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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 15, 2013

We join together in our annual intergenerational Christmas Pageant as the shepherds, angels and royalty gather around the newborn holy child.

Call to worship

From Patrick Murfin’s “We Build Temples in the Heart”

Today, let us be that stable, let us be the place that welcomes the last the weary and rejected, the pilgrim stranger, the coming life.

Let not the frigid winds that pierce our inadequate walls or our mildewed hay, or the fetid leavings of our cattle shame us from our beckoning.

Let our outstretched arms be a manger so that the infant hope, swaddled in love, may have a place to lie.

Let a cold beacon shine down upon us from a solstice sky to guide us the seekers who will come.

Let the lowly shepherd and all who abide in the fields of their labors lay down their crooks and come to us.

Let the seers, sages, & potentates of every land traverse the shifting dunes, the rushing rivers, and the stony crags to seek our rude frame.

Let the herdsman and high lords kneel together under our thatched roof to lay their gifts before Wonder.

Today, let us be that stable.

Introduction

WHEN GOD WAS A BABY

At the Christmas pageant last year, children picked out costumes from piles the director had arranged on the tables outside the sanctuary. You could be an angel, a shepherd, an animal, or a king. Two brothers came in already dressed as Batman, and stood reverently by the manger looking at the baby Jesus. “There is no Batman at the manger,” one person said later.

“Probably not,” I answered, “but there is a lot we don’t know about what actually happened. Historically, we barely know Jesus lived, much less whether he was born in Bethlehem, or whether he was married to Mary Magdalene, or whether he went to India to study in the ‘lost years’ between being a twelve year old talking with the teachers in the temple and beginning his ministry as an adult.” I saw her eyes glaze over with this much information, and circled back to the point. “Right. Odds are against there having been a Batman.”

The baby in the manger is a soul story, if not an historical story. Soul stories are as likely to be true as stories from history, but they are perhaps a different sort of true, and you approach them differently. Before and after doing historical research, Biblical study, and the kinds of work on context and language one does when looking at a story from a Scripture, my inclination is to interact with the story as I would with a dream.

Holding the image of the Divine as a baby in mind and heart, I invite myself to let go of my hold on the Abrahamic God, the ideas about the Divine I can live with or not, the elements of the concept of a God I believe in and those I don’t believe in. A soul story is a dream from the depths of a culture, not an individual. This is bigger than my squeamishness or my history.

When God is a baby, no one has to be afraid of God. No one has to tremble before God’s wrath. No one has to wonder what they have done wrong, how they have disappointed God. A baby God isn’t mad at you – in fact, it needs you to coo over him, hold him close, smell her head, curl her tiny fingers around your pinkie, protect him and visit her with presents. No wonder Christmas is a well loved holiday – we get to coo over the baby God, and feel the aching openness of a heart at its very beginning.

Among the ways to understand the Divine is as the spirit of love, the spirit of light, the spirit of life. A baby love, a baby light, a baby life would carry within itself all that it will become, like an oak within the acorn, like two hundred and thirty-eight possible tomatoes contained within one tomato seed, like a mighty river that starts as a spring seeping out of the earth in a high and quiet place. The light starts as a tiny spark. A new baby love has all the possibilities in the world, it carries all the hopes and dreams. Later on, as it grows and matures, it becomes more real, and if you are skilled and lucky, it grows richer and deeper. As life starts you care for it and nurture it. You are careful with it. You delight in it. A baby is full of possibility.

What if this is a story about the soul entering the world of the body? The light of spirit and wisdom, the Divine Seed planted in a human being? Some of the founders of our free religion believed that the seed of God, a tiny sliver of the light, was in each of us.

I think about the Divine seed, the wise baby, within me, containing the whole of divinity in itself, yet needing to grow. Antoine St. Exupery writes: “the seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground.” (“Flight to Arras”) Is my soul the seed, or is it the light? I say it is both. Do we long for the Divine, or are we Divine ourselves? Both. Do we search for God or is God within us? Both.

In times of confusion and doubt, I see myself able to visit my soul like the magi, the wise magicians, and kneel before it with gifts of quiet, respect and love. I can nurture the light, the seed of God within me. I can protect it from the forces of power-over that show up next in the faith story, the forces of fear and control, the Herod power, the light-killing, love-killing power of the outer world and of my inner world as well.

I wish for each of you at this time of the rebirth of the light that the light be reborn in you, that love be cradled in your heart, that you be a seed haunted by the sun, finding your way from the nurturing darkness, past all obstacles, stubbornly and rapturously breaking through to live in the light.

The Christmas Pageant

Today, we are a family, a community, gathering not only to enjoy an old story, but also for the feeling of being together. We have lit our chalice as a symbol of the light that people before us have celebrated forever and the light that shines within each of our souls. However it is expressed, it is a time of joy.

The season of the winter solstice has been celebrated in one form or another for thousands of years. A hundred different cultures have told stories about how the birth of their gods took place at this time of year, or how light, hope and life are returning to their world and to their lives. This evening, we will present the version of this story written by Christians, which is part of our American and Western culture, whether we are Christians or not. It is the story of a special baby, a child of God as all babies are, a child called Jesus. And today, this story is wrapped not only in swaddling clothes, but also in wonderful music about the greenery, the holly and the ivy, the candles, music and merriment that were part of the season long before Christianity was born – like our next carol, “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly.”

THE CHRISTMAS STORY:

Now this is the Christmas story. It happened long, long ago, in a far away land. A man and a woman named Joseph and Mary had to make a journey to the city of Bethlehem, because there was a new law that said everyone had to return to the city where they were born to pay their taxes. Joseph was worried about Mary taking this trip as she was going to have a baby very soon, but Mary wanted to be with her husband for the birth of their first child. It was a long trip to Bethlehem, three full days of walking.

Mary was glad when they saw the rooftops of Bethlehem in the distance. “Joseph,” she said, “let’s stay at the first inn we come to. I think our baby is almost ready to be born.” But when they got to Bethlehem, they found the little town crowded with people. They stopped at the first inn they came to and knocked on the door. But the innkeeper told them, “I’m sorry, there is no more room here.” At the next inn the innkeeper said, “We’re full. Try the place three streets over. It’s bigger.” Joseph tried another place and another place, but everywhere it was the same story: “Sorry, no room for you here.”

Finally, when it was almost night time, they saw a house at the edge of town with a light in the window. Joseph knocked at the door, and told the innkeeper, “Please help us. We need a place for the night. My wife is going to have a baby soon and I don’t think she can travel any farther.” And the innkeeper said, “There’s no room in the inn, but don’t worry, we’ll find someplace for you.” The innkeeper showed Mary and Joseph to a quiet little barn where the animals were. (Animals, come join us in the barn with Mary and Joseph.) It was clean and warm and smelled like sweet hay.

And on that very night in that barn in Bethlehem, their little baby was born. It was a boy and they named him Jesus. Mary and Joseph wrapped him in the soft swaddling cloth and made a little bed for him in the hay.

BIBLICAL READING: Luke 2:1-7

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

That night, like every night, there were shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem, watching the flocks of sheep. The shepherds were surprised and amazed by a very bright light in the sky and a strange song coming from nowhere and everywhere, all at once. It was angels and they were glorious! (Angels, please find the shepherds to share the good news.)

After sharing the joyous news with the shepherds, the angels went to find the baby born in a stable in the city of Bethlehem and to tell everyone about him. (The Angels are free to wander the sanctuary spreading the news and come to the barn to say hello to baby Jesus. Then they should return to their seats.) Mary and Joseph never saw the angels, but the angels saw them and their little baby and all said, “What a beautiful child!”

BIBLICAL READING: Luke 2:8-16

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” Suddenly a great company ofthe heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.” So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.

After the angels had gone away, the shepherds remembered what they had said, that a wonderful baby had been born and that they could find him by following the brightest star in sky. So the shepherds all said to each other, “Let’s go look for that baby.” They had no trouble finding the stable, because of the bright star, and sure enough, there inside were Mary and Joseph, watching over their little baby, Jesus. And the shepherds all said (very quietly), “Oh! What a beautiful child!” Then they went away and told everyone what they had seen.

On this same night, three wise men saw the bright star and said to each other, “Look at the amazing star! It must be shining for something very special!” The wise men loaded up their camels with treasures and traveling supplies and followed the star all the way to Bethlehem. (The Wise Men will make their way to the barn/stage.) Jesus was only a few days old when the wise ones found him, but they knew he was special. “What a wonderful child. This child will be our teacher.” And they gave the baby gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Mary and Joseph wondered for a long time about all of these things that happened when their child was born. “Isn’t it wonderful that all these people would come to see our baby and give us presents for him. They don’t even know him.” When Jesus grew up, he was a courageous teacher, just like the wise ones said. And one ofthe most important things he tried to teach people was to love each other and to treat all people, even strangers, with kindness and care. And people who have tried to follow his best teachings have become better people, and have spread light through their world, which is what we are here to do.

Today we shared the Christmas Story about one special baby. But this baby isn’t the only special one. Every child is a treasure, is a wonder and a miracle. And as they grow up, they are always and forever a treasure, a wonder and a miracle.

Reading

For so the children come and so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come
Each night a child is born is a holy night.

[parents] sitting beside their children’s cribs
feel the glory in the sight of a new life beginning…
Each night a child is born is a holy night, a time for singing,
a time for wondering, a time for worshipping.

Excerpted from “Each Night a Child is Born is a Holy Night” by Sophia Lyon Fahs

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 1, 2013

If the Bible didn’t drop out of the sky onto the top of Mt. Ararat, where did it come from? Did God write it? Does it have mistakes? How do we read it as religious liberals?

Call to worship:
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A person will worship something – have no doubt about that.

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts – but it will out.

That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.

Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Reading: 
Howard Thurman

In the quietness of this place, surrounded by the all-pervading presence of the Holy, my heart whispers:

Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in good times or in tempests,

I may not forget that to which my life is committed.

Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.

Sermon:

This Bible I’m holding in my hand has power. Power to make a whole roomful of Unitarian Universalists uncomfortable. We have strong feelings about this book. Even the way it looks evokes strong feelings. Its sides flop down when you hold it up. Maybe there is a zipper around the side. For some of us there are things in this book we love: passages that move us, inspire us, strengthen or guide us. Some of us haven’t looked at it in years and won’t again. Some of us fear what’s in here. There are places that can shame us, fill us with guilt, enrage us and sadden us. Some of us have had this book used against us like a club, and some of us have used it that way ourselves at some point along our path.

This book has shaped history and culture, it has inspired the feeding of the poor, the establishment of hospitals and schools, and it has also been used to support slavery and slaughter. As thinking people, we owe it to ourselves not to be merely reactive about this book. Let’s form an educated view. Let’s remove some of the mystery and mis-information that overlay the way we see the Bible.

How Did We Get the Bible?

When did we get it? First of all there’s not really an “it”, it’s a “them”. The first two-thirds of the Bible is the Hebrew Bible, what most Christians call the “Old Testament.” “Testament” means contract, or covenant, an agreement between two parties. The Hebrew Bible is made of books of the history of the Hebrew people, their law, books of prophecy, poetry, proverbs, and a hymnal: the book of the Psalms. The books were written on scrolls, and different synagogues would have different scrolls. Some would have a copy of the scroll of Isaiah, some of Deuteronomy, etc.

Early in the first century of the Common Era a group of Jewish scholars got together and formed the accepted list of the books that would be included in the Hebrew Bible. If you have a Roman Catholic Bible you have all those books. If you have a Protestant Bible you have fewer, because during the Reformation in the 16th century the Reformers took several books out of their accepted list. The scrolls were in Hebrew, but, since after 70 CE when the Romans destroyed the Temple and scattered the Jews to the far corners of the earth, Hebrew ceased to be a living common language, so one could understand them well in Hebrew. A translation in Greek, called the Septuagint, was used until the Latin translation in 400 and the first English one in 1380.

The New Testament is made up of four Gospels, different views of the life of Jesus. Three of them, called the synoptic gospels, are very similar, leading scholars to believe they used the same sources, and one, the Gospel of John, contains stories the others don’t have, and it has much more of a “Divine” view of Jesus than do the others. Then there are the letters. Most of them are letters by a Christian called Paul, St. Paul, the Apostle Paul, to various churches around the Mediterranean. Then there are a few letters by other folks, and the whole thing ends with an apocalyptic vision (meaning a vision of the end of the world) by a man known as John.

In the beginning of the Christian movement when they talked about “The Scriptures” they were talking about the Hebrew Bible. There were numerous Christian writings circulating. There were lots of gospels, lots of letters, lots of Revelations. No one really thought of making an accepted list, or Canon, of scriptures until a man named Marcion popped up un 140 with a list he wanted to make the official one. He included part of the Gospel of Luke and ten of the letters of Paul. That was it. The church responded by calling a meeting at which a new list was drawn up that looked a bit more like what is there today. Over the years books were added. The biggest debates were over the books of Hebrews and the book of the Revelation of John. It was somewhere between 170 and 220 that these New Testament books began to be given the same status as the Hebrew Bible.

In the early days, before the invention of the printing press in the mid 1500’s, few people could read the Bible. Many of the clergy were as illiterate as the people they served. Stories from the Bible were told by traveling troupes of actors, or were pictured in stained-glass windows in the cathedrals. Then the printing press was invented and copies of the Bible didn’t have to be painstakingly written out by hand any more. More and more homes acquired one. More and more people learned to read so they could read their Bibles. More and more people started to get their own ideas about what the things in the Bible might mean. The church’s control was broken.

How Do People Use the Bible?

That is a little about how we got the Bible. Now let me talk about how people use it. There is a wide variety of beliefs in the Christian spectrum about what the book is and how it should be read and used. Some denominations, like the Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Episcopal churches say that the Bible has equal weight with church tradition and dogma. What the Pope says has the same weight as what St. Paul says. Other Protestant traditions, coming out of the Reformation, used as their slogan “Only Scripture.” Church tradition and church leaders’ pronouncements had no weight, only the words of the bible.

If it’s going to be that important, though, you’ve got some problems. If you are living your life by this book, what do you do about internal contradictions? Translation problems? Interpretation problems? Some people, on the fundamentalist end of the spectrum, stand on a belief in “Biblical Inerrancy.” That means there are no mistakes in the whole Bible. They say that the Bible is “the inspired word of God.” “Inspired,” in this case, means that God verbally gave each word to the folks who wrote them down. So you can say about something in the Bible: “God said it, I believe it. That settles it.”

In the middle of the spectrum there are people who believe that it was the authors who were inspired, not the words. The general gist of the writings is from God, rather than each and every word. So if there is a mistake or two it’s less of a big deal. People in the middle of the spectrum can feel more comfortable if women are wearing pants and makeup, even though parts of the Bible forbid that. They are willing to concede that parts of the writings are influenced by the culture and times of the writers, and are therefore less weighty as guides for life than other parts which seem less bound by time and culture. On the other end of the interpretive continuum are people who feel that most everything in the Bible is heavily influenced by the time and culture in which it was written, and that we should read it like we would read the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, with reverence and interest and appreciation, looking for concepts and phrases that inspire us. In that system, the reader is the one who is inspired to see meaning in the text.

If we want to see meaning in the text we can ask ourselves what the writers meant when they wrote it. To whom was it written? What did it mean then? We have lots of cultural overlays that keep us from seeing what’s there. One example of that is the story of Adam and Eve. Women have been portrayed as temptresses for thousands of years because of that story. If you read the story in the 2nd chapter of Genesis, though, you will be hard pressed to find any tempting of Adam by Eve.

Another story where knowing the cultural context makes the story make more sense in is the New Testament story of the woman who has had a flow of blood for twelve years. She touched the hem of Jesus’s garment, and then when he turned around and asked “Who touched me?” she was afraid. Why? Because in those days, when a woman had a flow of blood, it made her ritually unclean. She couldn’t touch anyone in her family, she couldn’t touch any dishes. If someone sat after her on a chair they instantly became unclean also. That meant they had to take a day-long series of baths to get ritually clean again. Jesus was on his way to the home of an important person, because he was needed to heal sickness in that house. When she touched him and he found out, she was afraid because she had just made the rabbi ritually unclean and delayed him in his journey.

Another instance where a whole story has been altered by cultural misunderstanding is the Christmas story. Many of us hear year after year about how Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem and there was no room in the inn, so they had to move into a stable for the night and Jesus was laid in a manger. All the actual text in Luke says is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. A Bible scholar who has lived among the Palestinian people his whole life says that there is a good word for the hotel type of inn, and that is not the word the author uses. The word translated as “inn” would be better translated as “guest room.” In houses in the middle east back then the animals came in for the night to the same house the family used. The family stayed on a raised platform, while the animals slept on the ground level. Their mangers were around the family area. Someone with family in a town, like Joseph had in Bethlehem, would never have been allowed to stay at an inn. That would have been a disgrace on the hospitality of his family. They would have stayed with an aunt or a cousin. Since the census was being taken, though, and since the whole family was in town at once, the guest rooms were full so they had to sleep in the equivalent of the living room, putting the new baby in one of the mangers that stood on the edge of the family’s living area. It presents quite a different picture, doesn’t it? Much warmer, surrounded by family.

The Bible is a book with truth and meaning, but it is not the only one. It is a book of sacred stories, re-tellings of human interaction with the Divine. We all have a story of our lives, a story of how things happen to us. Some of our lives have miracle stories, stories of coincidences that change the course of things, stories of descending into the deepest wilderness and coming out again, stories of losing our connection with the Source and then finding it again.

I believe we are given many sacred texts, including drama, music, poetry and art. Our own lives are also given to us for study as sacred text. Our experience of life and God is as weighty as inspired writings. In books we study the story of other people’s interaction with their own longing, pride, greed, generosity, bravery, cowardice, and with the Divine. We are all also living stories, seeing those same elements interwoven in the lives we lead. Things can look different if we see them as being in the middle of a sacred story. Not all sacred stories are “nice” stories. They are not all happy stories. But they have power and meaning. I invite you to look at your life as a sacred story – where have you wrestled with the dark? Where have you glimpsed the light? What do you know from experience, not only from being told? It is difficult to pay attention, but that is what we are called to do. As the Talmud says, “If you’re sitting in a window, and you see God pass by, go sit in that window 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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 17, 2013

The Universalists were among the first denominations to ordain women. These women had a picture of how church should be that differed somewhat from their colleagues of the time.

The Call to Worship
by Olympia Brown

Dear Friends, stand by this faith…. Work for it and sacrifice for it…. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith… which has placed before you the loftiest ideals,… which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for noble duty and made the world beautiful for you…. Do not demand immediate results… but rejoice that you are worthy to be entrusted with this great message… and rejoice that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost…. Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation.

Meditation Reading
by Olympia Brown, written 130 years ago

Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are children of God and must share the wealth of the world…. You may say this is impracticable, far away, can never be accomplished,… but it is the work we are appointed to do…. Sometime, somehow, somewhere,… we must ever teach this great lesson.

Sermon: The Iowa Sisterhood

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.

The Iowa Sisterhood is a story from the later part of the 180Os, from the Midwestern Unitarian churches.

In the Unitarian Universalist Association (what we call the UUA) today, half of our ministers are women. The beginnings of this are in the Midwestern women ministers of the late 1800s.

The Iowa Sisterhood was an informal network of 20-25 women ministers, who at one time held every major office in the Western Unitarian Conference, including President. They shaped liberal religion in the Midwest, designing and building churches to look like houses, each with a large fireplace in it, to make it more like a home. They organized over 20 churches from Iowa to Colorado, preached a radical theology that would stir controversy in most churches even today, and poured out their lives for the cause of liberal religion and womens suffrage. They read William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. Their heroes were Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Olympia Brown, the first women who were ordained in 1852, around the time most of these women were born.

In a book called Prophetic Sisterhood, author Cynthia Grant Tucker explains, they believed:

God had created the universe to run by natural laws and did not perform miracles, or intervene in people’s daily lives and that nothing was served by believing in Christ’s divinity, people’s corruption, or the Bible’s status as divine revelation.

They were, for that time, shockingly liberal compared to the more Christian tenor of the New England Unitarian’s.

Why did they emerge in Iowa? The two women who started the whole thing wee Mary Safford and Eleanor Gordon. They grew up on farms near to one another, around Hamilton, Iowa, and they were friends. The year they were born, as I said, was the year the first woman ministers in the US were ordained. In the mid-1870s, when both were in their early twenties, these two young women, sitting under an old apple tree, pledged to one another that “they would spend their lives together serving the world as a team.” Their commitment began a life-Iong devotion to their joint work and to each other. The last church they founded together was in Orlando FL in the 1920s.

Together, with the help of a nearby Unitarian minister, Oscar Clute, they organized a church in Hamilton. The success of their church attracted the attention of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, then the secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference. Jones was a radical man who was an irritant to the Unitarian Association in Boston because he pushed to separate liberal religion from its Christian roots. He felt that labeling Unitarianism as broadly Christian was too limiting, that free religion was what Unitarian had best to offer. Jones became the mentor of the women ministers, participated in their ordinations and encouraged them to recruit more women. His status before he left the American Unitarian Association, helped them, and his time and attention fueled their ministries.

In 1880 he offered Mary Safford the pastorate of the church in Humbolt Iowa. This is the time when Thomas Edison was starting his company and installing electric lights on streets and in homes. Gordon arranged to become principal of the school there, so she and Safford were able to continue working in tandem.

Some non-Unitarian members of the Board of Education were alert for evidence that their principal was teaching evolution, which they considered to a Unitarian doctrine. When Gordon told her physiology class that the opposable thumb made possible the arts of civilization, a Board member reported her. Asked to explain herself; she invited her opponent to have his thumbs immobilized for a day. “If at night he does not agree with me I will be glad to discuss the matter with him.” Her challenge was not accepted and the matter was dropped.

After a few years she became discontent with teaching, and Jones encouraged her to pursue studies for the ministry. If you will, you can, he said to her. Together, Safford and Gordon ministered in churches through out the Midwest, taking an interest In any young women who wished to advance themselves through education, often helping them financially. They brought several women into the ministry, feeling that women, especially if they were willing to remain unmarried, thus letting go of the competing responsibilities of a family, were well suited to be ministers.

Partly, the women succeeded in that time because they cast the ministry as a sensible extension of women’s roles. They spoke of themselves as “mothers of congregations who were making good homes for their families by using not only their sympathies but also their mental powers, business acumen, and understanding of world affairs beyond the kitchen and the nursery. If the conception of ministry as religious housewifery made the male clergy worry about being lesser men, it offered their sisters a change to aggrandize their womanhood by elevating the sphere that had been theirs historically.” (Tucker)

For several decades in the Western Unitarian Conference, a division had been developing between those who thought Unitarians should be identified as “broadly Christian” and Jenkin Lloyd Jones and “the Unity men,” who thought any profession unnecessarily exclusive. Believing that radical, rather than traditional, Unitaria nism offered the best hope for the advancement of women In the affairs of religion and feeling that there ought not to be a “copy-right on the word Unitarian,” at the 1886 WUC convention Gordon and other members of the Iowa Sisterhood helped defeat a motion that would have committed their movement to a liberal Christian formula. Abiel Livermore, the president of Meadville Seminary, later charged that “a company of women” had ruined the WUC. This struggle went on for years. It is still going, actually. The women did not join Jones when he split off from the Unitarian Association, though, after a vote to keep the Unitarians under the banner of the religion of Jesus.

Along with their religious voice, many of the women found their political voice as well. The group had the textbook disagreements about the ways to make change happen. Early in Eleanor Gordon’s career she had advised women to wait for evolutionary social progress to bring them political equality. In 1907, after she became President of the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association, she became more militant. During her term she led a group of women who removed physical obstacles to ballot box access, started a campaign to pressure political candidates, and introduced parades and other confrontational tactics. This is the same dynamic found in civil right’s struggles both for African-Americans and for gays and lesbians. Some want to be more confrontational than others, who want to trust the system to change and evoIve. You need both kind of people, but that’s another sermon.

The story of these female ministers in the 19th century is full of courage and bravery but also of sorrow, defeat and bitterness. Not only did frontier parishioners face the problem of poverty, sickness and climate, but they were regarded as heretics of the worst kind by their orthodox neighbors, the Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Calvinist Congregationalists, all of whom had preceded them in the region. Non-Trinitarians were ostracized and persecuted; they were made the object of scorn at public revivals and had their businesses boycotted.(Tucker)

In 1870 there were only five female ministers in the United States. In 1890 there would be over 70 women of the approximately 101,640 Protestant clergy listed in the 1890 census. Of the seventy ordained women the Universalists had the largest number – 32; the Unitarians were next with 16 and the Methodists and Congregationalists combined for 15. After their years of service, it seems there was a feeling that, in that area, the women had taken over. Studies show that the main group feels an other group is taking over when it tops 20% of the whoIe.

Mary Safford suffered a breakdown from exhaustion. She and Eleanor Gordon had tensions in their relationship when folks gravitated more to Mary (in fact, there was a joke. What do Catholics and Unitarians have in common? They both worship the Virgin Mary. Sometimes Gordon was treated like a parish associate, sometimes her work, writing, her ideas were attributed to Mary. They suffered the scorn, not only of the non-Unitarians in their communities, but that of the mainstream Unitarian church in Boston. Especially later on, after the First World War, there was a trend in the US toward the masculinization of society, which, it was felt, had not been manly enough. The Unitarian publication, on its masthead, promised a virile religion. I can imagine ho w the women ministers felt about that. Maybe all that had to be in balance for giving women the vote. The pulpits that had been filled by women were now filled with men. Teddy Roosevelt, the rough rider, the cowboy, was elected, as he embodied all those qualities.

The last church Safford and Gordon founded was In Orlando, Florida, where Gordon served as its minister from 1910-27. They are both buried in Hamilton, Iowa.

Safford said that “true religion must first of all be ‘free’ religion, free from irrational dogma that discouraged personal growth.” She held that the human soul would evolve, not in solitude but, through community. That is what church is for. People make their common tasks divine “by doing them in the spirit of love and helpfulness.” May we make our common tasks divine. May our struggles for civil rights be divine. May we learn the perspective that comes from seeing our struggles In the broad stream of history. May we all be mothers of children, mothers of causes, mothers of our community. They had a hard road, and it wasn’t always a happy road. They did what they set out to do, but they didn’t see how much their influence undergirds our current situation. People wonder about their purpose in life, and sometimes they know, but they wonder if they accomplished that purpose. These women were successful in changing the UUA.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 10, 2013

Racism is deep in the human DNA. Most peoples of the world have some other people they paint as lazy, oversexed, untrustworthy and stupid. Is there a way to heal that in ourselves?

Call to Worship

What we’ve started
by Betty Bobo Seiden

We are here today because we want our religious journey to include more than one holy land, more than one vision, more than one scripture….

We sing praises in many styles and in many languages.

We make a joyful noise unto whomever nourishes and sustains all life.

When we look around us here today we see the beauty of diversity – people of various sizes and shapes, heads of different colors and textures. We see an age span of several generations. We are aware of personality differences, of differences in perspective, of ancestors who represent every continent of our world.

Come let us celebrate our diversity. Come let us worship together.

Reading:

Exerpt from It’s Hard Work
by Rosemary Bray McNatt

… The truth is this: If there is no justice, there will be no peace. We can read Thoreau and Emerson to one another, quote Rilke and Alice Walker and Howard Thurman, and think good and noble thoughts about ourselves. But if we cannot bring justice into the small circle of our own individual lives, we cannot hope to bring justice to the world. And if we do not bring justice to the world, none of us is safe and none of us will survive. Nothing that Unitarian Universalists need to do is more important than making justice real – here, where we are. Hard as diversity is, it is our most important task.

Sermon: Dismantling Racism

It’s important to me to talk about racism. I don’t like to do it. One of the nice things about being white is that I really don’t have to think about it if I don’t want to. White is the norm. If I say “there were these two guys walking down the street,” you’ll probably picture white guys. Otherwise I would have said “there were these two black guys walking down the street.” Or “there were these two Asian guys walking down the street.” Dr. Thandeka, a professor at Meadville Lombard, a UU seminary in Chicago, asks her students to play the “race game.” All it involves is identifying people as white too. So you say “It’s that white woman over there.” Instead of just “it’s that woman over there.” Doing that, feeling its awkwardness in white company, brings it home how much whiteness is still the norm in this culture. I don’t have to feel guilty about it. It’s not my fault. I do need to be aware of it, though, if I want to be a smart person. I watch the news and I’m grateful that I could go into Barney’s in NYC and buy an expensive designer handbag, and security would not grab me outside the store and handcuff me while they check to see if debit card was legit. I could be driving out in the country at night and notice a pickup truck with a confederate flag on the front bumper behind me and have good odds that if I got into trouble, those fellows would stop and help me out.

I love watching BBC police shows, and I’m often struck by the differences in the behavior of the black police. I try to put my finger on it, but it’s hard to do. If any of you have noticed that, I would love for you to help me articulate what it is.

Peggy McIntosh is a professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College who turned her skills honed in looking at gender in our culture to looking at race. She began to write down things she noticed. Things she was able to do as a white woman. See what you think.

Peggy McIntosh

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live. 4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.

11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person’s voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.

12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability. 14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

16. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.

17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.

19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my race.

25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.

26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.

27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.

28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.

29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.

30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.

31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.

32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.

33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.

34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.

36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.

37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.

38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.

39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.

40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.

43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.

44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.

45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.

46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.

47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.

48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.

49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.

50. I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.

She talks about her whiteness as granting her an invisible backpack full of visas, tools, maps, and codes that she can pull out as needed to make her way in the world. I thought that was interesting, as I had been raised to think that people of color were disadvantaged in that they didn’t have these normal things. I was not raised to consider that I might be over empowered by my whiteness, so that if I stay oblivious to it I might be doing damage.

Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $10.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges.

This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.

John Scalzi is a sci-fi fantasy author who talked about it this way in his blog “Whatever.” Since I never did role-playing games, I had to look up a few terms.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US – or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world – is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

Now, once you’ve selected the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, you still have to create a character, and how many points you get to start – and how they are apportioned – will make a difference. Initially the computer will tell you how many points you get and how they are divided up. If you start with 25 points, and your dump stat is wealth, well, then you may be kind of screwed. If you start with 250 points and your dump stat is charisma, well, then you’re probably fine. Be aware the computer makes it difficult to start with more than 30 points; people on higher difficulty settings generally start with even fewer than that.

As the game progresses, your goal is to gain points, apportion them wisely, and level up. If you start with fewer points and fewer of them in critical stat categories, or choose poorly regarding the skills you decide to level up on, then the game will still be difficult for you. But because you’re playing on the “Straight White Male” setting, gaining points and leveling up will still by default be easier, all other things being equal, than for another player using a higher difficulty setting.

Likewise, it’s certainly possible someone playing at a higher difficulty setting is progressing more quickly than you are, because they had more points initially given to them by the computer and/or their highest stats are wealth, intelligence and constitution and/or simply because they play the game better than you do. It doesn’t change the fact you are still playing on the lowest difficulty setting.

You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.

– Blog: “Whatever”

There is a lot I don’t understand about racism. If I were to talk about all the things I don’t know, we would be here a lot longer than y’all want to be, so I will talk about some of the things I do know. I know that every group on earth is racist about some other group. Here is what they all say:” They are dirty and lazy. They don’t want to work. They are over emotional and their religion is strange. Their brains are smaller– they just can’t think the way we do, so they are better at hands-on work — as long as you tell them exactly what to do. They will hurt children and women.” Who is that talking? It’s the Japanese talking about Koreans, whom they traditionally have despised.

It’s the he Northern Italians talking about the Southern Italians, whose skin is darker than theirs. The Northern Indians hate the Southern Tamil Indians, whose skin is darker. In Sri Lanka the Tamils hate the Singhalese. Moslems and Hindus slaughtered each other in 1947, as Pakistan and Bangladesh were being partitioned off from India. More than a million Hindus and Muslims were killed during the partition. Malaysians hate the Chinese. The Serbs hate the Croats. The Czechs hate the Slovaks. In Africa, the Hutus hate the Tutsis and slaughter each other. Right now the Tutsis are in power, but that will change, as it has before. In Nigeria the Hausa hate the Ibo. Sunni and Shiite Moslems war with one another in Iraq. In Syria, there are families and clans that hate each other. In Darfur, in the Sudan, the Arab-identifying Muslim nomadic Sudanese are slaughtering the non-Arab identifying Muslim sedentary Sudanese. The Israelis hate the Arabs. Will it always be this way? What has to change?

The Arabs have a proverb: “Me and my cousin against the world. Me and my brother against my cousin.”

Racism is a global dynamic between people. Here is another thing. It’s more comfortable to think of racism as mean things individuals to do other individuals. Less comfortable to think about how the whole culture has been fixed, over time, to benefit the people who are in power.

European Americans have had most of the power in the economy and the government. We also have tremendous power in the schools and the service industries. Our first black president is experiencing a tremendous resistance and outrage from the powers, and it’s interesting to ponder how much of that is because of his race.

None of us in here wants to be racist. We don’t like to think of ourselves that way. But most of us do participate unthinkingly in white privilege. This is not something to wallow in guilt about. Wallowing in guilt makes you stupid and drains your energy. You don’t think well. You don’t want to face the people who don’t have the privileges you do.

White privilege is something to notice. This is not something non white people can or should have to help white people with. This is white people’s responsibility. In our UU churches, bless our hearts, it is not uncommon for the people of color who come in our doors to be approached about being on the anti-racism committee. It happens sometimes that when a black person joins the choir, suddenly the repertoire changes to include more gospel songs, even if that particular black person prefers classical, folk, or country. Dr. King had a dream that people might someday be judged by the content of their character. Let us work to be that change in the world, and judge one another that way, and let us make our own characters so real and kind that when we are judged that way, we won’t be found wanting.

Dr. King said in his “I have a dream” speech “we shall hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” The racism in our world certainly could weigh on a person like a mountain of despair.

I have thought a lot about despair and hope. I’ve been wondering about that image of a stone of hope. It comes from the mountain of despair, so it’s made of the same stuff. How can that be?

The thing that despair and hope have in common is the vision of a better future. A necessary component of despair is knowing that things aren’t what they should be. To feel that, you need a vision of what things should be. Despair is when the vision of what should be combines with the weight of what is and threatens to overwhelm you. You can’t see how to get there. You can’t believe things will ever be better. Despair is giving up. The antidote to despair is that we just take a little piece of that mountain, and the piece we take is the vision of how things could be.

We all know that, if all you have is a sense of how things should be, you can be one miserable human being. In ancient Greek mythology, when Pandora opened the container and let all the evils fly out into the world, she slammed the lid shut with just one left inside. What was it? Hope. What was hope doing among the evils of the world? Hesiod said it was because hope is empty and no good, and it takes away people’s industriousness. Friedrich Nietzsche said ” Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” Yes, hoping without action is foolish, if an action can be taken.

Rita Mae Brown says “Never hope more than you work.” That’s what those people in Ohio were doing. Hoping and working. That’s what the people who believed in Dr. King’s vision did. They held the vision and they worked.

Maybe stone is just the right material for hope. Dr. King did not say “Out of the mountain of despairs we mine a jewel of hope.” It is not something rare and precious we find within the despair, covered, held and hidden in there. Maybe stone is just the right value for hope. Stone is ancient, far more ancient than humanity, and it’s everywhere. It’s common. We can lose hope over and over and just pick up more anywhere. You can throw hope away in a fit of rage and loss of spirit, then just hack yourself off another piece. Maybe stone is just the right hardness for hope too. Hope has to be tough. One of my friends said at a twelve step meeting her sponsor handed her a stone and said, “Any time you feel like taking a drink, put this in your mouth. When it dissolves, go ahead and have a drink.”

We hold on to our hope. Find yours, and live with it in your pocket, in the palm of your hand. What do you hope for? We hope, and we do what we can do make things better. We reach out to friends, we pray, we meditate, we open our hearts to joyful events and sorrowful ones. We hope for ourselves, we hope for one another, we hope for this church, and we hope for our country.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 3, 2013

What kinds of things can we do to strengthen our community? Conversation, shared tasks, vulnerability, sacrifice, these are some of the elements of strong community. What makes a church a community for the people who belong to it?

How do you prepare for hard times? How do you protect your life against times when the rain dries up and the wind blows hard and everything is brittle and easily broken? When nourishment is hard to find and you aren’t sure you can face what’s coming next? If you are in that situation literally, what you need is to have a good deep well, a well that reaches way down to where there is nearly always water. Last month we had water communion, where we mingled our lives together by pouring water into the common bowl, talking about the places that fed our souls. Water is the basis for all life. Everything that breathes is largely made of water and needs water to live.

The poet Bryon says: “Til taught by pain, [we] really know not what good water is worth.” – Don Juan

On Friday we had a memorial service for Jenny Malin. She was rich in friends. Some of those friends were from her chalice circle here at First UU.

When we are in pain, or just in a long dry spell. Those things that sustain us – we don’t know what they are worth until we are in trouble. We need connections with people, friends, people who know not only our name but what moves us, what hurts us, what we love. Being here in this church community is a way of making connections, but Sunday morning is a time when having a conversation of any depth is hard.

One of the good opportunities here for building deep connections with people is our small group program – we call them Chalice Circles. In our Chalice Circles we talk together with 4-12 other people about big questions like

“What is an example of grace in your life?
When have you experienced a heartfelt truth, and how did it change your life?
What about your daily work do you find nourishing?
What is the meaning of life?
Why do we need religion?
Why evil?
How do we know what we know?
How can we face death?
Why do we suffer?
What does it mean to be human?”

The lessons have a structure for the purposes of sustainability and fairness. The format give us a way of structuring our interactions so that all of us, the quiet ones as well as the verbally quick, may be heard and made to feel a part of the whole. There is an opening reading. This is one from the topic of Listening:

I like to talk with you.

I like the way I feel
when you are listening
as if we were exploring
something in ourselves:

The plunge into a silence
and how you come up with words
I tried to find:

The otherness about us which makes
conversation possible.

When I talk with you,
the give turns into take
and borrow into lend.

Now and then, a phrase from you
will kindle like a shooting star;
the mornings in you rouse me from a sleep.

I like the babble and the banter when I greet you
at the door,
and when the room is filled with guests,
your quiet look,

as if there were a secret between us
of which nobody knows.

– from Raymond Baughan

After the opening reading, everyone briefly checks in, saying a few words about how they are that week. Then a bowl is passed around with lots of slips of paper with readings on them having to do with the topic of that lesson: forgiveness, hands, failure, hope, patriotism, views of God. After they are read, there are a few questions posed in the lesson. Participants choose one question or a few questions and talk about them in a time of sharing. Everyone gets a chance to talk, and no one interrupts or talks back to you or even asks you a question.

When you are through, they say “thank you.” That helps shy people feel safer sometimes. When everyone is through with what they wanted to say about the questions, there is a time of silence, where people just breathe together for a moment or two. Then the discussion starts, when you can comment on what someone said, ask questions, say what came to your mind as they were speaking.

There is a covenant of respectful behavior that is followed. Each group works out a covenant of how they want to be together, so there is kindness in the discussion, support, so no one person dominates the group. A facilitator is there to remind people of that, to hold the covenants in mind like a container for the group.

When the discussion is done, there is a check-out time. We usually say “How do you want us to hold you in mind this month?” It’s a way of getting to know and trust a few people you may never have otherwise had in your life. Another bonding experience is the service the Chalice Circles promise to perform together. One group painted the women’s restroom by the offices. Some might help set up or clean up after big events.

In order not to form cliques, the groups run for a year and then re-form, to keep attention on the fact that there are always more people who may want to be there, and that the groups will grow and change. Chalice circles are one way in which First UU is hospitable to people by welcoming them in to a space of friendship and conversation.

In the UU tradition, we believe in ongoing revelation. Everything that is knowable about the world, about the human being, about the truth, about the Spirit, about ourselves, about one another, is out there, still to be found out, still to be revealed. We believe that there is tremendous wisdom and beauty in the scriptures of the great religions of the world, but we believe the truth is still coming in, that it can evolve, that the story of each of our lives and the story of our lives together are as sacred as the story of the people of Israel or India. So the story of your life, the story of our lives together, is sacred scripture.

Dr. Thandeka, who teaches theology and culture at a UU seminary in Chicago called Meadville Lombard, says that it is in small groups that we practice the central ritual of our faith, the sacred act of being in right relationship with one another. She says that the power of people coming together to share their stories, to talk about ideas, to accomplish a service for others, that power is the central authority of our faith. I think that power is the water we use to quench our thirsty lives, and to quench the thirst in one another for being heard and known. In doing that, we help to put the world back together.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 27, 2013

The Sources don’t really mention spookiness or magic, but we’ll talk about it in a way that’s appropriate for all ages in an inter-generational service about mystery.

Sermon

Mystery, Spookiness, Magic and Wonder

This is the time of the year when the nights are growing longer and the days are growing shorter. Most people are a little scared of the dark. You can’t see where you’re going as well. You can’t see what’s around you. When I was a little kid, I was pretty sure there was a bad guy living in my closet. My mother would push all the clothes aside, and say, “See, there’s no one there.” That just made me think he was really good at hiding. Many people think there is a monster under the bed, and they don’t want their feet or hands hanging over the edge. I wasn’t really scared of anything under my bed, but I was scared of spiders. My mother would tell me they were more scared of me, because I could squish them, but that didn’t help me, for some reason. This is the time of the year when the darkness grows, so it’s a natural time to talk about fear.

Everybody is scared sometimes. We have different ways of trying to deal with our fear. Some people try to be really good, following all the rules perfectly so nothing bad ever happens to them. That doesn’t always work, though. Some people try to make themselves scary so no one will mess with them at all. Let’s see a scary face. Good ones! Halloween is an ancient holy day where people act out their fears and their bravery.

We dress in scary ways, or we dress in powerful costumes like fairies or superheroes. These costumes make us feel like we might have the powers of the people whose outfits we wear.

The ancient people did not know what happened to people when we die. We don’t know either. What we do know is that all bodies are part of the earth. We are made out of the same materials as stars, earth, and sea water. Our dogs, cats, chickens, ferrets and birds are also part of the earth. So we know that we’ll become part of everything again, and that we’ll feed the grass, which feeds the cattle, which feed the people. We’ll feed the plants, which feed the people. So we become part of life again. Some religions teach that we are reborn again and again, and that we live many lives. Becoming part of the circle of life by going back to the earth? That’s one sure way to be reborn. That is what this chant is about.

Chant

Hoof and horn, hoof and horn
All that died shall be reborn
Corn and grain, corn and grain
All that falls shall rise again

Isis – Astarte – Diana – Hecate – Demeter – Kali – Inanna

The people in parts of Africa say there are different stages of being dead: one, when you stop breathing and another when people don’t remember you any more or tell stories about you.

As long as we remember people, they are part of us.

We are the old people
We are the new people
We are the same people
deeper than before

Chant

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

In living we die – in dying we live. The fruit is first seed, yet seed comes from the fruit. In the mystery of life and death and rebirth.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 20, 2013

It’s the final installment of our series on the Buddhist Eightfold Path. “Right Concentration,” or meditation, is the practice recommended by the Buddhist teachers, and recently by the medical community. What is involved in it?

I began this series on the Buddhist eightfold path last year, and in the first sermon I asked how many of you remember the old Hollywood Buddhist movie that came out fourteen years ago called “The Matrix.” In it our hero woke up to the knowledge that his life was an illusion, that he had literally been sleeping through his life entertained with phantoms of a dream of work and relationships, none of which were real. He joined the community of other people who were awake to the true nature of reality, who were living in real time.

The first part of the Buddhist eightfold path to the end of suffering speaks to this dynamic of “waking up” to the true nature of reality. You are called to understand that life is not as it should be, that everyone is suffering because they are (quite rightly) chasing happiness, but chasing it by grabbing at shiny wisps of illusion: the right job, the right look, the right car, the right clothes, the correct cultural experiences, the right education. In order to prepare one’s life for happiness one must understand the way things work. Grasping at things that pass away is the path to misery. Understanding that, one trains oneself to live in the world with grace and compassion. Speaking in wholesome ways, acting ethically, making ones living in a helpful way, holding one’s heart open to the suffering and the joy of others.

Our hero in the movie, though, trained his mind to be so stable, so powerful, so concentrated that he could, in the midst of a gun battle, see where each bullet was and move to avoid it. Even bullets, moving as fast as they do, were no match for his extreme present-mindedness that parsed each second into enough discreet sections that he had plenty of room to move within them.

That is what we’re talking about today. Present-mindedness. You will be able to leave here today and walk between raindrops. Well, maybe after a few years of training. The eighth element of the path to the end of suffering is the most technical of all, so we are going to have a couple of experiences that will show us what my words can’t. Here at the beginning, lets breathe together for ten breaths. Try just to count breaths. If you have thoughts, just notice … “hm, thoughts … ” and gently bring your attention back to your breath. Start counting again if you lose track. Don’t worry about doing this correctly.

TEN BREATHS

Did your mind wander while we were breathing together? Most people’s do. Buddhist teachers call that “Monkey mind.” They describe our thoughts as a jungle full of monkeys chattering and swinging from tree to tree. Another teacher says, no, they are a jungle full of drunken monkeys, chattering and swinging from tree to tree. Some people like the quiet of just breathing and other people dislike it so much they get mad. “What are we doing this for?” is a common question. Some people want rapture, and they get it, but the teacher will say “just keep breathing and meditating and the rapture will fall away and you’ll get equanimity, which is better.” Some want visions. One student is said to have called his teacher over during a meditation session, very excited, and told him “Teacher! I saw the Buddha all shining and golden and he smiled at me.” The teacher nodded, and said “just keep breathing and he will go away.” What is the goal of learning to concentrate one’s mind? To be calm, compassionate and deeply happy. To be psychologically sturdy, less easily thrown by a crash in one’s bank account, a bad diagnosis, trouble in the family. To be able to have a good emotional cushion so you’re not scraping on raw nerves, to be able to feel your mind warm, loose and relaxed instead of stuffed, pushed, overwhelmed and snappish.

These are not all of the benefits, though, as studies at MIT , Harvard and Yale discovered in the nineties. The “gray matter” in one’s brain actually thickens in those who meditate regularly, especially in older people. That’s the gray matter that thins as one ages. It thickens again if you meditate. Slow wave sleep patterns improve. The immune system works better, creating more of the the things that fight disease in those who meditate regularly. Skin conditions clear up better. Every disease process that is exacerbated by stress may benefit from mindfulness meditation, vhich lowers stress. The actual practice of meditation has these effects, while subjects who just sat and thought about whatever they wanted did not exhibit the changes. What is this concentration, this training, this mindfulness meditation? How do you do it?

You begin by sitting still and breathing. Counting your breaths, the way you were just now invited to do. As you count, just go to ten and start over again, as those numbers might be easiest to keep track of. The goal, the experiment, is to see if you can occupy your mind with counting your breaths. Your awareness is of sensations in your body: hunger, discomfort, thirst, restlessness, your awareness is of sounds in the room and outside, and you acknowledge that awareness and then gently invite your attention back to your breaths. Your thoughts may start careening around making lists of things to get at the store, conversations you would like to have with your spouse or partner, things your children said, something you feel guilty about or resentful over. Acknowledge the thoughts and gently bring your attention back to your breath.

It is like exercise, hard at first, then easier. Harder on some days than on others. Some people like to say a word while they meditate, and you can say any word that makes you feel peaceful. Shalom, Buddha, peace, love, Om, Shanti, which is Sanskrit for “peace.” There are traditions of meditation in every faith. Mostly they fall into the “full mind” or “empty mind” techniques. Full mind asks you to chant, or pray the same prayer over and over, which occupies the mind. Counting breaths is meant to occupy the mind. If you are doing a walking meditation, then your mind is occupied with feeling the ground against your foot, first heel, then arch, then toes. Repeat. Empty mind meditation asks you to picture something empty and calm: a valley full of snow, a glassy lake, an ice rink, an empty riding ring. When you have thoughts, you gently sweep them away, inviting yourself back to the calm surface of the lake, or the snow. It’s not hard to do, except that it’s really hard to do. When I do it, I benefit. I’m always about to get back to doing it. It’s only been about ten years. Anytime now, I’ll start again.

This path is part of our Unitarian heritage, as Emerson and Thoreau both were reading the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, which shaped the Transcendentalist movement, lending them the notions of the Oneness of all things, the over-arching one mind permeating the universe, and the idea of living correctly in a way that is not connected to a Divine being watching you, being pleased or disappointed.

I will not say that, if you get good at this, you will be able to dodge bullets. You may, however, be able to be in the present moment more, the moment in between the bullets of what might happen, who you used to be, what they did to you, what you did to them, how you might end up, everything that could go wrong, what you hope will go right. This practice is not new, it is ancient. You do not have to accept it on faith. The teachers say just to try it and see what happens.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 13, 2013

It’s Celebration Sunday! We are invited to bring our new pledges, or the affirmation of our 1-2-3 year pledges to the front of the sanctuary in celebration of our participation in this community, its mission and its ministries.

Sermon

One of the passages in the Hebrew scriptures that inspires my ministry here is this part of Isaiah 61

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
Because the LORD has anointed me
To bring good news to the afflicted;
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to captives,
And freedom to prisoners;

I’m a believer in being part of a congregation of people who are trying to do these things. It seems also to be a perfect description of what we are here for as a church. One of the things we do is to help people find their freedom. One of the things we don’t free ourselves to do sometimes, is to believe. We are skeptics, it is not hard to get many UUs to say what they don’t believe. It is good for us to figure out what we do believe. Several weeks ago we put up photographs of First UU people with captions of what they said they believed in.

“I’m a believer in … reason and observation,”
“I’m a believer in … the community,”
“I’m a believer in … the good in everyone,”

Go around at coffee hour and take a look. At the kick-off for the canvass we had chocolate cake and wrote on pieces of paper where we finished the sentence “I’m a believer in … ” Those are up here in the glass bowls, and they will feature in our celebration after the sermon.

Here at First UU in Austin, one of the things church frees us to do is think about and declare what we do believe in.

One of the things we are not free around is money. We worry about not having any. There is shame around being in debt, around not being able to pay bills. There is fear about what the future will hold, whether we will be thought well of or scorned. One of my friends has a recurring nightmare where he is hearing people at his own funeral say to one another ‘Well, he never did amount to much.” There is even shame around having enough money. How do you provide well for your children without ruining them? How much is too much to leave them? You want them to have enough, to have a stake with which to start life, but you don’t want the amount to be disincentivizing. My spell check doesn’t recognize that as a word, but I heard it on the news this week.

Money is fascinating, and hard to talk about. This is the time of year when we talk about it with one another, when we ask for feedback about how you think the church is going, and where we talk about what the church means to us, and where we invite one another to claim a place in the community, a respectable place, by pledging generously within your means. The amount doesn’t matter – the generosity does. Some of you would be hard pressed to give a dollar a week, and yet I’m going to press you to do that. There is no shame in that, as long as it is generous within your means. Some of you give six thousand a year, and it’s easy for you to do that. I’m going to ask you to give until it feels significant. If this community is significant in your life.

I haven’t been giving enough, so I’m going to raise my pledge by 20% this year, and each year after that until it feels good. I want you all to consider that as well. Let me tell you a few numbers, which will make you glaze over. It costs the church about 1500 dollars per member to keep running. Not per family. The number comes from taking the yearly budget and dividing it by the number of members. I hesitate to tell you that number because it may not represent a number that will be significant giving for you. So now forget you heard that. I worry about people kind of quickly figuring: okay, I’ll just pledge that and cover myself, so it’s all okay. Well, that may be your significant amount, or it may be like the teenager who, when asked to cut the grass in the backyard, said “Why? I never go out there.”

Our aspiration is that we would all be giving about 5% of our income each year, or 2% of our net worth. That may seem impossible right now. That’s okay. First UU doesn’t want to run on resentful money, or forced money. This church wants hopeful money, aspirational money, invested spirit money, full hearted money, excitement money, belief money. Belief in our mission, in where we’re going, in what’s happening here.

Where are we now? Where are we going? We have added a hundred new members in the past two years. We are bursting at the seams, when it’s not canvass Sunday. The Fred dinner attracts between 20-30 people every Wednesday night for movies and classes. We are staffed properly for growth. Let me tell you what this church looks like to me. You all have helped start two other UU congregations. You have kept this church going for nearly sixty years, (it will be 60 years next year, so we need to start planning an anniversary party) You have been teaching children for sixty years, having meaningful conversations for sixty years, listening to great music for sixty years, making brave decisions, prudent decisions for sixty years, creating a theater company within the congregation, an art gallery with changing monthly exhibits. You have been through good times and hard times. You know what? This is a good time, and I believe in you.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 15, 2013

Yom Kippur is the final day of the Jewish High Holy Days, which are about repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. It is also a day when you may work to be released from a vow you cannot keep. Let’s talk about forgiving others, and forgiving ourselves too.

Yom Kippur is the final day of the Days of Awe, celebrated at this time of year by our sisters and brothers in the Jewish Community. We in UUism are free to dance with many different religious groups, so we are exploring what gifts and insights Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have for us. These High Holy Days are about atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation. Let be talk about atonement first. To do that, I have to talk about sin.

It is difficult for us UU’s to talk about “sin.” One UU web page on the net says that you can attend a UU church for years without hearing the word “sin.” Our denomination began several hundred years ago in reaction to the Calvinist concepts of Original Sin. Jonathan Edwards, a Princeton-educated New Englander, put forth the Calvinist view in his sermon: “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” He described God as holding us as someone would hold a spider over the fire, completely justified in dropping it into the flames, yet in his mercy, moment by moment, keeping it alive.

Present-day Christians don’t usually paint that gruesome a picture, seeing the belief in a loving God a s primary, but they still have to deal with the theology of Original Sin. Calvinist Christianity, building on the work of the early North African church father Augustine, teaches that humans are born in sin. We are all broken in our essence, and this brokenness is passed down from generation to generation, making it difficult if not impossible for us to choose to do the right thing. We are bent towards sin, predisposed to run from God.

Unitarians and Universalists, in the early centuries, taught that it is ridiculous that God would have created us to be sinful and then punished us for it. It goes against our best reason to think that God set things up for us to fall and then sends us to hell for falling. Most UU’s feel that humans are born good, but because of influences in our culture or lack of education, opportunity, racism, sexism, or bad examples, we do bad things. UU minister Forrester Church says in the “Nature VS Nurture argument, it’s as if the Calvinists come down on the genetics side of the argument and the UUs come down on the environment side. They say sin is nature. We say it is nurture. There are pluses and minuses to both ways of seeing the world.

Forrester Church says he believes strongly in both He says: “Subscribing to the genetic argument, I believe that we are born sinners; and, equally convinced by the environmental argument, I also believe that over time and through experience, sweet and bitter, we acquire an aptitude for sin.”

Here is what I believe, and I find this to make the most sense and provide the most cheerful out look on life, which is important to me. I don’t think sin is either nature or nurture. I don’t believe in Original sin, and I don’t believe we are born good. I believe we are born some good and some bad, in other words, born human. We keep acting out our some good, some bad nature our whole life long. Some people say “How could you think a baby was born in sin?! They’re so cute and wonderful!” As a mother, I see the romanticizing of babies as sweet and innocent is laughable. They may be innocent, whatever that means, but they are self centered creatures who are beautiful and compelling enough usually to keep you from pitching them out the window the fourteenth night in a row they awaken you every two hours to get fed or just because they got the urge to hang out with you for twenty minutes before they doze off again.

That debate aside for now, whether we do wrong things because it is our nature or because it is the result of forces at work upon us from our environment, or whether we are acting out our mixed regular human nature, the fact is that most of us mess up.

So I think of myself as a sinner. If I’m ready for it, if I know it’s going to happen some time, I can be more cheerful about it. Yep. I messed up again. I’ll do that. I try not to, but it happens. Yep, my partner messed up, or my child, or the person at work, or the treasurer of the church next door. It helps me not be surprised and disappointed by human behavior.

It also gives me more compassion for myself and for others. We do wrong things. Some of those things are mistakes. The popular piece of information to impart these days is that, in Hebrew, the word for sin means “missing the mark.” We just missed. It makes it sound like bad aim. Some wrong things we do are like that.

But some are things we do while knowing full well that they are wrong and damaging. We in the liberal religious tradition need to have ways of talking about this too.

What is our spiritual practice when we do things that are destructive? What do we do when we break promises?

One important thing to know about Yom Kippur is that Jews don’t believe God is in the business of forgiving you what you have done to others. If you have wronged God, God will forgive. If you have wronged someone else, go ask that person for forgiveness.

In the Jewish tradition, if you break a vow, you have an opportunity, during the Days of Awe, when the Book of Life is left open for a time, to make things right. You can go to three members of your community or one ordained person, and tell them what the vow was, tell them you have not managed to keep the vow, and ask to be released from the vow. We can also try to make amends for the wrongs we have done. We can make an honest effort to go to the person we have betrayed, lied to, or hurt, and we can tell them we are sorry and that we have every intention of not repeating what we did. And we can ask their forgiveness. They may give it or they may not, but at least we have done our part.

The Days of Awe are also about forgiveness and reconciliation. What about people who have wronged us? Carolyn Myss, medical intuitive, says that when you harbor anger at a person, when you hold on to something wrong they have done to you, a portion of your life force is directed to that person to keep up that negative connection with them, to wish them ill, to grind at the desire to have them sweat in front of you, realizing what they have done, and “repenting on bended knee.” Given that the odds of that happening are slim to none, she suggests that in not forgiving someone, your life force is being drained off into a bad investment, and that you let it go. There is so much wisdom in that. Our resentment and hatred do those who wronged us no real harm, while it eats at our guts and makes us sick and weak.

I don’t have a problem with forgiveness, but do I have a problem with just “letting it go.” What if someone has done something truly awful to you? Tortured you, abused you, betrayed you, what if they are a parent and they have molested you? What if they molested your children? Do you just forgive and forget in order to grow spiritually?

I’m with the Israelis on this one. They say “Forgive, but never forget.” In the new Holocaust museum in Washington are the words “Never Again.” You don’t have to forget when you forgive. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you have to be in relationship with the one who hurt you. It just means that you give them over to karmic justice or Divine justice and quit reciting their wrongs in your mind and heart. Give them their eviction notice in your head. Resign from the job of making them see what they’ve done. If you’re ready. If it feels right to you.

These Holy Days are for us to be reconciled with God and with one another. I have talked about asking forgiveness from God and from one another, but I use the freedom of this pulpit to ask: does God ever do wrong things? Is there some forgiveness called for there? Elie Weisel, in his book Night, and his play “The Trial of God,” has inmates at Auschwitz, in their despair, call God to trial for allowing such evil to exist in the world. At the end, after pronouncing God guilty, the inmates rise and recite the Kaddish, which proclaims God’s sovereignty in the world. For a Jew, it is possible to argue with God, even to accuse God, but not to live without God. Some of us are harboring resentments against God, who somehow did not fulfill our expectations of him. We are angry because she let something awful happen. Maybe during this time we can decide to let go of that draining resentment as well.

These Holy Days are an opportunity, every year, to apologize for wrongs you have done, mistakes you have made to forgive other people, to let go of resentments, and to bring out the vows you have not been able to keep and do the work of being released from them. What I try to give you, each Sunday, is a small excerpt from the “Soul Home Repair Manual,” so we can attend to making the world a better place, starting in our own hearts and our own spirits.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 25, 2013

Margaret Sanger, an early activist for women’s reproductive health was ridiculed, vilified and persecuted. She was far from perfect, but she still can be one of our heroes.

One of my friends from Alabama has a shrine in the hallway of his house. Over a little shelf with candles on it hangs a picture of Jesus. On one side of Jesus hangs another picture, this one of President Jimmy Carter. On the other side is University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant.

One of the sources of our Unitarian Universalist faith is the prophetic words and deeds of great men and women. In believing that there is ongoing revelation about the truth of things, one lets go of thinking that all truth has been laid out for us, that a sacred book could have answers to everything. Truth is revealed through actions and words, not only of ancient people but of people who have made history in our own lifetimes. We also learn from the words and deeds of the people down the street in our neighborhood, sitting next to us on the subway, dancing to the swing band while we play the fiddle.

I have been thinking for years about whose pictures might make up my shrine, if I were to build one. I might have pictures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robin Hood, Margaret Sanger, Bette Midler. I wasn’t raised to have heroes, in the sense of believing someone was without flaws. My father taught me that the line between creation and destruction runs down the middle of every person. He adored JFK, and maybe he thought of him as a hero, but he was well aware of at least a few of the man’s weaknesses. This sense that everyone is flawed has kept me from building a shrine like my friend’s.

It’s getting harder and harder to admire people with your whole heart. We come to realize unsavory things about Thomas Jefferson or Jimmy Carter. Someone says Bette Midler wasn’t kind to the little people on her way to the top. Bear Bryant certainly wasn’t a perfect hero. Apparently Gandhi had a difficult relationship with his children. Should we allow ourselves to enshrine people who do a variety of deeds, some enlightened and some egregious? Perhaps we could keep our sense of purity if we allow as much of their picture in our shrine as represents the percentage ofthem that is admirable, so we would have tom up confetti photographs in a montage.

I would hate to think how I might have to rip off chunks of my photograph if I wanted to be up there amongst my heroes. If! demand perfection of them, surely I must demand it of myself, right?

So I’m stuck. I want to draw from words and deeds of great men and women, but how do you tell who is great and who isn’t? What if I love some of the things Emerson said and did and I don’t love others? What if one of my friends is brave and kind, adventuresome, healthy and skilled, but clumsy at relationships and bad with money? I still admire my friend.

The ancient Greek heroes all had flaws, and their gods had flaws. The characters moving through the Hebrew Scriptures had flaws, yet they are held up to us as models of faithfulness and bravery. Where did I get this idea that the people in my shrine should be perfect? Where did I get the idea that perfection had anything to do with greatness? The revelation of truth, in my life, has come from things people have written and said, from a painting by Mark Rothko, and from music by Josquin des Prez.

I just got a swift and lovely “beyond categorical thinking” lesson from a burly Alaskan man in his seventies. His hair was white and somewhat uncombed, his boots were scuffed and his khakis wrinkled. He was getting a pedicure in the Fairbanks nail salon where we were doing the same. That took me aback a little, but it was when I saw him hand the lady a bottle of autumn bronze polish that I had to admit I had looked at him and judged him as a certain type of man. He showed me handily that I had no idea what type of man he was, and for that I thank him. His picture would be in my shrine for a while, at least.

Suddenly it has occurred to me that those I enshrine don’t have to be the same people year in and year out. Guides need to change as the path changes. I might need a model of insane courage at one point in my life, while at another point I may not be taking the same risks I would were I responsible only for myself. At that point I may want a model of care and gentle thoroughness.

I can relax. Perfection and greatness, I think, are unrelated. I can now respond with equanimity to the people who love to burst my bubble about people I admire by telling me Gandhi’s children hated him, or that Bette Midler was rude to them, or that Robin Hood is fictional. I’ll just mutter “Your mom’s fictional” under my breath and light my candles in peace.

I wanted to start with this, because we’re going to talk about a particular world-changing individual this morning, and what she brought into the world was what it was, with both good and bad consequences. Would she be a hero in my shrine? She certainly affected my life, and I’m betting she has influenced yours. She enabled me to do what I have done with my one wild and precious life.

Margaret Sanger was one of the eleven living children of a woman who had eighteen pregnancies. Her mom was Catholic and her dad was an atheist. “The Village Atheist,” Mike Wallace says in a dismissive tone in his 1957 interview with Sanger, which I watched on YouTube Friday. He had served in the Civil War, which would make anyone an atheist. The family admired Socialists. Margaret and her ten siblings were jeered at on their way to school, called “devil’s children.” Nice way to grow up. It may have made a hostile Mike Wallace a bit less intimidating. Seeing her mother die at 49, her body ravaged by constant pregnancies, she blamed her father for the death. She left home to train as a nurse, but married a nice Leftist architect and settled in the suburbs of New York. She had three children.

When their home burned down, they re-settled in the City. Margaret became involved in socialist politics, in workers’ rights, in the bohemian culture of their neighborhood, Greenwich Village, and started writing a sex education column called “what every mother should know.” She began working among the poor and immigrant families in the Lower East Side” delivering babies for whom there was little room, little food, tending to women who were suffering from botched five-dollar terminations or from trying to do that themselves (I’m speaking a bit indirectly because there aren’t only adults in the room). People begged her for information on how to prevent this happening again and again. The Catholic Church hierarchy was opposed to this information being distributed, but the law was also against it. The Comstock Act had made it illegal since 1873 to speak about birth control, claiming it was an obscenity. Doctors could not send information through the US Mail. Medical textbooks containing this information could not be mailed.

Margaret went to the libraries in New York to research for some information on contraception to give her patients, but couldn’t find anything. In her speeches she told of a patient named Sadie Sachs, whom she met after Sadie had terminated a pregnancy herself. The second time she was called to Sadie’s family’s apartment for the same reason, Sadie didn’t make it. Sanger said she threw her nursing bag into the comer of the room and swore she wouldn’t take one more patient until she had a way to prevent this dangerous and desperate situation for women and their families. Her father disapproved of her crusade for birth control until she reminded him that, if her mother had been able to control her fertility, he might still have his wife. Then she had his support.

With the influence of some of her anarchist friends, among them Emma Goldman, she came to believe that only by freeing women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would fundamental social change take place. She started a monthly eight-page publication called “The Woman Rebel,” and talked about birth control, which was a radical term at the time. She liked how direct it was, and, later, when she founded Planned Parenthood, she disapproved of the name they chose as being too soft. She began writing a sixteen page how-to guide called “Family Limitation” which included graphics and details about how reproduction works and how to interfere with it. “The Woman Rebel” was sent out, but the Postal authorities managed to suppress the first five issues. In August of 1914 she was indicted under the federal anti-obscenity laws. Instead of standing trial, she jumped bail and sailed to England under a pseudonym, ordering the release of “Family Limitation” while en route. In England she was supported by the people who were alarmed about population explosion and the limited food resources of the planet. (It was fascinating to see the 1957 Mike Wallace, hair shining like black patent leather, smoking a cigarette, telling her that, with recent improvements in agriculture, there would be plenty of food, even if they planet’s population increased by and incredible thirty percent.)

When she came back in 1916, she opened a birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Nine days later she was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse. The judge said that women should not have the right to have sex with a sense of security that pregnancy would not result. This conviction was appealed, and another judge ruled that physicians could have the right to prescribe birth control for medical reasons. That was the first victory. She was asked to found another clinic up in Harlem, and she staffed it with all African American doctors and nurses. W.E.B. DuBois was on its board of directors. Some have called any enthusiasm for birth control for people of color a kind of genocide. One strand of shame in this story is that some of the things Sanger has said do indicate that she felt children ofthe infirm, and of prisoners, are marked from the beginning, and that some women should be sterilized.

Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, and middle class middle of the road people (not just Anarchists, Socialists and Bohemians) began to join their voices to hers. And they joined their money to hers. One person can speak loudly, but a group of people? Watch out. Sanger travelled to China and Japan, and worked with a prominent Japanese feminist to strengthen the birth control movement there. In 1929 she founded the organization to lobby for changes in federal birth control laws. Having no success with that, 1932 saw her challenge the law again by ordering a diaphragm from Japan. It was confiscated by the US Government, and the ensuing court battle led to a 1936 ruling that overthrew a significant portion of the Comstock Act. In 1937 the American Medical Association adopted contraception as a normal part of medical care. In 1946 she founded the organization that was to become Planned Parenthood. Her dream was of a pill that a woman could take, just one pill a day, that would prevent contraception. Finally, in the early 50’s, she found a research scientist, Greg Pincus, who had just accomplished in vitro fertilization of rabbits. The American press ran a shadowy picture of him with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a picture whose overtones whispered “mad scientist.” Sanger visited him to talk about a pill. Hormones are the key, he said, but I don’t have the money to do the research, and you certainly don’t. It would take millions.

Sanger enlisted her friend from the women’s suffrage days, Katharine McCormick, who controlled the International Harvester fortune. She wrote Dr. Pincus a check and told him to get whatever he needed. Shortly thereafter was a pill that prevented pregnancy in rabbits. They needed a physician to try it on humans. Enter a handsome Roman Catholic doctor named John Rock, a Harvard educated infertility specialist. He took on the job because, at 64, he had seen too many women whose lives were ruled by unplanned pregnancies. They tested the pill on women. Now here is one of the streaks of shame in the process. They tested in Puerto Rico, where there were more birth control clinics and looser laws about medical testing. The pill worked, but the side effects were rough. Millions of women in the next twenty years went on the pill. 80 percent of women born since 1945 have been on it. The hormonal dosage has been slashed, so the side effects are fewer these days. And the world, for women who have access to contraception, has changed. We can go to school and have relationships at the same time. We can accomplish things in the world with three or four kids that we might not be able to do with ten or twelve.

She is still under attack. State by state, legislatures are closing family planning clinics. Sanger saw enough pregnancies terminated by desperate women to vow to prevent unwanted pregnancies in any way she could. These clinics provide safer terminations, but much more than that, they prevent countless more abortions by giving information and contraceptives to people who need them. It’s monstrous that those who say they are anti-abortion are, by their legislative actions, going to take away the resources poor families need to prevent abortion. Listen to the Mike Wallace interview, and you will see it permeated by the same hostile engine that runs the current legislative push to close down clinics. The engine is fueled by the religious views of a few. It’s so striking to hear this supposedly neutral journalist passionately the position of the Roman Catholic Church, using terms like “sin” and “evil” to refer to sex without fear of conception. It’s obvious because our culture has changed so much in 56 years. You all were part of the change, and you will be part of the changes still to come.

“I feel we have divinity within us, and the more we express the good part of our lives, the more the divinity is expressed within us… All religions are so much alike, when it comes to the divine part of our being.”

People sometimes ask why there aren’t more women throughout history who have achieved great things. There are some, but when you are already achieving the great thing of building new human beings in your body, braving death to give birth, then getting them as best you can to adulthood, there isn’t much time or energy for anything else unless you have the wealth to pay for help with them, or unless you have something that will help you choose when to invite another member into your family.

I could go to seminary and be married. I could become a therapist and work half time, because I could afford pre-school for two kids. Thank you, Margaret Sanger. Thank you for enduring social abuse and for being thrown into jail eight times to make this enormous change. We wouldn’t have agreed on some things, but you are still one of the heroes in my shrine.

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