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© Davidson Loehr

 November 25, 2007

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, but also – more than we are comfortable knowing – with what is evil.

Is it really possible that as a nation we have so much more than others without having somehow taken it from them? It felt so much better to believe that we are pure, and the world’s riches flowed naturally to us as rewards for our great purity. Yet we do know better.

We gather here as good people, but not perfect people. We gather not to seek a false purity but a more informed, more nuanced kind of wholeness. For even if we are as poets have said dust of the earth, within the dust there are motes rising to the light – and they too are part of us.

Let us seek grown-up blessings for the dust of our bodies, for it is the dust of Mother Earth, made of stardust. And let us seek the blessings of the “motes rising,” those small but sacred signs of the spirit within us that can be both aware and awake.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

SERMON: Feeling Blue About Feeling Guilty

I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on some insights from the author John Perkins, one of my current favorite authors. He’s writing about the dark underside of our American imperialism, how empires work, about the slavery always involved somewhere when those in an empire are living much better than those whose labor supports their life style.

In 2004, he wrote the best selller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, later brought twelve other writers together to write A Game as Old as Empire, and this year wrote The Secret History of the American Empire.

Empire is not about control for its own sake; it is about exploitation of foreign lands and peoples for the benefit of at least the more privileged in the country that controls the economies of others (GOE, p. 17). This is also what I’ve been calling chimpanzee politics: the pursuit of power and privilege for selfish interests.

Slavery may sound like a quaint notion from the 19th century, but it is always part of empires, and our global empire enslaves more people than the Romans and all the other colonial powers before us (EHM, p. 205). we’re Number One.

These are important things for us to know. But as I was putting together this picture of the nature and the cost of our American Way of Life, something else started bothering me, which took me down a very different path.

So I want to start by sketching the dark side of our imperialism, but then take you down the second path, too. The two paths form a dilemma that was expressed by the author E.B. White, when he said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” It also makes it hard to plan a sermon.

We now have the first truly global empire in history. Most of us aren’t terribly aware of this; but those exploited by it are, and many of them suffer from extreme poverty. On average, twenty-four thousand people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every day. More than half the planet’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. For us to live comfortable lives, millions must pay a very high price (SH, p. 6).

How have we established our empire? One answer is, through sheer military force. We have military bases in more than a hundred countries, and almost without exception they are not there for national defense. But more importantly, we establish our empire through economic policies that let us control other nations. One measure of this, which I found very clear and helpful, is about the difference between using tariffs to protect your industries, versus using “free trade” to break down and control the economies of other countries.

Our own economy developed behind some of the highest tariff walls in the world. President Ulysses S. Grant reportedly said in the 1870s “within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” It only took another eighty years, but US tariff rates were not significantly reduced until after WWII. Since then, the most successful developing countries besides ours have been Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan, which have prohibited the import of any goods that would compete with any of their most important industries. That’s also how we developed our own strong economy. Now under the mantra of “free trade,” the First World has kicked away the ladder, prohibiting Third World countries from using the only economic development strategy proven to work: the strategy of protectionism and tariffs (GOE, p. 21). “Free trade” is neither sacred nor wise; it’s a devastating weapon the strong use to enslave the weak.

Ghana, for example, was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on food imports in 2002. The result was a flood of imported food from European Union countries that destroyed the livelihoods of local farmers. It seems that the IMF’s economic hit men “forgot” to ensure that the EU abolish its own massive agricultural subsidies. As a result, frozen chicken parts imported from the EU cost a third of those locally produced. (GOE, p. 22)

Zambia was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on imported clothing, which had protected a small local industry of some 140 firms. The country was then flooded with imports of cheap secondhand clothing that drove all but 8 firms out of business. Even if Zambia’s clothing producers had been large enough to engage in international trade, they would have faced tariffs preventing them from exporting to EU and other developed countries. And while countries like Zambia are supposed to devote themselves to free trade, First World countries subsidize their exporters through export credit agencies – often with disastrous results for the environment and economies of the Third World. (GOE, p. 22)

The IMF’s structural adjustment program in Peru slashed tariffs on corn in the early 1990s, and corn from the US – whose farmers are subsidized at a rate of $40 billion a year – flooded the country. Many of Peru’s farmers were unable to compete, and so turned to growing coca for cocaine production instead. (GOE, p. 22)

Many IMF programs have required sharp cuts in health and education spending, making it harder to improve the quality and capabilities of work forces with low levels of literacy and few technological skills. In some countries, such as Ghana, the percentage of school-age children who are actually attending school is falling because of IMF-imposed budget cuts. (GOE, p. 22)

John Perkins describes Ecuador – a country in which he helped cause this harm – as typical of countries around the world that we have brought under our control. For every $100 of crude oil taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remaining six dollars and change covers military and other government expenses – which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor. So out of every $100 worth of oil taken from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water (SH, pp. xx). Two weeks ago, I talked of how we lure Third World countries into great debt as a tactic for controlling them.

The cost of servicing Third World debt is greater than all Third World spending on health or education and nearly two times the amount those countries receive each year in foreign aid. Despite current lip service to forgiving it, Third World debt grows every year, currently approaching $3 trillion. It is one of our most effective weapons against countries that have resources or locations that we want to disempower and control.

Why don’t we read about these things? The tactics are brutal, but They’re simple and clear – why don’t we read about this? Perhaps it’s partly because the US was ranked #53 on the World Press Freedom list in 2006 (compared to #17 in 2002) and has been severely criticized by Reporters Without Borders and other non-governmental organizations for jailing and intimidating journalists (EHM, xviii). Using fear to silence criticism is another hallmark of both empires and slavery.

Number 53! Fifty-two countries with greater freedom of the press than we have? This is not the America of our myths, the one so dear to our hearts, is it?

Where else can you see the kind of slavery that supports our lifestyle? You can look at Mexican workers living in shantytowns just south of our border, or Asian children practically chained to their work stations, working 12-hour days, six or seven days a week to make our sweat shirts, tennis shoes, Gap jeans and other cool clothes. You can multiply these stories a hundredfold, but they are all forms of slavery, of people being coerced to work in desperate situations in order to keep us supplied with our way of life. Meanwhile, about 8,760,000 children a year are starving to death (24,000 a day x 365), with millions more dying of treatable diseases because they can’t get treatment. Some of those people may have made the clothes we’re wearing right now.

Where else can you look? Columnist Bob Herbert wrote a disturbing piece a few weeks ago in the NY Times, on the slave trade that is alive and well in the U.S. – the sex slave trade.

He says that over 18,000 foreign nationals are believed to be trafficked into the U.S. each year. According to the State Department, 80 percent of them are women and children, an overwhelming majority of whom are used for sexual purposes. (Bob Herbert, “Today’s Hidden Slave Trade,” 27 October 2007, The NY Times op-ed page).

If you don’t think we have this in Austin, leaf through the Yellow Pages in the Austin phone book as I did this week. Look under “Escorts,” and see if you aren’t a little stunned at the number of listings for 24/7 services. See how many of them advertise international women from all countries, and imagine how many of those women are forced into that work.

But most of our slave traders aren’t involved in the sex trade. They just recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell here, there and everywhere (EHM, p. 181). We get cheap prices; they get lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

There really is a lot of suffering, a lot of injustice. we’re not likely ever to do anything about it if we don’t even know about it. I”m not even sure what we can do if we do know about it. And there are hundreds more dark stories like these, as many of you know.

Now here’s my problem: the more of these stories I read, the more depressed I got, and the less I wanted to read any more of them. Did I need to read them all? Was I insensitive if I got sick of feeling depressed? In order to be a caring person, must I be miserable?

Then an insight hit me when I read this week that the United Nations now says that Somalia is the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, not Darfur. I thought, “My God, have we been hopelessly depressed over the wrong one? Is there a prize for being hopelessly depressed over the right one?”

I have a colleague who really seems to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we should never be happy; we should starve with the hungry, suffer with the suffering, and the rest of it. He’s believed it and lived it for the thirty years I’ve known him, sometimes showing a lot of personal courage – I don’t think He’s going to change.

I know good committed people like this. Their passion is sincere. But this is a philosophy that wants us to believe that as long as one person is suffering, none of us should be happy – as though our being miserable somehow helps the world, or has a positive moral value.

This is like one of my favorite strange stories from religion, a story about the Jains. Jainism is an ancient religion derived from Hinduism, with over ten million followers today. One of their key teachings is their insistence on the sacredness of all life, from humans to bugs and even smaller.

This is a belief that can lead to some very odd behavior, like wearing surgical masks around during the day so they won’t inhale any microscopic organisms. My favorites are the stories of Jains who will carry a mattress infested with bedbugs around the city. Rather than killing the bugs, they want to feed them. Bedbugs feed on our bodies when we lie in bed, so these Jains support themselves by going around yelling, “Who will feed the bugs? Who will feed the bugs?” When someone gives them some money, one of them will lie down on the mattress and let the bugs feed on him. Who will feed the bugs? Who will support my belief that the world needs me to suffer?

If you believe we are morally bound to be miserable as long as there is injustice, you can never stop suffering. So many bugs, so little time! So much suffering, misery, war and injustice to get upset about. How could it ever end? But I think the Jains have missed the point.

Our job is not to suffer, but to live. Don’t feed the bugs. Don’t look for reasons to be miserable just because there is so much misery in the world. The theologian Howard Thurman was right when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive!”

So we’re back to that dilemma: Do we spend our days trying to save the world, or savor it?

This is the dilemma that brings to mind a wise statement made by the historian Will Durant some years ago. He had written his massive dozen-volume history of pretty much the whole world as his life’s work. Then he wrote a 100-page summary of those big volumes, The Lessons of History. And finally, in an interview, he was asked if he could sum it all up in half an hour.

He did it in less than a minute, this way: “Civilization is a river with banks. The river is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

That river always runs through life, carrying not only the unjust and evil, but also the benefits of the unjust and evil, the good things they bring us. The river has ships that bring us goods from sweatshops where people work in conditions of virtual slavery to support our way of life without making us pay a fair price for it. There are things in that river to which we are addicted.

Because we’re the empire, we’re complicit in most of the major evil in the world. We can’t be pure, ever. And there is no way we can stop being complicit in this, just as Jains kill thousands or millions of micro-organisms every day – just by living, inhaling them, or having them destroyed inside by their body’s T-cells. No one is pure; we’re interconnected with everything, the good and the bad. And that isn’t a “problem” to be solved; it’s the human condition.

This was brought home to me in a wonderful way during a worship service about a decade ago. An activist man in the church seemed absolutely to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we cannot rest, and his Sunday announcements were tedious for almost everyone but him. One Sunday he was on a rant about the destruction of the rain forests – how some large corporations are cutting them down for lumber or to make grazing pastures for cattle, what a crime this is against Mother Earth, and how all decent people must be outraged.

After getting worked up and trying to guilt-induce the entire congregation – something that almost never works – he said that well, those who really care about the earth can join him and his group for a meeting after church. Then he said, “We’ll meet at the Burger King.” He seemed not to know that Burger King was one of those corporations that had cut thousands of acres of rainforest to make pastures where they grazed the cattle that produced the hamburger he was going to be eating. we’re complicit. we’re interconnected. You can’t get away from it. If you can only be happy when You’re not complicit in evil, You’re doomed.

We have these two paths: living in the river or living on the banks. Deciding to save the world or deciding to savor it. And it does make it hard to plan a day!

So what do we do? I don’t think we’ll agree on this.

Should we honor the tried and proven tactics of willful ignorance & denial? They’ve worked wonders for many centuries. “Don’t tell me, I”m happier not knowing how the world really works? I also don’t want to know how politics works or sausage is made.”

Should we suffer, feed the bugs, and bank on some kind of salvation by purity? That’s a bus stop at which no buses stop.

One solution is to act locally in simple ways that don’t drain our life force, but which strengthen it. Last week I challenged you to write letters to the editor about the nearly burlesque bad behavior of the leaders of the Hyde Park Baptist Church, in refusing at the last minute to allow the 23rd annual Austin Area Interreligious Ministries Thanksgiving service to take place in a gymnasium they owned, because it involved non-Christians – particularly, Muslims. “Interreligious” doesn’t seem to be a word in the vocabulary of that church’s leaders. I don’t like to ask you to do things I”m not willing to do, so I wrote a Viewpoint piece on it, which the paper printed yesterday. I don’t know how many of you wrote letters, but this is something that we can do. we’re this well-educated bunch of liberals, and one thing we owe the larger community is our voice in trying to help others see a nuanced responsible moral path more clearly. It is also empowering for us. And writing some of these pieces can be a lot of fun. Let’s take care of ourselves and our gifts first, then feed the world with the overflow of our gifts.

Of course, this isn’t new advice. You’ve all heard this wisdom before, if you’ve flown commercial airlines. When They’re giving you the pre-flight instructions on the oxygen mask, they say that in the event of an emergency, put your own mask on first, and then help others. Give oxygen to yourself first, or you may not be able to help anyone else. It’s the same rule in life.

Your job is to live more fully, not to suffer, not to feed the bugs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. For the world needs people who have come alive. Then, from your own fullness, let it spill over. If you have joy, spread it. If you have extra money, help out. Just finding those organizations with people devoting their lives to improving the lot of the less fortunate is a noble thing to do. They are living much closer to the river than most of us are who just read, talk and write about it. we’re not doing the work, they are. But they can’t do it without financial support, and it isn’t wimping out to write a check. Twenty-four weeks a year, we split our collection plate with different non-profit organizations doing just this – and I hope we can move toward sharing every week’s collection. This isn’t feeding the bugs, it’s feeding the de-buggers.

Supporting the efforts of those who live and work much closer to the river than we do or would want to is one way we can live on the banks while remaining creatively aware of the greater suffering that must be attended to by people who can do that day in and day out without – I hope – losing their own joy in life.

And yet it isn’t this simple. Just the act of acknowledging our complicity in the world’s largest and most rapacious empire changes who we are. Our complicity in the world’s major evils of slavery runs deep. We show it at Wal-Mart, Sears, and at exclusive shops – many of which are now reportedly getting their name brands made in China. We show our complicity in our technological gadgets, our cars, everywhere. We wear our complicity in our clothing; we drive it, use it in laptops and cell phones. We are dipped in complicity with the evils of our American empire, all the way down.

So what now? Where from here? I don’t have that answer, but I know how I must begin, and I invite you back into the attitude of prayer with which we began:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, and also with what is evil.

We gather here as good people, but not perfect people. We gather not to seek a false purity but a more informed, more nuanced kind of wholeness. For even if we are as poets have said dust of the earth, within the dust there are motes rising to the light – and they too are part of us.

Let us seek grown-up blessings for the dust of our bodies, for it is the dust of Mother Earth, made of stardust. And let us seek the blessings of the “motes rising,” those small but sacred signs of the spirit within us that can be both aware and awake.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

—————-

(NOTE: I’ve used three of John Perkins’ books for this sermon: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, A Game as Old as Empire, and The Secret History of the American Empire. To make the references shorter, I’ve abbreviated them as EHM, GOE, and SH.)

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© Davidson Loehr

28 October 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us seek to overcome evil. Evil isn’t as powerful as it seems. Both the evil around us and the evil within us don’t get their force from a moral power, but from an unholy hunger, using us for its own selfish ends.

Let us remember that we can overpower most evil by staying grounded in life, in love, and in an unshakable sense of our own sacred worth. For we are children of the universe, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, the sons and daughters of God. Living out of that identity is living in the light, and evil hates the light.

Let us not be tricked into feeling unworthy of the great gift of life and love that connect us with our core and the core of all other living things.

One of evil’s worst tricks is making us doubt our own worth. So let us never forget that we are as worthy as everyone else, that we are beloved of this place, and beloved by God, by all the gods of life, truth and light. Let us remember this, remember this.

Amen.

SERMON: Vampires and Goblins and Demons, Oh My!

It’s Halloween and I want to talk about vampires. Not those unimaginative literalist suckers who just want to drink blood. I mean the far more numerous, and far more dangerous kind known as psychic vampires, who can suck the life out of you.

These people, in their more extreme forms, are also called sociopaths by psychologists. They’re people who can do immense psychological and sometimes physical harm to others without ever feeling any guilt, which is what makes them so dangerous. We need to recognize them, and know how to protect ourselves from the psychic vampires both around us and also within us. For while only a few have a truly sociopathic character, we can all slip into this behavior, and it never serves us or others well.

It’s about the lack of a conscience, the lack of a capacity for feeling guilty when we demean or harm someone, and that’s a bad thing. The very first personality disorder recognized by psychiatry – that means a permanent, untreatable character disorder – was guiltlessness (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 6)

Sociopaths are now estimated to be 4% of our U.S. population. That’s one in twenty-five people, an incredibly high number. It means that within the roughly 2.5 million people here in and around Travis Country, there are about 100,000 sociopaths. Or that right here in this church of about 600 voting members and over 900 in the whole community, there would be two or three dozen here. Well actually, there aren’t any here. We have these invisible filters across all the doors, so that only completely pure and selfless people can get in. Good thing, too – or this church would just be a representative cross-section of the world around us”.. These people are dangerous, but they are not rare.

Not all life-draining vampires are sociopaths, though all are destructive. They’re dangerous because these are extreme, sometimes unalterable, forms of selfishness. And selfishness is the cardinal sin of every religion in the world of which I”m aware. You really don’t matter to them, except as you serve them and do it their way. Your wishes, needs, spirit, soul – they don’t matter. You’re a piece in a game they have played – played perhaps all of their lives. And if they’ve played it all their lives, You’re not going to change them.

Stories of psychic vampires go back into our prehistory, probably six thousand years and more. So people who live by draining the life out of others have existed in all cultures throughout history. They can be immensely charismatic and seductive, and we seem fascinated by them in that disguise.

As part of my homework for this sermon, besides reading or re-reading two books, I watched seven movies about this character. One was George Cukor’s 1944 classic “Gaslight” about a pure sociopathic character (an excellent and powerful movie in which a young Ingrid Bergman won her first Academy Award for Best Actress and Charles Boyer played her sociopathic husband chillingly).

The other six were all vampire movies. As far as I know, there have only been six well-known vampire movies in the past 85 years. In two of them, both named “Nosferatu,” the monster is presented without any charm at all: just grotesque, hungry evil. Not surprisingly, both these movies, in 1922 and 1979, were commercial failures. We like to see our evil sugar-coated. (If you want to see one of these, I think the 1922 silent film is the better one.)

The four commercially successful films were the four in which the vampire is very charming and seductive. These include Bela Lugosi’s 1931 film “Dracula”, the 1979 version where Frank Langella plays a wonderfully seductive Dracula, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version called “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” where charisma and seduction are everywhere. The most recent one, the 1994 movie “Interview with the Vampire,” carries sexy charisma to the extreme of casting Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Antonio Bandera as the male vampires, and an 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst is cast as a beguiling child vampire who will say “I”m hungry, and the city awaits.” Yes, children can be vampires too, from very early ages. It can start early in life, and is found in all professions including psychotherapy, ministry, law enforcement, teaching and parenting; they walk among us and look like us.

If you’re interested in this, I’d recommend the 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, by psychologist Martha Stout, and Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves & Others, by Barbara E. Hort (1996).

We now have quite a bit of empirical data on sociopaths. By inserting a series of questions to measure along the Psychopathic Deviate Scale into the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI – it’s Scale 4 in the MMPI), psychologists have collected data from hundreds of thousands of people. That’s where the data come from that say about 4% of our society are sociopaths.

The author relates stories of an eight-year-old son of very wealthy parents who used to blow up frogs for sport – I don’t know whether this was meant as a reference to George W. Bush, who did the same thing, or is just an innocent coincidence. She also told the story of a psychologist who used her power to do great psychological harm to patients who seemed too smart or too pretty – and got away with it for over a decade. Both these authors, psychologists themselves, make a point of warning that there are many sociopaths acting as psychotherapists.

When you suddenly realize that someone in your life is sociopathic, it can be a terrible jolt. The scene that comes to mind for me about this comes from another movie that I saw when I was fourteen: the original version of “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” It was the most powerful movie of my teen years, and for me even then, it was a movie about the difference between “real” and “unreal” people. The scene that stuck with me – one of the most frightening scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie – comes when the couple (who know of this alien scheme for body-snatchers taking over the earth) are walking down the sidewalk with, I think, one of their uncles, or at least a friend who has known them all their lives. They’re trying to convince him of this unlikely story, and he looks understandably unconvinced. Then as they’re talking, you hear off-camera the sound of a car’s screeching tires, a “thump” and the cry of a dog, and you realize that a car has just killed a dog a few feet to the right. The couple turn immediately to look. But their friend just keeps walking straight ahead, unaffected. That’s when I understood the difference between what I would call “real” and “unreal” people, and it was chilling.

These vampires or sociopaths are people for whom the life force – or even the life – of others simply does not matter. It’s about control, persuasion, winning, manipulating, and the game never ends until they are stopped. And in all the mythic lore, there are no stories of vampires ever committing suicide. Once they start feeding, they will continue until they’re stopped.

Why do they do it? It looks like it may be about half genetic and half cultural.

The Texas Adoption Project (which followed adopted children for 35 years) reports that, where scores on the Psychopathic Deviate scale are concerned, individuals resemble their birth mothers, whom they have never met, much more than they do the adoptive parents who raised them (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 123). So a person’s tendency to possess certain sociopathic characteristics is partially born in the blood, perhaps as much as 50% (The Sociopath Next Door, pp. 123-4).

Where does the other half or more come from? It’s curious. There are no data linking sociopathy with childhood abuse or attachment disorders. (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 134) But it does look like our culture helps create sociopaths.

In America, the guiltless manipulation of other people blends in with social expectations a lot more than it would in Asian countries, for instance. Asian nations have traditionally taught that we are interconnected, and that we owe something to others, both through their religions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and through their secular cultures. And in Asian nations, the percentage of sociopaths are between .04% and .13%, or one-thirtieth to one-one-hundredth of ours (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 136). That’s a big difference, and a frightening one. A growing number of our citizens” bodies and souls are being claimed by the body-snatchers.

A lot of charismatic leaders are such vampires, and they’re easy to spot, though people don’t seem to spot them until it’s too late. You have a charismatic vampire any time a leader or teacher sets himself up to be a conduit of wisdom, truth, or divinity that is not directly available to lesser mortals – like us. This applies to religious or political leaders, for instance, who believe God has spoken directly to them – but not to those who disagree with them (Unholy Hungers, p. 52).

Most of the vampires that we meet, though, aren’t this dramatic or large. They’re kind of ordinary, though psychologists who work with their victims will tell you they do immense and lifelong harm. I knew a young woman who was a very bright girl, brighter than her sociopathic boyfriend. When she graduated from college at the top of her class, her C-average boyfriend said, “Well, Sweetie, it’s a good thing that you’re pretty smart, because you’ll never be very pretty.” That’s a vampire, sucking the life out of his own girlfriend. When I heard this story, I wished it had ended with her telling him, “Look, Bucky Beaver, beauty is only skin deep – like you!” But it didn’t end that way. His remark took life from her, that she didn’t get back for many years.

Then there are the more passive-aggressive vampires – probably my least favorite type – who make others serve their desires by hanging around like bats, poisoning the air, making the place toxic until people finally decide to give in so they can have some peace. These people aren’t just passive-aggressive selfish pests; they are vampires, because they don’t care at all – or even notice – the wishes, needs or values of anyone else. Others exist only to serve their wishes. This has to begin sounding more familiar, doesn’t it? They’re just not rare.

Some of these vampires, goblins and demons do it through outright power and charisma. Others do it through evoking pity, which makes people let them get away with murder. Pitying someone can blind us to the fact that they use that pity to paralyze us while they behave badly again and again. Pity is like the anesthetic that lets the operation happen.

One author says that the combination of consistently bad, selfish or demeaning behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a sociopath’s forehead as you will ever be given (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 109).

The best-known example is the battering husband who sits at the table crying, head in hands after beating her again, apologizing, saying it will never happen again. But it will (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 108).

The pity play is used to wipe the slate clean so they can begin the cycle of hurting and repenting again. The crocodile tears come not from deep feeling but from a deep kind of scheming.

How do you spot Vampires? What can you do?

The clearest way to know that you have been in the presence of a vampire or a sociopath is a feeling of shameful insufficiency. We should look around for a psychic vampire whenever we feel that we are somehow flawed – not because of what we”ve done, but because of who we inherently are (or are not). We feel we are not good enough, or thin or smart or sexy enough: “Well, Sweetie, it’s a good thing you’re pretty smart because you’ll never be very pretty.” (Unholy Hungers, p. 15) Whenever we experience this feeling of shameful insufficiency, we have probably been the victim of a psychic vampire (Unholy Hungers, p. 16). They can be parents, relatives, friends, teachers, ministers, psychotherapists, spouses, children – anyone.

For a long time, I’ve had a mental image of a sociopath that has helped me understand them, and might be useful to you. I learned it from a psychologist I knew when I was 21. We were talking about a very pretty woman we both knew who was a striking example of this style – very quick, witty, seductive, and manipulative. At one point, I said, “You’re a psychologist. Can’t you people fix her?” He said, “You have the wrong picture. You’re picturing people like this as a very nice house which has a big gap in its foundation, and you wonder if the gap can’t just be bricked up. But no. Instead, imagine a building – several stories tall – that is very strong and attractive, with a foundation that goes fairly deep, but which is built at a twenty-degree angle. It’s stronger than most of the buildings around it, but dangerous for anyone who runs into it the wrong way.”

So you have probably been around a psychic vampire or sociopath if you leave feeling deeply unworthy, insufficient, flawed. Or if they have this cycle of demeaning or vicious behavior, followed by dramatic apologies that let you feel sorry for them so they can begin the cycle again – which they will. Or if They’re the passive kind that hang around like bats, making the psychic atmosphere toxic until they get their way.

Now the question that’s in every vampire movie: how do you kill a vampire? Understand I am not talking about physically killing something or someone – just ending their ability to drain your life and the life of others. And I don’t just mean other people who are vampires. We can also fall into this drive for power over others at all costs.

One psychiatrist I’ve read has said, “I am convinced that we enter the world seeking love, and when we don’t find love, we settle for power.” (Jean Shinoda Bolen, quoted in Unholy Hungers, p. 17).

That seems right to me too. So killing an inner vampire means we need to go back to the moment when we couldn’t find love and settled for exploitation (Unholy Hungers, pp. 215-216).

The vampire myths are helpful in telling us how to kill psychic vampires. They say that the most desirable woods from which to fashion the stake to kill a vampire are hawthorn and ash. Hawthorn blooms early in the spring, and its bloom signals the beginning of spring’s rebirth from winter’s death – a regenerative moment that would be odious to a vampire. Ash is the wood of Yggdrasil, the tree of Norse mythology from which all life was created (Unholy Hungers, p. 60). So the enemy of the destroyer of life is life itself, renewed and refocused around a living center inside of us.

And that brings us back to church.

This is where honest religion can help, because its job is to help us find and reconnect with healthy life, to be filled by it. And religion is part of almost all the vampire stories, where they say a cross or a consecrated wafer is something vampires can’t stand. The reason the cross and the consecrated host worked against vampires was because those were seen as the symbols of the sacred. But the most recent vampire movies (since 1979) make it clear that these things don’t really have any power.

In “Interview with the Vampire” they acknowledge that those are myths made up by Bram Stoker a century ago. That’s really a measure of religion’s loss of respect over the past fifty years or so. But what’s right about this is that when we are connected to what is holy and gives us life, or when we are serving our calling, doing what we are meant to do, we are nearly immune to the power of a vampire because he or she has nothing important to offer us: we already have life, which is what they don’t have. The myths call vampires “the undead,” but they’re also “the non-living.”

So: do the sociopaths win? Is life really stacked in favor of those who can take advantage of it? Are the rest of us – as sociopaths believe – just fools for valuing feelings and love, which make us so easy for them to take advantage of? Do they win? No, they don’t win. Martha Stout, the author of The Sociopath Next Door, sums it up in a way worth repeating:

“One study found 75% of sociopaths were dependent on alcohol, and 50% on other drugs, to dilute the boredom (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 187).”Sociopaths cannot love, by definition they do hot have higher values, and they almost never feel comfortable in their own skins. They are loveless, amoral, and chronically bored, even the few who become rich and powerful (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 188).”A person without conscience, even a smart one, tends to be a shortsighted and surprisingly naive individual who eventually expires of boredom, financial ruin, or a bullet (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 191).”At the other extreme, interviewers talked with 23 people with super-conscience and selflessness and found they shared three traits.

(1) “certainty,” about what is right and what they must do;

(2) “positivity”, an optimistic outlook;

(3) “unity of self and moral goals.” integrating their moral stance with their concept of their own identity, and the perceived sameness of their moral and personal goals (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 194).

“So my best psychological advice is, do not wish to have less conscience. Wish for more (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 195). “Conscience is the still small voice that has been trying since the infancy of our species to tell us that we are evolutionarily, emotionally, and spiritually One, and that if we seek peace and happiness, we must behave that way (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 216).

“If we can connect with our life force – our psychological immune system – we are far more invulnerable to psychic predators because what they offer is trumped by the life we have within us. Some of you have experienced this when you were in a toxic relationship and finally came to your senses or stood up to one of these predators. It takes some courage and heroism to defeat a vampire, but not the action-hero kind. Even the vampire myths say it’s feminine energy that destroys a vampire.

There’s a great story Martha Stout tells about this. There was a bully on a bus of middle-schoolers who was sitting next to a retarded boy, picking on him, making fun of him – something he had done often. But this day, there was a young girl sitting in the seat behind him. She leaned forward and said, “That’s mean. Quit it!” He sneered at her and called her some names, but she held her ground and he got up and moved.

Confronting a predator is like exposing them to the sunlight, and vampires hate sunlight. Why, as we grow up, do we so often lose the courage to confront the predators in our lives, our relationships, our institutions, our government? The people who habitually put others down and demean people or whole classes of people – why do we lose the courage to stand up and say, “That’s mean. Quit it!” To say it and mean it and not back down? (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 98)

Here was a girl on the school bus who knew she was worth something, that her friend was worth something, and she wouldn’t let a big bully pretend otherwise.

And humor has a lot of power to dispel the vampire’s strength – because it’s hard to be intimidated when you’re laughing (“Look, Bucky Beaver”.) And there is something tragicomic about a person trying to live in a non-human way; they would have to be, and live among, an entirely different species of Snatched Bodies for it to work.

If we can remember a few basic facts, we can be protected from vampires. First, when you identify a psychic vampire or sociopath, get them out of your emotional life immediately. You may still have to work with them or see them at family or professional gatherings. But never again give them any emotional opening, because they will use it only to manipulate you, and you are not likely ever to beat them at this game they play so well.

Just remember that you are a child of the universe, a child of God, and that it really doesn’t get any better than that. You are not inadequate, not broken, not in need of someone else’s special redemption. You are loved. And love, fired full bore, will blow away the nastiest vampire, like a blast of sunlight.

It’s not too hard to make most monsters vanish. Sunlight kills mildew, and it does a good job on our demons and goblins too. But first, it takes being aware of them, and it takes the courage to confront them, like saying “That’s mean. Quit it!”

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” the monster is dissolved in an unusual way. The wicked witch of the West is finally destroyed when a determined girl throws water on her, and she melts. It must never have rained in the land of Oz, though I don’t think it was the water that did it. I think the water was just stage business. What dissolved the witch was a girl having the courage to confront her face to face, without blinking or backing down. It took a girl who was not afraid. The trick looks like magic, but it isn’t magic.

Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.” One lesson of Halloween is that most of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears. Other lessons of Halloween are that ghosts vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can be transformed into possibilities. On second thought, maybe that’s magic after all.

Happy Halloween, precious people.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

14 October 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us give thanks for the beliefs that can unite people rather than dividing them.

Almost everywhere religion shouts today, its shouts fan the flames of exclusion, bigotry, hatred and violence. The hateful actions drown out the pious talk.

We shudder as we hear the shouts of self-righteous judgment and see the actions of bigotry, and our hearts shiver. Let us go inside our own minds and hearts for the more hopeful and peaceful messages we carry there.

Let us give thanks for beliefs and actions that can make us more whole, and let us be grateful that those beliefs have such deep roots into our very own souls. These are the “still, small voices” that can still offer us comfort and courage. Here are some of the timeless and universal words that come from that place. These were adapted from the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, but our own hearts could have written them, if we but had his poetic gifts:

Lord of life and love, or all that is holy and good,

make me an instrument of your peace

Where there is hatred sow love

Where there is injury pardon

Where there is doubt give faith

Where despair give hope

Where there is darkness shed light

Where there is sadness, joy

Let me not look for help so much as to help

To be understood as to understand

To be loved as to LOVE

For it is in giving that we receive

In pardoning that we are pardoned

And in dying to small ways, we are born into greater ways:

The paths of peace, hope and love.

Let us give thanks that the words find such a natural home deep within our own souls, so that we may have them with us always. Amen.

SERMON: Religion – Bad and Good

You know, we meet here in this liberal church, along with about 1/10th of one percent of Austin’s population, and we can do honest religion, can talk about high ideals like character, can attack selfish behavior as the cardinal sin of all great religions. We can insist that all beliefs should be open to questioning, because honest religion is one of the highest callings we can have. It’s one of the best hopes we have of evolving beyond the “chimpanzee politics” of power that is sought for selfish ends, and the rest of it. And it’s all true.

But it can also be pretty naive. Because outside the walls of this place, across our country and around the world, what the vast majority of people associate with the word “religion” has been and continues to be responsible for immense harm to millions upon millions of humans and other species. And if we just do our liberal thing and remain silent about the horrific abuses of religion, we become silent accomplices to the things done in the name of religion and its gods the world over.

While the worst forms of religion have owned the news headlines for the past several years, some new authors have arisen to attack the very idea of religion as a dishonest and evil thing. And at least five of these books have become best-sellers, read and discussed by millions of people. I can’t think of another time when so many books attacking the very idea of religion became best-sellers.

These authors are Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) and Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). This morning, I want to share some of their criticisms with you, because I think they are mostly very good criticisms. And even if you find some of them disillusioning, honest religion has always claimed that it’s better to be disillusioned than to be illusioned, because the worst kind of faithlessness is the fear that the truth will be bad.

There’s another reason for taking these angry critics seriously. These are the voices of some of our modern prophets, doing what prophets have always done. They come in from outside the polite little games of religion, saying, “This is nonsense! You people are hypocrites! You claim to serve high ideals, but You’re not! And we come to criticize your silly religions in the name of those higher ideals sacred to us and which, we insist, should also be sacred to you!” These are bright men whose values and beliefs are very close to those of most of us here. We ignore good angry critics at our peril – especially when so much of what they say is clearly right.

As Sam Harris says, “That so much of [human suffering] can be directly attributed to religion – to religious hatreds, wars, taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources – is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity.” (Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 57) I agree with him there.

All these authors are angry about the harm done by the kind of religion that gets all the headlines, and about the moderate and liberal religious spokespeople who stand silently by, acting pious.

Richard Dawkins ridicules the Islamic reactions to the 12 cartoonists whose anti-Islam cartoons appeared in Danish papers with banners including “Slay those who insult Islam,” and “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion.” (Dawkins, p. 25) Let’s be honest: carrying a banner that says, “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion” is both absurd and obscene. And for the record, it does not do any honor to Allah.

Another author lists a few examples of the warring due directly to religion today: The fighting that has plagued Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Niberia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Ivory Coast, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Iran and Iraq are merely a few recent cases. (Harris, pp. 81-82)

Another says Northern Ireland’s problems would probably disappear in a generation if religiously segregated schooling were abolished. (Hitchens, p. 261) And in Ireland alone, it is now estimated that the unmolested children of religious schools were very probably the minority. (Hitchens, p. 51) For far too many priests, the culture of systemic child abuse became the eighth sacrament. It is inexcusable for people in religion not to speak out about it under some misguided sense of banal sweetness.

The angriest of these books is the one by Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). While he can be a brilliant bully, he has traveled and lived all over the world, done very impressive research, and seems as well-informed as he is angry.

He notes that both Protestantism and Catholicism – though mostly Catholicism – have been eager allies of fascism. Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. (Hitchens, p. 235)

And the very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler’s government was a treaty with the Vatican. In return for the concession of some privileges to the church, the Holy See ordered Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any subject. At the first meeting of his cabinet after this capitulation was signed, Hitler announced that these new circumstances would be “especially significant in the struggle against [Jews].”

German Protestants followed suit by publishing their own accommodation with the fuhrer, and establishing what became known as the German Christian Church to support the Nazis. None of the Protestant churches, however, went as far as the Catholic hierarchy did in ordering an annual celebration for Hitler’s birthday on April 20th. On this date, on papal instructions, the cardinal of Berlin regularly transmitted “warmest congratulations to the fuhrer in the name of the bishops and dioceses in Germany,” these congratulations were to be accompanied by “the fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars.” The order was obeyed, and faithfully carried out. (Hitchens, p. 239). These were immoral and ungodly acts of institutional cowardice, and you need to expect those of us in the religion racket to speak up, to police our own discipline.

The Catholic Church was equally involved in Franco’s bloody dictatorship in Spain – and is now paying for it, as the Spanish government is cutting funding to the church, permitting gay marriages, and saying publicly that it will establish a secular Spain. Throughout Europe, organized religion has largely died out since WWII, perhaps from a widespread reaction against the sins of the churches when they were offered political power.

Perhaps Voltaire got it right long ago, when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” for the atrocities do seem to grow directly from the absurdities.

Short of the big-screen drama of war and fascism, religion can be linked to other forms of deep and lasting harm. In 2005, a survey was conducted in thirty-four countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution. The United States ranked thirty-third, just above Turkey. Meanwhile, high school students in the United States test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math. These data seem unequivocal: we are building a civilization of ignorance that will disadvantage our children, and it looks like it is linked to the influence of religion. (Harris, p. 70)

Besides cataloging some of the physical harm done by religions, all these authors also attack the teachings of the religions as ignorant, hateful, and destructive of both human character and human society. They could have in mind, as an example, the creationist teaching that Noah had a pet brontosaurus. Daniel Dennett offered a very interesting metaphor for understanding how ideas – at least bad ideas – work.

You watch an ant in a meadow, he says, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant”. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum) that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the ant into a position to benefit its progeny, not the ant’s.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikely – even suicidal – ways, all for the benefit of the guest, not the host. Daniel Dennet asks whether anything like this ever happens with humans, and of course it does. (Dennett, pp. 3-4) What He’s saying is that ideas work like these parasites in humans, driving us to serve the ideas – the ideologies – even at our own expense. And He’s saying that many of the ideas taught by the world’s religions are among the worst offenders, doing the most harm.

One famous religious teaching is that intercessory prayer works. Dr. Herbert Benson (author of the best-seller The Relaxation Response in 1976), a cardiologist at the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, headed a $2.4 million Templeton-funded study on intercessory prayer. (The Templeton outfit, generally not respected by scientists, tries to save face for supernatural interpretations of religion.) They monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn’t know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn’t know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it. (Dennett, p. 63)

The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. There was a difference between those who knew they had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other, but it went in the wrong direction. Those who knew they had been the beneficiaries of prayer suffered significantly more complications than those who did not. (Dennett, p. 63)

This may sound counter-intuitive, but talk to any hospital chaplain about the number of times a patient reacts to their visit by saying something like “Oh God, I didn’t know I was so bad off they”d send a chaplain!”

All these authors ridicule the idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality. While good-hearted people can always find good-hearted teachings, the other kind also abound. If children get out of line, we are to beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13-14). If they talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark 7:9-13, and Matthew 15:4-7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshipping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes. (Harris, p.

And Christopher Hitchens asks about what the Ten Commandments do not say. Is it too modern, he asks, to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended? (100) Is that too modern a criticism?

He says that as far as he is aware, in every country in the world today where slavery is still practiced, the justification of it is derived from the Koran. (Hitchens, p. 181) If this is true, this should not be the first time we’re hearing it. Religious spokespeople and the media should have covered this long ago. Maybe some of you will tell me that they have, but I”m not aware of it. Why should anyone believe religions have any good honest advice for living, if we haven’t the decency to point out the honestly bad advice they also contain?

What is new and different about these critiques is that they are also angry at moderate and liberal religions for their complicity in the harm and bad teachings done in the name of religion.

Sam Harris says that even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world. (Harris, p. ix)

And Richard Dawkins says even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which religious extremism flourishes. (Dawkins, p. 303)

And there is indeed longstanding and widespread complicity with the worst religious teachings, among those who should know better. It isn’t just those we might consider fundamentalist crazies who support hateful and murderous teachings. St. Augustine thought heretics should be tortured; St. Thomas Aquinas thought they should be killed. Martin Luther and John Calvin both advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, Jews, and witches. (Harris, p. 12) If this is Christian love, nobody needs it.

When the author Salman Rushdie was given a death sentence by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who disliked some of his views on the Koran, the key religious leaders of the world did not condemn Khomeini’s order of murder. Instead, they said the main problem raised by publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy. These included the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, as well as the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. (Hitchens, p. 30) Let’s be clear: the problem was not blasphemy; it was the psychopathic order by a charismatic religious leader to murder someone who disagreed with his religious beliefs. If moderates and liberals want to be regarded as moral and courageous people, why didn’t they speak out? Many secular people did, but very few religious leaders.

More recently, in the wake of the Asian tsunami, liberals and moderates admonished one another to look for God “not in the power that moved the wave, but in the human response to the wave.” I remember reading some of these things, and imagine you did too. On a day when over one hundred thousand children were torn from their mothers” arms and drowned, there is something very smarmy about moderate or liberal theologians pretending to find God in the actions taken by caring people in response to a destructive act of nature. It is trying to save face for their God, but more importantly it is trying to save face for themselves and their profession, pretending they are really still about something real and important that affects the world. (Harris, p. 48) I agree with the critics who find this abominable.

In the face of this kind of horrid thinking, as Sam Harris says, atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of bad religious beliefs. (Harris, p. 51)

All of these authors think religion should be ended as an unredeemable kind of evil. I don’t agree with them, even if such a thing were possible. But much of the developed world has nearly done away with religion. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations” Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. (Harris, p. 43)

On the other end, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations” human development index are all quite religious. (Harris, p. 44)

Countries with high levels of atheism, these atheists point out, are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. Or consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms” average employees in godless countries: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population say they expect to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Jesus is credited with saying it will be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Apparently, in the fantasies of many American Christians, come Judgment Day there are going to be huge herds of camels galloping through the eyes of needles. (Harris, p. 46)

I agree with all these critics that one of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about our deepest personal concerns – about ethics, spiritual experience, and human suffering – in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. (Harris, p. 87)

I wonder how many of you here agree with the general thrust of these critiques of religion? (About 80-90% of hands went up.)

So do I. Where I disagree with these men is in the matter of the definition of religion, though it isn’t a terribly big quibble. Some of them won’t consider Buddhism or Confucianism as religions because they have no official supernatural gods. And they wouldn’t consider what we do here to be religion either, though I think they”d like it. They don’t want to call anything done in churches that is honest or healthy religion, though some will call it spirituality or philosophy. I call it honest religion, but don’t really care what it’s called, as long as it can be called forth. And I think healthy beliefs are really far more widespread than these authors think, or than polls show.

There are tens of millions of people in this country who don’t believe a tenth of the official dogmas of organized religions, but who do believe in the basic decencies upon which we depend for a civilization. There are tens of thousands of people who believe the same generic things we do, right here in Austin. And these healthy generic beliefs we share also have a lot more healthy and fun humor to them – official religions are horribly humorless. So let me quote from a few people who have spoken from this more wise and witty center, and see if you don’t feel a bit closer to them.

One of my favorite wise quotes about religious belief is from H.L. Mencken, who said: “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.” (Dawkins, p. 27) In other words, we must respect other people’s religious opinions, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect their opinions about art, music, politics or football. What matter most are their actions, not their words.

And on the subject of death, since the fear of death seems to drive so many religions, I like Mark Twain, who said: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” (Dawkins, p. 354)

And a very sweet thought from Emily Dickenson, who said, “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.” (Dawkins, p. 361)

When these critical prophets talk about what they believe rather than what They’re so angry about, it’s easy to feel close to them. Here’s Christopher Hitchens, speaking for all who, like him, reject religion: Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. (Hitchens, p. 5)

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. (Hitchens, pp. 5-6)

There are tens of millions of Americans and tens of thousands right here in Austin who would resonate with these sentiments far, far more than with the hateful rantings of an Ann Coulter or Rev. Hagee in San Antonio who wants a Christian holy war to begin with our nuking Iran.

I would love to have all four of these critics in church here, where I could preach to them, invite them into an attitude of prayer, and try to sell them on reclaiming the possibility of honest religion, even while you and I would probably join them in rejecting the many varieties of bad and dishonest religion that most people of good heart and good will would also reject. And I think those four authors would like it here. They might even find a certain kind of good and healthy spirit move within them – and I think they”d like that, too. Honest religion is one of our best hopes for a more humane future.

Bad religion really is a mean and dangerous thing, and we need to say so when the occasion invites it. But honest religion – and it can’t be liberal without being honest – is equally a blessing to theists, polytheists and atheists, because it honors our heart without insulting our head, and knows that while we are indeed a mixture of good and evil, the good will usually win out, if only we will help it, and help one another. That’s good news. It’s also good religion.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

September 30, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Come holy spirits.

Enter the hearts of those who believe that

Love is better than hate

Understanding is holier than bigotry

Peace is more blessed than war

Come, holy spirits,

enter those who know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full chorus.

Enter us, holy spirits, that we may be more inclusive and more complete.

We confess to too many smallnesses.

We confess that we are too often selfish,

serving and caring for only our own values and those held by people who think like us.

We confess to that smallness of vision and of association that is such a stumbling block to our larger humanity.

And yet we are the raw material from which our larger possibilities must be fashioned.

And so come, holy spirits.

Come into the hearts of those who are faithful to high callings.

We will make ourselves ready.

Come holy spirits, come.

Amen.

SERMON: Spirits – Holy and Otherwise

For me, the subject of the Holy Spirit begins with a biographical story. When I was six, I hated the Holy Ghost.

I was in a Presbyterian Sunday School, which I loved because the teacher loved children and told us wonderful stories each week.

The cement-block walls were an awful chartreuse color, but there was a color poster of a blue-eyed, brown-haired Jesus surrounded by six-year-olds, so it was a friendly place to be.

Then one Sunday, with no explanation, the wonderful old Sunday School teacher was gone, and taking her place was this horrible woman who seemed to hate both stories and children. She tried to teach us theology, but we all heard it as another story – though not a very good one.

The title seemed to be “Trinadee,” and it started out OK.

First, there was this God up in the sky. Well, Superman and Captain Marvel were up there, so there had to be room for a God. That was fine.

Then this God had a son. But we had his photo on the wall and he liked kids, so that was ok too.

But then, there was – this ghost. The only mental picture I had was of Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and it was a ridiculous image to try and fit into that story. When she finished, she asked us if we understood. I didn’t even understand why she’d ask that about a story.

Trying to be nice, I said, “Well, it’s a pretty good story, but next time leave out the ghost.”

I didn’t yet know the word “apoplectic,” but that’s what she became. “It is not a story!” she screamed. Well, a six-year-old knows a story when he hears one, so I said, “Yes, it’s a story and it’s not a real bad one, but the ghost is dumb. Leave out the ghost.”

From there, things escalated. She told me that Jesus doesn’t like little boys who call this a story, and I said, “Well, then you can leave out Jesus, too.” So a couple things happened that day. First, my happy childhood Sunday School experience ended. And second, by virtue of wiping out two-thirds of the Trinity, I became a Unitarian.

Ironically, when I grew up and understood what the concept of the Holy Spirit was about, it became one of my favorite religious ideas. We are embodied spirits. I agree with the mystics on that: we aren’t primarily bodies; we’re primarily spirits, wearing bodies.

Honest religion, the theme of the sermons this fall, is a phrase with two words. Honesty is easy enough to do if You’re not afraid of crossing other people’s comfort zones or boundaries of orthodox thinking.

But also to be religious means we must be concerned about seeing and saying the highest ideals to which we can aspire. Not because God commands us to, but because those ideals help define the healthiest and most deeply fulfilling life and world.

And the highest of the spirits is, as nearly all religions have said, a spirit of compassion and love for others, that can over-ride smaller and more self-serving ambitions. The Catholic Church, and after them almost all of Christianity, calls it the Holy Spirit, and that seems the right name for it. St. Augustine write in the early 5th century that the great gift of the Holy Spirit was the gift enabling you to love others as yourself – and that if you didn’t get that gift, you didn’t get much.

Even though the idea of one single holy spirit vastly oversimplifies how complex we and our many spirits really are, it’s useful for speaking not about the spirit but about our own longing for the sense of peace that could come from stilling our quarrelling voices, of raising our own selfishnesses to the higher level of equal concern and compassion for others. You can find this yearning expressed simply and poignantly in some of the great religious poetry.

Here’s just one line from a famous Catholic prayer called “Come, Holy Spirit”. See if you can’t feel the yearning from which this prayer could come: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love.”

Don’t you wish it were that easy! In real life, we usually have to tend to a variety of different spirits that drive us. But the larger hope or wish is that we could just be filled with an overriding spirit of compassion and love that could somehow automatically choreograph all our disparate voices. So some of the religious poetry can speak to this yearning of ours, whether we think in terms of gods or not.

Here’s part of another, a poem written by a woman named Edith Stein, who the Catholic Church made into St. Benedicta. She seems to have been one of those rare people who was filled, possessed, by this spirit of love. Just listen to these dozen or so lines from her poem and see if they don’t have an emotional, a spiritual, effect on you, as she stands in awe of this gift within her:

Novena Of The Holy Spirit

by St. Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me

And illumines the darkness of my heart?

You lead me like a mother’s hand,

And should you let go of me,

I would not know how to take another step.

You are the space

That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.

Away from you it sinks into the abyss

Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.

You, nearer to me than I to myself

And more interior than my most interior

And still impalpable and intangible

And beyond any name:

Holy Spirit eternal love!

One thing this spirit business is about that’s frustratingly right is that it seldom seems to be under our control. We can control our behaviors under most circumstances, but it’s much much harder to control what we wish we could do, how we feel, what we love or hate. Those things seem to be beyond our direct control. You can quit smoking or drinking, but not wanting a smoke or a drink as easily. We can be nice to someone we hate, but it’s a whole lot harder to want to be nice to them! The reason – and this is really what today’s sermon is about – is that this spirit business is not only much more complex than Western religion implies, but also very different. So I want to talk with you about spirits – holy and otherwise.

The word “spirit” is a rich, multi-layered word. If you look up synonyms, you find things like vital essence, presence, disposition, and my favorite, enthusiasm. The Greeks turned spirits into daimons and gods, for they saw people filled with these powerful dispositions, and saw the same dispositions appear in every generation, as eternal presences that outlived us.

That word “enthusiasm” still contains this ancient history. It comes from the Greek en-theos, which means “filled with a god.” And we are indeed filled with gods, filled with spirits that are the most significant thing about us.

Sometimes we call this character, which also comes from a Greek word meaning a deep kind of mark that identifies us, which is what our guiding spirits do. And we are still driven by spirits you can recognize in the Greek stories of gods and daimons. They are still with us, thirty or forty or more centuries after the Greeks first noticed them:

Harpies. You hear someone screaming “I’ll tear that creep’s arms off! I’ll rip out her hair, gough out his eyes! She’ll never escape my wrath, never! I’ll make him suffer forever!” (Add the wordless screaming “Harpie” sound) We’ve all heard this voice, maybe from our own mouths. It’s the spirit of unmitigated rage and vengeance. These are the voices the ancient Greeks called the Harpies: dangerous, vicious supernatural forces of rage and vengeance.

Or you hear somebody say that “Of course might makes right, and the fact that the US is the mightiest military power on earth gives us the right to invade and occupy Iraq, sell off its assets, take control of its oil, kill over 700,000 of its people, and if they don’t like it, let them try to stop us.” This is the voice of Ares, the Greek god of war.

Or someone does something absolutely destructive and dumb, and says they couldn’t help it because they were in love, and You’re hearing a modern incarnation of Aphrodite, the goddess the Romans called Venus.

You could go through the rest of the ancient Greek gods and daimons and recognize them from people in your own lives, maybe from your own life. The Greeks saw these spirits as so powerful and everpresent they sculpted statues of them, and built temples to them.

In some ways, one of the most interesting of the ancient Greek Olympic deities was the goddess Hestia: the only Greek deity not drawn or sculpted, though there were altars to her. Hestia makes it more clear that these spirits are invisible dynamics, not really supernatural male or female deities. And Hestia is invisible but terribly important. She was the goddess of the hearth, the home. She represents the feeling, the presence, that makes a house feel like a home, or a church service feel like a worship service. It may be invisible, but everyone knows whether it’s present or not, and its presence makes all the difference. We are embodied spirits. When you meet someone you knew in childhood but haven’t seen for many years, what you really recognize as you talk with them is that spirit or character that was distinctive about them. “

“Character” is a word that meant a very deep identifying mark, and a famous Greek saying was that your character is your fate: its style will determine who and what you will be, and how people will remember you.

So the spirit that You’re expressing at the moment gives you your character at the moment. And the spirit that comes to define your life defines your character and your fate. You can probably think of people in your own lives who come to mind, people you can and do sum up very simply: she’s so selfish, He’s so vain, she’s so very caring, He’s such a trustworthy friend.

And while we’re on words, there’s the great German word “Zeitgeist,” which means the ‘spirit of the times.” Whole eras can be defined by spirits. Classical music was defined, as many music historians have said, by the spirit of Apollo, as Romantic music was defined more by the spirit of Dionysus. The Hippie movement of 35 years ago was defined by the spirits of peace, sexual liberation and individual freedom, and those spirits – I think they were mostly the four goddesses Demeter, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia, and the wildcard god Dionysus – choreographed much of that generation, as some here can remember.

It choreographs, defines, drives, is the god that rules for better or worse. This is where the Greeks had a more honest and accurate picture of human nature than our Western religions have.

Our Western religions want to talk just about the Holy Spirit, as they want to talk about just one god, as though there could ever really be just one dynamic in charge. The Greeks saw that we have numerous spirits in us, several or many drives that push us in different directions, that They’re seldom compatible, and that the real goal in life is achieving some nuance, and the ability to moderate the quarreling tendencies we have. The Greeks originally had twelve Olympian deities, though not all sources agree on the same twelve. But they were saying they could identify at least a dozen styles, dynamics, biases, spirits that we can always find driving the lives of ourselves and others. And the gods and spirits seldom agree, and usually bicker, just as they do in our own mind and our culture.

That’s where Zeus came in. As the top dog among the Olympian deities, the Alpha Male among the gods, his job was to try and harmonize all the bickering voices. That’s our job, too: to harmonize the bickering voices that drive us. There were gods that neither Zeus nor the Greeks respected, even though they had to acknowledge their power. Ares, and god of war, wasn’t respected by Zeus because he was all passion and no reason. And Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was also all passion and no reason.

In the stories about Aphrodite, almost no one’s life was made better by crossing her path. It ended badly or tragically for the humans, this passion that followed lust wherever it led, everything else be damned. Without using our reason to play the role of Zeus and balance the often selfish voices within us, we are unlikely to live wise or fulfilling lives, and unlikely to be much blessing to others.

One of the themes in these sermons is our task of evolving beyond the chimpanzee politics that are rooted very deeply in us, the notion of power gained to serve our own selfish ends rather than to serve others. And this is where we tie back to chimpanzee politics. Because each one of these spirits – with the exception of the Holy Spirit – is selfish, concerned only with getting what it wants, no matter what harm it does to us or others.

Hermes is a sneaky guy nobody can trust, very clever at using words to persuade anybody of anything. He creates advertising campaigns that sell Americans on eating unhealthy food and becoming unhealthy people, or cars that guzzle gas and pollute the air, or a thousand other gadgets that run up credit card bills so tens of millions of people are buried under interest rates of 20-30%. Even in ancient Greek mythology, neither humans nor gods could trust Hermes. He was always out for himself.

But so were the other spirits.

The god of war destroyed Germany seventy years ago, and may yet destroy America in our lifetimes. The spirit of Apollo can make organizational or corporate clones of people, subordinating them to structures of authority and ignoring their humanity because that spirit can’t see their humanity. Zeus’s philandering, his sense that the Alpha Male need not be faithful, destroys trust, commitment, and the relationships upon which we and our society depend.

His wife Hera’s fury at being betrayed by Zeus and her endless search for revenge, like Poseidon’s inability to stop carrying a grudge – the entire Odyssey is driven by Poseidon’s ten-year grudge against Odysseus for killing his son – these have some justice to them at first, but soon become so selfishly obsessive that they destroy the lives of others around them. Any single spirit is selfish. We are mostly driven by just a few of them, and our hardest job is like Zeus’s: creating a harmony between our conflicting urges and desires, that can let us be a blessing to ourselves and others.

In modern medicine, we describe cancer as a kind of growth that cares only about reproducing its own kind of cells, even if they kill the body. Left untended, that’s what individual spirits or gods do, too.

They each in their own way further the art of chimpanzee politics by being unable to see anything beyond what they want right then. This includes, many many times in Western history, the God of Western religion. Dishonest religion and bad priests have so often turned that god into a blood-thirsty demon rather than a spirit that could be called holy.

If we’re going to do honest religion, we need to talk about gods. So let’s understand gods. They are not critters in the clouds. They are imaginative constructs, concepts, leading us to centers of psychological and sometimes natural power. And religion – as any Buddhist can tell you – is not about gods. So in honest religion, we can ask – and need to ask – how useful these gods are for us today, as we try to find ways toward healthier ways of being that are less selfish, more integrated, and more compassionate toward the much larger world around us.

And here, I think the idea of Zeus is really much more useful than the idea of the Hebrew god Yahweh. God can’t pull all of our various drives together well, because the obsession with monotheism – which is really mostly an obsession with priestly and political authority – can’t recognize how many other spirits really are present in our lives and our world.

And Western religion almost never invites us to identify with God – that could get you burned at the stake, or committed to an institution – but to worship him, through the rules and rituals made by the people who dress up in his clothes and talk in holy words. That’s not helpful.

The Zeus story, understood psychologically, teaches us that we are the ones who must learn to play the role of Zeus within our own little circle of spirits, mediating and moderating between our various desires to serve – not our own selfish interests, but something larger, more inclusive, more life-giving to ourselves and others.

Here’s what that sounds like in pretty ordinary language. This is from Felix Adler, the Jewish intellectual who founded the non-theistic Ethical Culture Society back in 1876:

The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear. (An Ethical Philosophy of Life)

To add a little to that, it’s usually by finding the right gods, the right spirits in others that we can bring out the right spirits in ourselves.

This is close to the Buddhist idea of the sangha, the holy community where healthy transformation is possible because health and wholeness are held as the norm by the community, and the lower spirits of selfishness are disempowered. We can talk about honest religion all we like. But without the commitment and discipline to have a community that can discredit our persistent habits of working only toward the things we like, we’ll just be doing chimpanzee politics. Then your money and your energy and hopes will go to fund a social club to please the most clever and manipulative, whether in a church, a club or local or national politics. That’s chimpanzee politics.

It’s also human history and human nature. But it is that selfish part of human nature we’re here to evolve beyond, by seeking the community of bigger, better, less self-serving spirits. we’re seeking Holy spirits rather than merely clever ones. It is one of the most important of all human aspirations, and the only adequate goal for honest religion anywhere.

Still, the eternally frustrating fact is that, as the Greeks saw over 3,000 years ago, these spirits are not under our direct control, and it often feels like the most we can do directly is open our hearts and minds, and pray that they come into the larger place where we’ve made them welcome.

So we’ll end with a prayer, on behalf of this church, but also of all honest religion anywhere.

Come holy spirits.

Enter the hearts of those who believe that

Love is better than hate

Understanding is holier than bigotry

Peace is more blessed than war

Come, holy spirits, enter those who know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full chorus.

Enter us, holy spirits, that we may be more inclusive and more complete.

We confess to too many smallnesses.

We confess that we are too often selfish, serving and caring for only our own values and those held by people who think like us.

We confess to that smallness of vision and of association that is such a stumbling block to our larger humanity.

And yet we are the raw material from which our larger possibilities must be fashioned.

And so come, holy spirits.

Come into the hearts of those who are faithful to higher callings.

We will make ourselves ready.

Come holy spirits, come.

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

September 23, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

An ancient prayer said, “The heart daily hopes, yet daily fears that for which it daily hopes.”

We hope for miracles, changes of all kinds, wondering how much else would change for which we’re not ready. We’ll quit a bad habit like smoking, drinking or drugs, to find that now we can feel the deeper problems those habits had tried to hide, and it can make the old demons look attractive. We often do fear that for which we hope.

How much of our behavior comes from wanting to be safe – financially, professionally, personally safe? How much of our behavior comes from just wanting to be adequate? How powerful the feeling of inadequacy is! As though we’re broken, not knowing how to be fixed.

Where is the still center that might offer a kind of calm for which we yearn? If it can’t come from outside – from buying, owning, driving or wearing it – how can we find, inside of us, that “peace that passes understanding”?

We are not broken people, and not inadequate. We come here unfinished, but not broken. There are things we would add, would change, to help find a more fulfilling home for our thoughts and feelings.

We seek these things here, now in this place. We seek these things together. We seek these things.

Amen.

SERMON: Oh God, is it my turn?

What I’m doing in the three sermons this month is a kind of Unitarian heresy because I’m revisiting the idea of a trinity. The 19th century Unitarians rightly rejected the notion of a supernatural trinity, where the man Jesus was physically fathered by a sky god, and the Holy Spirit was an actual presence connected with God and Jesus. That is superstition, and not very interesting. But as early as the 3rd and 4th centuries, some of the best Christian thinkers had been defining the trinity as a psychological concept rather than a supernatural one – and that’s both more interesting and more universal. So that’s what I’m looking at this month.

It’s still probably easier to understand this three-part idea by looking at the Buddhist version. They also see religion or life divided into three different but complementary arenas, which they call Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. “Buddha” means a source of insight and wisdom. We need a source of insight into the human condition and wisdom about living well. You can call that God, or Buddha, Allah, Science or Reason – or you can just call it Truth or Goodness or other abstractions. We need something there, and something that will stand up to our toughest questions and most personal needs. That’s part of what last week’s sermon was about.

But Buddha, God, Allah, Truth, Goodness or the rest of the grand abstractions won’t do a thing unless we make them ours, and try to guide our lives by them, embody them. In Christian thought, this is called “incarnational theology.” Others see it as a kind of existentialism, meaning ideals aren’t real until we give them the form of our own life. The Buddhists call this dharma, meaning the personal work we need to do to recognize our Buddha-nature, to nurture the Buddha-seed they believe is in each of us.

Others might put it differently by saying that we have to become the change we want. But the message is about the same in each of these ways of talking.

And the third part of this trinity of living within a new kind of awareness is what Christians call the Holy Spirit, which I’ll talk about next week. The Buddhists, as always, talk about it in more down-to-earth ways, as the sangha. That means the community where these important life concerns are held to be sacred, and protected.

This morning, I want to talk with you about how, in liberal religion, the first two parts of this psychological trinity connect: how high ideals can be transformative for you. Or, how do you go from potential to actual change?

Almost every Sunday, you’ll hear stories here about the kind of ideals and insights into the human condition, that have been transformative for many centuries and may be transformative for you. Think of those stories each week as packets of seeds being passed out. They’re good seeds, from good stories that have mostly been around a very long time. They seldom sprout quickly. They mostly just sit there in the background of your mind, like possibilities whose time hasn’t come.

But sometimes your life will take a turn and some of the ideas and stories will come alive for you, when it’s the right time. Here’s a story about what that can sound like. It’s taken from Anthony de Mello, who was born into Indian Hindu culture, then became a Jesuit priest. He saw all religions as variations on deep themes common to all people, as I do and as many religious liberals do. He collected spiritual stories from all over the world, and had a gift for reducing them to short, bite-sized things. Here’s one:

Parable: Who are you?

A woman in a coma was dying. She suddenly had a feeling that she was taken up to heaven and stood before the Judgment Seat.

“Who are you?” a Voice said to her.

“I’m the wife of the mayor,” she replied.

“I did not ask whose wife you are but who you are.”

“I’m the mother of four children.”

“I did not ask whose mother you are, but who you are.”

“I’m a schoolteacher.”

“I did not ask what your profession is but who you are.”

And so it went. No matter what she replied, she did not seem to give a satisfactory answer to the question, “Who are you?”

“I’m a Christian.”

“I did not ask what your religion is but who you are.”

“I’m the one who went to church every day and always helped the poor and needy.”

“I did not ask what you did but who you are.”

She evidently failed the examination, for she was sent back to life. When she recovered from her illness, she was determined to find out who she was. And that made all the difference. Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight, p. 140

This “Who are you?” question is a question that is always hanging in the air in any good church. A good church is an invitation to come into a space where we are committed to holding up very high ideals and given the chance to see how we measure up, and what we might like to change.

It’s like being able to study with masters: stories from many of the world’s great religions and spiritual thinkers. Since we’re religious liberals, they’re all welcome. We’re not trying to make you into theists, Christians, atheists or anything else. We’re here to become more whole, more integrated, more authentic people. And any teaching or story from any source that’s in touch with the possibilities that lie within us is holy thread from which we can weave the fabric of our fuller humanity. That’s one of the great freedoms of liberal religion: all is holy that can connect with life in deep and more life-giving ways.

But traditional religion usually uses such dramatic terms it can feel like going before a god who wants to know who you are and will only accept answers more perfect than almost anyone could give. Then you think, in a fearful voice, “Oh God, is it my turn? Is it my turn for this test I’m bound to fail?” That drama lets churches and priests use fear to exalt not God but themselves and their church’s dogmas. They claim to mediate your salvation, which empowers them far more than it empowers you. That’s not honest religion.

Making it all sound so dramatic can create a lot of fear around the idea of changing your life story – for that’s what religious transformation is about: changing your life story, living out a different part in a different script.

Literal or authoritarian religions often try to protect your soul, spirit, by molding you into the shape of their beliefs. They mean well, but it’s a kind of salvation by obedience and conformity, a “cookie-cutter” salvation that seldom fits actual human beings. It’s easiest to see when they talk about the place of women or gays or people who ask too many questions. They often have a kind of cookie-cutter to put you into the shape they think everyone should have. There’s some comfort in that, I imagine, but it’s not how liberal religions do it.

Liberals try to protect your soul, your spirit, by providing a kind of greenhouse where it’s safe, and you can find the spiritual nutrients to grow and change, in an atmosphere that offers you courage rather than fear. Liberals religions are about a salvation by empowerment. I mean liberal Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or atheism. The liberal, open, style of religion is about salvation by empowerment.

Still, it’s a do-it-yourself kit. Most of the time here, you’re not thinking about changing your story or changing very much at all. You’re doing your life, and you find something interesting or stimulating about coming to a place where these stories are told, and so many others seem willing to ask questions that take them beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy. So you file these things away somewhere and get on with your life.

But sometimes that “Who are you?” question can come at you with real force, and you can’t find a good answer in the way you’re living. Maybe you just need to talk it out. That’s one of the things our Listening Ministers are for here. They’re people who have had about thirty hours’ training in learning to be good listeners, to provide a space where you can just talk confidentially, and tell your story. Often, that’s the first step in discovering the wisdom you have inside of you. Most of us really do know what we should do, if we stop to think about it. If you’d like somebody to listen, just call the church office and ask for Extension 18.

Changing your story is crossing over a boundary, breaking rules you once lived by, disappointing some people’s expectations of you, and there’s no way around it: it’s hard.

The classic story of wrestling your way across an old boundary in the Bible – one of the best in any tradition – is the story of Jacob wrestling with something supernatural at the Jabbok river. It is one of the more ancient stories in the Bible, from a time when it was believed that all boundaries were guarded by spirits that didn’t want you to cross over beyond them. Today, we know there’s a lot of truth to that. There is something that makes it hard to break out of old ways, old stories and roles.

So Jacob was to cross over, and in the middle of the night this thing – a god or an angel, depending on whose interpretation you take – began wrestling with him. Jacob wouldn’t give up and wouldn’t let go. The spirit was powerful, and dislocated his hip. But still he wouldn’t let go. Then the spirit pleaded with him to let go because the sun was coming up. That’s another way you know this is an ancient story – the forces of the night can’t survive in broad daylight.

There’s a lot of truth to that too, psychologically speaking. The light of day makes most monsters disappear. So Jacob wouldn’t let go unless the spirit blessed him. Finally the spirit blessed him and gave him a new name – his spiritual name, perhaps his deepest name. He was named Israel, which meant “One who has wrestled with God and with men and has prevailed.” And though the struggle gave him a limp, he became father of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The Jacob story is a myth, of course, which means it isn’t about something that happened in history, but something that can happen always and anywhere, especially when we cross over old boundaries. These old demons are very real. Today, we may call them primitive psychological scripts that still run our lives, and it can be quite a struggle to get out of their grip, to cross beyond the territory where they rule.

Jacob’s was a dramatic, extreme kind of awakening for a dramatic, extreme character. Most of us are less dramatic. But for anything to happen, we have to take it inside ourselves and let it help transform us.

It’s about defining yourself in a different, higher, currency, and we do wrestle to do that. When we do, we come to embody, to incarnate, higher ideals and aspirations than we had been settling for. That’s what’s meant by “incarnational theology,” or doing your dharma. It’s about living your life in the key of life, the key of integrity. If you look at it through that musical metaphor, then a good liberal church is trying to play sacred melodies. The difference from more conservative churches is that we draw our sacred melodies from all over the world, because our goal is to see ourselves as children of the universe, rather than just children of one local creed or dogma.

I remember a liberal Baptist minister I knew a dozen years ago, who made a point in one of his sermons by reading from the Bible, the French existentialist Albert Camus and the Indian Hindu Gandhi. Parts of the sermon were read on a local radio station, and at our weekly ecumenical luncheon, a more conservative Baptist asked him how he could quote atheists and Hindus. “We can’t reduce God to the limits of our own understanding,” he said. “The Holy Spirit includes everything that is holy.” That’s the spirit of liberal religion.

Anything that can help us toward the kind of awakening religion is about needs to be welcomed in, to help the seeds sprout, to help turn potentiality into actuality.

And when the potential begins to become actual, it releases its power, and some magic happens. Denise Levertov wrote a short poem about that magic moment:

“Variation on a Theme by Rilke,” 

by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me-a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic-or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

I can. I can wrestle with this. I can change this. I can do this, because I’m not alone. A mighty spirit of life and health is in me, helping me, becoming me. I can. It’s the moment of rebirth, of knowing you’re a child of God, a child of Nature, a child of the universe, and no one can take that away from you. Not by threats, violence, injustice, put-downs, nothing. When this becomes our most fundamental identity, when we believe this – and it’s always a matter of faith, not being able to prove it scientifically – it is transformative.

It can give birth to a kind of hope that’s otherwise hard to come by. We are then living under a blessing there may be no other way to get. Despair can come when we feel that life is through with us, and hope comes when we realize that life still expects good things of us: expects us to come alive. Like the woman who woke up wanting to know who she was – and just wanting to know that made all the difference. It’s being born again, taking our dharma seriously, incarnational theology. This transformation is the miracle some people come to church every week hoping for.

Still, It can sound so dramatic, you think Well, my life isn’t lived on such a dramatic scale, and I couldn’t begin to be that dramatic or bold. But it isn’t always such a dramatic thing. I was talking with the medical assistant at the doctor’s office this week, asking what he’s doing, what he wants to do. He said he wants to learn X-rays, then hopes to be a technician with MRI and CAT scan machines. Then he said, “I used to be pretty bad, and then we had my daughter. She’s 2-1/2 now and the joy of my life. She’s changed me. Now I want to raise her right, and do what’s right for her and my wife.” There’s a man who has had a change of heart that led to a change of focus in his life. That’s a religious transformation. It doesn’t have to involve God-talk at all. It’s being transformed to live in the key of life – your life.

Theologians can make anything sound so remote you can’t imagine relating to it. But honest religion is very down-to-earth. We’ve all had those moments when we were moved to take ourselves more seriously, to serve higher callings, and they’re moments we’re still proud of. When those moments come, we reach for higher aspirations, and try to find a place where higher aspirations are taken seriously. At it’s best, that’s what a church is for.

We know from thousands of news stories that churches are very often not at their best. Dishonest religion leads to hypocrisy, bigotry, hatred, and a whole host of values that make our lives and our world worse rather than better. At its worst, religion is an enemy of much that is decent and noble.

But at their worst, so are politics and “family values”. Honest religion, like honest politics or healthy family values, is about rejecting lower ideals and serving higher ones: rejecting bad stories and choosing better ones. These paths of honesty and courage are some of our best routes toward becoming better people and a better society. That’s part of what this church is about.

Here’s another way of putting it – another one of those stories. Traditional religions exist to empower themselves and their story as much or more than to empower their people. So many of them will say that whatever we need that’s good can only come from God, and of course they know what God wants of us better than we do. So what we need isn’t in us. We are unworthy, and we have to go begging for it. That kind of theology gives nonsense a bad name!

Religious liberals live within a more abundant story that says the purpose of religion is to awaken us to possibilities that are already inside of us, like a Sleeping Beauty. So one of the best myths of religious transformation that I know of doesn’t come from the Bible, but from “The Wizard of Oz.” I especially like the deep theological reading of the story done by the rock group America, where they say, “Oz never did give nothin’ to the Tin Man that he didn’t, didn’t already have.” The message is as good as the grammar is bad.

The characters were in the land of Oz, which is one of those mythic boundary places like the banks of the river Jabbok. And like Jacob, they start by thinking only the great Wizard can give them what they need: a heart, a brain, courage, home. That’s like begging a god or a church for approval, as though they had the authority to give it. But Jacob, if you think about it, didn’t get anything from that strange night spirit that he didn’t already have. He beat him. He held on, he wouldn’t quit. He earned his new name. God never did give nothin’ to Jacob that Jacob didn’t already have.

And God, or Oz, can’t give you anything you don’t already have, either. But sometimes the stories of gods – or of great wizards from the Land of Oz – can reawaken those buried treasures in your heart. And then, for a moment, you know who you are. It is like a being struck on the shoulder with the flat of a sword, granting you honor, and a task. And you know, for that moment, that you can. In that moment, it can feel like anything is suddenly possible. And it may be, you know – it really may be.

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© Davidson Loehr

September 16, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

(This prayer’s story has much in common with today’s sermon theme. It’s the first prayer I ever wrote, back in 1982. I did my ministerial internship at a UCC/Disciples of Christ church in Hyde Park (Chicago): a very liberal and creative Christian church.

At some point, the minister told me I was to write and deliver the prayer for a coming Sunday.

“I don’t pray to things,” I said.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“Here, we pray.”

“So I’m supposed to pray to something?”

“Oh no, it will be much harder for you. You need to write something that is a prayer and feels like a prayer, but which you can say with complete integrity. This should be interesting.”

And so – please join me in an attitude of prayer:

We pray not to something,

but from something,

to which we must give voice;

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

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

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are, and admit who we are not;

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

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness. We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people,

those experiences,

and those transformations that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes with an open heart, an honest soul,

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

AMEN.

SERMON: The Difference Between a Church and Disneyworld

Before talking about Disneyworld, I need to talk about chimpanzees. Last month, I repeated a version of the sermon called “Chimpanzee Politics” that I had done last spring.

What drives chimpanzee politics – and most of ours – usually boils down to selfishness, getting power and privilege for those in power, and the few allies they have in their drive to gain and keep that power.

And that’s why it’s so significant that the key sin, the fundamental human failing noted by all religions I know about is the sin of selfishness. If we’re to evolve beyond our closest relatives the chimps, we have to do it psychologically, politically and culturally, because human cultures move much faster than biological evolution can adapt to.

At their best, religions are about helping us evolve beyond chimpanzee politics. They are about expanding the sense of who we are and what we’re here to serve. This runs throughout human history, going back at least 2500 years. For Confucius, living well meant living for one’s largest sense of self, which meant that we need to see ourselves as small parts of the much larger social world, the whole society. We need to expand our sense of “self” beyond ourselves. Then we should act in ways that serve that larger self.

In Western religions, that larger horizon is called “God.” Most people use the word God as though there were a critter somewhere above the sky, a guy, a big fellow who watched, heard us, could make good or evil things happen to us, much like the god Zeus from ancient Greek religions. But that’s not honest religion, and it’s not useful.

For the best thinkers in all religious traditions, the word “God” is not the name of a critter; it’s a symbol, a symbol of that highest creative horizon we can visualize. And it doesn’t matter what we call that larger horizon – whether we call it God or something else – as long as we can call it forth, and make it present in our lives and our behaviors. That’s what we’re about here: trying to call forth that larger sense of who we are, and lure ourselves into it. That’s what all honest religion is about.

This isn’t just about liberal religion; it’s about honest religion, which is a much larger category. Here, for example, are some words from a preacher I’ve never quoted or heard of, Brother Carl Porter, an Evangelical Holiness minister from Georgia:

“God ain’t no white-bearded old man up in the sky somewhere”. He’s a spirit. He ain’t got no body”. The only body He’s got is us. Amen. Thank God.”

That’s honest religion.

As some of you know – but most of you probably don’t know – this phrase “honest religion” is an especially important phrase this fall. This past Thursday the third ad of a thirteen-week ad campaign appeared in the Austin Chronicle. The ads are about 2″ high and 5″ wide, and are very simple. The first ad had only two lines, and simply said Honest Religion www.AustinUU.org

The ads are all different, but all contain the words “Honest Religion.” Most add a third line. Last week’s was “Honest religion for skeptics,” and this week’s, in sync with the Austin City Limits music festival, is “Honest religion for music lovers.” Other ads will mention families, straights and gays, or just ask “Got honest religion?” You can usually find them in the Calendar or Arts sections. They’re meant to be provocative and witty, like you folks. But They’re also meant to remind us, and me, that honest religion is what we’re about here, in ways that not many churches can claim.

In honest religion, we have to try and say in plain words what we mean. The only way we have to evolve past our deep animal selfishness – our real “original sin” – is through imagining ourselves as small parts of a much bigger reality that empowers and commands us. And that means living to serve the highest ideals we can see and say. Theists might say this is living to serve God; and that means things like truth, beauty, justice, never doing to others what we wouldn’t want done to us.

Almost every crime, every sin in life is a sin of selfishness. The sins, the crimes, that seem to get the strongest emotional responses from us are sins of betrayal: betrayals of trust. A business like Enron that betrays the trust of not only their stockholders, but also their employees, and cheats them. Politicians who sell out the people who elected them in return for money and privileges from the lobbyists who own and train them. Anyone who betrays the trust of the majority by using it to benefit only a small minority. These are the faces that selfishness takes in our lives, the way we still practice chimpanzee politics in our daily lives.

We feel more betrayed when people use our trust to serve themselves than in any other case, I think, because we know that this selfishness is in all of us, and our greatest commandment is the commandment to outgrow it and learn to live for, and serve, others. This is the goal of good character education. It’s also a goal of honest religion.

The difference between a church and Disneyworld.

So now we can talk about the difference between a church and Disneyworld. How many of you have been to Disneyworld? I wonder how many of you know what the four-word mission statement of Disneyworld is?

Disneyworld’s mission is “to make people happy.” To make people happy – not aware, deep, informed, caring, nuanced or responsible. Just happy. And not happy for a lifetime, or even for years. Just for a few days, leaving a happy memory. It worked for me when I spent a week there with my wife and two young stepdaughters aged 9 and 12 years ago.

A church, on the other hand, is not here “to make you happy.” You’ll find some things in a church that you’ll like, by joining groups, meeting new friends and so on. But the church isn’t here to make you happy. To put it in theological terms, a church is here to make God happy. For some of you, that statement will communicate, and will be enough. For others, it will be confusing or irritating or even useless, and you may have this mental image of something like a Cheshire Cat smile up in the sky: just the smile, nothing else: “God is happy”. It’s a pretty silly picture. But the word “God” is not the name of a Critter in the clouds. It is a religious symbol, trying to point us toward feeling a relationship, a kinship, with the creative and sustaining forces of the universe, and the highest and noblest ideals to which we should be aspiring. That’s what any honest religion will say. It isn’t about Disneyworld; it’s about this world, and our place and duty in this world.

A church is here to make God happy. A church is here to articulate, exalt and serve the highest ideals we can see and say. A church must be a kind of sacred space where these highest ideals are called forth, to help us evolve beyond the self-centered level of chimpanzee politics, and most human politics.

That doesn’t mean that everything that goes on here is religious. Most of it is not: we have parties, dinners, book discussion groups, plays, music, all sorts of things that are fun to do, that make us momentarily happy. But restaurants, book stores, theaters and clubs have those things, too. What has to be different here is that, above all the activities and groups, there is this invisible sort of umbrella we call the church, which holds those high ideals up, always. That’s what we’re trying to do in every Sunday service. It’s our mission: calling forth those highest ideals and larger horizons, and making them present to us again. There are very few places in life where you can count on finding that sanctuary for high ideals, but you can count on finding it here.

What high ideals? Maybe your family or friends wonder just what we care about, or if there is anything sacred to us as religious liberals. There is, and it is neither hidden nor fancy. They are the same high ideals that every religion worthy of the name cares about: ideals that make us feel beloved of this place, and move us to pass the love on to those around us. Though religions say this in different words – some in terms of gods, some not – there is not much variation between the high ideals of different human cultures or religions.

That’s what it means to say a church isn’t here to make you happy, but to make God happy. we’re here to call forth a kind of “voice from above”: not a voice from above the sky. That would have to be a very loud voice, yelling from that far away – it would scare the birds. But a voice from above the fray of chimpanzee politics, a voice from above our clamoring for our own needs to be met. It’s a voice saying that the answer to our self-absorbed yearnings is to grow beyond the self-absorption and to get absorbed in the work of a higher calling and broader identity. It’s about the unfinished business of evolving beyond chimpanzees and bonobos – those apes who are our closest relatives on earth – into a truly humane animal that can be a blessing to others and to the earth.

That’s what honest religion is about, regardless of its brand name.

We yearn to have something in our short existence that somehow partakes of the infinite, the eternal – or at least something good and honorable that will outlive us. We find our most satisfying identity not by shining spotlights on ourselves, but by becoming smaller parts of something larger. To put it in god-talk again, a church exists both because we need things and because God needs things. We say “God needs things” in the same way we say “Truth” needs things, or “Justice” or “Honor” need things from us.

We need to feel beloved by life, and by ourselves. We need to feel that though we’re just here a moment, something about our moment is momentous. Something about our being here is momentous. We matter tremendously. Western religion may say we’re all children of God. That’s one poetic way of putting it. Hindus may say your soul is part of the infinite and eternal forces that create, maintain and destroy everything in the universe. Buddhist may say we have a Buddha seed within us, that we suffer from the illusions we create with words, but that we can wake up, that the light of enlightenment can turn on, even in us.

That’s what honest religion is about, and what this church is about: offering a place where personal and spiritual transformation is possible. Tell your friends that, when they ask what we are all about here.

We are religious liberals because we won’t accept slogans, creeds, dogmas, rituals or mandated behaviors that come from priests, churches or traditions unless they feel honest, and they are useful to us and worthy of God – worthy of the highest we can see and say. We reject creeds and dogmas not because we don’t care, but because we care too much to settle for mediocre versions of religion. (The phrase “useful to us and worthy of God” comes from the 3rd century Christian writer Origen, in his book On First Principles, Book IV.)

There’s nothing supernatural about all this. It’s the part of our human nature we’re trying to nourish, whether you want to call it the Buddha-seed, the God-seed, or the depths of our potential to become more fully human and alive.

we’re all aware of needing to serve ideals higher than our own personal wants and needs. These are the insights and yearnings that gave birth to all of our gods.

Here’s a very simple but important example of how high ideals become a commanding presence, taken from right here in this church. This church has gone through some important changes in its culture over the past few years. It’s getting younger. If you have visited many Unitarian churches, you’ll usually find that the average age is near sixty, sometimes higher.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with our new members. About thirty were invited, I think about twenty could make it on the Tuesday night. Not one of them was over forty. The next night, I met with ten visitors at the monthly orientation meeting. Eight of them were made of four married couples, all with young children. The other two were men in their 50’s. We seem to have babies and young children everywhere. A few years ago, we had only three or four children in our middle-school program. This year we have about twenty.

For many members who have been here for ten or thirty years, this is a huge change in the church’s culture. They were used to having their circle of friends also be the effective center of the church. No more. Now they are a group among other groups. Of course this happens every so often, but that doesn’t make it less painful for people seeing a whole lot of strangers – and with over six hundred members, and over nine hundred people in the broader church community, no one here will ever know more than a fraction of the people.

If we were just chimpanzees, those members who have lost their “Alpha” status would be forming alliances and trying to gain power to turn back the hands of time, get rid of all these strangers – that’s most of you folks – and somehow try and make it feel like the church where they first found a home ten, twenty or forty years ago. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, they are finding ways to be noble people acting in noble ways, reframing their role to support a church that’s moving into the future. You may remember the lines from the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran’s great poem on children, where he says: You may give [your children] your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them,But seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

It’s wise and lovely poetry, but it isn’t easy. It hurts to see time pass when it feels like it might be passing you by. So I want you who are new to our church to notice how easy the members of this church make it for you to come in, take part, and take charge. They are the role models that you can look back to in a few years when it’s your turn to pass the torch!

But see how this is an example of how serving ideals that transcend our own personal wants are transformative, both of individuals and institutions?

Now we come to your part in all of this. It’s simple. Your part is to be here, and be present. We’ll promise honest religion for head and heart – that’s another one of the ads coming up in the ad series. I’ll try and focus each Sunday on high ideals that can transform our lives and our world, and to present them in ways that may touch you, move you, and give you something worth taking home with you. I try to make sermons both inspirational and educational. Taken together, a year’s sermons are a kind of spiritual curriculum for both your critical and your compassionate sides.

But you have to be here for it to work. Try to be here every Sunday. We could serve some of the finest spiritual meals in the world, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if you aren’t here. And if you want your children educated, they have to be here, too. It wouldn’t matter how good a religious education curriculum were if kids were absent half the time.

So come in, get active, bring your creative and constructive ideas. Add your voice. Be present. Make it your church. Take this strong healthy church and make it stronger and healthier. Make that the legacy you leave to the future here.

And support this institution financially. Discover where you belong in the range of financial giving here, and settle in. Our average pledge is about $1,400, but we have people pledging from very little to tens of thousands of dollars a year. Think about where your income level fits in here. Is it about average? Lower? Higher? Find your most responsible level of financial support, and settle into it. we’re not going to whine or beg – this is a grown-up church and You’re adults. We do expect that you will be generous and pay your way here. For those are also high ideals that help define and shape our character: supporting the institutions we believe in. So pledge something, and be generous in your pledge. It will absolutely transform the way you feel about this good church, and about yourselves.

That is what a church is finally about, and where it is most different from Disneyworld. Let’s face it: Disneyworld has better rides. But when you get off the rides, You’re about the same as you were before they took you for the ride. Church isn’t about being taken for a ride; it’s about transformation. It is about being in an atmosphere where high ideals are sacred things, and where they will rub off on you, and you may become so glad they rubbed off.