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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.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 19, 2014

What does it mean to trust someone? What are the depths of being hospitable? How far do you go with people who take you places you didn’t want to go? These are life-balance questions that we must address on the road to emotional and spiritual maturity, both as individuals and as a congregation. We get a chance to practice here.

I meet in my office with the Healthy Relations Team every month, and we talk about the covenant. A while ago, we were reviewing the covenant, not because there was a thing wrong with it, but just to keep it fresh, to remind ourselves that it’s a living document which changes as our understanding changes. In the original, it said that we were going to interact with one another in an atmosphere of trust.

What do you think that means?” we asked one another. I said that it felt almost dangerous to me. When someone who doesn’t know me well says they trust me, I start to worry. What do they mean? I worry that they might mean they trust me to be who they would be if they were me. Do they trust me to be a friend the way they would be a friend? Do they trust me to keep secrets I should not keep? Do they trust me to have the same values they do, to look at things the way they do? To be cool the way they are?

People will disappoint you, and you can’t imagine that they will be like you. I’ve heard people say “I thought she was my friend!” their voices distressed and sad. “A friend wouldn’t do that.”

Perhaps that is not how that person thinks about friendship. Maybe a friend would do that, in their system of friendship. Someone wrote that trust meant she could be know that the other person would never hurt her physically or emotionally. It’s trust like that that scares me, because when you’re in a large community, trying to get things done, talking together about deep things, and we don’t know the issues about which each person is sensitive, it’s possible that someone’s feelings will get hurt. Then they’ll think “Oh no! I trusted you!”

People expect confidentiality when it’s not necessarily assumed. Anne Lamott is a writer who writes about the people in her life. All writers struggle with how much they can write about friends and family. If you’ve heard a story but you weren’t there, can you write that? If there is a family secret, what price will you pay for writing about it? Once, at a family reunion near Charlotte, NC, I told a cousin I was thinking about writing the story of my upbringing, about this family that sets off fireworks at weddings, that has eighty people every Thanksgiving, where there are sometimes bull rides in the back yard after dinner, where we all line up for flu shots while the turkey is being wrapped up in the kitchen. Word spread around the reunion, apparently. Uncle Norman, a retired orthopedic surgeon in his eighties, crooked a finger at me to come with him. We went around the back of the house and he started shaking that finger at me. Normally when someone shakes a finger at me, I feel like reaching out and grabbing it, to attain some control of the situation. I was taught to revere my elders, though, so I just stood there while he lectured me with his finger in my face. “You will not write anything embarrassing about this family, do you hear me?” He went on to talk about Presbyterianism and Unitarianism and missionaries and lots of other things that I just let wash over me because Uncle Norman doesn’t have the same kinds of connective tissue in his conversation most people expect. One cousin said that talking to Uncle Norman is like surfing the internet without a pop-up blocker. You’ll be cruising along, talking about Gurkha fighters in Nepal, and suddenly he’ll say something about when Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. Anyway he lectured me about not writing embarrassing things about the family, which confused me because I don’t really know anything embarrassing about the family. I feel a lot of affection for that family, and I admire them greatly. If someone said they were writing about the family, I would respond by telling them I was very much looking forward to what they would write, and could I help in any way…. Anyway, writers struggle with this, and Anne Lamott said she finally figured out that if people wanted you not to write them into your books and makes them look bad, they should behave better. Some people trust you to keep their bad behavior confidential. If they did it in public, they obviously don’t care about keeping it confidential, so why do we feel we must protect them?

One person’s idea of trust is different from another’s. I asked some friends what they would think a covenant would mean when it said something about “an atmosphere of trust.” Some people said that it meant they assumed good will. Others said they needed that in their covenant because people had squared off, not believing that they were being told the truth in meetings, believing that there was some kind of cabal running things. Many of you remember my friend from a church far away who….CORE COMMITTEE STORY. When a church goes through a period like that, it needs to address the distrust directly, so people will look at it and know something isn’t right if they think there are secret machinations going on. It makes all kinds of sense that you would put it in your covenant if that is your situation. I think it’s just all my questions about trust that make me want to talk about it with you.

In books about trust, people write about public trust and private trust. They speak of different levels of trust granted to different people. Some people you would trust to drive well enough with you as a passenger, but you wouldn’t tell them something you didn’t want everyone to know. Some people you would trust enough to tell them a guilty secret, like that you enjoy Stephen Segal movies, even when they are really bad. I have no idea where that example came from. It’s about …. A friend. Public trust has to do with trusting people to stop at red lights, to stay in their lane of traffic, not to walk up to you in an airport and hit you, not to get on a plane if they have an Ebola fever. Can you trust people like that? Mostly. So we drive defensively. Because you never know. That driver in the truck ahead of you might have just gotten out of the hospital. She might be addled from some good news or bad news or a six-pack. You need not to cast yourself into the social net unprotected.

Some people you would trust with your life. They can know everything about you. They’ve seen you at your worst and they continue to love you. They’ve seen you make bad decisions, they’ve seen you be grumpy. You’ve forgiven one another for things because you’d rather go into the future with them in your life than go without them.

I like to know what someone is trusting me to do. Do they know that I’m trying my hardest, even if I fail? Do they know I want to be the person they want me to be, even though, over and over, I’m just able to be the person I am?

Mostly I think you can trust people to be who they are. Over and over. That’s a pretty safe bet. You cast yourself into the social net, or into a beloved community, trusting people to be who they are. They’re trying.

We say in the goals of this church that we welcome all people of good will, and assuming good will is something we ask of everyone. We tell all of our incoming members that one of the expectations of membership is that they bring their good will to the church and that they assume good will on the part of others. I think this is probably the same thing as operating in an atmosphere of trust. Even if someone is doing something you think is wrong, you can be pretty sure they are doing it because they think it’s best. That doesn’t stop you from being able to say “I disagree with you on this one. Can you help me understand your decision to do things this way?” We covenant with one another to disagree from a position of curiosity and respect. We don’t covenant never to disagree. That would make for an unhealthy community. We have to be able to trust one another to talk about things.

We want to make this a welcoming community, which means several things to me. It has to feel safe enough. It has to have hope and joy and challenge. Trust isn’t in the covenant any more, but respect is there, kindness, curiosity. The bones of trust are still there, in other words. We do have an atmosphere of trust here right now, in that we trust people to have the best interests of this community in mind, and we trust that people are aspiring to treat one another the way we said we wanted to do so.

This is a church which aspires to be hospitable. Part of creating a hospitable environment is being friendly, and part of it is making a place where people can feel reasonably safe. Not that someone won’t hurt their feelings by mistake, but that you won’t get assaulted or emotionally brutalized. We have only banned one person from the community since I got here. That was my first year, a man who had shoved someone in the gallery, a man who sent me emails full of lies and accusations about the people in the church, who finally, after months of conversation, wrote me that he sure understood why that fellow went into the UU congregation in Knoxville and shot it up on a Sunday morning. Usually it’s the President who does the talking to people in a serious breach of covenant, but this time I wrote him that he couldn’t come back. Knoxville was the one word that did it.

Our job is to be hospitable to all people of good will. Our job is to be welcoming in an intelligent way. You don’t have to welcome being treated badly, being stolen from, being deceived, being scared. The Buddhists have a concept called “idiot compassion.” It’s not good for someone who is stealing to be allowed to keep stealing from you. Whether they are stealing things, your sense of safety, your trust, or taking liberties you did not invite. It is respectful and compassionate to set a boundary and say “we don’t do that here.” We are co-creating a church here, one that has been through storms and sunny days, and we will do what we can to make it strong far into the future.

Podcasts of sermons are 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, Rev. Marisol Caballero, Chris Jimmerson
October 12, 2014

Now THIS is Church! I have that feeling pretty often, and I wonder when you have it. Is it music? The candles? The faces of the people?

Text of this sermon is not yet 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 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
October 5, 2014

As the Jews celebrate the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we reflect on when we’re not the people we know we are capable of being.

The music this morning was a Kol Nidre, which, in Hebrew, means: “All vows.” In the Jewish tradition, many of you know, it is a part of the ritual of the high holy days (which end this evening) to ask God to release us from all vows we were unable to keep. We acknowledge that, although we strive to be good people, smart people, nearly perfect people, we fall short. We fall down. Many of us have even sat at a healthy relations workshop and been tempted to get snappish with the other participants. The “All Vows” prayer says that we are people who fall down and get up, knowing we will fall again.

I was amazed the first time I heard about this tradition. To be released from vows I made in the past that I was unable to keep, vows that were unadvised, vows I made while still too young to have all the information. I was grateful to a people who had a different understanding of God from the one with which I’d been raised. The God of my childhood would have understood that you couldn’t keep your promise, of course. He never thought you could keep it in the first place. He would love you — in spite of your weakness and sin. But release you from your vows? No. You would have to carry them wrapped around your heart like barbed wire, just to remind you who and what you really were. A dumb sheep. A wretch. To include a prayer in worship in which you were released from your vows felt like mercy to me.

One of the traditional stories of the High Holy Days is about the half-brothers Isaac and Ishmael. Those of you who grew up in church or synagogue know the story. Abraham and Sarah had been promised that they would have many descendants, but the years were passing and they hadn’t had a child. Sara gave her Egyptian handmaiden Hagar to Abraham and she got pregnant. The book says then she began to despise Sara because she had a son and Sara didn’t. Sara complained to her husband and he told her to take care of it. She treated Hagar so badly that she ran away and nearly died, lost in the desert. Finally she found a spring of water. God spoke to her there, telling her to go back to living with Sara and Abraham, and telling her about her child, who was to be a father of nations. Hagar named that place “The Well of the Living One Who Sees Me.” When she was desperate, afraid and alone, God saw her and met her there. Tradition holds that Ishmael was the father of the Arab nations. Sara did have a son, Isaac, whom tradition holds to be the father of the Jewish people. To make a lengthy and confusing story simple, they never got along. When Abraham died, though, the scripture says they buried him together in the place with the well. Tradition has it that this was a reconciliation between the brothers. It is this theme of reconciliation that defines these holy days which we celebrate as the year enters into its season of gathering darkness.

Yom Kippur translated as “the day of judgment” with its rituals of repentance and reconciliation, takes place in the season of darkening time. Mystics of the northern hemisphere call us to reflection, to self-examination as the days grow shorter. In the natural world, when the nights grow longer, plants turn their energy to growing their root systems so they can be hardier and more stable when the time comes for all that greening and blossoming. For us, reflection, looking at our good deeds and our destructive ones, doing what the 12 step program calls “Taking your own inventory” is a way to become hardier and more stable, to get ready for whatever greening and blossoming we’re going to do. After the reflection, we take responsibility for who we are. We see ourselves clearly. We have qualitiesÉ. I won’t say “good” qualities or “bad” qualities, because most of the elements that go into who we are can go both ways. Seeing ourselves clearly means we don’t skitter around on the surface of our decisions yelping about what made us do it and why we didn’t have any choice. We stand our ground, take a deep breath and say “yes I did that.” “Yes, I’m like that. We make amends, show our understanding of the hurt we’ve caused and present our intention to do better.

The Holy Days are a time to begin again clean. the start of a new year. In these days we celebrate the beginning of the world. We remember the faith-story of the creation, where God made light and dark and called them both good. In the story, light is sacred, and the dark is too. At the celebration of the birthday of the world, can we say we are grateful for the light, and may we speak of the sacred dark? It’s hard, in our culture, to think about “sacred dark.” This culture is in the habit of using the image of darkness to speak of ignorance, wickedness, poverty and cruelty.

In the language of psychology, we talk about bringing unconscious contents into the light of consciousness. Dream symbols are analyzed, feelings are analyzed, behavior is analyzed. We place great faith in analyzing, in explaining things. In the Christian traditions, God is Light, and somehow, even though, in the book of Genesis God creates the day and the night and calls both good, the church has almost always talked about darkness as a way of speaking of evil and destruction. In the New Age traditions there is a lot of talk of the Light and surrounding people and things with light. There are beings of light and beings of darkness. I’m not saying I want everyone to let all of those ways of speaking go. I just want to wonder today. I want to wonder about the sacred dark. Can we reclaim the sacred darkness as an image for a time of reflection, going deep, for the nurture of our hearts and the return of our souls to health?

Most religions have a description of the sacred dark. In ancient traditions the dark is the womb of the Great Mother. You enter the darkness, the womb, when you die, and you come out reborn, reformed. In ancient temples and in some Cathedrals, mazes and labyrinths, spirals and tunnels take you into the center, and back out again. Celtic traditions talk about Cerridwen’s Cauldron. There is cooking that happens in the sacred dark. There are chemical changes in a soul, in a life, in a way of thinking when times of darkness arrive.

We enter a time of sacred dark when we lose part of our identity – we are no longer a day-to-day parent when our children grow up, or we are no longer able to be athletic when our bodies change, or we are no longer able to be the devil-may-care bad to the bone kid when we realize that the substances that have been our best friend are killing our lives. We enter a time of sacred dark when we, who are used to knowing things, don’t know anything that will help us in this situation In the Zen Buddhist tradition this place of sacred dark is encouraged. It is call “don’t know mind,” and it is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is one thing and wisdom is another, and the sacred darkness comes to help us make the transition. During the Days of Awe we are asked to see our lives. Not as we wish they were, but as they are. At first we see ourselves harshly. We wander in a panic in a desert of criticism and despair. Then the Mystery shows us a spring of water. Then we remember that we are loved. We remember that we are surrounded by people who can witness our lives. We are surrounded by the Spirit of Love that flows through us and through the world. We can be truly seen by the eyes of love, and they see us clearly, but with compassion and mercy. The eyes of love say “You can get up again. I will believe in you no matter how many times you fall.” Then we can begin to forgive those who have wronged us, knowing they also are people who fall short of what they would like to be. Then we can begin to forgive ourselves, and see even ourselves with the eyes of love.

Closing words

Because we spill not only milk
knocking it over with an elbow
when we reach to wipe a small face
but also spill seed on soil we
thought was fertile but isn’t
and also spill whole lives and only
later see in fading light how
much is gone and we hadn’t
intended it
Because we tear not only cloth
thinking to find a true edge and
instead making only a hole but
also tear friendships when we grow
and whole mountainsides
because we are so many and
we want to live right where black oaks
lived, once very quietly and still
Because we forget not only what
we are doing in the kitchen
and have to go back to the room we were in
before, remember why it was we left
but also forget entire lexicons of joy and
how we lost ourselves for hours
yet all that time were clearly
found and held and also forget
the hungry not at our table
Because we weep not only at jade
plants caught in a freeze and
precious papers left in the rain but
also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside
they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as
though they might be rearranged but
which, once loose, refused to return
and we are helpless
Because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days
we need to gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
–Nancy Schaffer

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
September 28, 2014

What does sexual integrity look like? What is the history of our sexual mores?

This morning I’m going to talk about the next Commandment in the sermon series, and I have to say I’ve gotten a lot of comments along the lines of “I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say about this one!” I found myself saying “I can’t wait to see what I’m going to say too,” since it is one of those commandments that feels to me to be based on something we say we don’t believe any more, yet it also seems sensible. What am I saying? Here is the part that makes me mad about it, the part we say we don’t believe any more.

In those ancient times, a woman was the property of her father until she was married, then she became the property of her husband. It was important to the laws of inheritance that a man pass his property on to his own sons. Knowing whose children your wife was bearing was a matter of knowing whose blood lines were being perpetuated, knowing your family wealth was going to blood family. Punishments for sex outside of marriage were severe. In the laws set down in the first five books of the Bible, if a new bride were found not to be a virgin, she was dragged back to her father’s house and stoned to death by the men of the village. If she were raped, the man who raped her was forced to marry her. Having intercourse with your neighbor’s wife was an offense against your neighbor, a violation of his property rights. Married men could have sex with prostitutes; that was not considered adultery. The purpose of marriage was for rearing children. A man could marry more than one woman. King David had several wives. His son Solomon had thousands of wives and more concubines. Romantic love was not what it was about for most people. I’m sure there were many couples who loved one another, but that wasn’t the center around which the relationship turned.

From Jesus’ day we have the story of the woman taken in adultery.

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If anyone of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Was Jesus soft on adultery? He said

Matthew 5:28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. and Matthew 5:32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

Mostly what he seemed to try to do was to get people to look at themselves and their self-righteousness, to try to get the sinners to do better and the righteous folks to be kinder.

What might this Commandment have to say to people who don’t believe a wife is property?

In relatively recent history, romantic love became a reason for marriage. The ideal (at least here in the States) is that you will find someone with whom to be in love, and that you will love that person forever. People are expected to be faithful to their partners, and according to the studies about half of us are.

Most Americans, and most UUs, expect faithfulness of themselves and their partners as well. For some, there are other arrangements people make for marriage and partnership. Some have “open marriages” where both are allowed to have relationships outside the marriage, with the promise that there will be no deceit or lying about it. They say it’s the lying that adulterates, changes or destroys the relationship. The folks who name themselves polyamorists make committed relationships with more than one person at the same time. What is most important is that couples agree on what the situation is, and that it be fair to both parties.

It is not the Commandment that keeps most religious liberals faithful. It’s a sense that, if you have promised to be faithful you should keep that promise in order to honor and strengthen the trust you have with your partner. That trust is the surround within which vulnerability, intimacy and growth can take place. Also, having more than one sexual relationship at a time seems to most people to be spreading your energy too thin. One relationship of intimacy and engagement is demanding of time and energy.

An old Yiddish proverb says “You can’t ride two horses with one butt.” What makes sense in terms of ethical sexuality is what we talk about to our kids in the “Our Whole Lives (OWL) curriculum, and to ourselves.

Here is what I think:

I think there are many promises in a relationship that can be broken, and many things that, added to the chemical mix of an intimacy, can adulterate it, change it, or ruin it. For some couples, work is the adultery. Your partner’s energy, charm and good will are being spent elsewhere. You are not getting enough attention and all the work issues seem to take your partner farther away from you. For some couples, porn is the adultery. If one of you is spending more energy having sex solo with porn than you’re your primary person, something is wrong. Energy they could reasonably expect to be flowing toward them is flowing in another direction. You may find yourself comparing the real partner you have with an unreal dream, and reality may suffer. For some people, it feels like their partner is spending all their energy on their family of origin, or on an addiction that takes them away from the relationship. There are emotional ties outside of the relationship that hurt the relationship, there is emotional abandonment, when the person is there in body but not in other ways. There is sexual abandonment. Some people seem to believe that they can stop having sex with their partner and expect their partner not to look for sexual intimacy elsewhere. When I worked as a couples counselor, now and then I would run into people who had decided they didn’t want to have sex with their partner. Then they would be outraged and betrayed when s/he found sex elsewhere. The old rabbis had strict rules about what breaks the marriage covenant, and no sex was high on the list of things that killed the covenant. There are lots of ways to avoid showing up for your relationship. There are lots of ways to shred a covenant that has been made between two people.

I think couples should talk about their expectations of one another, about what arrangement they want for the relationship and not assume that there is only one way to go about things. If you make a covenant with a partner, try to keep it. If the covenant is broken, try to be engaged in renegotiating it so it is authentic again. In my opinion, if you are in a relationship where you would rather be alone than be with that person, then you should go on an end it. If you are in a relationship you wouldn’t want your children to be in as adults, YOU could change it. That’s a sermon about divorce, though, and that’s for another day. What matters is being loving to those you are with, as well as to yourself.

The UU stance toward sex is that it is healthy, healing, sacred, to be celebrated, but that its destructive side is equally powerful. The abuses of sexuality are hurtful. Several of my clergy colleagues have been removed from ministerial fellowship because of unethical sexual behavior within their congregations. One thing to know is that, in Texas, if a minister behaves sexually with a congregant, it is rape. Period.

I am one of the signers of an interfaith Religious Declaration on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. Part of it says: Our culture needs a sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts. All persons have the right and responsibility to lead sexual lives that express love, justice, mutuality, commitment, consent, and pleasure. Grounded in respect for the body and for the vulnerability that intimacy brings, this ethic fosters physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It accepts no double standards and applies to all persons, without regard to sex, gender, color, age, bodily condition, marital status, or sexual orientation.

We are fragile beings, my friends. Sometimes adultery is carelessness, sometimes it’s communication. Let’s love one another the best way we can.

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
September 21, 2014

John Murray’s rowing ashore in New Jersey in September of 1770 was the beginning of Universalism on this continent. What is the Universalist element in our faith? Our good news is that no one goes to hell.

Sermon: A UU faith story: John Murray

This morning I’m going to tell you about John Murray, who came to the New World in 1770, a defeated man, trying to start over again in a land where he could disappear. He was 29 years old, a widower. His wife Eliza and their one-year-old baby died in England, and medical bills had crushed him, landing him in debtor’s prison.

John Murray lost everything because he was converted to Universalism in England. He had been a lay preacher and Bible scholar with the Irish Methodists, and he loved good preaching. He visited every church in London, which is how he heard James Relly, a Universalist preacher. The idea that God was loving and that everyone would be saved in the end appealed to him and to his wife Eliza. Their friends begged them to come back to normal church. Their families cried. His business dried up. When he ended up bereaved, in prison, bailed out by Eliza’s brother, he just wanted to disappear, never preach again, never talk theology again, start all over with no history where no one knew him and he didn’t have to face either looks or words of loving concern or a self-righteous “I told you so.” He booked passage on the Hand In Hand, which was sailing for New York. The captain landed in Philadelphia instead, due to a miscalculation. Lots of the passengers got off. They sailed again for New York, but ran aground on a sand spit off the coast of New Jersey, at Good Luck Point.

Asked by the Captain to row ashore to look for food and water, came to a clearing in the pines and saw a large house and a trim looking church made of rough sawed lumber. A tall farmer stood in front of the house cleaning fish.

The following dialogue is imagined in the collected stories for UU children called “UU and Me.”

“Welcome” called out the farmer. “My name is Thomas Potter.”

“And I am John Murray, from the ship Hand in Hand.”

“Yes,” said Thomas, “I saw your ship in the bay, stuck on the sand bar, she is.”

“May I buy your fish to take back to the ship’s crew?” asked John.

“You can have them for the taking, and gladly:” answered Thomas, “and please come back to spend the night with my wife and me. I will tell you all about this little church and why it is here.”

John gratefully carried the fish to the sailors, and then returned to Thomas’ home for the night.

“Come, my friend, sit in front of our fire, this chilly fall evening,” said Thomas. “I’m so glad you have come. You may be the very person I’ve been waiting for.”

Potter told Murray that he had often heard the Bible read, and had thought a lot about God, coming up with ideas that made sense to him. He built the little church hoping for a preacher who would teach about things that made sense to him.

“Today, when I saw your ship in the bay,” he said to Murray, “a voice inside me seemed to say, “There, Potter, in that ship may be the preacher you have been so long expecting.”

John said quickly,” I am not a preacher.”

“But,” said Thomas Potter, leaning forward, “can you say that you have never preached?”

“I have preached,” answered John slowly,” and I believe, as you do, in a loving God.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” shouted Thomas.” You are the preacher for whom I have waited for so long! You’ve got to preach in my church on Sunday!”

“No,” replied John firmly. “I never want to preach again. Tomorrow, as soon as the wind changes, I will be on my way!”

After John went to bed, he couldn’t sleep. He wrote later that he thought to himself as he tossed and turned,” I just want to get away from everything…if I preach I know there will be trouble. Why start all of that over again? “By Saturday night the wind had still not changed, and John finally agreed to preach the next morning. Thomas Potter was happy. And so, on Sunday morning September 30, 1770, the first Universalist sermon was delivered in America. Thomas Potter, a Universalist before he even heard John Murray, heard a preacher talking about love instead of an angry God and a fiery hell.

I would say that John Murray is the patron saint of people who are stuck. Our life runs aground, and the way we get it going again is by doing what we were born to do. Circumstances may conspire like border collies nipping at your heels, driving you to the place where you realize what you need to do. May we all find a guide like Thomas Potter, who will give us the push we need in the right direction.

The Revolutionary War came, and John Murray worked as a chaplain to the troops, under the orders of General George Washington. When the war was over, and the new US was founded, in 1779, John Murray organized the first Universalist church in America in Gloucester, Mass.

(Owen-Towle, The Gospel of Universalism, Introduction, p.v). (Scott, These Live Tomorrow, pp.25-26)

Unfortunately, you still can hear a good many sermons preached by people who believe in hell. We are surrounded by people steeped in that belief, preachers who will use a funeral service to warn the grieving family and friends that they won’t see their loved one again if they don’t repent and believe in just the right way, so they will end up in heaven. Our UU children, along with the Presbyterian, Methodist and other more progressive denominations’ kids, hear from classmates at school about how they are doomed to eternal torment for not being the right kind of Christian. We call our movement Unitarian Universalism because we believe in Universal salvation. That means we believe a loving God would not send anyone to hell.

I think a belief in hell makes people dissociated – holding two deeply rooted opposite thoughts in their minds at the same time, not really able to look at either of them, not able to be a whole and integrated person because of that. I heard a songwriter from Lubbock on NPR years ago. He said “We learned two things in Sunday School. One, God loves you and he’ll send you straight to hell. Two, sex is dirty and dangerous and you should save it for the one you love.”

We prosecute parents who burn their children even once for disobeying. Do we believe we are more moral than God? Would anyone you know send one of their children to hell for eternity for any kind of misbehavior, much less for having the wrong thoughts or beliefs? No! Are we better parents than God is? To hold in your mind that God is love and that he will send you to hell requires a twisting of good sense and a good heart. To believe that we should be one way as humans, but worship a God who behaves in a less moral way doesn’t make sense. It would build your understanding on a deep fear and mistrust, and it would make you abandon trust in your own sense.

What about now? We are surrounded by people whose belief in Hell has death-dealing consequences.

Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless American youth, up to 42 percent identify as lesbian or gay, and a disproportionate number identify as bisexual or transgender. Why do LGBT youth become homeless? In one study, 26 percent of gay teens who came out to their parents/guardians were told they must leave home. LGBT youth also leave home due to physical, sexual and emotional abuse LGBT youth report they are threatened, belittled and abused at shelters by staff as well as other residents.Http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/reports/HomelessYouth.pdf

LGBT youth are 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Even teens who are questioning their sexuality are 3 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers.

One prominent minister in California says if a member of his listening group finds their kid is gay and won’t repent of their “sin,” they need to shun them completely and “turn them over to Satan.”

Parents are desperate to show their kids that they have to change, and throwing them out of the house is seen as tough love. These kids are on our streets. They are suffering in our town. One of the reasons we participate in the pride parade is so that the kids can see that there is a church, an actual church that does not teach that they are sinners because of their sexual orientation.

“Hell” is a mistranslation of the Bible. Current views draw on Dante’s Inferno and Miltons “Paradise Lost.” There are levels of eternal torment supervised by the demonic lackeys. In Milton, Satan and his rebel angels are chained in a lake of fire. Dante has you descend through all the levels of hell, until you reach Satan, who is stuck waist-deep in ice.

Three words in the Jewish and Christian scriptures are translated “hell.”

Sheol: from the Hebrew, meaning the place for the dead.

Tartasus: a Greek word for a place where the dead were, now separated by a river, the good on one side and the bad on the other. Able to see one another. Rabbi Jesus cited this view in his re-telling of the Babylonian parable about Lazarus and the rich man.

Gehenna: The valley where the trash was burned. Outside, destruction. Sometimes in the Christian scripture, the writer wrote “sheol,” and translators wrote “hell.”

In the Jewish scriptures, the dead go to Sheol. It’s not a place of torment at all. You are there, watching your descendants live their lives. Then, the Greek idea of Hades began to be known in the area because it was all part of the Roman empire. Rabbi Jesus was referencing this idea now and then. In other passages, the reference is to the smoldering trash heap outside the city walls.

My friends, this knowledge is there for anyone to find if they study. No one has to believe in hell. Our forbear William Ellery Channing preached that.

We have good news. This is a hell-haunted society. It’s not just theoretical. People make hell for one another, sometimes because they believe in a literal hell. We are called to speak to the root cause of some of this wickedness.

Theodore Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Where does the Universalist part of our faith lead us to stand? One, we believe that all will be well, in the end.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 24, 2014

For every people on earth, there are places where power gathers. This mountain, this street, this tree. How can we participate in the recognition and creation of such places?

I watch the news and feel overwhelmed. Brutality in the Middle East, some of which we are enabling by sending arms which will be used against Palestinians. Some of the rebels we were talking about arming in Syria turn out to be part of a group even Al-Kaeda refuses to recognize. We remove a violent and remorseless dictator and it’s as if we’ve lit a match and burned the structures that were holding chaos at bay. When you find yourself wondering whether it takes a brutal dictator to keep other brutal ideologues from slaughtering more innocents than the dictator did, it’s time for some deep reflection and going back to basics. When you feel that you have worked for years to recognize and heal from your own inner racism, and you see other people still venomous with it, when you realize that, even if we all worked to get rid of our individual racism, it’s still there in our institutions: the media, the courts, the police, capitalism itself, and you just want either to start screaming, preaching, and prophesying about it or to lie down quietly and make Zen circles with a brush dipped in black ink, it’s time for some deep reflection and going back to basics.

When you see your government talking about defeating an ideology with air strikes, when everyone knows that this will add outrage and righteousness to the ideology and convert more people to its precepts, when you don’t really know how an ideology can be defeated, knowing that you can’t even argue with your own family and change their ideologies, it’s time for deep reflection and going back to basics. What are the basics?

Lao Tze says

“if there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.”

I want to talk to you this morning about creating sacred space, a place in your home, in your yard, that is especially for the life of your soul. People from ancient times have had altars in their homes. People from Lithuania to Nepal, from Congo to California have small tables, shelves, book cases where a small figure of one of the aspects of God sits, where there are photographs of ancestors, bits of stone and wood, feathers and berries and beads arranged. Offerings of fruit, flowers, or candles speak of gratitude and reverence. Sometimes these spaces are small. Sometimes they are large. In Scotland are ancient circles of standing stones. In many places, there are stacks of stones. Temples, gardens, shrines. One of the voices articulating the reasons people make sacred space is Tim Seal, in a book called “Roadside Religion.”

Tim Seal is a young man with the same hobby as mine: visiting and interviewing folks on the religious fringes. On the front cover of his book is a photograph of a structure of red-brown girders with a large blue and white sign in front of them:”Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here!” Beal is a religious scholar married to a Presbyterian minister; they load up their two kids in the summer and go on road trips to see people’s expressions of their interaction with the Divine, expressions these folks invite the public to interact with by putting them right beside the road. The family visited Holy Land, USA, in Virginia; the Golgotha Fun Park and Biblical mini-golf in Kentucky; and Noah’s Ark of Safety in Maryland.

He writes: “These places are as deeply personal as they are public. At the creative heart and soul of each is a religious imagination trying to give outward form to inner experience.”

Yes, but what does “sacred” mean, you ask? You might be sorry you wanted to know. People have been thinking about it for a long time. Many First Nations writings say “everything is sacred,” yet there are still holy mountains, burial places, medicine wheels, and ritual areas.

From Roadside Religion:

“Drawn from the Latin sacer, the most basic meaning of “sacred” is “set apart.” But what sets it apart as such? Different theorists of religion find very different answers. For Emile Durkheim, the answer was sociological. The sacred is that which symbolizes and indeed creates the social and moral coherence of the community. It is … that which a social group (a clan, a church) sets apart to represent and create unity. For other [theorists], the answer is phenomenological, that is, it’s a matter of understanding how the sacred is perceived and experienced …. French philosopher Georges Bataille …. described the sacred as that which is experienced as radical otherness, representing a realm (real or imaginary,) of animal intimacy that threatens to annihilate the social and symbolic order of things. For historian of religion Mircea Eliade, too, the sacred is wholly other, but he focuses on the religious person’s experience of it as an experience of transcendence that serves to orient her within a sacred cosmic order. “The sacred is where you encounter God, The Holy, where you feel awe, where things have a flash of making sense to you, where you have a feeling of connection to that which is larger than yourself, where you suddenly have new information that makes a shift inside you and things are different now.

When you have that feeling is it inside you or in the place itself? Are there real sacred places, springs and mountains, coming together of ley lines or a vortex of energy or are there just places that have been invested with meaning by the people who carried within themselves a human urge to be part of something larger than themselves? I don’t know the answer to that. No one does.

Have you even been to a place you felt was sacred? There is a spring down the hill behind Nazareth Presbyterian Church that is sacred. I used to work there, and I would slip off down the hill and worship there when I could get away from church responsibilities. It drew me. It felt like a responsibility to myself to get there.

Sometimes objects feel sacred. I don’t know if they are sacred in themselves or because of energies invested in them by people. When you watch the opening credits of the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird” you hear a girl humming, and the camera pans over a harmonica, a pearl necklace, a carved doll, a whistle, a broken pocket watch. Some children collect feathers, stones, beads, berries strung together. Those objects are sacred if they have mana in them. “Mana” is an anthropological word for this buzz of holiness that seems to accrue to certain objects or places in human groups. Another word for that same buzz is “numinous.”

Making sacred space can be a large undertaking or a tiny one. Iwant to encourage you to think about making a place in your house or yard that is sacred space. How do you do that? Start by making an intention that this space be set apart from other spaces. Your ancient instincts will help you. Put a beautiful cloth there, some stones, pieces of wood, a pocket watch, some beads or berries, photographs of your family and friends, reminders of times you want to mark in your life, reminders of something you learned or something that changed you, then add flowers and light candles to give it freshness, to interact with the space.

Sometimes your altar will be just for honoring those changes, those people.

Sometimes your altar will be a thank you, for getting through and illness or a divorce, for getting though a difficult period with a child or a friend, maybe it will be a thank you for life being in a good place right now, or just for life. Being.

Your altar might be a prayer, a tangible, concrete prayer or wish or intention that you put out into the Universe, that you present to God, that you communicate with your Higher Power, or your deepest/best/highest self. Some say there are parts of your brain that think in images rather than concepts, If you are trying to make changes in your life, in your self, they say it is good to have all parts of your mind and heart with you in this undertaking. Making your prayers concrete, in images, helps all the parts of your mind understand what you are trying to ask for, what you are trying to invite in. A friend wanted clarity, so she put a pair of her grandmother’s glasses on her altar, as a tangible reminder of what she was asking for. If you are building something in your life, put some sticks on top of one another like a building, or if you are trying to get rid of something, write on a candle or scratch into the wax what you are wanting to melt away. Then burn the candle (never leave a burning candle unattended) and say to God, to the Universe, to your inner mind “As this candle burns away so let this habit or this person’s influence melt away from my life.” Then, every time you see that candle getting smaller, your deep mind, your whole conscious and unconscious, sees that and says, “Oh, I want that influence, that habit, that connection, to get smaller.”

A sacred space in your home reminds you that the Holy is in the dailiness of your life, not just in certain times and places. You can remind yourself that your home is a sacred place by having a mezuzah for the door of your house, in the Jewish tradition. That is a small container of a verse of scripture that you attach to the doorframe and you touch it when you come into your house. You can have a bowl of water by the door, if your pets won’t knock it over, and touch your hand to the water whenever you come in, like holy water. A sacred space reminds you that you are more than a work machine, a family caregiver, a lover, more than yourself. It reminds you that you are part of the Mystery, and that Mystery is close at hand. It reminds you that you are a partner with the Mystery in creating peace, which is a dynamic, hard working, soul growing enterprise.

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
July 13, 2014

They say “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” but we kill all the time: plants, animals, and other humans. What does our biology tell us? What do our ethics tell us?

Sermon: Thou Shalt Not Kill

Many people talk about the Ten Commandments with great passion and reverence. We have been talking about them for about six months now, once a month, bringing our free UU minds and hearts to this traditional moral code. Today we’re on the sixth Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” This is one of those that people recite so piously and break so blatantly. We kill plants and animals for food, of course, but almost no one thinks this particular commandment is asking us not to kill for food. We kill in wars. We use the death penalty for certain criminals, usually the blacker, poorer ones. Texas accounts for 40 percent of the nation’s executions. These are the instances in which we ignore the Commandment most egregiously.

There are people who take it literally. Pacifists take it to mean that the ideal is not to kill anyone, at any time. When the Amish who suffered tragedy when a man with a gun ordered the boys and women out of a schoolhouse and shot the girls, they did not balance their hurt with hate. As a pacifist community, they publicly forgave the gunman, and they reached out to comfort his family as well as the families of the girls he killed and wounded.

The folks who are more passionate about the Commandments being displayed in courthouses and schools are the same ones, usually, who are in favor of the death penalty, against abortion, pro war. It’s an odd mix. People say it’s cheaper to kill criminals, that tax payers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for them, the rest of their lives — but the way our appeals system works, it’s actually less expensive to feed and house people for life than to execute them. If you do that, you also have the option to set a person free when new evidence, another confession, or DNA reveals their innocence.

In ethics classes at seminary I heard the argument that the Commandments are for individuals, that nations cannot be held to the same ethics. You can say “turn the other cheek,” and it might be a spiritually deepening idea for a person, but how can you turn someone else’s cheek? If you are a leader of a group, how do your ethics shift as you think about your responsibility for others?

Most of us are not pacifists. I would prefer not to kill, but if someone were doing active harm and I could stop them only by killing them, I might. I would prefer to stun them, tie them up, and take turns with some of the people in this congregation talking to them about how disappointed we were with what they had done. They might beg for death after a few days….

Most Biblical scholars say the Commandment isn’t a prohibition against all kinds of killing. Most of them now translate it “Thou shalt not murder.” That narrows it down, but then the high school debate team shows up and peppers us with questions: what is murder, and how is it different from killing? Is the death penalty murder? Is it murder when you kill someone in self-defense? What about killing in defense of another person?

What about killing in a war? Does it need to be a war that is a just war? Is there ever such a thing? When is war a just war? WWII, to stop the Nazis, has been called “the last good war.” We killed and were killed in Iraq for a purpose few people supported, and now we are taiking about how to get back in. Most ethicists will say that killing in a war, if done according to the rules of engagement, is not murder. Anyone who has been in a way knows, though, that the lines blur, and mistakes are made.

St. Augustine said you have to have soldiers, but they should be reluctant soldiers. I know we have a lot of soldiers who are reluctant to kill. That’s as it should be. It appears that the higher up in the military you go, into the halls of the Pentagon, the people who have actually been in wars are usually reluctant to go to war except as a last resort. That tells you something valuable right there.

Biblical scholarship tells us the commandment doesn’t baldly read: “thou shalt not kill,” it’s “thou shalt not murder.” One scholar even said it should be more accurately read: “Thou shalt not murder within thine own tribe.” Now we’re getting somewhere! That makes more sense, with all the murdering and mayhem that went on right after the Hebrew people were given that Commandment. The people to whom the Commandment was given wasted little time before they were killing the folks on the other side of the river, in the land they felt had been promised to them. The god they worshipped gave the Commandment and then, weeks later, was commanding them to kill all the residents of this town or that one, to kill people who had broken some of the other Commandments, to kill a child who wasn’t obedient enough. They were killing foreigners who were on land the Hebrew people felt they’d been promised by God.

“Thou shalt not murder,” or “Thou shalt not murder within thine own tribe” gets murkier as we go. Different cultures’ ideas of what kind of killing is justifiable seem to be evolving. Morality does seem to evolve. Child labor, enslaving people, domestic violence, all are less and less acceptable in our culture. Despite the fact that most people like to think that values are eternal and that without a god who tells us how to behave “anything goes” what we find in historical experience is that values are relative and are created by people.

We can usually tell when someone has a sense of right and wrong, and we are alarmed when we meet someone who doesn’t seem to have that sense.

Edward O. Wilson’s book “The Biological Basis of Morality.” Edward O. Wilson is currently the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a lecturer at Duke University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.

He says “Moral values come from human beings, whether or not God exists… ethical codes have arisen by evolution through the interplay of biology and culture.”

Wilson says that there came a point in human evolution when the earliest humans realized that our survival depended upon our willingness to band together and cooperate rather than each trying to survive alone.

The down side of our inborn propensity to moral behavior is xenophobia. What he means is that cooperation mostly occurs within groups, tribes, or nationalities who define themselves and their well-being often in opposition to other groups, tribes, and nationalities. “Thou shalt not commit murder within thine own tribe,” remember. This is part of the human dilemma: We are predisposed both to cooperate on the one hand, and to assert our personhood or grouphood on the other.”

When we make someone “other,” or “less than,” then it’s easier literally to kill them. What we have to watch out for is thinking that a certain kind of person is not like us inside. We are called to look at any human and think “my family.” It’s fascinating to watch some people react to the unaccompanied children on the border, seeing them as they would see their own children, and see other people view the children as germ-ridden invaders, coming to ruin our lives. Some of us live in South America and have a problem with gang violence. Some of us live safer lives. Some of us live with gangs here in Chicago or LA or Austin. Some of us have the resources to help.

Edward Wilson says the more we learn about our common origins, the more we will realize that we are related with a common origin and a shared future. The Bryan Sykes book “The Seven Daughters of Eve” uses mitochondrial DNA, only passed on through the mother, to trace the seven “clan-mothers” of western European people. Apparently there are nine clan mothers for the Japanese, possible only 29 genetic mutations on the primal mtDNA of the first “Eve.” Race, then, is not a scientific way to categorize people, even though skin coloration does have a tremendous effect on people’s lives, in this culture and most others. We could find out which clan mother we were related to, and then we’d be surprised at the colors of our relatives. We could probably all go back five or six generations and be surprised by that, though! Perhaps if we all get our mtDNA checked, we will wear t-shirts with our clan number on it, or the name of our clan mother. We will greet relatives with a shout. We wouldn’t shoot a #12 if they had their #12 t-shirt on over their army uniform…. That’s a cousin. Then again, maybe we won’t use it to feel like kin, we’ll use it to say “clan 26 RULES and clan 14 DROOLS!”: then start wars over that.

I don’t know how to change my own nature, much less human nature in other people. I don’t know what to do about immigration and the violence faced by many children like our own children. I don’t think that it is possible to come up with the single, final answer forever and ever amen. I also give up on the conceit that there is no truth, and that no one can know anything. Be responsible for what you know. Practice seeing all humans as your sisters and brothers. Let’s figure out how to be a voice that will help humanity evolve into a group that sees killing one another as unthinkable.

I love the poem by the Unitarian e.e. cummings:

“may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

“may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s Sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

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
June 29, 2014

Spiritual growth: this is more important for First UU than numerical growth. What might that look like for UUs? How do we know if it’s happening?

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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.