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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 13, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our third UU principle says we will affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. Are there some ways to encourage one another that don’t sound like judgment or advice?

Sermon

There was a big election upset. “Upset” is how many of us feel. Sad, sick, shaken. Angry. Blaming people who didn’t vote, regretting not working harder, for believing pollsters and pundits. Many of us broke up with the news for a while, broke up with social media, cynical about anyone’s explanations of why and how this happened. They didn’t know squat before the election. Why listen to them now. Upset.

And here come the holidays, family time. Some stay with chosen family during those times (we’re having Thanksgiving dinner here at 2:30 on the day, but others go to the family they were born or adopted into. For most of us, there are people we will see who would say they love us, but who voted for someone whose policies and promises threaten us and our beloveds.

Do we beg off this season? Do we say we just have too much going on or do we tell the truth, that we have not yet figured out how to sit at a table and eat with people who actively participated in bringing about a situation in which we or our beloveds are suddenly endangered, vulnerable? Did they just want change so badly that they were willing to shrug off our fears as unfounded? Would they shrug off stories of bullying’s escalation, of hate crimes increasing? Would they shake their heads and say “not all Trump supporters?” They would never beat up someone. If they saw a person of color thrown to the ground by a white man, would they interfere? If it were a police officer would they start filming? If they went into their kids’ school and saw a kid with brown skin crying because someone just told her to go back to Mexico, or because her best uncle just got deported, would they shrug and say well, you don’t have a country if you don’t have borders? They have shrugged off a cascade of racist statements and stances, the discovery of a confession of sexual assault (yes, grabbing a woman’s private places is a sexual assault,) they have shrugged off or explained away mysterious finances, possible ties to an enemy power, made it clear that we queer folks, brown and black folks, women and children don’t deserve protection as much as they deserve— what? Survival is how some Trump voters see it. They need jobs and they feel forgotten (because they have been) and they feel endangered. In most rural parts of the country, there is no liberal news channel. Maybe they’ll get CNN, but mostly they get Fox. Fox facts are the only facts they hear. They want to feel safer, and they made a choice to dismiss and shrug away the dangers staring the rest of us in the face. That’s hard to understand and forgive. Also, I could be wrong. They may not want to feel safer. They may also not want to change their picture of what an American looks like. Or they may just want someone in charge who is a Big Daddy, and will tell them he’s got this, don’t worry any more.

Some white folks are claiming to be so surprised, shocked at the glimpse of the America they’ve just seen. They had NO IDEA it was this bad. No person of color is shocked or stunned. It was part of a sleepy and thoughtless privilege to remain unaware of the racism and the deep-rooted sexism in our culture. Now they’ll say “Oh, it’s not that bad.” And it won’t be bad for a lot of us. It will continue to be bad and worse for women, who are already hearing coarse men “joking” about grabbing their private places. What we have learned is that people who say they love us are willing to shrug, to excuse, to blame it on God or their preacher, to minimize our fear and wave away our concerns. The Mike Pence headshake with downcast eyes and dismissive chuckle is going to become the gesture of art in conversation.

How do we talk to those we love, those who claim to love us, when they have chosen to vote for “change,” (the kindest word I can find for this conflagration of American Constitutional values)

What we know is that it’s going to be really difficult. Awkward at its very best. I’ll tell you what I know today, and that’s the best I can do.

We go BACK TO BASICS when things get bad. That’s what we do. Our UU basics are our principles. The third one, the one I was scheduled to talk about today, turns out to be perfect for this problem. We covenant together to affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. You all know that I like to say “in our homes and congregations,” so here we go.

Acceptance of one another means acceptance of the people who have different ideas from ours. Acceptance of the people does not mean or even imply acceptance of all of their ideas, because some ideas are destructive, and lead to injustice. We accept the people, though. I accept that you are who you are, and I trust that you will be you. I may need to protect myself or others from you. I may need to limit what I talk to you about, but I accept that you are who you are. That’s being a Unitarian Universalist. What is this “encouragement to spiritual growth” part, though? Well, spiritual growth is where you get clear about your values, and you live those values, so your spirit’s water runs clear and doesn’t hurt anyone downstream. Do we encourage spiritual growth through argument? I imagine there are some people who have grown through being harangued or shamed, but not many. People grow spiritually when we feel a dissonance between our values and our actions, and when we can deal with that dissonance in an atmosphere of curiosity and respect. Not safety, necessarily. Change is hard. No comfort, but curiosity and respect.

1. Figure out what you want for you, what you want for them, and what you want for the relationship. That’s what the Crucial Conversations people suggest. 2. Listen deeply. Listen with focus, suffused with curiosity, until you can almost see how they got there. That’s what the FBI hostage negotiators suggest when you’re trying to get someone rigid with certainty and grievance to put down their weapon and come out peacefully.

3. Give your own internal “weather report.” No one can argue with you saying “I feel afraid for my people who are black, brown, undocumented, queer, differently abled. I am sick and sad, and watchful for signs of autocracy. I love this country whether it’s right or wrong, and that means that sometimes it’s wrong. I believe it’s wrong now. And I love you, even though I’m hurt by your actions right now.”

4. Don’t despair. This may sound harsh, but that is a privileged response. Folks in marginalized communities and populations have been struggling forever. There is life and joy in the midst of struggle. Just because there is a struggle doesn’t mean you did something wrong. Not everything can be fixed. Life is struggle, and we can’t afford to give up.

5. Resist at every turn. The time to be nice and silent is not now. We don’t argue and shame individuals, but public policies, actions of the government, contempt for the press or the judiciary? We lobby. We write letters, we make noise. Those of us who are disruptors disrupt, and those who want the power of respectability, use that power for good.

6. One thing people are doing to indicate that they are protectors, safe spaces, is to wear safety pins on their clothing. We have boxes of them in the Gallery at the Social Action table. BUT. Here’s what it means when you put it on. You are willing to get next to a brown or black or Muslim person at a bus stop if you see them being harassed. It means you have looked online to see how to deescalate a potentially violent situation. We don’t want to make things worse. It means you will take the time to find out how to get that person to safety. If you have your kids with you you may want to take it off, if you don’t want them involved in such a situation. If you are feeling rushed and committed or weak and weird that day, you can take it off. People are wearing them, not to signify that they are a perfect ally, but to signify that they want to get there, and that they are actively seeking out training in order to be a good ally. We don’t wear them because all the cool kids are doing it, or because we feel guilty about the racist comments we didn’t challenge in order to keep things sweet on the surface.

7. Challenge. A good long stare is sometimes enough. A full minute of silence, count it off in your head. You haven’t said anything, you can’t be kicked out of the family or friend group, but the Dowager Countess face with a full minute of silence will go far. Let’s practice that now.

8. Engage by asking questions. Questions are powerful. Most of your ministers have preached sermons about asking good questions. “Help me understand this.” “How did you come to this view?” “What is your favorite thing about this?” “Do you have any concerns about this?” I wrote a whole sermon about asking questions that should be on our podcast somewhere. Watch Van Jones’ The Messy Truth videos. He is a Black man, a commentator on CNN, he spoke at General Assembly a few years ago. He gets in a room with a politically and racially mixed group and engages with such strength and kindness until he gets to the common values people can agree on. So we can build on strengths instead of clawing at differences.

9. We cannot afford to be squeamish here. We cannot be separatists. If you don’t have the spiritual strength to get in there and find common ground with people, that’s how it is, but if you do, you can build on people’s strengths, on their values. Van Jones as filmed some conversations of himself doing this in mixed political groups. He searches underneath the facts and talking points for someone’s vision of how things should be. Maybe we can ask people about the world they think should be. Maybe we can say “what is your vision of a fair country?”

There are loud and scary people in this country with varying points of view. Some of the loudest, scariest people who used to be dismissed as being fringe elements have just won the right to occupy the White House. If we talk to our friends and relatives who were Trump voters, if we find shared values with those regular people, we strengthen them and ourselves for times of trouble. Most of them don’t want to see hate crimes. They don’t want to see school children bullied. If we can all agree on that, that’s something. Most of us, after eighteen months of the most astonishingly vulgar and shocking campaign rhetoric, feel battered, wounded. Many of us are triggered and traumatized by having a loud verbally and sexually aggressive insecure narcissist in our peripheral vision for a long time, representing the loud aggressive bullying man in our past experience. Many among us do not have the strength yet to do anything like have a curious conversation with Trump supporters. Those among us who do, though, need to strengthen alliances. Things will go badly for the asylum seekers first, and those are our people. Then they will go badly for the undocumented men and women, boys and girls. People of color, poor people, women, gay women, gay men, then men who disagree with those in power. I hope none of that happens, but we are watching. We are watching for how the press is being treated, and it’s not starting in any kind of a reassuring way. This is not up to anyone else, my people. We must train ourselves to be the safe ones. You can wear safety pins to designate yourself as a safe person for Muslims, people of color and the undocumented. If you wear them, though, be sure to know that it means you have some knowledge of what to do in a situation where you’re needed. Whom to call, where to drive someone to, which agencies can be of help. We don’t wear safety pins because we would like to be competent allies, but because we are becoming competent allies. May that be so, more and more.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 6, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In the third strand of the Noble Eight-Fold Path, the Buddha recommends that we abstain from lying, divisive speech, abusive speech, and idle chatter. How might we do this?

We gather this morning on the Sunday before a Presidential campaign which has broken all recent records for vulgarity and nastiness. Well, there was the election of 1828, where Adams’ camp called Andrew Jackson a slave-trading, brawling murderer. This was ugly, but no one could much quibble, as it was all true. Jackson’s people said Adams was visiting with his wife before she was divorced, and that, as ambassador to Russia he had procured an American working girl for Alexander 1. The one that takes the prize for me was when, in 1800, the Federalists let it be known far and wide that the Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson, was dead. That was a rank exaggeration. It’s been bad lately. I don’t mean to make light of it. The fabric of our culture is showing the wear. The Buddha said Right Speech entails “Abstaining from lying, abstaining from divisive speech, abstaining from abusive speech, abstaining from idle chatter.” Buddhist teachers as you to wonder whether something you are about to say is true, and whether it is useful.

When we lie, we damage the bond between people. If you lie people don’t know who you are. Our interactions with one another are founded on steady ground between us. It’s strongest when I know you are telling me truth as far as you can, and I’m telling you truth. Lying makes us all sick, the one who lies, and the one who is lied to. We live in a culture of speech. All around us is talking. We read emails and ads and we watch TV and we talk to one another. Almost all ads are lies; almost all TV is lies of one sort or another. To say you will do something and then not follow through is a lie. I’m guilty of that one. Doing what you say you will do makes more happiness and less suffering. To find someone who speaks the truth to us is a treasure. To be a person who speaks the truth will make you a treasure.

Let me say something here. Buddhist teacher Eric Kolvig points out that the Buddha didn’t say “if you lie, you’re a bad person.” Buddhism is not a path of morality, of good and bad. It is a path of noticing, becoming aware. Instead of “good” and “bad,” there is “harmful, increasing the suffering in the world,” and “not harmful,” increasing peace in the world.” Everyone wants to be happy. Almost everyone. The eight-fold path: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration, is the way to freedom from suffering, to peace of mind and happiness. If you notice yourself lying, don’t beat yourself up, don’t wallow in the delicious drama of being a bad person, just notice and gently wonder “What would this situation be like if I were to speak more truthfully?” One of my teachers, Wendy Palmer, writes that Wondering is so much more effective than trying.

Abstaining from “divisive speech” is the next element of right speech. What is that? It’s anything that drives a wedge between us. If I gossip about her (over there) to you (over there) even if it’s true, then you know something about her that she doesn’t know you know, and you have to not let her know that you know it. If the connection between the two of you is like a road, it becomes difficult to travel a road with that big a boulder sitting in the middle of it. In one of the books I read this week, Rabbi Stephen Wylen says we shouldn’t say things that lower another in the estimation of one with whom you are speaking, unless you are giving a factual warning about someone to prevent harm or loss, and you do that with doubt, like “I don’t know if this person has changed, but he was abusive to his last wife, so you may want to keep your guard up for a while if you go out with him.” In our congregational behavioral covenant, we agree to “limit disagreements to the individuals or groups directly involved.” This prevents divisive talking as folks gather support in the wider community for their side of a conflict. We have seen so much divisive speech in this cycle, categorizing groups of people and painting them as criminal, lazy, stupid, weak. We look at each other and are almost repulsed “HOW could they be so…?” Anything that turns it into “us” and “them” is divisive. We wil hardly ever succeed in including everyone when we say “us,” but we can wonder what the world would be if we did that.

It could be that just talking about someone who isn’t there can be divisive. The Buddhist teachers I read all talked about becoming mindful of talking about an absent third party. Not that it’s always harmful, but it often is, so it’s an interesting exercise to become aware of doing it.

Other teachers say talking about one another builds community. We drop interesting tidbits about other people that help others see how amazing they are.

The third element in the Buddha’s teaching about right speech is that we refrain from abusive speech. It makes us sick to heap abuse on other people, and it’s likely that we talk to ourselves that same way. That makes us sick for sure. So many hear abusive speech as children, and it sticks in your heart and begins to shout at you in your own voice. When people speak to you abusively, it tells you much more about them than it does about you. They are hurting, they are poisoned, and they can’t even see you clearly, much less speak to you in a way that is about you.

Sometimes we are tempted to tell the truth in a way that is abusive — just to let someone have it. Even when what we’re saying is true, if we using the truth as a weapon against someone, it can do harm. Hard truths should be said in love. Gently. With respect. With the willingness for the hard truths about yourself to be told as well.

The last element of Right Speech, according to the Buddha’s teaching is abstaining from “”Idle chatter.” Well, like they say, “Now you’ve quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin.” I read a story about a man who decided he wouldn’t speak if it weren’t necessary, and he was silent for the next thirteen years. That made me mad. How do you decide what’s necessary? Telling your partner you love them every day at least once is necessary, in my opinion. It’s not a situation where you can say “Honey, I told you I love you when we got together and I’ll let you know if anything changes.” Asking someone how their day was is relationship strengthening. Is it necessary? Maybe that silent man wasn’t in any relationship. Maybe he didn’t even have a dog, or a friend. How do you decide what’s “idle chatter?” Humph. Well, I know it when I hear it.

The Talmud says God spoke to the tongue and said “all the other parts of the body I have made standing up, but you I have made lying down, and I have built walls around you.” The word is powerful. It can create and it can destroy. Choose to create. Your inner wisdom will guide you. Silence

The wise man in the teaching story said he had decided never again to utter an unnecessary word. He was silent for the next twelve years. The story didn’t say what persuaded the wise man to break his silence. I think that would have been important information. When the story was done, I felt mad. Yes, mad. I do understand the beauty and the power of silence. In conversations with clients, with my children, with parishioners, I stay silent sometimes as a way to give them space to figure things out on their own, and oftentimes they do. In my office I have a carved wooden mask of a woman’s face, and she is holding one finger up to her lips. She reminds me to say less. Sometimes that works.

Why did the teaching story make me so mad? I guess because it was teaching that you shouldn’t say unnecessary words. What makes a word necessary? I have done couples counseling for nearly twenty years now, and silence does as much damage to a relationship as hard words. Sweet words strengthen the bond between people. We need to hear that we are loved, that we look good, that we did a great job, that we are appreciated. Those are necessary words. I have known people who starved to death emotionally in relationships where their partners didn’t believe in saying unnecessary words. Some folks think the only thing talking is good for is to exchange information or to give advice. You say, “talk to me about your day,” and they say “It’s nothing you haven’t heard before. No new information.” You say “Tell me how you feel.” and they answer, “It wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t fix the situation.”

Stories that families tell carry history and identity. Stories friends tell to one another, on one another, create bonds and memories that can support a life when it’s sagging. I was on the phone with my sister last night. Our beloved friend Pat Jobe visited them last month in Texas; he and his seven year old son spent the day. Now, Pat’s a talker, and so is his boy, and so is my brother in law. My sisters children are now telling Pat stories, imitating his voice as they remember lines from his stories. Their family was fed by the lack of silence. They have enough to go on now for months, just from that one day. They tell his stories back to me. One day at a party he was telling a woman that he was jealous of Charles Burgin because “Charles is better looking than me, richer than me, he’s more successful than me and he’s funnier than me.” The woman said “Oh, Pat, he’s not funnier than you.” Last night on the phone my sister had to give the receiver to her eight year old daughter so she could deliver the punch line to me. Her little girl voice said, in a dead-on Forest City NC accent. “OH Pat, he’s not FUNNIER than you!”

I want to say to that silent wise man: “Mr. wise man, I hope you are not in a relationship, and I hope you don’t have any children, and I hope you don’t have any friends, because, if you are, shame on you for not thinking it necessary every day to say “I love you,” or “How are you?” or “Tell me your day.” I hope you live in a hermitage far away from folks who need you or love you, maybe with one very understanding cat and I hope you pat her.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 30, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As we approach Halloween, All Saints and All Souls days, we might think about which ancestors we would choose to honor, and what actions we could take to honor them.

During the time of meditation we called out the names of those we have lost. The Celtic tradition says that the veil between the worlds of the dead and the living are thin at this time. In the Mexican/Aztec tradition, these are the days to celebrate the death of innocent babies and little children, then the next day, adults who have died. The Roman Catholic church delineates All Saints Day on Nov 1, and then All Souls Day on the 2nd.

This is a good time of year to honor those who have gone before us. Do we want to be just like them? No, we are each a unique self, and not to be the best of who we are dishonors the creative force. Do we search our ancestors to find something of ourselves? Of course.

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.”
– Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

Some people use Ancestry.com, others do the mitochondrial DNA testing where you swab your cheek and send it off in the mail. Everyone has ancestors, whether they were the ones who raised you or not. They are part of you.

I’ve told you some family stories, mostly about the Southerners on my mother’s side. I want to start by telling you about my dad’s aunt Neoskaleeta this morning. She was the oldest of three children, born in Huntingdon, PA to Rev. and Mrs. Tiffany. We don’t know why, but there in the 1890’s, they named their daughters, Mary Neolskaleeta and one Ruth Winureeta Tiffany. Local Native names. Ruth Tiffany was my grandmother, and Aunt Neosk found “Mary” to be dull and always went by Neoskaleeta, or Neosk. She had an illness as a child, maybe scarlet fever, and her hair fell out. When it grew back in, it was flaming red. She was argumentative, in contrast to her sweet sister, rebellious, and willful. In high school, when she declared she wanted to be a doctor, the principal told her that was out of range for a girl, but she could become a nurse. She went away to college, then medical school, got her diploma, rode back into Huntingdon on a motorcycle, went to the high school, and smacked the diploma down on the Principal’s desk.

She moved to Bahrain to be a doctor and married a man who worked for Standard Oil. A family story says that one day, men on horseback brandishing swords came and demanded she go with them. A sheik’s favorite wife was having trouble in childbirth. He wouldn’t have a male doctor look at her, and he’d heard there was a woman doctor in that town and went to fetch her. After hours long travel, she met with the sheik. If you save my wife, and if she has a daughter, I will pay you this much. If you save her and she has a son, it will be this much more. If she dies, you can find your way home across the desert alone. She saved the woman, who had a son, and the sheik gave her a back of gold and jewels. She gave those jewels to her children and grandchildren one at a time over the years. That’s what I hear. My grandmother, Ruth, married the preacher. He was a towering figure in the US during the twenties, thirties, and forties and fifties. They still sell his books in Christian book stores, I’m glad they are all part of me, but it’s Neoskaleeta I’m going to invite to sit down at the table with my inner committee. Do you have an inner committee? Who is on it? Any ancestors?.

This morning I want to tell you about some of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors.

Who will we want to emulate? A Universalist preacher named Hosea Ballou? 1796-1852 The “family” stories about him: “Hosea Ballou, another Universalist once found himself sharing a carriage with a minister from another denomination, someone who believed very much in hell and damnation. Midway through their ride, the fellow asked him: “Could it be that you are Hosea Ballou, the infamous Universalist preacher?” Hosea admitted with pride to being who he was, and this other minister began to question him about his beliefs.

“So you do not believe in the existence of hell?”
“No.”
“Not even for the punishment of truly heinous crimes?”
“No.”
“Not even when you imagine that you yourself could be the victim of such a crime? Can you not conceive of a space in hell for someone who harmed you personally?”
“I cannot conceive of any place in hell, friend, for it does not exist.” Finally, exasperated and upset, the man asked Hosea, “Am I to understand then that if I were a Universalist, there would be nothing to stop me from killing you and the driver and making off into the night with this carriage?” And Hosea replied, “No, sir. If you were a Universalist, the thought of doing so would not have occurred to you.”

Another time a father came to him, concerned for the eternal soul of his son, who was always in the bars, partying and making bad choices. Please talk to him, pastor! He begged.
YES, let’s go build a fire outside the bar, and we’ll drag him out of the bar and throw him in it!
The father was horrified. “Why would I do that to my son?”
Ballou nodded. Why indeed, and are you a better parent than God?

There is Theodore Parker, a Transcendentalist Unitarian minister who founded a Vigilance Committee to get in the way of the slave catchers who came to Boston to kidnap men and women who had escaped slavery and drag them back South. He was a fiery abolitionist, and had an integrated congregation. He was constant about reminding people about the Black activists and soldiers who helped with the Revolutionary War. He wrote a letter to President Millard Filmore, another Unitarian forbear, which said There hangs in my study . . . the gun my grandfather fought with at the battle of Lexington… and also the musket he captured from a British soldier on that day,” Parker wrote in his letter to President Fillmore. “If I would not peril my property, my liberty, nay my life to keep my parishioners out of slavery, then I should throw away these trophies, and should think I was the son of some coward and not a brave man’s child.” Millard Filmore thought he was doing the best thing for the Union, signing the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave-catchers to come north and snatch people. The new law also required all private free citizens to assist in the capture of those who had escaped. The members of the Vigilance Committee followed the slave catchers, harassed them, got in their way in many ways. They saved the lives of the men and women on the slave catchers’ list.

Margaret Fuller is one of the most dramatic female forbears. Her life is like an opera. She was born to a Unitarian family, educated in Latin, math, writing. She was a frequent visitor to the Emerson’s home, and a conversational adversary to him. Rumor has it that he had a great crush on her, but we don’t know if there was anything between them. She became a foreign correspondent for Horace Greely’s paper, the NY Tribune, He sent her to London to cover the literary world, but she became passionate about the Italian revolution, and went to Italy to cover the revolution there. Before this, war news was written by soldiers, and involved stories of battles and strategy. She wrote about the French bombardment of Italian citizens, and her stories held the human interest that war stories hadn’t included before that. She met an Italian Count, and they had a baby. Maybe tney weren’t married. She was advised not to come back to New England with a love child and an Italian Count, but they set sail. Caught in a storm, the ship was battered by waves and began to fall apart within plain sight of shore. A sailor said “I think I can make it, hand me the baby!” He strapped the baby to himself and dived in. They both drowned immediately. She stood on the deck as people on the shore watched in horror, her white night gown and her dark hair whipping in the wind, as the ship broke apart, its wooden hull battered from within by a giant marble bust of John C Calhoun being delivered to from Italy.

We are going to be ancestors ourselves. Whose story guides us? What family traditions do we carry on, consciously or unconsciously? What stories do we want told about us by our children’s children’s children? Do we sometimes do the wrong thing for reasons which seem sensible to us, as Millard Filmore did? Did we strain our relationships for the sake of justice or authenticity? Did we flout convention or do we live within the mores of a community to build trusting relationships or did they find a way to do both?

We can get guidance from the lives of those who have gone before us. No one is without flaws. No one is superhuman. Sometimes I color part of my hair red to honor Neoskaleeta, her intelligence and courage. I preach because that’s who I am, and I hope it honors all the preachers I come from. We are grateful to be here. We are grateful to be here together.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 23, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

When making a decision, the 10-10-10 rule is used to think about where you’ll be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years after the choice. Similarly, the second strand of the Buddhist Eightfold Path is sometimes translated as right intention.

Call to Worship
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

Sermon

The meditation reading was from Emerson, and he said what you believe about life shapes what you think about. What you think about shapes your actions. Your actions shape your work, your relationships, your whole life.

Buddhist teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi says The Buddha talked about two kinds of thoughts: those that lead to happiness and those that lead to pain. The ones leading to pain are thoughts of desire and greed, thoughts of ill will, and thoughts that lead to harmful actions. Those that lead to happiness are thoughts of contentment, thoughts of good will, and kind thoughts that lead to non-harming. Happiness will follow that person like a shadow, always there. For the person who thinks greedy, hateful, vengeful thoughts, pain follows like a cart follows the ox who is pulling it. Does happiness shadow you wherever you go, or do messed up situations lumber behind you like a cart on wobbly wheels? The first strand of the path was “right understanding, “or “right view.” Your right view of existence affects the things you care about, it affects where you put your focus, your habits of attention. The right view, or right understanding we talked about last month is the realization that life is full of suffering. Suffering is caused by desire. If you could let go of desire you lose your suffering. Not your pain, because pain comes with life in a body, but your suffering over your pain, the stories you tell yourself about your pain. The eightfold path of wise thought and action is the way to move yourself toward happiness. The teaching assumes that we want to be happy. It’s not wrong to want happiness, to aim for freedom from suffering.

Buddhism invites you to make three intentions, which I’ll tell you in a few minutes. First let’s try to look at the intentions currently guiding us. Emerson says you already have intentions that permeate your life. Do you want to be loved above all else? Do you want to be beautiful? The smartest? Powerful? Secure? Admired? Helpful? Do you want to leave the world a better place than you found it?

What are the stars you steer by? If you were to make a circle and pretend it was a compass, what one word would be at each compass point?

Martha Beck writes, in her book Steering By Starlight, that to find your real desires, you should ask yourself “what then?” questions about them. Say you want your business to succeed. Why? You would be respected. What then? Your dad will finally give you his blessing. What then? You can stop feeling like a failure. Odds are there is another way to stop feeling like a failure, because that feeling is inside you, not somewhere external. You want your business to succeed so you can have money. What then? You would feel secure. What then? You could stop feeling afraid. Is there another way to stop fear? Say you want a baby. What then? You would feel loved. Is that the way to get there? Maybe yes and maybe no, but it’s a hard job for a kid to be born to fill a hole in an adult. Is joy on your compass anywhere? Contentment? Think all the way out into the future, and imagine the feeling you want to have about your life.

Susy Welch, a business writer with a demanding job, a marriage and school aged children, talks about thinking out into the future in this way. She came up with a way to make decisions in her overwhelmed, information drenched, demand-crunched life. Should I say yes to the Saturday meeting the boss wants me to lead, which will be a huge plus in my column when it comes to promotion time, or should I say no to the meeting and go to my son’s black belt test? She asked herself this question: what would each course of action bring into my life in 10 minutes, 10 months or 10 years? I0 minutes from now her boss would be happy and her son would be crushed. 10 months from now her job would still be full of opportunities and her son would have a tangible memory of her love and support. In 10 years he would be looking for a relationship with someone who was not an out of control work-a-holic, and he would be confident that he was number one with her. That’s the decision she made. OR, and this is my contrariness, in 10 minutes her son would be happy and her boss would be disappointed, in 10 months she could be looking at someone else in the job she had coveted, and her kids would have had plenty of chances to feel her love, and if she had given up the meeting her son wouldn’t have grasped the sacrifice she’d made, and in 10 years he’d be looking for someone whose world revolved around him and he’d have unreasonable expectations.

I think the 10 10 10 works for decisions like “do I really want to go to the gym today?” In 10 minutes you’ll feel virtuous, but maybe whiny about missing a nap. In 10 months you’ll be stronger and maybe grow addicted to the gym. In 10 years it’ll be so much a part of your life that you don’t even look at it as a decision any more.

I think the 10 10 10 is a fun way of considering choices, and that the most useful part of it is the 10 year thinking. In order to think that far out you have to know what you’re aiming for. You need to have hold of your core values, you want to be squinting into your spyglass at the star on the horizon by which to steer.

Remember the three intentions the Buddha recommends? Here they are. First, you understand that greed, craving, and desire cause fear and suffering, so you make an intention to renounce desire. Second, you intend to have good will toward all beings. Third, you make an intention to do no harm. These intentions cure fear and suffering. They move you toward freedom and joy. Intend to have good will towards all beings. Intend to do no harm. You still might get fired, get sick, go broke, lose a child to illness, violence or accident. Life holds both beauties and horrors. Your intention is like a rope you’ve fixed along the way to your goal, and you can grab hold of that rope when conditions get rough. An intention forms your thoughts and gives rise to your actions. It’s not a feeling, or a hope, it’s a plan of action. Scarlett O’Hara set her intention on her knees in a field with the sunset behind her “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” That intention shaped her decisions, for good or ill, for the rest of her life – uh – for the rest of the movie. Some of us set intentions very early in life that shape the person we become: “I will find security.” “I will not be around anger.” “I won’t try – it just sets me up for failure.” “I will never be hurt again, so I just won’t get attached to anyone or hope for anything.”

Marilyn Monroe said “I just want to be wonderful.” There is an intention that can shape a life.

To be content, as the Buddha said, and Suzy Welch came up with later, is that you look a couple of steps ahead of your desires. If you want to drink yourself to sleep every night, you think about what comes after that: sick feelings and a sense of having done yourself damage. If you think ahead to the feelings that will come after you act on that desire, the Buddha says, you don’t have to repress the desire. Everyone has always known that repressing desires doesn’t work very well at all. Thinking it through sometimes can. When you think it all the way through, the craving just falls away like autumn leaves from a tree. If you want to have an affair, you think two or three steps ahead to the chaos and insanity that will likely come into your life because of that. If you want to change relationships, you certainly can. Just don’t sit in one thing and hope for another thing. Clarity works to diminish the desire. Be content with where you are, or think what needs to change and change it.

If we have the intention to be content, we practice being content. We are grateful for what we have. We take care of where we are, the things we have, the people we have in our lives.

If we intend to have good will, we practice letting go of resentments. That’s hard, and fortunately there is magic to help you. That magic is called the resentment prayer, where you pray for a person to have everything in their life that you want in yours. So you would pray for your mother in law to have peace of mind, financial security, good health, etc. In Buddhism it’s called the metta, or loving kindness prayer, and you don’t have to believe in it or even mean it at first, you just try it.

If we intend harmlessness, for some of us that means we give up doing wrong to people. For others, it might mean giving up violent thoughts, for others it might lead them to eat in a vegan way, the way of most compassion and the least harm. What does it mean for you? Take the steps that feel natural, that feel like a call, that feel like a move toward freedom and joy. So it’s little by little. Contentment and peace rather than agitation and anger. It takes practice, practice, practice.

Notice what intention has been guiding your life. It works like a mission statement. Wonder to yourself how it has shaped your experiences and wonder ( so much better than making a resolution) what your life would be like if you intended to be content, do no harm, to have good will toward all beings.

“Be a lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.” –Rumi

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 9, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer, “We Must be Saved,” he talks about what makes us whole as we try to do right in the context of history. Rev. Meg explores the beautiful complexity of this poem.

Prayer

We Must be Saved 
by Reinhold Niebuhr

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
Therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous,
can be accomplished alone;
Therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous
from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love
which is forgiveness.

Sermon

These are the Days of Awe, celebrated by those among us with Jewish roots. Rosh Hashanna was October 3 and 4, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. Yom Kippur starts Tuesday evening and ends Wednesday evening. Observance of this holiday includes fasting from sundown Tuesday until nightfall Wednesday. Repentance from wrongs you have done, asking for forgiveness from those you have wronged, and gratitude for being pardoned are at the heart of this holy day.

Last Sunday you heard Susan speak about Rosh Hashannah, about new beginnings. Today I would like to continue by talking about the story that is traditionally read right at the beginning of these “Days of Awe.” It is the story of Abram (later given the name Abraham)Sarai (later given the name Sarah) and Hagar. The story in the Bible, written and later edited by the Jews, has a different perspective and emphasis that the story in the Quran. You know that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (named in order of their appearance) are called the Abrahamic Religions, as they share the same stories of their history.

In the Bible, which contains the Jewish version of the story, Abram has had a vision where he was promised that his children would be as many as the stars in the night sky. Time passes and his wife Sarai does not conceive, so she arranges for her handmaiden, Hagar, to lie with her husband, and she will bear a child by him. As soon as Hagar knows she is pregnant, she begins to look upon Sarai with contempt. Sarai is hurt and angry, and begins to treat Hagar cruelly. Hagar runs away, and an angel finds her by a spring and tells her to go back and submit to her mistress, and her son will be the father of great nations. He will be a wild donkey of a man, the angel says (the Jews say the angel says, about the forbear of the Arab nations, and his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand will be against him, and he will live in opposition to all his kinfolk. She goes back. The angel comes back to Abram and Sarai, and says they will have a child by the next year. He changes their names to Abraham and Sarah. After their child Isaac is born, Sarah is jealous of Ishmael, and makes Abraham send them out into the desert again. He sends them with a little skin of water, but it’s not enough, and they are near dying of thirst. They are both crying, and God hears them and shows her a well where she gets water. Ishmael grows up in the desert and becomes and expert archer.

In the Muslim version, Hagar is the daughter of an Egyptian king who has been given to Ibrahim as a second wife. She bears her son, Ismael, and Sarai is jealous. She makes Ibrahim take his second wife and child to a desert valley and leave them there, telling them God will care for them. They almost die of thirst, and Hagar runs back and forth between two hills looking for water. Finally God causes a spring to flow from the ground, and they are saved. Ruth Behar, and anthropologist and Jewish scholar, guesses that this terrible story was chosen to open the days of repentance and reconciliation because everyone in the story is at fault. Sarai was cruel and jealous, Hagar was unwise to treat her mistress, or the first wife with contempt, and Ibrahim was the miserable dad caught between two feuding family members. It is fitting that we see that each of us contributes in a way to whatever misery in which we find ourselves. There is almost always a way we could have done better, and it is good to see that before you ask for forgiveness.

You can see how different points of view spin a story in different ways. In the Muslim world, Hagar is an Egyptian princess, a godly woman of faith whose son was the father of the Adnan Arabs. Ibrahim was a faithful father who traveled between his two households, loving both sons and both wives. In the Jewish story she was an arrogant and unwise brat who trash-talked her mistress and gave birth to a wild donkey of a son. What can you expect from our distant cousins, these Arabs, who descend from a wild donkey of a man? His hand is always raised against others and the hand of others is always raised against him. How many of you have family members, at the level of first cousin or closer, who don’t speak because of a conflict? Do you think the stories each side tells about what happened are different?

What if Sarah had apologized for her cruelty? What if Hagar had apologized for her contempt? What if they could have done what was best for the family, for Isaac and Ismael? What might the rippling after-effects of such apologies have been? What would forgiveness in that family done for the world? Repentance and forgiveness are what this season is about for Judaism, which is one of the sources of our UU faith.

We have seen a Presidential candidate apologize recently. Once a couple of months ago, the kind of apology that is not an apology, where you say “If I did something that hurt some people, I’m sorry

An apology with “I’m sorry if….” in it is thin gruel, and will not nourish any relationship. The one Saturday morning was better. “I said it. I was wrong, and I apologize.” That’s more like it. You acknowledge what you did. You acknowledge that it was wrong. You apologize.” That’s a C- apology. It’s the one we most often give and get. “I was tired. I wasn’t myself. I was worried about some other thing and it came out sideways…” The non-interactive apology. There is no asking for forgiveness. There is no validation of the hurt that was caused. There is no deep understanding of the other’s point of view. A truly great apology involvesan understanding snf sn acknowledgment of of what happened. Not only in you but in the other person. It’s not too quick. A premature apology, where you say you’re sorry and that means the other person isn’t allowed to talk any more about their feelings about what happened, is unfair and controlling. A great apology leaves room for the hurt person to talk about what it was like for them to be hurt. It validates the hurt. There is deep listening. Patience. Vulnerability. It’s as simple as saying “I can really see how that hurt you.” Then it might be good to say more about that. See if you really do see, if you do understand. A great apology has a lot of listening in it. Then there is an ask – for forgiveness. Forgiveness also takes listening. Listening until you understand another person, how they could have done what they did. Deciding whether you still want to be in relationship, and under what conditions.

Listening is one of the most healing actions in the world. It is also, as I’ve said to you before, astonishingly rare. Deep listening, I’m convinced, can not only make a great apology, it can lead to forgiveness because it leads to understanding. Deep listening can transform lives, nourish souls, and bring justice. So many people suffer from not being seen or heard. Your family, your church, is a place where you can practice the healing art of listening and forgiveness.

You could practice nourishing souls and transforming lives this very afternoon if you wanted to make a listening appointment. Some people worry that, once they start listening, they will be sucked in to a three-hour commitment. Make a container. Set a timer. Get a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend, and say “Ok, you talk for 30 min and then I’ll talk for 30 min.” When the other person is talking, you get still (this is a complicated/simple spiritual practice) open your heart (also a practice) and be present to them in the moment (also….. you get it). You don’t think about what amazing question you are going to ask them. You don’t plan your self-defense, as you are feeling criminally misunderstood. You try to receive what is the heart of this matter. What is the feeling? Mad, sad, glad? There are lists of feelings online you can print out if you would like assistance in this. You listen with love. Ask yourself how this situation would be changed if you were held in the arms of love while you listened?

Sweethearts, when you can quiet the mad buzzing of the voices in your core, the energy attached to being right, the panic at being misunderstood, the urge to tell the story of when a similar thing happened to you, when you can sink the advice that bubbles up and needs to, has to come out, then you can get still enough to really listen. This is why listening is such a rare gift. To get to this place takes practice. A good way to live our mission is to listen. This is what can change people’s minds in politics. This is what can make a hostage-taker put down his guns and give himself up. Listening is what can bring the realization of common ground between protectors of the water and people in the oil business trying to deliver the energy that modern life in our culture demands. Our Chalice Circles, which you can begin to sign up for today, are a crucible in which you can learn to listen and be listened to. If you feel you need a trained listener, please let me know and I will connect you to one of the trained listeners in the congregation. Listening can heal the world.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 25, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The second UU principle is that we affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations. How can you get wise enough to balance justice and compassion?

Most of you know I have two sons, now in their twenties, and, although they are friends now, they bickered when they were young. My mission as a mother was to reach them to be useful citizens and good company. I asked myself “What happens in our culture when people fight? They get fined or jailed for disturbing the peace.” So we had jail (time out) and fines (losing money.) They didn’t have any money to lose, at first, but I fixed that by giving them a bag of nickels at the beginning of the week. When they would fight or whine, I would say “Please stop that. If you don’t, you’re each going to owe me a nickel.” Whatever money they had left at the end of the week, they could keep. Why did I fine both of them? “He started it” didn’t work because I didn’t have time to have court every time. Some kids can start something very subtly, and the less subtle one always gets in trouble. Sometimes if they were fighting over a toy, I would give the toy a time out for starting a fight. Fairness is a blurry and elusive goal.

This morning I’m talking about the second of our seven UU principles, We covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”

Our principles name the values we covenant together to affirm and promote. “Covenant” means to promise. By signing the membership book of this church you are promising to affirm, which means to say out loud that you agree with, and promote, which means to say it in public to people who might argue with you. The easy part is that most of our principles are so mildly stated and general that most people would say they agree with them. The harder part is actually walking the path they lay out for us on a daily, personal basis. The first principle we talked about was that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That one is hard for some folks who want to believe that some humans are worth less than others.

If you were to write this second principle for a child, you might say “We should be kind and things should be fair.” Justice is making things right and fair. You get what you deserve. Your actions have consequences. You open something, you close it. You pick something up, you have to put it back in its place. You dirty something, you clean it up again. You do the crime, you do the time. We covenant together to promote this value.

Equity is wanting justice for everybody equally. We agree that things should be right and fair for everyone. Male, female (or in between) should have the same rules; all shades of skin color, gay, straight (or in between,) Spanish speaking or Asian, moneyed or poor. Actions should have consequences. People shouldn’t get away with bad behavior. Some shouldn’t be able to dirty everything while others clean up. Our upcoming pledge drive is when we remind one another that the many shouldn’t count on a few people to keep this congregation financially strong and about to act out its mission more and more.

Often, though, someone else does help you: cleans up after you, gives you money, helps you more than you deserve. Sometimes your consequences are mitigated by someone understanding your circumstances. Someone makes the church part if their legacy so we get to have a justice fund and begin to provide breakfast tacos to the people who come to the first service. It’s often a wonderful thing when that happens.

Compassion adds some grace so that sometimes you give more than a person deserves. Or you can get more than you deserve. Why isn’t the world fairer, then? Why is there so much pain, hatred and misery? Often it’s because there is an imbalance among justice, equity and compassion.

How do we walk the path of justice, equity and compassion? You know I advocate adding the words “beginning in our homes and congregations” to the end of each principle, so lets talk about that.

I wrestle with this principle because, in my life, justice, equity and compassion fight with each other. Say I have a situation where someone has hurt me. Justice demands that the hurt be paid for somehow. Equity demands that if I hurt you, I have to pay too. The same rules apply to both of us. I would rather forgive you and have you forgive me. That’s where compassion comes in, I think. Should compassion overpower justice, though? Would it be a better world if we were sweet and understanding about where people are coming from when they create havoc and destruction? Can you be compassionate and still carry through with just punishment?

Here it is in the context of raising children. As I said at the beginning, I think a parent’s job is to prepare children to live in the world out there. In our culture we pay for things in money, labor and time. If one of my children made a mistake that costs me forty minutes, maybe driving something he forgot over to him at school, he owed me forty minutes of his time on some project where I have need. When they were small, if they didn’t obey by the time I counted to three, they owed me a nickel of their allowance. That feels like justice. On the other hand, I have compassion with the boy who made the mistake. I know I made mistakes like that. I understand not obeying. You get busy, you want to do what you want to do. I feel like that too, and I’m not the world’s most obedient person, so they came by that honestly. On the other hand, I know if my mom had made me pay for forgetting with time I might have learned at an earlier age to be more organized. If I allowed my children to ignore me when they were small, they would not have had as much chance to grow up into people I want to spend time with. Too much compassion, too much understanding of how someone got to where they were doing things wrong — it makes you weak on justice. That deprives the person who is behaving incorrectly of the consequences that lead to learning, and that’s mean to everyone else. There has to be a balance between steel-cold justice and mushy-gushy compassion. The Buddhist teachers talk about “idiot compassion,” a term attributed to Trungpa Rinpoche. Pema Chodron expands on this, writing “It is the general tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see them suffering….” You’re doing it for yourself, to avoid discomfort.

To our urge for justice, we might quote Mahatma Ghandi, “If we choose an eye for an eye, we will all soon be blind.” To our rush of compassion, we quote Malcolm X, “We sometimes must kill the one who is evil in order to save the many who are innocent.” My father used to quote what he claimed was a Chinese proverb: “Mercy to the tiger is cruelty to the lamb.”

We wrestle with this in our church community on a small scale in our relations with one another. If one of us behaves inappropriately, how much do we have compassion and say “Well, I know that person, and I know why she is acting obnoxious or why he is hard to talk to or why this one has bad manners or no tact or why that one can’t shut up.” Knowing the person, knowing why, that helps us have compassion. On the other hand, it makes the person never get confronted with bad behavior. That, in turn, makes it hard on the people around them. In fact, I think a belief in another’s worth and dignity makes it important for me not to dismiss that person or give up on them. We shouldn’t give in to a temptation to say, “Don’t bother with them, they can’t change..” “Love” is the one word some use to sum up this principle. Love includes compassion, and it also includes justice. When you love, you want the person to be better. You want them to face themselves. You want to challenge them, to say your piece, you want to encourage them to remember their community. Of course, that kind of challenge has to be done rarely, with fear and trembling, only after you have looked at yourself, faced yourself, and done your best to ensure that your behavior and attitudes are correct.

The Covenant of Healthy Relations you all voted on seeks to flesh this out, it presents what this might look like. You can find it on a big rolling board in the fellowship hall.

“Justice, equity and compassion.” If it feels too vague, as you walk this UU spiritual path, make it more specific. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At the grocery store. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At the gym. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At work. “Justice, equity and compassion.” In our living rooms. It’s really difficult. Let’s see if we can aspire to it. Some justice was moved forward yesterday as the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Sometimes justice involves the experience of finally being heard and seen, finally having your story told. Bells rang out across the nation, echoing the bell from the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, VA. You have downloaded bell sounds, so let’s celebrate that moment here in Austin with the ringing of our own bells.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 18, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The first strand of the Buddhist eight-fold path is “Right Understanding.” Do you understand how things work? What causes suffering? What is the way to be happy?

Sermon

I see a lot of articles on how to be happy? They have titles like “7 steps to happiness” and “5 things we do to keep ourselves from being happy.” Most people want to be happy. We’ve all felt it. It tends to disappear, though, when our bank account shrinks to nothing, or our shoulder hurts, it shrinks when people we love are in trouble, or when we’re anxious or outraged or suffering.

On the front of your order of service is a photo of a path. The reason for this is that, today, we’re going to start talking a one of the oldest “8 part path to happiness,” which is at the center of Buddhism.

Buddhism is a religion that came up out of Hinduism. A Hindu prince had been sheltered from the world. Not just from the world, but from religion. His mother had died when he was a baby, and a holy man had prophesied that the boy would grow up to be a great general, a king, or a holy man. His father decided to eliminate the holy man option by raising the boy in a palace built just for him. When he was 16 he was given a beautiful wife, and they had a family. When he was in his late 20’s, though, the prince wanted to venture out. On the road, he saw an old man. “What is the matter with him?”

“He is old,” answered the charioteer. “that happens to everyone.”

On subsequent ventures out, he saw a sick person, a dead body and an ascetic. His charioteer explained to him that people get diseases. They get old, they (and by they, I mean we) die.

In growing Despair and horror at the realities of suffering and death, grieving at the thought of losing his mother, his father, his wife and children to these terrible ravages of living in mortal flesh, he decided to go follow the ascetic path. He was so committed to this path, enduring pain, starving himself until his belly button touched his spinal cord, never achieving satisfaction, but always wanting to go farther to find wisdom. Five other Ascetics who were so admiring of his dedication that they became his followers. After years of this, the Buddha realized these holiness practices weren’t going to get him to wisdom and peace. He accepted a bowl of rice from a little girl, took a bath in the river and sat down under a tree. His disciples were shocked, and left him. sat down to meditate. He realized that none of the ascetic practices he had been following we’re going to work. He vowed that he would stay meditating under the tree until he reached Enlightenment period all night and evil demon, Mara the demon of Illusion tempted him with food, beautiful women, power, all the normal people just moved into Nirvana when they reached Enlightenment, things that men are tempted with. Enlightenment was his. Normally but the king of Gods himself Brahma asked the Buddha to stay and teach. He agreed. Now he was hesitant to teach, but the simple truths that had come to him while he was sitting under the tree wood rescue human beings from suffering and unhappiness. He walked to the river where some holy men were sitting, among them the Five Guys who had abandoned the Buddha when he took rice from a little girl.

He preached the truth that had come to him as he sat under the tree for several days and nights

1. Life is out of joint.
2. This suffering, this out of place-ness is caused by desire.
3 if you stop craving/desire, you’ll be happy
4. The way to stop craving is the 8 fold path.

This is the first of eight sermons, over the upcoming months, on the eightfold path of Buddhism. The Eightfold Path is not like eight steps, or little boxes you check off one by one as you accomplish them. It is a path of eight elements interwoven, braided together, having to do with understanding, practice and behavior that Buddhism says will take you on a journey away from suffering and toward freedom. The first component of the path is “Right Understanding.” “Getting it” is the first and continuing job of the person on this path. You get stuck by the temporary nature of good health, by the sudden lightning strike of tragedy and trouble. A friend gets killed in a car accident. You have a heart attack. A piano falls on your head. Suddenly the assurance of ongoingness is gone. Suddenly security looks like a laughable illusion. Your ideas of how things work are upended. Or you catch a glimpse of the truth of how things do work. You have a glimmer of a sense that many people create their own suffering, that disquietude lurks at the corners of most lives, that grief, hope, fear, hunger for security or pleasure or acceptance drive people to do what they do and that satisfaction is elusive. A deeper reality crooks its finger at you and whispers ( if you’re old enough to remember the deeply Buddhist movie “The Matrix) it whispers in Laurence Fishburn’s voice: “Wake up. There must be satisfaction somewhere, let’s go look for it. “

One of the things I find most relaxing about Buddhism is that it doesn’t ask you to take any of this on faith. It asks you to try it out and see if it works for you. Buddhism asks you to start with your experience. Most people’s attention is squandered on the anxiety, all the worry, and the fear in their lives. What will happen to us? Am I doing this right? Will people have a good time at my party? Will I get well again? Will I end up a bag lady? Will I find love? Moment after moment, for most people, is filled with hope that things will go well and fear that things won’t. That life is a roller coaster. In the words of the poet John Prine “Some times you’re up, some times you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown.”

Things happen to you, then you make stories about the things that happen: that they shouldn’t be happening, that they are a punishment for something you did, that your life is unfair, that you are unlucky and unblessed. Buddhism says all of these thoughts about what happens, all of the roller coaster emotion caused by hoping and fearing makes you suffer. There is a way to end the suffering. In your life, you will have pain, but you don’t have to make yourself extra suffering over the pain. The eightfold path, with its eight elements, is the way to train yourself morality, mentally and emotionally, to be free from suffering from the thoughts you have about what happens. Here are the eight elements: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

Right understanding, the first strand of the Eightfold Path, “getting it, ” involves seeing how things are. You understand that you suffer because you have attachments to how things should go. You crave, you cling, you hope, you fear.

You have hopes that an interview will go well. You are anxious about it. You worry afterward about whether they liked you. If you get the job you worry about doing it well. If you don’t get the job you wonder why they didn’t like you. You have ideas about how it should go. You have interpretations of how it went, ideas from your interpretations, and you suffer over those.

Someone you love is drinking or using again. You worry about how bad it’s going to get. You feel the feelings from when it was at its worst. You interpret your friend’s using as his not loving you, because if he loved you he would want things to be good for you, and things aren’t good for you when he is using. It feels as though he is doing it to you.

In your thoughts is a way you wish things would go. You have fears about how things could be. All of these things, hopes and fears, cause you suffering. When you are anxious about these things you miss a lot of your life: seeing your other friends, you can barely hear what people are saying to you, you don’t enjoy your food, sleep, sex, beauty, things seem garbled and dim. You are suffering. How could that stop?

Wake up. “Get it” that if you calm and focus your mind you can see reality more clearly. “Get it” that what happens happens. There are certain things you can do to make the interview go well, and you do them. Or not. Then it happens. You get the job. Or not. You can interpret it any way you want to. They didn’t like you?

Maybe. Maybe they had someone else who was a better fit. Maybe this is not your job, maybe yours is coming. If the job wouldn’t have been a good fit for you, you would have been miserable in it. Is that what you wanted?

In meditation we have the chance of seeing the story we are telling ourselves about our life. You can notice the thoughts you are having about what is happening in your life. There are a hundred different stories, and seeing your story is part of getting it. Another part of Right Understanding, of waking up, is understanding the law of Karma. Its literal name is “right view of the ownership of action” The Buddhist teachers say: “Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs.” The Buddhist scriptures, like the Christian scriptures, talk about results of actions as “fruits.” “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If our lives are like a river, it’s as if we are all living downstream from our actions, and the dirty or clean water that runs because of those actions catches us later.

Good actions are morally commendable, helpful to the growth of the spirit, and productive of benefits for yourself and others. Unwholesome actions, to use a more Buddhist word than “bad,” ripen into suffering.

Getting it means that you see that suffering occurs from craving, desire and attachment, that the way to end suffering is to end craving and attachment, that the way to end craving is to attend to the eightfold path of right wisdom and right behavior. To own your actions, your part in any situation, to let go of blaming and clean up what you are putting into the water upstream from where you live.

I have a friend who tells the story of her mother-in-law, Carolyn, at the drive-through window at the bank. The teller had sent out a pen for her to use in filling out her deposit slip. She had dropped the pen, which had fallen underneath the seat of the car. Carolyn could reach the pen, she could get her fingers around it, but she couldn’t pull her hand out with the pen in it. Finally they made a present to her of the pen so she would go on.

We are caught like that with our grasping, unable to be free. What is the pen under your seat? What is keeping you from moving? Do you need to let it go? Do you need to drive to a safe place in the parking lot of the bank, get out of the car, move the seat, and get the pen? Either way, you get unstuck, and unstuck is where we want to be. Oh, and happy. We want to be happy.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 4, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Water Communion Service. We each bring our water from a place that has meaning to us and pour our waters together. We sing water songs and have a child-friendly sermon.

Notes from the sermon

Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit

In the stories the ancient people tell about how the trees and rocks and animals and people got here, Some stories are of God shaping human beings from mud. Others are of a divine being named Spider Woman gathering different colors of earth, mixing them together to make all shades of skin, plants, flowers, and singing the Creation Song over them so they came to life. Science teaches that life came from the ocean, and beings emerged who could live either in water or on land, and then life evolved so that some lived in water and other life lived mostly on the land, breathing air. So we sing:

Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit

Our bodies are more than half water. It’s not like water is from here down, that’s silly because you can feel the bones in there! It’s mixes all in with the bones and muscles, blood and skin. Have you ever seen your blood? Sometimes when you get hurt, you skin breaks and some blood comes out. People’s blood all is pretty much the same. What color is it? Red. All life needs water to survive. We like to teach our children to be very aware of water. We are grateful for the clean water we get to drink. We are careful with the plants we plant around our houses, so they don’t use too much water, we don’t leave the water running while we brush our teeth. We like to drink water all day long in order to stay healthy, and we do what we can to help people in other places in the world where they can’t easily get to clean water. Some children your age have to walk a long long way to get some water and bring it back to their families. Sometimes the water is dirty, and it sometimes make their families sick. Some people are working with those families to build wells closer to them so they can get good water without sending their kids out to get water from far away.

Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit

Have you ever held your breath? Boy, do we ever need to breathe! Air comes into our bodies, all the way in. and we blow it all the way out. Sometimes we can sing while we breathe out. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we just breathe. Some places have air that is clean and good for you, and some places have air that’s dirty with car exhaust or factory smoke or pollen. We like breathing, and so we use our votes to vote for people who will keep our air the cleanest. So we can sing!

Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit

Our religion, Unitarian Universalism, has a symbol, the lit chalice. See it up here? The fire represents the spirit that helps us love, the spirit that is a voice of truth inside us. Do you have a sense inside when you’ve done something good? When you’ve made a mistake or hurt someone? Ancient people said there was something inside us that lives forever, that lets us feel when we are close to God, close to the Big Spirit that connects us all, and when we are farther away. The Big Spirit that connects us all is a spirit of love and truth. That’s why we light a chalice for our Sunday services, in our home chalices before dinner together, even at meetings that we have here at the church.

Our spirit brings us close to the fire that speaks to us of the Big Spirit of Love and Truth.

Let’s sing again while the last group of people come up and pour their water into the bowls.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 14, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

When the Unitarians merged with the Universalists, they decided to write a list of ideas we all “affirm,” which means to say “yes” to, and “promote,” which means we talk about these things, not only amongst ourselves but with others as well. Let’s take a look at how they speak to what is going on today.

What a situation we have out there these days! The election is unlike anything we’ve seen, terrorism is affecting European people now, so it’s getting a lot of press. Folks feel somehow that they have to choose sides between suggesting that Black lives matter and honoring the dangerous job that law enforcement is trying to do. You have to have fine-tuned ears now because people all talk at the same time on the cable news shows. People on both sides act like the others have taken leave of their good sense. In a situation like this, we need to go back to basics. We need to turn to our Principles. When we talk every Sunday about what holds us together, we say our mission. That’s not the only thing at the foundation of our church. We have Principles, and a thoughtful commitment to the Principles will shape your life. Taking a deep refreshing a dive into them this year, we will see what treasures we can bring up from the depths, to aid our growing strength as spiritual/spirited people.

The Principles were adopted in 1960, when the Unitarians and Universalists were merging. They were hammered out with passion, fury, diplomacy, compassion and compromise. Their language was of the time, and, in the early 80’s the women let it be known that changes needed to be made. There were discussions, thoughtful and fruitful. Much smoother than before. There were several General Assemblies where votes were taken. I remember, in the early 90’s when I was just coming into this denomination from the Presbyterians, at my first GA I got to see the seventh principle, about” the interdependent web of all existence, of which we a part” was given its final positive vote, to allow it to be added to the original six. My sense of the truth of that Principle, my experience with Earth-based spirituality, found it deeply satisfying that this denomination had taken that step.

So our principles are the result of a lot of committee work. They can challenge and change us, and I want you to know that the work of teams of people thinking and acting together are the way all of the best church work gets done. The Principles are something we agree to affirm and we agree to promote them, but they are not a test of belief, as a creed is. Creeds, also created by committees, were originally crafted as a focus for Christians who were being tortured for their beliefs. People had a list of beliefs to hold onto as they were threatened with death. It was self-definition in the midst of a hostile culture. It feels good to some folks to be part of a group reciting ancient words.

Our principles are not commandments or a creed, but they do point to who we aspire to be. They are a big, inviting house where there are lots of rooms, lots of ways of being and believing within a structure, a container for our right relations.

In this election cycle, we watch Trump rallies, and it is easy to see the people who do not live by the principles. It’s not that they would not be welcome here, it’s that they would feel a lack of fit. They would understand, listening to the principles being read that this was a different place. About as different as you can get from a Trump rally. There is still the longing for fairness, just different thoughts on how to get there. Different methods for getting there. There is still the longing for safety, but different thoughts on who should be included in that safety. The Principles inform our lives, and, often, unless we were raised with them, the first time we heard them we felt ourselves rung like a bell.

The first Principle that we agree to affirm and promote is the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This does not hold for ideas, which have to prove their worth. We are not called to affirm or promote the worth or dignity of every idea, but of every person. There is no individual or group of people who are worthless, who are undeserving of dignity. This idea can guide our thoughts, and show us how to treat people. Just in case you think this just means “be nice,” let me spell this out for you. I like to turn up the heat on our understanding of the Principles by adding “beginning in our homes and congregations” to the end of each one. So, we recognize the worth and dignity of every person in our home, including ourselves. Does this mean letting everyone do what they want to until civilization falls? Clearly not. A colleague of mine in the state of Maine took a walk in her neighborhood. Hanging from an apartment building was an enormous rebel flag. A woman happened to come out of the building, and they began a neighborly chat.. My colleague asked about the flag and found out this woman’s boyfriend had hung it. My colleague asked, gently, whether the woman knew that, for a lot of people, that flag was not a symbol of the South, but an emblem of racism and white supremacy. The next day it was down. Gone. She didn’t harangue. Didn’t hammer or nag. Just kindly, without self-righteousness, gave her some information. In this, she respected the worth and dignity of the woman and her boyfriend. That’s hard to do, though, and the likelihood is that the racism didn’t change, it just went inside the apartment. What works better?

In the spring I talked to you about how new research seems to indicate that the brains of liberals and conservatives are wired differently. From tiny involuntary eye movements in reaction to various peaceful or provoking photographs, researchers say they can have a good idea about a person’s political leanings. The corollary of this is that words will not change someone’s mind. The only things that changes someone’s mind, we learn from the FBU hostage negotiators, is listening. Deep, active, sincere listening. Listening to the point where you can almost sense the need for security, the urge to rest in the familiar surroundings of only people you understand, to the point where you can almost see how giving the whole system over to someone who claims he knows what to do, who claims he can fix everything, where you want to believe that there is someone more grown-up than you who will take care of things. It’s that kind of listening that will give you the best odds of partnering with another mind in making a change.

We honor the worth and the dignity of other people by believing that they can teach us something if we engage in conversation, if we listen, if we say our piece when what the I Ching calls “the window of influence” is open. Say our piece and then leave it alone. We honor people’s worth and dignity when we do not infanitilize them because we don’t understand their language or their culture. We honor their worth and dignity when we not only treat people with fairness, but we work for more fairness in the laws of our land. We see so many examples of this not being done. We see mostly male legislators, with values shaped by ignorant preachers, encroaching on sensible health care for women. White folks are waking up again to the structures of white supremacy in our society. We don’t need to feel guilty, we just need to notice it and not fall back asleep, and we need to do what we can do dismantle unfair structures, and use the privileges we do have due to our gender, our skin color, our mainstream sexuality or our able-bodied ness in ways that help those without. And if you know someone who quibbles about whether the structures are still unfair, just as them whether they would like to trade lives and be treated the way people of color are treated. If they would like to live in a body that works differently from the majority of bodies.

What we are seeing in this election cycle is a high status person giving permission for the voicing of crude, cruel, racist, sexist and uneducated prejudices. There are thousands of these folks in every state. I’m not here to play “ain’t it awful” I’m here to say we have an enormous and difficult listening opportunity.

Most listening opportunities are easier than that, with people in your family and at work. My challenge to all of us is this. Knowing that words don’t change people who disagree more than a few degrees from you, or people who are not open to you, let’s put all our emphasis on listening for a few months. Can we do it? I don’t know about you, but I know I won’t be able to. But I’m going to keep trying. It’s my goal. Listening is such a gift. Become aware. Almost no one does it. No one, and I think it’s the key to health and happiness. Take a look at the front of your order of service.

Let yourself hear “shhhhhh.” And trust your good sense to tell you when it’s time. To shhhhhhhhh.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 7, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

My attempts at cooking and baking have taught me some things. More recently, Kiya and I spent three weeks in Mexico learning Spanish, which has taught me even more.

One of the things I do as a writer is to try to tell the truth as much as I can, at least to myself. There is one trick I use to get to underlying truth, and I’m going to use it this morning so you can see how it works. Then you can decide whether you might want to use it too. I write a sentence or so, and then I write “What I really mean to say is …. ” And wait to see what happens.

With the first part of my vacation, as those of you who are on Facebook with me will know, I started experimenting with cooking and baking. I learned something about how I like to do things. What I really mean to say is, I cooked every meal when my boys were growing up. What I really mean to say is I grilled every meal. The grill was in the carport, so rain or shine, summer or winter, I grilled chicken breasts or pork chops, steaks, hamburgers, ears of corn, onions, peppers and peaches. There is something satisfying about cooking over an open flame, and there is very little measuring involved. Measuring seems like too much when you have a job and two small children.

I was no good at cooking. What I really mean to say is that I had decided when I was in my teens that I was bad at it. I used to experiment all the time. I made my own yoghurt, I made bread, I put salads together with apples and sunflower seeds. The grownups mocked me. It was the early 70’s, when salad was mostly iceberg lettuce and thousand island dressing.

I got confident. What I really mean to say is that I got confident enough to make a mistake, which was trying to make an applesauce omelet. I know. I should have known it would be awful, and lo, it was. Awful. I left the kitchen. What I really mean to say is I left the kitchen to my mother and my sister, who were a pair, and went to do math and play chess with my dad, because that was the division of parents decided upon in the family. It was also the early 70’s, which was a time when Feminism was trying to find itself again, and young women were told not to learn to type, because if you could type, that’s what you would be doing for the rest of your career, and we were somehow shown that, in order to move beyond stereotyped femaleness we should scorn all parts of the stereotype, which included cooking, make-up, perfume, giggling, or whatever was associated in the culture with the “Mad Men” type of womanhood. It has taken the new generation of young women who can wear aprons, have tattoos, struggle with work and family balance, and still ask why struggling with work and family balance is more of an issue for them than for working men their age.

In sharing my adventures on FB, I got help. “Freeze the flour before you make the pie dough” was a good one, as everything must be very cool for it to work well. One person offered to come over and bake for me. That is not help, that is just — something else. Sharing your knowledge with someone, (if they are mature enough to be open to input, which I, of course, am) can be helpful. A friend in Richmond sent an excellent set of measuring spoons, and someone in Austin gave me an extra Cuisinart she had, which fulfilled a wish I’d thought was out of reach. Another person kindly told me I should not start with the hard things, but start with the basics. That doesn’t work for me. What I really mean to say is I learn best by being thrown into the deep end. Plus, I don’t really want to learn to cook. I’m a first born Virgo, which means I just want to cook. See the difference?

Fortunately, the deep end is where I landed at the Spanish Immersion school in San Miguel De Allende. We had to find a gay-friendly school, which is something many people don’t have to consider. There are UUs in San Miguel, and they helped us with a house to rent and good information about where to buy meat and vegetables, wifi, electricity, water and cell phones. The school was about fifteen minutes taxi ride through hair-raisingly crowded and narrow cobblestone streets. The first day I just showed driver the address on the screen of my phone. That’s how much Spanish I had. The school had said, by email, that we could start any Monday. Monday morning, we were shown into a class of four people. They had already been going two weeks. They were on p. 52 of a 60 page work book. Immersion means that Spanish is taught in Spanish, but I speak moderately good French, so I found I could understand nearly everything. 80 percent of the words used in the class were very close to the French, so I could follow along. I was happy figuring it out. That part of my brain that is good at remembering names lit up, and I remembered the vocabulary words well. Grammar, well, not so much. And speaking. OY. That is the hard part. Still, we had wide-ranging conversations about US and Mexican politics, about religion and the revolution, about Chinese herbal medicine. The teachers were professionally patient with my struggles to say things I wanted to say. We had been practicing with Duolingo, an app on the phone that teaches any language you like, and I’d learned to say “Los elefantes no beben leche” (The elephants don’t drink milk), and “Quiero mas ulvas en my pastil.” (I want more grapes in my cake,) but none of those sentences was of much use with taxi drivers or in class. Everything in class was in present tense, which keeps communication fairly simple, and it’s a good spiritual exercise. I enjoyed practicing with taxi drivers and waitresses. They were also professionally patient with me, and once in a while, with a smile, they would correct my words. I was telling one that, at the pool where we were going, ‘voy a sentarse en la sambra,” (that I was going to sit in the shade.) “A la sombra,” he kindly corrected. Then, “what is that in English?” he asked. “The shade,” I said. He practiced that word a few times. When he came back to pick us up, he said “That word again? Shike?”

“Shade,” I said, and felt much better getting one sound right in my words but not all of them. The words for Thursday and egg sound the same, and dog and but sound the same, etc. It’s comical for the Spanish speakers to hear me talk, which I’m glad about. I’m still very timid about speaking, because I hate to be a beginner, What I really mean to say is I think I should be able to do everything well right away, What I really mean to say is being a learner is fine for other people, but I’m very uncomfortable in that role, What I really mean to say is …. What? It takes courage to make mistakes. It takes courage to be a learner. Why does it take courage? It shouldn’t. What I really mean to say is everyone should know that when you are learning new things you are, by definition, not going to be good at them right away. What I really mean to say is I’m just like everyone else, and it makes me mad that I have to keep reminding myself of that. Life reminds me often enough.

I learn over and over that it’s ok to be a learner, that mistakes are inevitable if you want to grow, that some people learn best when they are over their head, that the kind of help that equips the person who is adventuring is better than the kind of help that takes the adventure away. What I really mean to say is I’m glad to be back sharing life with you, and this is going to be a learning year.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 5, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What can we learn about community from pecan trees? From the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash?

Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 22, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“What’s the Difference?” This week we’ll look at the difference between venting vs. lamenting.

Today is the last of our “What’s the Difference?” sermons for this church year. We’re talking about the difference between lamentation and venting. In the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a book of Lamentations. The book consists of five separate poems. In the first (chapter 1), the city sits as a desolate weeping widow overcome with miseries. In Chapter 2 wonders whether the destruction of the city by the Babylonians is because of the sins of the nation. Chapter 3 has in it hope that the chastisement will be for the good of the people. The next chapters go back to wondering about the sins of the people, being sad and distressed that God seemed to have deserted them, questioning whether the punishment was too great for the sin, and hope for the recovery of the people. This exile of the people happened in 586 BCE. Many Jews stayed in Babylon, but others longed for Jerusalem. “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept for thee, Zion. We remember thee, Zion.”

Each chapter is a poem, the first four are acrostics. They have groups of 22 lines, each starting with the next letter of the alphabet.

Lamentations are a form of prayer used in many ancient cultures. They are a crying out on behalf of a community, a cry from the heart and the spirit. There is anguish, self-examination, questioning of the way things work. “Did I cause this? What is my responsibility? Did I do something wrong? Am I supposed to learn a lesson here? What might the lesson be? How did this happen? What are the causes? What could we have done differently?”

Lamentation is rooted theologically: in your relationship to the Universe, to Wisdom, to God. Venting is just letting off steam, right?

Most of us have been taught that Venting is a good way to let off steam, to lance the blister of your anger. If you don’t express it, it turns inward. I was taught that as I was learning to be a therapist. Back in the 80’s, 30 years ago. Turns out, it’s not so true. Venting, with words or with physical punching, can make some people more angry, more aggressive. College students at Ohio State University, in a study directed by Dr. Brad Bushman were asked to write an essay, which they were told would be graded by another student. After they turned in the essay, they waited for it to be graded. It was returned to them with a big red F, and the comment “This is the worst essay I’ve ever read.” They were mad. One group of students was told to vent their anger by punching a big pillow. The other group just sat for a time. Then the researchers came in with cups and hot sauce. They told the angry students they could put any amount of hot sauce in the cup and their grader would have to drink it. The students who had just sat quietly with their thoughts poured a small amount into the cup. Those who had punched the pillows poured much more hot sauce, some filling the cups! That you need to vent your anger is being shown to be one of those “sticky” stories, to use a word from Malcom Gladwell. All evidence to the contrary, the story still persists.

Complaining is actually bad for you. Neuroscience (and if you are interested in this part, there is a class in the science of religion offered by two scientists in the congregation – look in the announcements in your oos) “synapses that fire together wire together.” Once you have a particular thought, it becomes easier and easier to have that thought again. You can complain, but if you become repetitive with it, it can cause a trend toward that kind of thought, and pretty soon you’re that whiny person who is hard to hang out with. Venting releases stress chemicals into your body, which is bad for BP, weight and blood sugar.

What can you do instead, that is different?

The ancient practice of lamentation differs from venting. It’s more often about a situation the community is in. It’s rooted in your theological view of the world. What is the world supposed to be like? Who is taking care of things? What is our part in what is happening? You are calling out in lamentation. To God, or to the Spirit of Life. Your heart is in a lament in the way that it’s not in a vent. Your attention is turned to your responsibility in the mess as well as wrongs done by another.

The first word of the book is “how,” which is central to the dynamic of lamentation. How did this terrible situation come about? What did I do? What was supposed to happen? What did I think would happen?

I wrote a lamentation in Biblical style, starting one line with each letter of the alphabet:

All the people on both sides seem to have lost their civility
Both Democrats are saying things which seem to me to be unwise
Civil discourse seems to be becoming a lost skill
Donald Trump
Education is so important to democracy.
Frustration and anger make better news than civil discourse.
Great? I think he means “Make America White Again.”
History is a great teacher.
I must admit I used to be riveted by the horrible things said and done.
Jefferson and Adams had a campaign nastier than this one.
Knowledge of the past gives us perspective
Laughing at it is not working for me any longer
My heart is seized with sorrow for my country
Nausea grips me as I watch the news
Oh, how did we get into this fix?
Please tell me everything is going to be all right
Quivering with dread, we listen for the next awful thing he’ll say
Remind me that nothing too terrible has happened yet
Sweet dreams of a just society fuel our actions.
Teaching civics in the school would help people understand how things work
Understanding others is what we should work on before trying to be understood by others
Variations in views are a quality of every free society
We’re all in this together
Xenophobia is a human failing we must always work against.
Yelling is a sign that no communication is happening.
Zero is the number of ideas on how to fix it.

Maybe next time you want to vent, hold it, deepen it, and write a lament in Biblical style. You might learn something, and rather than just going round and round in welle worn circles, you might. grant your pain some forward motion.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 8, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Make New Mistakes” If you can’t be the good witch, can you be the good-enough witch?

Meditation
Rev. Dr. Maureen Killoran

Let us tell the stories of mothers … stories that could be true.

Let us tell of warm mothers, soft and round, likely to be found with flour on their nose, and always ready to pour you a glass of milk to go with the cookies on your plate. These mothers are increasingly rare.

Let us tell of mothers who are like bubbles of champagne: they surprise your senses, leave you giggly, but when you least expect it they erupt with an unexpected ‘pop.’

Stories that could be true.

Then there are grouchy mothers, stressed mothers, exhausted mothers, faces lined with worry and spirits tired and grey.

Other mothers are wise and reliable; not prone to many words or to a lot of noise – but you know that when you need them, they’ll be there.

Let us tell of fierce mothers, the ones who’ll love you even when you’re wrong.

Let us tell also of absent mothers, whose memory shimmers at the edges of your heart.

Let us tell of distant mothers … cruel mothers … loving mothers … giving mothers. There are walk-away mothers … save-the-world mothers too-busy mothers … mothers you cry because you lost them, and mothers who make you cry because you can’t …

Stories that could be true.

May we hold in our hearts the mothers we have known; those who loved us-and those who tried.

May we forgive the mothers who didn’t get it right, and try to release the knots of disappointment … anger … grief … pain.

May we hold in our hearts the truth that mothering-nurturing-is a task that belongs to us all.

However old or young you are, whatever your gender, may you make extra room for nurturing in your life this week.

May you say something real to a harried store clerk, give a co-worker a genuine compliment, take time to listen deeply to a friend.

In our shared silence may we remember, and reflect, and create anew, the stories of love and nurture, from this point forward, stories that can be true.

Sermon

I worked for around 15 years as a therapist, and I heard a lot of people talk about feeling like a failure. When we explored that feeling, it seemed that anything less than perfection felt like failure to some people. They felt they had disappointed their parents. “What did your parents expect from you?” I asked “They wanted me to be perfect.”

Many of us are more critical of ourselves than anyone else could be. Our mistakes glare at us when we survey our lives. Things we’ve said, things we hadn’t thought of that we should have thought of. Damage we’ve done. Businesses we’ve attempted that didn’t make it. Relationships that didn’t last. Times when you yelled at your children when you had resolved not to yell.

Speaking of that, happy Mother’s Day. Parenting is a minefield of mistakes. Mother-guilt is the worst, as you look around and imagine that every other woman is a better mother than you are. You try to teach good values, manners, conversational skills. You wonder sometimes if your kids are already damaged by something you did while you were still building them in your body, or by something you forgot to protect them from, or by something they are doing that you should have known about even though they were trying with all their skill and might to keep it from you. For your own protection and peace of mind.

I’ll tell you how to be a good mother (and father.) Understand that they are watching what you do, along with listening to what you say. Be the person you would want them to be. Don’t only talk about your values, live them. Heal yourself. Ask what you would want them to do in the situations in which you find yourself, and then model that.

Back to my therapy office. I had a cartoon on the wall (and I’m not a big cartoon person) that showed Glinda in her psychiatrist’s office. She’s saying “Everyone wants something. This one wants a heart, that one wants courage …. It’s too much.” The caption underneath reads “Glinda learns just to be the good-enough witch.”

Some of us will go to great lengths to avoid making a mistake. It can keep you from trying new things. Mostly it’s the first borns and only children. Some of us grew up with people who would joke “I’m never wrong, except for this one time in 1993, when I thought I was wrong, but it turns out I wasn’t. … ” The family joked that the headstone on my grandfather’s grave should be engraved with “Often in error, never in doubt.” Sometimes people do the same things over and over, even though they’re not working, just because to try something new would be scary and odd, and these, at least, are familiar mistakes.

The world’s best wisdom says mistakes, even failures, are generative, they are necessary for growth. Mistakes are how you get to new knowledge. Thomas Edison said “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Danish Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr, says, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field”.

The drive to avoid mistakes can lead to a certain kind of success. There is nothing wrong with this. Out of the 23 first NASA astronauts, 21 were first borns. This is not the case for inventors, though, many of whom are people who are more sanguine about trying things. They are more ok with making mistakes, doing things that turn out not to work. My older son and I were playing around with a puzzle. Nine dots in rows of three, making a square. The challenge was to draw a line, without picking your pencil up, connecting all nine dots. We had worked on it for about ten minutes, trying this or that, and my younger son came over to see what we were doing. He picked up the pencil, drew a line that ran, shockingly, out of the square, and then back down to connect the rest of the dots. They hadn’t said not to move out of the box, but we had imagined that rule for ourselves.

This congregation is vigorously living our mission, trying to figure out whether we want to be a Sanctuary Church, or just be a church that does sanctuary when it’s called for, and works with several refugees at a time trying to keep them from being in a situation where they have to leave their homes and families and go into sanctuary. We might make a mistake. We might have to say “Hmm. This isn’t working. We made a mistake. Let’s do something different.” You’re not irresponsible if you make a mistake doing things no one else is doing nor knows how to do. You’re not an idiot. You’re just trying a new thing.

We are moving forward on a building expansion and renovation project. We are using the best expertise we know how to use. We raised money at the top of the range of what churches can raise, 5 times our annual giving. You all are a tremendous success. Will we spend it all perfectly? We’re going to try. Might we make a mistake? What if we do?

What do you do when you make a mistake? You see what part of it was yours. You take responsibility and let go of the self-defense.

Then you say you’re sorry.

Then you try to learn and heal that part of yourself that led to the mistake. And you try to make amends.

“I’m sorry. I love you.” Repeat. To the universe. As you heal yourself, you heal others.

I made a mistake this week. I know better. I said things that hurt someone I like and respect a good deal. I realized I’d caused hurt, and I apologized. I was laughing about something just because it made me uncomfortable, I said, which was the truth. I was understood and forgiven on the spot. I didn’t forgive myself, though. That takes longer. Looking at what happened, I made a plan to get more comfortable with that issue. In order to say fewer hurtful things, some people try to watch what they say. That never works.

The beauty of working on yourself, on the thoughts and love level, is that you don’t have to watch what you say if you see more clearly, if you judge less and understand more.

“I don’t know what to say to these people,” I heard someone say.

Well, first of all, there is no “these people.” There are just people. There are those of us who are Democrat and those of us who are Republican. There are those of us who are comfortable financially and those of us who are struggling. There are those of us who are straight and those of us who are gay, and a lot of people on the continuum in between. There are those of us who are male and those of us who are female and there are those who move in-between on the continuum. The wider we draw the circle the less we have to wonder what to say to “those people.” They are us.

Go ahead and mix with folks you don’t know what to say around. You will make mistakes. Look forward to it. It’s the way we learn, and we love learning.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 1, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How might UUs use prayer beads? What is prayer for UUs? How does having something tangible in in our hand help our mind and spirit?

Call to Worship

from “Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers”
by Anne Lamott

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, “Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,” you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. […] Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

Meditation

by Annie Dillard

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Sermon

You were given three beads as you came in this morning. What we are going to do is talk about prayer beads. The reason for beads is that people want to pray. We want to meditate. We want to slow down and take ten deep breaths for our blood pressure, but we don’t. We want to remember to say kind things to our partner or spouse, we want to say the lovingkindness meditation during the week, but we don’t. Beads are there as a tangible reminder, something to hold, to help us keep track, to catch our attention, to ground us with their texture in our hand, to connect our meditation with our senses.

Beads have been used from time immemorial to help people pray. Of course they don’t know for sure when people began using beads to pray. There are beads that look like prayer beads from Egypt as early as 3200 B.C.E. In a museum in central Europe, there is a fossil of a necklace of shell and bone. We don’t know if it was used just for decoration or for prayer. These days, most of the world’s inhabitants — nearly two-thirds of the planet’s population — pray with beads. Maybe they relate to the abacus. Maybe ancient people did what the Christian third century Desert Mothers and Fathers did, carrying a particular number of pebbles in their pockets, which they dropped one by one on the ground as they said each of their prayers.

INDIA
In India, sandstone carvings dating from 185 B.C.E. show people holding prayer beads. The same strand of prayer beads, called a japa mala, is still used, designed for wear around the neck. It has 108 beads for repeating mantras or counting one’s breaths. Japa means saying the name of God, and mala means “rose” or “garland” in Sanskrit.

BUDDHISM
Buddhists inherited the mala from Hinduism, since Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. They use 108 beads or a number of beads that goes into 108, so you would go around the circle of beads twice or three times to make the 108. In Tibet, malas of inlaid bone originally included the skeleton parts of holy men, to remind their users to live lives worthy of the next level of enlightenment. Today’s bone malas are made of yak bone, which is sometimes inlaid with turquoise and coral.

The 108 beads represent the number of worldly desires or negative emotions that must be overcome before attaining nirvana. Buddhists believe that saying a prayer for each fleshly failing will purify a person.

CHRISTIAN
It’s interesting that the word mala means “rose,” or “garland.” Roman Catholics and Anglicans use a Rosary as prayer beads. It’s name comes from the Latin “rosarium,” meaning “rose garden.” The beads were also sometimes made of crushed and cooked rose petals. Praying the rosary is a traditional devotion of the Roman Catholic Church, combining prayer and meditation in sequences (called “decades”) of one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be to the Father, as well as a number of other prayers (such as the Apostle’s Creed and the Hail Holy Queen) at the beginning and end. The Desert Fathers (third to fifth century) switched from using stones to using knotted ropes or a piece of leather to count prayers, typically the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”) The rosary is given ceremonially to a Greek Orthodox monk as the second step in the monastic life. It is called his ‘spiritual sword’.”

ISLAM
In Islam, prayer beads are referred to as Misbaha, and contain 99 beads, corresponding to the 99 Names of Allah.

NATIVE AMERICAN
Beads have always had a spiritual significance to Native Americans; neck medallions as early as A.D. 800 served as talismans. Certain items of jewelry and other ornamentation using beads were often central in healing ceremonies.

AFRICAN
The Yoruba believe that using beads enhances the power of ritual objects. The Masai find beads so meaningful to their culture that their language includes more than 40 words for different kinds of beadwork.

PRAYER
We’re Unitarian Universalists. How do we pray? From not at all through all types of meditation to traditional asking God for help. People think and talk about prayer in such different ways. For most religious people of every faith, prayer is asking God to do something. You beseech the Lord, you beg, you plead. Some people teach that God is a good parent, that God knows what you need without being asked, but that the asking is for your benefit. That is how I was taught. Other people act like God is an arrogant and forgetful king, who could do anything he wanted to do for you, but, unless you beg pretty, unless you do everything exactly right and say just the right thing, with just the right tone, just the right level of faith, having sent seed money to the right religious enterprise, God will not do what you need for him to do.

I think prayer is putting our focus, our energy toward something, or being grateful for something or just holding something in our heart and mind. I think there is something important about paying attention, and that is a big part of praying. Paying attention to the thing. Anne Lamott says there are only three prayers you need: Thanks. Wow. And Help! Do you need to have traditional beliefs to be in a position to say “Help!” No. I like to believe that there is a river of love running through the world that I call God, and that I can call out to love for help. Does it come from outside me? Inside? From other people, from the animals, the rocks, the trees and the stars? From spirits of people who have died? From particles smaller than the bosun that respond to desperation with some kind of release of energy? Or is it just good for me to acknowledge that I need help? Does any of that really matter, when you’re desperate for help and some help arrives? But maybe it doesn’t arrive, and then you are left telling yourself stories about why it didn’t…. Choosing your beliefs is fraught with joy and heartbreak.

REPEATING PRAYERS
Maybe prayer, like ritual, is one way to change your consciousness at will. Medieval monks wrote that after several weeks of repeating a prayer for many hours a day, they entered an altered state. They said they could see a powerful light around them. One mystic described the condition as a “most pleasant heat,” a “joyful boiling.”

In the early 1970’s, Dr. Herbert Benson, president and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School, documented a phenomenon he dubbed “the relaxation response”.

Benson experimented using Sanskrit mantras. He told his subjects to sit quietly and repeat the mantra either silently or aloud for ten to twenty minutes, to breathe regularly and to let all thoughts pass by, inviting the mind to be blank.

Benson found that those who repeated the Sanskrit mantras, for as little as ten minutes a day, experienced physiological changes-reduced heart rate, lower stress levels and slower metabolism. Repeating the mantras also lowered the blood pressure of those who had high blood pressure and generally decreased the subjects’ oxygen consumption (indicating that the body was in a restful state). Benson and his colleagues also tested other prayers, including “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, and found that they had the same effect. Even words like “one,” “ocean,” “love” and “peace” produced the response. It appears that Benson and his colleagues had uncovered a universal principle: repetitive prayer allows human beings to enter a relaxed state. More recently, researchers at U Mass and other institutions have discovered that meditation can lead to the thickening of certain regions of the brain. Gray matter is actually produced. There is a benefit to prayer that has little to do with belief at all.

We could use the three beads to: do the Buddhist prayer
1. yourself,
2. one you love
3. one you have trouble with

OR Do one thing you’re grateful for, one thing you are asking for, one thing you will give

OR Sets of ten deep breaths

I want you to think about the mission of this congregation. You could use the first bead to think about how your soul has been nourished, what nourishment it needs, how you have nourished the souls of others, and how you could do that today. The second bead is all about transformation. How has your life been transformed today, if it has? What kind of transformation would you like to experience? Could you help transform someone else’s life today? The third is the justice bead. How have you done justice today? What kind of justice do you need? Can you support someone else who is doing justice? We are not all activists every day: sometimes we are called to be in support. This is something you practice. I invite you to try it.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.