hate, and moves on with her life. She had a dream for her marriage, and it didn’t come true. Not all dreams come true, but all dreamers deserve the chance to dream again, and they can’t do it if they’re wrapped up in hate and hurt.

This kind of rejuvenating forgiveness, which we do not for others but for ourselves, is a decision to let go of resentments and thoughts of revenge, and to move ahead with our life.

This internal forgiveness takes away the power the other person continues to wield in your life, where your pain and anger have possessed you like demons. Through forgiveness, you choose to no longer define yourself as their victim. Rejuvenating forgiveness is done for yourself, not the person who you think wronged you.

It’s this second meaning that has the most religious and psychological power. The first, the restorative forgiveness, can be powerful within a relationship of trust and respect. Without that trust and respect, it just frees the person to do it again; it rewards abusive and selfish behavior. The second can be powerful within our own psyche, by cutting loose the hold that anger, resentment and hatred can have on our hearts. Be careful confusing the two categories of forgiveness. People don’t have a right to demand forgiveness: that’s a gift only we can give, and we shouldn’t give it if it will be likely to hurt us or be understood as a sanction for abusive behavior.

You don’t have to forgive the person – the person may be long dead. But (like the woman divorced ten years earlier) the anger lives on as though it had happened yesterday, keeping your heart from even being open again, let alone loving again. You can’t dream again when you’re possessed by the demons of hurt and hate. You’re trapped, not your partner or parent. Do yourself the favor, not them.

You can forgive within yourself what you would still hold the abuser responsible for. That inward forgiveness does not necessarily mean you want to be around the person again. It means you relinquish the hold that anger and hatred have on your own heart, so you can move on and dream again.

It seems important to say over again that restorative forgiveness only works within a relationship of mutual respect and trust. Otherwise, it’s enabling the worst behavior in another, and rewarding it. And there must be transparency. A mate who cheats in secret, then tries to rationalize it by demanding his/her privacy is not to be trusted. No one is safe in that relationship. Without honesty and transparency, there will be neither respect nor safety.

Now I want to go back to an earlier point, left over from that version of the Prodigal Son story with a mother rather than a father. It almost sounds like it’s the mother’s job to forgive, while we don’t really expect it from the father. This could sound like it’s the mother’s job, or women’s jobs, to teach men how to forgive – and I don’t want to say that, especially on Mother’s Day, because it’s just assigning women another job. But the other piece from the story is that if women do most of the forgiving, then where do they find forgiveness? Where do they find the understanding and forgiveness they need for their own sense of failure? – which may be that they weren’t able to accomplish a list of tasks not even Wonder Woman could manage. Maybe this is a good hint to the men and the children in their lives on this Mother’s Day. There is a woman living with you who may have been more forgiving of all of you than you’ve been. Now where is she going to find the understanding and forgiveness she needs?

And while the men and children are figuring out just how and where they might be more understanding, a final word to the mothers. If you are good at forgiving, don’t forget to forgive yourselves.

Just like justice needs an element of humanity in order to be a safe thing, so does forgiveness need a sense of justice to be a safe thing.

Let us try to balance a rich sense of justice and an empowering kind of forgiveness, as though the quality of life both within and among us were shaped by them – because they are.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

SWUUD Spring Conference

27 April 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY:

Once there was a girl who had an amazing dream. She dreamed that she could see a house in the next village, see into its back yard, and see a big tree there. And she knew – she just knew that buried beneath the tree there was great treasure! The village was separated from hers by a river, so it wasn’t a great walk there, but still she had never visited the village in her life.And yet she saw this house so clearly, and felt that she knew just where it was – and then the tree and the buried treasure. It was a very odd dream, she told herself the next day – she’d never had anything like that before!

But the next night, she had it again – the same exact dream! Same house, same tree, same treasure. This time she could see a little more of the village, a little more of where the house was. The next night, she had the same dream, and the night afterwards. She dreamed that same dream for five nights in a row – nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Monday through Friday, every night, the same dream of buried treasure.

On Saturday when she got up, she was determined to go see that house. She took a shovel with her. She crossed over the bridge, and had seen so much of the village in her dream, she felt she knew just where the house would be – and it was! She even looked around the side into the back yard, and sure enough, there was that same big tree she had dreamed about. Now you can’t just go digging a really big hole in somebody”s back yard without their seeing you do it, so she decided to be honest. She knocked on the door, and when a woman answered, she explained about the dreams she had had for five nights, and how she wondered if it would be all right if she dug up the treasure, and split it with the woman.

The woman was very kind to her.”Oh my dear,” she said,” I’m afraid there is no treasure buried here! But this is so very strange, because my son had exactly the same dream for the last five nights! Except he dreamed that his treasure was buried in the village across the river, behind a red garage. He left to walk over there this morning.”

“My gosh,” the girl thought, “that sounds like my house!” The girl thanked the woman, took her shovel and headed for home.

In the meantime, the boy had found her house. He had also taken a shovel, and also decided that he might as well just tell the truth, because he’s surely get caught digging a big treasure hole behind their garage. So he went to the door, and when the woman answered, he told her his story.

Again, the woman was surprised, and said, “Oh, my boy, I’m afraid there is no buried treasure here, but my daughter had the same dream, and went off to find a house across the river.” She wished him a good walk back home.

But it made the boy mad. “How foolish I feel!” he muttered. There must be some kind of silly epidemic going around, where kids are all dreaming these ridiculous dreams! How foolish!” He went home, was tired and felt foolish, didn’t talk to his mother about it (he said he couldn’t find any such house), went to bed, read a Batman comic book, went to sleep, and by morning he had forgotten most of the story about his dreams. Within a few weeks he’d forgotten it all together.

But the girl thought about it in bed that night, and thought about it all the next day, too. Maybe the boy didn’t have buried treasure – though she wasn’t sure of this – but that didn’t mean there wasn’t real treasure behind her garage, where he had seen it! The more she thought about it, the more certain she was, until finally she talked with her parents about it. After some arguing, they agreed to let her dig, on the condition that she would have to fill in the hole when she was done.

It was a lot of digging! She dug and dug, until she had dug a hole about five feet deep. Then she struck something hard. As she cleaned it off, she found it was a large heavy wooden box buried under ground behind her garage. She dug more dirt out to expose the whole box – it was almost five feel wide – and then she opened it.

And inside of the box was – more gold, jewelry, diamonds and rubies and emeralds than she had ever seen in her life! It was a huge treasure, big enough to last her for her whole life. Soon her father got another job in another state, and they moved – after she had filled in the treasure hole.

After they were settled in their new city, she sometimes wondered about the boy, and whether or not he ever found the treasure buried in his yard – she was positive he must have some too. But the boy never wondered about it again, and within a few years they too sold their house and moved away. Would anyone ever find it? One thing was for sure – they wouldn’t find it if they didn’t dig for it!

READINGS: THREE BIG STORIES

1. “On Size”

The first big story is really a fairly scholarly definition of the kind of “bigness” that matters most in life. You’ll hear more about this later, but here’s what this man wrote:

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

That’s a lot of big words. The second story is easier.

2. “The Little Tin Fiddle”

This is a story about the world-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who died a few years back. When he was only three years old, he heard a solo violinist at a concert and found his calling. He asked for a violin for his fourth birthday. His father bought him a toy violin made of metal with metal strings. Young Menuhin burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing more to do with it. (James Hillman, The Soul”s Code, p. 17)

There was something in him even at age four that was insulted by being offered a toy instrument, as though he had no better music in him than that. The little tin fiddle didn’t have the range, the depth or the nuance, and nobody would want to listen to it for long even if it could be played well.

3. “A Magnificent Calling”

In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a visitor went into one of these huge buildings. Over to the right were carpenters, and he said to them, “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? we’re carpenters. we’re building pews!” Then he went to some stone masons. Again he asked, “What are you doing?” They laughed, and said they were members of the masons’ guild, the finest of all the guilds. They acted like just belonging to that group meant they didn’t need to be doing anything at all.

On the other side of the room there was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters, the masons and the others. Of her too, he asked, “What are you doing?” This woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him, “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!”

PRAYER:

If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors. Let us not fail to be mediocre when we could instead fail to be absolutely brilliant. Let us not fall short of being moderately compassionate. Let us rather fall short of being wellsprings of love.

Of all our failures in life, perhaps the saddest are those in which we failed even to try and serve the highest and noblest ideals.

It is a sin to fail at low aims. Not because we failed, but because we aimed so low.

But it is not a sin to fail at very high aims, like aiming for truth, justice, compassion and character. Because even our failure puts us into the company of the saints, the company of those who also believe that rising to our full humanity and rising to our full divinity may be the same rising.

Striving after low and paltry ends is a boring sin, not worthy of us. Let us have greater ambition for our shortcomings. Let us vow never to fail at anything that wasn’t noble and proud, never to accept lower aspirations for ourselves, our lives, our country or our world.

We confess that we will all fail. But let it not be a failure of vision, or a failure of aspiration. If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors, and then let those failures bless us – for they will.

Amen.

SERMON: Salvation

This word “salvation” may make some of you want to run screaming out of here, reminded of a religious upbringing you”d rather forget. And I know it’s a scary word. But actually, it is a very down-to-earth word, completely at home among religious liberals. It came from the Latin meaning “to save,” but it also has the same root as our word “salve,” and has the meaning of health or wholeness. It’s about serving and being defined by big ideals rather than small ones. I did this in yesterday morning”s sermon by quoting from some ancient religious writings. But since most of you weren’t there yesterday morning, today we’ll do it through other stories that make this special kind of “bigness” more clear.

That first Big Story, “On Size,” was written over thirty years ago by a liberal theologian named Bernard Loomer. He was the Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School for a decade, then finished his career teaching religion in California, where he also began attending, and joined, a Unitarian church. Some may think he was one of us because he once joined a Unitarian church. I don’t care what church he joined; I think he was one of us because he understood just what kind of size matters, and why it must be a commanding presence in our lives.

And the touching story of young Yehudi Menuhin. If he’d been given an 18th century Guarneri violin for his fourth birthday – like the one he played later in his life – he wouldn’t have done justice to it. An instrument like that really takes your measure. To pick up a first-rate violin then just fiddle around with it can mark you as some sort of a tourist, or a fool. But that violin would have been good enough that he could have spent years growing into it, and even someone with his gifts would never be likely to outgrow a first-rate instrument.

Then that peasant woman in the cathedral! Her job was bigger than the jobs of the carpenters and stone masons. Not “bigger” in the sense that it was more important to the cathedral, but in the sense that it was more important to her. She lived in a world where her simple role was part of a calling that transcended even her time and place. And living within a perspective that big absolutely blesses us.

The treasure is buried within and among us, which is also where Jesus said the Kingdom of God was located. But it’s usually buried fairly deep, and requires some honest and often hard personal work.

It doesn’t require great talent, only a great soul. The carpenters and stonemasons were connected, in their imaginations, only to petty causes: building pews or just feeling smug because they belonged to a cool club. And whatever satisfactions or gifts of life they got from that would have to be equally shallow. We need more.

All three of these stories are metaphors, and I want to add a fourth story, to bring them together and tie them to religion, and to us. Fifteen to twenty years ago I belonged to an ecumenical ministers” group of about forty ministers. Every Thursday, we had lunch together, and the different churches took turns hosting and preparing it. One Thursday I arrived fairly early at the small rural Presbyterian church that would serve us, and got to overhear a remarkable conversation between three Presbyterian woman who were setting the tables.

I entered in the middle of it, and pretended to ignore them, so that they would keep talking and I could eavesdrop. They had been trashing some religion – either Baptist or Catholic – and finally one woman exclaimed, “Well, thank God we’re Presbyterians!” There was a silence. After a few seconds, the second woman said, “I don’t think we’re supposed to be Presbyterians. I think we’re supposed to be Christians.” Another awkward silence, and after a few more seconds the third woman spoke. “No,” she said, “even that’s too small. we’re supposed to love one another, that’s all.”

In this story, you have both first- and second-rate instruments. Actually, the first woman, the mere Presbyterian, was clutching about a third-rate fiddle. If she had a religion, it didn’t show. She treated the church as a club – like the stonemasons in the other story – where just being around people like her made her superior to those damned Baptists or Catholics. If you asked her what these Presbyterians of hers believed, she may have done no better than giving you a half-memorized list of third-hand beliefs she had learned the way you learn the rules of a sorority or an Elks” Club.

Like the little tin fiddle, there’s no moral range here, there’s a bad tone to it, and it couldn’t even sound good if it were played well. If all she has is that self-important hand-me-down identity of being a Presbyterian, you have to hope she’ll be led around by somebody using a far better instrument in the service of a much bigger vision.

The second woman was also holding a toy instrument, though a larger one. Her second-hand identity was called “Christian.” If you asked her what she meant by that, she too would probably have recited a tattered list of other people’s beliefs. Maybe that list would include a set of prescribed chants on things like Jesus, God, the Bible and two or three favorite teachings. But the odds are they’d be someone else’s beliefs, especially if she expressed them in the same words as everyone else in the club: she would just be chanting. So she might have picked up the instrument, but had never actually practiced it. Once more, you”d hope she’ll be led around by somebody coming from a much bigger and richer place.

But that third woman – she made music. You assume she also belongs to the Presbyterian club and the Christian club. But she would not settle for such a paltry calling, any more than the four-year-old Yehudi Menuhin would pick up the tin fiddle. She made music because she was the only one who seemed to know that religion was about behavior, not belief – it’s about being, not saying: deeds, not creeds. After all, only members of our club or some rival club care what we believe. Those are only turf battles. And doesn’t conformity of belief prove that we haven’t thought any more deeply than the other club members? In any tradition, that’s just the second-hand religion for their masses – whether it’s called Presbyterianism or Unitarian-Universalism. It’s exalting our group because they’re Our Kind of People. But this is a definition of narcissism, isn’t it? Those outside our club don’t care what we believe; they only want to know whether we can sing them a song of active caring rather than a self-righteous little ditty.

Now you see how this mixed metaphor of finding salvation by making big music on first-rate instruments can work in religion. It works pretty well. But it’s more complex, because religion adds a dimension that must command us. Honest religion isn’t about anything as shallow as belief. It’s about who we most deeply are and how we should live. You can prove it within yourselves, right now. And if you can do that, then you can be saved, be made bigger and more whole. And you can, because you knew when you heard the story of those three women that only that third woman even got it. And I suspect you may also have felt that there is something very wrong about posing as a religious person but not getting it. You know this. You’re built this way. Almost all of us are. It is built into who we are and must be if we are to come into our full humanity.

Salvation is about that kind of size and that quality of spiritual vision that can make us useful and content rather than merely decorative. In liberal religion it is about digging deep enough to find the treasure, the spirit, rather than staying on the self-satisfied surface. You know what I mean, I’m sure.

The spirit of liberal religion – which is opposed to the spirit of literal religion – is between about two and four thousand years old. It’s not new at all, and it had multiple births. It was born in the Hindu Upanishads, where they saw that Brahman, the creative and sustaining force of the universe, is present in each of us just as the taste of salt is present throughout the oceans.

It was born in the Buddha, who saw that the secret of life isn’t about gods or supernatural end-runs. It’s available to all of us here and now, if only we will wake up to life’s less dramatic but more authentic possibilities – and if, once awakened, we will understand that compassion is the only appropriate and life-enhancing response to all other creatures.

The spirit of liberal religion was born at about the same time in some of the ancient Hebrew prophets, who attacked the self-important rituals of the priests, and said God was not interested in what we believed or how we bowed and scraped, but only in how we treated one another, especially the most vulnerable among us.

It was also born at least twice in China. First, in Confucius, who was concerned not with gods but with our selves here and now. And he saw that our mistake was that we conceived of ourselves as far too small, whereas our biggest and most necessary self only exists as part of the larger society around us. So our job, he believed, is to learn the care and respect that make our relationships with others flow smoothly.

Lao Tzu also gave birth to the spirit of liberal religion, the spirit of deeds not creeds in Taoism, when he wrote one of the finest moral teachings in history:

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man’s job?

If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,

However intelligent you are.

It is the great secret.

(Stephen Mitchell translation)

The spirit of honest religion, of being human religiously, was born at the deepest and most nuanced levels of all great religions and philosophies.

And then, more than a thousand years before any of these others, the spirit of liberal religion was born in the world’s oldest story, the still-magnificently modern story of Gilgamesh. He ruled over 4700 years ago, and the earliest texts of the story are from 4100 years ago – before any of today”s great religions, gods or philosophies had been born. They saw themselves as living in the “modern age,” because writing had just been invented there a hundred years earlier. And they asked of what use were the old gods to modern people. They decided the gods had become impotent ornaments, but that the meaning and purpose of life – now up to us – were still immeasurably rich, and close at hand: through the deeds we do, the positive differences we make, the art and music we create, the love and joy we can share with families and friends, and the influence we can have on those who will come after us. There in that most ancient story was a religious vision more courageous and unfettered than that of any Western religion.

You can feel how big all of these ancient liberal visions are – a bigness that doesn’t insult the human spirit by offering the religious equivalent of little tin fiddles.

All of these were among the births of the multiple spirits of liberal religion. Any one of them, or any good combination of them, can offer a commanding vision big enough to let us feel that we are building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God – or the legitimate heir to what was once called God, as Gilgamesh, the Chinese, the Buddha, the Greeks and many moderns would put it.

That rich and ancient history is the tradition I stand within and try to serve as a religious liberal. I’m not a “Unitarian-Universalist,” and I hope you’re not either. Understand that I don’t mean that in a cheap way. I mean it in an expensive way, a demanding way. Denominational identities like the banalities of creeds or official “principles” are just too paltry to do justice to the human spirit. they’re little toy instruments on which no interesting music is ever going to be played, and which will drive the more aware and gifted people away, as it did the four-year-old Yehudi Menuhin. I suspect that tin-fiddle spirituality is the chief reason why we have lost almost 70% of our market share in the U.S. since 1961, and still don’t have many more members than we did then.

We owe ourselves and our people this kind of spiritual and intellectual bigness – not something to let us think we’re smarter or more special than others, but something character-based and commanding. We each need to offer our people and our communities deep and nuanced spiritual instruments that can challenge even the most gifted among them, and an understanding of the human condition big enough both to contain our spirits and to command them. If what we offer can’t take its place proudly among the world’s most profound religions, we should be ashamed to offer it.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether we call our spiritual center God or something else. What matters is whether we can call it forth, and invite it into our lives, our churches, and our world. The people who trust us need to feel that their best efforts are helping to build a magnificent cathedral to God – or the legitimate heir to what was once called God. That kind of a vision, that kind of an instrument, is big. And that kind of size matters.

Salvation is about a healthy kind of wholeness that is buried within and among us – not on the surface, but deeper. As in the children’s story, we first have to get beyond ourselves, because it isn’t about us. But always, after the road that leads us outward, there needs to be another that leads us back home – as T. S. Eliot put it,

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

As a religious movement, we also need to get beyond our comfortable biases as social or political liberals, because it isn’t about us either. It’s about finding an avenue to a deep and true perspective on our life and on life itself – a perspective that can not only empower us but can also command us. And if it is an honest and profound kind of liberal religion, what it commands us to do is to dig, to find that treasure buried within us, to arrive where we started, and perhaps to know the place for the first time.

And then to do something – to come alive, to recognize that we are children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and the hope of our world. Then the transformation and miracle of salvation has occurred. We have been born again, born of the Holy Spirit, born of the joy of life that has found us at last. And with that, a whole new world has begun. A whole, new, world has begun.Hallelujah!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

SWUUD Spring Conference

26 April 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

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

I am not yet born; O hear me.

I am your tomorrows, but I am not yet born.

I am not yet born, console me.

Protect me from the doubts that strangle, the fears that stifle,

the friends who drain and demean.

I am not yet born; give me dreams of what we may yet become,

and nourish me, that I do not starve before I gain the strength to walk,

and to fly, and perhaps even to soar with the eagles.

I am not yet born; O hear me,

Protect me from those who can remain big only by keeping those around them small, for I am yet a fragile thing.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength

against those who would freeze my humanity,

who would make me into a thing, a mere thing,

who would dissuade and drain me until I lose my spirit,

and then my soul, and then my hope,

and your hope as well.

For I am the greater you who is not yet born,

And together we must strive, must strive with the gods if necessary,

for so much is at stake, there is so much to be gained.

I am the you who is yet to become,

and I am not yet born.

Help me.

SERMON: The Ancient Roots of the Liberal Spirit

The soul of liberal religion is not a new thing. Even professors of religion often speak as though it had been born in the late 18th century, in the work of the great German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. But Schleiermacher – as he knew – was a late-comer.

The spirit of liberal religion – which is opposed to the spirit of literal religion – is at least four thousand years old. It’s not new at all. It had multiple births, and I want to talk about some of those births this morning.

First, it was born in the world’s oldest story, the still-magnificently modern story of Gilgamesh. He ruled over 4700 years ago, and the earliest texts of the story are from 4100 years ago – before any of today’s great religions or philosophies had been born. They saw themselves as living in the “modern age,” because writing had just been invented there a hundred years earlier. And they asked of what use were the old gods to modern people. They decided the gods had become impotent ornaments, but that the meaning and purpose of life – which were now up to us – were still immeasurably rich, and close at hand: through the deeds we do, the positive differences we make, the art and music we create, the love and joy we can share with families and friends, and the influence we can have on those who will come after us. There in that most ancient story was a religious vision more courageous and unfettered than that of any Western religion.

But as writing both evolved and spread, others saw themselves as living in modern times. If they traveled enough to learn about other cultures, they could now reflect not only on the day’s gossip, their era’s guesses at enduring truths, but could also see that people in other times and places saw things quite differently, and lived with comfort and passion over quite different assumptions.

You know how the liberal spirit of deeds not creeds was born in the Hebrew prophets, but I want to talk about some traditions you may not know as well, because we tend to be quite provincial and think that our religious spirit originated in 16th century Transylvania or 19th century New England.

That liberal spirit was born at least twice in China.

First, in Confucius, who was concerned not with gods but with our selves here and now. And he saw that our mistake was that we conceived of ourselves as far too small, whereas our biggest and most necessary self only exists as part of the larger society around us. So our job, he believed, is to learn the care and respect that make our relationships with others flow smoothly.

There is a story from 13th century Neo-Confucianism about this kind of transcendence. Confucians were very determined not to have any supernaturalism in their practice, so they were quite upset when their Master said that today he would be talking about magic. Angry but polite, one of them raised his hand to ask what the Master might mean by that objectionable word, “magic.” The Master sighed. “Oh,” he said, “I can go into that, but it will take some time.” Then he leaned toward a student in front, and asked if he’d get him a glass of water. When the student returned, the Master took a sip of water, then said, “That was magic. He did my bidding, without threats or bribes, simply because I asked him to and he wanted to do it. That is the kind of magic that makes our interactions with others flow smoothly, and it is the magic we need to learn.” Why is this liberal? Because like all good religion, it’s about behavior, not belief. Nobody cares what we believe.

Lao Tzu also gave birth to the spirit of liberal religion, the spirit of deeds not creeds, in Taoism, when he wrote one of the finest moral teachings in history:

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man’s job?

If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,

However intelligent you are.

It is the great secret.

(Stephen Mitchell translation)

Why is this the spirit of liberal religion – or simply the spirit of honest religion? Because it links us to something eternal, without insulting our intelligence or confining us to the teachings and biases of any one religion. Its insights transcend theology and resonate in the hearts and heads of all people. Here are some other quotations from Lao Tzu’s book, the Tao te Ching. See how liberal, and how modern, they sound and feel:

“Must you value what others value, and avoid what others avoid? How ridiculous!

“The great Way is easy, yet people prefer the side paths. Be aware when things are out of balance. Stay centered within the Tao. When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn – all this is robbery and chaos.

“Let the Tao be present in your life and you will become genuine. Let it be present in your family and your family will flourish. Let it be present in your country and your country will be an example to all countries in the world. Let it be present in the universe and the universe will sing. How do I know this is true? By looking inside myself.” This is very close to the Hindu notion of how our atman, or individual soul, is part of Brahman, or the creative forces of the universe.

I think, page for page, the Tao te Ching is probably the wisest book ever written.

Then we can go to the Greeks, who also had a non-theistic approach.

Xenophanes (570 – 480 BC), criticized the religious literalism of his day in words that still ring true. He had traveled a lot, seen a lot of cultures and religions, and noticed the psychological projection in all religions. Here’s some of what he said, over 2500 years ago:

“Mortals suppose that gods are born, wear their own clothes and have a voice and body. Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians say that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.”

And he added that if horses and oxen had hands and could draw pictures, their gods would look remarkably like horses and oxen.

And then there’s Socrates, still generally regarded as the greatest of all Western sages. It’s hard to imagine the effect Socrates had on people, though we know that he was finally condemned to death for asking his disturbing questions that were more profound than his society’s answers. But we have the eyewitness testimony of a man named Alcibiades, who was shaken to his core.

According to Alcibiades, Socrates” questions bite the heart like a viper, and provoke in the soul a state of philosophical possession, delirium, and drunkenness.

“I was in such a state that it did not seem possible to live while behaving as I was behaving…. He forces me to admit to myself that I do not take care for myself.” That’s what religious prophets do, though few in history have done it as well as Socrates.

Socrates believed that an innate desire for the good exists in all human beings. Here was a profound and specific assertion about why we have inherent worth and dignity, at least if we’ll let that deep awareness command us.

Socrates described himself not as a philosopher or teacher, but as a midwife, helping to give birth to the greater possibilities he believed dwelled within us, waiting to be called forth.

For all the Greeks, humans suffer because they are ignorant of the way to live. Ignorance – as in Buddhism – is the fundamental human sin.

Even for the Epicureans, those who are seen as affirming the joy of pleasure, but who really believed that we should be equally happy with simple pleasures as with expensive ones. Even the Epicureans were taught always to act as though Epicurus were watching them.

This was echoed a few centuries later by the Romans, who taught that we should live “under the gaze of eternity,” which meant to live as though all the noblest people, the greatest souls, were watching us, then to do only what we would be proud to do under that gaze. It’s hard to improve on that as a one-sentence guide to living ethically and morally.

Another liberal thinker named Plotinus (204-270) used the metaphor of sculpture to talk about how we should form ourselves. “If you do not see your own beauty yet, do as the sculptor does with a statue which must become beautiful: he pares away this part, scratches that other part, makes one place smooth, and cleans another, until he causes a beautiful face to appear in the statue. In the same way, you too must pare away what is superfluous, straighten what is crooked, purify all that is dark, in order to make it gleam. And never cease sculpting your own statue, until the divine light of virtue shines within you.”

Probably my own favorite spiritual and psychological center came through the Paideia culture of ancient Greece. You may not know the odd word “paideia,” but you know its ideals. The Greeks believed that the best kind of humans were both born and made. Breeding mattered – after all, all their mythic heroes were imagined as the offspring of a human parent and a god. But the noblest humans were also made, by shaping them in the image of the highest ideals the culture could articulate. That meant the most sacred treasures in ancient Greek culture were those collective ideals so high and commanding that they bestowed a dignity of character on both gods and humans. The collective noun for these highest ideals was paideia. It was in the root of their words for both children and education, as it still is for us (e.g., pediatrics and pedagogy). Mortimer Adler started a “Paideia Project,” and there are still a few Paideia Schools around, including one in Austin. But mostly, we know of this ancient project of “salvation by character” through the Romans.

When Cicero read of the Paideia culture, he realized that the Romans had neither the word nor the concept for these noblest forms of humans that could be made through shaping their character in the image of transcendent ideals. The word he coined to translate “paideia” into Latin was perfect: humanitas, which means the essence of being most fully human. It was the root of all our liberal Humanities education, those courses now fading from our schools, designed to bring us near the intersection of that place where our full humanity and our full divinity merged, like the ancient mythic breeding of the human and the divine. All of these ancient teachings so far were done without using any gods, yet they are among the most profound in human history. they’re timeless and inclusive, and beyond theology or the limits of any one religion in ways that Western religions” Yahweh, Jesus and Mohammad are not.

The spirit of liberal religion, of that greater self to which we should try to give birth, was also born twice in India, in Hinduism and Buddhism.

Here are just a few quotes from the Upanishads, written about 2200 to 2500 years ago:

“Know that [the creative power of the universe] is forever a part of you, and there is nothing higher to be known. It is found in the soul when sought with truth and self-sacrifice, as fire is found in wood, water in hidden springs, and cream in milk.

“If you deny this power, you deny yourself. If you affirm it, you affirm yourself.” This is almost identical to the teaching attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, where he says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth with destroy you.” It is profoundly liberal. And though it doesn’t require any gods, it does require great integrity and personal courage.

Then a final thought from the Upanishads, which may strike you, as it has struck many others, as profoundly happier than most religious teachings:

“[The creative power of the universe] is joy: for from joy all beings have come, by joy they all live, and unto joy they all return.”

The Hindu and Buddhist notion of karma is a lot like Socrates” notion of how our lives take the shape of the quality of ideals we are serving. As the Upanishads say, As we act and behave in life, so we become. If we do good, we become good; if we do evil, we become evil. By pure actions we becomes pure; by evil actions we becomes evil. You can feel how close this is to Greek thought – some scholars believe the Greeks got it from the Hindus – by remembering one of the most famous of Greek sayings, attributed to Aristotle but perhaps being much older: “Plant a thought, reap a deed; plant a deed, reap a habit; plant a habit, reap a character; plant a character, reap a destiny.” Hear how modern this is: it’s existential religion, like Buddhists talking about our duty to nurture the Buddha-seed within us, or the Christian Meister Eckhart talking about the God-seed within us, and how we should help it come alive and define us.

Now a paragraph or two about Buddhism. This terribly quick romp through some of the world’s great, deep and complex religions is not meant to be flippant; it’s trying to fly over a lot of territory to show that the patterns are profoundly liberal to the core, and profoundly empowering and commanding, as all honest religion must be.

The Buddha grew out of, and away from, Hinduism. He taught that we just need to wake up from the illusions we create for ourselves through our ways of talking and thinking. When we wake up, the world won’t be perfect or ideal, but it will be real, and we can find our real place in it.

Every one of these ancient religions and philosophies is concerned with how to live, how to become the person we can be most proud of having been. And every one of them finds the power to do this within us, rather than through pleading with an external deity for it. All believed we must tune ourselves to a higher frequency, align ourselves with an enduring or eternal order, serve others, see ourselves as small parts of a much larger reality. But the power to do this was always within us. We were not missing pieces, not missing parts. We were born as a mix of good and evil, but basically good, though we’re ignorant of the thing we need to know, which is that we have the power to become the kind of people we can be most proud of. We also have the responsibility. The gods won’t do it for us. we’re not saved, not made whole, through believing this or that – only through being.

Perhaps the best that preachers and churches can do is aspire to the role of Socrates, to be midwives and help us give birth to the greater possibilities within us, and to do it – as Alciabiades testified – whether we like it or not.

The soul of the liberal spirit is about waking up – waking from dogmatic slumbers, but also waking from lethargic slumbers that don’t or won’t look beneath the surface of life into its more complex – and darker – depths. That waking up is an individual calling, challenge, task and achievement. It’s the birth of our individual soul from the globular mass of our class, our social identity, our political or sexual or racial identity, to ask who we are – individually, personally, really, beneath all those other important but secondary influences that help to shape and mis-shape us.

You can feel the depth, presence and power of these questions, can’t you? They have always had that power of birthing our better selves, once they grab hold of us enough to wake us up.

We await and yearn for that kind of birth, that level of being “born again, born of the Holy Spirit.” How can it happen? “We can only hope,” some say. But Socrates and the rest of our liberal predecessors wouldn’t buy that, and neither should we. Perhaps we can only hope, but not only only hope – not only only hope.