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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 12, 2015

The Plagues of Egypt were ten calamities that Israel’s God inflicted upon Egypt to persuade the Pharaoh to release the ill-treated Israelites from slavery. In our culture’s story, who or what is the pharaoh who won’t let the people go? Who is enslaved by this pharaoh? What can be done? How Many Plagues Will It Take?

Our Jewish neighbors and cousins just got through celebrating Passover.

We have a Seder meal here every year, where we tell the story of Passover, and where we have to sit in front of food for a long time without eating it, which is hard. Some of you weren’t there, so I’m going to tell you the story again this morning here at the beginning.

The Hebrew people were enslaved in Egypt. How did they get there? Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob had twelve sons (and some daughters). They sold one of their brothers to traveling salespeople in a caravan and he was taken to Egypt. They soaked his coat of many colors in the blood of an animal and told their father he was dead. Joseph had many adventures in Egypt, and ended up being an advisor to the Pharaoh. He brought his brothers and their families down to live in Egypt when there was famine in the land where they had been living. They lived well there and multiplied. Then, it says, “There arose a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.”

Gradually the Hebrew people were enslaved. Moses kills the overseer. Finds out people know. Helps the seven daughters water their flocks, marries one of them. Tends flocks. Sees burning bush. God calls him to lead but he is dubious. God performs a series of miracles to convince him. Staff to snake, hand leprous then healed. Hesitant. Aaron will speak for you.

A series of plagues – Blood, frogs, gnats, flies, dead animals, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, first born were killed and finally the exodus.

This month our Green Sanctuary committee has put together a slew of activities for our Spring Into Action project. With these activities we are combatting some modern day plagues.

Our dependence on fossil fuels, world wide, is poisoning the air. NASA photographs show dirty air from China swirling over the Saudi peninsula, over Africa, to the US and onward around. We trust ourselves too much and attempt to do things to get more fuel that have unforeseen consequences. We try to modify grains to feed the world better, and we do, but then we get arrogant. World bank, seed copyrighting, etc… farmer suicides.

We rely on control to keep the elite on top. Violence pervades our human race. The rich have become apathetic or merciless.

Now, some will say this is different because in the text God sent the plagues to curse an elite who were stealing the lives and labor of an oppressed people. These mostly are plagues we bring on ourselves. We are violent because of fear. We are greedy because of fear. Some of the plagues have come because we have trusted our knowledge too much, We wanted to cure famine, and we have, except for those caused by war, but we’ve created problems. The insecticide in our corn has killed butterflies.

Maybe fear is the Pharaoh. Maybe arrogance is the Pharaoh. Inside us is the one holding on and the one who must let go. This is not just a sermon for middle class comfortable people who have the option now of dealing with our own inner well being. We must let our inner Moses rise against the greed that controls politics, where corporations who aren’t interested in the public good buy a climate that lets them do whatever they want to. This is the planet we live on. There is no promised land to which we can go. We must see the oppression all around us and continue to work to see how we benefit from it and to call it out degrade and dismantle it. Our promised land is the Beloved Community, and we are making our way toward 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 15 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
April 5, 2015

Vedran Smailovic played his cello as mortars were falling on his street. His courage shone a light on the insanity of war. The service features a choir piece inspired by his story composed by Kiya Heartwood and featuring cellist Anna Park & guitarist Klondike Steadman.

This is Easter, which is about life and death.

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.
Deuteronomy 30:19 New International Version (NIV)

Every day the choice between life and death is set before us. Some situations write it large, our choice, in flaming letters. Today’s story is about Vedran Smailovic, the Principle cellist in the Sarajevo Opera. Sarajevo was the capital city of a section of Yugoslavia called Bosnia-Hertigovina. It was a modern city of about half a million people. Yugoslavia was breaking up, with complicated factions you don’t need to hear all the details of for this story. Troops laid siege to the city in what was to be the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. It lasted nearly four years. Life, for the people there, became a daily search for food and water. Nearly 14 thousand people died in the siege, 5 thousand of those civilians.

There was a bakery which was still open down the street from Vedran Smailovic’s apartment. People lined up every day to buy bread, despite mortar shelling and sniper fire that claimed innocent lives every day. On May 27th, 1992, a mortar shell hit right where the people were standing in line for bread. It was total carnage, with 22 people dead and many wounded. Helping the wounded, Smailovic wanted to do something. He wasn’t a politician or a soldier. He had his cello. The next day he dressed in his tux and tails and, sitting on a chair scorched by flames, he sat in the hole left by the mortar shell’s explosion and played his cello. The piece he chose to play was Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor, written from a fragment of manuscript found in the ruins of Dresden, Germany, after the firebombing of that city during WW II. He was taking the chance of being fired on by snipers or killed by more shelling, but this was his way of answering the war. People gathered to listen.

“Then he went to other sites where shells had taken the lives of Sarajevo’s citizens. He played there, and he played in graveyards. He played at funerals at no charge, even though the Serbian gunners would target such gatherings. His music was a gift to all hiding in their basements with rubble above their heads, a voice for peace for those daily dodging the bullets of the snipers. As the reports of Smajlovic’s performances on the shattered streets spread, he became a symbol for peace. A reporter questioned whether he was crazy to play his cello outside in the midst of a war zone. He countered, “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?” Daniel Buttry

We are not being shelled here, but we still face the choice between life and death every day.

I want to tell you about my friend Marsha, who is dying. She has so many things wrong with her she doesn’t even bother listing them. Hospice came a couple of years ago, but six months later they left. She drives a big Oldsmobile 25 mph so if she has a heart attack on the way to the grocery store she won’t hurt anyone. Marsha is a poet. We met when I used this poem of hers in a church newsletter. It’s called

Fearing Paris

Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side,
you decided to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”

Marsha Truman Cooper

About a month after the newsletter was put on the internet, I got a package from California. It was a book of this woman’s poems with a letter. She was “ego-surfing the Net;” she was happy that I had used her poem, and here were some more

I sent her a thank you note, along with one of my books. I didn’t hear from her for a long time, and I had a little worry that sending my book may have seemed like a smart-aleck thing to do. Maybe I should have just appreciated her work and not said “here, I’m a writer too!” I decided I would call her.

I got the answering machine. I was in the middle of saying “Marsha, hi, this is Meg Barnhouse calling,” when I heard the receiver lifted and someone going “wheeeeeeeeeee.” We started talking, and I told her how much I was enjoying her poems.

“I can send you everything, for free,” she said. It’s just that -“

“What?”

“Some of them are – spicy.”

“Yahoo,” I said.

“Whew, well, that’s out of the way, then,” she said. She had just experienced a conversion a few years ago that had really heated up her marriage, she said. “Conversion to what?”

“Oh, I hesitate to say, because you might think it’s so weird, but I’m not like that, I mean, it’s Roman Catholicism, but … you know…. Some religious people are just awful.”

I said that didn’t sound weird to me. I knew Catholics who were very nice, not awful at all.”

How did that heat up her marriage? “Well, since I got this new dimension to my life my husband seems to like me even better.” Her laugh started low and ended high, like a waterfall running backwards.

She said she and her husband had been married 37 years, and last night she had a dream about him, that they were making out in a parking lot, scandalizing the passers-by. She was thoughtful and bawdy and she was having fun. She mentioned in passing that she was sick. “I’m sorry you’re sick,” I said. “I hope you feel better soon.” She said, “Well, I may as well lay it all out for you. My heart is shutting down. My kidneys stopped working a few years ago, and then my heart, and I just got the news that my liver is going. So, I’m dying.”

She said she is praying all the time now, not to be healed, not to die, usually, except when the pain gets too bad. When she is appreciating, she says, the pain almost goes away. “I’m not feeling pain at all right now while we’re talking, so I must be appreciating a lot.” She said she just prays to feel love for Jesus and to feel his love for her. “It’s pleasure,” she said. “Love is pleasure, and if people say they love someone who never gives them pleasure of any kind, it’s a lie.”

I said, “That’s like some people saying they love a God they’re really scared of. I tell people don’t believing God who doesn’t believe in you,”

She said “YES, or even LIKE you.”

She said for her, that is what her religion is about, loving Jesus and being loved by him. I said that was it for me too, only I would call it The Spirit. “Same thing.”

“Yeah.”

“I asked to be shown heaven every day,” she said, “and I’ve seen it a lot. It’s different every day. Yesterday heaven was a white Rolls Royce, and I was sitting inside. You know, I’ve never been inside a Rolls, but I could smell the leather.”

Our Unitarian forefather, Henry David Thoreau wrote,

“When it is time to die, let us not discover that we never lived.”

My friend the poet is very sick, but alive.

You don’t even have to be actively dying to see this choice between death and life presented to you on a daily basis. Where are you going to put your focus? One the things that are wrong or the things that are going well? How are you going to let your words out into the world? To hurt or to help? Are you going to have a life of grumbling and fear or an open life where you make room for joy and creativity? Are you going to be stagnant or move forward?

We become soulful people here, religious people, to learn to be kind when it’s not convenient, to learn to forgive, to accept help. We are practicing to live more peaceful and joyous lives, but we are also practicing to live well and, eventually, to die well.

Mary Oliver captures that sentiment in her poem,
When Death Comes.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

So, you lions of courage, precious to the earth, don’t be just visiting here. Live deep and love generously. Everything is a brotherhood and a sisterhood. Life is unstoppable, and it will go on. And we are all part of it, now and forever.

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 15 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
February 15, 2015

Let’s talk about love on this Valentine’s weekend. How can we learn to love one another and this planet on which we live? How can we get better at receiving love? We take a lesson from “The Book of Love”.

Sermon

This weekend is all about love. We’ve been sending greetings of love to friends and family, special ones to partners, spouses and lovers. There are ironic greetings, romantic ones, sexy and sweet and grumpy ones. Love comes in all the shimmering, sparkling shades of the rainbow, including shades of gray. About which the UU group Leather and Grace has come out with a statement, you can look it up online.

You may have heard me say that the purpose of life is to learn to love and be loved. Just my opinion, with no bearing on what you believe about its purpose, but there it is.

It is important to me to be honest about love, but I can only be honest from my perspective, my studies, my experience. When I was in seminary we learned that love was an act of will. You choose every day to love the people you love, the way you love them. I was married to a man I met in seminary for seventeen years. I often heard him say this to other people, that love was an act of will. After many years, this was embarrassing, unsatisfying. I wanted to be loved passionately, because I was fabulous, I wanted to feel it. When, for many many reasons I decided to end the marriage, I wondered if he might be able just to will not to love me any more. Easier for everyone. It turned out to be awful, harder, crazier than that, as most of you who have gone through a divorce already know.

Some people say love is complicated. In the Christian Scriptures there is a description of love in the letter to the Corinthians.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

One thing I love about the Christian Scriptures is that they proclaim that God is love. That is a basic foundational proclamation in that major religion, and I appreciate its followers who hold fast to that and stand on it with both feet. I find it interesting that some people whose whole religion says “God is Love” also sometimes seem to imagine a God who is not patient and kind, who is envious and boastful, easily angered, and who DEFINITELY keeps a record of wrongs. Do they not read their own Scriptures?

Human love relationships aren’t always patient and kind, even though we want to be. It’s hard for us not to keep a record of wrongs. They say that the happiest relationships are the ones where people have bad memories. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were many different loves, but never the same love twice.

Some of us are in love and others are between loves. Some are in long term relationships, and others are in ones that have just been born.

The text for this morning is a song sung by The Magnetic Fields

The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing

But I, I love it when you read to me
And you, you can read me anything

The book of love has music in it
In fact, that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

But I, I love it when you sing to me
And you, you can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know

But I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings
I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings

Songwriters: Warren Davis, George Malone, Charles Patrick
Published by: Lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC

You can sing me anything. You can read me anything. That’s courage. That’s vulnerability. Open to hearing about dumb things, transcendental things, instructions for dancing, opening heart shaped boxes. So many of us have rules about love. You open it, you close it. You dropped it, you pick it up. You hurt me, I hurt you. Don’t talk to me any more about former lovers, about money, about my drinking or using. For me, it’s nutrition or music theory. I don’t want to hear about bee pollen or 251 substitution in jazz or solfege. I’m wrong about that, though.

Is it courageous to be open to being read to, sung to from any page? There is plenty that masquerades as love, but is accusing and needy, tit-for-tat, abusive, eye-rolling, ignoring, withholding, or toxic. These are for sermons to come. The bad love series?

Real love is what we’re talking about today. It can still hurt. It can still be difficult, but in the midst of the struggle you have, at your core, the knowledge that this is what you want. The voice saying “GO! Save yourself!” Is not there. I think good love is medicine, whether it’s romantic, friendly, family, animal companion love, or watching videos of elephants who are friends with dogs. Love is powerful.

What about receiving it? Some of us are better at it than others I work on my own capacity to believe and feel that I’m loved. Every other day. Let me read you what I wrote about it.

I didn’t even make a New Year’s resolution this winter. I’m not sure why. For the last ten years or so my resolutions have been very short, and they have come to mind, one by one, in late December. The first one was “Tell the truth.” I never thought I didn’t tell the truth, but as I tried to keep the resolution on a moment-to-moment basis, I realized how much a sweet small lie lubricates social interactions. I found a way around those and counted down the months till I could indulge in them once again.

About some things, you just have to lie. Clogging, for example. I had someone ask me once how I liked clogging. (We are in the Appalachian region here, and there is a right good bit of it going on at fairs and festivals.) I answered that clog dancing held a special place in my heart. It does: the place where I imagine hell, if there were one, and what it would be like. For me it would be filling out paperwork while a flatbed truck full of white people clogged in the background to a speeded-up track of “Give Me That Old-Time Rock and RoiL” But I digress.

Telling the truth was what I paid attention to that whole year, discovering that my untruths mainly consisted of lies I told to myself.

“Be quiet” was the next year’s resolution. It floated into my head during prayer and meditation. I did an inner double take. “What? I make my living speaking. How can I be quiet?” The Universe responded with-well, with quiet. I had to figure it out. It turned out that I needed to pay attention to being quiet inside, to not having to have an answer for every question I was asked, to being content to let others dominate a group discussion, to not voicing every opinion that was in my head.

Over the years there have been some easy resolutions and some hard ones. Who could have known that the year I resolved to “enjoy life” would turn into one big challenge? There you go. The Universe/God/Spirit/Wisdom is like that sometimes.

This year no resolution came to mind. I’ve been working on a question, though: “What would it be like if you felt really loved?”

Maybe the resolution is to wonder about this question. When I feel loved, my mind breathes better. My body relaxes. My behavior steadies. Something in my spirit opens like a rose. I want to feel it if I can, from the people around me or from the Spirit of Love that flows like an ancient river through the universe.

On my first CD I printed a quotation from a letter Martha Graham sent to Agnes de Mille. According to Agnes de Mille: “I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy…. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly, “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

When I feel loved, it’s easy to keep the channel open, and that’s really what I want.

Maybe I could get really good at loving the world just every other day. Maybe on that day I could love myself as well. Just every other day, let go of self-improvement and challenging other people’s mistakes. I invite you to think about doing this, too. Every other day, maybe we could let go of wondering if we are good enough, of wondering if we are doing it right. Every other day rest, if we can, in the warm animal pleasures of wind, water, food, earth, friends, love, and beauty. Every other day put in abeyance the drive to feel that we are smart enough, thin enough, cool enough, doing enough.

The reason I wonder about doing it every other day is that, having read Kant, I have to ask what the world would be like if all of us did this every day. I’m not sure how well it would work. Maybe we would melt into self-satisfied goo. One the other hand, the world would be sour and clammy if we didn’t do it at all. So, on alternate days we can all agree that this is New Age pap, and we can sharpen our intellectual claws in ourselves and one another with edgy glee.

It’s February. Surrounded by talk of love, I’m growing aware that I do have a resolution for the year: I get to wonder about love. Maybe being grounded in love makes change easier, rather than lulling us into staying the same. Maybe if we felt safer we would grow more freely. What if we felt really loved? This year, I aim to find out.

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 15 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
February 8, 2015

Rev. Meg Barnhouse finishes her ongoing sermon series on the Ten Commandments. The tenth commandment has to do with greed and desire.

Call to Worship

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Reading

Ellen Bass

The thing is to love life,
to love it even when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Sermon

We have reached the end of our series on the Ten Commandments. This last one is the one that forbids coveting anything that is your neighbor’s. I was halfway through the work on this sermon before I realized I was going in the wrong direction. I was writing about how our US consumer economy is built on coveting, how advertisers work to make you want things you didn’t even know about, things you don’t need. I was writing about how we have lost our sense of “enough” and how that is the root of addiction, how people wanting more than their share is pillaging the planet.

Then I read the commandment again and remembered that it wasn’t about wanting. It was about wanting things that belong to someone else. If you just want something you can plan to save to buy it, or make something like it. Coveting, wanting things that belong to other people can drive you crazy.

Tenth Commandment
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

You can’t save up to buy that particular thing. It’s your neighbor’s. In this passage it talks about your neighbor’s wife like she’s a thing, and in those days the wives did belong to their husbands, as did the children. The commandment never could have read “don’t covet your neighbor’s husband.” Number one, that would be talking to women, which they would not have done, and number two, it would have sounded wrong to them to speak of a man in a list of animals and things. I’m enough of a 21st century person so that it sounds wrong to me to speak of a spouse as belonging to their partner. People do drive themselves crazy all the time, though, wanting a person who is in love with another person. People should be with the ones they choose to love. That’s just my opinion, and that’s another sermon.

Coveting, wanting something that is someone else’s doesn’t only make you eat your heart out, It sets you up for wishing something bad to happen to your neighbor, or it makes you think about how you deserve that thing and they don’t, all encouraging an adversarial dynamic rather than a compassionate or cooperative one. It can create bad feeling between you, guilt and anger and sorrow. The community is damaged. In a coveting situation, you are damaged and/or the community is damaged.

TEARING THE FABRIC

My friend Pat Jobe says he knew a woman who would see a nice car or a beautiful house, and she would say, “Ooooh, I wish that was mine and they had one better.” That’s how she got around the sin part of coveting. UU professor Philip Simmons is the author of “Learning to Fall” and speaks about what he’s learned while living with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Writes that any wrong-doing tears the fabric of being. He points to our seventh principle, that we promote the view that everything is connected in an interdependent web of existence, and says that web, of which we are a part, sustains damage when we act destructively.

“All world religions place wrongdoing in this larger context. Papa-krita, the Vedic Sanskrit word that comes closest to our “sin,” denotes any action not in accord with the cosmic order. In Taoist philosophy, Tao refers both to the fundamental nature of things and the way of being in alignment with it. The Hindu and Buddhist concept of karma acknowledges that actions… not in alignment with the order of things, affect us both in this life and lives to come.”

Simmons urges us “to acknowledge that what we think and say and do matters in ways beyond our ordinary understanding. And so the sacred work of healing is harder than we thought: we confront our sins to heal not only ourselves and our relationships but the universe.”

Our lives are rooted in that connection, in oneness of all existence, and it is our religious practice to see that connection, to practice behaving as if it were real, to let the implications ripple through the living of our days.

Even if we are above wanting things, we UUs, in our passion for self improvement, can covet other people’s good qualities to the point that it makes us slide in to a spiral of despair and disappointment in ourselves. Forest Church, long time minister of All Souls UU in NYC wrote a great piece where he says that reading prescriptions for happiness is often so depressing that he thought he would try to point people in the direction of happiness by writing about how to be unhappy. “Advice on how to make yourself miserable could brighten your day. In this spirit, let me offer three bits of miserable advice that almost everyone can follow to his or her own detriment.

If you are anything like the rest of us, I expect you have developed a surefire talent for undermining your confidence by selectively comparing yourself to others. For instance, you have a co-worker who is enormously creative. Overlook the fact that she has just broken up with her fifth husband, has a “little” problem with alcohol, and is on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Forget all that. Simply measure your creative capacity against hers and weep.

Then there is that friend who is always the life of the party. You know how immature and insecure he is. No matter. He is always the life of the party. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be the life of the party sometimes?

And how about your rich second cousin? Just look at him. He has everything anyone could want. Admittedly, you’ve never seen him smile and he barks at his dog. But how happy you would be with only half his money!”

Make a composite person, he advises, someone with all the kindness of this one, the beauty of that one, the health of this one, the money of that one, the happy family life of this other, and then compare yourself to that composite person. Then you can really be miserable!

Whether it’s coveting our neighbor’s house and garden, their money or their health, their ease with people or their loving parents, their vacation home or their sunny disposition, we all do it. It’s in our natures, for many among us. If you ever eat your heart out over someone else’s height or weight or complexion or their relationships or their personality or their talent, know that you are human. I understand that’ it harms the community for us to be coveting, but we do it. What now?

Philip Simmons gives us this wisdom:

“We do not heal ourselves by scourging or rejecting our sinful parts but by drawing them into a circle of holiness made large enough to include them. There’s nothing our demons enjoy more than a good fight, nothing that confuses them more than our embrace. Our goal, always, is to transform evil through love.”

Let’s lay aside the semantics of whether coveting is sinful or evil, and just agree that it can do damage. Can it be embraced in a way that helps?

How can we embrace the “demons” of coveting and jealousy?

Julia Cameron is a therapist who works with artists. In her first book, The Artist’s Way, says that jealousies can point you toward what you are being called to bring into your life next. When you list the things you are jealous of in other people, you have a “map” of where you need to go next.

One artist who did this laid hers out in a grid: Who I’m jealous of. Why. What action does this indicate? She blogs at bluedogbarking.com

One of my spiritual teachers, Martha Beck, would say “do you really want more comments? How would you feel if you got them? Warm, validated? What then? You would be empowered to keep going? Confident? What is it you’re really after?

Coveting is reality. We all do it. It just causes you suffering to think you shouldn’t, because it causes suffering whenever your thoughts argue with reality. Even if I could, I don’t want to hammer you into making yourself quit wanting things other people have. If you want to quit wanting, there is a way. You meditate, you learn to be still a lot, you practice being grateful for what you have. Meditation will help you grow in your spirituality, which will help you with craving and wanting. Gratitude is a powerful spiritual practice, which I wholeheartedly recommend. To supplement that, in the meantime, when you covet, when you are jealous, when you want something someone else has, write it down. Ask yourself why you want it. What do you imagine it bring to your life? What is the lack you are really feeling? What could you do to fill that lack? Coveting is an indicator of where you need to go. Use that energy for good. Use it to move yourself toward wholeness. Demons love a good fight. See if you can embrace them instead, turning their energy toward the good.

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 15 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
February 1, 2015

The ancient Celtic festival of Brigid celebrated the fertility of the earth and its animals. We celebrate our animal companions in the intergenerational Animal Blessing service.

This Sunday we are celebrating a Blessing of the Animals. Why would be bless animals? Because they bless us so often. We don’t talk about them very often, but animals as companions have touched almost all of us, and it is good to acknowledge that. As children we may have fallen asleep with the purring weight of a cat on our chest. Or on our head. We watched TV in the company of the family dog. We went exploring in the woods and our parents would feel safer knowing that the dog was along with us. They comforted us when we cried, they made us laugh, they were a personality in the midst of the family. For most of us, they still do those things. Here is what people say about animal companions: they give unconditional love. They forgive you anything. They think you are the be all and end all of the universe. They are sensitive to your feelings. They don’t care what you look like, what your sexual preference is, what your beauty level or your car model or your job is. They just love you because you belong to them.

Animals have been in relationship with humans for thousands of years. Often in a mutually beneficial way. Often hurting one another. Humans were traveling with jackals, helping each other hunt. The dogs hung around the campfires and ate scraps, sounded the alarm for intruders. Enjoyed some protection from the humans, and gave them protection in turn.

In ancient Egypt, they worshipped cats and dogs. By that time, people had dogs as pets. We know because they were buried, sometimes, with their favorite dogs. The god of cats was named Bast. Egypt was the first country we know of that had laws against harming dogs.

Animals as companions can do so much for us. A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society in May, 1999 demonstrated that older people who have pets tend to have better physical and mental well being than those who don’t. A 1997 study showed that elderly pet owners had significantly lower blood pressure overall than their contemporaries without pets. There is an experimental residential home for the elderly called the Eden Alternative, which is filled with over 100 birds, dogs, and cats and has an outside environment with rabbits and chickens, has experienced a 15 percent lower mortality rate than traditional nursing homes over a span of five years.

Animal Assisted Therapy has been beneficial for kids recovering from abuse or other trauma. There are a few therapeutic homes for kids that use animals to calm agitated kids, to connect with autistic kids, to heal wounded kids.

Mending a bird’s wings, caring for sheep and cows, sitting with cats on your lap, relating to dogs, seems to be healing for children. Helping another life through the caring of disabled or unwanted animals teaches nurturing and lets the children see beings who are surviving and relearning trust, just as they must do.

We sometimes act like they communicate the same way we do. We smile at the animal to say hello. I hope they understand that. For animals, baring teeth is a threat. We would be in trouble if we said “look, that cute dog is smiling at me,” when we saw a dog baring its teeth. We feel close to animals, so we attribute to them the same emotions we would have in a certain situation. If a dog comes to you with ears lowered, chin down, you may think they are sad or being pitiful. That is their non-threatening friendly look. Their excited “Hey! Let’s go!” look is easier to read. Scientists who observe animals say they do have emotions. They just get excited, humiliated, threatened and confused by some things we don’t normally think of. Some things we have in common though. We want to be touched, loved, we want food shelter, attention, territory, a purpose, loyalty, belonging, exercise and fun.

Even for ordinary families in ordinary time, there is a strong psychological and emotional attachment between people and their pets. Studies have revealed that most pet owners view their pets as both improving the quality of family life by lessening tension between family members and waking up their owner’s compassion for living things (Barker, 1993; Pet Theories, 1984; Voith, 1985). Using a projective technique to investigate owners’ closeness to their pet dogs, one study (Barker and Barker (1988, 1990) found that dog owners were as emotionally close to their dogs as to their closest family member. They reported that more than one-third of the dog owners in their study were actually closer to their dogs than to any human family member. I read a book called The Social Lives of Dogs by a classically trained anthropologist who began observing dogs instead of far off tribes. She and her husband had a dog who the husband described as “the keeper of my soul.” He and the dog were inseparable. She asked him idly one day if he had to choose, would it be, her on the dog. He was quiet for a moment. “Don’t ask me that,” he answered.

Companionship helps us be healthy and happy. It is part of the art of living.

Economist John Maynard Keynes, saw the purpose of human history as our species learning to “cultivate the arts of life.”

It was in a publication called “Yoga World” that I saw a wonderful description of how to be a good companion. Sometimes an animal can be this to a human, sometimes a human can be this to an animal. Sometimes we can find this with another human. To be a good companion, it says, “You will need to be caring and concerned about his or her happiness. As a friend, you will want to share his or her concerns and labors. Naturally, you will want to make his, her, life more pleasant. You will have to know life and yourself well enough to become trustworthy, capable of keeping your agreements. To be a friend, your word must be true. A true friend, you will hold good will in your heart even when you misunderstand or distrust your gracious companion. You will refuse to indulge bad moods brought on by your inadequacies. It is not easy to be a true friend.

May we all find a being like this is our lives. May we sometimes be able to be a friend like this ourselves, to another being. Our job here on earth is to learn how to love and be loved. As our animal companions teach us those things, we are grateful to them.

Bless you my friend. You show me how to enjoy my life as I enjoy yours. You give me the chance to nurture you with food and exercise. I get mad sometimes at the things you do, but you always forgive me. I hope I get as good at forgiving as you are. Thank you for blessing my life and making it better. I want to make yours better too.

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 15 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
December 21, 2014

Garlands, red, gold and green, carols, presents and celebration… when did Christmas become what it is today? We learn a bit of “Christmas History”.

Here we are, surrounded by the whirlwind of a 21st Century Christmas! It wasn’t always this way. First of all, most of us are sober, which would never have happened during the early centuries of its celebration. In the early days of Christmas celebrations in Europe, bands of beggars roamed the streets, pounding on the proper middle class front doors of the business people, even rapping on the fancy front doors of the rich, demanding treats, alcohol, and even money. The wise men brought gifts to the baby, so gift-giving was part of the tradition. Nothing fancy, some nuts and fruit to the children, some wassail (alcohol) to the beggars, and you were in the spirit of things.

Christmas is coming,
the geese are getting fat
(also, … the goose is getting fat)
Please do put a penny in the old man’s hat
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you!

Where did they get the nerve to do that? Had they no sense of the social order? Yes they did, and it was part of the social order that it be upended at Christmas. This upending of normal social roles has its roots in the celebration of Saturnalia in Rome, a celebration in late December presided over by the agricultural god of seed and harvest, and rejoicing in the return of Sol Invictus, the Unconquerable Sun. There wasn’t much to do agriculturally during this time – the hard work was over. There was plenty of food and fresh beer and cider, so it was a time to overindulge. Tradition held that, during Saturnalia, a feast was held where masters and slaves ate together, In some households, the masters waited on the slaves. Gambling, normally frowned upon, was acceptable, and masters and slaves gambled together. The sober toga was taken off and dress clothes could be worn during the day on the street. Rowdy behavior was acceptable during the few days of Saturnalia, as it is today on New Year’s Eve. Mostly everyone just stayed drunk for three or four days.

When the Emperor Constantine declared that Rome would be Christian, the bishops decided to take over this big celebration and brand it as the birthday of Christ. Not that anyone thought he was really born on December 25. The shepherds would not have been out in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night in December. Even though Israel is the Middle East, where people think of it as hot all the time, it gets cool and rainy in the winter. The sheep would have been sheltering inside with their shepherds. Maybe it was spring, or maybe September. But say you want your new religion to catch on, you don’t want to try to get a whole new celebration going when there is already a perfectly good and well-loved celebration already happening. You just say, “you know what? The Unconquerable Sun is the Unconquerable Son… Of God… ” And let the people keep drinking. They won’t care.

This topsy-turvy-ness was still part of the celebration centuries later. The Puritans, having escaped the revels of Popish celebrations, and finding no mention of Christmas in the Bible, outlawed the celebration of Christmas. It smelled Pagan to them, which it was. Non-Puritans in the Colonies might attempt to make merry, but they were fined. It stopped being illegal in the 1700s, but it was frowned upon. Culturally taboo until it became accepted when the Federal Government declared it a national holiday in 1870. Many businesses didn’t even close for Christmas Day until then.

It was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who made many of our Christmas traditions. He was from Germany, and some families in Germany brought evergreen trees inside during the dark time of the year. In 1848, a picture of them by their decorated tree was published in the Illustrated London News, and then it became the fashion for British families to decorate an evergreen tree at Christmas. One business man commissioned an artist to draw a Christmas card, but it was too expensive for most people, so many families, including Victoria’s, encouraged their children to make cards to give to friends.

All of this helped to bring Christmas from the streets into the home. Decorating tips were in all the women’s magazines, coaching women to make this season a favorite of their families. Gifts were given, instead of to roving bands of beggars, to the children of the household. Continuing with the topsy-turvy nature of Christmas, in many families the children are allowed to wake up the parents and demand their presents and their entertainment. What a relief, though, not to have to worry about beggars coming to your door! Some people did remember the poor on Christmas, and went instead to where they were to serve them food (not alcohol, though, normally) and give money.

Giving to the poor was encouraged also by St. Nicholas, a Greek Orthodox saint from what is now Turkey who was kind and charitable and had so many miracles attributed to him he was called Nicholas the wonderworker. The Dutch called him Sinterklaas is an elderly, stately and serious man with white hair and a long, full beard. He wears a long red cape or chasuble over a traditional white bishop’s alb and sometimes red stoia, dons a red mitre and ruby ring, and holds a gold coloured crosier, a long ceremonial shepherd’s staff with a fancy curled top. Sinterklaas is a name evolved from St. Nicholas.

He traditionally rides a white horse. This is probably from the Nordic Viking traditions, where Odin rides a white horse through the air, along with the evergreen trees, mistletoe, the yule log and green wreaths. The Vikings conquered Britain, and Odin became Father Christmas.

Sometimes Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, was portrayed as a thin serious man, sometimes as an elf, sometimes like a Celtic Green Man in green, or red or blue. It wasn’t until

A Visit from St. Nicholas
by Clement Clark Moore

It was the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St. Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.
His eyes-how they twinkled, his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful’ of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle,
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

That St. Nick was defrocked, not a Bishop any more, not a saintly church man. He became much more accessible and friendly.

The way he is pictured, always now in red, has a lot to do with an ad campaign by Coke in the 30’s, where they commissioned an artist to draw the real santa clause, and he pictured him using the model of a retired salesman who lived nearby, in a suit the red color of the Coke logo.

The presents and drinking, the merriment and caring for the poor are always in tension at Christmas time. I don’t really know why there should be tension but, there is. Food Bank billboard and FB sweet mother photo that show that this is clearly true. The billboard on Burnet and 49th says “Tis the season to be jolly” and the word “jolly” is crossed out and “feed the hungry” is written underneath. Why cross it out? Why not a plus sign, letting it read ’tis the season to be jolly AND feed the hungry?” On Face Book there is a picture of a note lots of sweet people are putting up with a Christmas list on it. “wrap gifts” has “Gifts” crossed out and replaced with “wrap your arms around your loved ones.” I’m all for wrapping arms around loved ones, but why must it be either or? Use the plus sign, you people?

Doing good should not be a once a year spasm of guilt toward “those less fortunate.” And it should not necessitate being a somber humorless puritan. I like the way the people in this church do it, all year long and having a pretty good time. In fact, if I were in charge of ending hunger in the world I would like to have a whole cadre of jolly, merry hearted people around me. Suffering is there, and we must address it, but if your life is going well right now it’s part of your job to add to the joy in the world. So let’s be jolly and feed the hungry and have a good time smelling the spicy mixture of Druids, Vikings, Romans and Christians that is this season of the year.

Merry Yule, Happy Christmas, and blessings on all celebrations of the return of the light celebrated by ourselves and our neighbors.

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 23, 2014

The sermon is on gratitude as we recognize the one hundred year legacy of founding member and longtime music director Janet McGaughey.

Call to Worship

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Centering

“And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:
Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart, And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”
– Khalil Gibran

Sermon

It’s Thanksgiving and that means family. My family will be getting together this week in NC. Here is what it was like a couple of years ago.

Coming into the front room, I saw knives gleaming on bookcases and coffee tables. Uncle Lindsey had recently returned from Pakistan, where he and my mother had grown up as missionary kids, and he’d brought back a collection of Gurkha weapons. There were kukris of every length, dangerous curved blades whispering of battles long past. My cousin Rebecca’s twelve year old son Thatcher was running out the door to the screen porch brandishing a long Talwar sword, chasing his little sister Park into the back yard. No one seemed overly concerned. Since half the adults there were doctors and the other half were lawyers, I figured that if anything happened we could sort it out, so I set my casserole down on the side board and drifted over to where Lindsey was holding forth on his trip, on the bravery of the Gurkhas, and on the beauty of the Himalayas.

Listening to Uncle Lindsey is like surfing the web with no pop-up control. You will be talking along about the Himalayas, and suddenly he will start talking about Roger Bannister’s four minute mile, or he’ll say something like “Presbyterians are the only denomination that requires their ministers to be educated in Hebrew and Greek,” or “Santa Gertrudis bulls are too large to be pastured in North Carolina.” Still listening, but letting my eyes wander, I looked out the back windows into the yard and saw an enormous Brahma bull being led around the yard by a woman dressed like a rodeo cowgirl. Her blue vest with the silver stars sure was sparkly, but I could not be dazzled by sparkles when right behind her was this two thousand pound animal, speckled gray and white, with a hump on his shoulders and a dewlap flapping from side to side under his neck as he plodded behind her with the expression of a being praying for world peace. I was glad somebody was, with all the knives around. Most of us rode the bull that day, except the very elderly generation. They watched and clapped, though. Even cousin Pooh was tenderly coaxed out of her wheelchair and onto his broad and placid back.

Uncle Henry used to pray before dinner every year, a long prayer that reminded us about the Puritans and the Native Americans, a prayer that named one by one the blessings of this land and this family. Since we were at Rebecca’s house, I had been invited to say the prayer. No one else recognizes that I’m a minister, because they don’t approve of women ministers. My prayer was of gratitude for the land too, for the family, for the love that surrounded us. I invited those present to call the names of those we missed, those who weren’t able to be there or who had died. One person said “Margaret Annie, that was real nice.”

The food and the company were a great pleasure. We told stories of long-ago mischief and the planned some new mischief. One cousin and his wife told about entertaining the devout and extremely dull President of a southern Christian college. They had made the mistake of inviting a couple of the other cousins, and one of those had attempted to liven up the conversation by slipping Amaretto liqueur into his own wife’s after-dinner coffee. Through an unfortunate mix-up, the devout President’s wife was the one who was served the doctored coffee, and throughout the rest of the evening she pestered my cousin’s wife for her recipe. As the two who were in the know shook the sofa with their suppressed giggles, she said, “I finally turned to the woman and held her gaze.” Her hands were on either side of her face, like a horse’s blinders. “I held her gaze so she wouldn’t see them over there on the sofa laughing, and I told her, ‘Well, my secret is: I grind my own beans.'” They bet the lady ran right out to get a coffee grinder, but the taste of that coffee would continue to elude her.

After dinner we all lined up, as always, for flu shots. One of the doctor cousins brings a cooler full of medicine and doses everyone in a back bedroom with the help of his ten-year-old daughter. She’s an expert with the alcohol and cotton swabs. It’s good to get a chance to be brave together after dinner.

Thanksgiving for me is the family. I took my sons to this gathering every year since they were born. I am grateful for the tradition, the talent, the wildness, the faith, character and kindness of these people

Most families can be fun for a couple of hours. For many of us there are moments of being judged, moments of being misunderstood, pressured, evaluated. Maybe there are moments when we want to put out faces down into the sweet potato casserole and just give up. Maybe there are moments when we cross our fingers and pray that Aunt Elise won’t drink so many glasses of sherry that she ends up face down in our potatoes. We wish Uncle Haim would quit joking about our hair and that Aunt Nancy would leave our love life alone.

There are also moments of companionship, of feeling surrounded by love, moments when you share stories, take a nap, receive or give nurturing care, have good conversation. If it is just god-awful every year, then I question why you go. Usually it’s just a matter of building habits of attention that direct your receptors to the good things. Part of how you develop better habits of attention is through spiritual practice.

I am no good at spiritual practice. Even the one I use is easy for me to forget. I think I’m busy with important things, and I can’t be bothered with something so simple a child could do it. Even though studies show it’s good for your physical and mental health. Even though the Jewish scriptures say it will make your heart strong and merry. Even though mystics and psychologists alike praise it. What is my spiritual practice? Gratitude. It’s cheap too, and doesn’t take a lot of equipment or training.

A practice of gratitude starts with habits of attention, which shape your experience of your life. Gratitude begins with a habit of noticing the good things in your life and being grateful for them. You might say “thank you, God, or Higher Power, H.P. or Spirit, or Force, or Universe, or Soul Of All Things. Many of us have a sense of the Divine that is different from the traditional Judeo-Christian descriptions, and for some people, the name “God” is too much attached to the sense of the Divine they are trying to get away from. I read about one person who called her Higher Power “Donna.” It’s okay to explore different ways of thinking about the Higher Power you DO believe in. The Force has many names. Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart says if you only ever said “thank you” as a prayer, it would be a good prayer life.

Cicero, born about a century before Rabbi Jesus, wrote : “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others,” he said. By the 18th century, the free-market thinker Adam Smith, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” supposed that people who did not feel gratitude were only cheating themselves out of happiness in life. And in the 19th century, Immanuel Kant described ingratitude with “the essence of vileness.”

Br. David Steindl-Rast, an author of many books and articles about gratitude says: “All gratitude expresses trust. Suspicion will not even recognize a gift as gift: who can prove that it isn’t a lure, a bribe, a trap? Gratefulness has the courage to trust and so overcomes fear. ” It takes trust in the bending arc of the Universe to be grateful. Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, in the mid-1800s, said “The arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Can we trust the universe? Is everything going to be okay in some way? Gratitude seems easier if you are willing to believe that. If we are just all headed to the slaughterhouse, gratitude seems stupid. All belief is a choice, and I choose to go with Parker on the arc of the Universe, and with Julian of Norwich, who said “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Believing a thing just means choosing to act as if it is true. In an experimental way. To see what happens.

In the Jewish scriptures, in the book of Proverbs (17:22) it says “A merry heart does good like a medicine: but a broken spirit dries the bones.” Psychologists are beginning to take gratitude seriously as a field of research. Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, says: “Psychology has generally ignored the positive emotions. We tend to study the things that can go wrong in people’s minds but not the things that can go right. Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness have tremendous positive value in helping people cope with daily problems, especially stress, and to achieve a positive sense of the self.” Studies are beginning to indicate that people who describe themselves as feeling grateful to others and either to God or to life in general tend to have higher vitality, more optimism, suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical depression than the population as a whole. These results hold even when researchers factor out such things as age, health, and income, equalizing for the fact that the young, the well-to-do, or the hale and hearty might have “more to be grateful for.”

In an experiment with college students, those who kept a “gratitude journal,” a weekly record of things they should feel grateful for, achieved better physical health, were more optimistic, exercised more regularly, and described themselves as happier than a control group of students who kept no journals but had the same overall measures of health, optimism, and exercise when the experiment began. (Researchers use frequency of exercise as a barometer for general well-being because it is an objective measure that links to subjective qualities; people who exercise three or more times per week tend to have better indicators of well-being). Psychologist Dan McAdams of Northwestern University, whose specialty is well-being research, says he recently became interested in gratitude when he saw studies suggesting that increasing a person’s sense of thankfulness could lead to lower stress and better life “outcomes,” meaning success in career and relationships. Gratitude isn’t even listed in the 1999 addition of the presumably encyclopedic “Encyclopedia of Human Emotions,” a standard psychology text. “But if a sense of thankfulness can turn someone’s life from bitter to positive,” McAdams notes, “that makes gratitude an important aspect of psychology.”

Gratitude keeps you in the present moment — it clears your mind of the wishing, wanting, worrying, regretting and story telling about why we are this way or why someone else did what they did. You are freer to move, to change, to be guided as to what your next step might be. I do think that trying to change things you cannot change is a sure way to lose your mind. It’s a textbook way to stay exhausted. It is a textbook way to stay dissatisfied. Exhaustion and dissatisfaction are two indicators of soul sickness. Sometimes, around the Holidays, your soul just gets tired. You feel irritable and tense, nothing looks fun, you can’t think. When your soul is getting sick, it’s time to dust off your spiritual practice. Not that you dust it off only when you are sliding into a sink full of the dirty mop water of despair, but that’s as good a time as any.

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 16, 2014

Why bad things happen to good people is a basic question for humanity, no matter what your view of the world.

My first angry questions about the bad things in the world were related to my parents’ marriage. I remember at 10 or 11 being angry at God because they were not getting along. I walked ahead of them down a sidewalk in Mexico City, my teeth gritted, crying, and asking “Why, WHY can’t they be happy together?”

The most recent sorrows have been the suffering of people in Syria, Israel Africa. Closer to home, there is cancer in a child, cancer in grown-ups, and car accidents, The question of why bad things happen has occupied my mind for about fifty years then, and I’m not even close to the answer. I hope you weren’t thinking we might have it.

We talked a lot in my family about war and starvation, we talked about the cruelty of people around the world. My father was in the news business; he heard it all. He says he used to stand by the AP ticker and cry.

I’m not alone in not having the answer. This question has been debated for at least 20,000 years. We know this from excavations in the Indus Valley which uncovered fragments of Hindu scriptures. The Hindus among us say that evil is a part of God. Shiva is the creator and the destroyer. Kali-Ma creates by destroying. There are demons, but they roar and devour on assignment from the gods. All destruction isn’t had, after all. Any gardener pulling up leggy, spent plants will tell you that. Destruction makes room for the new.

The Buddhists say evil is illusion. If you can see through the illusion, becoming enlightened, you will be free. Bad things happen because people are attached to their picture of how things should be, to the outcomes of certain actions. We desire security, health, good relationships, admiration, long and happy lives for ourselves and our children. Since we are attached to those things through desire, we make ourselves unhappy when they don’t happen the way we want them to. If we could let go of desire we would suffer no longer. If only we could just enjoy our health, our families, our eyesight, our money, our minds as long as they last and let them go with peace in our hearts we would be fine.

One of the oldest books in the Hebrew Scriptures is the book of Job, and the question of why bad things happen to people is what the whole book is about. In that story, Satan is at God’s side, and they are talking like colleagues. “I bet Job wouldn’t be such a fine upstanding servant of yours if he weren’t so healthy and wealthy,” Satan says.

“You go ahead and test that theory,” God says, and Job’s sufferings begin. After he has lost all of his children, all of his possessions and his health, and is sitting on top of an ash heap letting the dogs lick his sores, his three friends come to him and deliver their best religious opinions of why he is suffering.

“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” one says.

“God corrects and disciplines his people ….. God wounds but he also bind up. You have to trust. You are not more righteous than God.”

The second friend is shocked at Job’s questioning God.

“God is always just. Your children must have sinned against God. Even now, if you become pure and upright, he will restore you. “

Job says “I have done nothing wrong … but how can a mortal be blameless before God? His is powerful and mighty. How can I argue with him? Then he goes on to argue some more …

The third friend reiterates the argument that Job must have done something wrong. Even if he didn’t before now, these rude questions and arguments are bad enough to deserve all the punishment in the world. “

Job still stubbornly says. “God is wise and powerful, and he is God. I want to talk to God himself about this.” So God comes down.

Jung says it’s because God knew that God had done wrong. (In fact Jung talks about the death of Christ as God’s answer to Job.)

Here is the answer God gives in the book of Job. I am God. Who are you? I don’t owe you anything. Then Job repents. God tells the friends that they have not spoken correctly about him as Job has, he makes them repent too. Then he restores all Jobs property and gives him more children. Seven sons and three daughters, to whom he grants and inheritance along with their brothers. We find beauty and sophistication in the arguments of this ancient text. But not an answer.

Is God responsible for evil? Did he create it? Those who say “yes” to that are the ones who believe, if God is Omnipotent, that He is in control of everything. He must therefore be “allowing” evil. The question, for those who want to believe that God is both all-loving and all powerful is best put by Archibald McLeish in his play about Job called “J.B.” He writes “If God is good, he is not God. If God is God, he is not good.”

There are those in the three religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, who say evil is a result of the Fall, which is what they call the story of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden, choosing consciousness, choosing the knowledge of good and evil. All pain, all cruelty, all war and pestilence came into being after the Garden.

There are those who believe that all evil is a result of free will. We suffer because we decided to marry the wrong person or didn’t have the skills or the knowledge to work a relationship out, or we were too stubborn or too prideful, etc. People die in floods and earthquakes because greedy or lazy developers continue to build along fault lines or on flood plains. We get cancer because we eat food that’s processed with chemicals or have to breathe air that companies have polluted or because we live too stressful a life. Children are molested because their molesters were molested.

People make bad choices with their free will. Progressives are rooted in the Romantic Era’s philosophy that children are born a blank slate, and that if they have the right nurture they will grow into good people. People would make better choices if they had peace in their homes and neighborhoods, if they had good schools and consistent parenting. So we work to make those things better in order to decrease the suffering in the world. The UU thinking is that we are good in our nature, but capable of doing evil. The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, which was extremely influential in Unitarian thought, asserts that our living conditions and training have a big effect on our ability and tendency to choose good. If we can make these conditions better for people we will see more people choosing to do good.

There are those who say a lot of evil comes from “Natural Law.” Nature doesn’t take our hearts into account at all. If you are a living organism and you stay outside in sub-zero temperatures, you will freeze. Natural Law. If a woman decides to hit someone over the head with a two-by-four, it’s not the wood’s fault. It is, in fact, the wood’s job to be hard and unyielding. Natural law says if one hard unyielding object hits another one, the softer one will get a dent in it. We count on that law on a day to day basis, as we mash potatoes and cut paper. Our world would be chaos if wood were hard when you want to build with it and soft when you try to hit with it. If cars were strong when you load them down with your family and their luggage, but soft when they run into someone on a bicycle.

Nature makes a lot of organisms that are not viable. Other organisms break down and die. Nature doesn’t discriminate. Some of these organisms are microscopic. Others are us or our children. We use our free will to deal with what comes with as much grace, love, and compassion as we can muster. For some people this makes sense, but they feel the loss of a God who can protect and defend us and our children against the heartlessness of Nature.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooken rose, my youth is bent by that same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas.

Is most of what we call evil simply an interaction between human free will used badly and natural law, or are there people (or dogs and cats, for that matter) who are just born bad?

Is there a force of evil that exists outside of us, beyond us? For people who believe in a personification of evil, in a devil, explanations are simpler, and the big picture has a drama and a story line that satisfy. Even if you just believe in some kind of an energy or force of evil, it helps explain a lot. As in most matters of belief, you end up choosing what you believe and acting as if it’s true. Those among us less comfortable with belief in the spiritual realms would say what choices made in the context of cultural and societal influences. Those among us comfortable with beliefs in spiritual unseen forces believe that there is an energy that wants to tear life down.

For us, the decision to be on the side of that which builds up, that which heals, to be on the side of love is our spiritual path. When terrible things happen, we lean on one another for strength and comfort. It is my belief that loving actions leave an energy behind that never fades. Loving actions since the beginning of life on earth are added to this stream of energy, and that is what I mean if I say the word “God,” By loving, by standing with one another in suffering, we actually build God. This is the Spirit of Love that flows in and through us if we allow it, urging us in good times and in terrible times, to choose love.

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 9, 2014

This year marks the 100th anniversary of World War I. How did it change our world? How might we hold in our hearts some of its lessons?

In the early 1900’s, technology was changing the world in Europe and Russia. People became more ready to think about doing things other than what they’d been “born” to do. Electricity was more widespread. The automobile enabled more travel. The strictures began to lift.

One peasant was able to travel from the countryside to St. Petersburg to see the Tsar. He wrote about his disappointment after coming face to face with the man. The Tsar in my mind was the container of wisdom, the glory and the history of Russia. What I saw, he said, was an ordinary little fellow on ordinary legs. It was as if he suddenly realized that ordinary people were running things.

All of the heads of state were cousins, related to Queen Victoria. Nickolas, the Tsar of Russia was related, as was his wife Alexandra. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was her grandson. He used to visit her in the summers, admiring the ships that ruled the seas and vowing to himself to have a navy as grand as his grandmother’s when he grew up. He was ashamed of his left arm, which did not work, and which he was shamed for as a child. The German culture prized physical perfection, and he had been injured by the forceps at his birth.

Germany was newly a nation, wanting to be part of the colonizer group like France, Great Britain and Holland.

Germans were convinced of the superiority of their culture. Socialists wanted change. The Kaiser was riding around in cars. wearing a cavalry uniform. Everyone was reading Nietzsche. The cities were the great melting pot, and in order for revolution to come, they reasoned, the cities had to explode.

The people of Europe were doing better than they had been. It is not when the people are at their lowest that revolution happens. It is when things start to get a little better that revolution happens. The structures of class had seemed set in stone. The way things had always been were in a terrible tension with what was coming into being. Artists had visions of a looming storm. Something felt clogged that had to be freed. If that meant war, some said, so be it.

“A war with Austria would be a splendid little thing for the revolution.” Lenin

Anarchists were people who wanted change, but did not believe that working within the systems that existed would be possible. They had no power in those systems. When people feel powerless is when they start breaking things. Emma Goldman, in the US, was advocating civil disobedience and planning an assassination to send a message to the way things were. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Serbia, a man named Gavrilo Principe had been rejected by the Serbian army for being to small.

“Wherever I go people think I’m a weakling. Even though I’m not.” In the Serbian Army some officers who believed they needed regime change. The old ruler was on his way out and the Archduke Ferdinand was going to take the throne. He had already had his portrait painted wearing the Emperor’s medals. These officers, who called themselves The black Hand, stirred up a few of the Anarchists. Told them the route the procession would take, supplied them with pistols. Security got wind of something threatening changed the route. The driver took a wrong turn and drove the Arch Duke and his wife to face the assassin.

“By far the cleverest thing I ever did in my life was to marry my Sophie. She is everything for me: my wife, my doctor, my advisor – in a word my whole happiness… And then our children! They are my whole pride and joy. I sit with them all day long in amazement that I can love them so much. And then the evenings at home when I smoke my cigar and read my papers. Sophie knits and the children tumble about, knocking everything of! the tables. It’s all so cozy and precious…”

Smashing Serbia became the manly thing to do. Appearing strong in the moment of crisis. It’s a test of character rather than of national interest.

Instead of a small war with Serbia they got all the allies.

When he realized that he was now going to be at war with Great Britain, France and Russia he tried to back away. The general head of the military said we’re going to war.

A well loved leader named Jean Jaures tried to stop it. “What will the future be like, when the billions now thrown away in preparation for war are spent on useful things to increase the well-being of people, on the construction of decent houses for workers, on improving transportation, on reclaiming the land? The fever of imperialism has become a sickness. It is the disease of a badly run society which does not know how to use its energies at home.”
— Jean Jaures

This eloquent antiwar orator was assassinated before the war started.

Honor had to be satisfied. Serbia must be punished. People demanded it. It was embarrassing to do nothing. It looked weak. Unmanly. Diplomacy was for sissies and weaklings. Kaiser William would Strike, helping the Austrians punish the Serbs, and get it over with.

“We’ll have Paris for lunch, St Petersburg for dinner” However. alliances had been formed. Treaties had been signed. Too late they all realized that, if they struck Serbia, the Russians would come defend them. And the French. And the British. Kaiser Wilhelm tried to walk it back, along with his cousin Nicholis, Tsar of Russia, but the military folks were dead set on war. He couldn’t stop them without looking foolish.

No one could fathom the gruesome brutality of this war. The Irish and Russian boys thought their bravery and panache would see them through. Apparently their commanders did too, as some soldiers were sent into battle without rifles. The helmets, for the first two years of the war, were leather covered in cloth to protect the leather from mud splatter. It’s two years later when, horrified by all the head injuries, they started issuing soldiers steel helmets.

Both sides dug trenches, some dug whole underground complexes, to protect the soldiers. Both sides lobbed bombs over. Flamethrowers. Poisoned gas. Sometimes there were raiding parties sent over the walls, and boys were slaughtered this way. You can think of giving your life for your country, but a boy’s war hero dreams don’t usually include giving up a leg or an arm, the nose on your face or your eyes and lungs.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
N a mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Dulce et Decorum est(1)
by Wilfred Owen

Bent double. like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed. coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. many had lost their boots,
But limped on. blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Nine million people died. It was good for the economy. For some, the war was the best part of their lives. Companionship. Bonding.

People grieved their loved ones. Began being interested in spiritualism. Communicating with the dead. Arthur Conan Doyle one of the leaders of Spiritualism. Lost his son Kingsley in the war. People searching for answers to why. “It is almost incomprehensible to me’, Kathe Kollwitz wrote, ‘what degrees of endurance people can manifest. In days to come people will hardly understand this age. What a difference between now and 1914… People have been transformed so that they have this capacity for endurance…

Worst of all is that every war already carries within the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.’

It is nothing but the inevitable, logical center of the whole system of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and I stand for it absolutely. If it should ever in any important respect be impaired, I would feel like asking the Secretary of War to get the boys who went across the water to fight,… and I would stand up before them and say, Boys, I told you before you went across the seas that this was a war against wars, and I did my best to fulfill the promise, but I am obliged to come to you in mortification and shame and say I have not been able to fulfill the promise. You are betrayed. You have fought for something that you did not get.

Woodrow Wilson

Does It Matter?
by Siegfried Sassoon

Does it matter?-losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter?-losing your sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 2, 2014

How do we honor those who came before us? How do we keep the stories as true as we can, cherishing the things they did that were right and acknowledging, then forgiving the things they did that were wrong? How do we claim where we came from and still understand our power to choose who we are now?

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

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