Rilke’s Swan

June 1, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 1, 2014

The Fourth Commandment is to rest. What do you do to rest? What might a “sabbath” be in your life?

I have been tired lately. It’s been May, when we all have all of our end of school year festivities, field days, picnics, lots of weddings, papers to write, exams to take or grade. Lots of us have been tired. You know it’s bad when the doves in the tree outside sound like they’re saying “File folder. File folder.” Last week I was what I call “stretcher tired.” I wrote a piece about it. Here’s how it goes:

The Stretcher and the Swan

I came up on an accident the other day. Emergency Services people were putting a woman on a stretcher. They were tender, attentive, capable. She was being taken care of. Traffic was being directed competently around the wreck. It would be cleaned up, hauled away. Taken care of. A fire truck was pulled up beside the ambulance, its chunky lights flashing. Standing by, just in case a fire happened. So they could take care of it. That was one well-taken-car-of situation. I wanted to be on that stretcher. I wanted calm and capable people to be taking care of everything. It looked restful. I was tired. I was the kind of tired you get at the end of a month-long project. I had pushed through to the finish and I’d make seven mistakes along the way but the thing was done. I was the kind of tired you get when you have ten different people feeling in their heart that you should have done it differently. Their way. I was the kind of tired you get when your house is messy, your grass is too long, your car is cluttered and there is a dent in the door and your gas tank is empty, along with your bank account. A tiny piece of me thought it would be restful to be lying down on clean sheets, fussed over in a clean hospital room, brought jello and chicken broth and straws that bend, have people worry about me.

Usually I think it’s a good day when you don’t have to take a ride in an ambulance, and I got back to that state of mind pretty fast. Anyway, I talked to a friend of mine who used to work in an emergency room and she said what happens when you come in is that fast moving people with big scissors cut off all your clothes. That didn’t sound restful at all. She suggested I pay for a day at a spa where helpful, calm people fuss over you all day long, and you get to rest, but no one cuts off your clothes with scissors. It’s cheaper than a hospital stay, when everything is all added up, and you can drive your car home afterward.

I know now that when I have a “stretcher day,” when being helpless looks good to me, that I just need to rest. How did I get to be a grown up and not know that I need to rest sometimes? I think I used to eat instead of resting. That doesn’t work any more. Resting used to sound weak to me. I used to work sick. Well, I still do that. I used to have two speeds, a hundred miles an hour and full stop. Crash. I thought you were supposed to go and go at full speed until you couldn’t go any longer, then you sleep. Then you wake up and start again. As I get older I’m adding more gears. I have “slow” now. Some days.

The poet Rilke wrote about a swan, how awkwardly he moves on the ground, but, lowering himself into the water, allowing himself to be carried, “wave after wave,” he writes, while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm, is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown, more like a king, further and further on.”

The wisdom of one of my holy books, the I Ching, talks about the wisdom of not doing. I get tired when I forget and start to act like I’m the source of my energy, my love, my creativity, like I’m the one who works things out, who sustains my friends, who gets things done. I’m learning to begin to experiment with letting go, with allowing wave after wave to hold me up and move me along. May I be granted the wisdom to know when to paddle my feet now and then.

Connecting with the deep power in which we live in the way to rest. It’s a way to let go of trying to fix things that are not our business. It’s a way to let go of trying to control things that cannot be controlled. We, like the swan, have to move into our element, stop doing the things we’re not built to do.

Finding our element, finding what we were designed to do, moving in the deep power that our forbears the Transcendentalists called “The Oversoul,” is one way to rest from the frantic and awkward efforts we make to do and be what we think is necessary. Another way to rest is, as my therapist/trainer would say: “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

This is where the fourth commandment leads, I think. This is the commandment that tells us to rest, to keep the Sabbath Day holy. We were tortured with this as children. On Sabbath, we were only allowed to go to church, read the Bible, memorize the Bible, eat or nap. When we would watch other families headed to the lake on Sunday, we’d say “They’re going to the lake!” and mama would say “Honey, they’re Catholics.” I always wanted to be Catholic. Mama would let us play sometimes on Sunday, but she kept it between the lines. Instead of playing “Battleship,” where you divide a paper into a grid of squares, within some of which your battleships lurk, we’d play “Going to Jerusalem.” We had donkeys in the grid, and your opponents were the thieves trying to set upon your donkeys as you made the treacherous climb up through the gorges to Jerusalem.

The Ten Commandments were given to a group of people who had been enslaved, and whose ancestors had been enslaved, back through 400 years of generations. It’s easy to imagine that they could have used some instructions relative to work. Rest was demanded. There were lists, eventually, about what constitutes work on the Sabbath. No planting, no gathering, no threshing, no grinding, no sorting. None of these is simple, as thousands of years of thought has gone into their meanings.

Take sorting, for example, which is defined as separating the desirable from the undesirable. Sorting or selecting is permitted when three conditions are fulfilled simultaneously. It is absolutely imperative that all three conditions be present at the time of the sorting.

1. B’yad (By hand): The selection must be done by hand and not a utensil that aids in the selection.

2. Ochel Mitoch Psolet (Good from the bad): The desired objects must be selected from the undesired, and not the reverse.

3. Miyad (Immediate use): The selection must be done immediately before the time of use and not for later use. There is no precise amount of time indicated by the concept of “immediate use” (“miyad”). The criteria used to define “immediate use” relate to the circumstances. For instance if a particular individual prepares food for a meal rather slowly, that individual may allow a more liberal amount of time in which to do so without having transgressed “borer.”

Examples of Permissible and Prohibited Types of Borer:

1. Peeling fruits: Peeling fruits is permissible with the understanding that the fruit will be eaten right away.

2. Sorting silverware: Sorting silverware is permitted when the sorter intends to eat the Shabbat meal immediately. Alternatively, if the sorter intends to set up the meal for a later point, it is prohibited.

3. Removing items from a mixture: If the desired item is being removed from the mix then this is permissible. If the non-desired item is being removed, the person removing is committing a serious transgression according to the laws of Shabbat.

So if you are making beans, you may sort the beans from the small stones that are in there

Trust human beings to take a rule which says you must rest one day out of seven, as God did when creating the earth, and make it so complicated that you need to call your lawyer before you do something on Sabbath to make sure you’re not breaking the law.

We need to rest. What’s so hard about that? It’s hard for us. “I work hard and I play hard,” our TV heroes say. We answer “how’ve you been?” With “Oh, busy. Crazy busy.” It’s true too. Crazy busy.

“Work is not always required… there is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”

– George MacDonald

A study by neuroscientists at the University of California says that there are complimentary brain networks that toggle back and forth. One is used for times in which we are paying attention, focused, trying to get things done. The other, which they call the Default Mode, is activated during times of rest, daydreaming, and other non attentive but awake times.” DM brain systems activated during rest are also important for active, internally focused psychosocial mental processing, for example, when recalling personal memories, imagining the future, and feeling social emotions with moral connotations.”

Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Joanna A. Christodoulou, and Vanessa Singh

Educational theorists are now trying to figure out how to balance attention demanding situations with time for internal reflection, daydreaming and doing nothing.

It’s okay to rest. In fact, the neuroscientists say that activating the DM network is good for recalling our past, processing our present, planning our future. Writers know it’s good for creativity. Artists of all kinds know if they don’t spend enough “do nothing” time, the brain lies down in the road like a tired mule and no amount of shouting and jumping up and down will make it move. Rest instead. Take a Sabbath. The DM network is activated when one is not focusing on external stimuli. It doesn’t toggle over when you’re paying attention to video games, a book, TV, although all of those are restful activities. Meandering. Sitting in the back yard staring at nothing. Ruminating. These are ways we connect with the part of us that balances our sometimes frantic activity. When we are rested we think and remember, plan and process better. Imagine someone was going to pay you a thousand dollars to figure out how to create a Sabbath in your day, or in your week. See what solutions occur.

The Summer Day

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?

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

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A Juicy Slice of UU History – Servetus

May 14, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 11, 2014

Michael Servetus was one of the martyrs of our faith. He lived during the Reformation and wrote a pamphlet called “On the Errors of the Trinity.”

This is a story of the birth pains of free religion. It is a story of dangerous ideas, the clash of politics and passion. It is the story of how hard it is to control people, how impossible it is to control ideas, even when you are trying to control them in yourself.

Michael Servetus was born in Spain to a family of minor nobility. He was a prodigy, speaking French, Greek, and Latin by the time he was 13. (1524)

This was a time of religious evolution on the Continent. In 1517, when Servetus was 8, Martin Luther wrote a protest about the Rome raising funds for war and renovations by selling indulgences. Those were like an investment in your heavenly future — if you bought a small one you would be forgiven for a small sin, a large one forgave a large sin. You could buy relatives out of Purgatory where they were living in torment. It was big business in the Middle Ages. Martin Luther, a monk in Wittenberg, wrote 95 points of disagreement about how sins were forgiven, and nailed them to the door of the church. This wouldn’t have been so effective if another element had not been thrown into the mix: the printing press.

Before the 1500’s, a book had to be hand copied. Only the very rich could afford one or two of them. Most people couldn’t read anyway. After it was invented, print shops were set up all over the place, looking for things to publish. Luther’s theses were copied and they sold out immediately. He began to write more. Erasmus, the famous humanist wit, was being read widely. Universities were springing up everywhere, as every Prince now wanted to set up a center of learning in his province.

The Church was losing control. In Spain, it had become overwhelmed with the number of Jews and Muslims that had poured into the country. When they wouldn’t convert to Christianity, they were exiled or slaughtered. The Spanish Inquisition is famous for its vicious horrors.

It was against this background that Servetus, at fourteen, was sent to the University of Toulouse to be secretary to a famous scholar. Toulouse was a conservative town, so his parents felt safe sending him there, but, unbeknownst to them, the U. was a hotbed of radical thought. Michael essentially was given a private course with his boss, reading Erasmus, reading Luther. Printed Bibles were also to be had, which the students were not supposed to read, so they read them in secret. Somehow Servetus had picked up enough Hebrew to discuss the meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. Hebrew had been a forbidden language because the church wanted people to read the Bible only in its approved translation. There is even speculation that he learned Arabic, as he made several references to the Koran in his writing.

Servetus knew that not long before he was born, 800,000 Jews had been banished from Spain, and thousands of Muslims had been burned at the stake in Spain, because they would not accept the Trinity. He reasoned that if Christianity could correct that doctrine, then great numbers of Jews and Muslims, who already believed in one God, would be more inclined to convert. In reading the Bible, he was struck by the absence pf any mention of this thing that had caused so much strife and pain. When he was 20, he published a piece called “One the Errors of the Trinity.” It was printed to be small, about 3×6, so it could be stashed away fast if it had to be. A thousand copies sold out immediately. In it he said that God had created Jesus and that Jesus had become divine through his actions on earth. He thought you shouldn’t be baptized as an infant, as if the priest’s actions had the power to save your soul. He thought you should have to wait until you were twenty (the age he was then) and had some moral sense. He wrote that the Holy Spirit was the divine part of the human being. The Spanish Inquisition wanted their young man home for trial. He headed up to Switzerland, where the Protestants were establishing power in the towns of Basel and Geneva. Invited to live with a powerful leader, he argued with him about the trinity so rudely, so insistently, insulting and calling names, that after 10 months he was thrown out of that house and that town had to move on

He moved to Lyons to work for a printer, and worked on printing Ptolemy’s Geography. With his great scholarship, he actually improved this book. He couldn’t help adding his own opinions to the book. He wrote, “The English are brave, the Scots fearless, the Italians vulgar, the Irish rude, inhospitable, barbarous and cruel. On the map of Germany, he wrote ‘É all Germany are gluttons and drunkards.” (p.105, Wilbur) He was greatly admired in Lyon but he got into trouble again when he began discussing religion. And so he fled to Paris in 1536, changed his name to Villeneuve, and attended the University to study medicine. What was happening in the world then? Henry the 8th was founding the Church of England because Rome wouldn’t grant him the divorce he wanted. Meanwhile, Michael Servetus, putting himself through school lecturing on geography, astronomy and mathematics, became a respected doctor living as a good son of the Catholic Church (except for the time when he was censured by the Inquisition in France for using astrology with his medicine). He edited a new Latin translation of the Bible, and became the famous Dr. Villeneuve, consulted by nobles and potentates of the Church.

He couldn’t leave theology alone, though, when the reformer John Calvin began publishing his Institutes of the Christian religion (which we had to read in seminary). Dr. Villeneuve began writing to Calvin, arrogantly, with the same style that had gotten him in trouble as Servetus in his twenties. As in the past, he was not so much interested in hearing what Calvin had to say as he was in correcting Calvin’s errors, and he used terribly impolite language. By then, Calvin had gained considerable power as the leader of Geneva. Switzerland. Calvin wrote to a third party in 1547 that if this Servetus came his way, “he would never let him get away alive.” (Wilbur)

People who held different beliefs concerning the Christian religion faced overwhelming dangers. Unitarian scholar Earl Morse Wilbur notes that by the year 1546, 30,000 Anabaptists had been put to death in Holland and Friesland alone, because of their faith. (A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents)

Servetus broke off this correspondence with Calvin for four years, during which he revised and prepared for the press his final work, The Restitution of Christianity, which was printed anonymously in 1552. Within the body of his new book, Servetus made a major contribution to the study of medicine. In illustrating a theological point, he described the pulmonary circulation of the blood from the right chamber of the heart to the lungs. He is given credit as possibly the first to discover, and definitely the first to publish this piece of medical knowledge..

No one noticed the medicine as it was surrounded by shocking and dangerous theological ideas. Then as now, the churches who are all about control worried about his soul and those of the readers he would influence. Then, as now, dangerous ideas get you consigned to the flames. Actual ones in those days, eternal flames of hellfire in these days. Servetus was a wanted man.

Communications between Protestant Geneva and the Catholic Inquisition in France–then deadly enemies– eventually led to the arrest, examination, and incarceration of Servetus/Villeneuve in France. Realizing his great peril, Servetus managed to escape from prison, and to disappear from sight. His French trial went on without him for the next ten weeks. The errors of his work were duly noted, and sentence was pronounced: that he should be burned alive by slow fire. Since he wasn’t available, this sentence was carried out on his effigy.

That summer Michael Servetus was keeping out of sight, moving slowly towards Italy, where he might have been safe. There weren’t many countries where he wasn’t being hunted. He made the choice to pass through Switzerland. Who knows why he stopped in Geneva. On a Sunday, when everyone, including strangers, was required to go to church. Someone reported his presence to Calvin, who had him thrown in jail.

There was a trial, examining Servetus’ heresies, and it appears Servetus thought he might win out or at least receive some minor punishment such as a fine or banishment. Finally, after much debate, Servetus was found guilty. Calvin himself pushed for a more merciful beheading, but his Council insisted on the fire. On Oct 27th, the sentence was carried out, Servetus was burned with his book chained to his ankle.

Widespread repulsion at the way he had died gave more energy to the movement of free religion — free from the control of any church. The man could be killed, but his ideas could not. The books were destroyed, all but three copies, which managed to survive and now exist in translation. Ideas have power, and your truth has power. How can we stay silent when we feel the Spirit call us to speak our free religion?

Three hundred years after his death, Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing could and did speak openly: “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith.” We sometimes forget how much blood was shed before such freedom was possible. Let us not forget. That is our heritage.

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

May the force be with you

May 4, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 4, 2014

Does a concept like George Lucas’ “The Force” represent most Unitarian Universalists’ idea of the Divine?

When film maker George Lucas rediscovered his copy of Joseph Campbell’s book “Hero of a Thousand Faces,” he had already written two drafts of the Star Wars screenplay. He had loved that book when he read it in school, Rereading the story of the Hero’s Journey, he could see the various elements of that journey: the awakening, the resistance to leaving home, supernatural help, leaving home, the training period where the young hero becomes strong, the battle with evil, the temptation to become evil, finding out that evil is part of you, (Luke, I am your father), resisting your new training, losing your patience with the wisdom, choosing to fight rather than use the power of the mystery…. Reading about the archetypes: the father (Darth Vader), the goddess (Leia) the mentor (Obi Wan,) the oracle (Yoda), the trickster (Han Solo) The story almost told itself. And, despite some of the mistakes that sprang from its being created mostly by white people, it spoke to people of many cultures.

People responded to the description of The Force. Obi Wan tells Luke “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” We watched him train his intuition along with his body. We thought “I could do that. I almost can do that now. I’ve felt The Force.”

Most people have felt a power flow through them at some time, and we hear ourselves saying words we did not know were there, doing deeds we did not know we could do, being “in the zone” when we were playing a game or making an athletic effort, where it felt that we could do nothing wrong, that the stars were aligned, that we were in the flow.

Unitarian forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a human being is a stream whose source is hidden, whose being is pouring in from somewhere else. As the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere, every particular person is contained in the (Force) Over-soul, the Unity within which we are all made one with all other. There is a common heart. All sincere conversation is its worship, all right action is submission to it. It is that force that makes us feel enlarged by doing good and diminished by doing wrong.

Within each person is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us. When it breathes through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affection, it is love “

The only word I changed in there is that, instead of saying “The Force,” Emerson said “The Oversoul.”

Emerson and his friends were reading the newly available translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts, and their new theology, called Transcendentalism, was shaped by their relationship with these Eastern Religions.

Conversation among religions is ongoing about whether this deep power is separate from us, but can be in us, whether it is us at our best or something greater than we are, whether it is only good, and evil is only its absence, or whether there is a separate force of evil, or whether both creation and destruction are contained in it, and we need to be careful about calling something either good or evil. Lucas made those choices.

The Force is strong in some and less in others. The Force has a “Dark” side (the culture in which we live uses the word “dark” to denote evil. It might more properly be used to denote the inability to see well, or move about with confidence. The Hebrew scripture says God created light and darkness and they were both good.)

So the Force has an evil side, or a destructive side. Carl Jung, upon whose work Joseph Campbell based his, would have called it The Shadow. Jung said that the archetypal Hero’s Journey mirrors the journey of the soul toward wholeness. In order to find balance, which is what gives one power, the oracle Yoda says, one must meet, fight and come to a resolution with the Shadow.

I invite you to feel as if you are in training, using your intuition to feel the Force, learning when to try and when to let it carry you. When your kids are too much, when your parents make you sad, when you get the bad diagnosis, when your life turns upside down, this is the time to get still and feel that deep power in which we exist. If we practice it in small ways, when life is going pretty well, we’ll be better at it when life takes one of its surprise spins. May the Force be with you.

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

Jesus’ Grandmothers

April 20, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 20, 2014

Who were the women in Rabbi Jesus’ family tree? What did their oddness say about him?

Some people call the genealogies in the Bible “the begats,” and they are hard to read. Why would I want to be reading you one? Well, because there are stories embedded in this one. Every name has a story (same with each of our genealogies) and I thought you might be interested in these. Women are hardly ever mentioned in these. This is the genealogy of Rabbi Jesus. Count on your fingers the women in this as I read it.

Matthew 1 – The Genealogy of Jesus

1 A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham:

2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob,

Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,

Perez the father of Hezron,

Hezron the father of Ram,

4 Ram the father of Amminadab,

Amminadab the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon the father of Salmon,

5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,

Obed the father of Jesse,

6 and Jesse the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

…then 24 generations without the mention of a woman, then…

16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

The usual genealogy in the Bible is a list of fathers. The mothers are rarely mentioned. In this genealogy of Jesus, there are a several items of interest. One is that it’s a list of Joseph’s forbears, which leads you to believe that the Virgin Birth didn’t mean the same thing to Matthew that it does to people today, but that’s another sermon. The second unusual thing is that there are four grandmothers mentioned in Jesus’ list of forbears: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah. Not only are they mentioned, but they are women with interesting stories, stories I would like to tell you today.

Matthew wrote this genealogy in a time when the rules for women were narrow and mean. There wasn’t much women who weren’t married to kings or emperors could do to distinguish themselves in the Greek and Roman cultures. The most you could go for was to be really good, stay under the radar, do what you were supposed to do, and not get yourself in trouble. It was easy to get in trouble. If you got pregnant without being married, if you didn’t get pregnant when you were married, if you got raped, if your husband died, all of those things were bad, and they were your fault.

Were these grandmothers of Jesus exemplary church ladies, following all the rules to the letter and making cautious moves so their lives could be free of turbulence and pleasing to those around them? NO. These women did not do the nice thing, pleasing those around them. What they did would now be called risk-taking. Doing the higher right thing, rather than the nice thing. Good rather than nice.

These women embody the difference between being good and being nice.

TAMAR

Tamar’s story is in the book of Genesis (38:6-30). It was the custom of the day, if a man died leaving no children, his brother would marry the widow as one of his wives and have children with her to be counted as the children of his dead brother. That way the brother’s line would continue. Tamar’s husband was one of the sons of Judah. Judah was the one the whole nation was named after later. Judah was a brother of Joseph, one of the ones who sold Joseph to the Egyptians and then told their father that Joseph had been eaten by a wild animal. They gave their father the coat of many colors, dipped in animal blood, as evidence. It wouldn’t have fooled CSI, but it was enough for Jacob, their father.

Anyway, Judah moved away and married, and had some sons and the eldest son married a woman named Tamar. The story says he was wicked in the Lord’s sight, so the Lord killed him. Judah told his next son, Onan, to have intercourse with her and make some children. He spilled his seed on the ground in front of her, refusing to make children with her. The god in the story gets mad at him for that, so he died too. We still have people whose beliefs about solo sex are shaped by interpreting this story wrong, and “Onanism” should be a term for refusing to do the right thing, instead of a term for having sex by yourself. Whew. This is awkward to talk about, but that’s the scriptures for you. The third son was still too young to fulfill the brotherly obligation, so Judah told Tamar to go back to her father’s house and live there as a widow. He worried that the third son would die too, as it seemed to him that some kind of doom was emanating from Tamar

11 Judah then said to his daughter-in-law Tamar, “Live as a widow in your father’s house until my son Shelah grows up.” For he thought, “He may die too, just like his brothers.” So Tamar went to live in her father’s house.

12 After a long time Judah’s wife, the daughter of Shua, died. When Judah had recovered from his grief, he went up to Timnah, to the men who were shearing his sheep, and his friend Hirah the Adullamite went with him.

13 When Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep,”

14 she took off her widow’s clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelah had now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife.

15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face.

16 Not realizing that she was his daughter-inlaw, he went over to her by the roadside and said, “Come now, let me sleep with you.” “And what will you give me to sleep with you?” she asked.

17 “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he said. “Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?” she asked.

18 He said, “What pledge should I give you?” “Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,” she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him.

19 After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again.

20 Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her.

21 He asked the men who lived there, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?” “There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,” they said.

22 So he went back to Judah and said, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’ “

23 Then Judah said, “Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.”

24 About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.” Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”

25 As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,” she said. And she added, “See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.”

26 Judah recognized them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not sleep with her again.

27 When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb.

28 As she was giving birth, one of them put out his hand; so the midwife took a scarlet thread and tied it on his wrist and said, “This one came out first.”

29 But when he drew back his hand, his brother came out, and she said, “So this is how you have broken out!” And he was named Perez.

30 Then his brother, who had the scarlet thread on his wrist, came out and he was given the name Zerah. She was good, not nice.

According to the Book of Ruth, this Peretz becomes the great great great great grandfather of Boaz, who is the great grandfather of David.

RAHAB

Rahab was a prostitute who lived in Jericho. The Israelites wanted to conquer that town, and their commander, Joshua, sent two spies to look it over.

Joshua 2 Rahab and the Spies

1 Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

2 The king of Jericho was told, “Look! Some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land.”

3 So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab: “Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy out the whole land.”

4 But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. She said, “Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they had come from.

5 At dusk, when it was time to close the city gate, the men left. I don’t know which way they went. Go after them quickly. You may catch up with them.”

6 (But she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them under the stalks of flax she had laid out on the roof.)

7 So the men set out in pursuit of the spies on the road that leads to the fords of the Jordan, and as soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut….

She made a deal with the spies for the life of her family. ” please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign

13 that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death.”

14 “Our lives for your lives!” the men assured her. “If you don’t tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the LORD gives us the land.”

15 So she let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part of the city wall.

16 Now she had said to them, “Go to the hills so the pursuers will not find you. Hide yourselves there three days until they return, and then go on your way

21 “Agreed,” she replied. “Let it be as you say.”

So she sent them away and they departed. And she tied the scarlet cord in the window. She and her family were spared when Joshua and his troops took the city. She was good to her family, compromised herself for them and saved them.

RUTH

Ruth was a foreigner, from Moab. She married the son of Naomi, who was from Judah, Israel. Naomi’s husband died, then her two sons. She told Ruth and her other daughter-in-law Orpah (where Oprah got her name) to go back to their mothers and find other men to marry. But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.

17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.

Isn’t it interesting that the words many people say at their weddings were originally said between a woman and her mother-in-law?

They got to Judah at the time of the barley harvest, and Ruth went to work in the field of a near kinsman Naomi pointed out to her. He wasn’t next in line for her, but second. Ruth reaped in the fields, and he noticed her. He offered her protection and food, and she stayed with his folks in the field. When the harvest was over, Naomi told her to go to the threshing floor where the men slept and lie down with him. He did not reject her. His mom was Rahab, remember from the genealogy? He was thrilled, but wanted to do the honorable thing, so he went and negotiated with the next in line so that he could take her as his wife. They made it happen the way they wanted it to, and she gave birth to Obed, King David’s grandfather.

BATHSHEBA

King David saw her bathing on the roof, and she was beautiful. Uriah, her husband, was off fighting David’s war. He called her to the palace and she slept with him. She found out she was pregnant, and David called her husband home for R and R. Uriah refused to go home while the war was still being fought. He slept at the gate of the city with his some of his men, like an athlete who won’t shave until the championship is won. David got him drunk and tried to send him home, but he slept with his men at the gate again. Then David placed him in the fight so he would get killed. He was killed, and Bathsheba mourned him, but she went to the palace and became David’s wife, and bore a son. The story says God was mad at David, so the son got sick and died. One of Bathsheba’s next sons was one of Jesus’ grandfathers.

What are these women doing in this genealogy? Commentators have worked for years trying to figure out what they had in common. They all made choices that were risky. They gathered up all the dice and rolled them, changing their lives. Life pushed them one way and another. Loved ones were killed, but they chose life. They put themselves in danger of rejection and harm. They chose life.

Especially Ruth and Tamar made a leap, instead of subsiding into resignation and bitterness over their fate. They didn’t shrug and say, well, I got dealt a bad hand, I’m just unlucky, or I’ve been done wrong. They took what power they had and used it to move their lives forward.

The gospel writer is telling the story of Messiah, the Redeemer. In the beginning of his story he embeds five women who chose to do a brave thing, even though it could get them into trouble. Is there something about redemption that takes guts? That takes a willingness to face rejection? Foreigners, a prostitute, a beauty who married King David, but is named in the genealogy as “wife of Uriah,” and Mary, the young woman who was with child before she had been with a man, yet her baby’s lineage is traced through her husband. Mystery comes into the world, redemption comes into the world with its own morality, with its own sense of the good that plays in all shades in between black and white. These are family stories that would not play well in some sweet Pleasantville. They are real families, real choices, real risks, and we learn that you never know how redemption will come to the world.

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

Depression

April 13, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 13, 2014

So many people suffer from bouts of depression. What helps? How does one be a friend to someone who is depressed? What causes it? How is it different from sorrow?

Sermon:
A Few Thoughts About Depression

There are lots of us who have moments of feeling like life is too overwhelming to be handled. Nothing will change for the better, we will never find what we seek, there will be no true sweetness or love for us. Happiness is a thing we cannot grasp or remember. For the fortunate ones among us, this feeling lasts a day or two and then it lifts.

For others, it stays, and it can take lives. The voices inside that watch and criticize multiply and feed on the spirit. There is no spark of hope to light the path. The mind is in a deep pit and there is no way out There is no energy to make choices or even to take care of routine necessities. Some keep functioning in their jobs and families, but inside it feels like a toxic wasteland. It hurts, mentally and physically. The body can ache as the soul twists in pain. Some people sleep all the time, some sleep fitfully. Every morning at three-thirty they wake up for an hour before being able to fall back to sleep Some people eat everything in sight, some stop eating. Sometimes depression looks like a long angry spell, and sometimes it looks like collecting things you don’t need. Hoarding is a kind of depression, including the hoarding of animals.

Depression is not sadness, although feelings of sadness can be present in depression. In sadness, you grieve the loss of someone you loved or a dream you cherished. You cry, you mourn, you feel awful. It’s healthy and appropriate. Some people think that if you are completely well-adjusted and mentally fit, you will be able to go through any situation in full serenity and peace. Not so. In many situations, sadness is the appropriate emotion to feel. If you weren’t feeling it, there would be something wrong.

Depression is not anger, although feelings of anger and resentment can be present in depression. Anger is meant to alert us to a situation that is harmful to us. We look around to see what needs to change, what needs to move. If we have to stay in a situation that is harmful to us, we may develop depression.

Low self-esteem and feelings of inferiority are also part of depression. I would like to say, though, that low self-esteem seems to be part of the human condition. Most people feel like everyone else knows something they don’t know, like there was a life handbook given out and they didn’t get one. Many people feel inferior when they compare themselves to others. The thing we don’t notice is that we are comparing our insides to their outsides. In depression, though, feelings of inferiority and regret grow into deep shame and feelings of worthlessness. You feel there is something wrong with you. There is a deep emptiness inside.

Depression has been around for a long time. King Saul, in the Bible, is described as suffering from periods of deep melancholy. The music David played for him on his harp helped alleviate the King’s pain. For some music is healing, for others it can be the beauty of nature. Many therapies have been tried throughout the ages. Hippocrates recommended a vegetable diet and abstinence from all excesses. Others tried entertaining stories, dirty jokes, exhortation and confrontation, counting your blessings, looking at people were are less fortunate than you, etc.

These days there are lots of cures to try. The biomedical discoveries about depression and its causes are coming thick and fast. Lots of things can mimic depression. Hormone imbalance, food allergies, thyroid mis-function, sensitivity to cyclical changes in the light as seasons change, certain medications, head injuries, diabetes, hypoglycemia, and other things.

If you don’t have any of those things, if you truly have clinical depression, you have an illness like any other illness of the body. There is no shame in it. There is no reason to be embarrassed. It happens to people. Like many illnesses, there are causative factors in the environment and in the mind of the sufferer. When you have a heart attack, the doctors give medicine and now they complement that with talk therapy and changes to your diet and lifestyle. Depression is that way too. The medicine is there, and it is good. If one doesn’t work for you, try another one. Each one works in a different way, and one will be better than another. Changes to diet and lifestyle are important too. Alcohol is a depressant. Nicotine can make depression worse. Some artificial sweeteners crash the level of serotonin in your body. Serotonin in necessary for the feeling of wellbeing that we enjoy. Exercise is an element in the cure of depression. Sometimes depression can be alleviated by walking thirty minutes a day three times a week. The problem is people who are severely depressed can’t make themselves do that.

The various anti-depressant medications are highly effective, unless a person is using alcohol at the same time. The problem is people have a shame reaction to them that we don’t have as much to heart medicine or diabetes medicine. We still feel like it’s a weakness of character. Like if we could just pull ourselves together we could beat this thing. Mind over illness in a powerful thing, and it works as well on depression as it does on arthritis and cancer. Sometimes yes, mostly no.

Talk therapy can do some good. What do we do in talk therapy to help with depression? One approach is called “Cognitive Therapy.” That theory holds that it is mistaken ways of thinking that lead to depression. You work with someone to become aware of some ways you might be thinking that sap your spirit. Another thing therapists do is talk with you about your anger or your sadness in which you may have gotten stuck. They will ask about depression in your family medical history, as it can run in families. There are lots of different therapies, and each of them seems to work with equal effectiveness.

How do you help someone with depression? Cheering them up isn’t the way. You can acknowledge their suffering as you would with someone who is battling any illness. You can’t ask them to snap out of it. They can’t always beat it with their will. Some people seem to feel it’s noble to struggle with it unaided, and it is as noble as struggling, medicine-free, with high blood pressure or multiple sclerosis. How do you help someone? You can encourage them to treat it as a lifethreatening illness and get on some medicine. It might not work, but it might.

If you do try medicine to complement your talk therapy or exercise, be aware that not every medicine works for everyone, and you may have to try several before you get it to the best point. Also, medicines tend to “poop out” after several years, and you need to switch.

If you think about suicide, please consider that it may be a helpful urge to kill off a part of your life. You should try making huge changes before you kill off all of it. Maybe a few relationships need to go, a few expectations. Maybe you will need to accept that you’ve disappointed someone or lost everything. Life comes up through cracks in the pavement, past rocks and on the precarious sides of cliffs. The pain is great and you think there’s no hope anymore, but that’s the depression dementor doing its work, and they lie. Talk about it. Get support. Get sober. Let go of the shame. Hang onto moments of joy.

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

God wants you to be rich!

April 6, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 6, 2014

The Third Commandment forbids taking God’s name in vain. So many people say “God bless you!” to the poor but do not help to change the situation. So many politicians say “God bless America” at the end of their speeches, but what do they mean by that? Might using God’s name for ulterior motives be taking that name in vain?

Sermon:

Hypocrisy and the Third Commandment

In the summers we used to go up to Roaring River, my Uncle David’s farm near Daniel’s Pass, NC. I remember riding in the back seat of his old Jeep and being reprimanded sternly. This was unusual for him – he wasn’t a stern person. He was the second youngest of thirteen children, and he had been always in trouble. What had I done? I had said “Gah ….. ” about something. I have no idea how to spell that. It’s a Southern child’s word. “Golly,” I knew, was forbidden, as it was a way to not say “God,” which was really really forbidden, since it was taking the Lord’s name in vain. Which brings us to the Third Commandment, the next in this year’s series:

“You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

The original Hebrew says, “La Tisah Ess Shaim Adoshem L’shav.” The key word is “Tisah” which does not mean “to take” or “to say” God’s name. Tisah is Hebrew for “to carry,” which means the commandment is telling us, “Do not CARRY God’s name in vain.” This word implies lifting up, carrying like a banner or a flag. “In vain” means uselessly, or in an empty way. It’s the only one of the Commandments that is tagged with this “The Lord will not hold anyone guiltless (literally will not cleanse) someone who does that. Is it possible that the scriptures mean to condemn little kids who say “Golly” or even “My God, that’s an ugly dog” more than murderers? No, it is not possible.

Ancient Jews avoided saying the name of God altogether. They used four letters YOD-HE-VAV-HE without vowels. These four letters are called the Tetragrammaton Instead of making the sounds ‘Yuh” “huh” Wuh” “huh” they say “Adonai,” which is translated “the Lord,” or just “ha-shem,” which means “the name.” This way they will avoid taking God’s name in vain. In English you sometimes see the word “God” written “G-d.”

Later on, Christian scholars added the vowels from the word “Adonai” to the Tetragrammaton, and pronounced it “Jehovah.”

When Moses was talking to God in the burning bush, he asks God’s name. “I am who I am,” is what the translation says. It would better say “I will be who I will be.” I remember one preacher saying that was God saying that he would be the same yesterday, today, and forever. It doesn’t sound like that to me. If a person said to you “I will be who I will be, “would you think that meant they were unchanging? I think that preacher was seeing what he already believed. That happens all the time in life. We see what supports the things we already think. To me, “I will be who I will be” implies that God is changing. I could be reading into the text what I already believe as well, though there is a little more evidence in the rest of the Exodus story. When God leads the people in the wilderness, he forms a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night. Smoke, fire. Those are constantly changing forms. I just think that is interesting. He wasn’t a hawk or a dragonfly. Those are also changeable, but in smoke and in fire you can see shapes, different people see different shapes. You can’t grab hold of either one, no matter how close you get.

Also, when Moses asks to see God, he is allowed to, but he only sees the back of God as God passes by. Some scholars say this means we never see God, we just see where God has been. I like that thought.

The Divine Force is always changing, and we only see where it has been. Even that is open to question and interpretation.

So “God” isn’t really the name of God, it’s just a human word in English to describe the concept of the Divine One. In other languages the concept is called “Deus, Dio, Dios, Zeus, Allah, then there are lots of particular names for particular gods or aspects of the one god: Krishna, Shiva, Yemaya, Oshun, Morrigan, Nana. Thousands of names.

Lao-Tse, the father of Taoism, writes in the Tao te Ching, “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth.

While naming is the origin of the myriad things.” In naming you begin to separate, you begin particularity; you begin to limit the One.

That’s a lot about the name of God. From those who won’t name the Divine at all, to those who hint at a name but refuse to pronounce it. These are folks who want to be very careful not to misuse the name. It’s not crystal clear what the misuse of the name is. If it’s not likely to be cussing that is going to cause God to be more displeased with you than if you had stolen or killed, what is it?

Then there are those who pronounce it all the time. “God bless you,” “God told me to talk to you,” “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” A lot of these people are kind hearted and good folks. They are sincere believers. Then there are those who use it thoughtlessly. Then there are those who use it for power or greed. Pat Robertson said we had hurricane Sandy because God was angry with America and had withdrawn his protection from the country because of the pagans, feminists, abortionists and gay people. There is the Phelps family who pickets the funerals of American soldiers with big posters that read “God hates fags.” There are those, like Ted Haggart, President of the American Association of Evangelicals, representing about 30 million people, who lift high the banner of the name of God to wade into the fray against gay and lesbian American citizens. A few days ago he was accused by a gay escort of hiring him once a month and asking him to buy crystal meth so they could get high together. There are those like Jimmy Swaggart, who raised millions as a televangelist, then was caught, twice, with prostitutes. Once DUI. Of course, those things could happen to anyone, I guess. But not everyone makes money making people feel guilty, then feel like there is hope for them if they send money in to support the television ministry.

Some preachers regularly ask for donations, claiming that those that give will reap the benefit of God’s blessing. People are told if they give enough, even if they are in debt, God will erase their debt. And if God doesn’t ease their financial troubles, then they aren’t giving enough. This principle is known as the “prosperity gospel.”

A person who used to work for Robert Tilton’s ministries said they were given bundles of envelopes and a letter opener. They were to take out the cash and toss the letters. They pulled in nearly $1,000 an hour.

The problem came when the televangelist watchdog group, The Trinity Foundation, founded by a man named Ole Anthony, sent a squad of detectives to Tilton’s office. They went through the dumpster and found piles of letters that were still folded in their envelopes, which had been slit to extract the money. One of the detectives, who earns a salary of $80.00 a week at the Foundation, carries a letter from that dumpster in his wallet. A worried mother was writing for prayers for her son, who was suicidal. “This reminds me why we do this,” he said. They leaked the story to Diane Sawyer and Prime Time, and Tilton went down.

Politicians who cloak their ambition in God talk are breaking the Third Commandment by introducing legislation to keep the Ten Commandments in the courthouses, but not knowing what they are, sponsoring anti-gay legislation when your numbers sink in the polls, hammering at folks about family values while cheating on their spouses, stealing money or beating their children. Those who say God is punishing homosexuals by sending AIDS. Those people are carrying the name of God in an empty way, pretending to know the mind of God.

These commandments are binding for Jews and Muslims as well, and those who break them are those who say God is punishing the US for its foreign policies with hurricanes and floods, those who say “In the name of God” before they blow someone up or cut off someone’s head.

It seems this commandment is about religious hypocrisy and violence, about claiming that you know something about what God thinks, who God would bomb, what God would drive.

Do UUs fall short of our ideals of behavior and right relationship? Yes. All the time. We are short with one another when we should be kind. We male-bash, or we get ugly about our differences of opinion, or we denigrate one another, or ignore the stranger in our midst because it’s uncomfortable to talk to someone new or because we just don’t have energy for a conversation that day. Or we don’t go to the polls and vote our principles. Do we carry the banner or our principles cynically, for power or money? Maybe. I can’t really figure out how to do that, but maybe during the discussion you can help me. There is good religion and bad religion. Most of it is mixed. Only a little religion has to do with God, I think. No one really knows, even though most people speak like they do. Our task is to clean up our own hearts and minds, and to name hypocrisy as breaking the Third Commandment.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Balance/Equinox

March 23, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 23, 2014

How do we keep our balance as life around us swirls? Is balance something to be desired, or should we just enjoy the roller coaster ride?

Sermon:

BALANCE

The Equinox is a time of balance in the earth’s year. The nights and days are of equal length. It is the still point in the great ebb and flow of light into dark and dark into light again. The light and the dark are among the first things created, according to the Hebrew scriptures. They are both good. They continue today, millions of years later, in the same pattern as when they began. Ancient people noticed four special sun events: the two solstices: the first day of summer, when the days are longest and the nights are shortest, and the first day of winter, the winter solstice, when the nights are longest and the days are shortest, and the two equinoxes, when night and day are the same length.

These four sun holidays are symbolized by a four-armed cross within a circle, called a solar cross. It looks like a wheel, and that is no accident. The turning of the seasons is the turning of the wheel. The wheel of the year turns, IIspring to summer, autumn to winter, and from winter round to spring. II The light and dark are in balance for a day. A moment. The turning of the wheel is continuous, and has been so from the beginning of time. The first turn of the wheel WAS the beginning of time. The first day, the first night, and the wheel has been steady ever since.

The equinox is about the balance of light and dark. Things that are not alive can balance in stillness. Things that are alive must balance in the midst of movement. In the midst of the movement of our lives, we look for a moving balance. A living balance.

Many of us are seeking balance in our lives. We try to balance acceptance and action, sternness and sweetness, talking and listening, taking care of ourselves and taking care of others, confronting things that bother us and ignoring them, trusting and worrying. I get frustrated when we have an idea of balance that has to do with stillness or steadiness or equal parts of this and that. Balance does not mean stasis. I learned in martial arts training that you need to spring into action from a place of balance, otherwise you fall over. You need to accept attack from a place of balance, otherwise you fall over. This is true physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes I am good at balance, and other times. I am horrible at it. Hey, maybe that could count as a kind of balance…. No?

We all know that balance is a temporary thing. So many things take our balance away. Being rejected, being chewed out, doing something wrong, losing financial stability, failures, loss, change. Finding ways of regaining a moving balance makes us more able to take what life brings.

STANCE

Your stance in life is how you approach life, how you let life approach you .. Are you going to have an adversarial stance toward life? Are you going to act as if everyone out to get you? That your luck is bad, you don’t believe compliments, people can’t be trusted, things are likely not to work out, you’re going to have to work harder than anyone else for things to work out for you?

Are you going to have a fixed, open stance, where you stand all open and vulnerable, not taking care of yourself, allowing others to decide your fate? What happens, happens… you can’t control anything. You don’t try to make anything happen for yourself…. Your mind is open, but you don’t close it on anything, you say “I have my truth and you have your truth” which kind of makes there be no truth.

Where you are trying to be all things to all people. “I can do that!” “I can be what you want me to be” “I can tolerate any behavior you choose.” This makes you easy to knock over.

Too narrow a stance might mean you have a small range of things that are acceptable to you. You have a picture of how things should be, and you don’t handle it well if they don’t turn out that way. It could be that you cannot let yourself make a mistake, so your perfectionism limits you.

Another factor in being physically and emotionally hard to knock over is to lower your center of gravity. When you have soft knees (assuming your knees can still do that) you can sink the center of your body a little closer to the ground. This is one of the things that makes you grounded and more stable. Emotionally, having your center of gravity low might be this; that you are willing to make a mistake, that you are willing to let other people talk, that you seek to understand others before you seek to have them understand you. That you might start a sentence with the words: “I could be wrong.”

We all only balance momentarily. Since we are alive, we are always losing our balance and coming back to it. No one is perfectly balanced all the time. Some people balance carefully, others more gracefully and freely.

One image of balance within movement I love is that of a pot on a wheel…. As we rest in that stillpoint within, we have a better chance of finding our balance in our shifting and frenzied lives. We can become clear about where to hold on and where to let go. When to feast and when to be frugal,when to speak and when to be quiet. When to come close and when to keep a distance. And we can find our balance. For a while. Until the wheel turns again.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Celtic Christianity/Redemption

March 16, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 16, 2014

What might redemption be? What are some of the views of the world’s religions about it? In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we’ll look at how the Celts saw it differently from the more common Roman Christianity.

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.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

The Second Commandment

March 12, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 9, 2014

The second commandment says humans make a mistake when they make idols, or when they worship something other than the One Spirit. What might be some of the idols of our culture? Physical beauty? Youth? Capitalism?

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.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Heard it through the grapevine

March 7, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 2, 2014

Is gossip always a bad thing, or can it be community-building? What does it indicate about our state of mind? Could it have to do with learning social intelligence?

Sermon: Gossip (Heard it Through the Grapevine)

So did you know that John Mayer’s been dating Katie Perry. He doesn’t have such a good track record in his dating relationships. None of them seems to work very long, and now there are rumors that he and Katy are having troubles. She seems to be doing fine, though. She just helped deliver a baby for a friend of hers in her friend’s apartment, so you can add delivering babies to her resume now.

The Oscars are tonight. I have a friend who is a Buddhist monk in Katmandu who loves to watch the Oscars. He can tell you which movie won Best Picture in 1987, who won best actress in 1995. Do you know that Brad Pitt has never won an Oscar? It looks like the red carpet is going to be soaked, with all this rain they’ve been having. What do you think Julia Roberts is going to wear?

Joan Didion says: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live… we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices, We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
-Joan Didion, The White Album

My whole life I’ve heard that people shouldn’t gossip, that it’s trashy behavior. My father told me that the highest quality people talk about ideas, the middle quality people talk about events, and the lowest talk about other people. Byron Katie, who advocates falling in love with what is, would say “human beings gossip. We just do, that’s who we are. You’re living on earth, sweetheart, make yourself at home.”

Research on gossip is beginning to show that humans are fascinated by one another’s lives for evolutionary reasons.

In a Harvard U Press book called Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar says that gossip within our group, for humans, is a social bonding practice somewhat like grooming is for other primates. In the context of evolution, those who know what is going on make it and those who are oblivious don’t. The current theory is that our ancestors lived in small groups, and the people got to know one another in a face-to-face long-term way. You would want to know who would make fair exchanges with you and who would short-change you, who would give good value to a group and who would try to take a free ride, taking more than giving, who would come through for you in a crunch, who you could trust with your family’s safety? You would need to know about the temperament, past behavior and predictability of those in your group. This kind of social intelligence increased the odds of you and your family doing well.

People who pay close attention to others develop the capacity for determining and understanding the interpersonal connections between people insofar as their emotional intelligence will allow them. Some people are particularly talented at reading emotional cues, anticipating the inner thoughts and feelings of other people, a skill that is sometimes called mind reading… Stephen Johnson, in his bookEverything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, says that watching reality shows is one way kids learn to see a social network as a series of points connected by lines of affiliation. “When we watch most reality shows, we are implicitly building these social network maps in our heads, a map not so much of plotlines as of attitudes: Nick has a thing for Amy, but Amy may just be using Nick; Bill and Kwame have a competitive friendship”. If they can see a social network, they are better suiting to building one for themselves.

Gossip can function as a training tool in the lives of groups. Every group has an unwritten contract: here are the things you do, the things you talk about, the things you let yourself notice. Here are the things we don’t talk about, the things we don’t notice, the things we never do. When someone breaks those unwritten rules, gossip can be a way of socially isolating that person, making them understand that they have broken the norms of the group, and giving them a chance to become better citizens. Sometimes gossip within groups helps to maintain the group’s mythos about itself, the group story. Everyone in this family is successful and sane, goes the myth in one family. Aunt Louise’s kids are messed up and she’s on tranquilizers because she married outside her faith. The last words are italicized, whispered. In this piece of gossip you get taught that it’s expected that we will not be messed up, and that we should marry other Methodists.

One book, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. By Christopher Boehme, suggests that small groups of foragers were like teams in that the individuals did best when their group did best. Having some people who were over-dominant undermined the team, and gossip might have evolved as one way of leveling among the people. People would have a fascination with those who had the most power, and the visceral deliciousness of something bad happening to that person might have been a way of making the team more egalitarian. That guy who won the Nobel? Sleeping with his secretary, who also did all his writing for him. That child raising expert? His kids are in jail.

Gossip has been shown to:

1. Strengthen relationships between friends and work colleagues

2. Reinforce shared values –
We tell stories in order to live. We make sense out of what happens in life by telling stories. We figure out who we are, who we want to be… you have cautionary tales, you have success stories. You find out about the karma fairy. What happens to people when they get divorced? What is the way alcoholism works? What are some good ways to raise kids? What does it mean when you get a twitch that won’t go away? What might that mean?

3. Offer increased feelings of “connectedness” and community spirit.

4. Assist in controlling the poor behavior of others, particularly in an office situation

5. Offers a sense of status by being included in the “gossip circle”
Gossip can even help ward off grumpiness. Half an hour over coffee listening to the dilemmas of a third party can be enough to make you realize that things aren’t quite so bad in your own backyard after all. The feeling of belonging that comes from being in on the gossip circle gives us a feeling of belonging that boosts our self esteem and increases our sense of wellbeing. Gossiping about the lives of people who seem to have it all reinforces the idea that fate can deal a bad hand to anyone, despite beauty, money, and fame. Even Taylor Swift has trouble choosing a man. Even Martin Sheen has a son like Charlie. Turns out gossip can be bonding, it can be a teaching tool, it can be an enforcement tool for group norms. Bad gossip seems to be when a person uses it to undermine the group…when it’s hurting the community. Good gossip helps the community. In that it’s like any life skill. Be a good team player, be good for the community, and it’s positive.

So gossip well, and remember, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson from Twilight? They never did get married. She said he was too controlling.

Podcasts are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Failure is impossible

February 16, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 16, 2014

Susan B. Anthony’s birthday is February 15 and we reflect on the important work and legacy of this Unitarian and Quaker.

In the 1890’s there were a group of women who conferred together to make a woman’s commentary on the Bible. They felt the Bible was commonly used to undergird all of the laws that were unjust to women. Even though they felt the Bible was an historical document only, and not holy scripture, they knew enough people took it seriously and they wanted to address it passage-by-passage and begin a conversation about it.

Elizabeth Cady Staton and Susan B Anthony and many other Bible scholars saw where Genesis said “and then God created man in God’s own image, male and female created God them.” They felt this could be interpreted as God having both male and female in God’s self, if creating human in God’s image meant that half of humanity was male and half female. They felt this justified anyone who wanted to pray to mother god and father god, but more importantly, declared the equality of male and female. The Woman’s Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton was published in 1898. It is available on-line for free.

Susan B Anthony is surely in the pantheon of Unitarian and Universalist saints. Her father signed the book of the Rochester Unitarian Church, and the family attended there. Susan was persecuted, ridiculed and jailed, and she worked tirelessly for the rights of the powerless. She was intelligent, persistent, tireless, fierce and serene. Everything we admire. In our free faith tradition, one of the sources we draw from is “Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love; ” I want to say we should all be like Susan B, but she had some things going for her that were powerful in her development and in her staying strong throughout her life. Some of us have those things and some don’t.

She worked first for the temperance movement. Drunkenness was an enormous problem in those days. Per capita consumption of alcohol was over seven gal. per capita. You have to keep in mind that most women didn’t drink at all then, most slaves didn’t drink, and no children were drunks, to speak of…. yet they were counted in that statistic. After Prohibition, by the way, that consumption went way down, and it is just now reaching seven gallons again after sixty years, but men and women of all colors drink now. I think most children still do not. Part of the problem with men drinking that much was not that it was immoral or icky to drink, but that the laws made males owners of all property in a marriage. They also owned the children, and always would get custody in a divorce. They also owned their wives and received any money their wives made.

If they were “bad to drink,” as we said in the South, they would drink up their paycheck and their wives paycheck. If they were the kind of drunk that would come home violent, they would hurt their wives and their kids and not much could be done about it at all. Beating your wife was not a crime in those days. All of the issues Anthony worked for flowed from her temperance work, as she campaigned for equal pay for equal work, for the right of women and African Americans to vote, for women to be able to get a divorce if she were abused, for women to have a chance at custody of her children, and for wives to be able to own property and keep their paychecks.

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in 1820. She didn’t like “Brownell” so she just always used “B.” She grew up in New York state in the midst of a Quaker family. One of the elements in her life that allowed her to be a confident crusader was that her father believed in her, loved her, and made sure she was educated at the same level as the males in the family. Having Daniel Anthony as the head of her household, growing up, gave her the experience of how much good a good man could do. Quakers believed that men and women were equal, that they thought and spoke and led equally well. Women helped run the meetings, and women had a say in all decisions.

Daniel Anthony sent his children to the town school until the school teacher refused to teach Susan long division. The thought at the time was that girls should be taught to read well enough to read their Bibles and taught enough arithmetic to count their egg money. Anthony brought the children home, started a school in his house and hired a teacher. When you are told, growing up, that you are smart and capable, when you are loved and admired by those who are in charge of you, it is much easier for you to be able to be smart and strong as an adult. Daniel Anthony believed in the work Susan was doing, and he supported her financially and emotionally. Her family helped her all her life, supplementing the fees she was paid as a lecturer and an organizer. When she was 20, Susan took a job teaching school from a fellow who had done poorly in the job. He had been paid $10.00 a week. She was paid $2.50.

Five years later, when she was 25, the family moved to Rochester, where they joined the Unitarian Church. When you join a Unitarian church you meet people who change your life. Rochester was a hotbed of abolitionist activity. The family befriended anti-slavery activists and former slaves. Susan was horrified to hear stories of the brutality and heartbreaking conditions of the lives of slaves, and she became more and more of an activist. Her family’s farm became more and more a center of anti-slavery activity. She grew more and more radical, along with her father and their friends. She was asked to be a paid abolitionist organizer, renting halls, hiring speakers, and publicizing meetings. She began speaking some herself, and she was good at it. She also liked it. You don’t have to do everything you’re good at, but if you’re good at it and you like it too, it’s pretty clear this is something you should do.

Susan spoke at a teacher’s convention, arguing, as a teacher, that both girls and boys should be taught, and that they should be taught together in the same room, that they could learn equally well, at equal speeds. She said there was not that much difference in their brains. It was thought by some in her day that women only had a certain amount of energy, and if they thought too hard and used their brains too much it would wither their reproductive parts. Clergy preached against the great social evil of educating boys and girls together. They said it would upset the balance of nature. What’s next, teaching our dogs and cats to read? When you study history you see that conservative religious voices, over and over, mouth what sounds from here like the most ridiculous claptrap. Those are the same voices now raised against same-sex marriage, saying “What’s next, we should be able to marry our dogs?” Liberal clergy from that time sound very much like voices from our time.

In the division that always, always happens when working for change, there were people saying “Don’t scare folks off by wanting everything all at once. Be reasonable.”

Susan B said “Shall I tell a man whose house in on fire to give a moderate alarm? Shall he moderately rescue his wife from a ravisher? Shall a mother moderately pull her baby from the fire it has fallen into?

In 1848, when she was 28 years old, the first Women’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, NY. She didn’t go. Local media had called it a hen convention, attended by cranks, hermaphrodites and atheists. Susan was shocked to find out that her father and lots of their friends supported the cause of women’s rights. They talked about that alongside the abolition of slavery Susan heard of the brilliant Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and hoped to meet her one day. When they did meet, they liked each other thoroughly and instantly. They were friends with Amelia Bloomer, who campaigned for more comfortable and sensible clothes for women. She wore an outfit that was called by her name. All three women wore those clothes for a couple of years, but they stopped when they realized it was keeping people from hearing anything they had to say. Clergy called the outfits devilish, and the press mocked them as women dressed like men.

It was not only women who were fighting against the destructive effects of alcoholism and addiction on families, who all went down together if the man of the family went down. The Sons of Temperance was a powerful political organization. Women were not allowed to join. There was a group called the Daughters of Temperance, an auxiliary group. Separate and unequal. Susan was a member of that group, one of their successful organizers and fund raisers. They elected her to represent them at a big conference in Albany NY in 1852. When she rose to make a point during a discussion, a buzz of outrage swept the hall. “The sisters,” shouted the chairman, “were not invited to speak, but to listen and learn!” Susan swept out of the room, followed by a few other women. Some other women stayed behind, disapproving. A few called the women who left “bold, meddlesome disturbers.” That very night Susan rented a hall and called her own meeting where women could speak. The room was cold and badly lit, and the stovepipe broke in the middle of Susan’s speech, but those who attended were energized and inspired. They decided to form a statewide convention. Susan was elected to head up that effort. She wrote hundreds of letters. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote speeches for her, and over five hundred women came to the conference they organized. “You stir up Susan,” Henry Stanton told Elizabeth, “and she stirs up the world.”

Their partnership lasted their whole lives, over fifty more years. Susan had more mobility, since she wasn’t caring for a household and children. Sometimes she would watch Stanton’s children while Stanton wrote her speeches. They always, no matter what they were writing and speaking about, spoke about the right of women to vote. They figured that would take care of both temperance and slavery. The women would vote correctly and abolish all evils. Susan and Elizabeth encouraged one another, kept one another radical. Her friendship with Elizabeth is the second element in her life that enabled her to be who she was. Without that partnership, as without the love and support of her family, Susan’s story would probably have been a very different one.

After organizing this convention where five hundred women attended, Susan and Elizabeth were invited to the next Sons of Temperance convention. When they arrived they found that they would not even now be allowed to speak. Clergy men stood up and protested that they would not sit with these females. Anthony and Amelia Bloomer refused to leave. One delegate shouted that they were not women, but some hybrid species, half woman half man. Another man said that they had no business disrupting temperance meetings with their dreadful doctrines of women’s rights, divorce and atheism. Anthony held a petition with ten thousand signatures she had gathered. Within minutes the two women had been thrown out, bodily.

As she lectured and traveled, some newspapers would attack her personally, calling her repulsive and ugly, saying that she was laboring under strong feelings of hatred towards men. She must have been neglected by men, and she was jealous. The third time Anthony and Stanton were rejected by the main temperance group, they disengaged from that group for the next 20 years. “We have other, bigger fish to fry,” said Stanton serenely. They began working on securing property rights for women. If women could own things, they could be free of abusive marriages. Maybe also if they had money, the legislature would listen to them better. They worked on that for the next eight years, until 1860. Anthony went door to door and town to town, gathering signatures on petitions, enduring snowstorms and ridicule, sleeping in cold farm houses and inns, going before the state legislatures everywhere she went. In 1860 the NY legislature passed the married women’s property act, enabling married women to own property, keep her own wages, not subject to the control or interference of her husband, enter into contracts, and have shared custody of her children. Many other states followed suit, changing the lives of millions of women.

Some of the suffragists, in years to come, were embarrassed by the radical things Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did. ECS wrote “The Women’s Bible,” mercilessly asking questions about the portrayal of women in the Bible, questions that would offend and upset most people even in this day and age. Harriet Beecher Stowe refused to write for Anthony’s newspaper, The Revolution, unless she named it something less aggressive.

Anthony rode stagecoaches, delivered speeches, and endured hardships until late in her 70’s. Until her father’s death, she had his full support. Until Stanton’s death, that partnership and support sustained her. She never married, never had children. Women’s rights, abolition, temperance, these were her passions and her life’s work.

She didn’t live to see women get the vote, in 1920. She did vote, though. In the 1872 election she voted illegally, she and a few other women. She was arrested, tried, and convicted. She was hoping to appeal, as the judge wouldn’t let the jury speak, and he instructed them to find her guilty. Her fine was 100 dollars. She told him, “You have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my political rights, my civil rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. I will not pay a penny of your unjust fine.” As he shouted for her to be quiet and sit down, she kept talking. “I shall urgently and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim that ÔResistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'”

We can learn how to make social change from Susan B: Five easy steps:

1. Trust yourself. What feels wrong to you is probably wrong.

2. Get mad. Anger is a good fuel for action. Try to get mad at the right person or the right institution, as Aristotle said. “It is easy to fly into a passion – anybody can do that. But to be angry with the right person and to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way – that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.”

3. Work to change things. Don’t just complain. Find out how to change things and start trying.

4. Lean on a friend. Have relationships, partnerships in making change.

5. Know how things work. Here is how they work: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you. Then they fight you, then they agree. Later, they say they agreed with you all along. If you know how it works, when they call you a man hater or ugly or repulsive or they say you’re not patriotic or ask what’s next, I’m going to marry my dog? You can know they have been doing it this way forever. Keep fighting.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

What we are worshiping, we are becoming

February 9, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 9, 2014

We begin our series on the Ten Commandments with the first one. From Rumi to Emerson, we’ll talk about a UU understanding of the truth and usefulness of the commandments.

On his pseudo news show “The Colbert Report,” Steven Colbert, who is from SC, interviewed congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia. Remembering that any show can take any piece of an interview, it is still telling.

“You co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Why was that important to you?”

“Well, the Ten Commandments is – is not a bad thing, uh, for people to understand and respect.”

“I’m with you,” Colbert responds as the congressman goes on, “Where better place would you have something like that than a judicial building courthouse?”

“That’s a good question. Can you think of any better building to have the Ten Commandments in than in a public building?”

“No. I think if we were totally without them we may lose a sense of our direction.”

“What are the ten commandments?”

“What are all of them?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to name them?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“let’s see, don’t murder. Don’t lie, don’t steal-uh– I can’t name them all.”

In the faith story of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, the Ten Commandments were given to Moses in the Sinai desert; In the Hebrew they are called Aseret ha-Dvarim, best translated: “the ten statements.”

The story is found in both Deuteronomy (5:6-21) and Exodus (20:3-16) The Hebrew people followed Moses out of Egypt and they traveled through the Sinai Peninsula to the land of Canaan, which was promised to them by God. After about three months they came to Mount Horeb, also called Mount Sinai. Moses went up the mountain to talk to God. Smoke came on the mountain, like the smoke from a furnace, because Adonai (God) descended on the mountain in fire, and there was the sound like a trumpet that grew louder and louder. On the mountain, God gave Moses the commandments, and many more commandments the people were to follow. According to the Talmud, there are 613 laws the Jews must follow. When public reciting of the ten was giving them more weight than the other 593 commandments, the recitation was discontinued.

It took Moses so long to come down from the mountain that the people grew restless, and Aaron, Moses’ brother, was pressured to make some gods who would go with them to the Promised land. He asked for all their gold earrings and bracelets; he melted them down and made a statue of a golden calf. The people celebrated with dancing, shouting and revelry. “Revelry” is Bible translator language for wild partying. Use your imaginations. Moses heard the noise. It sounded like war, the text says. He came down with the tablets, which were carved on both sides (rabbinic tradition holds that they magically had writing that went all the way through, yet read correctly on both sides. The “O” shaped letters still had the circle of stone hanging in the hole, floating there without connection to the surrounding stone.) Moses saw what the people were doing, and became angry and broke the tablets into pieces. He ground up the gold statue, spread it on their water and made the people drink it. Then he got two more tablets inscribed by God.

These are time-honored precepts, and they encapsulate more than one ancient culture’s wisdom about how to live a good life. In fact, they borrow heavily, verbatim in parts, from the code of Hammurabi, whose tablets we have in the British Museum. I remember, in seminary, being taken aback to realize how much of Mosaic law was taken directly from Hammurabi, which argued against it being given directly from God to Moses.

This morning, starting this series on the Ten Commandments, I will talk about the first one. “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Egypt was moving toward monotheism about this same time in history, around 1550 BCE. Maybe it’s an evolution of human understanding. Today when we talk about there being god in everything would say it’s the same sacred energy, Being, or quickening or Oneness, with many names. To most people, giving gods different names made them different gods. I have a family member who wanted a doctor who “worshiped the same God” he did. A Muslim doctor had the skill, unquestionably, but worshiped Allah, who was a god, but a different god, a false god. I was taken aback that there were still people who didn’t think of god as one, with many names. There are still some who think that way, calling “Allah” a “false god,” We watch movies about the Greek myths, thinking Zeus is an old fashioned action figure of a god, not thinking that Zeus is the same word as Deus, which is Latin for God in all Christmas cantatas. It is the understanding of the Divine that changes throughout the ages.

A cynical way to see it might be that the first commandment was a way to control the people – if there were just one god, there was just one group of people who could speak to that god and tell the people what he wanted.

From within the faith, the explanation is that The Hebrews had to become the Jews. If they were absorbed into the surrounding culture, there would be nothing distinctive left of them.

Nature religions had many gods with different roles: death and rebirth, being taken apart and put back together, male and female coming together for the fertility of the land, rain and sun and earth and wind all playing their parts, or not, for the life or the suffering of the people. History, in an earth-based religion, is made of circles and cycles. With one God, who works in the lives of the people, the movement is more in a line. This happened, then this. Telling the stories of God’s interaction with the people became more important than the regularity of the rain and the seasons.

To bring this to a Unitarian Universalist place, let me remind you of the Emerson quote we read together.

Emerson wrote: “The gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And we will worship something – have no doubt of that either. We may think that our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of the heart – but it will out. That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we are worshipping, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted [and slightly adapted] by Chaim Stern in Gates of Understanding, vol. I [New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1977), p. 216)

The word “worship” comes from two old Anglo-Saxon words “weorth” and “scipe” The first means worth, the second is to shape, as in scoop or shovel. So we are shaping what we see to be of worth, here in worship. That’s why atheists can worship next to theists, because, whatever your understanding of god or no god is, you have things you consider to be of worth. Coming here on Sundays shapes what you value. What makes you feel awe, feel like there is something greater than you are present? For some it’s freedom, for some it’s security, for some it’s power, for others it’s not hurting anyone but yourself. All of those values shape your life and your choices.

What I want to say this morning as you considerwhat you organize your life around is that I vote for love to be our highest worth. Truth is good, and I’m an addict, but truth without love can be destructive. Freedom is wonderful, and I need it like air, but freedom without love can be destructive. Destruction is necessary sometimes, but destruction without love is not generative, it doesn’t lead to more life.

Here is your homework, that no one will check or hold you to: What would your Ten Commandments be?

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Animal Blessing Service

February 2, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 2, 2014

We bring our well-behaved, house-trained animals to an intergenerational animal blessing service. Rev. Meg preaches about animal companions, and the First UU Intergenerational Choir serenades our animal friends with a variety of songs.

This is an exercise that you would go through if you were being taught to be an animal trainer. You get to play the dog, and another trainer plays the — well, the trainer. You are in a room together. No words are exchanged. You know there is something the trainer wants you to do. The trainer has something in mind, like he wants you to put your left leg up on a chair. That’s the secret training goal, and you all will work together until you figure it out . How does he get you to do it? He praises you for doing something close to it. You move your left foot, you get some praise. You move toward the chair, you get some praise. You move away from the chair, you are ignored. Nothing. Hmmmm.. What does he want me to do? You have to put it together, what do you get praised for? When you put your leg on the chair, you are praised extravagantly. Who doesn’t care about praise? Well, cats, but there you go. I have more often had cats than dogs, and, while I have loved horses, I have never had one, or a bird. I did a lot of reading this week, and I got fascinated with dogs, so I will probably end up talking more about them. And I need to say that I am no expert on anything about animals.

That training exercise shows some of what it’s like for animals living in inter-species households. They don’t know our language, and, at least at the start, they don’t know what we want, although as those who have less power, they are more aware of our language and our requirements than we are of theirs.

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.

Some things that are important to them, we don’t understand. Most animals, in a group, want to know who is in charge. Is it you? Is it someone else in the family? If you aren’t in charge, then they are. That can be what some animals want. It can produce anxiety in others. I had a greyhound living with me for a while, and I took her with me to a start-up weekend with a church group who had a new minister. After a few hours with the members of this church, she walked to the center of a circle we were talking in, turned to face the man who was in charge, and bowed deeply. Was he the President of the congregation? No. Was he the new minister? No. Was he talking the most? No. He was simply one of the founding members, and one of those members who, by virtue of who they are and who they have been, are chieftains in the group. She instinctively knew who was the top dog in that group, and she bowed.

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 health is like, or what your car model or your job is. They just love you because you belong to them.

Thank you for being part of my family. Thank you for entertaining me, for keeping me company. I will be a good friend to you, treating you with kindness. I will try to learn more about how you think, learn what is important to you, and not just imagine that you think like I do. I will do my best to give you a good life and a peaceful end. I bless you now because you bless me so much.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

The Magic of Music

January 20, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 19, 2014

They say that magic is changing consciousness at will, and music certainly does change how we see the world. Can music cheer or spook you? What does music do to your brain?

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Architecture and spirit

January 12, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 12, 2014

As we think about how to make our church more hospitable, let’s talk about the language of space, how buildings communicate. If “architecture is frozen music,” what tune are we playing?

Imagine a court room where you enter through a house-sized door into a homey room with couches and tables, lamps and rugs. The walls are painted in decorator colors . There are two circles of chairs, and the judge’s seat is one of the chairs in the inner circle. The judge is in street clothes. The atmosphere is casual. The jury is in the outer circle of chairs watching the proceedings. How would that work? Not well. The courtroom counts on visual cues for its sense of authority. There are the wood-paneled walls, the judge’s bench raised up high, the chairs all facing the judge, the jury off to one side in rows. No matter how shabby a courtroom is, the weight of the law is reinforced by the arrangement of the space.

When you walk into a cathedral in Europe, you know immediately that this is a building where people encounter their idea of God. The atmosphere is hushed and dark. Stained glass windows tell stories from the Bible, and stories of the people who were instrumental in the building process. The light is dim unless the sun is shining directly through the round rose window at the front. The source of light is mostly from just the one place. One source. A cathedral speaks volumes about what the people thought about God, about the priests, about themselves. God is high, high above. The feeling of awe you get from the lift of the space and the richness of the details is maybe a cousin to the awe you would feel for the majesty of God. Magnificence in the building mirrors the magnificence of the divinity, Everything is oriented toward the altar, where the chief miracle of the body and blood takes place, and toward the pulpit, where the Word is read and preached. The pulpit is up high, so people look up to hear the priest. That grants the position some authority. Any church building speaks of what the people think of the human and the divine. Some soar into the heavens. Some UU buildings are low and cradling, without ‘lift’ in the ceiling or in the feel of the room. What they want to express is that it is the community we celebrate. In some UU churches, the people sit in raised levels and the minister stands in the pulpit at floor level, more like a classical Greek amphitheater. In Charleston, one of our two hundred year old churches, the pulpit is raised high — that’s the way they built churches in the 1700’s before the Revolutionary War, when that building was built. Most UU churches in which I’ve preached bought their buildings from other churches or from old synagogues. Those who have built their own spaces tend to be sensible, light-filled, and with views that let the congregation soak up nature as they worship.

A Salt Lake City Tribune article First Unitarian in Salt Lake City this way: “a white-painted light-filled, simple space, impossible to hide in. Every corner is apparent, clearly illuminated by natural light from the tall, multi-paned Palladian windows, recalling the light of reason revered by Unitarianism’s great liberal forbears. The lines, the light, the absence of ornamentation serve as an invitation to introspection and meditation. There is no cross, no icon, no altar. Unitarians focus on this world, not the next. In austere contrast to the colorfully ornate symbolism layered over ancient Christianity, the Unitarian aesthetic, like its gospel, is minimalist: “It’s a simple, basic idea,” says Goldsmith. “We believe in the unity of deity.”

(“Like the faith, (the) Unitarian place of worship is geared to clarity and function,”Mary Brown Malouf, Salt Lake Tribune 7.26.03).

A British architect, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, says “Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.”

We are ramping up a conversation that has been ongoing for many many years in this congregation. The religious education space has been make-do for a while. We’re okay, but it’s time to pull all of the imagining and planning together that’s been done through the years, take a look at it and see what we could afford to do. There is a team of people whose job it is to research the costs and benefits of each option. What would it cost in money and time? What would it cost in terms of the ministers’ energy? The goal is to find a way to live out our mission and our long range plan and whether we can do that on this site or whether we need more space. We’ll be talking about this all Spring, off and on, because there is a lot to consider. What do we want our building to say? Many UU churches are hidden, hard to get to. Many UU buildings are saying “You’ll find us if it’s important enough to you. If you know one of us already. Lots of them are off the road behind lots of trees, with small signs that you can only read at walking speed. It seems to be a shy denomination. You can’t see our church from the street. Almost no one sees us by accident. The people who get here have to really want to get here. That might be the way we want it. This room is filled with light from lots of sources. The shape of the room is simple, as if to say “this is not a complicated faith.” As the Salt Lake article says, we value clarity and function. We have a window with a view of a garden, and nature is central to our sense of what is miraculous. Some UU churches have worship space with moveable chars, and they might have a party or a banquet in the same space in which they worship, as if to say worship and daily life are part and parcel of one another. This room, with its pews, is not that way, and seems to communicate that we are a serious denomination and we take our place among other denominations in the theological conversation.

We know what we want people to feel when they come into the space. Welcome. Safe. Architect Philip Johnson said “All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”Attribution:1975 address at Columbia University, quoted in Philip Johnson: Writings Oxford 79

What is our mission? You see that on the wall. What is our long range plan? I’ve written about it in the newsletter and spoken about it at our congregational meeting. The LRP talks about being a lead church in our denomination, a flagship church. The country is now divided into regions, and our denomination is asking large churches within the regions to be gathering places for people from the smaller churches for trainings, meetings, gatherings of all kinds. We seem already to be a church for whom the arts are an important element, and we would like to build on that strength. Social justice is important to our members too, and maybe we can find ways of intertwining the arts into our social justice outreach. One of the main goals set by the congregation is to be hospitable. This means to have a good place for people to come, a place that speaks of how important we feel about welcome. A place that has room for the folks who need what this church has, and for the people needed by this church. Yesterday at the New Member class I was talking to someone about how each person in this room is like a novel in and of themselves, and then I thought about how many book collectors we have in this congregation and how we dream of having a place for all of our books. We are collecting books here, gathering in people with their stories, trying to live our mission, and asking ourselves “what kind of space is needed so this church can happen?”

The LRP talks about how Austin has grown and is poised to grow in the next twenty years. Do we want to be a mega-church? No. Do we want to grow as big as we can possibly grow? Not really. Not with this minister. You are already a church that starts other churches. Live Oak Congregation and the Wildflower Congregation both grew out of this church. Our Large Church Consultant told us that, for a church to thrive, it needs 2oo members at its start, and a minister, some money and a staff person. We couldn’t spare 200 people from our current membership. Even at 600 members, which is about as big as we could grow with our current facility, we couldn’t spare 200. The LRP says we will have a 500 seat sanctuary so we can grow to 1,000 members. When we get to 800 we’ll take on an assistant minister who would like to have a church of his or her own, and we’ll start gathering 200 folks and raising money for them to go start a new church. It might be the folks who would like to build with straw bales, or have the kind of church where the whole congregation goes to build a house or plant a garden for a school on a Sunday morning.

The LRP calls for us to have space for one or even two artists to have studio space in the church, and we might advertise nation wide for artists to come spend a year with us interacting with the church and the surrounding community as painters, filmmakers or dancers in exchange for the free year of space. The LRP describes us in five years as being known in Austin for being on the forefront of one justice issue, focusing our best talents and efforts on making a change in Central Texas. Will we have rooms for neighborhood meetings, a kitchen we can really cook in? Bathrooms that are truly accessible? Will we have space for doing art with LGBT youth or immigrant youth? What kind of space do we need to accomplish these plans? What about outside space? How does the landscaping speak to who we are as a church? Are we neat and controlled or wild and exuberant? It all speaks. What is it saying? What do we want to say?

What kind of space will we feel moved to support? What kind of space will we be able to buy? Could the landscaping be important to that? Some art? A certain kind of walkway? Frank Lloyd Wright, a Unitarian architect, says “Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.” Attribution: An Organic Architecture MIT 70

What will show a true record of our religious life and how it is lived, how it will be lived?

“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul” Ernest Dimnet

Does this building act on the soul of the people who come in? On the soul of the community? Does it encourage people, make them feel at home, make them proud? Make them feel safe? How will the new space act on the soul of those who come in ? What kind of people will the new space attract? Formal people? Informal? Eccentric? Mainstream? I hope it attracts more people like you.

There is one thing I hope doesn’t happen. I have been in a couple of places where there was a new carpet. Suddenly the management was rigid and authoritarian about people not being able to eat or drink in a place that had previously been a comfortable space for milling around, socializing. The level of formality of the place jumped. People stopped using the room until there were enough stains on the floor so the management relaxed enough for the room to be usable again. The spaces we will create are for living in, for having church, having fun, talking and laughing and praying and teaching and dancing in. Like this one. Yes, we dance now and then! It’s good for the soul.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776