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© Davidson Loehr

 10 February 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Here in the midst of the miracle of life, we come to see if there might be a secret to it, a way of living that pays us in a better kind of currency.

Not pay in dollars, but in satisfaction, by helping us find more life, fuller life, more gratifying and grateful life.

Over and over, week after week, we come here to be reminded of the yearnings that hold the key to our hearts and souls.

And we come back because we know it isn’t as simple as just taking someone else’s authoritative answer. We come to hear and feel what might some day become part of our own answer to the perennial questions of who we are, what is worth believing, and how we should live.

The search itself is as sacred as it is frustrating, and it can bless each of us who show up to do the work of self-examination. There is hope there. And, thank goodness, there is also time. There is time for us to learn better how best to live. There is time for us.

Amen.

SERMON: The Parable of the Vineyard Workers

Jesus’ parable of the vineyard workers (Mt 20:1-15, adapted here from the Scholars Version done by the Jesus Seminar) is one of the most intriguing religious stories I know, and one of the hardest to pin down to a single interpretation. So I want to talk about it with you this morning. The Jesus Seminar rated it the third highest among the parables most likely to be authentic – in other words, a story Jesus actually told in something like this form.

I won’t assume you know the story, so will begin by reading it to you:

For the kingdom of God is like a vineyard owner who went out the first thing in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. After agreeing to pay the workers a denarius, he sent them into his vineyard.

And coming out around 9 a.m. he saw others loitering in the marketplace and he said to them, “You go into the vineyard too, and I’ll pay you whatever is fair.” So they went.

Around noon he went out again, and at 3 p.m., and repeated the process. About 5 p.m. he went out and found others loitering about and says to them, “Why did you stand around here idle the whole day?”

They reply, “Because no one hired us.”

He tells them, “You go into the vineyard too.”

When evening came the owner of the vineyard tells his foreman: “Call the workers and pay them their wages starting with those hired last and ending with those hired first.”

Those hired at 5 p.m. came up and received a denarius each. Those hired first approached thinking they would receive more. But they also got a denarius apiece. They took it, but began to grumble against the proprietor, saying, “These men hired last worked only an hour but you paid them the same that you paid those of us who did most of the work during the heat of the day.”

The employer said to one of them, “Did I cheat you? Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Can’t I do whatever I like with my money? Or are you giving me the evil eye because I am generous?”

In other words, the vineyard owner hired people for a twelve-hour workday (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.). Some worked all twelve hours, some worked as little as one hour, but he paid them all a full day’s wage (the denarius was the silver coin that was considered a fair day’s wage for workers). Those who came at the last hour were delighted, but those who had worked a whole day in the hot sun were angry, even though he paid them a full day’s wage, which was what he said he’d pay them.

As you can tell, it’s not easy to know what to make of this. It doesn’t seem at all equitable. Conservative Christians often say that the silver coin represents heaven. Though some of those who wrote the gospels forty to ninety years after Jesus died did have him talking about heaven, Jesus was a Jew who never talked about heaven or hell, just focusing on this life here and now.

When you start reading some of the interpretations that people give this parable, they are absolutely all over the board, which should give you the nerve to give the story your own best interpretation. I want to share some of the ways Christians try to make sense of this odd story, then talk about what Jesus meant by it, and then wonder what we might do with it.

One online skit for two clowns says the point is that we should be happy with what we have – since all the workers agreed to work for a denarius: that silver coin. These clowns say they are hired by churches to come do skits to reinforce the bible lesson.

One of the many large Calvary Churches in the country says that in the Parable, the denarius is Heaven, the glorious payment of God for a whole life’s work of a believer.

God pays with the same coin to those working for 80 years in the church or to the one who repents at the last minute of his life.

But this is fair, they say – for after all, everybody gets to live up above the sky with God in heaven forever. So since the reward is infinite, there is no injustice. That’s at least clever.

An Anabaptist Christian reading doesn’t make it about heaven, but about serving God in this life. This man says: “So, having considered all this, wouldn’t you prefer to be a one-hour worker? Not me! I love the Boss too much! I pity the one-hour worker! He only has an hour to be about his Father’s business.”

He says the point of the parable is Ungratefulness, and ends by saying, “Let’s be so busy serving we don’t have an interest in whining!” This is pretty close to a big Happy Face reading, though I don’t think the original vineyard workers would have bought it.

But what seems worth keeping is that notion that those who spend more of their lives doing God’s work are to be envied because they served high ends rather than shallow or selfish ends. For this interpreter, the silver coin, the denarius, means serving the highest ideals with your life. We all want to do this, and while those who only did it for an hour had a glorious hour, it only lasted an hour instead of a whole life. This man talks about serving life-giving ideals as serving God, and that’s easy to understand whether you’d want to call it serving God or not.

Another commentator says the point of the parable is about answering the call when it comes. For those of us in liberal religion, what that “call” really means is like what the theologian Howard Thurman meant when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Those who use God-talk to talk about these things will call that serving God. But it doesn’t matter what you call that attitude, as long as you can call it forth.

A lot of interpreters get hung up on the money part, and need to spin it to save face for God, because if this is about money, it sounds like God isn’t very fair. One didn’t want to engage this argument, so just said the point of the parable is that there is no room in heaven for people who just want more money or those who are jealous of the few who didn’t have to work very hard for their money.

And this leads to one of my favorite interpretations – favorite in a perverse kind of way – from Paul A. Cleveland, a professor of economics and business administration at Birmingham-Southern College, a man who has converted to the late Milton Friedman’s economic gospel.

He says the point of the parable concerns “The Danger of Presuming the Right to be Treated Graciously.”

“No one has the right to force someone else to deal with them in a merciful and compassionate way,” he says.

What he calls government entitlement programs – like welfare, social security, education and health care – are often called social justice, but he says this parable shows that they are not just, and not what God intends for us.

Furthermore, it’s wrong to have the government provide any social services or welfare, because this “assumes that people have the right to be treated mercifully and that this right is properly established by taking property away from taxpayers.”

In short, “The attempt to establish mercy and charity on earth via the law is not a Christian concept.”

This is the gospel of Milton Friedman. Next month, I’ll devote several sermons to looking at the worldwide effects Friedman’s fundamentalist economic ideas have had on the world since at least 1972, when I spend some time on Naomi Klein’s good but disturbing new book The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. But if you buy an economics of unrestrained greed, it’s no problem to believe that Jesus agrees with you. The truth is, you can interpret these and other stories almost any way you like. How you read them will be determined not by the stories, but by the spirit that possesses and guides you. Your interpretation is usually more about you than about the story. So when we hear these different interpretations, we’re not necessarily learning much about the story, though we’re learning about the interpreters, what they know and what sort of spirit drives them.

The last of these Christian interpretations I wanted to bring you is more in the “can you believe this?” category. It was posted to a chat list, not on this parable, but on the one that follows it. Here’s what the person said:

“I need help for a drama workshop on the Matthew 21 parable of the vineyard where the workers kill the owner’s son. Our church has two workshops per evening, one for younger children and one for older children. Any ideas? I’m burned out.”

Just from these few examples, you should get confidence to try your own reading of this odd parable and all other moral, ethical and religious stories. You couldn’t do worse than some of these, and would probably come up with a reading that you’d have a much better chance of incorporating into your own life.

Now let’s talk about what Jesus meant by the parable. Jesus, we have to remember, was not a Christian, and didn’t talk about heaven or hell. He was a Jew, and talked about living more wisely and fully here and now. So the silver coin wouldn’t represent heaven or any sort of afterlife. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with rewarding Christians, because Christianity wouldn’t be invented until several decades after he died. But the silver coin did represent what Jesus called the kingdom of God.

As I said last week, this was a common phrase used by lots of people at the time – Jews, Romans and later Christians – to mean the ideal world, the best kind of world. Originally, it was all here and now, not elsewhere and later.

And Jesus’ definition of this ideal world was shocking in its simplicity and its radical nature. He said the kingdom of God was one in which we all saw ourselves as children of God, and saw everyone else as children of God as well, no matter what social or economic class they belonged to, and then we all acted on the knowledge that we are all the beloved children of God. So the kingdom of heaven was defined by behaviors, not beliefs. I think this is one of the marks of Jesus’ profundity. Most of history’s great moral, ethical and religious thinkers have said the same: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha and Socrates no less than Jesus. But this is not the way religions usually teach, then or now, as you know. They usually give you an identity defined not by behaviors, but by following prescribed beliefs, sacraments and ritual practices.

And Jesus was clear that this kingdom was not supernatural, wasn’t a thing yet to come through some magic. He said the kingdom wasn’t something that was “coming,” that you couldn’t point to it. It was already here, he said, within and among us, as soon as we see who we are in the kingdom – children of God – and act like it toward others. Like the Buddha, Socrates and other great thinkers he knew nothing about, Jesus put the ball in our court, whereas Christianity – unlike Jesus – gave the ball, the authority, to the Church. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of radical love and compassion between all. And you’re living in it as soon as you act like it. You get paid in full the minute you finally get it. You know people who’ve lived that way for decades, and you must envy them, as I do. And you know others who have finally mellowed, or matured, into that quality recently. It transforms their life, whenever they get it.

If we see it early, we can have most of our life lived in this way. But even if we don’t get it until very late, we get the same quality of life, the same payment, just not as many years of it. So far, Jesus’ meaning is the best of the bunch. It is quite a pretty and poignant vision, but there are some things to question about it.

Jesus was young. He did his short ministry in his early 30s (some of the scholarly estimates now are that Jesus was probably born between about 5-7 BC, and may have been executed around the year 30). Does his vision sound realistic, that the world would dissolve into love? Does this sound like he had an adequate picture of human nature in the real world, or has he left out some terribly important things – like selfishness and power?

Dreams of peace and justice always seem to forget about power, as Jesus also seems to have done. Maybe it’s because those who dream about peace and justice seldom have any real power, so they assign too great an importance to mere ideas. They act as though those with power will just give up as soon as we start being loving. But history doesn’t support that. It shows they tend to see us as patsies, and take even more advantage of us, doesn’t it? Don’t tyrants love most of all those who will forgive them?

Even within a family or a relationship, his radical notion of forgiveness and love can only work where there is mutual love and respect. Practiced unilaterally, it can be very dangerous. As I’ve said before, if you want to see a place filled with people who practice loving their enemies and treating violence with forgiveness, go to a battered women’s shelter.

That kind of love and forgiveness can work within a loving and respectful relationship. Haven’t we all been opened, awakened, by someone in our lives who could forgive us something for which we couldn’t forgive ourselves, and love us anyway? It really can transform you into a more loving person. But if we’re dealing with very selfish, narcissistic or sociopathic people, it just makes us a sucker, and they’ll take merciless advantage of us.

That certainly seems true in politics, economics, history, work relationships and many personal relationships, doesn’t it? Can we say that Jesus’ vision, as beautiful and idealistic as it was, seems terribly naive, and that his dream of an ideal world forgot about the people who aren’t so inclined, and will take their advantages where they can get them?

After all, even in his story, those who worked only one hour had to know it was unfair to be paid for a full day. They just didn’t care. Neither do today’s CEO’s making nearly five hundred times as much as their workers. They’ll take what they can get, gladly. And they’ll always be able to find professors of economics and business who will swear that’s just what Jesus intended. Jesus’ kingdom of God was a utopian vision, and it’s perhaps worth remembering that the word “utopia” (Greek utopos) actually means “no place.”

All that said, however, there are still some things that are right and profound in this parable of Jesus’.

It isn’t about money, it isn’t about beliefs, and it isn’t about heaven. Jesus’ kingdom of God is about behavior, not belief. That’s what makes it a universal vision. It’s about finding a more compassionate, holistic way of seeing ourselves and others, so that we can begin to see ourselves as sacred creatures, put here for only a short time, challenged to find ways to make the time more fulfilling, so we can look back and say by God, I’m glad I lived that way!

That’s the silver coin that we seek. It’s one of the biggest reasons people come to the worship services of different religions. Even though we may not be much into magic or supernaturalism, many people come to sanctuaries like this each week hoping for a miracle: a word, a phrase, an image, an idea, a story or a connection that can open a door for us into a bigger living space.

The questions are always:

1. Who am I, really?

2. What am I serving?

3. Is it worthy of me?

4. If so, am I allowing it a commanding role? Serving it heart mind and soul?

In some ways, this complex parable of Jesus’ presents most of our problem today. We’re looking for the best way to live, individually and together. We believe it can transform the quality of our life if we’re serving the kind of ideals we should be serving. We know we can see the light we’ve been looking for at any time of life – the first hour or the eleventh hour, as this story puts it. And getting it right can make all the difference. We know all this.

But what’s the story that will do it? Jesus said it was a world of radical love and forgiveness. I’ve wondered out loud with you whether this might have been the fairly naive utopian vision of a very young prophet – for he seems to have left out any considerations of power, selfishness and ambition. This left a vacuum that history has filled with centuries of corruption, violence and war sponsored by the churches, and a toxic self-righteousness that has poisoned many families, including some of yours.

Some of life’s problems really do have simple and unambiguous answers that apply to almost everyone: we must work, we must eat, we must either play fair or gradually lose the respect of everyone we know, and so on.

But some questions require personalized answers, and the questions in this story are among them. If the “silver coin” is a life you’re glad you’re living this way, have you found it? How would you describe it? If you haven’t found it, what do you think it would be? Do you agree with Jesus’ prescription? (You don’t have to; arguing with teachers is an honored Jewish custom.) If not, how would you define the “kingdom of God?” What makes you come alive, what makes you feel beloved by God or by Life?

You see, we’re standing here in this marketplace of life, and all these potential employers are coming around, offering us what may be good offers, what may be Faustian bargains. The clowns are here, saying to just put on a happy face and be glad for what you have, no questions asked by golly.

Another says, “Oh, you’re not going to get much now, but if you’re obedient and don’t make waves, then some day you will win big, even if it isn’t until after you’ve died.”

The Friedman economist is here shouting, “Shut up and work! You don’t deserve anything the masters don’t choose to give you!” Some say the work is so satisfying you won’t even mind not getting paid.

Then there’s Jesus, with his idea that if we love one another and love our enemies too and learn to forgive, everything will be fine.

Finally, this preacher comes along who wonders if Jesus was too young and too naive, if just unilateral loving and forgiving doesn’t also make us easy marks for selfish or abusive people who’ll use us like patsies for their own ends.

But like so many good stories, this one is about life. The best stories are always about us, and we are all there in that market place of ideas about how to spend our lives, what kind of silver coin we think is worth our time, our trust, our life.

What about you? What currency could you work for that would make you feel that if this isn’t the kingdom of God, it’ll do until the real thing comes along? How do you find your own path between the whiners and gripers on the one hand, and the abused patsies on the other?

Another day has started. It’s already the fifth hour. What’s worth working for with your heart, with your hands, and with your life?

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Davidson Loehr

February 3, 2008

PRAYER:

Let us have humility in our lives, but let us also not underestimate our own power and authority. For we have far more power and authority in our lives than we imagine.

The Danish poet Piet Hein put this into a short poem some years ago, when he wrote:

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I am a humble artist, molding my earthly clod,

Adding my labor to Nature?s, simply assisting God.

Not that my effort is needed, yet somehow I understand

My Maker has willed it that I too should have unmolded clay in my hand.

Let us try to keep fear and false humility from making us bow before pretended authorities when we should question them ? in politics, in religion, and in our daily lives.

It is a bold claim, that we too should have unmolded clay in our hands, that we too can co-create our lives and our world. Yet it is one of the most fundamental truths of psychology, politics and religion.

Let us have appropriate humility, and let us have appropriate confidence and power. For there is so much to do, and we must do it together. Amen.

SERMON: The Kingdom of God is Like?.

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I only realized yesterday afternoon while sitting outside at Central Market working on this sermon where it was really going. I had thought it was about two parables, the two that are probably the most likely to be authentic parables of Jesus: the Good Samaritan story, and his odd comment that the kingdom of God is like leaven.

Then as I put together what I knew of the background and context from the bible and the early first century, I saw they were both spoken to a very specific context that doesn?t really fit us well today, that Jesus? original message not only wasn?t too helpful, but wasn?t very true or wise either.

We look at figures like Jesus, or Mother Teresa, Mohammad, all our religious and cultural heroes, through rose-colored, often romantic and nostalgic glasses, and sometimes just clearing away the haze also clears away the romantic nostalgia.

That?s what doing a scholarly study of any religion often does. We say we don?t want to check our brains at the door, but sometimes that turns into the question of whether we would rather be disillusioned, or illusioned. At the divinity school I attended ? and I suspect this is true of all good divinity schools ? it wasn?t unusual to hear graduate students say by their second or third year that learning about religion had shattered whatever beliefs they had come in with. The romanticism ends as you learn just what human creations all religions and all sacred scriptures really are. The bible was written by hundreds of people, each with their own theological and political agenda, not by God or Jesus. The Koran was too, went through many editions, and borrowed thousands of words from the Jewish and Christian scriptures, among others. And so on. That?s very empowering, freeing you from a more na�ve sense of religion, but it?s also disturbing.

I?ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar since 1991, and that?s where I have learned most of what I know about Jesus. This a group of mostly bible scholars started in 1985 to bridge the gap between what scholars have known about the bible and Jesus for over a century, and what people in the streets and in the pews are told about it. They?ve described that gap as larger than the Grand Canyon. They assembled scholars of the bible and Christian history, and spent eight years having them research every single saying attributed to Jesus, and write papers on whether it should be considered authentic. They assigned every single saying attributed to Jesus ? whether in the gospels or any other early literature ? and having the experts write papers on sayings that came within their field of knowledge. Sometimes, this meant over an hour of listening and arguing about two lines of Greek text. Most people would think this added a whole new dimension to the concept of ?boring.?

They did this by knowing a lot of the history, how the gospels were written ? they weren?t written until forty to ninety years or so after Jesus died ? by comparing them with older sayings from Jewish teachers and secular sayings of the time. When they published their book The Five Gospels: the Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus in December 1993, they reported that they thought only about 18% of the sayings attributed to Jesus were authentic, and only 60% of the scholars were sure that the Good Samaritan story, one of the most famous, was authentic in that form. Only 60%. And that made it the second highest parable they considered to be authentic. The highest-rated parable only got 62% of the scholars voting for it, and that was a very short sentence that doesn?t even sound like a parable, where Jesus said, ?The kingdom of God is like leaven that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.? (Matthew 13:33b).

I remember talking with a very bright Catholic priest attending one of our Seminar meetings, saying the irony was that he was so nourished by what he learned there, but then he?d have to go home and make sure he didn?t tell the people in his church what he had learned, because it would disillusion them. That?s only one of the reasons I?m not a Catholic priest. I think that while no one likes being disillusioned, it?s finally better than being illusioned. It?s liberating, and that word comes from the same root as ?liberal,? which is why I?m one of those, too. I think that being shaken out of our childhood beliefs is the first step toward finding beliefs that can serve us as adults, and it?s a struggle everyone should have a chance at. But that?s one of the reasons I?m a Unitarian rather than some other kind of preacher.

So today, I want to talk about two of Jesus? parables that may or may not be wise ? you?ll decide for yourself. Next week I?ll talk about the third most likely-to-be-authentic parable, which is kind of rude, even ugly, that you?ll almost never hear anyone preach on or agree with, and I?ll suggest that it really is profound and wise, just as I think Jesus meant it.

First, let?s talk about what parables are. They are not nice stories, and they?re not polite. They are the most radical and disturbing kind of story there is, and Jesus did them as well or better than anyone. One good biblical scholar, the Catholic John Dominic Crossan ? the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar ? has said that a parable is a slap in the face to the audience hearing it, and if it isn?t a slap in the face, it isn?t a parable. Its purpose is not to tell them what to do, how to behave. Its purpose is to subvert the worldview of the audience, to deny some of its most basic assumptions. The stories are disturbing, so they?re usually watered down to make them nice.

It?s easy to see all of this by looking at one of the most famous of Jesus? parables: the Good Samaritan story.

It sounds pretty straightforward, but it isn?t. A Jew is mugged walking along a dangerous road, a couple Jews see him there and cross over to the other side rather than stopping to help, then a Samaritan comes by, stops, helps, takes him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to care for him until he?s recovered. The editor of the gospel added the line after the story, ?Go and do likewise,? which would not have been part of the original story. But we need to know some history in order to understand how it?s a parable. The Jews and Samaritans absolutely hated each other at the time. In about the year 6, Samaritans threw human remains into the courtyard of the big temple in Jerusalem, to defile it. The very idea of a good Samaritan was as offensive as the idea of a story about ?the good serial murderer.? Part of the message of the Good Samaritan story was not only that your own kind often won?t help you, but the most radical, the most parabolic, message is that Jesus was telling his Jewish audience that the help they need can only come from the last person on earth they want help from. This would have been a fairly disgusting story to Jesus? fellow Jews ? and remember, Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Christianity hadn?t been invented yet.

We need to hear this parable ? and the one about the leaven ? in the same light as when Jesus said that a prophet isn?t honored by his own people, as Jesus wasn?t. What he?s telling his fellow Jews in the Good Samaritan story is that the help they need won?t come from the people they like, but can only come from the one they hate ? in other words, Jesus. It?s his most autobiographical parable. Scholars believe he was from Galilee, though in one gospel he is also referred to as a Samaritan.

It?s an insulting story in which Jesus is also exalting himself ? like the claim from the gospel of John that has him saying ?I am the Way, no one can come to God except through me.? It?s terribly arrogant, a world away from his humbler saying that no one is good but God alone.

I want you to imagine what this would have sounded and looked like. Jesus was a homeless man. He had no home, no steady job, had no wife or children, he begged for his food, and taught his disciples to beg for their food ? and even told them to eat whatever was offered to them, which would include non-kosher foods like pork and shellfish. The people who knew him didn?t respect him, and one story in the New Testament shows that his own mother thought he was crazy. And this is the man telling them that only he can help them! Today, we would give such a person a diagnosis. I?ll come back to the Good Samaritan, but want to go to the other one for a few minutes.

The highest-ranked parable is that little one-sentence one I mentioned earlier, that ?The kingdom of God is like leaven that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.? 62% of the Fellows in the Jesus Seminar said they were sure it was authentic, and about 90% said it probably was.

Believe it or not, it?s message is a lot like the Good Samaritan parable. At one of our meetings, I asked Dominic Crossan how on earth this was a slap in the face, or even a parable. He reminded me that the audience was Jewish, and that the high holy days of the religion are celebrated with unleavened bread. Jesus was saying, ?The kingdom of God is like what you?ve left out.? That?s what a parable does.

Today we make our bread with yeast that we buy in those little packages. It?s dry, clean, and has that wonderful smell when the bread is baking. But the leaven of the ancient world was pretty vulgar stuff. They made it by leaving a hunk of bread in a dark damp place until it was covered with mold, and stank. And the word for leaven was used as a metaphor. I?ve read that everywhere the word is used in the Hebrew scriptures, it means something corrupt, unclean, unholy.

Why would Jesus say the kingdom of God ? which meant the ideal world, the best kind of world ? was like something unclean and vulgar? Well, remember that Jesus was regarded as unclean and vulgar. He was a homeless man who traveled with the outcasts of society, who begged for their food. In one gospel, he is even described as a glutton and a drunkard. And he was saying the kingdom of God is like him and his followers. The Jews of his day didn?t agree, and not many of us would either.

Few of us travel around with homeless people who beg for their food, and prostitutes, and I suspect few of us would accept the idea that they are the kingdom of God. Just like the people in Jesus? audience, we still like to be around people like us. If homeless people or prostitutes came here on Sunday begging for food, I?d hope we would be courteous, but I don?t think we would cozy up to them during coffee hour. Even someone who wore a pro-life button or a pro-Bush button here would create at least uneasy silences, wouldn?t they? So sticking with our kind of people is as true of us as it was of Jesus? unappreciative audience two thousand years ago.

Are you beginning to feel the kind of slap in the face these parables were? They were powerful, rude stories that could get you killed. Socrates only questioned the things his society taught; Jesus attacked them.

And that little parable about the kingdom of God being like moldy, smelly leaven. What an odd idea, that the ideal world is like unholy corruption! Today, that could make you think the kingdom of God must be a lobbyists? convention in Washington DC. It might look like heaven to lobbyists and the corporations who own them, but it wouldn?t to most of us.

That?s why we sanitize these stories in churches and polite conversation, change them and make them all nice. The rules of sermon-writing seem to including keeping even the most disturbing messages within polite and comfortable boundaries. So some preachers will say that, well, the Samaritan story is really saying we shouldn?t leave people out, or we should help people who need help. But you really didn?t need a religious story to make that point, did you? If you didn?t already know that, something is very wrong, isn?t it?

I?ve heard a good preacher say that the point of the story is a lot like saying that we?re more complete if we can incorporate our shadow sides. He mentioned that the psychologist Carl Jung had made that critique of all of Christianity, which is true. Jung said Christianity had tried to leave out the shadow, leave out the selfish and bad parts of us, tried to define goodness as the absence of all evil. But Jung said no, it isn?t about being good; it?s about being whole, being integrated, and unless we claim and own the rotten parts, we?ll almost certainly project them out onto other people and attack them there. So the secret to the integrated personality ? as Jung and this preacher said ? is hidden in the dirty, uncomfortable things we?ve tried to leave out of it, and if we can add them back where they belong, we have the chance of growing into a fuller person, rising to our full height. This is a nice modern psychological message, and I think it?s true. But is this anything like the message Jesus meant? No. Jesus wasn?t a Jungian, but it?s the way we try to clean up rude stories that are attributed to our religious heroes, because we may go to see R- or X-rated movies, but on Sunday we want the sermons rated G.

When preachers use parables like this in sermons, they almost always clean them up and get away from the truly disturbing message they originally had. They?re not interested in what Jesus meant that was disturbing. They?re more interested in what they can say that?s clever and helpful. So we might say that well, the kingdom of God means a complete world, and that when we leave parts out, it keeps us from a truly integrated, authentic life. That?s nice, and also true. And also about as superficial as it gets, isn?t it?

Or we could preach on it by saying that the ideal world isn?t available from within gated communities surrounded by desperate ghettos, or self-righteous circles of those who think themselves superior to others and whose sense of superiority has cut them off from their common humanity with others. Those are also good sermons, and also true.

These are the kinds of games we play with a lot of religious stories, as you know if you?ve attended many churches. It?s the game of how most sermons are written. You already know the answer is going to be that Jesus was right, so they just have to figure out how to get you there this week. But look how much this distorts the original story, especially when the original story is such a crude and insulting parable. Sometimes, it feels almost like the Nickelodeon version of a Freddy Krueger movie.

This is part of what makes the old religious words and stories such odd candidates for trying to shed light on the world we?re actually living in. There is so much translation involved. We read Shakespeare and struggle with the odd-sounding Shakespearean English, because there is so much wisdom packed in those funny noises. But talking about a kingdom of God, and leaven, or even ancient hatreds between Samaritans and Jews ? which were tribes as closely related as first cousins? Why talk that way? Do we have to learn all this outdated stuff to make our way through life?

No, we don?t. In fact, we need to translate it into plain talk so we can know what we think we?re talking about. And we need to think about whether we agree with what this man is saying. It doesn?t matter who said it, just whether it seems to be wise and useful. So what?s this mean that we need to care about?

Now let me play devil?s advocate and wonder out loud whether the original versions of these two parables are even very wise. Remember, I?m not trying to tell you what to believe, only trying to make you interested in finding out what you believe.

Does the help we need often come from people we hate? No. Mostly, it comes from people we know, or at least people with whom we can identify. Do ?our kind of people? generally ignore and abandon us when we?ve been beaten down? Not in my experience. The most sensitive of them usually ask where it hurts, and whether they can do anything to help. There are certainly painful cases of psychopathic parents or partners that can be quite tragic, but overwhelmingly we can trust those who know us better than those who don?t, can?t we?

And do we need to add corrupt, moldy things to get decent food or a decent life? The image of smelly moldy leaven could have worked two thousand years ago. But it doesn?t work now, when the smell of yeast in baking bread is one of the nicest smells in the world. So is there anything about the parable that is relevant to our world?

Why would we want to invite people we don?t like into our community? It can sound quite idealistic, but would many of us really want to do it ? at least more than just once, for show? Why should we want that kind of stress? The Jews of Jesus? time didn?t. They weren?t persuaded by his story, and probably thought it was a vulgar idea. But then look around today, when some of the loudest conservative Christians don?t like the idea either. They have become notorious for trashing Muslims, trashing gays and lesbians, trashing assertive women, trashing anyone who isn?t like them, consigning them all to the roles of the unclean and impure. The most fanatical Muslims do the same. And our own behavior shows that we strongly prefer being around our kind of people, doesn?t it? Just look around. So whatever Jesus was addressing seems to be part of human nature, then now and probably always.

Let me add one more wrinkle, one more ambiguity, to take away some of the false authority and charisma of our favorite ?wise? sayings. Parables are really just used like proverbs and bromides, like ?A stitch in time saves nine.? And we apply them in a thousand ways that have nothing at all to do with the original meaning, like sewing torn clothing before the rip spreads and you have nine times as much work to mend it. We have used that old saw in a thousand ways that would have mystified the original seamstress who must have coined it about mending clothes. We have a whole mental library of these sayings, many of them contradicting many others, and we pull them out to fit the situation at hand. So we?ll say ?He who hesitates is lost,? then ?Fools rush in?, or ?Look before you leap,? then ?No guts, no glory.? ?Absence makes the heart grow fonder,? and ?Out of sight, out of mind.?

These aren?t really sources of wisdom, as much as they are catchy little sound bytes we can slap on life to feel like we understand it. Slapping a brand-name bromide on life is a way of taming life. We use the sayings we?ve heard ? not because they?re wiser than Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or other sayings, but just because they?re familiar. That?s how most of Jesus? sayings are used, too. We use Jesus? stories in the same way, kind of slapping them on for a needed sound byte ? like ?being a good Samaritan? ? without ever understanding or caring what Jesus actually meant by them in his very different time, context, and agenda.

It?s a measure of how much our traditional religions have become marginalized in our search for understanding today. Saying we want to be a good Samaritan doesn?t have anything to do with Jesus? teachings; it?s just a handy way to say we want to be decent toward those who are in need.

Now, for the question most of you are wondering about: how on earth can this sermon end? I?ll try it this way. The main purpose of education, including learning more about religion, is not to make us more fearful and obedient; it?s to empower us to question even the structure and foundation of the world as we?ve been taught it.

When you make a creative use of an old story to find a way to understand your life, who gets credit? Does it mean the original storyteller was really wise, even if you?ve completely changed his message? Or that you?re really clever? Or that we?re all in this together, may each have a part of the whole, that to leave out any part, however small, may be to diminish us?

Does this give new meaning to Jesus? old stories, or does it show some of them to have been unwise, even self-important and arrogant? Do you want to give credit to Jesus, to the creative opportunities offered by ambiguous old stories, or to yourself for using them to see patterns in the world around you? Does it help you appreciate the role a church can play in keeping us exposed to stories that can help us find our way through life?

Is it, as that Catholic priest said, disillusioning: the sort of thing you should be protected from, by me and all other preachers? Or is it empowering, even if a bit sobering? If sermons are supposed to bring Good News that helps to awaken and empower you, to remind you that you too are a child of God and part of the hope of the world, then was this a sermon?

Welcome to the church where you can find religion almost every Sunday, but where it nearly always comes to you in kit form, with some assembly required.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 January 6, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

We gather here, among other reasons, to try and find life-giving stories. More than anything, we are made more whole, we are saved, through finding stories to live within that open us to better possibilities.

Sometimes we are fed even by small pictures, little parts of stories where we found that spark of light. Good stories aren’t about truth, even if they happen to be true. They are about possibilities. We seek stories that are about possibilities.

Let us open ourselves to the best pictures and stories we can find, and ask ourselves whether we can find in them that whisper of God, that spark of light, that can give us a glimpse of something fine, something noble and whole. And let us have faith that the fine and more whole vision we see may be, or may become, part of our own story.

Let us seek that light, by whatever name we know it. And when we find it, let us be open to it, that it might return the favor and open us.

Amen.

SERMON: Graceful Stories

You know those 500-piece jigsaw puzzles you can buy with a picture of the completed puzzle on the outside. This morning’s sermon is like one of those puzzles, but without the picture of what it’s supposed to look like when it’s assembled. In a way, it’s a response to last week’s sermon, where I talked about how we mistake being certain with being right and are almost incapable of telling the difference between the two.

That could be seen as saying we can never be sure that anything is true, and in some ways that’s right. But not many people live that way, and honest religion is still about trying to find what is most important, and living by its light. This morning, I’ve brought you twelve of those lights: stories that are like puzzle pieces. they’re a particular kind of story I think of as “graceful stories.” I’ll give you an example of one before I try to explain it.

1. A balloon salesman at the circus held a handful of strings tied to helium-filled balloons of every color. Every once in awhile, he’d pull out a string and let a balloon go, so it would rise up in the sky and kids might see it and come find the balloon man to buy one. After he had let go of red, blue and yellow balloons, a little black boy standing near him quietly asked, “Mister if you let the black balloon go, would it rise up too?” The balloon salesman took the string from a black balloon, released it, and of course the balloon rose as fast and as high as all the others. He gave another one to the young boy, and said, “It’s what’s inside that makes them rise.”

Now that story probably never happened literally, just like most religious stories never happened literally, but we don’t care because we know it could happen, and it shows us something that is both true and empowering, which is what we want from our best stories. But the other stories I’ve brought for you today all happen to be true, as well as graceful.

2. The first story of this kind that I remember, one I read over thirty years ago, was about Winston Churchill. There was a formal reception at Buckingham Palace. The Queen was there, as well as Sir Winston and many of the world’s top diplomats. At one point in the evening, Churchill saw something he couldn’t believe. A foreign ambassador actually stole a sterling silver pepper mill from the Queen’s table. While this is not worth publicly embarrassing an ambassador and his country over, it’s also not right to stand by and watch such petty theft. Churchill solved this in a way that almost takes your breath away. He sidled up to the table, took the matching salt shaker from it, and put it inside his coat. Then, when no one else was around to hear them, he went over to the thieving ambassador. He opened his coat, showing him the salt shaker, and said, “we’re going to have to put them back – they’re on to us.” Something creative and magical was added to this scene by Churchill that transformed it from clever to graceful.

When I was in graduate school, I read a lot of Christian thinkers writing about grace, and their writings weren’t very helpful because they were mostly trying to save face for grace by explaining that it all came from God. That didn’t help make any sense of it here in the real world, until finally I came up with a kind of mental equation that let me understand what they were talking about. I began translating “grace” as “grease”: the kind of lubricant that makes life slide by so much more smoothly. Sometimes we add the magical and graceful thing on our own, like Churchill did. Sometimes, it comes when we are awakened by an innocent or unexpected comment from another person. But it transcends us and our species. It is a part of life, and sometimes we can find it in stories of other animals. I shared a lot of these with you last spring in the long sermon series on “Animal Stories.” Here are just two of those graceful stories of other animals doing something extra they didn’t have to do, that added that graceful dimension.

3. One is the story of a bonobo ape named Kuni, who one day caught a starling who had landed on her island in the Twycross Zoo in England. The bird had flown into a plate glass window and fell to the ground stunned but otherwise ok, and the trainers tried to get the ape to hand the bird to them so she wouldn’t hurt it. Instead, Kuni held the starling in her left hand, and climbed up the tallest tree on the island. Then, holding on to the tree with her feet, she carefully took the bird’s wing tips in her hands, spread them out as though the bird were in flight, and tossed the starling high into the air. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 156) (The bird was still too stunned to fly away and fluttered to the ground, where Kuni stood guard over it until it flew away later.)

4. Another came from the newspapers over a decade ago, the extraordinary story of two stray dogs, a dachshund and an Australian cattle dog, who kept alive a mentally disabled boy when he became lost in the woods for three “bone-chilling” days. The boy’s mother called the dogs “angels from heaven” after ten-year-old Josh Carlisle, who has Down syndrome, was rescued from a dry creek in Montana by a searcher on horseback. In temperatures close to zero, the dogs had played with him and cuddled him to keep him warm at night. Josh hadn’t eaten while he was lost, but the dogs must have led him to water, for he was not fully dehydrated. The boy had mild frostbite on all ten toes, having spent his first night with a light snow dusting the ground. When Josh was carried to the ambulance, the dachshund followed and kept jumping up to see in the window. “I’ll never forget that dog’s face,” said one of the rescuers. Both dogs found a new home with the child’s family, and his mother told reporters, “They fell in love with my son during those three days.” Here, the grace crossed over species lines – both ways. (Jeffrey Maisson, Dogs Never Lie, pp. 97-98, from the front page of the St. Louis Post Dispatch in March 1996.)

5. For the fifth story, we can move back to stories of human animals with one from a real estate executive named Robert Ellis. When his son was nine years old, they wanted to get him into soccer, but all the teams were full. Being creative, his wife told those in charge that her husband was a coach. This opened a space for their son. The husband, however, really wasn’t a coach and knew absolutely nothing about soccer. So he dove into this new challenge as though he had been called to coach a professional team of world-class players rather than a group of nine-year-old kids. He read many books on soccer, went to clinics, met Juan Mazia, who had been the great Pele’s coach, and even met Pele, who many regard as the best professional soccer player ever.

Ellis writes, “One day after having practices three days a week, giving lectures to the team that would make [the greatest football coaches or Army generals proud], I asked, “Are there any questions?” One boy raised his hand and said, “My brother got a goldfish for his birthday.” It suddenly hit me that the kids had never been in organized sports before. They weren’t professionals. They wanted to have fun. To get them to a more skillful level, I had to take it slow and easy. I wanted to be the total opposite of the bullying coach who abuses the authority he’s given.

“Practices finally became fun – it wasn’t all soccer talk”. We went on to have five out of eight seasons with undefeated teams.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], pp. 31-32)

6. The actress Mary Steenburgen wrote about her childhood, and her father. He was a freight train conductor for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, but he developed heart problems and so wasn’t able to work for years at a time. During these times, he would do odd jobs – seldom very dignified. Once he was a traveling salesman for a shoe company, and the company gave him a sign to put in the back of his old car that said HANOVER SHOE SALESMAN. Mary writes:

“It was an old secondhand car, and between the sign and the condition of the car, I wasn’t too keen on driving around with my father. I was thirteen and suddenly aware of our lack of money compared to the wealth of the rich kids at school. I mostly walked home from school, but this one day my father came to pick me up. As we were driving away from the school I saw this boy, Charles Harrison, who was president of our class and the most popular guy in our grade. I didn’t want him to see me in our embarrassing car, so I ducked down and pretended to tie my shoes.

“There was silence for a moment and then my father softly said, “Mary, you don’t have to be ashamed of this old car.”

“That’s all he said.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], pp. 27-28)

Years later, she wrote, “I can still hear the sound of his sadness and feel my face burn with shame at my own snobbery. I think that this tiny little moment actually informed a lot about the way I have dealt with the many blessings that have come my way. I am deeply proud to be a trainman’s daughter from Arkansas, and I have been vigilant to remember what does and doesn’t matter in life.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], p. 28)

7. The seventh story is about sports broadcaster Suzyn Waldman, who worked for the New York Yankees twenty years ago, as she still does – one of the first women sportscasters – a fact that made her so nervous that she would seldom say a thing in the locker room after the game if there were any male sportscasters present. “One evening, Yankees outfielder Dave Winfield had a particularly great game,” she wrote. “I mustered up all my courage, and with my tape recorder going, I started to ask my question – and made a mistake with his statistics. Two things ran through my mind. Do I keep going, pretend I didn’t notice, and not be able to use the tape, or do I stop the tape and make it clear to everyone here that I made a mistake? Dave Winfield made the decision for me. He put his hand on the machine’s Stop button, knowing I had reversed the statistics, and said, “I don’t like the way I started to answer that. Can we do it again?” My mistake had led to an incredible act of kindness by a relative stranger.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], p. 36)

8. One of my favorite stories, and one that comes close to the brilliance and gentleness of the Churchill story, comes from a new book I was asked to read in manuscript form and write a cover blurb for. It’s a good book called Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, written by a man (Bruce E. Levine) who has been a psychotherapist for about thirty years. Here’s how he tells the story:

One day a telemarketer began her sales pitch by asking what I did for a living. I paused for a second, and then I told her that I was a telemarketer evangelist. At first she misunderstood, thinking I said a televangelist, and she believed I was being dishonest with her, as clearly many people told her outrageous lies. Then I explained that I was not a televangelist, that I did not evangelize on television, but that I was a telemarketer evangelist and that I ministered to telemarketers who called me. She stopped her pitch and let me continue. I told her that I believed that many telemarketers were in deep pain about what they were doing, and this was made worse by the anger they received from most people they spoke to. In a soft voice, almost sounding like she was going to cry, she agreed with me. I told her that I knew she would not stay on the phone too long, especially since I wasn’t going to buy anything from her, but that I could tell she was a good person and that I had faith she was going to get a more satisfying job. She said, “God bless you.” (Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, pp. 53-54)

9. A ninth graceful story comes from Rachel Naomi Remen, the wise San Francisco physician whose stories I use whenever I can. A 40-year-old very plain librarian came to see her, depressed and aware of her plainness – everyone else in her family was handsome. Life didn’t seem worth it any more. Sitting in Dr. Remen’s waiting room were terminal patients, some bald from chemotherapy, some dying of AIDS. Eventually this woman, Janet, began talking with an AIDS patient, and got to know him. She’d volunteer to help him shop, bring groceries, etc. His name was Will. He was devastatingly handsome, 32, and dying of AIDS. She was devastatingly shy, and deeply convinced that she was too plain to matter. She began to help him, and became closer to him. Several months later, Will died. Rachel called Janet, found she was out of state. Worried about the powerful effect Will’s death would have, she kept calling. Finally Janet came in. She had been with Will’s family in another state, meeting them, attending his funeral. She looked different. She was, for the first time, wearing lipstick. She told the story of Will’s final days. He was very weak, mostly bedridden. On this day he was not doing well, she worried about him all day. Coming home, she ran up the stairs, her arms full of groceries. She opened the door, called his name loudly so he could hear her from his upstairs bedroom.

But Will was not in his bedroom. Fully dressed in a jacket, shirt, and tie, he was sitting in the living room waiting for her. His clothes, still elegant, looked as if they had been bought for a much, much larger man, but his hair was carefully combed and he had shaved. Janet could hardly imagine the effort it had taken for him to do this.

Stunned, she asked him why he had gotten dressed. He had looked at her for a long moment. Then he eased off the couch, and, getting down on one knee, he asked her to marry him. She helped him up, and hugged him for the first time. He died a few days later.

Rachel looked at her in silence. Still blushing (over the lipstick), she met Rachel’s eye. “In my heart I did marry him, you know,” she said. “He will be here with me always.” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 296)

10. The tenth story is one I just read two weeks ago, about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish theologian and wise man who died in 1972. (from Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 by Edward K. Kaplan (Yale).In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport, trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar counter glared at him – his yarmulke and white beard making him look like an ancient Hebrew prophet – and mockingly proclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel they didn’t have any food.

In response, Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the kitchen there might be some water?” Yes, she acknowledged. “Is it possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?” Perhaps, she admitted. “Well, then,” Heschel said, “if you boiled the eggs in the water, “that would be just fine.”

She shot back, “And why should I?”

“Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.”

“What favor did you ever do me?”

“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.” She burst out laughing – and brought him food. (From Connections in the NY Times, 24 December 2007, “A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma that Transcends It,” by Edward Rothstein.) 11. And then, my own favorite Unitarian minister story, written by Robert Walsh, now retired. (“A Baptism” from Noisy Stones by Robert Walsh). It’s a story with which all religious liberals and radicals can probably identify. Here’s how he tells it:

She called to ask if I would baptize her infant son. I said, “What we do is like a baptism, but not exactly. And we normally do it only for people who are part of the congregation. The next one we have scheduled is in May.”

She said, “Could I come to talk to you about it anyway”?

They came to see me, the very young woman and her child and the child’s very young father. She explained that the child had been born with a heart defect. He had to have a risky heart operation soon. She had asked the minister of her own church if he would baptize her son, and he had refused because she was not married to the baby’s father.

I told them that their not being married would not be an impediment to anything we might do, but that our child dedication ceremony still might not be what they were looking for. I explained that our ceremony does not wash away any sin, it does not guarantee the child a place in heaven, it doesn’t even make the child a member of the church. In fact, I said, it doesn’t change the child at all. What we expect is that it will change the rest of us in our relationship with the child, and with all children. She listened patiently.

When I was through she said, “All I want is to know that God blesses my baby.” In my mind I gasped at the sudden clarity in the room. I said, with a catch in my throat, “I think I can do that.”

And I did.

12. The twelfth story is another one from the psychologist who was the telemarketer evangelist, and I’ve added it because it’s the only one that would be easy for every one of us to do. Some of these stories seem to show a kind of brilliance that can make us admire them, but doubt that we’re going to match their quick thinking. This one doesn’t involve any quick creativity or profound wisdom, but it has a magic to offer anyone who tries it, I suspect.

Bruce Levine said he knew a minister who occasionally got completely drained by his profession – but you know this can happen to anyone in any profession, any home, any family. He would be so completely drained of that “grease” that he almost ground to a halt, and had trouble getting through Sunday morning services.

So when he felt completely drained on Saturday night, he would set the alarm for a little earlier on Sunday morning, and go to breakfast at a real dive of a restaurant. He would treat everyone there like royalty, and compliment his server on whatever he could legitimately compliment them on: their hair, how nice they looked in that shirt, the color of their eyes, anything. He would order a big breakfast, then leave a one hundred percent tip. After leaving the restaurant, he felt so completely filled with grace that he could sail joyfully through both his Sunday services.

Twelve graceful stories. These are the puzzle pieces that you can put together to form your own best picture.

According to the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, there is a spark of light – a spark of God – within everything in life. When you hear the symbol “God” used like this, you know it is referring to a potential, not a potentate. It’s a potential within each of us, as well as in stray dogs that keep a boy alive, and a bonobo ape who returned a starling to the sky. These sparks of light are hidden, but they’re there, and our job is to find and release them, so that like God, we too can say “Let there be light!” and help save our world from darkness.

And so on this first Sunday of the new year, let there be light – and let there be grace.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

  December 30, 2007

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON: Don’t Believe Everything You Think

One of our favorite myths is that we are a rational species, for whom reason trumps emotion – at least in grown-ups. It’s hard to understand where such an idea came from – surely not from watching human behavior in politics, economics, religion, gambling or dating.

There are hundreds if not thousands of counterexamples, because what really drives us has very little to do with reason. You can probably all think of five or ten, and I’ll share some this morning. One of the more famous stories comes from the field of medicine from 160 years ago, and is a story every medical student learns.

In 1847, a physician in Vienna named Ignac Semmelweiss saw a pattern others hadn’t seen. He worked in obstetrics, and obstetricians both delivered babies and also did the autopsies on women who died in childbirth – without washing their hands. The mortality rate of women in childbirth was running between 10% and 30%, and he decided the doctors must be carrying something on their hands from the autopsies to the deliveries. So he made all the doctors working under him wash their hands in a chlorine solution, and childbirth deaths dropped dramatically. He tried to get other doctors to wash their hands, and was ridiculed because he seemed to believe in invisible agents, like demons, which was unscientific and didn’t fit the teachings of the modern medicine of the day. Still, women delivering babies were far more likely to come out alive in his hands than anywhere else in Vienna. You’d think that would count as enough empiracle data to at least try washing hands. But his idea didn’t catch on widely for several decades. I don’t know if anyone has tried to estimate the number of women who died needlessly during that time, but he is now known as “the savior of mothers.”

What’s going on here? These doctors were smart, and they were good people. They went into medicine to save lives, and I suspect all of them would have felt horrible if they believed they were actually killing their patients.

What’s going on is that a very different aspect of human nature is showing. It’s happened in science and every other field, probably forever. Thomas Kuhn wrote about some of this in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I’d still propose as the most influential book of the past fifty years. As long as scientists share the same paradigms and assumptions, he said, they can think very logically. But when they can’t agree on basic assumptions, they can barely communicate at all. Like whether there could be invisible agents on the hands of doctors capable of killing mothers, an idea Semmelweiss proposed more than a decade before Louis Pasteur had proposed his “germ theory” of disease.

But you don’t have to go to 19th century medicine. This is so deeply a part of human nature you can find it anywhere. Here’s a story that combines comedy and politics, then adds some neuroscience.

In 1960, the comedian Lenny Bruce watched the very first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He said he would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate and they would be saying, “He’s really slaughtering Nixon.” Then he’d go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, “How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?” And then he realized that each group loved their candidate so much that a guy would have to be this blatant – he would have to look into the camera and say: “I am a thief, a [criminal], do you hear me, I am the worst choice you could ever make for the Presidency!” Yet if he did that, his followers would say, “Now there’s an honest man for you. It takes a big guy to admit that. There’s the kind of guy we need for President!” (Mistakes Were Made, p. 18).

Neuroscientists have recently shown that these biases in thinking are built into the very way the brain processes information. Three years ago, in a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process information about George Bush or John Kerry, researchers found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with information that contradicted their biases, and the emotional circuits of the brain lit up happily when they heard information that supported their biases (Mistakes Were Made, p. 19). In other words, once our minds are made up, it’s hard to confuse us with the facts, because we’re often not even able to see the facts.

Some of these stories are pretty unbelievable. They must shock my own naive hope that we’re rational creatures, because I find that I don’t want to believe them. In the Dinka and Nuer tribes of the Sudan, for instance, there is a shocking practice that has gone on for many generations. They extract several of the permanent front teeth of their children. Apparently, this began during an epidemic of lockjaw; missing front teeth would enable sufferers to get some nourishment. If so, it once made some sense. But very few children ever got lockjaw, and for several generations now, none have. So why continue it? Because it evolved into something else. They’ve forgotten about the medical history, and convinced themselves that pulling teeth has an esthetic value. They turned it into a rite of passage into adulthood. “The toothless look is beautiful,” they say. “People who have all their teeth are ugly: They look like cannibals who would eat a person. A full set of teeth makes a man look like a donkey.” “We like the hissing sound it creates when we speak.” “This ritual is a sign of maturity” (Mistakes Were Made, pp. 23-24). Now I know some parents are thinking about your children and their tattoos and piercings, but forget it. They’re looking at you and wondering why your body didn’t matter enough for you to put some art on it.

Or we can move from body art to the body politic. One researcher took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, then asked Israeli citizens to judge them. The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposals attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposals attributed to the Palestinians. Think about this. If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it really does come from the other side? (Mistakes Were Made, p. 42).

Closer to home, another social psychologist found that Democrats will endorse an extremely restrictive welfare proposal, one usually associated with Republicans, if they think it has been proposed by the Democratic Party, and Republicans will support a generous welfare policy if they think it comes from the Republican Party. Label the same proposal as coming from the other side, and you might as well be asking people if they will favor a policy proposed by a coke-snorting Taliban official. What’s more, none of these people believed they were being influenced by their party’s position. They all claimed that their beliefs followed logically from their own careful study of the policy at hand, guided by their general philosophy of government (Mistakes Were Made, p. 43). Yet their attitude of certainty has trumped reason, truth, and nearly everything else, and this seems to be as deeply a part of human nature as anything we have.

If we’re wrong but certain, and our brain doesn’t even let us see what we don’t want to see, we could do harm, feel no remorse, and not even want to make it right later if we had the chance. And there are plenty of stories from actual court cases like this from our rational species.

Many of you will remember the awful 1989 case of the Central Park jogger, the woman who was assaulted and nearly beaten to death. Five teen-agers were arrested, questioned for up to 30 hours straight, finally confessed and under coaxing, added details of what they did. They were sent to prison for life. Donald Trump bought a full-page ad in the New York Times, urging the court to give them the death penalty. Thirteen years later, a felon named Matias Reyes, already in prison for rapes, robberies and murder, admitted that he alone had done the crime. His DNA matched, and he provided details about the crime that no one else could have known. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, under Robert Morgenthau, investigated for a year and found no connection at all between Reyes and the boys, and in 2002 a motion was granted to vacate the boys’ convictions. But the court decision was angrily denounced by former prosecutors in Morgenthau’s office and by the police officers who had been involved in the original investigation, who refused to believe that the boys were innocent. After all, they had confessed (Mistakes Were Made, pp. 128-9). Never mind the DNA evidence, or the fact that the boys had said after their confessions that after 30 hours of constant interrogations they would have said anything, they just wanted to go to sleep. It isn’t about being right. It’s about being certain. And we are often incapable of telling the difference.

The best known of the efforts to clear innocent people on death row is The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld. They keep a running record on their Web site of the men and women imprisoned for murder or rape who have been cleared, most often by DNA testing but also by other kinds of evidence, such as mistaken eyewitness identifications – and mistaken eyewitness identifications are involved in about 75% of false convictions: people who were dead certain, and dead wrong.

As of December 6, 2007, their site reports that 209 defendants previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing. Almost all of these convictions involved some form of sexual assault and about 25% involved murder (Mistakes Were Made, p. 3). This is good news! Besides setting innocent people free, it also means that now we might find the guilty ones who actually did the crimes. Or so you would think.

Here’s the part that’s hardest for me to accept. Of all the convictions the Innocence Project has succeeded in overturning so far, there is not a single instance in which the police later tried to find the actual perpetrator of the crime. The police and prosecutors just close the books on the case completely, as if to ignore the fact that they made serious mistakes that imprisoned innocent people and have let guilty people go free (Mistakes Were Made, p. 151). It isn’t about catching criminals or following facts. It’s about the almost supernatural power of certainty. They were so sure, they believed they couldn’t be wrong. But how much sense does this make? We are dead certain yet dead wrong a lot of times. Certainty is only an attitude, not a guarantee. The attitude of certainty is about us, not the world outside of our psyches. If I tell you something of which I am absolutely, without reservation, dead certain, you’ve learned something about me. Whether you’ve also learned something about the world we both live in is something you might want to check for yourself. This is why certainty is so dangerous, and national, religious or political ideologies are so deadly. If one person who is dead certain but dead wrong can do harm with a clear conscience, a large group who think alike can change history, sometimes in horrible ways.

Here’s an insight from an unexpected place, the memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s henchman Albert Speer: “In normal circumstances,” he wrote, “people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over” (Mistakes Were Made, p. 65).

That’s a pretty remarkable confession and insight. But doesn’t this describe the self-reinforcing certainty within political parties, scientific communities, religions, nationalisms, discussions of astrology, abortion, homosexuality or discussions among University of Texas alumni about their favorite football team?

There are many more stories like this, but what do we do with this? What does it have to do with us – especially us liberals, who like to think we are rational people and sometimes even imagine we might be the hope of the world?

Years ago, I heard a great scholar (Stephen Toulmin) explain the Atlas myth to an audience which, as I remember it, included graduate students and professors in religion, science and philosophy. “We must understand,” he tried to explain, “that the picture of Atlas holding up the world is not meant to answer the question “What is holding up the world?” Instead, it gives us a mental picture to reassure us on an emotional level that this world on which we live, die, hope, love, lose and try to think big thoughts, this world rests on shoulders that are not only strong, but also friendly to us. That’s what all our stories are trying to do: create pictures that can embrace us within comfortable certainties.” The same is true of our religious certainties, political certainties, nationalistic and racial certainties, and all the rest of them. It isn’t about truth, any more than it was for those obstetricians Dr. Semmelweiss tried to talk into washing their hands 160 years ago, or about the Kennedy, Nixon, Bush or Kerry fans, or the happily toothless tribes of the Sudan, or those who cover themselves with body art and those who are sure it’s a ridiculous idea. It’s about wanting and needing to believe that when we are absolutely, positively dead sure, we couldn’t possibly be wrong – especially if we hang out with others who share our beliefs. Because if we can’t trust that deep feeling of certainty, what on earth can we trust? I think this is a deep human dilemma, not a shallow problem.

My favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said, “Remember that we stand on the world, but the world doesn’t stand on anything else.” Then he added, “Children think it’ll have to fall if it isn’t held up.” I think that’s a far more profound statement than it seems at first sight. Because like that scholar I heard explaining the Atlas myth – a scholar who had been one of Wittgenstein’s students – he wasn’t really talking about our planet. He was talking about the social, emotional and conceptual “worlds” we each live in: worlds that are finally held up not on the shoulders of Atlas, but on the shoulders of our own certainties, reinforced by the certainties of those who think like we do.

It looks like human nature is not built to seek and defend truth. After all, how would evolution have a clue what truth is? We are built to seek and defend an attitude of certainty, and to justify our opinions in the face of nearly everything that should snap us out of it. First we become certain, in a dozen different ways: from swallowing whole some ideology, absorbing second-hand beliefs, annexing our family’s or society’s biases and bigotries, reading some focused collection of authors (rather than others), and many other ways. But first, we become certain. Then we name whatever it is that made us certain, The Truth. Of course, there’s no necessary connection. Certainty is only an attitude, and has nothing at all to do with being right. But try telling that to thousands of years of persecutions in the name of religion, nationalism, race, culture, politics, and preference for particular soccer or football teams. Try telling it to doctors who waited for decades to begin washing their hands before delivering babies, to prosecutors whose behavior says they don’t care who really committed over two hundred rapes and murders if it wasn’t the one they convicted. Try telling it to billions of people who have lived their lives in fear of religious or political damnation.

We live within certainties that have become familiar and habitual. They define and bind our world and often our possibilities, in religion, politics, nationalism and a hundred other ways.

The philosopher of science who explained the Atlas myth once said that the way scientific thinking usually changes isn’t through a rational or scientific process at all. It mostly changes when the deans of top schools and editors of top scientific journals retire and are replaced by people who were educated under different assumptions and paradigms. Then different kinds of scientific articles are published in the leading journals, and different kinds of PhD theses are accepted by the most influential universities, and there has been a kind of scientific revolution. What’s this got to do with us? What all of this has to do with religious liberals, honest religion – and the scientific method, while we’re at it – is absolutely fundamental. That dilemma of identifying with the process that can question everything, versus the need to stand some place solid is the greatest challenge for human beings who want to take either science or honest religion seriously.

This is what is meant by saying that both the soul of liberal religion and the scientific method are a process, but never a position. The liberal spirit is the spirit that challenges an orthodoxy to make room for the truths that give us life. The minute we”ve chosen one and declared it to be true, we have created our orthodoxy, and then try to protect it from the spirit of liberal religion, which would question it, too. So we’re all friends of the spirit of liberal religion or science as long as they help us criticize the beliefs of others. But we’re not as eager to understand that once we”ve found our own orthodoxy, our own position of certainty, those same spirits must question our certainties.

You can tell that this is a subject we could talk about for weeks, and one that can lead into a hundred different directions, many of them very pertinent to the world we’re living in. And I will invest some time doing some sermons on these themes in the spring.

But for now, I have painted us – or at least I’ve painted myself – into a corner filled with questions more profound than answers, so I’ll end with questions:

If you can’t trust your certainty, or even the certainty of a group of people who agree with you, what can you trust? If honest religion can’t ever be grounded in absolute unchanging facts, how do we live with confidence? Are there some absolute unchanging facts? What do you think they are? If you can’t believe everything you think, what can you believe, and why? If you can’t share the certainties of your friends on important topics, do you think they’ll still be your friends? If you now thought they were wrong on fundemantal issues, for how long could they stay your friends if you had to work together on these things? If being certain has no necessary connection to being right, what does?

In some ways, this is like Cassandra’s dilemma in ancient Greek mythology. Apollo, the god women never liked, was after her. So he gave her the gift of prophecy; she could see and say what was going to happen in the future, and she would always be right. When that failed to soften her heart toward him, Apollo got angry. But there was some kind of rule that gods couldn’t take back gifts they”d given, so she still had the gift of prophecy. To get even, he added a curse. She would always see the truth and always be right, but nobody would ever believe her. Which would you rather be – certain, or right? Or are these really the right questions to be asking in an honest church?

Your move.

(NOTE: All page numbers are from Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) Why we Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

-[Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, 2007])

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 December 2, 2007

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us listen to some words of Jesus and see if we can hear within them the voice of a life-giving spirit. What good does it do you, he asked, if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?

Our soul. Our center. That place inside where we need to feel the presence of a life lived with integrity and courage, in the service of high ideals that bless the lives of ourselves and others.

That’s also what Jesus thought of as the narrow path that few would ever want to take, because it isn’t very attractive or seductive. Yet it asks us, as these words from Jesus ask us, to measure our lives in a different currency than the world fawns over. The currency that matters is how we respond to the sacred worth of ourselves and others – whether we try to develop these gifts life has offered.

The reward, Jesus thought, is the deep feeling that we are serving life, and life is returning the favor. The other meaning is that if we can not find that inner feeling of worth, we may not be serving the right gods at all,

Surely these things are right – not because Jesus said them, but because they resonate at such deep levels within people in all times and places.

Let us listen to the words that tell us life is to be honored and empowered, and that our reward for serving life in this way is that we will grow a soul that offers us comfort and love that can not be taken away.

Just this could transform our lives – just this. Amen.

SERMON: Mother Teresa, Revisited

This is the story of a woman who wanted to serve God by helping people. She did it, felt the presence of God, and was happy. But then something odd and I think tragic happened. She answered a new call, which took her in a different direction. She followed this new call for 49 years, becoming one of the most famous women in the world, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, winning a Nobel Prize and the adoration of nearly the whole world. But she lost her soul in doing it, because she was no longer serving a God who could make her or anyone else whole. That’s my understanding of what happened to this sainted woman, after reading the controversial and disturbing new book called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, just published a few months ago, and containing for the first time some of her private writings.

In a way, her story strengthens my own faith, though not in a way of which she would have approved. So this is an odd sort of sermon. Part biography, part very dark confession by Mother Teresa, and then my own theological assessment of what happened to her, what it meant for the world, and what it might mean for us. She’s such a famous saintly figure, I don’t expect we’ll all agree on this.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (Agnes Gon’-cha Bo’-ja-tswee) (August 26, 1910 – September 5, 1997) was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun. She first felt a call to work with the poor when she was 12. She became a nun and moved to Loreto, India at 18 (p. 14). She taught in the school at Loreto for eighteen years, was much admired, very satisfied and feeling the presence of God, just like it’s supposed to work.

In 1946 she had what she experienced as direct mystical communication from Christ, telling her to start a mission of charity working with the poorest of the poor. She mostly referred to these communications as the “Voice” until her superiors recoiled from the thought that she might be hearing voices. But she thought she had heard the voice of Christ.

She said she tried to talk Jesus out of this new calling, but he said, “I want Indian Missionary Sisters of Charity – who would be my fire of love amongst the very poor – the sick – the dying – the little street children – The poor I want you to bring to me – and the Sisters that would offer their lives as victims of my love – would bring these souls to Me” (p. 49). That odd idea of being a victim of Jesus’ love would become one of the deepest facets of her life and work.

It took two years to get approval from Rome, and in 1948 she began work in Calcutta with her new Missionaries of Charity. She would work with them for the next 49 years, building this into a worldwide phenomen with over 4,500 nuns working in more than 130 countries.

Few people have ever understood just what the purpose of her work really was. From the start, it was a proselytizing mission to win souls for Jesus, so more poor people could go to heaven – and to serve the Catholic Church. Her theology was among the most reactionary in the Catholic Church, absolutely against any ideas of women’s rights or social and economic reform.

She was not setting up places to provide good medical care or pain relief for suffering and dying people, and would sometimes tell people that the more they suffered, the closer they were to Jesus. She believed this as deeply as she believed anything. She wanted herself and her nuns to provide them with care and love as they were dying, and her biases come through some of the stories she told. See how these three excerpts strike you:

“We picked up [a man] from the drain, half eaten with worms, and we brought him to the home: “I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.” And it was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man who could speak like that, who could die like that without blaming anybody, without cursing anybody, without comparing anything. Like an angel.” (p. 292)

“The poor are bitter and suffering because they have not got the happiness that poverty should bring if borne for Christ”.” (p. 92)

“The work for AIDS keeps growing fruitfully. No one has died without Jesus. – In New York already over 50 have died a beautiful death.” (p. 309)

She seemed either oblivious or indifferent to politics, economics, or any of the causes of poverty – certainly including overpopulation and the disempowerment of women.

She had a genius for organizing and also, as she became a celebrity, for attracting big money. No one knows how much. She didn’t keep it in India, which requires detailed identification of charity funds. One former worker in her New York office said the New York account alone contained about $50 million. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Matt Cherry in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4)

The money did not go toward buying good medical equipment or training: her centers looked as impoverished at the end of her life as they had before all the hundreds of millions of dollars were received. It seems that the money was simply spent to start more of these Missionaries of Charity centers all over the world. Numerous medical journals reported on the primitive condition of these centers, the fact that hypodermic needles were washed out in cold water and reused, that pain medication was not given to suffering people, and that these were simply places for people to die, but not to be healed. She told her nuns that these poor existed so she and the nuns could earn credits with God.

Along the way, she also attracted some rich but sleazy people who wanted to buy her public endorsement in return for donations to her mission, and she seemed eager to oblige. After donations from the Duvalier family – Duvalier was the brutal dictator of Haiti – she spoke publicly about how much the Duvaliers loved the poor. After Charles Keating gave her more than a million dollars of the money he had stolen from his investors in the Lincoln Savings and Loan swindle, she wrote to the prosecutor’s office praising his love of the poor, saying she could not believe he could have done anything wrong, asking for forgiveness for him. Then the story took an interesting turn.

The deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles County answered her, explaining the process by which Keating had cheated huge numbers of poor people out of their life savings, and then pointed out that in their audits they discovered that quite a lot of the money he had stolen he’d given to Mother Teresa. He said, now that you know the money was stolen, when are you going to give it back? She never answered. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Danny Postel, 9-15-98)

She and Princess Diana formed a well-publicized relationship, and after Diana and Prince Charles divorced, she was asked about Princess Di’s divorce. She said, yes, they’re divorced and it’s very sad but I think it’s all for the best; the marriage was not working, no one was happy and I’m sure it’s better that they separate.

But two months earlier, Mother Teresa had been campaigning in Ireland to pressure voters into keeping their constitutional ban on divorce. The Irish Catholic church threatened to refuse to remarry divorced women. There were no exceptions to be allowed: it didn’t matter if you had been married to an alcoholic who beat you and sexually assaulted your children, you were not going to get a second chance in this world or the next. And that is the position that Mother Teresa supported. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Matt Cherry in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4)

When the Union Carbide corporation flew her to Bhopal, India after the accident in their chemical plant there killed thousands of people, she was asked by the media for a comment on this tragedy, and she kept saying “Just, forgive, forgive.” So under her values, it was O.K. to forgive Union Carbide for its deadly negligence, to forgive the Duvaliers for the brutality and murder of their Haitian dictatorship, and Charles Keating for stealing the life savings of thousands upon thousands of poor people. But for a woman married to an alcoholic child abuser in Ireland who has ten children and no one to look after her, there is no forgiveness in this life or the next one. But there is forgiveness for Princess Diana. (from Matt Cherry’s interview with Christopher Hitchens in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4.) She worked with the poor and forgotten, but her special dispensations seemed only to be for the rich and famous.

You can see why someone like Christopher Hitchens would attack her in print as a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud, charges he made in his 1997 book about her. He said that what she loved was not the poor, but poverty. Poverty kept providing her with poor people to let her nuns earn credits with God, tending to them without doing anything to improve their lot.

Some of you probably have your own opinions of whether what she did was good or bad. But I want to consider it from a theological perspective, which seems to me the most interesting way to look at this simple yet complex religious woman’s life.

Theologians say that the quality of the gods or ideals we serve has a lot to do with the quality and depth of satisfaction we can find in life. A first century Christian theologian once attacked the pagan worship of statues of gods, saying they were all made of wood, and “we become what we worship.” I’ve always thought there was a lot of insight in that statement that we become what we worship. Other theologians say that only real gods – really high and life-giving ideals, in other words – can make you feel whole and fulfilled, and that serving lesser ideals – or idols – will drain your soul until you are empty inside. For theology to have any relevance at all to real life, what we serve has to make a qualitative difference in your sense of satisfaction and happiness in life – meaning that what you serve will catch up with you: a variation on the ancient Greek saying that “Character is destiny.”

In some ways – and perhaps this will sound unkind – Mother Teresa comes as close as anyone I’ve read to Oscar Wilde’s story about the portrait of Dorian Gray. You’ll remember this was the man who lived a destructive life, yet always looked young and happy. But up in his attic was a portrait of him that showed the progressive degradation of his soul. Mother Teresa’s “portrait” was inside her soul rather than in her attic, revealed for the first time in the recent publication of her private writings (Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 2007) but – well, I’d rather read you some of her confessions so you can hear for yourself. I’ll warn you that this is pretty sad and dark stuff – and for most who hear it, probably very surprising.

In 1953 she began sharing the description of her inner darkness with her spiritual advisor, then later with several other priests over the next forty years. These quotations are taken from letters to several of the priests. I should add that for several decades, she repeatedly begged these priests to destroy all her letters to them. As far as I can tell, they all kept them, and allowed them to be published in this book, saying the letters showed the very human struggles she endured. It strikes me as an immense violation of confidentiality, though I can’t get too righteous about this because I’m glad people have a chance to read them. Here are some of the things she wrote to her spiritual mentors and confessors:

“there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started “the work” [with the Missionaries of Charity]” (p. 149).

“Pray for me – for within me everything is icy cold. It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness” (p. 163).

“There is so much contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God – so deep that it is painful – a suffering continual – and yet [I’m] not wanted by God. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything” (pp. 169-170).

“If you only knew what goes on within my heart. Sometimes the pain is so great that I feel as if everything will break. [My] smile is a big cloak which covers a multitude of pains” (p. 176).

At one point, her spiritual director suggested she write a letter to God. She did, and then shared it with him. (Father Picachy, 3 July 1959) In it, she said: “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love – and now become as the most hated one – the one You have thrown away as unwanted – unloved. I call, I cling, I want – and there is no One to answer – no One on whom I can cling – no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark – and I am alone. Unwanted, forsaken. The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable. Where is my faith? – even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness. So many unanswered questions live within me – I am afraid to uncover them – because of the blasphemy. If there [is a] God, — please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven – there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me – and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul” (p. 187).

“They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God – [that] they would go through all that suffering if they had just a little hope of possessing God. In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss – of God not wanting me – of God not being God – of God not really existing” (p. 192).

“Now Father – since 1949 or 1950 [I have had] this terrible sense of loss – this untold darkness – this loneliness – this continual longing for God – which gives me that pain deep down in my heart”. There is no God in me. When the pain of longing is so great – I just long & long for God – and then it is that I feel – He does not want me – He is not there. Heaven, souls – why these are just words – which mean nothing to me. My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls – to go where? Why all this? God does not want me. Sometimes I just hear my own heart cry out – “My God” and nothing else comes” (p. 210).

“People say they are drawn closer to God seeing my strong faith. Is this not deceiving people? Every time I have wanted to tell the truth – “that I have no faith” (p. 238).

She came to see her suffering as a sharing in Christ’s redemptive suffering (p. 215). This was her solution: suffering, being a victim of God’s love, is what brings you closest to Jesus. No wonder she wouldn’t give pain-killers to her suffering and dying people.

At one point she wrote that the physical situation of the poorest of the poor – left in the streets unwanted, unloved unclaimed – was the true picture of her own spiritual life (p. 232).

That’s enough of a sketch to get a feel for this simple yet complex woman. She had immense dedication, energy, skill and stamina, this modern saint who became the most famous woman in the world. Yet all the while she carried within her a soul like the portrait of Dorain Gray. Her suffering and desolate soul needed to hear the one thing she could or would not hear. That was the Voice that said God was no longer present within her because since starting the Missionaries of Charity, she had stopped serving a God of love and healthy empowerment. It was simpler when she had served as a teacher, because education empowers people, and can lead them toward more possibilities and fullness in life. But to work as a missionary in the service of an extremely conservative and reactionary theology is to reduce people’s horizons, rather than enlarging them.

She fought vigorously against the only thing proven to help reduce overpopulation and its resulting suffering: the education and empowerment of women, to give them options beyond remaining the victims of uncontrolled breeding and the victims of those who see that as their God-given role. Uneducated, powerless women and the awful results of overpopulation became the victims of the god Mother Teresa served for the last fifty years of her life.

Mother Teresa wanted to bring people to Jesus, and in an ironic way, she brought me to Jesus, too – to his asking what good it would do if you gained the whole world and lost your soul. Christopher Hitchens wrote that she did far more harm than good, and that many more people suffered because of her work. I think it came not from a bad heart, but from very bad theology, and a nearly perverse willingness to work with the poorest of the poor while pandering to the worst of the wealthy, to fund the pyramid scheme of starting more and more missions of charity, which loved to hug the poor – as she wished for half a century that God would hug her – but never by empowering them, nor by providing decent medical care or social and political intervention on their behalf, to improve their lot in life. Instead, she told them to find Jesus and love their suffering.

But it matters a lot which concepts of “Jesus” and “God” we serve. After 1948, she served the wrong Jesus and the wrong God, and paid for it through 49 years of deep inner pain, suffering and loneliness. I see her tormenting inner voices as the voices of conscience trying to tell her she was not on a path that was bringing her life.

So what did it profit her to gain a whole world and lose her soul? She made the lot of the poor far worse by popularizing an adoration of their suffering rather than working to change the structures that continued to cause it, so that the numbers of the poor and desperate might be reduced rather than merely fawned over.

As that first century theologian said, she became what she worshiped, and inside the outward saintly face of Mother Teresa, the Saint of Calcutta, was the portrait of a lonely, unloved and tormented Albanian woman named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhui (Gon-cha Bo-ja-tswee), abandoned by the God of life who had once loved and comforted her during the first twenty years of her career, when she was educating and empowering people rather than using them as part of the landscape to impress a God who tried to tell her for half a century that he wanted them raised up, not patronized.

I feel sorrow for the deep emptiness of this woman named Agnes, and for the plight of the ever-growing poor – a plight I think she made worse. My hope and prayer is that she might become a lesson after all, of the terrible cost of serving gods not worth serving, and the call to return to the service of life, health and empowerment of all the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. In a terribly ironic way, her life demonstrates, more than any life I know of, that you can’t fool God. You can’t serve shallow aims and find deep fulfillment. Jesus was right: we gain nothing of real value when we lose our soul, lose the sense that we are serving life, health and an empowering love.

That’s not what Mother Teresa said, but it seems to be the message her life taught, both to her and to us. If we can hear that message she could not hear, perhaps we can find the blessings she could not find. At least, that is what I hope and believe, for all.

——————

All page numbers in parentheses are from the book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, Edited and with Commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (Doubleday, 2007)

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© Davidson Loehr

 November 25, 2007

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

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Prayer:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, but also – more than we are comfortable knowing – with what is evil.

Is it really possible that as a nation we have so much more than others without having somehow taken it from them? It felt so much better to believe that we are pure, and the world’s riches flowed naturally to us as rewards for our great purity. Yet we do know better.

We gather here as good people, but not perfect people. We gather not to seek a false purity but a more informed, more nuanced kind of wholeness. For even if we are as poets have said dust of the earth, within the dust there are motes rising to the light – and they too are part of us.

Let us seek grown-up blessings for the dust of our bodies, for it is the dust of Mother Earth, made of stardust. And let us seek the blessings of the “motes rising,” those small but sacred signs of the spirit within us that can be both aware and awake.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

SERMON: Feeling Blue About Feeling Guilty

I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on some insights from the author John Perkins, one of my current favorite authors. He’s writing about the dark underside of our American imperialism, how empires work, about the slavery always involved somewhere when those in an empire are living much better than those whose labor supports their life style.

In 2004, he wrote the best selller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, later brought twelve other writers together to write A Game as Old as Empire, and this year wrote The Secret History of the American Empire.

Empire is not about control for its own sake; it is about exploitation of foreign lands and peoples for the benefit of at least the more privileged in the country that controls the economies of others (GOE, p. 17). This is also what I’ve been calling chimpanzee politics: the pursuit of power and privilege for selfish interests.

Slavery may sound like a quaint notion from the 19th century, but it is always part of empires, and our global empire enslaves more people than the Romans and all the other colonial powers before us (EHM, p. 205). we’re Number One.

These are important things for us to know. But as I was putting together this picture of the nature and the cost of our American Way of Life, something else started bothering me, which took me down a very different path.

So I want to start by sketching the dark side of our imperialism, but then take you down the second path, too. The two paths form a dilemma that was expressed by the author E.B. White, when he said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” It also makes it hard to plan a sermon.

We now have the first truly global empire in history. Most of us aren’t terribly aware of this; but those exploited by it are, and many of them suffer from extreme poverty. On average, twenty-four thousand people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every day. More than half the planet’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. For us to live comfortable lives, millions must pay a very high price (SH, p. 6).

How have we established our empire? One answer is, through sheer military force. We have military bases in more than a hundred countries, and almost without exception they are not there for national defense. But more importantly, we establish our empire through economic policies that let us control other nations. One measure of this, which I found very clear and helpful, is about the difference between using tariffs to protect your industries, versus using “free trade” to break down and control the economies of other countries.

Our own economy developed behind some of the highest tariff walls in the world. President Ulysses S. Grant reportedly said in the 1870s “within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” It only took another eighty years, but US tariff rates were not significantly reduced until after WWII. Since then, the most successful developing countries besides ours have been Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan, which have prohibited the import of any goods that would compete with any of their most important industries. That’s also how we developed our own strong economy. Now under the mantra of “free trade,” the First World has kicked away the ladder, prohibiting Third World countries from using the only economic development strategy proven to work: the strategy of protectionism and tariffs (GOE, p. 21). “Free trade” is neither sacred nor wise; it’s a devastating weapon the strong use to enslave the weak.

Ghana, for example, was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on food imports in 2002. The result was a flood of imported food from European Union countries that destroyed the livelihoods of local farmers. It seems that the IMF’s economic hit men “forgot” to ensure that the EU abolish its own massive agricultural subsidies. As a result, frozen chicken parts imported from the EU cost a third of those locally produced. (GOE, p. 22)

Zambia was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on imported clothing, which had protected a small local industry of some 140 firms. The country was then flooded with imports of cheap secondhand clothing that drove all but 8 firms out of business. Even if Zambia’s clothing producers had been large enough to engage in international trade, they would have faced tariffs preventing them from exporting to EU and other developed countries. And while countries like Zambia are supposed to devote themselves to free trade, First World countries subsidize their exporters through export credit agencies – often with disastrous results for the environment and economies of the Third World. (GOE, p. 22)

The IMF’s structural adjustment program in Peru slashed tariffs on corn in the early 1990s, and corn from the US – whose farmers are subsidized at a rate of $40 billion a year – flooded the country. Many of Peru’s farmers were unable to compete, and so turned to growing coca for cocaine production instead. (GOE, p. 22)

Many IMF programs have required sharp cuts in health and education spending, making it harder to improve the quality and capabilities of work forces with low levels of literacy and few technological skills. In some countries, such as Ghana, the percentage of school-age children who are actually attending school is falling because of IMF-imposed budget cuts. (GOE, p. 22)

John Perkins describes Ecuador – a country in which he helped cause this harm – as typical of countries around the world that we have brought under our control. For every $100 of crude oil taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remaining six dollars and change covers military and other government expenses – which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor. So out of every $100 worth of oil taken from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water (SH, pp. xx). Two weeks ago, I talked of how we lure Third World countries into great debt as a tactic for controlling them.

The cost of servicing Third World debt is greater than all Third World spending on health or education and nearly two times the amount those countries receive each year in foreign aid. Despite current lip service to forgiving it, Third World debt grows every year, currently approaching $3 trillion. It is one of our most effective weapons against countries that have resources or locations that we want to disempower and control.

Why don’t we read about these things? The tactics are brutal, but They’re simple and clear – why don’t we read about this? Perhaps it’s partly because the US was ranked #53 on the World Press Freedom list in 2006 (compared to #17 in 2002) and has been severely criticized by Reporters Without Borders and other non-governmental organizations for jailing and intimidating journalists (EHM, xviii). Using fear to silence criticism is another hallmark of both empires and slavery.

Number 53! Fifty-two countries with greater freedom of the press than we have? This is not the America of our myths, the one so dear to our hearts, is it?

Where else can you see the kind of slavery that supports our lifestyle? You can look at Mexican workers living in shantytowns just south of our border, or Asian children practically chained to their work stations, working 12-hour days, six or seven days a week to make our sweat shirts, tennis shoes, Gap jeans and other cool clothes. You can multiply these stories a hundredfold, but they are all forms of slavery, of people being coerced to work in desperate situations in order to keep us supplied with our way of life. Meanwhile, about 8,760,000 children a year are starving to death (24,000 a day x 365), with millions more dying of treatable diseases because they can’t get treatment. Some of those people may have made the clothes we’re wearing right now.

Where else can you look? Columnist Bob Herbert wrote a disturbing piece a few weeks ago in the NY Times, on the slave trade that is alive and well in the U.S. – the sex slave trade.

He says that over 18,000 foreign nationals are believed to be trafficked into the U.S. each year. According to the State Department, 80 percent of them are women and children, an overwhelming majority of whom are used for sexual purposes. (Bob Herbert, “Today’s Hidden Slave Trade,” 27 October 2007, The NY Times op-ed page).

If you don’t think we have this in Austin, leaf through the Yellow Pages in the Austin phone book as I did this week. Look under “Escorts,” and see if you aren’t a little stunned at the number of listings for 24/7 services. See how many of them advertise international women from all countries, and imagine how many of those women are forced into that work.

But most of our slave traders aren’t involved in the sex trade. They just recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell here, there and everywhere (EHM, p. 181). We get cheap prices; they get lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

There really is a lot of suffering, a lot of injustice. we’re not likely ever to do anything about it if we don’t even know about it. I”m not even sure what we can do if we do know about it. And there are hundreds more dark stories like these, as many of you know.

Now here’s my problem: the more of these stories I read, the more depressed I got, and the less I wanted to read any more of them. Did I need to read them all? Was I insensitive if I got sick of feeling depressed? In order to be a caring person, must I be miserable?

Then an insight hit me when I read this week that the United Nations now says that Somalia is the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, not Darfur. I thought, “My God, have we been hopelessly depressed over the wrong one? Is there a prize for being hopelessly depressed over the right one?”

I have a colleague who really seems to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we should never be happy; we should starve with the hungry, suffer with the suffering, and the rest of it. He’s believed it and lived it for the thirty years I’ve known him, sometimes showing a lot of personal courage – I don’t think He’s going to change.

I know good committed people like this. Their passion is sincere. But this is a philosophy that wants us to believe that as long as one person is suffering, none of us should be happy – as though our being miserable somehow helps the world, or has a positive moral value.

This is like one of my favorite strange stories from religion, a story about the Jains. Jainism is an ancient religion derived from Hinduism, with over ten million followers today. One of their key teachings is their insistence on the sacredness of all life, from humans to bugs and even smaller.

This is a belief that can lead to some very odd behavior, like wearing surgical masks around during the day so they won’t inhale any microscopic organisms. My favorites are the stories of Jains who will carry a mattress infested with bedbugs around the city. Rather than killing the bugs, they want to feed them. Bedbugs feed on our bodies when we lie in bed, so these Jains support themselves by going around yelling, “Who will feed the bugs? Who will feed the bugs?” When someone gives them some money, one of them will lie down on the mattress and let the bugs feed on him. Who will feed the bugs? Who will support my belief that the world needs me to suffer?

If you believe we are morally bound to be miserable as long as there is injustice, you can never stop suffering. So many bugs, so little time! So much suffering, misery, war and injustice to get upset about. How could it ever end? But I think the Jains have missed the point.

Our job is not to suffer, but to live. Don’t feed the bugs. Don’t look for reasons to be miserable just because there is so much misery in the world. The theologian Howard Thurman was right when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive!”

So we’re back to that dilemma: Do we spend our days trying to save the world, or savor it?

This is the dilemma that brings to mind a wise statement made by the historian Will Durant some years ago. He had written his massive dozen-volume history of pretty much the whole world as his life’s work. Then he wrote a 100-page summary of those big volumes, The Lessons of History. And finally, in an interview, he was asked if he could sum it all up in half an hour.

He did it in less than a minute, this way: “Civilization is a river with banks. The river is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

That river always runs through life, carrying not only the unjust and evil, but also the benefits of the unjust and evil, the good things they bring us. The river has ships that bring us goods from sweatshops where people work in conditions of virtual slavery to support our way of life without making us pay a fair price for it. There are things in that river to which we are addicted.

Because we’re the empire, we’re complicit in most of the major evil in the world. We can’t be pure, ever. And there is no way we can stop being complicit in this, just as Jains kill thousands or millions of micro-organisms every day – just by living, inhaling them, or having them destroyed inside by their body’s T-cells. No one is pure; we’re interconnected with everything, the good and the bad. And that isn’t a “problem” to be solved; it’s the human condition.

This was brought home to me in a wonderful way during a worship service about a decade ago. An activist man in the church seemed absolutely to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we cannot rest, and his Sunday announcements were tedious for almost everyone but him. One Sunday he was on a rant about the destruction of the rain forests – how some large corporations are cutting them down for lumber or to make grazing pastures for cattle, what a crime this is against Mother Earth, and how all decent people must be outraged.

After getting worked up and trying to guilt-induce the entire congregation – something that almost never works – he said that well, those who really care about the earth can join him and his group for a meeting after church. Then he said, “We’ll meet at the Burger King.” He seemed not to know that Burger King was one of those corporations that had cut thousands of acres of rainforest to make pastures where they grazed the cattle that produced the hamburger he was going to be eating. we’re complicit. we’re interconnected. You can’t get away from it. If you can only be happy when You’re not complicit in evil, You’re doomed.

We have these two paths: living in the river or living on the banks. Deciding to save the world or deciding to savor it. And it does make it hard to plan a day!

So what do we do? I don’t think we’ll agree on this.

Should we honor the tried and proven tactics of willful ignorance & denial? They’ve worked wonders for many centuries. “Don’t tell me, I”m happier not knowing how the world really works? I also don’t want to know how politics works or sausage is made.”

Should we suffer, feed the bugs, and bank on some kind of salvation by purity? That’s a bus stop at which no buses stop.

One solution is to act locally in simple ways that don’t drain our life force, but which strengthen it. Last week I challenged you to write letters to the editor about the nearly burlesque bad behavior of the leaders of the Hyde Park Baptist Church, in refusing at the last minute to allow the 23rd annual Austin Area Interreligious Ministries Thanksgiving service to take place in a gymnasium they owned, because it involved non-Christians – particularly, Muslims. “Interreligious” doesn’t seem to be a word in the vocabulary of that church’s leaders. I don’t like to ask you to do things I”m not willing to do, so I wrote a Viewpoint piece on it, which the paper printed yesterday. I don’t know how many of you wrote letters, but this is something that we can do. we’re this well-educated bunch of liberals, and one thing we owe the larger community is our voice in trying to help others see a nuanced responsible moral path more clearly. It is also empowering for us. And writing some of these pieces can be a lot of fun. Let’s take care of ourselves and our gifts first, then feed the world with the overflow of our gifts.

Of course, this isn’t new advice. You’ve all heard this wisdom before, if you’ve flown commercial airlines. When They’re giving you the pre-flight instructions on the oxygen mask, they say that in the event of an emergency, put your own mask on first, and then help others. Give oxygen to yourself first, or you may not be able to help anyone else. It’s the same rule in life.

Your job is to live more fully, not to suffer, not to feed the bugs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. For the world needs people who have come alive. Then, from your own fullness, let it spill over. If you have joy, spread it. If you have extra money, help out. Just finding those organizations with people devoting their lives to improving the lot of the less fortunate is a noble thing to do. They are living much closer to the river than most of us are who just read, talk and write about it. we’re not doing the work, they are. But they can’t do it without financial support, and it isn’t wimping out to write a check. Twenty-four weeks a year, we split our collection plate with different non-profit organizations doing just this – and I hope we can move toward sharing every week’s collection. This isn’t feeding the bugs, it’s feeding the de-buggers.

Supporting the efforts of those who live and work much closer to the river than we do or would want to is one way we can live on the banks while remaining creatively aware of the greater suffering that must be attended to by people who can do that day in and day out without – I hope – losing their own joy in life.

And yet it isn’t this simple. Just the act of acknowledging our complicity in the world’s largest and most rapacious empire changes who we are. Our complicity in the world’s major evils of slavery runs deep. We show it at Wal-Mart, Sears, and at exclusive shops – many of which are now reportedly getting their name brands made in China. We show our complicity in our technological gadgets, our cars, everywhere. We wear our complicity in our clothing; we drive it, use it in laptops and cell phones. We are dipped in complicity with the evils of our American empire, all the way down.

So what now? Where from here? I don’t have that answer, but I know how I must begin, and I invite you back into the attitude of prayer with which we began:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, and also with what is evil.

We gather here as good people, but not perfect people. We gather not to seek a false purity but a more informed, more nuanced kind of wholeness. For even if we are as poets have said dust of the earth, within the dust there are motes rising to the light – and they too are part of us.

Let us seek grown-up blessings for the dust of our bodies, for it is the dust of Mother Earth, made of stardust. And let us seek the blessings of the “motes rising,” those small but sacred signs of the spirit within us that can be both aware and awake.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

—————-

(NOTE: I’ve used three of John Perkins’ books for this sermon: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, A Game as Old as Empire, and The Secret History of the American Empire. To make the references shorter, I’ve abbreviated them as EHM, GOE, and SH.)

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