In Search of Freedom

by Posted in Audio available, Gary Bennett, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Gary Bennett

May 17, 2009

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

READING:

What persons great and not so great have to say on the subject of freedom. All but the last two quotes from Dr. Laurence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations , 1977

Will Rogers – Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Mark Twain – It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Theodore Roosevelt – Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

Abraham Lincoln – The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.

Albert Camus – Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

Ernest Benn – Liberty is being free from the things we don’t like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.

B. F. Skinner – By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave – the motives, the desires, the wishes . . . we increase the feeling of freedom.

Eric Hoffer – When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Adlai Stevenson – A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.

Abe Fortas – The story of man is the history, first of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within the system of necessary restraints.

Bernard Malamud – The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Virginia Woolf – To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Edmund B. Chaffee – The majority of us are for free speech only when it deals with those subjects concerning which we have no intense convictions.

Harold Ickes – Freedom to live one’s life with the window of the soul open to new thoughts, new ideas, new aspirations.

Gertrude Himmelfarb – Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely.

C. Wright Mills – Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and the best man winning than the man who inherited his father’s store or farm.

Norman Thomas – After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement.

Daniel Webster – Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.

Kris Kristofferson – Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Gary Bennett – America is 100 million people going to the same place at the same time to do the same thing, but traveling in 100 million different cars.

SERMON:

I really wanted to give this a title like Freedom: For and Against, but chickened out. After all, if there is any point on which pretty much all 6 billion of us are agree, it is that Freedom is a Good Thing. But deciding what it is exactly that we are for, that is a harder matter. I want us to think about the Tea Parties on April 15. Not the politics, which bothered me a lot; but what I would have to say shouldn’t come from the pulpit. But there were some serious moral issues that drew people to protest. There’s the legacy of debt we are still piling up for the future. The bumper sticker, “We’re spending our children’s inheritance,” isn’t so funny any more. And there’s the idea that taxes are an evil thing, because they take away our freedom.

“No taxation without representation,” the patriots of 1776 said, and for some the British tax on imported tea was such a dangerous matter, it justified dumping perhaps a million dollars worth of tea (10,000 at the time) into the harbor in a monstrous act of vandalism. “Liberty” was the word they used, a little more narrowly political than “freedom.” At the dawn of history we meet the Egyptian Pharaohs and the Sumerian priest-kings, gods or agents of gods who could not be crossed; there was only enough liberty for one. Actually wealthy nobles were there to fight for power with them from the beginning; and they established rules and boundaries over time. The Code of Hammurabi is the oldest set of written rules we know about; and from it we get that rudimentary concept of justice, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” As far as liberty goes, though, there still wasn’t much left over for anybody else. A similar struggle took place in England thousands of years later, leading to the Great Charter between King John and his barons, still considered the birthplace of our written law. One bullet point was the idea that new taxes could only be imposed by the King acting in Parliament; and some four hundred years later that was the wedge that led to the English Civil War and the transfer of ultimate power to Parliament. So it is no wonder that the idea that taxes were only just with the consent of the governed still was magic over a century after that.

But Americans today do have representative government; there’s nothing in the catchphrase that says that your party has to win for taxes to be legit. But the Libertarians who have been doing these tea parties for a number of years cite a different tradition, one in which taxes even with representation are pretty sketchy. Englishmen, including those of us on this side of the Pond, in the 18th century were actually pretty uncomfortable with the English Civil War as a model. It was bloody, filled with religious arguments, culture wars we might say, pretty dangerous to the propertied classes; a king was beheaded and even a primitive sort of democratic socialism (the Levellers) began to stir. So good Enlightenment thinkers preferred to talk about the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution of 1688. King James II was the sort of ruler who, by combining dangerous ambitions, ruthless means and incredible stupidity, manage to give despotism a bad name; and in short, he managed in three years to unite the whole country against him, went into exile and left everybody feeling that this was the way things were supposed to be done. The Revolution was popular, and so was its chief apologist, John Locke. Inspired by the example of Sir Isaac Newton, he proposed to show that the right to revolution arose from human nature itself. “Man in a State of Nature” is isolated from all other human beings, surrounded by the infinite bounty of the world; but those riches are worthless except insofar as he invests his own life force and liberty into shaping some of them into what then becomes his property. This leads naturally to trading with others, which requires contracts; and ultimately it becomes useful to having some impartial body around to interpret and enforce the contracts. That’s the government; just a bunch of hired hands, as easily dismissed as any unsatisfactory lawn mowing service. No Divine Right of Kings, no superior racial bloodlines, no sacrosanct traditions. And it was nothing like Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that human nature was so depraved and evil that only a crushingly oppressive force could keep people from destroying each other. So Locke’s ideas gained a great deal of favor from the progressive, secular-minded thinkers of the Enlightenment.

But the argument had a force of its own, and some of the conclusions were troubling. Locke agrees that voting is a good way to put governors in place, but he does not think it gives any special moral authority for robbing people of life, liberty or property; only impartial findings of breach of contract by a judge or jury could do that. So taxes, even for proper government services, really were an unjustifiable seizure of property. This has not been a popular idea for governments, not even revolutionary ones. The Declaration of Independence drops the word “property” and talks of “the pursuit of happiness” instead as an inalienable right; the Preamble to the Constitution states that “to promote the general welfare” is as basic an aim of our government as “to provide for the common defense.” Even Locke himself, a practical man, seems not to have taken the idea seriously. But it has taken on a life of its own, with the implicit promise that somewhere down the road all government should just wither away. And so modern Libertarians are inspired by the goal of absolute individual freedom.

But as inspiring as Locke’s words have been to generations of Americans, there are problems. You have to say that his argument is flawed at its most basic: his Man in the State of Nature has no navel. He has come somehow to full-blown civilized English manhood without being born, nourished or educated by the society of people around him; otherwise his absolute moral autonomy would be disappear in all these obligations to others. Any inherited wealth cannot be property created by his own labor. And if you take him out of the woods and put him into a modern American city, invested with the accumulated capital of technology and industry of earlier generations, then his property loses all relationship to Locke’s idea of property; at the same time, the notion that resources are infinite becomes more and more absurd. Perhaps people do have the right to vastly unequal amounts of wealth, but you will have to find a different way of grounding that right from Locke. Try Social Darwinist arguments about “survival of the fittest,” perhaps.

We also see that insisting on an absolute right to wealth will undermine other basic human values, and in the end undercut freedom itself. If you are at the bottom of the economic ladder, you cannot negotiate fairly with giant, immortal corporations; nor is there any good way of providing for the sick, handicapped or elderly in our anonymous cities. And no matter what your skills, you may find yourself in economic trouble if you exercise your freedom of speech, as many people discovered as a result of the McCarthy Era blacklists, or your freedom of religion, as many Moslems found out in the last seven years. So there is a completely different strand of liberal tradition summarized by Franklin Roosevelt in his Four Freedoms Speech: not only should all human beings have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but also freedom from want and freedom from fear.

So freedom is not just a relationship between the individual and the state; it also involves relationships of individuals with one another, and of entire peoples with one another. In the West we have tended to forget this in the last few centuries, as we have been obsessed with Individualism. In ancient and medieval times it was different. For example, the Greeks prized freedom above all things, but they measured it in the independence of their city-states, regardless of how they were governed; they considered inhabitants of empires to be slaves, even the relatively benevolent Persian empire. Let’s take another look at America in 1776. What did the British do that justified bloody red revolution? Taxes on stamps and tea? Really? Restricting settlement west of the Appalachians to protect the Indians? Oh, nasty. And of course they passed some punitive laws after the Boston Tea Party. Even so, it never added up to the level of abuse that a revolution should demand. And then there’s the question: what would the disgruntled Americans have done if they had gotten representation in Parliament? Would it have quieted them down? Probably not. The real beef our forefathers had was they wanted to govern themselves, and had come to think of us as a different nation. But nobody in the 18th century said that empires were wrong, or that nations had the right to be independent; so we borrowed the vocabulary from very different struggles in 17th century England. We still don’t seem to understand this deep need for national independence. After World War II, Americans came to believe that there was no more urgent moral cause in the world than the struggle for democracy, capitalism and freedom against Communism; we were drawn into struggles in places like Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba and Vietnam, assuming these peoples would share our values. We didn’t see that for many of them, distaste for American armies of occupation or puppet regimes would be a much stronger emotion than anti-Communism; they were traditional cultures that thought in terms of freedom for the whole people rather than for expanded individual opportunity. For them, the magic word was “anti-colonialism.” I will leave it to you to judge whether our past several decades of Middle Eastern policy have suffered from the same blind spot.

I think there’s another problem in our idea of freedom: if everyone does everything he or she can, not just in terms of what’s legal but of what we can do without being punished, can ours or any nation survive? Maybe I could get along, taking short cuts in my job, cheating on taxes, stepping out on my wife and, in the wonderful words of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, stealing the change from blind men’s cups. Some people do, and we probably even know a few. When Amy and I lived in Philadelphia, the story we heard was that whenever a city bus was involved in any kind of accident, more people filed whiplash lawsuits than could ever have fit on the bus. Even in Philadelphia, only a small fraction of people push the envelope this way; and no, if everybody did it, we could not remain free. There aren’t enough enforcers, and more importantly we don’t want for there to be enough enforcers, to have eyes everywhere at once. We just expect that most people will try to operate at a higher standard. So what is the point of individual freedom, if it only works when most people are careful not to use it? Perhaps thinking and speaking freely are always good (except for shouting FIRE in a crowded theater). Other nations disagree with us on this; democracies like Britain, France and Germany clamp down much harder on what they consider hate speech and libel. You can make similar arguments for freedom of religion, of assembly, and of the press; and certainly for all sorts of freedom FROM government intrusion. But in practice, we allow a great deal of freedom of action, including many actions which are not good for us or for society as a whole. Perhaps freedom is a precondition for moral behavior; I get no brownie points for not cheating on the test if the teacher is watching closely the whole time I take it. The Puritans who in the 1600s were arguing politically for the rights of Englishmen, even as they also pressed religiously for the priesthood of believers, must have taken this attitude. Just as a priest cannot assume responsibility for my ultimate salvation or damnation, so the state should not block me from going to hell in my own fashion. Only by being free to sin can I be virtuous in not sinning. Thinkers from Zeno and Epicurus to the Buddha saw liberation in self-denial. Doing what came naturally was to act in a subhuman or bestial fashion; the opposite of freedom was slavery to one’s appetites. Whenever government forces us to good things, such as using our tax money to provide for society’s victims, perhaps it robs us of the chance to aspire to virtue by choosing to contribute of own own free will to charity.

So here we are. For some, freedom is a matter of absence of any external restraint, so that even taxation for good causes is a kind of slavery; for others, only in the absence of outside coercion can we act morally. And a far older tradition says that freedom is the right of your group, your tribe, your nation not to be controlled by others, and that the amount of coercion you personally feel is much less important. To the people at the top of the totem pole, it is about not being restrained from exercising power; to the people at the bottom, it is how effectively their bosses can be reined in. And yet, with all these conflicting ideas of what they are talking about, most people assume that they can bandy the term around and have everyone understand. Why? Perhaps because all of these are pieces of an intuitive feeling for freedom which is hard-wired. The True State of Nature for humanity is not what Locke postulates: it is the lives we lived and which shaped us over hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years, wandering in small hunter/gatherer bands. The early humans, even the protohumans had no strong sense of individuality, or of conflict between their own needs and the needs of the group; there were no police to force actions needed for the survival of the whole, yet the tribes survived. If a tribe did shatter through selfish behavior into individuals or even couples pursuing their own aims, the needs of the dependent, unskilled young would not have been met and the genes of the whole group would have disappeared; so natural selection pushed very hard against selfishness and for what we call altruism. Emotions, religious feelings and moral beliefs reinforced tribal identification; and a concept of freedom which was both tribal and individual became part of our wiring. In evolutionary terms, the last 10,000 years was the blink of an eye. Through all the despotisms and imperfect lives, the image of tribal freedom has endured, and visionaries have kept pressing for it. Confucius’ teachings center on the right relationship of self and society; the Hebrew prophets argued for social justice and compassion, as did Mohammed a millennium later. Jesus emphasized the spirit over the letter of the law. Augustine saw freedom in an all-consuming love for God; but Jesus reminded us that God is invisible and can therefore only be loved through our feelings and action for the people around us. So perhaps the ultimate statement of freedom is this: Love your neighbor, and do whatever you will.

Sacred Palimpsest: the Rites of Spring

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

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Ron Phares

April 12, 2009

Mark 16

1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ”

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Gilgamesh; a verse narrative

Friendship is vowing toward immortality and does not know the passing away of beauty… You have known, oh Gilgamesh, what interests me, to drink from the well of immortality. Which means to make the dead rise from their graves and the prisoners from their cells and the sinners from their sins. I think love’s kiss kills the heart of flesh. It is the only way to eternal life.

Song of Myself

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.

Prayer

We come here today in the midst of a loss, a loss of trust, and of community and of direction within our congregation. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We are here in the midst of global ecological and political turmoil. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. As our spiritual disenchantment festers, our financial philanthropy dwindles. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We are here in the midst of a global economic crisis. Which touches not only our friends and neighbors, but also those we may not have met; our global brothers and sisters. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light.

But as the winter becomes the spring, so shall the troubled past become the promising future.

We come here to understand that the investment of our energies into our community lead to a greater personal and communal spiritual growth. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here to understand that a commitment to political and ecological non-violence will help us to change the world. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here and recognize that good life is giving life and that is accomplished through compassion, respect and interest in eachother. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here and recognize that in supporting all of the earth’s creatures we support ourselves. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light.

Amen.

Sermon

Isn’t it delightful that there’s the whiff of iconoclasm in reading the Bible in a UU church? I’m going to actually take it step further and make a confession. This will be a sermon of sentiment. It is sentimental. And I’ll own that and confess that as long as you all understand that a confession is not an apology. Because I feel today drawn between two ordeals. I feel it in myself. I feel it in our community. I feel it in the nation. I feel it in the land. I feel today drawn between beauty and ruin. The feeling took root two mornings past. It just so happened to be Good Friday. You’ll remember because it was probably the same for you, I walked out into the crisp, bright morning and inhaled… the scent of burning. And as I drove to Mayfield park that day, I could see the smoke, come down from the fires far, far north of us, fuzzing out the horizon of hills. So there was that tension, of beauty and ruin, right there in the day. You could see it. You could smell it.

It did occur to me that the day was significant. Perhaps not as much for our community, but for our greater heritage and the culture at large and certainly for many of my classmates at seminary, Good Friday is a momentous notch in the year. It is the day Jesus is put on the cross. And so, it was the day a hero died and a god was born. Beauty and ruin.

Now, this was a couple of days after Passover, which celebrates the freedom of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Pharo granted this beloved freedom after the breath of the Hebrew God killed the first born of every non-Jewish house. Beauty and ruin.

And this morning we have seen a fine piece of theatre about Brother Capek, who, like Jesus, spread his gospel of life while in the belly of a system of death, meeting a similar fate and producing a resonant faith. This is not to mention the performance of the play itself, which appropriately had its own share of beauty and ruin. It’s meta-theatre here at the UU church. Very avante garde. And here we have our flowers, which represent our own flowering and our willingness to give ourselves to others and to receive and recognize the loveliness of our fellows. These flowers are gorgeous. But these flowers are dead. Or dying. Beauty and ruin.

Meanwhile, pulling the lens back to wide angle once again, our economy continues to molt. One has the sense that the system wants to die or is, for all purposes already dead, except for one last mission; for there is a persistent will to not die to nothing, but instead to create another vessel for life, a similar but changed system for the energy of the dieing system to inhabit and invigorate. So that seems ruinous. But there is beauty there too. It’s quite a time to be alive.

So this tension felt, feels, very personal. But maybe you feel it too. Because the personal was just one plane upon which the tension arose. It was in the land, in the economy. It was on the calendar, in the significance of this time of year to our culture, to our practice of Unitarian Universalism, to Christians, to Jews, and, given that not for nothing does this all occur around the vernal equinox, it is significant as well to our pagan forbearers and contemporaries. It’s loaded. It is, and here I get to use the ten-cent word of the sermon title, a palimpsest.

That’s a mighty fine word. As a word, you’d think it might be good for ten dollars, not just cents. But while the economy is cracking, inflation has remained stable, so it’s still ten cents. And worthless in Europe. At any rate, a palimpsest is, first definition, “a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible,” and, second definition, “an object, place, or area that reflects its history.”

And so here, with this beauty and ruin in this calendrical space, we a have a sacred palimpsest. Humans throughout time have responded to this period of year, with the deepest method at their disposal: the art of mythmaking. Particularly in the west there is a sense of pairing, not of opposites necessarily, but of a pairing of beauty and ruin, which are perhaps only a prettier gloss for the clearly oppositional words: life and death. But I don’t want to make this binary. It is more subtle than a play of opposites. And so I will use, rather than life and death, beauty and ruin. I think it more accurately captures the nuance and desperation that culture after culture have felt, crafted stories around, and then placed and recalled for good reason at this time of year.

This palimpsest reminds me of a story in a book I read for class, though now I can’t recall which book or even which class. At any rate, an astrologist or physicist or some such was lecturing about the earth’s place in the solar system, it’s orbit and the implications thereof. At the end of his lecture there was a question and answer period. An elderly woman stood and reprimanded the lecturer. She told him that his words were wrong, that everyone knew that the earth was flat and that it was held up by the back of a turtle. The clever scientist saw quickly how to outflank the woman. Sure that the logic of a simple question would startle her out of her superstition, he asked her, “Well, what’s the turtle standing on?” But she was entirely unphased and replied conclusively, “It’s turtles! All the way down.”

I’m not agreeing with her science, but taken as a testimony to something like a sociology of spirituality, it rings true. What I mean is that, given the sacred palimpsest of this day, right now, and maybe always, maybe everyday, its beauty and ruin – all the way up, all the way down. I don’t think the theme is limited to this time of year necessarily, but its prominence is heightened by the earth’s current alignment, the cyclical flowering of life out of death and back, no doubt.

So here is this stack of turtle-backs of beauty and ruin, running through culture and time, through me, through us, through economy and ecology, from the concept of God through to the concept of Nature. And since these last two seem to meet, we may have a circle rather than an ascending line. So its stacked turtle backs, all the way around. Beauty and ruin, all the way around. It is not likely that we are left out of this great change taking place in our ecosystem, and by that I simply mean spring. We are of the ecosystem, after all. And so maybe this theme is biological, at its root. And if that’s the case, and I tend to think it is at least that, then we as individuals and as culture are, by our very hope and discomfort, expressions of something, articulations of something that is deep within ecological and, by extension, cosmic processes.

So what’s the message? Why is God, the universe, ecology, the pagans, the Jews, the Christians, and Norbert Capeck (in conjunction with whoever moved the flower communion from early summer to the equinox… I think I’ve just gone deterministically from God to a committee, which is true.) At any rate, what are they trying to tell me with this undercurrent of beauty and ruin? What am I trying to tell myself? And quite to the point, what in the name of beauty and ruin am I trying to tell you? What are we supposed to learn or be reminded of? How do we apply it?

For me, the answer has something to do with the notion that creation is a product of tension. Tension is what occurs between a writer and an empty page, between sculptor and clay, between lovers, between the promise of life and an empty tomb.

Recall the readings. The women find the tomb of Jesus empty. This is from the book of Mark, which is incidentally, the first gospel to be written. In Mark’s tale of the resurrection, we don’t ever see Jesus. We see this odd little dude in white, which may very likely be a later edition to the text, but we don’t see Jesus. We just know that his corpse is gone. We are told by this avatar narrator in white that he is risen. But the main thing to understand is that the tomb is empty. This is how Jesus becomes the Christ. His particular, locational absence makes possible his ubiquitous presence. The fact that he is not there, means he can be everywhere, incarnate now in us. The emptiness of the tomb begs questions, calls to our religious imaginations, leads us into that emptiness, so that we too might be everywhere in our reckoning and Christ-like in our compassion. The ruin of the tomb is the beauty of resurrection. It is a new life in the mold of the hero Jesus and therein a kind immortality.

This was also the quest of Gilgamesh and the meditation of its authors. The ancients who carved this tale into stone understood that immortality was not found in the conquest of time but in the timeless act of love. For though friends pass out of our lives, it is acts of true friendship, they tell us, where life is unbound.

So what of beauty and ruin? What of that tension? What are we to do with that sensation? Well, for one, take heart. Celebrate. Savor. The tension between beauty and ruin, gives us hope amidst the rubble of our lives. And when we are feeling high and fine and light, it reminds us to revel in every drop of light, every sweet breath because it is fleeting and will pass. But its passing makes it’s apprehension all the more exquisite. Beauty and ruin, but… beauty and ruin. It plants hope in horror, seeds forgiveness in evil, and from dry boredom, despair and lonliness, coaxes life and worth and laughter. It will come again. And more than that it is here now. Beauty is not permanent, but neither is it permanently suppressible. It is erupting and dying all about us all the time, even in our sorrow, even in our sin, even in our suffering and struggle. It is there. We find it. We nurture it. We savor its every sensation because we know beauty will pass and in that we are sustained. We are nurtured ourselves. We are found. We are given the great gift of unsustainable satisfaction. Beauty and ruin.

So here I am tempted, in response to our congregational episodes of beauty and ruin, to cajole you all into recommitting to this church and to each other, to finding that immortal sensation in friendship, to find life in the empty tomb of this building. But, alas, I see that I am too late. You guys are way ahead of me. I look around and I see the vibrancy of the children’s religious education program. I see book groups and philosophical discussion forums. I see the dedication of our church staff. I see covenant groups and adult education programs. I see, and usually smell, the men’s group breakfast (I smell the breakfast. I see the group.) I hear the talented voices of our congregation lifted and crafted in song and sermon. I see hours and effort put in by caring people in countless committees and positions of leadership and volunteerism. I see an updated web page listing these and many other ways to get involved. I see the senior luncheon and the Voyagers and the FuucYaa’s, a brave few of which are set to do a little evangelizing as they participate in the Hill Country ride for aids very soon. I see an active social action committee inviting our engagement. I see hands on housing and freeze night. I see you. I see you here today holding your flowers and sharing this moment with each other. We are here to refine our best nature. And I gotta say, on the whole, you guys are great. You’re doing it. You’re doing it.

I mean, we’re a little bit all over the map. We make mistakes. And where our mission ought to be, where our purpose ought to be, there is instead a big empty tomb. And that is alarming. But don’t run away. Run in. That’s where we will find life, that’s where we will find each other, if only our attitude is of life, or rather of beauty. Because beauty implies ruin, and that will make compassion the rule, and the key to unlocking immortality in each other. The Navajo have a benediction, or a parting wish classically given; “Walk in beauty.” But I say walk in beauty and ruin and be thereby compelled into a resurrection, into life. Not just life but life unbound. Original energy. And here, because I am a sentimental fool and willingly blind when I know I can get away with it, I have brought a little resurrection of my own. The flower communion is a meaningful event that affirms our principles, our compassion and interconnection. It is beautiful. But, as we noted before, it’s beauty in-folds ruin, as we have sacrificed some life by exchanging it. So I have brought something magical with which we can rejuvenate life. I have brought seeds. We’ll have them for you in the lobby as you leave. What you do is find a little spot of ruin, throw a few bits of good intention into it. Cover it so that it is protected from birds. Give it water and light, watch it grow. Invite your soul. Plant it. Nurture it. Savor it.

Consider the flowers in your hand the seeds of our community. Plant their image and significance in your mind. See it’s beauty and ruin in the hearts of your fellow seekers. Attend to that, protect it and watch it grow. Plant it. Nuture it. Savor it. It is all around you. It is you, every atom.

The Death and Life of Free Will

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

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Ron Phares

March 8, 2009

Reading from Ecclesiastes of the Hebrew Bible.

Illusion of illusions, says the Teacher, illusion of illusions! All is illusion. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.

This also is illusion and a chasing after breath.

Prayer

Let’s pray: We come here today humbled by the uncertainty of our times We return here today, to a touchstone of our lives We arrive here today audacious enough to hope that By our participation in these moments, our fears of uncertainty Might be transformed into a celebration of uncertainty. We come here to connect with our most profound understandings And to give our most generous attention to our ideals, our truth and each other. We are here, hat in hand but fist held high, humble and hopeful. And so we give thanks For this company, for this time and for this place And ask that it train and sustain us For mercy and grace.

Amen

Sermon

Today is a good day. These are uncertain times, but this hour is a good hour. This light. This breath is a good breath. They are good precisely because we are here to recognize them as good, to praise them and be grateful. And the way you’re sitting and thinking are also good, as are these words good words, framed as we are by this day and this hour.

But in the midst of this goodness, there is anxiety. In the midst of our gratitude, there is resentment. In the midst of our praise, there is judgment. We are conflicted, as bodies and as a body. And this is no surprise. In fact, it may be a constant. We’re complex. We’re messy. On a metaphysical level, we’re somehow complete and incomplete at the same time. That there is anxiety and judgment and resentment need not mar the goodness of this hour and may in fact highlight it.

After all, there are reasons we are here this morning. Admirable reasons. There are causes that account for our choosing to show up in this place. We want to be here. So give thanks. Despite our troubled hearts, and maybe because of them, we each made a conscious decision to come worship together. Or did we? Was it ever really a choice? We’re we going to come here this morning regardless of our experience of deciding to do so? Perhaps it was pre-ordained, written in the stars or in the book of life. Could it be that, your being here today was a predestined result due to nigh on infinite causes and consequences dating back to the big bang? A series of causes and consequences that you have no say in whatsoever?

I know that’s not what it feels like. It feels like you chose to be here this morning. But the paradigm in which we live maintains that while there are forks in the path, there was never really any question about which path is taken. Thus, choice is a figment. Free will is an illusion.

So here’s a story. Tell me if you’ve heard this before – a man came face to face with the truth in the form of an apple. A curious fellow, he was fascinated by the natural scene around him and the apple tree near which he sat. And then came the fall. And everything changed. To be clear, it was the apple that fell, not the man. You see, our protagonist’s name was Isaac Newton. And what changed everything, was his assertion that an unseen, but distinct, measurable and predictable force was causing the apple to fall to the ground. No longer did God keep the seas at bay. No longer did reality have a purpose.

Be careful of apples, people. They keep the doctor away, sure, but as Adam and Isaac Newton can attest, they have a conspicuous and dramatic potential to destroy worldviews and realign identity. For no less than that is what gravity did.

At any rate, the discovery of gravity was an assault, the final and definitive assault, on the preceding paradigm. Like most assaults, this one had collateral damage. Much like Galileo and Darwin, Newton did not set out to kill god. And yet there lies the occidental diety, amongst the rubble of antiquity. And next to him lay the corpse of free will. It might come as a shock that God and free will were in a relationship of such intimacy that they would both be felled by the same apple. It’s certainly not without irony. To many here, an omnipotent, omniscient God might be synonymous with predestination and the suppression of free will. And yet the in the end, the paradigm that Newton and his kind ushered in, eliminated the possibility of either.

Here’s the forensics; the way Newton described gravity set us on a trajectory of cause and effect, where every event has material causes, identifiable, measurable causes and every effect can be predicted by taking these causes into account. This view is maintained in physics, biology and psychology. It is a notion of reality where our predictive accuracy is limited only by the amount and accuracy of the information we posses. The metaphor is billiard balls. The metaphor is a machine. And it is a powerful worldview. Cause and effect took humanity to the moon. However, our personalities, our decision making methods are reduced or, perhaps, elevated to a definite (if difficult to figure) mixture of DNA, biological secretions and socialization that is purely mechanistic. This knowledge is inherent, however threatening it sounds. After all, we debate about whether a cause was nature verses nurture, not whether there was a cause. Play that out, folks, and it leaves no room for free will.

But let me shift the perspective a little bit. I first started thinking about this when I was considering the Buddhist concept of Prat_tyasamutp_da. This is the doctrine of dependent origination or mutual causation. Essentially, this observes that every being is contingent on every other being, that reality arises in an infinite and interdependent web of causation, that nothing in the universe exists without everything else in the universe. That made sense to me. I could kind of reverse engineer my present to that conclusion slash origin. So, I was thinking, “huh, if everything causes everything, that doesn’t leave much room for free will. But, I’ve grown up to really value free will.” It was a riddle.

And then it occurred to me that, “hey, this inderdependent web thing sounds kind of familiar.” It’s right there in our principles. To be fair, the committees at General Assembly didn’t come up with the interdependent web out of thin air. It is attested to in several ontologies, from Buddhism to the environmental movement and deep ecology to physics and western philosophy. It’s the butterfly effect, where the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Botswana has some consequence, eventually in Siberia. But think; a thousand butterflies. A million butterflies. Think every butterfly that ever lived.

Let’s just imagine this for a moment. Think of a spider web. You are a node or maybe a strand between two nodes on the web. I’m assuming that a spider web as we imagine it is more or less one-dimensional. Existence is not. So at every node imagine several other strands connecting at every conceivable angle. Each of these strands connects to a node in yet another web. And each node in another web has strands attached to it at every conceivable angle to other webs. And this tightly compacted weave and interconnected web is as big as EXISTENCE. If I move one node here, everything moves. If every event is mutually dependent, if it’s all cause and effect and every effect is another cause, what then of free will? Under pressure from all of existence, is there room for it? So Newton and gravity and the billiard ball cause and effect present a significant challenge to free will. Buddhism and our own UU principles severely limit any notion of free agency. It’s beginning to feel like piling on, but contemporary science kicks it to the curb.

Benjamin Libet conducted the touchstone experiment for this in the 1970’s. He was able to determine that people were acting before they decided to act even though they thought they were deciding to act before they acted. He found that the brain had initiated movement before any conscious decision to move had been made. According to Libet, free will, insofar as it is conscious, is more like story telling than decision making. It is purely after the act. In a more recent study, Yale psychology professor John Bargh (Barge) sent one of his grad assistants into town, arms full of papers, a briefcase, pens, all sorts of stuff, including a cup of coffee. The grad assistant would then administer a survey to random passers by. The survey described a person named Joe and included his photograph and asked something like, do you like Joe? Sometime near the beginning of this encounter, the grad assistant would shift his too many things he was carrying and ask the survey participant to hold the cup of coffee. This would be for a mere second. Very casually done. The trick is that some people were given hot coffee. Some people were given ice coffee. Consistently, the clear majority of people who held the hot coffee, for ONE second, liked Joe. And those that held the cold coffee, did not like Joe. You think the cold coffee people think they made a decision of their own free will to not like Joe? In a recent interview, Malcolm Gladwell, author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point, drives home the argument. Specifically naming the research of Daniel Wegner at Harvard, Gladwell states that, “If you go through all of this research that’s been done in psychology recently, you end up with the position that the conscious will is an illusion.”

We can do a little experiment here this morning. The experiment goes as follows : Decide you are going to close your eyes, relax, pay attention only to your breathing and have no thoughts, i.e. do a form of meditation. OK, if you were running this show this should be no problem, decide to have no thoughts, have no thoughts! It would be very surprising if most of you didn’t find it exceptionally difficult to banish thoughts. The brain, is generating them in spite of your conscious best intentions. That is what the brain is designed to do, regardless of whether “you” want it to or not. It has been said that we are, each us, fundamentally a hundred trillion cellular robots who are not self conscious and who do not know who “you” are.

So by now, I’m hoping that I’ve put some serious questions into your brain about the possibility of free will (as if you could choose to believe in free will or not). This might be the grown up version of being told there’s no such thing as Santa Clause. It’s a bummer. I mean, is it so much to ask? I’m not asking to control the stars, or even a starship, or even someone else. I just want the dignity of self-control. Now inherent dignity is collateral damage too.

And what does this say about morality? Did we just obliterate any notion of benevolence? Did the distinction between good and evil just evaporate? If we’re all part of an unplanned plan with no triumph of progress or humanly understandable goal of any kind, is there any meaning to be had at all?

These are serious questions. For what its worth, they are being hashed out by our champions of philosophy and science even now. In fact, you can watch parts of the conversation on you tube. I watched far too much of it preparing this sermon, so I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to disregard them. Sometimes you can’t fix a problem from the same vantage point and with the same tools with which you created the problem. It’s harder to find your way out of a maze when you are in it than when you are above it. So we need to shift our perspective. It’s like a couple Sundays ago, one of the youth First Austin and I were trying to teach the precocious little Spencer some really big words. Spencer, by the way, is our Director of Religious Education’s little boy. He’s like four or eight or some small number of years old. He’s a little guy. He’s locally famous for being the one in the kids choir that usually looks like he’s about to fall over from enthusiastic singing. Great kid. So we tried to teach him the word synesthesia so he could blow his teacher’s mind come Monday. We didn’t have a lot of luck. So I asked Spencer what was the biggest word he knew. He thought about it for a bit and then replied, “The Sky.”

The Sky. Right. Thank you Spencer for teaching me a truly big word. So, a shift in perspective. Let’s have a fresh look at how this argy bargy began. Go back to the interconnected web of existence and understand this: Every event in the world that has happened, every breath, every confession, every joy, every misspelling, every shift of sand on the ocean’s floor, every leaf dying in autumn, every inching of every worm, every event is plugged into you, is shaping you and propelling you just as you propel it all likewise. Can you feel it? Well…. Can you feel some of it? Maybe. Can you imagine it? Yes. In some way. Yes. And that is the trick.

The quantum physicist John Wheeler puts it this way, “There is no out there out there.” All we know is how we correlate with the world. We do not really know what the world is really like, without us. When we seem to experience an external world that is out there, independent of us, it is evidently something we dream up.

Modern neurobiology has reached the exact same conclusion as quantum physics. The visual world, what we see, is an illusion. The science writer Tor Norretranders, author of The Generous Man writes, “The merging of the epistemological lesson from quantum mechanics with the epistemological lesson from neurobiology attest to a very simple fact: What we perceive as being outside of us is indeed a fancy and elegant projection of what we have inside. We do make this projection as a result of interacting with something not inside, but everything we experience is inside.

So, there are causes, but we’re imagining our experiences of them. In some way, we’re projecting the events that determine our actions. Well, that’s not necessarily free will. But it is a radical kind of agency for which I don’t think we even have a word. I mean, the sky? The sky inside. This is radical agency. This is the agency with which we reappropriate our inherent dignity. So the next time you go outside and look up, I want you to see that great big word; dignity.

On top of that, all this radical agency is correlated. It’s all interrelated. It is entirely relational and co-arising. It is Prat_tyasamutp_da. Which, by the way, is a seriously big word.

So, if this is the adult version of the unmasking of Santa Clause, we can, as we did as children, take solace in the fact that we still get presents! It’s not Santa, it’s better. It’s our relatives, our relationships! We still get presents. We still get life. We still get love and hope and fear and breath and fresh bread. Now, I can say without exactly lying and for similar reasons, that, yes, Virginia, there is free will.

So today is a good day. This breath is a good breath. They are good precisely because we recognize them as good. We praise them and are grateful. And the way you’re sitting and thinking are also good, correlated as we are with this day and this moment.

And that there is anxiety and judgment and resentment need not mar the goodness of this hour and may in fact highlight it. For on a metaphysical level, we’re somehow complete and incomplete at the same time.

“Illusion of illusions, says the Teacher, illusion of illusions! All is illusion.” And so, I have been chasing my breath for the past while. But is there some inherent good in this futility? Is there some purpose to the mistaken attribution of purpose?

Free will, experientially, existentially, is akin to an emotion. To deny it would be like denying the reality of love or hate or hope. And as it turns out, emotions are among the primary building blocks of our reality. They have kept us alive and evolving since they emerged in our being. They are the connective tissue in our sense of reality. They are the connective tissue between each other. This is radical agency, but it is also relational agency. We need the world. And we need each other.

Look around. When you see your neighbor’s faults, then you will see your own also. When you see your neighbor’s dignity, then you will have secured your own. Let us embody it with ritual. When we have completed this ritual, please stand, stretch out, shake hands and say hello and thanks to the folks in your vicinity. It’ll be a nice way to close it. You can then remain standing and we’ll move into the song from there.

For now, if you would, hold out both of your hands, palm up. This is a gesture of openness, of asking and receiving. If this next gesture makes you uncomfortable, it’s okay. Honest religion often takes us out of our comfort zone. Keep your left hand open. But with your right hand, place two or more fingers on the wrist of the neighbor to your right, over here on the side a little and under the thumb. If you’re unable to find a pulse, it is enough to know that it is there. If you are on an aisle or sitting by yourself, hold your hand open and feel the qualities of the air.

You may close your eyes or not. However you are comfortable. Breathe in and exhale slowly, as if you were meditating. And keeping that breath intentional, consider how touch affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person and compassion in human relations, how touch embodies acceptance of one another and is a first step towards the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice.

Consider that through your fingerprints, you can feel the pulse of your neighbor. Through your singularity, you touch the life force. Finally, see if you can syncopate your breathing with the rhythm of your neighbor’s heart beat and let that syncopation expand in your imagination to include the rhythms of everyone here as nodes on the interdependent web of all existence and facets of the sum that is greater than all these parts. Listen now to breath and blood and life. At one time, be grounded, be here, transcend.

Amen.

Take a minute and say thanks to the folks around you. We’ll move to the next hymn from here.

Bridgebuilder Workshop

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Dr. Peter Steinke

February, 28, 2009

Text of this workshop is not available but you can listen to Dr. Steinke’s comments by clicking on the play button. Comments by individuals attending the workshop are not being posted. A DVD of the whole workshop  is available at the church bookstore.

What Defines Greatness?

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Jim Checkley, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Jim Checkley

February 22, 2009

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Is a Bold Hamster “Great” or Just What is “Greatness”?

Sometimes things just work out. Take this sermon, for instance. When I was asked to do this service, I quickly decided to talk about a topic that I have been fascinated with for a long time: what does it mean to be great? I was on the phone with Sally Scott and she asked me if I could do this date or that date, and we settled on February 22nd. I thought nothing special about it at the time.

However, forty-five years ago I would have instantly made the connection between February 22nd and George Washington’s birthday, because his birthday was a school holiday. In fact, back in those days we also got February 12th off from school because it was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Of course, as it turns out, Charles Darwin’s birthday is also February 12th, and the same year as Lincoln. But while they named a city after Darwin in Australia, there’s no way in America – except maybe for a few isolated Royal Blue areas – that we’d get Darwin’s birthday off from school.

We just marked the 200th anniversary of both Lincoln’s and Darwin’s birthdays. Washington would have been 277 today – a number of no special significance since it doesn’t have any “zeros” in it. Nonetheless, there is an interesting mathematical fact about Washington’s birth year of 1732. Put a decimal after the “1” and you have the square root of three – 1.732. Really. See, you never know what you are going to learn at a Unitarian church. I don’t know if this numeric coincidence portended greatness for Washington – perhaps a numerologist could tell us – but he certainly demonstrated greatness during his lifetime. As did both Darwin and Lincoln.

Like I said, sometimes things just work out.

The word great, like the words love and God, is subject to many meanings and often fierce debate. I’m beginning to believe I am an intellectual masochist because I keep picking sermon topics that are impossible to fully discuss in a 20 – okay 25 – minute sermon. So let’s narrow our theme today. When I’m talking about greatness, I do not in any way mean famous. Famous and greatness are two totally different concepts and the cult of celebrity often worships people who are decidedly not very great, but whom we hoist onto pedestals made of fluff, and which are either unsteady and fragile or else we – and I mean American society – are shallow and fickle. But really, what are the odds of that being true about America?

And I don’t have the time to explore the really wonderful topic of the “greatness” of villains, for example Lord Voldemort, who J. K Rowling tells us over and over in her Harry Potter books, has done great things – terrible to be sure – but great nonetheless. So for purposes of my sermon, I assume that we would all agree that Lord Voldemort – and the real characters of history like him – do not deserve to be judged as having greatness. And based on her many interviews and pod casts, I think J. K. herself would approve.

Instead, I am going to use William Shakespeare’s famous quote about greatness from his play Twelfth Night as a template to discuss what it means to be great and how we judge greatness. And although there are many who could serve as examples, including many women, African-Americans, and others, because the powers that be handed it to me on a silver platter, I am going to be a bit of a Taoist and go with the flow by talking about each element of Shakespeare’s quote using Washington, Darwin, and Lincoln as examples.

In Twelfth Night the comedic plot begins when Malvolio, Countess Olivia’s priggish steward, comes upon a letter that the merrymakers in the play have left for him to find. The letter is a fake anonymous love letter that Malvolio believes is from Olivia. The writer of the letter suggests that Malvolio can become “great” by doing certain things, each of which is more absurd than the last. Never questioning the authenticity or the origin of the letter, Malvolio proceeds to carry out the ridiculous tasks, until Olivia thinks her steward has gone mad and has him locked up.

Contained in the letter, which Malvolio reads aloud, is the famous quote about greatness: “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Although Malvolio says these lines, he is reading from the letter, and audiences both then and now immediately recognize that the term “greatness” has very little to do with Malvolio, who is ambitious, pretentious, and has an ego that far outstrips his qualities as a person. He is blinded by pride, and is a ripe target for the prank being played upon him. He is so out of it that he cannot see just how far from reality his own self-musings have taken him.

I suppose that the ability to recognize one’s own folly is a necessary antecedent to being great. Which would lead one to conclude that people who think they are great very often are not. We have all known a super-confident person of whom we cannot understand where that confidence came from. Humility seems to be one of the hallmarks of greatness, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I’d like to take a look at each of the elements of Shakespeare’s quote and see what we can glean from them.

The first part of the quote asserts that “some are born great.” This is one of the ultimate nature over nurture claims. The implication is that there are certain inherent qualities to being great and that they are manifest in the person from birth. But is it true? If we were in any mainstream Christian church today, the overwhelming answer would be yes, for there can be no better example in Western culture of someone who is believed to be born great than Jesus of Nazareth. When you are born god incarnate, that would seem to coincide with the notion of born greatness. I suppose that would apply to some other religious figures from other religious traditions as well.

But what about everybody else. Are any of them – us – born great? Well, the answer, of course, depends on what we mean by “great”, but overall, I tend to think the answer is a qualified yes. I tend to think that some people are simply born with certain talents, attributes, personality styles, et cetera, that put them ahead of the curve, so to speak, when it comes to doing great things and eventually, being thought of as having attained greatness. Of course, simply having those talents, attributes, personality styles, et cetera, is not a guarantee that they will be translated into greatness. In fact, like so many things, there are probably tons of false positives out there; that is, people who were born with the qualities, but never lived up to them, or worse, betrayed them in a hurtful or harmful way.

And in the category of things working out, I would suggest that if we are going to agree with Shakespeare that some are born great, then George Washington is one of those of whom we might say he was born great. I don’t intend to go into any history lessons here, so you can all relax. But listen to this. In an essay called “The Greatness of Washington,” Christopher Flannery says: “What Shakespeare is to poetry, Mozart to music, or Babe Ruth to baseball, George Washington is to life itself.” Now that is quite saying something. Flannery continues: “This is by no means to say that [Washington] was flawless any more than Babe Ruth was a perfect baseball player or Mozart a perfect musician. It is merely to say that, if he had not lived, such greatness could hardly have been believed possible.” Here we have the description of a man who was born to greatness and who, through his actions, character, and decisions, upheld his end of the bargain. And consider the words of Thomas Jefferson from today’s reading. Now, you’re supposed to say nice things at somebody’s funeral, but what Jefferson has to say is itself extraordinary and his reference to “nature and fortune” points to somebody who was born for greatness. But for me the coup de grace on the issue is the story of Washington and the cherry tree.

Mason Locke Weems wrote a biography of Washington shortly after Washington died and recounted the tale that as a lad, Washington got a new hatchet, and proceeded to test it by chopping down a cherry tree. When Washington’s father saw the tree, he asked George if he knew anything about it. George is reputed to have said: “I cannot tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”

Now in recent decades, there has been much ado about humanizing Washington, indeed, all the founders of our country, and in so doing, demythologizing both the men and their accomplishments. And in this regard, it is pretty clear that the truth of the cherry tree tale lies somewhere between Santa Clause and the Lock Ness Monster. And although Washington gave all the credit to his mother, the point is that Weems was trying to tell everybody that Washington was an extraordinary man, whose greatness was manifest when he was a boy, and thus is an example for us of one who was born great – not perfect – but great. And at that level, it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not.

The next part of Shakespeare’s quote is that “some achieve greatness.” The achievement of greatness suggests hard work, dedication, and the accomplishment of something that is unexpected, or at least something that was not evident or obvious in the person. And I think the unexpected part is important because it means going beyond who we (or others) think we are and making choices that expand rather than contract our embrace of the world at every level and in a good way. Let me explain.

We human beings use the power of flight as a metaphor for freedom. But when a bird flies, it is doing something that is as natural to it as walking is to us. We can marvel at the grace, speed, and power of a bird in flight, but we would never say that a bird has attained greatness simply because it can fly. It is expected that a bird can fly. I feel the same way about people and their abilities.

If you are six-foot-ten and can dunk, does that make you great? I don’t think so. You have great physical prowess and we will admire you for it, perhaps, but I would never say that you had achieved greatness just because you could dunk. Similarly, we admire and perhaps envy really intelligent people because of their brain power. But are those people great just because they can figure out Sudoku with relative ease. Again I say no. And I suggest the same thing even applies to the gods we worship. Simply because a god is powerful and can kill us, or in the case of Yahweh, destroy towns or even the whole world, I don’t think that god is automatically great. Powerful, yes. Scary, yes. But partaking of greatness? I don’t think so. At least not because of this.

Truth is, there is an important difference between something being great and something having a quality of greatness. I had been thinking for some time about this and it finally hit me: great is measured; greatness is judged or bestowed. I’ll say that again: great is measured; greatness is judged or bestowed. This may be obvious to some of you, but it was an interesting revelation to me. The Great Wall of China is great because it is huge and they say it can even been seen from space. But the greatness of the Chinese people who built that wall and their culture, now that is something that must be judged and ultimately bestowed. Barry Bonds’ record of 762 home runs is great; whether we would say that Bonds himself embodies greatness in the world of baseball is something that is being debated and will be decided by the judgment of history.

Which takes me full circle: achieving greatness means doing something worthy and that is unexpected of you, because if it was expected, it might be great in some measurable way, like a falcon that can dive at 278 miles per hour, but greatness, true greatness takes something more, something beyond what is expected, something that encompasses more than just ourselves, and something that others deem to be admirable, good, helpful, and perhaps even amazing.

With this in mind, I’d like to take just a minute to talk about Charles Darwin. Darwin was a reclusive man who spent almost his entire lifetime coming up with his theory of evolution by natural selection. His great-great-grandson, Chris Darwin, lives in Australia and was quoted in last Saturday’s edition of The Age as saying that “[Charles] never did an honest day’s work in his life.” What did he do? An almost preacher, Darwin spent all his time observing and collecting beetles and other critters and thinking about the origins of life on Earth. He spent many years ruminating about his already formed theory of evolution through natural selection, and it was only when he learned that somebody else – Alfred Russel Wallace – had come to the same conclusions that he published his Origin of Species.

Darwin was not the first to say that life had evolved. His own grandfather had come to that conclusion. Nor was he the first to claim to know the mechanism for speciation. Lamarck had put forward a theory of how one species morphed into another, famously stating that the giraffe evolved its long neck by stretching for leaves up in the trees, and then passing on the gain; but he got it wrong. Darwin, however, got both evolution and its mechanism right.

These were huge ideas that encompassed the entirety of life on Earth. And Darwin published and stood behind them at a time when doing so went against the great weight of society and culture – like so many who we call great, he courageously broke the mold. As Chris Darwin says, “Every age suppresses the unthinkable; Darwin expressed it.” And it is something Darwin was vilified for then and continues to be vilified for by some today. And it is for these reasons, and the fact that his theories, as they have been developed over the last century and a half, form the very foundation of modern biology, that he achieved the greatness that has been bestowed upon him.

The last part of Shakespeare’s quote is: “some have greatness thrust upon them.” And here I guess, I would have to quarrel a little bit with Shakespeare, although in matters of English usage, that’s probably a dangerous thing. While not as poetic, I would rather the quote had said “some have the opportunity for greatness thrust upon them.” Because I don’t think greatness can be thrust upon anybody. It is something that is earned – even if one is otherwise born for greatness – and not something that can be thrust upon one for the obvious reason that the thrust could just as easily cause the person to fail. What’s really going on here is that some are placed by fate, chance, destiny, or choice, in a position where the circumstances are so extraordinary, that if the person can handle them, can successfully weather the storm, and perhaps even achieve great things, then that person will be judged to be great.

Having greatness thrust upon one can, of course, be applied to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln ascended to the presidency after the ruinous Buchanan administration, and at the onset of the Civil War. He was literally thrust into a position of power just as the country was violently breaking apart and for four years had the weight of the fate of the nation on his shoulders. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation and is credited with ending slavery and saving the Union.

In a recent poll of historians conducted by C-SPAN, Lincoln just topped Washington as the best president of the United States, while Buchanan was dead last and is, in every respect, somebody who the world tried its best to thrust greatness upon, but who failed miserably. In many ways it is no accident that Buchanan, the worst president, and Lincoln, voted the best, came back-to-back during the tumultuous years heading up to and including the Civil War.

Well, that takes care of Shakespeare’s quote – or does it? Because you may recall that the full quote starts out: “Be not afraid of greatness.” What are we to make of this? In my last few minutes I want to talk about this part of the quote because I think, frankly, it is the most important part of all.

The first question to ask is why would anybody be afraid of greatness? I mean, you’d think that being great would be, well, great. But, I think the answer is pretty obvious, actually. Consider the men and women whom you think have attained greatness, however measured and by whatever means. I would bet that the person lived large, with courage, took risks, assumed great responsibility beyond him or herself, and was original in thought and deed to the point of breaking the mold of society and culture. In all events, I would bet, they went beyond what was expected of them and reached out beyond themselves to impact the world for the better. Finally, I’d bet that many of them, at least, exhibited one more characteristic – a willingness to leave the pack behind, to take the lonely path, and often to create something for others, something that they themselves did not or could not share in but which they protected for the benefit of others – people we often call heroes.

And here, finally, is where we get to talk about hamsters. I’ll bet you were wondering about that. Being a bold hamster takes courage, you see, because while there may be food just around the corner, there could also be a snake or a large bird. And if I were a hamster, it would be difficult to be bold, difficult to take those steps or take those positions or take those stands that place one at risk, especially on behalf of others or an important idea. But that’s what great people do. That’s what makes them great. Now people aren’t hamsters, but I think the point of the analogy holds. And so we might ask ourselves, are we like the bold hamster, venturing forth despite the risk, or are we somebody who Shakespeare was talking to, somebody who holds back because of the fear that we are going to be the bold hamster who is soon lunch?

These are among the most serious issues we face in how we live our lives, despite my somewhat tongue-in-cheek analogy. Let’s face it: it is not likely that any of us are going to attain the greatness of the historical figures I talked about – or could have talked about – today. But so what? I believe there is a bit of bold hamster in all of us, enough at least that we can see the path. But I suspect most of us anyway also have a bit of that fear of greatness, of taking the next step along that very path that might lead to greatness – the greatness each of us is capable of achieving.

Part of the purpose of this church and our religion is to help us to grow beyond our comfort zones, to embrace more than what is in our little world, and to think seriously about the gods whom we serve and how well we serve them. I think we can all walk the path of greatness because we can all do something that is unexpected of us, that breaks our own mold, if not that of culture and society, is larger than we are, and reaches beyond ourselves to impact the world for the better.

And if that’s true, then how do we know if we are on the right track? I offer two observations. The first is pretty simple. One measure of how big we are on the inside is just how far and how large our embrace is on the outside. The larger the scope of our embrace outside – be it family, community, country, or cosmos – then the bigger we are on the inside and the higher the likelihood of greatness. But always remember, greatness is not something that we ourselves decide. Greatness is judged and bestowed by others. So here is the second test.

In the Wizard of Oz, after gifting the Tin Woodsman with a new heart, the wizard cautions him by saying: “And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” It’s the same with greatness, for greatness, like the heart, is not measured by the great things you have done, but by how much honest admiration and respect you are afforded by others, especially those who know you or who you have touched.

Martin Luther – the guy who started the Protestant Reformation – thought that the Epistle of James did not belong in the Bible because James teaches that “faith without works is dead,” whereas Luther believed that it is only by grace that people are saved by God. I’m on James’ side on this one. We are all given gifts by nature, we all have our dreams, our passions and our hopes for our lives and for the lives of our children, family, friends and others. Without action, without works, those gifts are wasted and our dreams and hopes nothing more than electrical impulses in our brains that will one day be silent and lost as a grain of sand upon an endless beach.

Let our greatness be to live fully and fearlessly, to use our gifts in the service of our best and most illuminating gods, and to embrace as much of life outside ourselves as we can, and like Lamarck’s famous giraffe, stretch our reach to encompass ever more, until we surprise even ourselves. And then let them judge how we have lived – those who have known us and those who we have touched – and they will nod a knowing nod and smile a knowing smile for greatness.

Presented February 22, 2009

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

Revised for Print

Copyright 2009 by Jim Checkley.

And just because I know you’re dying to know, George W. Bush was 36th, or sixth from the bottom, just edging out Millard Fillmore and a touch behind John Tyler.