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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 11, 2013

So much of UU conversation has been about what we don’t believe. Let’s talk about one thing handed down to us by Emerson and the Transcendentalists – that there is one soul for all things.

I remember a class in Seminary where I sat stunned as the professor laid out my whole hard-won system of beliefs on the blackboard, listing the tenets of Mystical Pietism. I thought I had put that thing together over years of high school and college, late-night conversations, wrestling with what I’d been taught as a child, setting some of it aside, honing other pieces of it until they fit what I could live with, what made sense to me. Later, after most of that had fallen apart and I had walked out of its wreckage into what felt like a freer, more truthful philosophy, I was shocked again to read the tenets of Transcendentalism and find that there, laid out, was a list of my whole hard-won system of beliefs. Again.

I’ll read you the list in a few minutes, and you can see whether you are Unitarian Universalist in the Emersonian tradition. First let me tell you a little bit about him. His father was a Unitarian minister who died when Emerson was 8. Several of his brothers and sisters died in childhood, and two more brothers died of tuberculosis as young men. He fell in love with a very young woman, Ellen Tucker, whom he met in Concord MA on Christmas Day in 1827. They married two years later. He was 27 and she was 18. His mother moved to Boston with them so she could take care of Ellen, who was already sick with TB. Emerson was working as a minister, and his faith took one more blow when Ellen died, at 20. He wrote in his journal a year later that he had gone to visit Ellen at her grave and opened the coffin. She was due to inherit a large sum of money when she turned 21, but never made it that far. Waldo (as he preferred to be called) sued the family and was awarded her portion of the inheritance, which gave him an income equivalent to the one he was paid yearly as a minister.

He traveled, wrote, read, and supported his friends who gathered around Concord in what became almost a “genius cluster,” with the Alcotts, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller visiting, walking with him, talking intensely about the Eastern philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism, just coming into the American consciousness, about the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Their association enriched all of them. He married another woman named Lydia, whom he renamed Lydian, and she took care of everyone.

Too much had happened for Waldo to be comfortable believing in the traditional picture of a God who was a personality, in charge of everything. He and the skeptics around him struggled with the ageold conundrum: if God is God, he is not good. If he is good, he is not God.

If the belief that God was a personality, and that this personality was all-powerful was the root of the problem set before him by the skeptics, then perhaps it would be good to let go of that view of God. What do you go on? Not just scripture. There were lots of scriptures from lots of religions – how do you claim one is the truth? The Christian scriptures were being used to justify slavery and to keep women from taking their place beside men as their equals.

Do you go on other people’s instructions to you? No. You had to attend to your own experiences. Personal experience was something he felt you had to trust – your experiences and those of others.

Why are there some moments in life glow with meaning and with power? Some conversations have a depth and quality others do not, some people who seemed to be centered in something that others know nothing about. How do most people know what’s right and wrong, and why do we feel bad when we do something wrong? What can explain the feeling about the Divine that humans have in every time and culture? What feels true? What felt true to Waldo about God was that God was immanent, meaning nearby in life. “As close to me as my jugular vein,” as the Koran says. It made sense to him that God was in the world, in Nature, and that you could learn about the Divine by learning about Nature. He discounted the miracles in the scriptures, saying they had nothing to do with the blowing clover or the falling rain, that they were “Monster,” unnatural, and unworthy of the Divinity.

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

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

Emerson was not alone in describing a new way to see God. Samuel Reed, another minister of that time in Boston, a huge influence on Emerson, called for a religion that sees God in everything.

Emerson wrote in the mid-1800’s that each person makes her own religion, his own God. What is God? “The most elevated conception of character that can be formed in the mind. It is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection.” He called this the “oversoul.”

Emerson opened up the thinking of his time to the possibility that there is only one Soul, the soul of all things. That is God. Soul is in all things, in us, and the One soul makes itself manifest through our lives, our actions, our voices when they are creative, when they are useful, when they advance the cause of life and of love, truth and beauty. Could this be a way to think about a Higher Power for those of us who feel a need to think that way? Some among us are satisfied with the God or power or force they don’t believe in, or the one they do believe in. Others want to talk about it, not to make creeds or pronouncements, but to honor experiences we have had where we were loved or guided or lifted by something outside of ourselves. What do we call it? How do we talk about it without having to submit to doctrines and oppressive authority? The Oversoul, the One, the Source, maybe those are some ways for us to name this unnamable thing that we feel. See if this list captures some of your beliefs.

Basic Tenets of American Transcendentalism:

This list must not be considered to be a creed common to all transcendentalists. It is merely a grouping of certain important concepts shared by many of them.

• The human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal spirit

• Therefore, every individual is to be respected because everyone has a portion of that Oversoul or life force. (God).

• This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found everywhere, a deep power in which we exist.

• The divine can be found in both nature and human nature

• Jesus also had part of the Oversoul – so he was divine as everyone is divine –

• The miracles of the Bible are not to be regarded as important as the whole world is a miracle and the smallest creature is one.

• More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for this life – Emerson: “the one thing in the world of value is the active soul.”

• Death is never to be feared, for at death the soul merely passes to the Oversoul.

• Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. “Give me one world at a time.” – Thoreau

• Evil is merely an absence of good and not a force in its own right. Light is more powerful than darkness because one ray of light penetrates the dark.

• One must have faith in intuition and experience, for no church or creed can communicate truth.

• The unity of life and universe must be realized. There is a relationship, an interconnectedness between all things.

Are you a Transcendentalist? Do you desire to respect the Divine element in yourself, others and the rest of Nature? Might you believe that transformation comes through expanding our awareness of the Divine in all aspects of your life? Does it make sense to you that to be truly human, we need to live in community with others? I think I’m a Transcendentalist, which places me squarely in the middle of Unitarian Universalist tradition. If you are a Christian, you are squarely in the middle of UU tradition as well. If you are more of a Humanist, you are also squarely in the middle of UU tradition. The stream of thought, yearning, conversation and action in which we stand is a very large one. It feels good to have so much gone before and imagine all of those who will come after us in this faith.

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 4, 2013

We’re afraid of all the wrong things.

Sermon

In October of second grade we lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. The teachers at the Mulberry Street Elementary School drill us on getting under our desks, crouching down on our knees, putting our hands over our heads. That was how we were to weather a nuclear missile attack. I was scared. At night I would listen in fear to every plane that flew overhead. I waited for the engines to sputter like they did in the movies when a plane dropped a bomb. I waited for the whistling sound of the bomb falling on Statesville, NC. Sometimes I pictured the bottom land where I rode horses burned and black. I saw myself wandering the streets not able to find my mama or my sister. Even then I knew dying wasn’t the worst of it. Children spend a lot of time being scared.

I was scared of bees, too. I’ve spoken about the time I opened the door of my mother’s station wagon while she was on the highway, ready to jump out because there was a bee buzzing against the window by my face.

Fear can serve a purpose – it moves us out of situations that might be dangerous. It spurs us to protect ourselves, keep deadlines, use discipline in our behavior. It can make us stupid, though. “Fear is the mind-killer,” goes the quotation from Frank Herbert’s Dune. ” rest of the quote: ” I must not fear. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Some people like to be scared. Horror movies where scary men threaten beautiful women. Those movies wouldn’t work if the scary guy was threatening middle aged men, or ordinary looking people, or dogs. I’m not sure why we love to see beautiful people screaming. The news. Awful things happen. Horrors occur. Goodness happens, and humans help one another, but many factors go in to what stories are chosen for the news. I majored in political science, more particularly in the media at Duke, and we learned that one of journalism’s credos is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Good news just doesn’t sell papers, or generate clicks on the web site. Stations in the northeast run stories about how awful things are in the Southeast. Stations in the south run stories about how awful things are in the northern cities. Stories are most likely to be covered if the news people are there already, which is why the coasts figure prominently. News people love stories about themselves, so when the President doesn’t let the photographers follow him onto the golf course, you will have a couple of days worth of stories about that.

The stock central character in a lot of scary news stories is the black man. You see men of color being perp walked into the police station, you see their mug shots. When white collar criminals bring the world’s economy to the brink of collapse, none of them is photographed with their wrists cuffed, none of them is shown trying to escape police. Sometimes they are not prosecuted at all. This is a complex issue, but I want to point out how dangerous it is for black men, who can’t take a run at night, who get pulled out of their cars and rousted even a few days ago when their car is a police-issue black SUV and they are a New York City Police Chief, and who are in danger of being shot by law enforcement. The incident occurred as the NYPD is under fire for record numbers of pedestrians being stopped and frisked, the majority of them black or Hispanic. Some 145,098 people were stopped by the NYPD in the first quarter of this year.

Now we black men and we families of black men have to be worried that we will be shot by neighborhood watch people with guns. Our stereotypes can be deadly.

Another scary character is “the government.” I know a woman who says the government has wave machines that send waves over crowded places to lower the electromagnetic vibrations of the people so they will be angrier, more fearful, thus more easily controlled. She’s very nice, but that’s nuts. No government I’ve known has been that sneaky or well organized. Some people say that the media are keeping us scared so we won’t look at the corporate culture that eats up our family lives by making us work harder and harder, our culture that plagues middle class families with consumer debt because our minds are controlled to work more, work more, to buy more, buy more. I think that is giving the media too much credit for organization and malice.

People make money on our fears of someone breaking into our houses, even though we are much more likely to be hurt by the other people locked into those houses with us. They make money on our fear of identity theft, and it happens, but we’re more likely to ruin our own credit and good name than someone else is.

All of us have fears. Some of them serve their purpose, but some of them get stuck, and they are changing our chemistry, shortening our lives without doing us any good. Sometimes they make the thing we’re scared of worse. I raised two children on not very much money, so I got scared of bills. I just stopped opening them. That did not make them go away. In fact, that fear of opening mail cost me money.

Some practical suggestions on how to be brave. Some coaches suggest you keep an imaginary room in your mind where you keep outfits that will help you. You go in there and put on the accountant’s suit, and do your bills. You put on the fencer’s uniform and mask and go into the business meeting. You put on your wizard’s robes and sit down to write your book.

A less fanciful suggestion is made by (oddly) Merlin, in The Once and Future King. You heard me tell the children. Learn more about it. If you get a bad diagnosis, learn all you can about it. If you have to go through bankruptcy, learn all you can about it. If you are afraid of a certain kind of people, learn what you can about some individuals in that group. Some people are scary, but you can’t tell the scary ones by what group they’re in.

The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

Many people are afraid of terrorists in our country, and we should definitely defend ourselves against terrorism, but when you learn a little about it, you learn that:

You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack

You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack

Number of persons killed on American soil so far this year by terrorists: 3.

Number of persons killed on American soil so far this year by toddlers: 5.

We are scared of our children being gunned down at school, or being killed in a terrorist attack. Horribly, it happens. But learn more. We lose 5 children a day in the US in abuse-related deaths. We are scared to walk at night in our neighborhoods, scared to hike in the woods alone. We are scared to die by the hand of someone breaking into our home and murdering us.

We are scared to be killed by ricin or anthrax. So know this: We will be more likely be killed by driving too fast or eating too much fat or sitting on the couch night after night, resolving to exercise rather than actually exercising.

Here is what I am thinking. We’re scared of the wrong things. We lock our car doors and take our kids home to where the guns are. We tell them all about being wary of strangers, and we forget to tell them about protecting themselves from uncles and cousins. We don’t let our neighbors into our lives and shut ourselves off so there is no one to turn to when we’re in trouble. We are scared of people who are different from us, we don’t want to know them, we worry that they want to rob or rape us, we’re also worried that lunging to lock the car door will hurt their feelings.

Isolation is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us alone. Ignorance is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us at home, associating only with folks of our same nationality, class and color. Rigidity is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us from bending, growing, changing in a supple way. Missing life is greatly to be feared, but our fears lock us down into a narrowness of experience that sucks the marrow from our bones and leaves us dried up husks in nice brick homes with satisfactory retirement funds. Looking like a fool is greatly to be feared, but our fears make us keep silent when we should speak up and talk to much when we should be quiet. Yeah, we are scared of all the wrong things.

If you find yourself afraid of something, get to know it. check out its reality. Do some research.

Get to know yourself. Don’t ignore the violence in your own heart. Or in your own home.

Take the anti-racism course here in the fall. Increase your cultural competency. Practice seeing individuals rather than members of a group.

Encourage people not to be afraid. Even being afraid of Cancer doesn’t help. Many people overestimate their odds of getting it, and studies show that the greater a person’s fear is, the less likely they are to go to the doctor for timely diagnosis and treatment..

Take a small action to make things better. Most of you are doing that already. If you want a way to do it, talk to me or to Jack, our Social Concerns chair, and we will try to set you up. Refuse to be afraid. Refuse to be afraid.

Take a small action to make things better. Most of you are doing that already Refuse to stay afraid. Refuse to stay afraid.

Fearing Paris
by Marsha Truman Cooper

Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.

All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.

Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside,
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.

Just to be on the safe side
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then the danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.

You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris First.”

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 16, 2013

The sermon topic is “salvation.” What does the word mean? Is it something we want? How do we get it? We have yielded the ground on words like this to the more traditionally religious communities, but we really can go there. It will be okay.

Last fall this church held an auction, and one of my contributions was that people could bid to request a certain topic for a sermon. One person won the bid, and then another person paid that as well for his request. “God the Huntress” was one “auction sermon,” and I preached that last February. This one is “Salvation.” What would a UU view of salvation be?

Most sermons start with questions. What does “salvation” mean? What are the views of the religions in which Unitarian Universalism has its roots? Are we being saved from something? Saved for something? Are we broken, in need of some kind of fixing or are we good the way we are?

I’ll start with the word. When it is translated from the Hebrew, the language of the Jewish scriptures, it has the connotation “to keep alive,” “to redeem,” “to deliver.” In Greek, the language of the Christian scriptures, its root is “sozo” which means to save, to rescue, to deliver, to protect. “Sozo” is also translated in the New Testament with the words to heal, preserve, save, do well, and to make whole.

There is a range of meanings in the word “salvation,” from being delivered from something, kept safe, rescued, or healed. It has to do with the endpoint of the soul, with a state of being that is clean and free and peaceful.

Even though the word from the auction question comes out of the Jewish and Christian traditions, I would like to range farther afield into a more ancient religion to see what it was its adherents were trying for. I suppose the most ancient religions are the earth-based ones that Christian scholars call “fertility cults.” You find yourself in this great world and you have to feed your children, which are formed somewhat miraculously inside your bodies. Well, the female ones, anyway. Of course, matters of how to stay alive will be at the forefront of your thinking. Sometimes the berries are thick and sometimes they don’t grow. Sometimes your children are healthy and other times they are in trouble. Is it something you did? Can you do the things that will make everything good? Are there spirits or gods involved who want certain things? Do they need to be reminded to make things grow? Do they need to be appeased to make your childbirth go well, to give the hunters luck with the hunt? In this system, keeping the gods awake and appeased so that things happen well would be what was most desired. Salvation would have to do with being in favor with the earth and the sky so that your life is sweet and your children live.

In the middle east, Judaism was stirring between two and three thousand years BCE. Its main teaching was that there was one God, and that the best way to look at things was not as an endless cycle, the view of earth-based religion, but as a timeline with a beginning, a middle and an end. The primary relationship was not between the people and the Earth, it was between the people and the God. A person was called to be righteous, doing what the God said to do, but as the religion developed though the time of slaver, through the Exodus from Egypt, and the time as the people of Israel, Salvation was seen, not as an individual matter as much as it was that the people of Israel were to be redeemed as a whole. What redemption meant in that context was that they were free from oppressive rule, that they were keeping the Torah, the commandments, living righteously and pleasing to God. In the Jewish Scriptures, you are righteous even when you fall. The righteous person can sin, can fall, can disobey, but the righteous get up again and keep their faces turned toward God. Hope continues for the salvation of the people, and for the healing of the world.

In the earliest Hindu Scriptures, the Vedas, which come from about the time of the Exodus, the beginning of the Jews as a people, the main concern is for doing things in the right ways that would appease the gods so life would be good. Later on, in the Upanishads, the concern becomes more about how to attain eternal peace, how to get enlightenment. The earliest Upanishads were being written around the time that Buddhism was beginning, around 500 BCE. Both Hinduism at that time, and the new offshoot, Buddhism, were concerned less with how to make sacrifices to the gods and more about how to understand reality and the self in order to let go of the rollercoaster of happiness and suffering. How to come into peace. That peace would be the understanding of salvation from the Hindu and Buddhist point of view (and I want you to know I am painting with a very broad brush). Salvation is getting to the point where you are no longer weighed down by either good karma or bad karma. Karma is the energy generated by actions. You are born the last time and then escape from the endless wheel of rebirth. Some sects of Buddhism believe that you can be helped along the way by borrowing some of the good karma of the saints, or bodhisattvas. Others teach that you are on your own, doing good deeds to build merit for a better reincarnation each lifetime until you achieve release from the endless round of rebirth is salvation.

For most segments of Christianity, salvation means being rescued from the punishment due you for your individual sins. This is the system of thought I know the most about, having spent my childhood in a Christian family and studying for the ministry for three years at Princeton Seminary. Some Christianities teach that humans are born in sin. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians believe this. The action of God is necessary to lift you into salvation, which basically means you get to go to a place called Heaven when you die. Methodists believe that humans are born good, and that they can choose to do good or bad things. Even if you aren’t born in sin, you still choose to do bad things, and you need forgiveness. The teaching of most Christianities is that salvation comes from understanding that the death of Jesus the savior atones for your sins, as he took our punishment on himself to save us. So your sins are paid for. Forgiven. Paid for?

My father is a Presbyterian minister who has studied the Bible long enough to come to believe in Universal salvation. That God doesn’t send anyone to hell. That makes him a Universalist. He says “look, your sins can’t be both forgiven and paid for. If I owe you ten thousand dollars, and she pays you on my behalf, then my debt is paid for. If you say that you will forgive my debt and it no longer has to be paid, then it’s forgiven. Either one or the other, but not both.” He preaches that Jesus died, not , our sins, but he died because some people killed him. God forgives us with or without that, and also forgives those people for killing him. In that view, salvation comes from God’s forgiveness. You aren’t rescued from the consequences of your actions, no one teaches that. You are rescued from any kind of eternal separation from God because of your actions.

For Islam, the most recent religion we’re looking at (if we count Unitarian Universalism as starting back in the third century with the Arians “heresy) salvation has to do with going to heaven. You get to heaven if you believe in God (Allah) and in his message, Islam. If you just believe in God and not in Islam, your fate is in God’s hands. There is no heaven for people who don’t believe in God.

For Unitarian Universalists there is no danger of hell. People can create hellish lives for themselves and for one another, but it’s here in this life that hell is felt. If there is no hell, there is nothing from which to be delivered, except for our own guilt and regret over promises broken and damage done. Grace consists in forgiving one another, and in forgiving ourselves. Grace can be a realization, an insight that frees our thinking and feeling. It can be another person allowing us a fresh start, not holding our actions against us. Grace can be a touch from a book, a piece of music, a view on the hiking trail, a line from a movie that puts something into a new perspective. It can happen when someone else cleans up a mess you made. It can happen when someone decides that you are more than the mistake you made. Sin is, in Buddhist language “out-of-joint-ness,” in Christian language “missing the mark.” Both concepts have to do with something not fitting, not in harmony, not working the way it should. Unitarian Universalists have a sense of sin when we break promises, when we do not act out of our better selves, when we drink bottled water, or, worse, toss our empty water bottles in the trash. We have a sense of sin when we drive gas-guzzling cars or judge someone for something we’re supposed to tolerate. Sometimes we do things that are worse — – when we are abusing substances, being cruel to family, willfully turning our thoughts away from things we know we should be paying attention to. How do we get made whole from those things? How do we forgive ourselves, which is often the hardest step? Salvation, for us, means being made whole. It’s a process having to do with getting better and better at doing what we say we’re going to do. With our chosen spiritual practice, we get more stable, more emotionally disciplined, more sturdily rooted. With practice in compassionate and loving relationships, we get better at both giving and receiving love and compassion. We ask forgiveness for what we do wrong, and we make amends the best we can. What is salvation, wholeness after death? No one knows. Read “the Green After.”

Today I have too many friends who are dying. Sometimes at a Unitarian Universalist memorial service I feel dissatisfied-and I’m the preacher in charge. I think: What is going on that I can’t figure out how to preach my view of resurrection?

I know that people would want to hear it; I’m not worried about offending or confusing anyone; and I treasure the ability to speak the plain truth as I see it. The plain truth is no one knows for sure what happens when we die. That’s not a very stirring thing to proclaim at a funeral, though, honest as it is. We all have some kind of belief about it, even if that belief is that there is nothing after we die.

The reason I haven’t preached it yet is because when I call to mind my belief about the afterlife, it comes to me as a color.

At a camping weekend with friends, we were nestled in a clearing on a mountainside. Most of the folks were around the campfire, talking or dozing. Our chef was in the cooking tent, grilling and gossiping with his fiancŽe and a couple of others. I love those people, and they love me. Being surrounded by love is one fine way to spend your time. I wandered off to the hammock, and lay there looking up at the sky through early April leaves.

I was soaked with light, the blue of the sky, the green of young leaves, the sun shining through them like stained glass. I thought, “When I die, I want to have my ashes buried under this tree, so that for one spring after another my body can be part of this particular green.” I could feel my life flowing through the cells of a leaf, feel the leaf opening to the warmth and the light, feel myself part of that green, and I was happy.

If that is my afterlife, I will be deeply happy.

The hope of that afterlife doesn’t take any leap of faith. I know it can happen. The minerals and the water in my body can be soaked up through the roots of that tree. A part of my body will be unfurling, green in the sun.

My soul may be somewhere else. Sometimes I think my soul will float in an ocean of love. Will I recognize old friends, family, who have gone on ahead? I don’t know. I think I will know they are there. I will know this: there is not now nor was there ever any separation between us. I will know that they were with me as strongly when I was alive as when I’m part of the leaves.

The green of a new leaf, lit from behind with the spring sun-that color stays inside me, a glowing place of peace, the certainty of remaining part of life. During a memorial service I see that green, I feel that peace. It’s hard to preach a color, but I’m going to think of a way.

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 9, 2013

We hear in songs that love is a rose. We read the poets, who say life is a rose. From Rumi to Emerson to the Grateful Dead, the rose is used to evoke beauty, pain, the ephemeral nature of life. It’s summer, and the roses are blooming.

Reading: The Greening Breath

The new house we moved into has roses blooming all along its sunny southern side. Mama told me roses were hard to grow, so I never tried before, but here they are, and I like watching them. A medieval Christian mystic named Hildegarde of Bingen wrote: ” ……the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it.” Watching my roses, I see that greening breath moving up slowly through the stem, sending energy through the tips of the leaves as they uncurl, gathering in what they need from the summer sun. Hildegarde said: “The soul is a breath of living spirit, that ……permeates the entire body to give it life.”

I find myself wishing for that greening spirit in my soul this summer. The heat drains the life out of me. Some days I just drag around, crabby and overwhelmed. I see people on TV having cookouts, rafting down refreshing rivers, enjoying places I can’t afford this year. I know that comparing my life to life on TV is a no-win practice. When I’m hot, it feels like everyone else is graceful, loving, patient, financially savvy, organized, with animals who do what they are supposed to do. They do things a little at a time rather than letting them pile up. When it’s hot, everything is too hard. Or maybe I’m too soft. I can’t tell. The greening is hard to feel in summer, for me, but I see my roses feeling it.

Sometimes I wonder if it hurts to bloom. I know scientifically, that doesn’t make sense, but suspend disbelief for a moment and picture this: if you were a rose, and this were your first time out, would you be having fun being a bud, all curled around yourself, feeling hugged and tight, knowing what’s what? You are soaking up the sun, being gently tossed in warm wind, and suddenly everything starts to loosen up. Your petals are letting go! They are moving apart from one another! Do you try to hold on, try to grab for the edges and keep the changes from happening? Maybe you think to yourself, “I don’t understand this, but maybe it’s what’s supposed to happen.” You allow the once tight petals to move apart. Does it hurt? Does it cause anxiety? Do the buds think they are falling apart or do they know they are blossoming ? The roses seem to accept each stage with grace, but how do we really know that? Maybe we just can’t hear them screaming.

Are you evergreen, stable, cruising through the seasons, level and confident? Are you dry as a stick, all thorns, wondering whether any life is left in you at all? Are you uncurling in high anxiety, wondering if you are falling apart? Are you letting go, surrendering, hoping that this falling apart will lead to blossoming? I’m going to try to trust, imagining that whatever is happening is what is supposed to happen. Maybe that is true or maybe it’s not, but it is a stance I’m going to try out for a while. The shoot, the stem, the flower, then the seed, all in their own time.

I love that image of a rose bud, tightly curled, beginning to loosen and just going into a panic. “Help! What’s happening? My petals – they’re coming apart!” What the rose blossoms into is so lovely that it has delighted humans and ants and aphids and many other creatures for millions of years. The oldest fossils of roses, 32,000,000 years old, found in Colorado and Oregon, resemble more the East Asian roses than the American ones of the present day. The first record of the kind of roses we know best is a highly stylized one in a fresco at Knossos in Greece; it dates from the sixteenth century B.C. E. Maybe they come from East Asia. The Goddess Lakshmi was said to have been born from a rose that had 108 large petals and 1008 small ones.

From ancient days, the rose has been a symbol. A symbol is a thing that stands for something else, often something abstract and multi-layered, hard to understand. With its thorns and its beauty it makes an excellent stand in for many abstractions.

What is both beautiful and painful? What lifts the heart and pleases the senses but also can hurt you? What, in life, is welcoming and forbidding at the same time? Some would say “Life.” Khalil Gibran says: The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose – Kahlil Gibran.

You could say “creativity.” It certainly has its joys, but there is self-doubt, the mystery of when the muses are with you and when they’re not, and there is often lack of appreciation or criticism of what you produce. Progress would be some people’s guess. You try to change things and make them better, and there is always resistance, there is always conflict and failure that you have to get through. Progress has its beauty and its thorns. When most people think about what is beautiful that can also make you bleed, they say “love, of course!” The rose has been a symbol of love from ancient days. Sacred to the goddess Venus, whose Greek name is Aphrodite, the rose naturally became a symbol of the female face of God that the Christians brought to history: Mary, the mother of God. They say the rosary was called that because the beads were first made of the pressed-together petals of roses, in her honor. Lots of baby girls are named Rose Mary, Rosemarie…. After Mary, the rose of heaven.

The rose is love, all right. Pure love: white roses. First love: pink roses. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old Time is still a-flying – Robert Herrick, urges young women in To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time True love: red roses. O, my love’s like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June – Robert Burns , A Red, Red Rose

Cheating? Yellow roses. When I learned that it made me sad; the split rail fence at my grandfather’s farm was covered in yellow roses, and I have thought since then that they were the most beautiful.

One friend saw my sermon topic and told me about a poem by Walter de la Mare that ends: “Oh, no man knows, through what wild centuries, roves back the rose.”

Many wild centuries ago the rose was a sign of silence and secrecy. The word sub rosa “under the rose” referring to the demand for discretion whenever a rose was hung from the ceiling at a meeting or fastened to the door of the room where the meeting took place.

The number 5 is associated with the rose, as it has five petals in each layer. In mystery traditions, five represents the four elements plus Spirit. Also, a human being when standing with arms outstretched has five “points.” Geometrically, the rose corresponds with the pentagram and pentagon

The rose has linked them with the 5 senses. In an absolute sense the rose has represented the expanding awareness of being through the development of the senses. Many people touch smell and even taste roses. I don’t know what they sound like, but there could be people who hear them….

Politics and the struggle for justice is a prickly business. A red rose held in a hand is a symbol of socialism or social democracy: it is used as a symbol by the socialist or social democratic parties of many countries. This began when the red rose was used as a badge by the marchers in the May 1968 street protests in Paris. In the early 1900’s James Oppenheim had written a poem that was used in a textile strike in MA. “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.”

You Grateful Dead fans know that one of their best-known albums is titled “American Beauty.”

In an essay for the book Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. David Dodd Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs talks about how often the rose shows up in their songs. “The rose is a metaphor waiting to happen, and peoples have always ascribed to it some aspect of the mystery of life.” In the words of Robert Hunter: ” ‘ I’ve got this one spirit that’s laying roses on me. Roses, roses, can’t get enough of those bloody roses. The rose is the most prominent image in the human brain, as to delicacy, beauty, short-livedness, thorniness. It’s a whole. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life, than roses.” Jackson, Grateful Dead: The Music Never Stopped, (p. 152-153)

Dante uses the rose as a symbol of the whole universe, with its swirl of many petals a representation of the expanding cosmos.

The rose is such a rich symbol that it can hold many meanings. One woman I know imagines, when she is going into a difficult situation, that she is covered in roses. You are welcome to try it if you like. I do when I remember, and it’s quite pleasant. The rose has been working on the human brain for untold ages. It helps us. “I know this rose will open,” we sing. Rumi says:

“In the driest whitest stretch of pain’s infinite desert, I lost my sanity and found this rose.”

Are you evergreen, stable, cruising through the seasons, level and confident? Are you dry as a stick, all thorns, wondering whether any life is left in you at all? Are you uncurling in high anxiety, wondering if you are falling apart? Are you letting go, surrendering, hoping that this falling apart will lead to blossoming? I’m going to try to trust, imagining that whatever is happening is what is supposed to happen. Maybe that is true or maybe it’s not, but it is a stance I’m going to try out for a while. The shoot, the stem, the flower, then the seed, all in their own time.

“Slowly blooms the rose within……….”

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 2, 2013

Our stories tell us who we are, where we’ve been. They let us know what is expected of us and what we can expect. Sondhaim says “Beware the tales you tell, the children are listening. Your tale is your spell. The children are listening.”

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 5, 2013

“Right Action” is the next element in our series on Buddhism’s Eightfold Path. We avoid suffering by doing the right things:
1. not harming anyone or anything,
2. not taking what is not given, and
3. not using our sexuality in a destructive way.
Doing these things doesn’t make you “bad,” Buddhism just asks you to notice what brings happiness and what brings suffering.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April, 28, 2013

Fiery and Fearless: Olympia Brown. Rev. Olympia Brown, a suffragist, is seen as the first woman to graduate from theological seminary, and the first woman ordained to full-time professional ministry in the U.S.

I have preached a few sermons on Unitarian history. Here is a little slice of Universalist history for you. The Universalists are a Christian denomination of people who believe in the divinity of Jesus (which makes them Trinitarian as opposed to Unitarian) and the love of a God who would not send anyone to hell. This is the story of a woman Olympia Brown, born without a lot of patience, who had lost it all by the end of her life. This is the story of a woman who got a lot done, the story of a person who, like all of us, had good times and hard times. This is a story of a person living her soul. This is the story of one way social justice happens.

The first of four children, Olympia Brown was born in 1835 to Universalist pioneers in Michigan. After beginning her education in a schoolhouse her dad built on the farm, Olympia went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In first year English, the instructor assigned in-class orations and readings, stating “all of the young men will be required to give speeches before the class. “The young women must bring manuscripts to class and read from them.” Many believed women inferior public speakers to men, and unable to recite from memory. Olympia did not argue, but when her turn came the next day, she delivered a rousing oration with her manuscript rolled up in her hand. Olympia and other independent young women caused Antioch continuing consternation. In the mid-1850s the Amelia Bloomer dress came into fashion, a sort of pants-skirt combination, comfortable, practical, and scandalous, as it only reached halfway down the calf. Apparently a woman’s ankles had the power to cause great excitement! Bloomers let the young women move freely, so they could run and climb stairs quickly. Olympia always wore her Bloomer dresses as a student, and ignored the ridicule she received from the many outraged Yellow Springs students.

Physical education was not available for Antioch women in Olympia’s day, and she and her friends took long walks for exercise. When the college president found out that young Antioch women were seen in nearby towns laughing, running, and talking noisily, he sent to Boston for a professional chaperone. No such person had been hired to watch the men, so Olympia and her friends expressed their displeasure by teasing the poor woman relentlessly — in German. The chaperone lasted a week.

She and other students invited Antoinette Brown to come speak. Antoinette Brown was a Congregational minister who had gone to Oberlin. “It was the first time I had heard a woman preach,” Olympia said in her autobiography, “and the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as though the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand.” She decided she wanted to be a minister, and finally found one seminary that would admit her. It was a hugely radical thing to do on the part of the seminary.

It was not the Meadville Theological School in Pennsylvania, which on June 16, 1861, sent this response to her application: After apologizing for having kept her waiting for a reply, a Mr. Stearns wrote: “were it my private concern, I should say at once ‘come!’ I have no prejudice against a woman’s studying anything she can or against a woman’s speaking in public. From what I’ve heard of you, I’d be glad to have you for a pupil and more like you. But I have no right to commit the Institution to a new course of action.” I heard that a lot too, as a young seminary graduate, interviewing with search committees. “We have no personal sense that women shouldn’t be ministers,” they would say, “it’s just that my congregation would have difficulties. They’re not quite ready…”

Finally Olympia received a letter from Ebenezer Fisher, president of the Canton Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University advising her to study Greek there and board with a private family. He confirms September 25, 1861 as the beginning of her study. This was one of only three theological seminaries in the Unites States that would admit women students. At the end of the letter he adds: ” It is perhaps proper that I should say you may have some prejudices to encounter in the institution from students and also in the community here. Nothing very mighty or serious, I trust…The faculty will receive and treat you precisely as they would any other student. My own judgment is that it is not expedient for women to become preachers, but I consider it purely a question of experience and not at all of right–the right I cannot question. The other matter of expedience or duty I cannot decide for you. I am willing to leave it between you and the Great Head of the Church. (For the few of you who may be confused by that, he was talking about God, not the President of their denomination!) If you feel He has called you to preach the everlasting Gospel, you shall receive from me no hindrance but rather every aid in my power.” (June 21, 1861) Quite amazing, actually, for a man of that day. I head much the same thing from fellow students at Princeton Seminary. They would say “I’m so concerned about your feeling that you have a call to the ministry. Can you tell me what the story of that is? Can you tell me why you feel you would be a good minister?” In other words, “justify yourself.” Women students were asked to justify their presence daily. Some of the male students were there (and this is no fault of theirs) because they weren’t sure what else to do, or because someone had said “You have such a nice voice, you should apply to seminary. Here, let me help you fill out the application.” I’m sure there are places where men have to justify their existence every day too. It makes you tough. You have to be determined. Olympia Brown was determined.

No woman at the time, most books say, was ordained by more than one local church. No woman was ordained with the full authority of a whole denomination, which is what Olympia Brown wanted. She thought this would be a step in women’s access to authority and roles in decision making. When the Northern Association of Universalists were in session, she successfully presented her case for ordination.

When she was ordained in June 1863, Dr. Fisher, who had had such doubts about her coming to St. Lawrence, participated in the ceremony. He participated in the ceremony. That makes him a hero in my book. Rev. Olympia Brown later paid tribute to Dr. Fisher, saying: “This was the first time that the Universalists or indeed any denomination had formally ordained any woman as a preacher. They took that stand, a remarkable one for the day, which shows the courage of these men.”

The way it works is that the ones without power have to push and push and be told they are rude. They have to put up with folks acting like they are crazy or thoughtless or disloyal for pushing for change. Again, this isn’t the fault of individuals as much as it’s the way culture is. When you are Ôout of line,” when you are calling for justice, you all know that first they ignore you. When that doesn’t work and you become a little more powerful, they begin to ridicule you. Next, when you have more people gathered to your side, they begin to fight you. When you prevail, they say they were with you the whole time. In fact, it was their idea. Someone on the inside has to have the courage to stand up, to stand with those asking for justice if justice is to be done. You have to have help from the inside.

The Presbyterians did not ordain women untill 1955, the Episcopalians in 1973. The Roman Catholics, not yet. The denomination I grew up in, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church? Not yet.

1864 she was called to her first full-time parish ministry in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts. At this time Olympia Brown became active in the women’s rights movement, working with Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and other leaders. She and the people in that first church loved one another. It was not so with her next parish, a Universalist congregation in Bridgeport, CT. More about that in a moment, but first, her husband.

While still in Weymouth, she’d met John Henry Willis, a member of her congregation’s Board of Trustees, and they married in 1873. She “thought that with a husband so entirely in sympathy with my work, marriage could not interfere, but rather assist. And so it proved, for I could have married no better man. He shared in all my undertakings.” As did Lucy Stone, Olympia Brown kept her maiden name, with Willis’s agreement. It was a most felicitous marriage. When her husband died, unexpectedly in 1893, she wrote: “Endless sorrow has fallen upon my heart. He was one of the truest and best men that ever lived, firm in his religious convictions, loyal to every right principle, strictly honest and upright in his life,….with an absolute sincerity of character such as I have never seen in any other person.”

Her ministry at the Bridgeport church seemed to have been one fraught with peril from the start. It was a struggling church, the only kind then open to having a woman minister. There is a letter written to her that first year begging her not to leave, as this parishioner felt the church is just starting to prosper under her guidance. He regretted the difficulties she had encountered in the past year, but was optimistic about a brighter future and noted that, “with one exception, all are satisfied with your course.”

That one was a Mr. James Staples, “a bitter agitator,” who stepped up his pecking away at her ministry “like a raucous crow.” When she took a leave of absence for the birth of her first child, ministers were brought in to preach who would say to anyone who would listen, “What you need here is a good man.” Despite the efforts of her many supporters in the church, including PT Barnum, she was able to stay there only six or seven years, before he ran her off and split the church. Churches suffer when the raucous crow doesn’t get shut down by members craving the health of the church. She had lots of support, even powerful help, but apparently James Staples was allowed to continue pecking away at her. I wonder if anyone in that church said to him “You are not just hurting our minister and her family, you are hurting the church when you do that.” Perhaps they did and he kept on. Perhaps this was the reason it was a struggling church when she got there. It was split and weakened when she left. She was strong and mighty, and she endured for seven years.

She and her husband moved to Racine, WI, where he published a newspaper and ran his own printing business. Olympia was pastor of the Good Shepherd Universalist Church in Racine, WI. It was a disheartened church, apathetic and broke. She was asked to come turn it around. Under her leadership they perked up somewhat, and it was a happy time for the family. Both of their children became teachers: Henry Parker Willis was professor of banking at Columbia University and key in writing the Federal Reserve Act, and Gwendolyn Willis taught classics at Bryn Mawr.

At the age of 52, immersed in the fight to enfranchise women in WI, she left the full time ministry Women could vote there on matters pertaining to the schools. Olympia and her fellow suffragists were of the opinion that every vote eventually had something to do with the schools. They won the fight, but two months later the new law was overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Gwendolyn Willis describes her mother as “indomitable and uncompromising, traits that do not lend themselves well to politics and leadership. She cared little for society, paid no deference to wealth, represented an unfashionable church, and promoted a cause (woman suffrage) regarded as certain to be unsuccessful. She was troublesome because she asked people to do things, to work, contribute money, go to meetings, think and declare themselves openly as favoring a principle or public measure.” (Olympia Brown: The Battle for Equality, Charlotte Cote, Mother Courage Press, 1988, p. 171) Thank goodness we have some folks like that here too!

No longer having the patience for a state-by-state campaign, Olympia joined the militant “Woman’s Party.” I belonged to this party before I was born,” she declared. At the age of 82, in 1917, she was one of 1,000 women who marched in freezing rain and strong winds, picketing the White House to make known to President Woodrow Wilson their demands for a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. Many of the marchers chained themselves to the fence in front of the White House when the police came to break up the demonstration. June 1920, when she was 85, she marched to demonstrate at the Republican Convention in Chicago.

Later that year women were granted the right to vote. Of all the pioneers, Susan B Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Olympia Brown was the only one who lived long enough to cast a vote in a Presidential election.

Asked to preach, near the end of her life, at her former church in Racine, she testified to the importance in her life of Universalism, “the faith in which we have lived, for which we have worked, and which has bound us together as a church. . . . 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 ideal, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for the noble duty and made the world beautiful for you.”

After the suffrage victory, Brown dedicated herself to promoting world peace and became one of the original members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She died in 1926 at the age of 91. In the Universalist Church of Washington DC, a plaque honoring her reads:

Olympia Brown
Preacher of Universalism
Pioneer and Champion of Women’s Citizenship Rights
Forerunner of the New Era
THE FLAME OF HER SPIRIT STILL BURNS TODAY.

May it burn within each of us, when we feel a call, when something needs to be done. May our sense of a loving God sustain us, or our faith in the strength of justice and truth uphold us, may we honor those among us who have the fire. We need them.

Watch the streaming video of this sermon on First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin’s Facebook page.

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 7, 2013

Immigration is an issue that is getting a lot of attention in the public arena. What are some of the elements to consider? How does our stance relate to First UU’s goal of being an intentionally hospitable church?

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 31, 2013

There are dying and rising gods all over human history. What might the resurrection be about?

This morning Christians in this congregation and around the world are celebrating Easter, the day of the resurrection of Jesus, when in the Christian faith story, he became not only Rabbi Jesus the teacher, but Christ, the savior of humanity. Often, joining with our Christian brothers and sisters, I preach from a Christian perspective on Easter. This year we are going to look together at the story of Ishtar. The holiday was probably named, not after her, but after a Germanic version of her named Eostra, goddess of the dawn and new beginnings. Her name is similar in many cultures. Astarte, Ashtaroth… these were traveling and trading cultures, and it is likely their stories would have traveled with them. There is even a moon goddess in pre-Columbian culture around what is now Guatemala named Ix Chel, whose consort is a rabbit. They share a similar story: a voluntary descent into death and darkness, of having everything stripped from you, then emerging transformed.

This faith story comes from the ancient lands of Sumer and Babylon, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, modern day Iraq. This five thousand year old story begins as Ishtar is born from the full moon as it touched the river. The first full moon after the spring equinox, that moon we saw in the sky this week, became known as “Ishtar’s egg.” As the poem about her descent into death begins, she bends her ear toward the underworld. The word in Sumerian for “ear” and for “wisdom” is the same, so you could say she was puzzling about the underworld where her sister, Ereshkigal lived. There was a funeral going on there she wanted to attend. Getting ready, she puts on seven things: a dress, earrings, a breastplate, a necklace, a belt, or girdle around her waist, bracelets on her wrists and ankles, and a crown. She leaves her consort, the shepherd king Dumuzi, or Tamuz, and their two sons. She leaves her temples where people worship her, and she arrives at the outer gates of the Underworld. There she announces herself as “Queen of Heaven, on my way to the East.” The chief gatekeeper of the underworld is skeptical and questions her. She replies that she wishes to descend because of her older sister, Ereshkigal, and to witness the funeral rites of Ereshkigal’s husband.

The gate is opened a crack, and the attendant asks her to take off her crown. When she asks why, he answers: “Quiet, Ishtar, the ways of the Underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.” At the second gate the earrings are removed from her ears, at the third gate the necklace from her neck, at the fourth gate the ornaments from her breast, at the fifth gate the girdle from her waist, at the sixth gate the bracelets from her hands and feet, and at the seventh gate the covering cloak of her body. Ishtar protests as each symbol of her power is taken from her, but the guardian says this is the experience of all who enter the domain of death. When her sister sees her she is enraged, and she turns on Ishtar the “eyes of death,” inflicting on her diseases, judging her harshly, insulting her and accusing her. On a meat hook in her sister’s chambers, her corpse hangs like rotten meat. Three days she is down there. Her faithful hand servant, a warrior woman and advisor, charges two small animals with going after her disguised as flies, the lowest form of life. “You will hear the bitter queen of the underworld lamenting, moaning in pain as if she were giving birth. Moan with her and she will favor you. She will want to give you a gift – ask for Ishtar’s corpse. Sprinkle the body with this food and water of life, and she will come alive again and return with you.” They did as she asked, and Ishtar, alive again, was allowed to return with them to the land of the living. Attached to her, though, were two demons, who demanded that she send back a replacement for herself in the underworld. Returning to her palace she found Dumuzi /Tammuz the shepherd ruling, not having missed her. Suddenly she sees the perfect one to give to the demons. His sister, desperate to help him, offers herself, and they each end up spending six months in turn in the world of the dead.

Ishtar and Tammuz are among the many another dying and rising gods, along with Osiris, Dyonisius, Krishna, many of whom were conceived by a virgin, born in a cave, threatened with death when they were babies, and adored as having saved the world with their suffering. Ishtar’s worshippers in the land between the rivers would rise early on the day of the full moon after the equinox and greet the sunrise. Then the families would go hunt eggs, Ishtar’s eggs. They told the children these eggs came from the rabbit in the moon.

I’m not giving you this information to say “Oh, those silly people who believe this literally….” I’m telling you that the archetype, the pattern of dying and rising is engraved deeply in the human psyche. We don’t only see it in nature, in the lives of our bodies. We see it over and over in the course of our living. This story is of hitting bottom, of having the things that matter to you stripped away one by one. Many people in this room have had times like that in their lives, where everything was taken, where they were attacked by their dark inner sister, accused, destroyed, immobilized. There are heroes and sheroes among us: the people who have done the descent. They have hit bottom. They are not afraid of losing everything, because it has already happened. Maybe they have lost all their money, had their children taken from them, maybe they have lost their sanity. Marianne Williamson, renowned spiritual teacher, says a nervous breakdown is a highly underrated way to achieve enlightenment.

The Easter story is the story of losing everything. You are sick in your body or your spirit. Hope seems absurd. Part of you has died. You’re in the dark. Suddenly someone sends a tiny thing down there to help. Does it help by cheerleading and telling you everything’s going to be okay? No. It helps by joining in the moaning of your bitter and angry side. Then a little food and water sprinkled on the dead meat might make it begin to stir. You have been in the tomb and now you emerge. Is it just a human dynamic? Is it just about grass and corn? Is it about the earth or about the earth and more? A liberal Christian humor magazine called The Door offers a liberal Easter hymn. The words say “Jesus Christ is risen today, alleluiah…” in the title they have crossed out Easter and written ‘pretty yellow flower day.” In the verse, they cross out is, and write “may or may not have,” so it reads “Jesus Christ may or may not have risen today.”

I suddenly wanted to title this sermon “Your mama’s a pretty yellow flower.” How can they scorn a flower when it goes through the same things Ishtar did. The same things any dying and rising god does. It has to abandon its beauty, first losing its petals one by one, then its stem turning to slime, it seeds buried in the cold cold ground for a time, the water there tormenting it until it bursts open, then struggling back to the surface, through the dark, being tiny and vulnerable until it grows into its beauty again. That’s a rough journey. Our babies today have had a journey through darkness as well, closed up inside, then going on a harrowing journey to break in to the light. And we will all go back to the earth when our time has run.

As faith stories these proclaim that the Divine One is willing to descend, to empty herself of her power and suffer with us, that as she emerges she conquers the power of death, teaching us that there are pathways from here to there, and the great round continues to be danced. Behold the mystery: All that dies shall be reborn. May it be so in our lives.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 17, 2013

Sometimes you are halfway to a good answer when you finally formulate your question in a helpful way. What are some ways to come up with better questions?

SERMON: GOOD QUESTION

Great teachers are always asking questions. They know that if you give people the answer before they even ask the question, it’s a waste of breath. Socrates is famous for asking questions, so were the Jewish rabbis, so were Jesus and Buddha. This morning, picture me giving you a brightly wrapped box. As you open the box, out spill a pile of smaller presents. Those are my gifts to you this morning: some of the best questions I know. A good question can open your mind; a good question can make you think things you never thought before.

In my work as a therapist for the last twenty years, I can say therapy is certainly a question-driven process, from “How can I feel better?” to “What should I do now?” to “Why does watching movies with monkeys in them make me nuts?”

Sermon writing, much of the time, is a question-driven process. Often the sermon explores a question one of us has. Also, one of the ways I write a story or a sermon is to picture myself in the congregation or in the audience and ask “what would I want to hear about this subject if I were you?”

I had a religion professor at Duke who was in love with questions when my friends and I in the campus Christian organization were in love with answers. He had his work cut out for him. We kept trying to give answers to the ethical dilemmas he posed. He would shake his head impatiently and say we were going to the answer part too fast. I wasn’t used to getting C’s. That’s what I got on his midterm when I answered his question, which was something like “Talk about the meaning of life” by talking about my understanding of the meaning of life. I was frustrated, angry, confused. I thought “Fine, I’ll show him!” The final exam was, I think, “what is the meaning of death?” I answered with all questions. I mean, every sentence was a question. I got an A. I also learned something: I learned how much fun it was to ask question after question, and how one question led to another, and another.

If you have the right question, you are more than halfway to a good answer. If you are asking the wrong question, then you will get stuck. Lots of people come to couples counseling at first asking the wrong question. “How am I being controlled?” “What can I do to change you?” “What is wrong with you?” “What are my rights here?”

Better questions for couples are: “What part of my anger is anger at myself?” “How can I understand you better? How can I help you feel heard and understood? How can we both feel safer with one another?” Other good therapeutic questions can be: “What is your problem doing for you?” “What scary changes might occur if things got better?

When we do a child dedication in my church, I ask the parents “What is your job description for this child? So many of us grow up not knowing what is required of us. The default setting for this is “we just have to be perfect, then we will get our parent’s blessing.’ When you ask parents what they want for their kids, most of the time they will say “I just want them to be happy — you know — have a happy life.” It’s strange, then, that their kids have this sense that they have to be perfect. Anyway, it’s good for both sides for the parents to ask themselves that question. “What do we really want from this child?”

Asking questions is the thing to do when you are in disagreement with someone. Not like “What’s WRONG with you?” But “Tell me more about what you think about this. ” ” What led to you feeling like this?” Try to understand what they are saying before you try to make yourself understood.

If you are feeling attacked or misunderstood, a good thing to do is be quiet for a minute, breathe, and ask this question: “What are you doing?”

I was a chaplain in training at Walter Reed Army Hospital. My trainer was a wild man who asked great questions. If you answered him with “I don’t know,” he would look at you for a second or two and ask “Okay. And if you DID know, what would it be?”

Sometimes the gift of a good question can trick that inner mule you’ve got. Of course, you may not have one. it might just be me….

Another teacher, years later, asked me if I could figure out a system for doing laundry or something. “Oh, I don’t figure out routines very well,” I said. She looked at me somewhat sharply and said,” So — if someone paid you 1,000 dollars to figure that out, how might you do it?” WOW, that made it clear immediately!

What question are you dying for someone to ask you? Is there one? I would like to close with of my favorite questions: Think about a problem with which you are struggling in your life.

THE MIRACLE QUESTION
If you woke up and your problem had disappeared, how would you know a miracle had happened?
How would you behave differently? (be as precise as possible)
How would your family and friends behave differently?
How would they know a miracle had happened?
How would they see the differences in your behavior?
Are there parts of the miracle that are already happening in your life?
How did these things happen?
Can you get more of them to happen ?

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 3, 2013

The second element in Buddhism’s Eightfold Path is “Right Intention.” Your intention is the lodestar by which you steer your life. What is that, given your understanding of life, you intend to do and be?

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

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