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Eric Hepburn
July 6, 2014

Let’s talk about some of the many things about which we are justifiably proud. Let’s talk about the quality of our A-game and when (and how) we bring it. How can we bring our A-game more often, more consistently, more reliably? What’s the shame in our game? We’re gonna talk about that, too.

Call to worship:

“It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.”
_ Buddha, Dhammapada 252

Reading

We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken. We’ll build a land where the captives go free, where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning. Oh, we’ll build a promised land that can be.

We’ll build a land where we bring the good tidings to all the afflicted and all those who mourn.

And we’ll give them garlands instead of ashes. Oh, we’ll build a land where peace is born.

Come build a land where sisters and brothers, anointed by God, may then create peace: where justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an ever-flowing stream.

Sermon: Say It Loud: I’m Austin UU and I’m Proud

When Meg asked me to speak today, she said that she needed someone to give a rousing “This is who we are! This is what we are about” sermon. The title of the sermon is, of course, a riff on the famous 1968 hit from James Brown, Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud, which was the most rousing “This is who we are” song I could think of at the time. So when it came time to sit down and write the content of the sermon, I did a little background research. I found that James Brown did a free televised concert the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to assist in quelling the threat of riots and that the song was part of an activist push by The Godfather of Soul in the wake of those events. But what really caught my attention was that, sixteen years later, during a 1984 interview, Brown expressed regret saying, “…if I had my choice, I wouldn’t have done it, because I don’t like defining anyone by race. To teach race is to teach separatism.” James Brown has put his finger directly on the fulcrum of today’s sermon, how can we celebrate pride in who we are, pride in what we are about, without that pride becoming separatist. Without that pride spilling over into self-righteousness, into feeling that ‘we’ are better than ‘them’.

So I’m going to tell you my three favorite things about our church and Unitarian Universalism as I’ve experienced it here, it’s my top 3 – My favorite thing about this church is probably best expressed by something I wrote for a panel discussion on religion and the environment at St. Edwards University in 2008:

“I belong to a Unitarian Universalist Church not because I identify as a Unitarian Universalist, but because I believe that the Unitarianism Universalism is the contemporary religion most closely poised to become what I would call post-denominational. It is denominational thinking that separates Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Sihks, Buddhists, etc. Even when Christians use the term non-denominational, what they mean is precisely denominational in its implication: we are not allied with them. Post-denominational thinking recognizes that, within the context of a human meta-history, many mythologies, philosophies, and prophecies have developed. As Gandhi famously said, “I am a Christian and a Muslim and a Hindu, and so are all of you!” If we survey this variety of human wisdom traditions we can begin to ascertain patterns. Some patterns reveal falseness: they reveal the self-serving, the greedy, the insecure, and the power hungry, these are ultimately revealed by their fruits. Other parts of the pattern seem to reveal insight, insight into the true nature of life and the universe, insight into the nature of humanity, insight into the value of justice, honesty, integrity, and compassion. Post-denominational religion, is concerned with harvesting, developing, expanding, and teaching human wisdom, regardless of culture, language, race, ethnicity, national or regional origin, or any other contrivance which has classically separated (people) from one another.”

So this, for me, is the A-Game of Unitarian Universalism and of this church – we have the SPACE and the ENCOURAGEMENT to draw from ALL the sources of human wisdom in order to find our own path of spiritual progress … in order to nourish souls and transform lives. We have sermons which draw from every religious tradition, cutting edge science, literature, genre fiction, you name it… if it explores the human condition – and to be honest, what doesn’t – it is in-bounds.

Recently, I have been reading A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and he says the following, which I think helps to sharpen why the SPACE provided by UU’ism is important. Tolle says,

“The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won’t find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought. Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is the truth. That’s why Buddhists say “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth. If you believe that only your religion is the Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening … “

I agree with Tolle that the Truth, the one with a capital T, can’t be found in words or thoughts, that those forms can, at best, point to the Truth, but they never ARE the Truth. So, if the words and stories aren’t the truth – what is needed beyond words and stories is the SPACE for pointing, the SPACE for the unpronounceable name of God to be revealed … these glimpses of the Truth behind the words, called Satori in Zen Buddhism, are an important part of what nourishes souls and transforms lives.

Now, before we fall into the trap of patting ourselves on the back for having no creed and the space it provides, I have to warn you that I think the ego trap for contemporary UU’s is a little more subtle …

UU’s tend to be in the service of the ego, instead of the service of the Truth when we use our lack of creed or any other aspect of our identity to feel superior to other religions and other churches or when we assume that our way is the right way.

UU’s tend to be in the service of the ego, instead of the service of the Truth when we try to enhance our collective identity by claiming that historical figures whose ideas we respect were UU’s, even if they weren’t or by claiming that they would have, could have, or should have been UU’s.

UU’s tend to be in the service of the ego, instead of the service of the truth when we believe that the Truth is IN words and not beneath them. When we do this, we mistake cleverness for wisdom and we invite self-righteousness and ego to dom\nate our actions. Because, Meg is on to something when she warns us, repeatedly, that the moment when you feel self-righteous is the moment when you are about to do something… unwise.

I have tried my best to take her advice to heart while I was writing this sermon, but it is hard advice … after all, self-righteousness feels… SO… right!

My second favorite thing about this church in particular and UUism in general, is that we are moving consistently in a direction where we value being at PEACE over being RIGHT. Choosing peace, in today’s world, is serious A-Game. Obviously, dropping the creed was a big step forward in this area, but at a more local level, both in time and space, we are continuing to push toward an ideal for ourselves where we find tremendous value in being at peace and very little value in being right.

Let’s start with our Covenant of Healthy Relations – essentially the only substantive promise required for membership in this community – and a document that I think is quite remarkable in its emphasis – and in what it leaves out:

As a religious community, we promise: To Welcome and Serve

• By being intentionally hospitable to all people of good will
• By being present with one another through life’s transitions
• & By encouraging the spiritual growth of people of all ages

As a religious community, we promise: To Nurture and Protect

• By communicating with one another directly in a spirit of compassion and good will
• By speaking when silence would inhibit progress
• By disagreeing from a place of curiosity and respect
• By interrupting hurtful interactions when we witness them
• & By expressing our appreciation to each other

As a religious community, we promise: To Sustain and Build

• By affirming our gratitude with generous gifts of time, talent and money for our beloved community
• By honoring our commitments to ourselves and one another for the sake of our own integrity and that of our congregation
• & By forgiving ourselves and others when we fall short of expectations, showing good humor and the optimism required for moving forward

Thus do we covenant with one another.

That’s it. We basically have to promise to participate and be nice to each other. We have to promise to value being at peace with one another and to maintain that peace over and above all other agendas.

Why? Well, I hope it is because we realize that the product is not independent of the process. You can only create peace by being peaceful, you can only create generosity by being generous, you can only create cooperation by being cooperative. All other attempts to manipulate the means-ends relationship are intrinsically doomed to failure. As Gandhi says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Peace is another kind of space that we create, it is a space of safety and a space for being that is necessary for the nourishment of souls and the transformation of lives.

My third favorite thing about our church is our commitment to DO JUSTICE. Doing justice is an ongoing thing, it requires justice in our interactions with each other, it requires justice in how we choose to be in the world, it provides opportunities for us to engage in collective action against issues of injustice in our communities and in the larger world.

When I think of the social justice work that we do, and when I think about what to be proud of about our church, when I think about our A-Game, I think of our freeze night program. It is a program that has been in operation for a long time and it takes in single homeless men, the most underserved and arguably the most difficult segment of the homeless population. When we walk the walk, when we put our money where our mouth is, we rock. We pick hard challenges and we step up to the plate to take them on. And, in many ways, every single member of this church can feel proud of our successes in these areas. Because each of us contributes in our own way: as it says in our covenant – we affirm “our gratitude with generous gifts of time, talent and money.”

And, when I meet with individual members of our congregation and I find out about the individual justice work that they are doing in their lives and in the community, that makes me justifiably proud that this community that we support nurtures and supports the kinds of people who go out into the world and do justice.

I remember when we went through the mission development process, I was a trustee at the time, we really struggled with HOW to use the word justice in the mission. It was really clear from all the work we did with the congregation that justice work was critically important to this congregation, but we had to put the word justice into the mission and we struggled to find the right word to go with it. We talked about valuing justice and about practicing justice, we talked about a lot of different words that tried to capture the right relationship with justice for our congregation, but where we ended was DO. Because the only important thing about justice, in the end, is that it gets DONE. And the only way to get justice done is to DO IT NOW, in the present tense, in this moment – the present – the only moment there ever is. You can’t put off doing justice until later, that’s just an excuse for allowing injustice to continue. Now DO JUSTICE are just words, but they point to a deep truth about HOW WE want to BE in the world.

What I hope my ‘top 3’ list has done is paint a certain perspective of how I see our mission to ‘nourish souls, transform lives and do justice’ and I want to leave you with a brief reading from Eckhart Tolle that I think captures how doing justice from a spiritually nourished and transformative space is different than how western culture typically approaches such issues:

“These days I frequently hear the expression “the war against” this or that, and whenever I hear this, I know that it is condemned to failure. There is the war against drugs, the war against crime, the war against terrorism, the war against cancer, the war against poverty, and so on… War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated … Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists … Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind … (ego).”

Because ego, collectively and individually, is the shame in our game – it is that feeling of self-rightrousness that corrupts our best intentions and shifts our attention and our energy from the service of the Truth, to the service of theidentity. When we bring our A-Game,it is strong, it stands on the shoulders of every giant we can find, it holds hands with all, excludes none who are able and willing, and it is in the service of life, in the service of the Truth… and that makes all the difference.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 14 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Eric Hepburn

August 8, 2010

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Eric Hepburn

Sunday, May 25, 2008

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Invocation:

A wise person once said to me, you get to choose how to live, and there are basically two choices, you can choose to be right or you can choose to be peaceful.

The more I have reflected on this the more clear it has become that choosing to be right is about ego, while choosing to be peaceful is about wisdom.

Peace be with you.

Let us join together in song.

Prayer

How can we become more compassionate?

It is helpful to think of a generic situation where you are engaged with another person.

You perceive their actions, and from this perception you normally confer onto them motives and thoughts.

It is by these motives and thoughts, which we have imagined, that we determine how we will react to their action.

One form of compassion happens when we are clear and honest about the actions of others, but kind and generous when we infer thought and motive.

There is an expression for this in English, it is called ‘giving the benefit of the doubt.’

One way to cultivate our capacity for giving the benefit of the doubt is to keep in mind that we do not know what others are thinking.

Another way is to confer to others a range of possible thoughts or motives, and to be intentional when we treat them as if their motives are the noblest ones.

One of the side effects of this practice, is the way that it helps and encourages others to live up to the generosity of your interpretations.

Let us pray this morning that we can learn to become masters at giving others the benefit of the doubt.

Sermon: Understanding Evangelical Christianity

My first chosen religion was evangelical Christianity, I was a holy roller, I sang and danced and spoke in tongues, and I shouted Amen, whenever I was moved. My second chosen religion was Atheism, I was a professional skeptic and debunker, proud in my claims not to believe in anything that hadn’t been proven. And now my chosen religion, they say the third times a charm, well my chosen religion now doesn’t have a name, I attend this Unitarian Universalist church and I stand in this pulpit from time to time, I search for the truth, and I am honored that you have agreed to spend this morning with me so that I can share some thoughts with you about this journey.

In the home where I grew up religion was not a serious issue. We subscribed to the pedestrian mainstream American view that Christianity was true, but that you didn’t have to go to Church to be a good person, and good people go to heaven, which is important, because hell is not a very nice place.

During my childhood I spent summers with my maternal grandparents. When I was twelve they moved back to rural Illinois where our extended family lived. My Great-Uncle Web was a preacher at a Free-Will Pentecostal Church there, and since all my cousins who were my age went to Church three times a week, I wanted to go with them.

Now, I had been to Church before, but I had never seen a Church like this. I don’t think I will ever forget the first time that I saw someone speak in tongues. I didn’t have to wait long, it was about seven minutes into my first service when my Great-Aunt Rose got to her feet and began making noises not unlike ululation at first, and then transforming into a kind of wailing string of syllables. It was eerie and a little frightening, but by the end of that service, I knew that this wasn’t just an eccentricity of my Aunt Rose, but a normal part of how these people, many of them my family, worshiped.

Three weeks later I was saved, the next week I received the spirit of the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues for the first time, later that summer I received the gift of healing and performed a faith healing on my great-grandmother’s chronic headaches, which she swore lasted a whole week. I also participated in casting out my first demon that summer, it was a spirit of man-hating in a young woman in the congregation who had been abandoned by her father, and who later went on to marry one of my cousins. As the summer drew to a close, I became concerned about how I was going to continue ‘walking in the light’ when I returned home. My uncle’s Church didn’t have any affiliates in my area, but he assured me that if I prayed and searched, God would find me a home congregation.

I returned home, filled with hope, not only of finding a spiritual community, but of rescuing my family from their religious malaise and bringing them once more under the direct protection of Jesus Christ. Both of these quests were disastrous. My family rejected my evangelical advances and my search for a local congregation was even worse, I was told by many ministers and preachers that speaking in tongues was wrong, that it was a misinterpretation of scripture, that it was even the work of the devil. This practice of Speaking in tongues had become central to my way of worship, as had dancing in the spirit, and raising my hands in the air, and shouting Amen when something the preacher said really resonated with me. Sitting quietly and listening to someone talk, standing still with a hymnal in hand singing dirges, I couldn’t reconcile these methods with my desire to worship and glorify God. I searched, and after a while I stopped searching, I read my Bible, and after a while I stopped reading, I worried about my salvation, and after a while, I stopped worrying.

My life became much as it had always been and when I returned to my Grandparents’ home the summer of my 14th year, I inititialy refused the invitations to go to Church, I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, I preferred to forgo the ecstatic experiences of church to avoid the pain of losing them again. And I also felt let-down by God because I believed that he had not helped me to find a home congregation.

But it didn’t last long, a month maybe, and I was back at Church, on my knees weeping, asking forgiveness for my failure to stay on the path. So I sang, and I danced, and I shouted Amen, and I spoke in tongues. And this time when I went home, I didn’t struggle. I rendered unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s, and unto God the things that were God’s. In this case, the God that I worshiped was in rural Illinois and my normal life; school, immediate family, friends, these things belonged to the secular world of Caesar. That was my last summer in the Church.

Religion once again became a non-issue in my daily world, but that all changed during my first semester at college. I was taking a philosophy course on contemporary moral issues, and when the topic of homosexuality came up, the quiet (or sometimes not so quiet) bigotry of rural Christianity was waiting there in the back of my brain, ready to argue the point of why homosexuality was wrong. I bolstered my claims with biology, with logic, with everything but the kitchen sink. But when the professor asked me what was wrong with two people loving each other, with two people wanting to be each others’ best friends and helpmates, I had no answer. Like most people who had never actually known or been friends with any gay people, I was all focused on the sex act. Once I was forced to step beyond the bedroom into the world of life, where people love each other, where people care for each other, and where sex is simply a physical expression of that love, I was left without a leg to stand on. On that day, in that class period, I abandoned the God of rural Illinois, I publicly changed my position on homosexuality, apologized if I had offended anyone, and began to self-identify as an atheist. Because my professor was right, hate and intolerance are incompatible with love. And I knew then that Love and justice were more important to me than the God of the Bible, than the God of rural Illinois.

I spent the next few months reading psychology texts and talking with people, trying to reframe my religious experiences into this new atheistic framework. I rewrote my narrative of those years using terms like: social pressure, group think, and brainwashing. I researched the Bible critically, embracing a deconstruction of both the text and the life of Jesus. I believed that I had been duped, that I had been sold a Santa Claus type lie, the only consolation was that the people who sold it had believed it to be true. In reality, this simply increased my feelings of condescension toward grown-ups who had failed to realize that the Jesus story was just another myth. I patted myself on the back for being smarter than they were.

Luckily for me, my journey was not over. It took two other mentors to help me find a deeper and more honest view of the truths of those years. The first one was a Sociology professor named Lonn Lanza-Kaduce. He issued a challenge at the beginning of his Sociology of Law course. He said that anyone can read a theory and tear it apart and find all of its weak points; deconstruction is easy. What is hard, he said, and more rewarding, is to give each author their strongest possible reading. What problems or issues is the author most concerned with? What truth or truths are they trying to deal with? As a reader, can you give the author the benefit of the doubt and confront him on his strongest ground, instead of searching for his weaknesses. It was a serious challenge and it had a profound impact on the tenor of the class, every week we had serious discussions about the merits and strengths of different theories and we looked at how different theories actually addressed different domains of problems, and how much of the criticism that was written about them was really missing the point. We learned how to build better theories.

The second influence was Dr. David Hackett, a religion professor, I took the Sociology of Religion course primarily as a way to improve my background knowledge and debating skill when I challenged the evangelical literalist Christian missionaries who regularly visit college campuses with their confrontational style of ministry. It had become a favorite pastime of mine to spend hours in the middle of the day debating them, challenging them, winning over the crowd. I wish I could say that I had done it with love, I wish I could say that it had meant more to me at the time than winning the debate, in the background was always this justification of keeping them from preying on students’ insecurities and feeding them lies, but, in reality I knew that I was preaching to the choir. My sparring with them was about my own ego, my need to show my superiority, so I got what I deserved when I took this Sociology of Religion course.

When I found out that the professor was a practicing church-goer, I almost dropped the course, luckily for me, my ego was too big for that. Just like the philosophy professor had pulled the rug out from under my homophobia by asking the larger question about love, this professor pulled the rug out from under my sense of atheistic superiority by asking if there was value in the story. He claimed that one didn’t have to believe that the Bible was the literal word of God in order to be a Christian, that one did not have to subscribe to the divinity of Christ, or the resurrection, or miracles, or any of the things I had spent the last two years lambasting. If the Roman myths served Roman culture, and the Greek myths served Greek culture, why couldn’t the Christian myths in the Bible serve as a moral framework for Western Christian culture.

Well, he had me there. If we had permission to view the Bible as a collection of stories, a collection of myths, then we could apply the same ‘strongest-reading’ approach that I had learned in the context of social theory. I became a fan of Jesus, of Buddha, and of Mohammed in that class. I read their words, and the words from other world religions in that class, I looked for the passages where they saw the truth most clearly and didn’t worry about the parts where their culture, or their fear, or their greed, or their other human frailties got in the way. I began to believe in the universality of truth, in the idea that we are all seeking this truth, that it is a fundamental part of our nature, that it is this truth that unites us and makes us whole.

In graduate school I began to integrate my love of the prophets with my own narrative. I began to critically evaluate both my early religious experiences, my atheism, and my atheistic contention that those early experiences had been meaningless. Ultimately, I was able to reconcile my understanding with my history and reclaim the genuine aspects of those early religious experiences.

I no longer find it surprising in retrospect that one of the most socially bizarre and controversial aspects of my early practice, speaking in tongues, has ended up being one of the most important to me. When I was an atheist I was ashamed of this part of my past, ashamed because I believed that I had been socially pressured into faking a religious experience. But the more I reflected on the experience, the more I realized that I had been wrong. The social pressure theory wasn’t true to the story, it wasn’t true to my experience. The pressure I felt was not pressure to fit in, it was not pressure to please my family or the church, it was the pressure of what to say when you believe you are face to face with God. When you are in that moment of prayer and you feel yourself in communion with God, with the Universe, what do you say? What can you say? Such immense beauty, such immense pain, such immense love? That is what speaking in tongues taps into. When you want to shout your feelings to God, but you can’t put them into words, you just let those raw feelings out in the form of sound. And in that church, you were allowed that freedom and I experienced it, and I cherish it still.

Now, I’m not suggesting that UU’s should start speaking in tongues, it wouldn’t be genuine, and it wouldn’t produce the desired result. What I am suggesting is that we start thinking, individually and collectively, about how we can foster an environment, how we can produce a spiritual haven here in this sanctuary every Sunday, where people leave their self-criticism and their criticisms of others at the door. A space where people can clap, sing, dance, meditate, sit quietly, hum, think, pray, do whatever they do, but do it without worrying about being judged or without spending any energy judging or thinking about what others are doing. Can we, the distracted intellectuals that we are, find a way to experience communal peace and joy here together every Sunday? I think that we can.

I think it starts with looking inward, with using this time we have here together with the unconditional love and support of our community to bask in the light, love, and joy of the truth. Because the truth is joyful. Let me reiterate that for all of us intellectual doubting Thomases who have a much easier time seeing everything that is wrong with the world, and I include myself. The truth is joyful. This didn’t sink in for me until I went to see the Dalai Lama when he came to town, and I tell you friends, the truth has set that man free. And that freedom radiates from him like a warm light of love and joyfulness. He is not joyful because he has comforting illusions, he is joyful because he has spent his life smashing the illusions that separate us from the truth. There is ever-present in his life the radiance of God, the radiance of an interconnected and interdependent universe, the radiance of the power of life and love.

That radiance, the radiance of the truth, is the light that has inspired all religion. It is the same light that the Evangelical Christians are seeking to capture when they go to church, the same light they are trying to share when they come knocking at your door, the same light that you were searching for this morning when you made your way to this sanctuary. The truth is not fractured, but we are often fractured. The truth is not exclusive, but we are all too often exclusive.

The next time you are confronted with someone who has a religious symbol system that you don’t share, I want you to try and translate. You don’t have to subscribe to God language in order to use God language. Maybe internally, you prefer to use the word Universe instead of God, or maybe you don’t like to assign a word to that concept at all. That’s OK. You can translate into their language, and if your heart and intentions are in the right place, your translation into their symbol system will work out.

This doesn’t only apply to Evangelical Christians, it can apply to anyone. If you remember that the differences are often differences in religious language, differences in symbols and not differences in ultimate truth, then you come to realize the possibility of breaking spiritual bread with any of your brothers and sisters. This does not negate the reality of differences in belief, those differences are real, they exist. What I am suggesting is that when we focus on our differences in opinion, we create divisiveness and discord. When we focus on what we agree on, on the magnificence of the universe, the beauty and the pain of living, the importance of love and compassion, the comfort of human companionship, when we focus on these core truths of religion, we create peace and joy. The choice is up to you, you can choose to be right, or you can choose to be peaceful.

Benediction

I would like to close today with a greeting, because today’s sermon, if given its strongest reading, was about changing the way we meet people, it was about conferring the greatest benefit of the doubt to all of our brothers and sisters, without any reason to do so but faith, without any reason but love.

The greeting is Namaste and it means ?I see the light in you that is also in me.?

Namaste.

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© Eric Hepburn

June 3, 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.

Invocation

I’d like to open this morning with a passage from the Martin Luther King Jr. sermon Rediscovering Lost Values:

“The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations.” In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws. I’m not so sure we all believe that.

We never doubt that there are physical laws of the universe that we must obey. We never doubt that. And so we just don’t jump out of airplanes or jump off of high buildings for the fun of it – we don’t do that. Because we unconsciously know that there is a final law of gravitation, and if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences – we know that. Even if we don’t know it in its Newtonian formulation, we know it intuitively, and so we just don’t jump off the highest building in (Austin) for the fun of it – we don’t do that. Because we know that there is a law of gravitation which is final in the universe. If we disobey it we’ll suffer the consequences.

But I’m not so sure if we know that there are moral laws just as abiding as the physical law. I’m not so sure about that. I’m not so sure if we really believe that there is a law of love in this universe, and that if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences.”

Prayer:

Please join me in an attitude of prayer, as we share this reading from Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking

so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,

we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,

our presence automatically liberates others.

Sermon : A liberal reclamation of natural law

When Dr. King argued in our opening reading that there are moral laws that are just as abiding as the physical laws, what laws is he referring to? In order to be clear in our consideration of an answer to this question, we must start by being clear about the nature of morality. Morality is the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil. So, what Dr. King is arguing is that just as there is a law of gravity that describes the inevitable relationship of attraction between two masses, there are laws of morality that describe the inevitable relationships between right and wrong, between good and evil.

Classical natural law was the first systematic attempt to explore these relationships. It was based on the idea that there is a human nature and a human essence which defines how human beings must live in order to have a good life. Aristotle’s formulation of the first principle of natural law was that one should do good and avoid evil. However, if we survey the history of natural law, we can’t help but notice some of the dogmatic and inhumane positions that have been taken in its name. We can look back to Aristotle and read of natural law used in defense of slavery. We can survey contemporary natural law thinkers and read of opposition to abortion, opposition to gay rights, and support for economic disparity. When we view this checkered history, we might reasonably assume that the idea of natural law is simply one more archaic holdover from a bygone past when humankind had little understanding of the world and relied on inflexible and absolutist proscriptions to govern social life. We might reject the very idea of natural law and embrace the relativistic ethics of postmodern academia. But I suggest to you, that tossing out the idea of natural law along with its substantial historical baggage is a case of tossing out the baby with the bathwater, because, perhaps more than ever, a reclaimed version of natural law could provide the very anchor that liberalism seems to be so badly in need of.

So, let’s start with a fresh look at the core concepts of natural law in light of our current religious and scientific knowledge. The basis for our revised concept of natural law is simply the idea that there are rules or laws which govern the operation of the universe. This proposition is generally accepted when we are dealing with the analytical categories of the hard sciences; with laws of gravity, laws of inertia, laws of ecology, laws of genetics, or laws of biology. But when we attempt to formulate what natural laws govern humanity, this is when things have tended to become more controversial. If there is natural law that applies to all living things or natural law that applies specifically to humanity, perhaps these constitute moral law as Dr. King spoke about. The question is: how can we discern these laws? It is true that we are not exempt from the laws of gravity, or inertia, or relativity, which effect all matter in our universe. It is also true that we are not exempt from the laws of ecology or genetics which govern all forms of life as we know it. But human natural law, moral law which applies exclusively to our species, must itself be rooted in those aspects that are uniquely yet universally human.

Aristotle’s analysis identified reason as the key human virtue that distinguishes us from other animals. Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and the other major figures in natural law thinking have all followed suit. So, if it is reason, if it is our advanced capacity for logical and speculative thought, that differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, then it is here that we will find the core of a human natural law.

Our contemporary understanding of human biology and cognitive science, as well as the contextual issues of biological and social evolution, provide us with important insights that were unavailable to the classical thinkers. For instance, it is quite clear to us now that the human ability to reason does not develop much beyond the level of our primate cousins without the acquisition of human language and symbol systems. Language is the cognitive toolkit required for human level reasoning and we are not born with it, we must acquire it through learning. What makes us human is that we learn, and what and how we learn determines our humanity. The evolution of human knowledge and culture has become much more critical to our survival than our biological evolution.

Research in developmental psychology indicates that our worldview and moral development proceed in relatively linear stages, for example from pre-conventional, to conventional, to post-conventional. In addition, there is strong evidence that the average mode of moral development of a population is strongly associated with the types of social structures, institutions, and cultures that the population will have. Along these related arcs of individual development over a lifetime and social evolution over recorded human history, we find opportunities for a new take on natural law and a new story arc for humanity.

Just as most classical natural law has been rooted in the Christian theology of the Fall, in the presumption that humanity is imperfect and flawed, in the assumption that we are incapable of overcoming the taint of original sin without divine intervention; so our reclaimed natural law must be rooted in the ideology that humanity has awakened to an amazing capacity to learn, to understand, to act, and to create. We are here to learn about our universe and about ourselves, and as we learn, as we understand, as we act, and as we create, we are perfected. The ancient Hebrew understanding of the word perfect was not a state, it was not a condition, it was a process. It is this dynamic process of continually learning, understanding, acting, and creating that I believe is the fundamental human natural law.

The first corollary to this law is humility. Humility is the recognition that there is no end to this process of learning, no end to this process of perfection. Our perception of our place within this process may be accurate or it may be wishful thinking. We must be assertive about acting on our beliefs, but open about the ultimate rightness of those beliefs. Like good scientists we must remember that our understandings are only theories and that they may need editing or be disproved as we continue to learn and as our understanding grows. Developmental stagnation often occurs when we forget humility, when we cherish our current theories more than we cherish learning, when we believe we have already learned something, or don’t need to learn any more. These failures of humility happen when we forget that it is our essence to keep learning, when we forget that what we already know is just tentative, just a bridge to the next realization.

The second corollary to the fundamental human law is compassion. If humility is the recognition that we never stop learning, compassion is the recognition that the same is true for our brothers and sisters. Compassion, in this context, is remembering that it is more important to be peaceful than to be right. A focus on being right produces an emphasis on the other person being wrong, it short-circuits the possibility of constructive dialogue, where people can share their understandings and potentially reconcile their disagreements. It is failures of compassion that produce most developmental stagnation at the social scale. When groups and individuals in society become convinced that they are right, that others are wrong, that they have learned all there is, or all that they need to know, then they stop producing open and honest dialogue with one another. While this critique applies to much of the religious right in this country, it also applies to the dogmatic left. Dogmatism is, by definition, both a failure in humility and a failure in compassion.

As we engage successfully in this process of perfection, of learning and acting, then we progress toward enlightenment. These elements of learning, understanding, acting, and creating make up an iterative process of human engagement. In order to work effectively we must learn through observation, understand through abstraction, and apply what we have learned through action, thereby creating our best version of reality. Our moral development stagnates when this process becomes broken, when we fail to learn, when we fail to understand what we have learned, when we fail to act on our understandings, when we have these failures, we fail to create the best world of which we are capable. Because we are not powerless, our greatest fear has come true, we are powerful beyond measure.

Those who have realized their power, who have let their light shine out to the world, they are the prophets in our human story. They are the beacons of moral development who blaze ahead into uncharted territories, showing us the way. They taught us myths when we knew only of the hunt and the cave. They taught us to love all our human brothers and sisters when we knew only of the love of kinship or the love of the tribe. They taught us science when we had turned our myths into facts. They taught us compassion when our hearts were filled with greed. They taught us humility when we knew that we were right. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed- Martin Luther King Jr., Tenzin Gyatso the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Mohandas K. Gandhi- and how many others whose names are lost in the past, and how many more who will bless us in the future? They are out there among us as we speak, waiting to teach us the next lessons. They are the outliers on the bell-curve of moral development, those who have managed to evolve further than their peers, the bodhisattvas of humanity, hoping for the chance to lend us a helping hand as we labor to live up to our status as the radiant children of god.

If we reject the story of the Fall and its implication of our inherent imperfection, if we embrace the idea of awakening, if we embrace the idea of our perfectibility, then we must embrace the open ended nature of our own story. Once again we have the benefit of knowledge and insights of which the classical thinkers were unaware, we know, even though it is very difficult to understand, that our universe is old beyond imagining, that it is vast beyond our comprehension, that countless species of life have come into being and passed into extinction on this very planet we call home, that the timescales of our human civilizations are but blinks of the eye in the history of life on this planet. We have learned these things together, we struggle to understand them, and one day we must act on this understanding to continue the creation of our story. Right now our story is but a tiny chapter in the tale of this universe. How large a part we will ultimately play is up to us, for we are powerful beyond measure.

We learn, we apply what we learn to our universe, to our societies, and to ourselves, we recreate the universe as we go. This is the nature of our gift, the nature of our humanity. When we apply this gift to the betterment of ourselves, to the betterment of our brothers and sisters, to the betterment of our environments and ecologies, to the betterment of our governments and institutions, then we do good. We promote the fullest version of humanity that is possible in that moment. Then, we are powerful beyond measure. Then, we are the radiant children of god.

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And as we realize this about ourselves, let us learn to see it behind the faces of everyone we meet:

– that behind their mask of flesh and blood, is an I that is so much like our own

– that they are also luminous beings, wondrous to behold

– that they too are endowed with a will that struggles to free itself

And may these realizations help us find a way:

– to live together as brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself

– to grow together as kindred spirits on a shared quest for truth

– to decide together to make this world the utopia that it can be

SERMON: Demons of the Heart, Part 2

The sermon that I’ve come to share with you today is based heavily upon the works of three people who I consider modern-day prophets: Martin Luther King Jr., Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, and Mohandas K. Gandhi. When we think about religion there is a tendency to focus our attention upon the great religious prophets of the distant past, prophets whose context was so radically different from our own that it seems difficult, sometimes even ludicrous, to apply their teachings to our modern lives. So I want to focus on these modern day prophets, who applied the highest teachings to the problems and the situations that they faced right here in the modern world. Hopefully, their example will serve to remind us that the highest ideals of life are not made for pedestals but to govern the hearts and deeds of each one of us?

First I would like to share with you some passages from a Martin Luther King Jr. sermon entitled “loving your enemies”.

The agape form of love is understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them..

When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

And this is what Jesus means? when he says, “Love your enemy.” And it’s significant that he does not say, “Like your enemy.” Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, “Love your enemy.” This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.

I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus? thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil… Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love.

There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted? For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does.

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you.

Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them.

And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.”

I’d like to translate some of this traditional Christian language into some terms and ideas that are a little more accessible to those of us who, while having a great respect for the religion of Jesus, do not subscribe to the religion about Jesus.

First, Dr. King relies heavily upon the idea that we love our enemies because God or Jesus loves them. At the core of these assertions, I believe, is not any sort of construct about God being a personality or a father figure or Jesus his sole manifestation in the flesh, but the more fundamental truth of human unity. The more fundamental idea that we members of this human species are brothers and sisters, children of the same universe. The more fundamental idea that our similarities are greater than our differences and that we ultimately struggle for the same things: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Second, I think the idea of agape needs clarification, because every time that the word love is used in this sermon, he means agape. He’s not talking about eros, about erotic love, about the love of beauty, or about the love of attraction. He’s also not talking about philia, about the love of companionship, the love of friendship, or the love of kinship. He is talking about agape, about understanding, redemptive goodwill. He is talking about having a basic feeling, a basic attitude toward all people that acknowledges their basic worth as human beings, that understands that they struggle to be good, just as we do, and that hopes, one day, that they will overcome their inner demons and come to live out the better angels of their nature, just as we have those hopes for ourselves.

Next, I’d like to talk about the attitudes that we take when we are in opposition to others, because what we believe, what we intend in the world has a great impact on how we act, how we are perceived by others, and ultimately, in a karmic sense, on the real outcomes of our action. When we act in opposition to another person or group of people, we have the power to choose this attitude. We could choose to treat them as an enemy, to dehumanize them, to devalue them, to disrespect and marginalize them, then we are trying to defeat them, to destroy or maim or cripple them. This is what Dr. King is arguing against. On the other hand, if our opposition is accompanied by agape, then the intent, the attitude toward the opponent, does not seek defeat, it does not seek destruction, but it seeks redemption. Within the acts of this opposition are nested opportunities for the opponent’s redemption. Within the acts of this opposition are found indications of goodwill, of understanding, and of hope. Underlying these acts of opposition is an obvious foundation of clear morality which calls out to the opponent as a brother or sister. Seeking to defeat an opponent backs them into a corner, opposing them with agape leaves open a door for cooperation where we can join with them to defeat the common problem.

I’d like to turn now to another prophet, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Driven from his homeland and his people during the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese, the Dalai Lama has become an international spokesperson for compassion, peace, love, and nonviolence. Despite the tremendous oppression and violence done to the people of Tibet, the Dalai Lama has earnestly and consistently treated the members of the Chinese government with kindness and respect, while publicly condemning the actions of the government. I would like to share with you some of his thoughts on love and enemies.

Love is the desire to see happiness in those who have been deprived of it. We feel compassion toward those who suffer; this is the desire to see them released from their suffering. We habitually feel affection and love for those closest to us and for our friends, but we feel nothing for strangers and even less for those who seek to harm us. This shows that the love for those closest to us is heavily tinged with attachment and desire and that it is partial. Genuine love is not limited to those close to us but extends to all beings, for it is founded on the knowledge that everyone, like us, wishes to find happiness and avoid suffering. Moreover, this extends to all people the right to find happiness and be free of pain. As such, genuine love is impartial and includes everyone without distinction, including our enemies.

As for compassion, we must not confuse it with commiserating pity, for that is tainted with a certain scorn and gives the impression that we consider ourselves superior to those who suffer. True compassion implies the wish to put an end to others’ suffering and a sense of responsibility for those who suffer. This sense of responsibility means that we are committed to finding ways to comfort them in their trouble. True love for our neighbor will be translated into courage and strength. As courage grows, fear abates; this is why kindness and brotherly love are a source of inner strength. The more we develop love for others, the more confidence we will have in ourselves; the more courage we have, the more relaxed and serene we will be.

The opposite of love is malice, the root of all faults. On this basis, how can we define an enemy? Generally, we say an enemy is someone who seeks to harm our person or those who are dear to us, or our possessions; someone, therefore, who opposes or threatens the causes of our contentment and our happiness. When an enemy strikes against our belongings, our friends, or our loved ones, he is striking against our most likely sources of happiness. It would be difficult, however, to affirm that our friends and possessions are the true sources of happiness, because in the end the governing factor is inner peace; it is peace of mind that makes us relaxed and happy, and we become unhappy if we lose it.”

Too often we confuse love with affection and compassion with pity. For what is love, when we have removed all attachment, but the wish for the other’s happiness. And what is compassion, when we have removed all traces of condescension and judgment, but the wish for the other’s healthiness. Love and compassion in the language of the Dalai Lama are tantamount to the agape that MLK spoke of, a genuine expression of goodwill towards all, a hope for their freedom from suffering and for their experience of happiness.

The other aspect of the Dalai Lama’s thought that I think warrants emphasis, is the personal responsibility and ownership that we must take for our own happiness, our own healthiness, our own spiritual development. Because, the key to enlightenment, to love, to compassion is not out there? it is in here. Similarly, the stumbling blocks, the walls, the barriers to enlightenment, the true enemies, are also, in here. And the one power that you have as an individual, the one thing in the whole universe that can never be taken from you, is the power to choose; the power to choose how you view your life, what your priorities are, what you believe in, and how you will live your life within the context that is given to you.

Finally, I would like to share with you some of the words of Mohandas K. Gandhi. For although his prose is not as elegant nor his theology as well articulated as that of Dr. King or the Dalai Lama, Gandhi was a prophet who through his own life made the real possibilities of nonviolent action manifest. His biography stands as a testament to the potential power of each one of us to produce change in the world by living up to the ideals that we hold highest.

Having flung aside the sword, there is nothing except the cup of love which I can offer to those who oppose me. It is by offering that cup that I expect to draw them close to me. I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man, and believing as I do in the theory of rebirth, I live in the hope that, if not in this birth, in some other birth, I shall be able to hug all humanity in friendly embrace.”

Whenever I see an erring man, I say to myself I have also erred; when I see a lustful man, I say to myself so was I once; and in this way, I feel kinship with every one in the world and feel that I cannot be happy without the humblest of us being happy.

I am too conscious of the imperfections of the species to which I belong to be irritated against any single member thereof. My remedy is to deal with the wrong wherever I see it, not to hurt the wrong-doer, even as I would not like to be hurt for the wrongs I continually do.”

Doesn’t the New Testament say, “If your enemy strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left?” I have thought about it a great deal. I suspect he meant you must show courage – be willing to take a blow – several blows – to show you will not strike back – nor will you be turned aside . . . And when you do that it calls upon something in human nature – something that makes his hate for you diminish and his respect increase. I think Christ grasped that and I have seen it work.”

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.”

Each of these prophets, each of these men, comes from a different religious tradition. Each of them has been tested severely by the tides of history, by the oppression of their people, by violence in their homeland, and by the constant threat of death against their own lives. And each of them, through their own search for truth, has come up with essentially the same answer:

Begin by looking inside, by taking responsibility for yourself, for your own feelings, your own actions.

Let go of anger and fear before they fester into hatred.

Act against injustice wherever you find it.

Tolerate other people, remember that they are just as flawed as we are.

Treat those who oppose you with the respect and human dignity with which you expect to be treated.

This is their advice, and it’s a tall order. Some might even argue that it is naive, that it isn’t the way the world works. My answer is this: the philosopher applies the power of intellect to describe how the world works, the prophet applies the power of love to describe how the world could work. That is why I call these three men prophets, and that is why I believe that their wisdom is not for pedestals but was meant to govern the hearts and deeds of each one of us?

BENEDICTION

I would like to close today with the quote from Gandhi that called me to do this sermon. I offer it to you as a blessing and as a meditation, in hopes that it may bring you closer to God, however you define it.

“the only devils in the world are those running “round in our own hearts, and that is where all our battles ought to be fought.”

Eric Hepburn 2006