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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 21, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In this ongoing sermon series about differences, this Sunday we’ll look at the difference between Protestants and Catholics. When did the Protestants split from the Catholics and why?

The history of the Christian religion goes back to the days after the death of Rabbi Jesus. He had been a teacher in the Jewish religion, showing the people how to be righteous, what love looked like, redirecting their attention to what was important: loving God and loving your neighbor. His followers were confused and disheartened. 49 days after the first day of Passover, 49 days after the events leading to Jesus’s execution had begun, the disciples grew inspired and encouraged to go spread the word. Accounts of this event, called Pentecost, say tongues of flame rested upon their heads and they began to speak in tongues. One kind of literal mind might say that there were actual flames on their heads, and another kind of literal mind would say it was probably just that someone said “hey, I have an idea!” and since there were no light bulbs back then to “appear” over someone’s head at the arrival of a bright idea, they spoke of flames. “Let’s go speak to other people in other countries about this!”

So the story began to spread. The authorities tried to stamp it out. One of the first persecuters was Saul. He traveled far and wide to execute Christians until he had a dramatic conversion experience and started to spread the word with more dedication, skill and privilege (being a citizen of Rome) than anyone else had done before. The disciples had been preaching a reformation of Judaism, so if people wanted to become followers of Jesus, they had to become Jews first, which meant circumcision. This made recruitment more difficult than it needed to be. Saul, who had changed his name to Paul, said no one needed to become Jewish first, that you could go straight from being a worshipper of Diana and Zeus to being a follower of Jesus. This is what made it a new religion, which, in the Roman world, had little to do with its roots in Judaism. Because Paul worked all over the Roman Empire, whose center was Rome, Rome became the center of the new religion. After 300 years of persecution by the emperors, the Emperor Constantine made it the official religion of the empire.

Lots of Gospels had been written, stories of the origins and teachings of Jesus. There was a Gospel of Thomas, a Gospel of Mary, a Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Many teachers were interpreting the story and making rules about how people should think, act, and believe from a combination of Jesus teachings, found in all of those gospels (the earliest of which was written about thirty years after the rabbi’s death), and their own thoughts. Arguments among the followers of the various teachers grew so virulent that the empire itself was losing its peace. “Get yourselves figured out!” Constantine demanded. “Decide what you believe and teach that and make everybody stick to it. No more fighting!”

The first Church Council, to decide these matters, was held in the year 325. They chose four gospels, and wrote the Nicene Creed, which is recited in Roman Catholic churches as a statement of belief. Many councils were held after that, continuing to the present day. The councils determine what is orthodoxy (the teachings the mainstream churches agree on) and what is heresy (the answers declared to be wrong by the councils.) The church evolved, absorbing local pagan holidays, continuing to develop dogma and traditions. With the fall of the empire, the barbarians came in. People didn’t learn to read. There was war and pestilence. Some of the priests learned to read, and so the knowledge of what was in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures was spotty. Whatever the priests said was what the religion taught. All authority was with the Pope. Many of them were fine people but some were corrupt and power hungry. Fighting for authority and power with the kings and queens of various countries caused turmoil. Crusades were expensive. In 1054 the Eastern Orthodox Church split from the Roman Catholic church. That’s a story for another sermon. By the fifteen hundreds, one of the fund raising techniques was the sale of “indulgences.” This was a corruption of what indulgences were, originally, when they were not sold, but given in recognition of good works or a pilgrimage. By the middle ages, the process had been corrupted. Instead of doing the penance for your sin you could pay a priest to do it for you. He would say the prayers and you’d be in the clear. That devolved eventually to some folks being able to buy indulgences before they even committed the sin, just to have the penance in the bank. This practice was one of the targets of protest.

The protest began in 1517. A priest named Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet disputing the efficacy and power of indulgences, called the 95 theses. Legend says that he nailed it to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. The Reformation of the Church had begun. The growing number of protesters were called Protestants. Just as the Arab Spring could not have happened without the Internet, the Protestant Reformation could not have happened without the printing press. Books began being printed in Europe (although the technology was invented in Korea in the 1300’s) in the mid 1400’s. A goldsmith name Gutenberg invented a printing press which could turn out 3600 pages a day. He printed a Bible in Latin. Educated people began reading it for themselves, and discussing what they found. It was no longer enough for the priest to say it was so, people wanted what the priest said to agree with what the Bible said. The Protestants had many differences with the Catholic Church. They liked plain sanctuaries, without stained glass or statues to detract from focus on God and the Bible. They would rampage through Catholic Churches and smash statues with the righteousness of the Taliban.

In the early days, you could say Protestants had three main points where they diverged from Catholics.

1. Sola Scriptura: it is only by the scripture that we learn about God. Ministers teach that word, and the sermon is the center of the worship service. How churches have done things throughout history has very little weight. / in the RC, Orthodox and Episcopal churches, church tradition and teachings is given equal weight.

2. Sola Fide: It is only by our faith that we are saved from hell. All you have to do is believe correctly and you will go to heaven. You are supposed to do good works and be righteous, but your actions and works are not what get you to heaven. It’s Jesus’s righteousness which is laid around you like a cloak. In gratitude for being saved you are a good person./ non Protestants need to do good works in addition to being believers in order to be saved. You have to go to Mass, give a tithe, not sin badly.

3. Sola Gratia “By grace alone.” You can’t decide to have a saving faith, it is given to you by God’s grace. Your righteous deeds are nothing, you are good as a gift of God’s grace. No priest can bless you, only God blesses with any authority. Denominations differ on how much you participate in your salvation. If it’s none at all, you have baptism of infants, because even adults don’t have any partnership with god in their salvation, so why not baptize you when you’re a baby? If it’s a partnership, if you have choices, they wait until the age of reason to baptize you. You can walk up to the rail for communion. In denominations where they want to remind you that you have no part in your salvation, the communion comes to you as you sit in the pew. We’ll talk more about that if we talk about the differences among the Protestant denominations.

Unitarian Universalism is closer to Protestantism. We have roots there, as we do in the early Christian heresy of Arianism (which we will talk about in another sermon in the “what’s the difference?” series: Trinitarian and Unitarian). Like the Protestants, we don’t have priests. We believe in the priesthood of all believers. That shows up, even in something as simple as the animal blessing, where the blessing doesn’t come from the minister, but rather from each of us, all of us reading the blessing together. We center the worship service on the word and music rather than on a litany recited by a priest. Our sanctuaries are usually plain. Sometimes we light candles, which feels too Catholic to some and feels good to others. Sometimes there is a committee that decorates the sanctuary with art, although that feels too fussy for some and delightful to others.

Unlike Catholics or Protestants, we center authority in the individual in relationship to community. Not in the Pope, not in the Bible.

Light of ages and of nations
“Singing the Living Tradition” – Hymn 190

Light of ages and of nations,
every race and every time
has received thine inspirations,
glimpses of thy truth sublime.
Always spirits in rapt visions
passed the heavenly veil within,
always hearts bowed in contrition
found salvation from their sin.

Reason’s noble aspirations
truth in growing clearness saw;
conscience spoke its condemnation,
or proclaimed eternal law.
While thine inward revelations
told thy saint their prayers were heard,
prophets to the guilty nations
spoke thine everlasting word.

Lo, that word abideth ever,
revelation is not sealed,
answering now to or endeavor,
truth and right are still revealed.
That which came to ancient sages,
Greek, Barbarian, Roman, Jew,
written in the soul’s deep pages,
shines today, forever new.

Unlike Catholics and Protestants, we do not say that revelation of truth about God and humanity is “sealed,” set. We believe it is ongoing. We can always learn more. Our theology evolves as our understanding evolves. As science, art, morality, law and culture evolve, so does our understanding of what is important, what is required to be a good person. No one book or person has the answers.

We bless one another. We call religious professionals to teach, preach and administrate, but they are not more holy than anyone else. Our minds can change. There is no eternal punishment for being wrong in your beliefs. We think through our beliefs and check them with the community. Our actions don’t save us, but we hope they go some way toward healing the world. Our hope is in love, in action, in justice, in one another, and in that mystery which shows up, bidden and unbidden, to surprise us with insight, connection, joy and grace.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 14, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What kinds of love are there? What makes love good? How do you know if you love someone? How can we get better at love?

Years ago I worked in an office with Pat, a friend and co-author. Pat talked about love all the time. He preached in a country church and got complaints from the members about how all he talked about was love. “Love, love, love,” one of the elders would say, frustrated and derisive. “That’s all you talk about.” The mailman, Perry, would come every afternoon. A tall bald man with a mustache and skin the color of coffee, Perry would wave as he came in with the mail. “Hey, Perry!” we’d say. On his way out, he’d give a little salute. Pat would call out, “WE LOVE YOU, PERRY!” I’d see Perry through the glass door, smiling and shaking his head a little.

Whenever Pat would tell me he loved me, I would say “Yeah, yeah. You love everybody. What does that even mean?” He’d say it meant that he felt positive feelings about someone, that he wished the best for them, that he wanted the light to shine on that person, that he’d keep their secrets, unless telling them would get a laugh in public.

I thought love was something to be handed out with care. Somewhere I’d gotten the idea that love meant putting someone else’s needs above your own. I had two small boys I’d have given my life for, some animals I’d loved wholeheartedly, a few best friends. I loved Pat, but if it were him or me, it’d have to be him. You know what I mean?

Thinking about this again has been one of the ripples made by a little book called The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The Japanese author talks about her things as if they were alive. You don’t want to tie your socks in a knot in the drawer, she says. They have worked hard for you, bearing your weight, living between your feet and your shoes. After you wash them, put them tenderly in the drawer to rest, in a way that’s not stressful for them. I was charmed by this, although I thought it would be exhausting to go around thanking things as if they were alive. Then I realized I didn’t know why this would be exhausting, so I thought I’d experiment for a few days. The first thing I bowed to and thanked was the coffee pot after pouring my mug of espresso. Next was the pink tulips on the kitchen table. I thanked my socks, but I decided they liked being knotted up in the drawer all cozy and undemanding.

As it turns out, thanking things was not a zero-sum activity. The more thankful I was the more thankfulness I felt. I thought about Pat, and about the people who say the more love you give, the more you have to give. That works unless you believe love means you have to put other people ahead of yourself if you love them. I realized I don’t believe that any more. I don’t even know where that belief came from. Not from the Bible, which is poetic and very sensible about love. The most famous passage about love is I Corinthians 13. “Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.” Loving like that would take toughness and commitment, and I can’t go to “enduring whatever comes,” having worked with battered women for years in South Carolina. The rest of it is something you can really work with when trying to figure out what love is, and if you love someone right, and if they love you right.

I think that idea of putting others ahead of yourself comes from a medieval idea of “courtly love,” which is an idealized love, a noble love that has very little to do with having a relationship with the object of your love so much as it has to do with performing services for the beloved. You love them in a romantic and idealized way, you shine your love on them like a beam, and they consent to receive it.

Real love has to do with a day to day negotiation of whose needs take precedence at which time. Your well being is affected by theirs, so it is mutually beneficial for both people to be doing as well as possible.

Is this true just for partners or is it true between parents and children, friends and other beloveds? We only use the one word, “love,” to describe how we feel about a spouse, a house, a cereal, West Texas, and all kinds of things. As most of you know, the Greeks had four separate words for love. There is unconditional love, agape. This is used in the Christian Scriptures for the love of humans for God, and the love of God for humanity.

Eros is passion, being engulfed by beauty, stunned and lit up by desire. It is mostly, but not only, for lovers. You can feel that way about nature at times, too, art and music, dance. Lit up and carried away. It’s a powerful energy. Philia is affection between equals. Family and friends, the way you love going to the movies or hiking. Storge is also used for family love, but it’s a love out of duty, loving them because what are you going to do, they’re family. It has a strong whiff of just putting up with it.

If I no longer believe that I have a limited amount of love to give, maybe the more I love, the more love I’ll have to give.

And if I were a sweet and earnest minister, I’d end there with a comment about loving the people and things that come my way, and we’d be in a pink hearts and candy mood because this is Valentine’s day, but I can’t do that. Because that’s depressing. You know why? Because it’s not true. And lack of truth is depressing.

Love is hard. I don’t care whether you are loving a friend or a child, a brother or a lover, love is hard. You worry if your love is enough for them. You worry whether you are lovable enough, and are they just fooled into thinking you are? You worry about messing up the relationship or being drained by it. You worry because your loving them doesn’t seem to be enough to make them stop taking the pills or drinking, it’s not enough to keep them always safe.

Having real relationships is about talking in an openhearted way with someone who could break you. Letting go of being mad, or well defended with sarcasm and an ironic remove. It means struggling to understand them before being understood by them. It means doing what you say you’ll do and trusting them to do the same. It means making decisions to leave if a heart connection isn’t possible or if they love drinking more than they love you.

Children are scary. You don’t know what can happen to them. You worry that you’ll break them. What will you do if one of the tigers: addiction, violence, derision, mental illness, physical illness, accident leap out of the forest as they are walking innocently by and snatch them into a place where you can’t reach them?

Some among us feel loved, and some feel unlovable. If our parents or care givers were unwilling or unable to give us love in a way that we could feel it as love, we tell ourselves the story that it must be because we are unlovable. None of us is unlovable.

Love won’t fix everything. You will find that UUs sometimes declare that love will fix people, situations, behaviors. Love is a power and it can do a lot but it can’t fix everything. Some things can’t be fixed. Sometimes we love broken people. It is heartbreaking. Still, we must not protect ourselves from heartbreak by holding ourselves aloof from love. Our hearts, by the end of our lives, should be scarred and full, broken over and over, tenderized.

The Painted Drum
– Louise Erdrich,

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 7, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We all feel anger from time to time. What good does it do? Is it always harmful? How do we handle it when it burns through us?

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Forgiveness

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 24,2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our covenant says when we fall short of that to which we aspire, we should forgive ourselves and each other and move on. What is involved in that? How do we begin to forgive ourselves?

I knew a man who had worked for an asphalt paving company. The owner, he said, would drive any new work truck he’d just bought into the work yard, gather the workers around, take an iron pipe, and hit the side of the truck hard enough to make a dent. “This is a work truck, boys,” he’d say. “Don’t worry about a few dings.”

We want to keep things nice. You make a new friend, you start out in a marriage, you build a new church, and you want it to stay nice. Your new friend tells a secret to someone else. You have a fight with your new spouse. You spill grape juice on the rug in the new sanctuary. Everything is ruined. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Forgiveness is the way into the good part of the relationship, the useful part of the building, the working partnership with the truck. Our relationships are working relationships. Our church is going to be a working church, a useful church. Your marriage is a working truck with dings that remind you of where you might have been more careful, or where you worked out something important.

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen Anthem

Every heart to love will come but like a refugee. We seem to try everything else first. We are driven out of the land of perfection with the people we love, because we can’t be perfect and neither can they. Sometimes we tighten down and attempt to live in the land of control. We are driven from the land of control and we let go and live in the land of despair and cynicism. When finally we flee that land, because it’s dry and inhospitable, we come to love. Or maybe our path is tracked through different lands, the land of need, the land of dependence, the land of rescue, but we finally come to love. Then we leave again, or forget, but we come back, if we’re lucky and wise, over and over to our spirit’s home, which is love. How do we live with the cracks? How do we live with the cracks in our own expectations of ourselves? One of the ways is by the practice of forgiveness.

Forgiveness helps us move forward. You have a piece of ribbon in your hand. Thing of something you need to forgive. Maybe someone wronged you. Maybe you have to forgive yourself for something. Tie a knot in the ribbon to represent this knotty thing which needs forgiving.

How do you do it?

You don’t have to wait for the person who wronged you to apologize. You allow yourself to look at the damage your resentment or hatred is doing or will do to you. Nelson Mandela famously said “Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die.” You forgive because it’s better for you, better for those around you, and better for the planet. What does forgiving mean? It means not dwelling on the wrong that was done to you. It means to tell the story that hurts the least. If the story you are telling yourself about what happened was that this person must despise you, or that they don’t love you, or that they think you’re stupid, tell a less hurtful story, like that they were hurting, or they were careless, or that they were blinded by anger or pain. Tell the story that helps you let go. When you let go of what they did to you, does that mean you forget about it? No. You don’t necessarily forget about it, because that would leave you vulnerable to being hurt and damaged again. You forgive, but you may need to remain aware that they can’t be trusted with a secret, or you can’t let your kids be around them, or you may need to make a boundary with them, for example, you might say you will no longer talk to them about a certain topic, or you won’t talk to them if they have been drinking. You tell the least hurtful, most understanding story, and you draw boundaries. This doesn’t mean what they did was fine. It was hurtful. You are forgiving for you and those you love, so you can move on and not drag this thing along with you.

One of the most striking examples of forgiveness happened last June in Charleston, SC. Families of the nine shooting victims told their stories, expressed their pain to the racist white boy who had pulled the trigger, and then told him they forgave him. At first it made me mad. I pondered why they would choose to forgive? Was it that they were radically following their Christian faith? Was it because Black folk have been so terrorized in the American South that they know if they rose up and poured into the streets, violence would continue to rain down? Who am I to say? They named it as faith and they prevented further violence. Out of respect for them, I take them at their word. The horror followed by such a shining show of grace got the confederate flag taken down. I think they were right to forgive. I would like to think I could do that. They certainly are inspirations and teachers for me.

Jungian teacher Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “Forgiveness seems unrealistic because we think of it as a one-time act that had to be completed in one sitting. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. It is not all or nothing, if you can do a 95% forgiveness, you are a saint. 75% is wonderful. 60% is fine. Keep working/playing with it. The important things are to BEGIN and to CONTINUE. There is a healer inside who will help you if you get out of the way. For some, temperamentally, this is easy. For some it is harder. You are not a saint if it’s easy, not a bad person if it’s not easy. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.”

What about when you can’t forgive yourself? The story of what you did or didn’t do, the movie of the damage done runs through your mind on a loop. You may start to feel that you don’t deserve to have a good life, people who love you, that you have nothing good to give. One way to get started is to realize that if you can’t be understanding with yourself, you can’t be understanding with others. If you can’t treat yourself fairly and with love, you can’t do that for others.

Acknowledge the wrong you did. Ask forgiveness from the person or people you hurt. Make amends if you can. Then let it go as much as you can. Using the same techniques as with forgiving someone else, when you find yourself dwelling on it, gently put your thoughts on something else. Tell the least hurtful story about it you can, as long as it’s true. Come to the wisdom that there is good and bad in everyone, and just because you did something hurtful doesn’t mean you are a bad person. You are a human person. Getting stuck in something you did wrong is useless and harms you. Ask yourself if your best friend told you they had done that thing, what would you say to them? Be as understanding and loving with yourself as you would be with your best friend. Try to do better.

Resentment prayer. Start to untie the ribbon if you want to. Begin. And continue.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 10, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“What’s the Difference?” This is the first in a sermon series on differences between one historical, political, or spiritual perspective and another. In this installment, we’ll look at the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam.

This text was created by talk to text, so any spelling incongruities, any sentences which contain ridiculous content are due to the fact that my telephone misunderstood the words I used. In addition to that, these are simply the notes for the sermon, not the sermon itself. Click the play button above to listen.

The sermon itself can be seen on the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin Facebook page. The podcast is also available on iTunes.

Sermon

Muhammad was born in what is now Saudi Arabia, in the town of Mecca, in 570 ce. His father died 6 months before he was born, and then his mother died when he was 6 years old. He lived with family, with an uncle, learning to be a merchant, and grew up as a member of that powerful merchant family. He married, had children, and used to go to the mountains to a cave on a solo retreat once a year. The angel Gabriel began talking to him on those retreats and the things Gabriel said, Mohamed memorized and told to a few people who started following him. The main thing that Gabriel had to say was that there was only one God. This was quite different from the culture surrounding Mohammad, where every rock, tree, and River has a spirit. Animism is the name of that religion. Sometimes people call it polytheism.

The first visit from Gabriel came in the year 610. Muhammad was 40. His followers began writing down the things he would tell them, and that is what became the Quran. After 3 years of quietly speaking to his followers, Muhammad began to preach in the town of Mecca in the year 613. He did not only preach that there was one God. That would have been fine with everyone, I guess. He preached that all the other gods and images of the gods were idols and should be destroyed. People did not receive this sweetly, and his followers began being killed. Muhammad would have been killed too, but he belonged to that prominent family and had privilege that kept him alive. In the year 622, Muhammad took his wife and children and fled to the town of Medina. This is known as the Hegira, and it is celebrated with rituals at the the first day of the Muslim year.

In Medina, Muhammad continued to preach and gained more of a following. Threats against the Muslims continued, but the new religion spread. Its is unclear how much of its spread was due to good ideas and how much was due to the followers of Muhammad behaving somewhat like an army, threatening and the lives of those who did not convert. All of the perspectives, I imagine, describe this process somewhat differently. The people of Mecca, losing prestige as Islam began to grow, launched an attack on Medina in 625, defeating the Muslims. 5 years later, Muhammad returned with an army of 10,000 followers conquering Mecca for good. By the time Muhammad died in 632, Islam had spread through the entire Arabian Peninsula.

Muhammad’s death created a terrible problem, he had not appointed a successor as leader of the Muslim world, which now numbered in tens of thousands of followers. Who was to teach the true meaning of the religion? Who was to hold the authority for the faith? He had been the father of many children, but only one, Fatima, had lived to adulthood.

The largest group of followers thought that the elite of the faith should choose the next leader, or caliph. This is the way the Pope is chosen and Roman Catholicism: the elite vote. This is what the majority envisioned, and they thought the best successor would be the father of one of Muhammad’s wives. This man’s name was Abu Bakr.

The second, smaller group thought that authority should be handed down through the family. They wanted Ali, Fatima’s husband, who was also a cousin of Muhammad’s. The bigger group won, so Abu became the caliph. Ali watched from the sidelines, and his supporters simmered. Abu got sick and died, and before he died he appointed another successor, who was the second caliph. The second one, also conquering more territory, including Persia, ruled for 10 years before he was assassinated by the Persians he had just conquered. Abu has not only appointed his successor, he had appointed his successor’s successor, who then took over as the third caliph, and ruled for 12 years before he was assassinated. So the first three caliphs, Abu and the two successors that he appointed, ruled for the first 25 or so years after the death of Muhammad.

After the assassination of the third caliph everybody agreed that Ali, the original choice of the people who thought it should stay in the family, should be caliph. . He ruled for five years, and everybody was reunited and it felt so good. Ali, the choice of the people who voted to stay in the family, appointed his son Hassan to be the fifth caliph. Unfortunately, he was soon overthrown by another person from the group that saw the elite should decide who ran the place. This split the group for good, and while the majority followed the rebel who had overthrown Hassan, the group that felt that the divine line should run through the family followed Hassan’s son, Hussein. Since they had wanted Ali from the beginning, they counted Ali as their first leader, and they called him an imam, Hassan was their second and hussein was their 3rd imam. The first three choices of the majority group had just been a delay.

The 7th Caliph of the majority group beheaded Hussein, and the minority group started following the son of Hussain. All of this happened in the seventh century, and this is at the root of the split today. The majority group are the Sunnis and the minority group are the Shiites. Both sides of this division are all over the world. The Shiites are running iran, In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was in the Bath party, which is a branch of the Sunni. The people who run Saudi Arabia are a fundamentalist sect of the Sunnis called Wahabi. ISIS is a Sunni group.

It seems to me that the main point of the split is the question of where authority resides Is authority conferred by the vote of the group or is it conferred by God through making the next leader be born to the current leader? This may seem petty but when you are searching for answers to questions like how to pray, how to eat, how to die, what to forgive, but not to forgive, how to keep your society in line, it becomes very important that your answers have the weight of authority. If you don’t believe that your leaders have been chosen the correct way, their decisions do not have that weight and society disintegrates.

This whole story is a lot longer, but I’m going to stop here for a moment and bring the focus to us. The Sunnis and the Shiites are living in a polarized world. Is there any polarisation in our world? The latest studies show that 33% of Democrats would be horrified if their children were to marry Republicans. It is 49% on the Republican side. What is that all about? Why does it sound odd when someone stands in the middle between the Republicans and the Democrats sees sensible policies on both sides? What does it sound strange when are Democratic politicians say that some of their dear friends at work are Republicans, and they are trying to work together? We are used to mocking one another, washing our hands of one another, imagining one another as misguided and foolish, and describing one another that way. We are not beheading each other though, which is good.

Most of us do like a simple framework from which to see the world and understand it. We grab on to one that works for us and we use it as a lens through which to interpret things that happen to us and other people. The lens tells us how the world should be, and how to get from here to there. For some people the way to get from here to there is to stamp out everybody who disagrees with our plan. This is seen by that group of people as a strong stance, unambiguous and pure. Other people think the way to get from here to there is to discuss, to compromise, to explore, maybe two use several different lenses through which to view things. Both ways can be helpful and both ways can be useless.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin has a very famous essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox. He divides human beings into two groups. ( By the way I like people who say there are two kinds of people in the world, this is he divided people that have two kinds of people and those who don’t.) Anyway, Berlin says that there are hedgehogs, who stay in one place, and know one thing very well, and look at the world through that one decision they made, or that one over arching article of faith. For example, everything is about love. Or everything is about sex. Or everything is about power. That is a hedgehog view.. And there’s the Fox who knows many things and draws from many sources. It is not a bad thing to have one overarching truth. It is mainly limiting in that it can make you feel that other people need to get out of your way and let the truth be universally accepted. There are hedgehog people who go through the world understanding that the earth is the most important thing, and working on green issues is the most important thing. Everyone else should drop what they’re doing and work on that. If they don’t they are misguided. Other people say that welcoming the stranger is the most important thing and everything should be about that, or everything should be about getting rid of the racist structures of our society or everything should be about the class struggle. Mother Jones famously was against suffrage for women because she thought it detracted from the class struggle. Many of the women during times of the abolitionists were asked to let go of their work on suffrage because the work on abolition was more urgent.

There are hedgehog people and Fox people in all religions. Even within the Sunni and Shia groups, there are multiple varieties from fundamentalists to mystics to fairly secular folks. The problem is that the people with the guns, the people who are using their knives to behead other people are hedgehog people who think everybody who is not like them should be destroyed. Isis is a Suuni group. Sometimes when they stop a bus full of people they have questions that they ask to tell whether someone is Shiite or Sunni. You can sometimes tell by the names. If someone is named after Hassan or Hussein, it is likely that they are Shiite. Not always, though. Mohammed could be either. You ask them how they pray. Sunnis cross their arms over their bodies and the Shiites keep their arms more extended as they rest their hands on their thighs. You can ask where someone comes from, as there are Shiite regions and Sunni regions, Shiite towns and Sunni towns.

The reason Saudi Arabia supports Isis is that both are Sunni. This is why Iran, which is Shiite in its power structure, is helping the US, its enemy, fight Isis, because isis is Sunni. It’s really a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia that we are naively floundering around in the middle of. Because beheadings. And now our ally, our buddy, Saudi Arabia has just done a bunch of the beheadings of its own, horrifying us, but because they are our ally, we don’t say anything.

This is the start of a sermon series called what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Sunnis and Shiites? Now you know. Where does authority lie for us? Within the individual. It is the ring of truth that tells us what we follow and what we don’t. For Christians of most stripes, it is the Bible. For Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Anglicans and Episcopalians, it is both the Bible and the church. Where the authority lies is not a trivial matter. Getting rid of the impurities, waging war against disagreement, this is not a trivial matter either, and we have trouble with it the same way everyone else does. We liberals have the same lust for certainty, the same intolerance of ambiguity, the same tendency to disrespect those with whom we disagree. Stay humble my friends. As I say often to you, that flush of self righteousness is the precursor to bad behavior. Start many sentences with the words “I could be wrong.”

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 20, 2015
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Yule is a holiday that shimmers with elements of different cultures. There has been more interaction among peoples, cultures and religions than we sometimes know.

Call to Worship
From Rainer Maria Rilke

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fire, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!
powers and people,
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.

Meditation reading:
Star Hawk

Hear the words of the Star Goddess,
the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven,
whose body encircles the universe:
“I who am the beauty of the green earth
and the white moon among stars
and the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise
and come unto me.
For I am the soul of nature
that gives life to the universe.
From Me all things proceed
and unto Me they must return.
Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices,
for behold-
all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.
Let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion,
honor and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know Me,
know that your seeking and yearning
will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.
For behold,
I have been with you from the beginning,
and I am that which is attained
at the end of desire.”

Sermon

Good Yule to you all, and Merry Christmas! Along with our sisters, brothers and cousins in all Christian churches around the world, we are getting ready to celebrate the birth of the Baby, the Divine Child, the light of the world. We have all heard the story of this birth. This morning I want to talk about that story as the story of the divine seed in us, the wise baby spoken of in many cultures throughout the world.

In our Unitarian Universalist tradition we try to approach all scripture with respect, and with a broad sense of its possible meanings. One way we can do that is to approach the stories as if they were true in a transcendent way if not necessarily in an historical way. In other words, they tell truths, not about the world of history, but about the world of the soul.

Listen to the story of the birth of the Divine Child Yeshua in Bethlehem. His mother Mary had a visit from an angel who announced that she would give birth to a savior child. When it came time for the birth, the family was visiting Joseph’s home town of Bethlehem so they could pay their taxes. Born before Mary had been with a man, the baby was laid in a manger. Angels and shepherds attended his birth, and some time later three magi came from far off lands to pay tribute to the new king born in Israel. The magi had stopped in at the palace, asking King Herod where the new king was. The wicked King Herod quickly ordered all the males under the age of two in the town killed, so this royal child would not grow up to threaten his power. Warned by an angel to flee the slaughter, Joseph and Mary and their baby went for a time to Egypt, where they were safe.

The story of the Divine Child is repeated in many cultures throughout history. This information should let you know how important this birth story is, what the writers were saying about the baby by including these elements. They were saying he was a god-king, in a code the people of that time would hear and understand.

The Egyptian God Horus was born of the virgin Isis; as an infant, he was visited by three kings.

In Phrygia, Attis was born of the virgin Nama.

A Roman savior Quirinus was born of a virgin.

In Tibet, Indra was born of a virgin. He ascended into heaven after death.

The Greek deity Adonis was born of the virgin Myrrha, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. The Buddha is said to have been born of the virgin Maya, who was impregnated by a white elephant putting its tusk into her side. Those stories are from 500 BCE.

The most striking parallels are between Krishna and Christ (I say Christ because I want you to hear how like “krishna” it sounds, and also because that is how Christians talk about the divine aspect of Jesus, reserving the name “Jesus” for his human aspect.

Yeshua and Krishna were called both a God and the Son of God.

Both were sent from heaven to earth in the form of a man. Both were called Savior, and the second person of the Trinity.

Their mothers were holy virgins, who had similar names: Miriam (Mary) and Maia. His adoptive human father was a carpenter.

A spirit or ghost was their actual father.

Krishna and Jesus were of royal descent.

“Krishna was born while his foster father Nanda was in the city to pay his tax to the king.”

Both were visited at birth by wise men and shepherds, guided by a star.

An angel issued a warning that the local dictator planned to kill the baby and had issued a decree for his assassination.

Both were identified as “the seed of the woman bruising the serpent’s head.”

Jesus was called “the lion of the tribe of Judah.” Krishna was called “the lion of the tribe of Saki.”

Both were considered both human and divine.

I don’t tell you these things to shake anyone’s faith, in fact, many scholars are now cautioning us about making comparisons between religious stories that are too facile. I’m telling you that there are some similarities to lift up that this is a nearly universal human story that tells a truth about the life of the soul. The story of the Jesus, the Divine Child, has all the elements of every divine/human being’s story: Born in a miraculous way, threatened after birth but saved, visited by those who could see his light, a precocious child… the temptation, death and resurrection are part of all the stories too, but that is not what we are talking about here. In fact, what I want to talk about is the Divine Child in each of us. I want to say that maybe we are all divine and human at the same time.

The image of the Divine as a baby is so rich. I invite you to let go of your hold on the Judeo-Christian God you believe in or don’t believe in. Open up to an understanding of the Divine as Love, as Light, as Spirit. When God is a baby, no one has to fear Him. No one has to tremble before His wrath. No one has to wonder what they have done wrong, how they have disappointed Him. The thought of a baby lets you start new, before anyone got a picture of what you are like. Before you got defined and diagnosed. Before you made any mistakes, before there were any misunderstandings.

A baby love, a baby light, a baby spirit carries within itself all that it will become, like an oak within the acorn, like a mighty river that starts as a spring welling out of the earth in a high and quiet place. The light starts as a tiny sliver, something you care for, something you nurture, you are careful with it. You delight in it.

What if this is a story about the soul entering the world of our body? The light of spirit and wisdom, the Divine Seed (to use a traditional Unitarian phrase) being planted in a human being? Most of the founders of our free religion believed that the seed of God, a tiny sliver of the light, was in each of us. Maybe it enters into us when we are in the dark of our mother’s womb.

Do you sometimes have the experience of the Divine seed glowing within you? Does it sometimes come in a midwinter time of life, when it is dark, when it is difficult to see in front of you? When you are in a time of not knowing, uncertainty? In the dark, even the tiniest light is visible.

The Divine seed, the wise baby, is within all of us, containing the whole of divinity in itself, yet needing to grow.

Antoine St. Exupery says: “the seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground.” (“Flight to Arras”) We have the experience of being able to feel the light, however faint, as it shows us the next step to take. When our souls are seeds “haunted by the sun,” we can grow. Is our soul the seed, or is it the light? Both. Do we long for the Divine, or are we Divine ourselves? Both. Do we search for God or is God within us? Both. That is my belief. You, as always, are free to believe about this what makes sense to you.

In times of confusion and doubt, see us able to visit our soul like the magi, the wise magicians, kneel before it with gifts of quiet, respect and love. We can nurture the light, the seed of God within us. We can protect it from the forces of power over, the forces of fear and control. The Herod power, the light-killing, love-killing power of the outer world (and of our inner world as well.) I wish for you all at this time of the rebirth of the light that the light be reborn in you, that love be cradled in your heart, that your spirit be tenderly cherished.

Here is a poem by the 17th century Muslim Sufi poet Hafiz that says what I want to leave you with:

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender even more deeply
To freedom and joy.
We have not come into this exquisite world
To hole ourselves hostage from love.
Run, my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.
Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

Hafiz

1. William Harwood, “Mythology’s last gods: Yahweh and Jesus,” Prometheus Books (1992), Page 257.

2. Rev. Phil Greetham, “3: Where did our Magi come from?”

3. “Mithra,” Barbara G. Walker, “The Woman’s encyclopedia of myths and secrets,” Harper & Row, (1996), Pages 663 to 665.

4. Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, “The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?,” Thorsons, (1999).

Author Kersey Graves wrote a book in 1875 titled “The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors.” It lists 346 “striking analogies between Christ and Chrishna.”

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 6, 2015

As the choir is singing Bach’s beautiful Magnificat, the sermon will give background on Mary, her words, and the radical social, political and personal layers of this most ancient of Christian hymns.

Text of this sermon is not yet available. Click the play button to listen.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.