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© Emily Tietz

May 27, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Prayer

There are voices that would call us to remember to see what is valuable in each other and ourselves. To act in ways which add life to life. This takes more courage and more consciousness than one might expect.

And there are voices that would call us to take the easier and less conscious path. The one on which we don’t take care to notice or acknowledge value in whomever or whatever is before us.

The voices are within us and without.

Let us listen to the higher ones.

Because when we don’t it is all too easy to imprint another with fear. It is all too easy to be the heavy foot that silences another’s hope. And it is very easy to live out of whatever fear we ourselves have been imprinted with.

But life doesn’t have to be like that.

Let us create a world in which even the smallest of us can trust that our words will be heard and welcomed. Let us create a world in which no one around us – not even us – has to be afraid even in silence.

Let us listen to the voices of our higher selves.

Amen.

Sermon: One Inch at a Time

A few months ago Davidson told a Hindu story about the god, Krishna as a boy?

One day his teacher saw him chewing in class and asked what he was chewing. Kids weren’t allowed to chew gum in class. “Nothing,” he replied, and kept chewing.

You can imagine this made the teacher a bit irritated. It was very clear that he was chewing. She marched to his desk, commanded him to stand up, then said, “Now open your mouth and let me look inside!” The boy opened his mouth and when she looked in she saw a thousand million galaxies. That got me to thinking, what would life be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies inside of each other.

When I was in college I took a class that dealt with domestic violence. One afternoon, the professor cited a study that really stuck with me. The purpose of the study was to determine what factors made a difference in how the life of a person who was abused as a child played out.

The researchers interviewed two groups of adults. One group was adults who had been abused as children and who continued destructive patterns in their adult lives – self-destructive or otherwise. The other group was adults who had been abused as children and were able to step outside of destructive patterns.

After interviewing all of the participants, the researchers found that it wasn’t the severity of the abuse, or the kind, or the duration that noticeably made a difference in the trajectory of the individuals’ lives. What made a difference was this: the people who had been able to move beyond destructive patterns could all point to at least one person whom they believed – really believed – in them. The individuals in the other group could not.

It could have been a teacher, best friend, a neighbor, or even just a one-time and brief encounter. It didn’t matter who the person was or how long they knew each other. It simply mattered that someone had shown them that they were whole and valuable.

That’s powerful stuff.

What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?How we choose to live in relationship either adds life to life, or diminishes it. Throughout human history we’ve explored questions of how to see each other and how to see ourselves; how to treat each other and how to treat ourselves. We call the endeavor sacred. We attribute holiness to whatever is at the core of the quest. On our innermost level we recognize that recognizing the holy brings life to a higher level. So we incorporate into our religions codes for higher living. To be admittedly simplistic, we say that if we get it right, we spend eternity in heaven; if we get it right, we achieve nirvana; the more we get it right, the higher a being we come back as in the next life.

It’s powerful stuff.

What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?

Robert Fulghum offers some thoughts in his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

He writes “In the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be felled with an ax, the natives cut it down by yelling at it. (Can’t lay my hands on the article, but I swear I read it.) Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree just at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works.”

Ah, those poor naive innocents. Such quaintly charming habits of the jungle. Screaming at trees, indeed. How primitive. Too bad they don’t have the advantages of modern technology and the scientific mind.

Me? I yell at my wife. And yell at the telephone and the lawn mower. And yell at the TV and the newspaper and my children. I’ve even been known to shake my fist and yell at the sky at times.

Man next door yells at his car a lot. And this summer I heard him yell at a stepladder for most of an afternoon. We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines – especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling.

Don’t know what good it does. Machines and things just sit there. Even kicking doesn’t always help. As for people, well, the Solomon Islanders may have a point. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts.

There is a saying that goes, “We give ourselves away one inch at time.” I think it’s also true that we chip another’s spirit away one inch at a time.

What would life be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?

One night I was flipping through television station and landed on PBS for a while. The motivational speaker whom they were featuring, and whose name I didn’t catch, told a story about a certain tribe somewhere in Africa. When a person commits a crime, large or small, they bring the person to the center of the village. Then all the rest of the villagers surround the person. One by one, they begin to tell the person things they love or admire about them. The session is not over until everyone says at least one thing. This can go on for a long time. When they are finished, the person is welcomed back to the community. The speaker finished by noting that the need for such interventions is rare.

Notice that this is not a practice of “turning the other cheek” or letting destructive behavior go. The tribe takes immediate action. They directly acknowledge what the person has done and that it must not continue. They then address it by calling the individual back to his or her higher self.

And the need for such interventions is rare.

We may chip another’s spirit away one inch at a time. I think we also help restore it one inch at a time.

What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other? I’d like to find that out.

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Nell Newton

May 20, 2007

The text of this sermon is unavailable but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Portions of this service have been abridged. During the service Tai Chi exercises were performed by Nell Newton, Jerry Moore and Phil Joffrain.

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Rev. Marilyn Sewell

April 29, 2007

The text of this sermon is unavailable but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

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Youth of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

Patrick McVeety-Mill

Megan Blau

Aaron Osmer

Edward Balaguer

March 15, 2007

The text of this sermon is unavailable but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

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© Bren Dubay

December 3, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER

Jack R. Harris-Bonham

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming, we joyfully gather here this morning in the presence of new friends and old acquaintances.

We’re thankful for the many and varied blessings that have been bestowed upon us. We hope that in the coming weeks we can be reminded of those who have less, who are impoverished both physically and spiritually.

May our thoughts turn into actions as the season of giving rapidly approaches. This morning we also hope and pray that the war, which rages in Iraq, will come to a peaceful and equitable end. So many have suffered and some many more will suffer until this war is over. We pray for that end.

Help us to listen carefully to the message of community that is being offered to us this morning. Remind all of us that community starts with risk and continues through risk and, if it is to be successful, the risking simply never ends. If we can’t risk, then we can’t have community. Also engender in us today the feeling of tolerance for those who do not hold the same opinions. Let us make room in our hearts for everyone – especially those with whom we have had problems.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON

Thank you for your warm welcome. It helps these trembling hands and shaky knees. Every time I approach a podium I think of an exchange with our daughter, Jillian. I’d been invited to deliver a commencement address and she had recently graduated from St. Edward’s here in Austin. So I thought, with her graduation fresh in her mind, I’d ask her for advice about speech making. What she told me was “Be funny, be clever, be brief.” Then she looked at me as only a twenty-two year old can look at her mother and said, “You don’t stand a chance.” It’s fear and trembling all the way to every podium now.

But you’ve made feel welcome and the hands and knees are a little more calm. Thank you. I especially want to thank Jack Harris-Bonham. Jack, it’s been a pleasure exchanging phone calls and e-mails with you. And I, of course, want to thank you, Mary. Because of you and people like you, Koinonia was able to survive some dangerous times. We’re grateful for your support over all these years.

I hope all of you will return this evening to see the documentary about Koinonia, Briars In the Cotton Patch . You’ll see what I mean about dangerous times – about those times when Koinonia was being shot at, dynamited. About the boycott when no one in the county would sell anything to or buy anything from this small group of people living together on a farm in southwest Georgia. You’ll learn of how Koinonia started a mail order business to survive. That same mail order business continues today and remains our main source of income. Among other things, we grow pecans – when that mail order business began in the 1950s, co-founder Clarence Jordan came up with the slogan: “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia.” And we’re still shipping the nuts out of Georgia today. I’ve brought catalogues.

When you see the film, you’ll get a glimpse of how some impressive organizations were born at Koinonia? the most famous being Habitat for Humanity. And of how we continue today to serve others, of how we welcome visitors from all over the world. I hope you will want to come visit.

But this morning rather than focus on the story you will see in the film this evening, I wanted to share with you three stories, some thoughts about language, about labels, titles, what’s in a name.

Koinonia – it’s a Greek word found in the Christian Scriptures. It means “community,” “fellowship.” Truth is I had never heard the word and certainly had never heard of the place before visiting Americus, Georgia in May, 2003. Koinonia. I had never heard of it. Couldn’t spell it. Wouldn’t even attempt to pronounce it for months after I first saw the name. It was a chance visit. I was in a hurry to get back to Texas. I only stopped by Koinonia because I was being polite – at least outwardly. Someone had asked me to stop. Inwardly, “I don’t have time to stop at some farm. I’ve got to get back to Houston.” Eight months after that first brief visit, I was asked to be the director, twelve months after that first visit, I moved to Georgia. I wasn’t looking to leave Houston, to leave my home, my life, my work in Texas. But I did. And I had to face some things. One of the people that helped me to do that the most was my Unitarian friend, Carla.

Koinonia is an intentional Christian community. It started in 1942; about 25 of us live there now. We’ve pooled our talents and resources, we live simply, each according to need and together we take care of the farm and do whatever we can to help our neighbors and each other; we work for causes of social justice. Everybody is welcome at the farm – Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, Christian of any stripe though our fundamentalist friends seldom have much patience with us, seekers, non-seekers, Unitarians – all our welcome. I was and am comfortable with all that. But what I had to face when moving to Georgia was this word “Christian.” I never used it. Never called myself by that name. It would stick in my throat. I didn’t have that same problem with the label “Catholic.” I am a Catholic. I cut my teeth on the likes of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, co-founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, on the likes of the Jesuit social justice activists Dan and Phil Berrigan, of Mother Teresa, Saint Frances of Assisi, St. Theresa of Avila, Hildegarde of Bingen. I attended a university where serving the poor, the hungry, the prisoner, the orphan, the widow, praying, meditating, learning to think, appreciating other traditions and attending Mass were all on equal footing. I saw priests, nuns, brothers, lay people whose names will never be known give of themselves unselfishly, untiringly to others. When I said the word “Catholic,” these are the people that came to mind not the crazies who also bear that name. But “Christian” crazies, definitely the crazies. All that was lousy, awful, disgusting about them and that history – that was the image that made the word stick in my throat.

Then I moved to Koinonia. Founder Clarence Jordan, who died in 1969, was a New Testament Greek Scholar and a Baptist minister. A Baptist? Now that name conjured up some images for me. But from the beginning, the people at Koinonia have been a diverse group of people. That’s what I saw when I got there. What I also saw was a reluctance to use the word “Christian.” This intentional Christian community choking on its own name? Why? When did this happen? What made it so? And here I was coming to join Koinonia and I had the same problem. Then that Unitarian friend I mentioned helped us. I read from an e-mail she sent.

[Bren,] you said something at Mama’s [Caf] over breakfast that caught my attention, I didn’t want to let it go, or forget. And it seems more important now. Something about not letting people forget, or blow off, Koinonia’s Christian underpinnings, its foundation in the Gospel. And I wanna say, as a second generation Unitarian with a deep suspicion of anything that comes with a cross on it, YOU GO, GIRL!

It matters. Language matters, and calling yourself Christian, if you are, matters. Language – names, labels, they carry identity, and we’ve seen a genuinely creepy, sad and dangerous thing happen over the last 50 years or so – our names get stolen and corrupted, and we’re left without our identities, confused and robbed of the power our names held.

Remember “feminist?” It used to be a very simple word that meant a person who believes that the world should be run as if women matter. Then the Opposition stole it and twisted it. They took women’s anger with domestic violence, and called them “man haters.” They took women’s efforts to be heard and called it “strident.” It went on and on, even as essential feminist ideas became the law of the land. And the Opposition was really, really effective. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a woman say, “I’m not a feminist, but?” then proceed to proclaim a perfectly ordinary feminist philosophy. But the Name, the Word, “feminist? is ickyickyicky and they won’t claim it. If you can’t describe yourself, can’t identify yourself – well – people like that have no power. Notice any feminist movers and shakers, and politicians or writers in the last ten years?

And “liberal.” Every great political effort that moved us a little closer to the ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had liberals behind it. But the Opposition got their teeth into the word. Have you heard it said without a derisive sneer any time since, oh, – 1975? And by the sheer force of repetition it worked. Now even the most dyed in the wool liberals struggle with words like “leftist” or”moderate” or “progressive” or any number of things that don’t quite fit. Because “liberal” sounds ickyickyicky, weak, wishy washy. But there were no liberals [that fit that description] marching in Selma, going to jail during Viet Nam, getting women the vote, or running the Underground Railroad. Not only do liberals lose the power and cohesion that comes from a name, they lose the great history that goes with it.

The same thing is happening with “Christian.” With the rise of the Radical Right, a small vocal camera-hungry group of extremists took over the label “Christian.” They identified their narrow, angry views as Christian views, claimed to be the voice of Christian America, and dagnab it if a lot of people didn’t believe them. Even my most ditzy apolitical friends associate “Christian? with hostile, ignorant, hateful people. Just like the women who mumble “I’m not a feminist, but?” liberal Christians have a fumbling discomfort with the word. And why wouldn’t they? The Christians of Leviticus are in charge of the name, and the Christians of the Beatitudes are homeless.

So, yeah, the Koinonia folks need to reclaim the name from the Nasties who grabbed it, and clean it up a bit, and wear it proudly on their sleeves. Otherwise the Nasties get to define you for the world, and you lose the great power, and the great history of the name.

Carla wrote this first part prior to the presidential election of 2004. She continued on after the election – I’ll have to wade a bit into her politics here – but you’ll see the point she wants to make. She finished the e-mail with this:

Now it’s after the election. I don’t know where my brain has been, or why I’m feeling so blind sided by it. This sudden revelation that many ordinary people voted for Bush because he seems better fit to be a “moral leader?” A moral leader? Since when is our national CEO supposed to be our moral leader? There are countries where they do that, but they’re not democracies, and the CEO isn’t called a president. So what inspired this vision of George Bush as Desmond Tutu – what has he identified as a key moral issue? Not poverty. Not hunger. Not illiteracy, social alienation, despair, addiction, violence. No, the great moral issue that he used to bring his voters to the polls – gay marriage. That is his idea of a great moral problem. And what’s scarier is that so many people agree with him. We desperately need to start a loud conversation in this country about what’s really important, and why. And we really need progressive Christians to reclaim their name and their history, and take the lead. They have history, they have credibility, they have the language, they can be heard by people on both sides of the Divide. And they can recognize a moral issue when they see one. Tell your hesitant Christians at Koinonia that we need them to save the country, and be snappy about it – Onward through the fog. [Your Unitarian Friend,] Carla.

Thank you, Jesus, for Unitarians. That’s what I really wanted to title this talk today, but I was afraid none of you would come.

What Koinonia went through in the 90s was perhaps more frightening, and certainly more insidious, than the bombs, bullets and boycott of the 50s. We grew “embarrassed?” about our name and slowly, over time, not at an instant death, but a slow eating away of our soul? Some of us forgot who we were. But not anymore.

Claim your name, live your name, embrace other names.

Claiming the name may be the easy part, but it is living it … By living it you become secure in it and if you truly are, you reach out to all other names, embrace them, learn from them. You don’t fear them. If you don’t fear them, you don’t harm them. I don’t have to tell you that Christians continually get into trouble because their actions don’t match their name. What happens though when they do? Remember recently, the attack on ten little Amish girls? Remember the response of the Amish? They went to the family of the killer and said, “Stay in your home here. Please don’t leave. We forgive this man.” That more than the senseless killing shocked us. It was the Christianity so many profess but which the Amish practiced that left us stunned.

Part of what you’ll see in the film tonight is the story of three Koinonia children. To our knowledge, they are the only white children in our nation’s history who had to go to court to win the right to be allowed to attend a public school. And, oh, my goodness, what they suffered at the hands of their classmates – but what may shock you more is their response to it. Greg Wittkamper was one of those children. He graduated from Americus High School in 1965. Forty-one years after his graduation, he was invited, for the first time, to his class reunion. Living your name matters. Finally, a group of Greg’s classmates reached out to him, apologized for what they had done to him. Greg sent us copies of the letters he received. Perhaps if there is time this evening, we can take a look at them, but for now I want to read you a story written by one of Greg’s classmates. It was sent to him along with a letter of apology asking him to come to the reunion. [ Greg & TJ ]

“What’s going on over there?”

“TJ’s fixing to whip Greg!”

“Naw!”

“Yea! He claims Greg called him a bad name in Mrs. Bailey’s government class, and he’s gonna beat his butt!”

TJ and the crowd caught up with Greg just as he reached [the baseball stadium parking lot] – Since we all knew he parked his car beneath a colored friend’s house a block beyond the park, it was not difficult to determine direction he would take after the dismissal bell rang. He was not dim-witted as to leave his vehicle on campus in the morning and expect to be able to drive it home.

Our class of 1965 was not the only class to study with “white sympathizers,” but we were the first to have colored students pictured in our annual. LBJ had just said they could go to school with us. We cussed them. We sneezed on them. We wanted to hurt them.”

[As teenagers in Georgia in 1965], we knew what was expected of us. We were to be seen in church regularly, we were to be at the football games in the fall whether on the field or in the stands, we were to look forward to voting for Democrats when we reached eighteen, and we were to have no use for people different from us.

Greg looked like us, yet he was drastically different from us. His family had taught him from the same Scriptures where we memorized verses, yet – but – well?

Well, Greg lived toward Dawson on a farm where Negroes and white folks lived and worked together. Back then the notion of whites and blacks living together was wrong! Caucasian teenagers approaching voting age in Sumter County in the middle of the 1960s were reared to believe nothing else. Some say this communal living is still wrong.

There must have been fifty of us standing four deep around a ten foot circle on this particular day. TJ challenged Greg to hit him first.

“Thomas, you know I did not call you a name, and you know I do not want to fight you,” Greg calmly replied.

“Knock hell out of him, TJ,” someone sneered.

Each witness knew Greg did not talk ugly, nor was he belligerent, but we wanted to see a fight. We wanted a victory.

History books will say Selma was worse, but there were not many newsman with cameras in Sumter County like there were near the Edmond Pettis Bridge during the Freedom March. Americus had beatings, shootings, and killings “

“Kick the crap out of him!” came another taunt.

TJ eventually threw the first punch – the only punch – landing it high on Greg’s face.

Greg winced and staggered backwards, maybe five steps. His knees buckled. He reached back with his left hand to cushion his fall. Greg did not fall. Nothing ever touched the ground other than his two feet.

Over the past forty years I have often recalled Greg’s inconceivable counter.

He hastily recovered and repositioned his full stature within arm’s length of the seasoned football player. Without one word, Greg clasped both his hands in the small of his back, jutted his chin forward toward his opponent and waited for the inevitable.

The inevitable did not happen. A coach came and the crowd dispersed. Greg whipped all fifty of us that afternoon without throwing a punch! I did not realize it until years later though.

I saw a sermon that afternoon. Because I did, I understand the Scriptures better today – one verse in particular.

As a boy, I, that day, went home feeling embittered about life and a miss opportunity to get even with someone I violently disagreed with. As a man, I admire a young man whose actions matched his words. I want to thank him for what he taught me.

Claim your name, live your name and if you do, you will embrace other names.

Over the past two years, several of us from Koinonia have traveled with an interfaith delegation to meet with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace in that troubled part of the world. There are peacemakers there though it’s not their stories that are often told by the media or by the politicians.

I share, in closing, a story from my recent trip as an example of embracing other names.

“I am Palestinian,” he said. “I will tell you about four of my friends. When they were young boys, just children, the Israeli Army came into their home and killed an uncle right in front of them. They tried to move his body, but before they could, the bulldozers came and knocked down their house. They grew up with hearts set on revenge. One of them often brags to me why he’s here, in prison. But today I heard him and all his brothers. They were weeping. There was no bragging today. It was a letter that made them weep. They showed it to me. It was a letter someone had sent to their mother. I will read it to you.”

“My name is Sarah Holland. I am the mother of Micah who was killed by your son. I know he did not kill Micah because he was Micah. If he had known him, he would never have done such a thing. Micah was 28 years old. He was a student at Tel Aviv University working on his Masters in the Philosophy of Education. Micah was part of the Peace Movement. He had compassion for all people and he understood the suffering of the Palestinians. He treated all around him with dignity. Micah was part of the movement of the officers who didn’t want to serve in the Occupied Territories. But nevertheless, for many reasons, he went to serve when he was called up from the reserves.

What makes our children do what they do? Do they not understand the pain that they are causing – your son for having to be in jail for many years, and mine whom I will never be able to hold and see again, or see married, have a grandchild from him. I cannot describe to you the pain I feel since his death, nor the pain of his brother or his girlfriend or all who knew and loved him. All my life I have spent working for the causes of coexistence, both in South Africa and here. After Micah was killed, I started to look for a way to prevent other families, both Israeli and Palestinian, from suffering this terrible loss. I was looking for a way to stop the cycle of violence. Nothing for me is more sacred than human life. No revenge or hatred can ever bring my child back. After a year, I closed my office and joined the Parents? Circle, Families? Forum. We are a group of Israeli and Palestinian families who have all lost immediate family members in the conflict. We are looking for ways to create a dialogue with the long-term vision of reconciliation.

Then your son was captured. Afterwards, I spent many a sleepless night thinking about what to do. Could I be true to my integrity and the work that I am doing? This is not easy for anyone. I am just an ordinary person, not a saint. But I have come to the conclusion that I would like to find a way to reconcile. Maybe this is difficult for you to understand or believe. Yet, I know in my heart that this is the only path that I can choose, for if what I say is what I mean, it is the only way. I understand that your son is considered a hero by some. He is considered to be a freedom fighter fighting for justice and a viable Palestinian State. But I also feel that if he understood that taking the life of another may not be the way, if he understood the consequences of his act, then he could see that a non-violent solution is the only way for both nations to live together in peace. Our lives as two nations are so intertwined.

I give this letter to Nadwa, a Christian, and Ali, a Muslim, both members of Parents? Circle, two people I love and whom I trust to deliver it. They will tell you about the work that we are doing and perhaps it will create in you some hope for the future. I do not know what your reaction will be. It is a risk for me. However, I believe you will understand as it comes from the most honest part of me. I hope that you will show the letter to your son and that maybe in the future we can meet. Perhaps you will want to join the Parents’ Circle. Let us put an end to the killing and look for a way through mutual understanding and empathy to live a normal life free of violence.

With respect and hope, Sarah Holland”

When he had finished, the Palestinian prisoner neatly folded the letter then stared out the window as he spoke.

“This was the letter that my friends gave me to read. If everybody signed this letter, perhaps there would be peace. If governments would read? To me this Sarah Holland is wise. What she writes – this is the essence of what we must do, this process of reconciliation and dialogue, this sense of forgiving. Without them, I don’t care how many peace agreements you sign, without dialogue and reconciliation, without forgiving, without serving one another there will not be any quiet in this country for any of us.”

Thank you, Jesus, for Muslims and Jews – and Christians. And thank you for allowing this Christian to speak to you this morning. Thank you.

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© Emily Tietz

November 19, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mary Oliver wrote:

To live in this world

 you must be able

 to do three things:

To love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing 

your own life depends on it;

And, when the time comes to let it go,

To let it go.

We pray for the wisdom, the courage, and the heart for all three.

Amen.

SERMON

As I sat in my living room to write this sermon, I found myself looking out the window at a canopy of trees. The chilly wind was blowing through the leaves and I could see some leaves already changing colors.

I smiled.

I love this time of year.

The air seems to be energized with promise.

Soon the leaves will flutter down and blow around our feet. Tree limbs will be bare and the soft sunlight of winter will stream through them. It’s a time energized with promise because it’s when nature intentionally lets go of things it needs to let go of. It seems to snuggle into the earth to rest. And then when the time is right, it will wake up, stretch its limbs, and flood with new life.

The new life couldn’t come, though, if the trees weren’t willing to let go of the leaves they need to let go of. And it wouldn’t come if nature didn’t then find time to rest from the labor of producing and sustaining leaves.

Plant life recognizes this need.

Humans know of this need too, though we don’t always recognize it.

Maya Angelou writes:

Carefully

the leaves of autumn

sprinkle down the tinny

sound of little dyings

And skies sated

of ruddy sunsets

of roseate dawns

Roil ceaselessly in

cobweb greys and turn

to black

for comfort.

Only lovers

see the fall

a signal end to endings

a gruffish gesture alerting

those who will not be alarmed

that we begin to stop

in order simply

to begin

again.

So many great mythologies have stories about the need to let something end before a new beginning can come.

The Christian story is the one told at Easter time. There is a death and then a resurrection. The resurrection could not happen without the death. New life cannot come unless or until something dies.

Trees and shrubs make an annual habit of willingly letting their leaves die and letting them go. Or they simply die to the ground or beg to be pruned back. They seem to trust a promise that new, vibrant life will come in time.

Plant life does its “Spring Cleaning” in the fall.

I did some this summer.

I didn’t set out to do it. I was planning a landscape design for our backyard and wanted some inspiration for the design’s structure. I recalled some things that I’d heard about feng shui and the art of placing things such that they feel good and have meaning. I thought that sounded nice, so I picked up a book in hopes of sparking some creative ideas. I ended up getting all kinds of ideas – only a few related to the landscape design which, months later, is still in process.

Something that stood out to me was the suggestion to take a good look at your stuff and clear out the clutter.

There are a number of things that qualify as clutter:

Stuff that is unused, unloved, unnecessary or just plain messy; like stacks of junk mail or old magazines.

Stuff that just gets you down, consciously or unconsciously; like disheartening books or unfinished projects that you know you’ll never get to so they make you feel a guilty sense of obligation every time you see them.

Then there is the stuff that depletes you; like photos of people who disapprove of you, objects from past relationships, gifts you’ve kept only out of a sense of obligation.

And, of course, there’s the stuff that was relevant at one time in your life, but just isn’t any more so it takes up space and keeps you rooted in the past.

My husband and I thought, “You know, it’s really time to do this.” We decided to take on the whole house – every cabinet, every closet, every drawer, every shelf, every room.

Now, this is really not as straight-forward a task as one might think. There is a reason why every object stuffed in its place is stuffed there. And in order to decide whether to keep something or clear it out, you have to look at why you’ve got it in the first place! The answer is almost always an emotional one. Fortunately, the book warned us about this?

There’s the stuff we keep because we love it, we use it, it makes us feel good, or it has an enriching memory attached to it.

Then there’s the all the other stuff.

The stuff we keep out of fear that we, or someone else, will need it someday; or aunt so-and-so would just die if we didn’t keep it; or it’s associated with a past memory or identity that doesn’t serve us anymore but we just can’t let go.

So, with all this in mind, we rolled up our sleeves and began one room or cabinet at a time.

Over the course of two months we took carloads of stuff to Goodwill or Half Price Books, sold stuff on Craig’s List, or simply threw it away. Finally what was left was stuff that we love and use and know why we’ve kept it. The house seems to be breathing a sigh, “Thank you.”

It seems a simple task, but what happened was absolutely profound and could not be predicted. Each bit-of-stuff asked me to examine what I hold onto inside my heart or mind that enhances life and what I hold onto that really drags life down; what associations, what thought patterns, what values, what identities serve me well, and which ones keep healthy growth at bay. It was a gift; one that I’ll be mulling over for a long time.

Now for the rest of this sermon, I need to own up to the fact that I’m going to try to persuade you of something. I’m going to try to persuade you that it’s good, even essential, for human beings to regularly let go of things in order to let new life in. And I’m going to try to persuade you that we know that already. See what you think. It’s up to you.

The plant world lets go so gracefully with an innate trust that after a time of rest, vital life will come.

Humans, though, we have trouble with that. We tend to hang on to so much stuff both literally and figuratively. It eventually weighs us down or stagnates; and still we hang onto it out of fear or habit or pride or unconsciousness. It makes it darn near impossible for fresh life to find a place to root inside of us and grow.

What would happen if we followed the plant-world’s lead and regularly took inventory to let go of the things that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know we need to let go of? What would life be like if we trusted it to know what we need and return to us fresh new vitality? I’m really not talking about physical objects here – that’s just a means of finding out what’s deeper. I’m talking about our minds and our hearts and our souls.

I think that human nature and the culture we live in make that hard to do.

Our culture values productivity – or at least busyness. We call it the “American Work Ethic,” and there’s a lot of pressure to live up to it. But it takes a seriously intentional slowing down to be able to take an internal inventory.

Notice the messages we get just from television commercials. I remember a commercial from a couple of years ago with a business woman on a subway. She looks tired but satisfied. The time is printed on the screen – 10:30 pm. The voice-over says something like, “Always make sure that your investment banker is familiar with the last train out.” Then the name of the company appears on the screen and the narrator boasts about how much their employees work for you.

Any time that I saw that commercial, I found myself thinking: If their investment bankers are regularly working from dawn to beyond dusk, what’s happening to the rest of their life?

It’s easy to think that we need to keep moving so fast that we don’t have time to pause to figure out what to let go of. So we keep accumulating. We accumulate stress, fears, guilt, resentments, stubborn pride, grief, judgments.

Of course, we accumulate joy and laughter and enrichment and delight as well.

But think about a body of water that has no outlet. Fresh water may have entered the pool, but with no outlet, even that water stagnates and becomes toxic. In the Ancient Near East, people called flowing water, “living water.” I suppose that would make non-flowing water, “lifeless.” I like that image. When we allow our spirits to flow, we are full of life. When we don’t everything deadens a bit.

So we accumulate objects, people, achievements, identities, habits, thought patterns, emotions, and if we don’t consciously sort these things out sometimes and let some go, they take over our lives and we become frustrated without knowing why.

I’m reminded of a story about two Buddhist monks who were on a journey. They came to a river which they had to cross. A woman was there who also needed to cross the river. The elder of the monks picked her up with her consent, carried her across, set her down on the other side and they went their own ways. At the end of the day’s journey, the younger monk was seething. “Why did you carry that woman across the river?!” he demanded. “You know we’re not supposed to touch a woman!” The other monk just smiled, “I left her back at the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

Perhaps the most dangerous things we accumulate are voices. Yes, voices; the ones that tell us:

You’re not good enough to _____(You fill in the blank)

If you were really a good person you would…

– Behave a certain way

– Be involved in certain activities

– Achieve certain accomplishments

– Make a certain amount of money

– Be interested in certain things

The list goes on

You are only acceptable if _____?

Your life is only worthwhile if_____?

You can only be loved if_____?

When we’re not conscious of those voices, we’re driven each day to satiate them. And they’re insatiable. We’re driven to constantly attempt to live someone else’s idea for our life instead of living our own.

I think these voices are the most dangerous things we accumulate because they keep us from the absolutely holy task of living our lives, our lives, authentically.

I think the most important kind of clutter clearing we can do is to quiet enough to become conscious of these voices, figure out who they really belong to (a parent, a teacher, our culture?) and then learn how to release them.

These are not the voices of our higher selves. New life cannot come without letting them go. They kill us one cell at a time.

You’ll notice that the title of this sermon is, “Listening to the whispers.” It’s part of a quote that says, “We need to listen to the whispers of our higher selves so that we don’t have to hear the screams.” We can each imagine what forms the screams can take.

I think that our higher selves know that it is essential to follow the lead of the autumn trees. They whisper,

Let go.

Let go of the voices, the fears.

Let go so you can rest from what incessantly drives you to live a life

that is not your own.

Let go to make way for fresh life to fill you.

I love this time of year.

The air seems to be energized with promise.

Soon the leaves will flutter down and blow around our feet. Tree limbs will be bare and the soft sunlight of winter will stream through them. It’s a time energized with promise because it’s when nature intentionally lets go of things it needs to let go of. It seems to snuggle into the earth to rest. And then when the time is right, it will wake up, stretch its limbs, and flood with new life.

Happy autumn.

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Members of Yew Grove CUUPS

July 30, 2006

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© Scottie McIntyre Johnson

July 9, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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INTRODUCTION

Back in the days not long ago when the craze was for young born-again Christians to wear those “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets, some Unitarian Universalist teens started wearing them, too, saying that the initials on their bracelets stood for “What would Jefferson do?”

I submit for your consideration the idea that Jefferson himself would have hoped that response to “What would Jefferson do?” would be very nearly identical to response to “What would Jesus do?”

We Unitarian Universalists sometimes like to claim Thomas Jefferson as one of us. And, I think we can say he was a Unitarian. He was never an official member of a Unitarian church in Charlottesville, his home, because it was a very small town, and there weren’t enough people there who shared his liberal religious views to organize a church. (That sounds familiar to me?) But we do know that while he was vice-president of the United States, he attended Unitarian and Universalist church services in Philadelphia, and he called himself a Unitarian in letters he wrote to various friends, including John Adams (another of our Unitarian U.S. presidents.)

So -I proudly call Thomas Jefferson a Unitarian, too, but just as Jefferson called himself a Unitarian, he also called himself a Christian. He wrote to the famous Universalist minister, Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was also signer of the Declaration of Independence, saying: “I am a Christian, in the only sense [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others?.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote in an angry letter to another of his friends: “I am a real Christian.” [Some] “call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said or saw.”

I think Thomas Jefferson’s religious views might be quite consistent with those of many members of the UU Christian Fellowship, which you probably know is a modern-day organization affiliated with the UUA, the Unitarian Universalist Association.

We know that Jefferson wasn’t perfect. His inconsistencies pertaining to matters of race and, in particular the issue of slavery, have somewhat tarnished his image, of late. Perhaps Jesus was perfect. Thomas Jefferson thought he was, that Jesus was. Unfortunately for Jefferson, the historical record and DNA evidence on him is available, and so we know he was just an imperfect human being.

But, perhaps we could all do worse than to ask ourselves – as we make our decisions at the supermarket, at the mall, at the auto dealership, in the voting booth – we could all do a lot worse than to ask ourselves “What would Jefferson do?”

SERMON

A few months ago, there was a short article in the “Religion” section of The Dallas Morning News, “one in an occasional series on the spiritual lives of historical figures?, the column said. This one was about Thomas Jefferson and specifically, the little book he complied that has come to be called The Jefferson Bible.

I was delighted to see the article because a copy of The Jefferson Bible was the first purchases I ever made from Beacon Press, the publishing house of our Unitarian Universalist Association. I’ve always liked American history, especially the early periods up through the Civil War, and I now love the fact that both the Unitarian and the Universalist streams of our modern UU faith flowed so abundantly throughout the early American landscape, helping to water the fields from which sprang the fragrant blossoms of liberty and justice.

And I happen to pretty much agree with Thomas Jefferson’s take on Jesus of Nazareth, so, of course, I’m going to like Jefferson’s Bible – and many UUs seem to like it.

As I said in my Offertory words, Jefferson was raised an Anglican, but as a student at William and Mary College, he was introduced to philosophy and church history, and was influenced by the English deists who put forth the notion of a Creator God who set the world in motion, and then stepped back, to interfere no more in its workings. But Jefferson did not remain a deist throughout his life.

During his tenure as John Adams’ vice-president, (1797-1801) he became quite friendly with Dr. Benjamin Rush, a medical doctor and out-spoken Universalist. He and Jefferson had what Jefferson described as many “delightful conversations?, about the Christian religion.

Around this same time, (1796) Joseph Priestly, the English clergyman and scientist who you may remember as having discovered oxygen, came to Philadelphia and established the first church in America to be founded as a Unitarian church from its beginning.

Priestly had been a Unitarian clergyman back in England, and when his home and laboratory were burned to the ground, at least partly because of his unorthodox religious views, Priestly was invited by Benjamin Franklin to come find safe haven in the United States, in Philadelphia, and he did.

Thomas Jefferson visited Joseph Priestley’s Unitarian church and heard him preach. It’s possible that Jefferson may have had a similar reaction to what I’ve heard described many times by many of us when we talk about our first visit to a UU church. That he couldn’t quite believe someone was actually up in a pulpit preaching the unconventional notions, considered blasphemous by most, that he had come to believe on his own! Jefferson developed quite a friendship with Joseph Priestly, and their conversations and correspondence solidified Jefferson’s Unitarian views, and in fact, caused him to re-examine the value of Christianity, from which he had by then become alienated and removed.

Always a free-thinker and one who came to his conclusions based on evidence and the careful reasoning of his own mind, under the influence of Priestly and Rush, the Unitarian and the Universalist, Jefferson turned his attentions again to the New Testament Gospels he had, of course, studied as a youth. “To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; (Jefferson wrote to Rush), but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”

Jefferson had come to believe that Jesus exhibited (quote) “the most benevolent, and the most eloquent and sublime character that has ever been exhibited to man” whose “system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has ever been taught”, (unquote) but Jefferson rejected as contrary to evidence and reason, and to the very intentions of Jesus himself, any belief in Jesus’ divinity.

Like Priestly and other Unitarians before him, Jefferson thought that the Gospel texts had been corrupted in transmission, both naturally by time and human error and intentionally by those in the early Christian church who had sought to increase their power and status by making the new religion more popular to non-Jewish converts by grafting onto it elements of Greek sophistry and Roman mysticism. Jefferson proposed to purify the Gospels of Jesus by ridding them of those things he saw as corruptions, although he did not actually complete this task until well into his life in the year 1820, at the age of 77, some 6 years before his death.

And, how did he finally do that? There is a Garrison Keillor joke you may have heard about the notice posted for am adult r.e. class in a Unitarian Church that said, “Bible Study Begins Next Week. Bring your Bibles – and your scissors.” Well, that’s literally what Thomas Jefferson did!

Using two copies each of Greek, Latin, French and English translations of the four Gospels, Jefferson took a razor and physically cut from the pages any references to supernatural occurrences – no virgin birth, no angels in the sky, at the beginning. No walking on water or feeding the multitudes in the middle. And, certainly most disturbing of all for orthodox Christians, no resurrection at the end.

And then, Jefferson pasted into a blank book those parts of the story he thought could be true. He left in what seemed to him to be the plausible facts about Jesus’ life. He also combined the 4 narratives into a single chronological story. He, of course, left in all the sayings and moral teachings he believed Jesus had said. Jefferson described this work (and these are his words, not mine) as separating “diamonds from the dunghill?.

And what did Jefferson leave himself and us with after all his snipping and pasting? I return to the Dallas Morning News article I mentioned at the beginning which quotes Catholic author and historian Garry Wills (with whom I frequently agree) as saying that although Jefferson’s Gospel tells the tale of “a good man, a very good man, perhaps the best of good men,” this Jesus is “boring, utterly without mystery”, “shorn of his paradoxes and left with platitudes.”

I beg to differ with Garry Wills and to agree with Thomas Jefferson. If, in his religious searching, Gary Wills has come to believe in Jesus the Christ, born of the virgin Mary, risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, neither Jefferson nor I would try to change his mind – or yours, should those be your beliefs. Jefferson said, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

I believe that this pulpit is different from others in that my job up here is not to try to convince you of anything. You are the authority when it comes to your own religious beliefs. Religion is different from science in that we cannot know, we will not know, in this life at least, what is “true” and what is not. “For now we see through a glass darkly?.

So I am here only to share with you my perspective, and you may use it to inform your own, in some way, if you wish, so, this is what I think: I do not find Jefferson’s human Jesus “boring, without mystery?, “shorn of his paradoxes and left with platitudes.”

I personally have no need of supernatural beings when miracles are all around me. To me, nothing could be more miraculous than the natural world. No revelation from God could be more astonishing than the reasonable and demonstrative fact that an ordinary human mind, or minds, somehow devised the radical and elegant prescriptions for living that have been passed down to us as the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Seek always justice. Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. The truly valuable things in life are not material things. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Treat the least among you as if he or she were the messiah. Look around you, for the Kingdom of God is at hand if only you have eyes to see it. Platitudes? No, I don’t think so.

Thomas Jefferson also knew how much easier it is to espouse a religion about Jesus than it is to live out the religion of Jesus. And the miracle, my friends, what I see as the miracle, anyway, is the religion of Jesus. A description of a way of living that puts others ahead of self, peacemaking ahead of violence, compassion and forgiveness ahead of self-righteousness and revenge.

Now, I don’t always live my life that way. Neither did Thomas Jefferson. But, I find that by looking at Jesus as Thomas Jefferson did in his Bible, as a human being, but an extraordinary human being with a visionary message delivered with powerful eloquence, I, just like Jefferson before me, can now reclaim a part of my religious past – no longer to be throwing out a beautiful baby with the implausible bathwater I still can’t swallow – to mix a metaphor or two.

And, just like Jefferson, late in my life, I am coming to appreciate anew those figurative diamonds he literally cut and pasted into this little document to serve as a description of the beautiful way of living in harmony with all of creation that Jesus spoke about.

And, so this morning I am moved to say: Thank you, Jesus! And thank you, Thomas Jefferson. And Benjamin Rush and Joseph Priestly and all the rest of you brave and noble and reasonable Unitarians and Universalists down through the centuries. Your clear and compassionate thinking is the miracle. You are the miracles. We are all the miracles.

Amen.

Scottie McIntyre Johnson 2006

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Rev. Jim Rigby

January 29, 2006

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Rev. Emilee Whitehurst

January 22, 2006

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