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Davidson Loehr

28 September 2008

PRAYER:

Let us be pulled into spiritual paths that leave us with a good aftertaste. There is so much religious advice around telling us how we had better get in line with this or that set of beliefs being hawked by churches and preachers who sometimes just feel too slick or mean. But their certainty is too simple, doesn?t have a good smell to it and leaves a bad aftertaste.

Let us instead be lured into paths of loving others as we love ourselves, and loving ourselves as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life?s longing for itself, stewards of only the highest ideals. Such spiritual paths are very simple, but they have an aroma and an aftertaste that is still pleasing even years later.

So much in life can be identified by the lasting taste, smell and feel it leaves with us. Let us learn to be drawn to the places that smell good – that smell like ambrosia, or the subtle scent of those angels of our better nature.

Amen.

READING:

The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travellers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you?” “Look at our pictures, and books,? they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.” Then came in the men, and they said, “What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want gifts?” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, “This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

SERMON: What Do You People Believe, Anyway?

Every religious liberal has heard some version of this question from their family or friends. It?s hard to answer questions of belief in ways that are both honest and interesting. Maybe all I can do here is let you hear how I grapple with this, hoping it might help you grapple with it too.

One way of getting into the complexities of belief today is through understanding the complexities of families today. For a couple decades at least, we’ve been used to the phrase “His, hers and ours” to describe what we learned to call “blended families.” Other siblings, parents or other relatives often become at least temporary parts of our families too, as with the family who lit our candles this morning, and as with some of your families.

And what is true of our blended families is also true of the blend of beliefs we each have. Honest religious belief can never again be the simplistic kind of white-bread thing we thought it was fifty years ago.

The things we cling to today are blended families of beliefs, borrowing from all over the world map.

In old-time religion, it might have seemed enough to recite a creed cobbled together many centuries earlier by people living in a very different world, as though that could do more than make us uncritical members of a very old club with no necessary wisdom for the modern world.

Now the lights from which we find enlightenment come in many different sizes, shapes and genders, like the lights upon our altar. Men, women, children, experiences we never expected to change our life, but did. Wisdom we’ve read in self-help books, business books, snippets of Buddhist or Christian or philosophical thought, lines from movies or songs, readings from astrology, things we heard on Oprah, comments from family, friends, therapists or preachers that stick with us – all these things are blended together into our traveling carnival family of practical wisdom, using this bit today, another tomorrow, seldom noticing that this bit and that bit may even contradict each other.

We’ve been trained to think that religion is primarily about what we believe, but defining ourselves by beliefs really doesn’t work well today.

In this more complex world of spirituality, orthodoxy is always too small for real life. It creates too many theological fights, some of them deadly, that amount to a church or preacher restricting God and life to the limits of their tastes and biases, exalting a creed written centuries ago, and sometimes getting hateful toward those in the church across the street, who don’t share the beliefs.

To exalt beliefs is to give way too much credit to theologians! I’m a theologian – I got my Ph.D. in theology – and I can tell you as an insider that you don’t want to invest too much in the spoutings of theologians. You might think that there must be some secret knowledge that theologians learn, that gives them a special kind of authority not available to normal people. But I spent seven years in graduate school, and if there had been that kind of secret knowledge, I would have found it. The truth is, theologians have no secret knowledge about life, because their courses aren’t about life. Theologians are academics, and their courses are restricted to thinking about life from the perspective of their religion. But wisdom comes from living through life experiences and being able to reflect on them in ways that shed light – and that’s not what theologians do.

Here’s an analogy. Talking to a theologian is like talking to a Buick salesman. He can tell you a lot about Buicks, but don’t trust him to tell you what the best car is, because he may not know much more about that than you do. And don’t trust him to tell you whether you need a Buick, some other kind of car, or no car at all, because he has a conflict of interest. The same is true with theologians. They can tell you about their personal religion, but not whether you need it, or whether it’s better for you than other religions or no religion. They also have a conflict of interest.

So as a theologian, I want to tell you not to worry too much about gods you can’t see, and don’t trust theologians trying to tell you about those invisible gods they can’t see either. If we live like that Roman family in the reading, we’ll have a pretty sweet-smelling religion and life.

Orthodoxies and polished belief statements are mostly like advertising brochures that often have very little to do with the lives led by the believers.

Think of the Roman family in that reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson. They were completely outside the acceptable boundaries of belief that Friar Bernard had learned, so he prayed for his God to destroy these Romans. Now that alone is incredible, disgusting, and not terribly surprising. His beliefs were making him small and dangerous, in a world that went way beyond them, the way the world usually goes way beyond the boundaries of beliefs. He was just one priest, so he didn’t have much power. But if he’d had much power, he could have been very dangerous. As we heard his disgust beginning to unfold for this generous family, he was starting to smell bad. But then his humanity trumped his theology, he realized these were cultured and caring people – lovers, even! – and his comfortable little world of beliefs was thrown out of order.

His beliefs no longer seemed so valid, because life had trumped belief. That’s how it should work. Life should always be able to trump beliefs. The Romans had a saying that we should behave as though all the truly decent people who had ever lived were watching us, and then do only what we could proudly do in front of that audience. And in this story they certainly behaved that way. Their beliefs served them and others because their religion wasn’t about beliefs – it was about behavior. If Friar Bernard’s god was watching him as the Romans believed their gods were watching them, he would have been pleased at Friar Bernard’s final frustrated wail, but not at his early arrogance of wanting those whose beliefs were outside his understanding to be destroyed.

So what do we believe, anyway? Usually when we are asked what we believe, we try to think of some polished belief statements somebody taught us, because they sound more impressive than something we could just make up. If we just make up our own words for what we believe, it seldom sounds very dramatic.

When conservatives do it, we liberals often love to pick them apart. It’s one of our favorite sports.

Someone says, “I believe in this God who created the whole universe and who loves little old me!” That’s dramatic, but pretty easy to pick apart. We can’t even imagine how vast the universe is. Billions of galaxies. We probably can’t even imagine what a billion would look like. And three thousand years ago, when the god of the Bible was first exalted by a small tribe of Hebrew people in the Middle East, they thought the whole universe was smaller than the state of Texas. I think some Texans still do.

So it’s easy fun, showing that the most dramatic conservative beliefs fall apart at second glance. On the other hand, if we try to use our own words, or slogans we hear in our highly evolved liberal groups to define ourselves by beliefs, it can get just as arrogant, and may not be very truthful. If we say we believe in deeds not creeds – what deeds can we point to that we’ve actually done, that aren’t really kind of ho-hum in the grand scheme of things?

If we say we celebrate freedom of belief – and we love the sound of that one! – how many examples can we think of involving our children, family or partner choosing beliefs that contradict ours, and actually celebrating that rather than just tolerating it? If we say we believe in fighting for justice, what examples can we think of that we’ve done that don’t just sound trivial – and justice, not just the biases of generic social or political liberals?

The trouble with using polished and rehearsed little bromides is that they will usually sound more impressive than our lives look. And religion isn’t about putting on a pious front or trying to impress anyone with our purity and righteousness. That doesnt really fool anybody, and it has a bad aroma.

When I hold myself against the highest ideals, I have to admit that I don’t look very good. I’m not out there saving the world. I don’t give a lot of time or money to really noble causes, I haven’t risked my life like soldiers have, at least not since I was a soldier many years ago. I haven’t sold everything I own and given it to the poor as Jesus asked. I can resonate with platitudes like “As long as one person isn’t free, no one is free.” They feel stirring, but I can’t think of anything I’m really doing to walk that talk that costs me much – and when I actually think about it, I don’t even agree with the statement.

You can say things like “I believe in Reason, Science, Justice, Truth, Goodness, America, Mom and apple pie,” and that sounds pretty darned swell. But how much of this has been evident in the way you lived your life during the last couple weeks?

And it gets worse. When we do something really charitable, we usually want credit for it. So then were our motives altruistic, or mostly self-centered? Jesus said to give in secret, not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and we probably all admire that degree of humility, but we seldom have it. We hope somebody notices what we’ve done, and are not above finding some sneaky way to tell them. Now maybe I’m the only one here who’s like this, but I don’t think so.

I think there may be a lot of people here who feel that it’s about all you can do to do your work, try your best to raise your children well, and have more than a few minutes a day for quality time with your partner while keeping in touch with the people you love. You might like high-sounding rhetoric, like hearing good sermons that lift up really noble aspirations, and somewhere in both your head and heart you really mean all this as much as you know how to mean anything. But your life doesn’t look like the picture of the perfect life from a spiritual advertising brochure any more than the lives of religious conservatives do.

So maybe the question is, how do you express yourself in an authentic way?

One answer is to define ourselves not by beliefs but by behaviors, and to try and act like all the most decent people in the world were watching us.

There’s a big difference between identifying ourselves with beliefs and identifying ourselves by our behaviors. The history of religions has plenty of both, and almost all the really bad ones were those who exalted rigid beliefs above decent behavior toward those who didn’t share their beliefs, as Friar Bernard did at first.

I’ll just pick two famous examples from history, from two different religions. John Calvin was the 16th century theologian who preached the gospel of original sin and human depravity, and taught it to tens of millions of Christians who followed his Calvinist theology. It’s a horrid doctrine and terrible theology, but if anything, he was a living example of moral depravity in some of his behavior. When a brilliant and impertinent Spanish physician named Michael Servetus – this was the physician who first discovered the circulation of blood – wrote an essay on the errors of the Trinity, and sent a copy to Calvin, Calvin seethed. When Servetus then had the nerve – and bad judgment – to show up one Sunday in Calvin’s church in Geneva, Calvin had him arrested, and burned alive. Worse than that, Calvin instructed the executioners to tie Servetus in a chair, lower him into the flames, then raise him up, lower him again, so in all it took half an hour before Servetus died.

And the Ayatollah Khomeini, among other hateful acts, ordered the murder of the novelist Salman Rushdie because one of Rushdie’s novels made fun of a fundamentalist Islamic belief. These were both powerful and charismatic men, regarded by their followers as God’s agents – though not, I think, regarded so by any God worthy of the name. But their behavior put the lie to their professed beliefs, and left a terrible stench in the annals of history. There was nothing of God about either of them in these actions. Genuine gods don’t care whether people buy the stories of this or that church or charismatic preacher. They care whether you are coming more alive, finding the kind of truth that makes you more whole, how you treat others, whether you’re a blessing or a curse to the world.

The goal is authenticity, not orthodoxy. And orthodoxies often offer little more than an anesthetic for those who are afraid or unsure how to be authentic.

It’s worth believing not in slick-sounding creeds but in a sweet-smelling life. And the clues to this are all around us:

1. They’re in that Roman story. The priest defined himself by beliefs and we all knew he was too small. The Romans never even mentioned beliefs, and even in the story they smelled sweet.

2. A bigger clue, and better news, is the fact that we all knew that. We could all tell the difference between the feel and the smell of Friar Bernard’s smallness and the largesse of the Roman family as soon as we heard the story.

3. And the best news is that we act on it, and act on it naturally, easily, and often. We just ordained Jack Harris-Bonham here this morning. We didn’t do it because of his beliefs. I’m not sure what they all are, and I don’t much care. We did it because he was here for two years, as an intern then as the contract minister during my sabbatical, and we came to know his heart and mind through his actions toward others. And like the Roman family, we knew this was a decent person and a blessing to the world, whatever beliefs get him there.

So what can we say about honest religion that might be useful? One thing is that there is no secret knowledge: nothing that is necessary to us is really hidden. We can hear stories like the reading by Emerson, awful stories of arrogant men like John Calvin and the Ayatollah Khomeini, we can delight in recognizing the promise of someone like Jack Harris-Bonham and ordain him to whatever kinds of ministry his heart and the whims of the world may lead him to, and we have already shown that we have almost all the spiritual knowledge we need to be saved, and to help heal the world around us. We know the difference between the stench of bad faith inflicted on ourselves and others, and the sweet smell of a life lived pretty fully and well here and now, among one another.

Religious instruction is important, to help train the moral sense that is already a part of us. But by the time we’re in our teens or earlier, the question of what’s really worth believing and how we should behave toward one another can be distilled into one very simple piece of advice: just follow your nose.

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Davidson Loehr

21 September 2008

PRAYER:

When people or experiences become doorways or windows, let us learn to look through them.

When someone or something in life opens us to the possibility of a life with more understanding, compassion or wholeness, let us gather our courage and step through that opening, from a world of the habitual into a world of the possible.

When we feel the pull of authenticity, let us bend toward it, that it may draw us into lives of greater integrity, love and joy.

Life is a series of pushes and pulls, too many trying to push us toward selling out, settling for too little from ourselves, pushing us toward the dissipation of our spirits.

But not all of life is against us. If we live among angels and demons, and have been frightened by the demons, let us remember there are angels as well: messengers from Life, from places of trust and empowerment, from a healing kind of truth and hope.

Those angels. Let us walk with those angels, in whatever guise they appear. Sometimes they even appear among those who love us. We hunger for messages of wholeness and hope. Let us listen for them, answer them, and be prepared to be transformed.

Amen.

SERMON: Unitarian Christianity

I want to spend some time this fall making us more aware of the rich history of honest religion. By “honest religion” I mean a religion that is open to all critical questions and doubts, and whose truths must be grounded in life itself, not merely the dogmas and ideologies of this or that church or cult. Last month, I talked about that spirit in the story of Gilgamesh, which is the world’s oldest story, going back 4700 years. Today I want to jump 4500 years and talk about Rev. William Ellery Channing. Most of you may never have heard of him, but he was the man most responsible for making Unitarianism into a separate American faith, nearly two hundred years ago. He did it through a very influential sermon delivered in 1819 called “Unitarian Christianity.” It’s ironic that the seeds he planted were neither Unitarian nor Christian, and would eat away at the foundation of theism and Biblical religions.

It’s a little tricky when we look back to an outstanding person who happens to have some connection with a label we also claim. Is it just mindless hero-worship? Worse, is it a kind of slobbering narcissism? “Well, they were spectacular and Unitarian. And I’m a Unitarian, so I must also be spectacular!”? That’s kind of like wearing a Longhorns t-shirt and thinking we must therefore be a nationally-ranked athlete. I have a Longhorns t-shirt that I wear to the gym, but I’m a rank athlete, not a ranked one. It’s a big difference.

Another approach to history’s gifted thinkers is to say, “Here was someone faced with the same kinds of life questions that face me, who found a way to look beyond the habits of their time, and respond to them by tapping into something timeless and life-giving. I want that too; maybe I can learn something here!” That’s what I want to do this morning.

So I want to start by backing off and describing what the spirit of honest religion is about, so we can see this William Ellery Channing fellow in the right context, so we can see how any of this might be useful in our own search for honest religion. Some historians have said it’s too bad that American Unitarianism was ever called Unitarian because it’s the wrong name – and I agree with them. “Unitarian” was the insult name assigned it by those who hated it two hundred years ago. But it was never about how many gods we should count. It was about a style of seeking honest religion, and it was the same style that has been there in all times and places, whenever the spirit of honest religion appears.

There are many ways to put this primal spirit of honest religion. One is that it is about coming alive, seeking the truth and healing our world. Another is summed up in ten magnificent words from the Christian scriptures: “Examine everything carefully, hold fast to that which is good.” (I Thessalonians 5:21, NASB). Those ten words are also a pretty good summary of the scientific method, and of how we all try to make sense of things in our lives. We all try to examine everything carefully, holding fast only to what looks good, don’t we? We could say it’s just about waking up, as the Buddhists do: that we are mostly trapped within illusions we create through our odd ways of putting things, and there is a freedom in facing ourselves and our world as we really are, and finding the kind of real-world happiness that is there only for those awake enough to see it.

In every flowering of the spirit of honest religion, there is a kind of trinity that underlies their faith. And that trinity is there in the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing as well, which is another reason it’s too bad what he was doing was called Unitarian. This trinity isn’t about gods, and it can’t be fit inside of Christianity or any other religion. It’s much bigger. It’s the enduring method of doing honest religion, a kind of three-legged stool on which the business of trying to take ourselves and life seriously always stands.

1. The first leg is grounded in our experience here and now. Religion has to relate to you and your actual life, or it can’t be your religion. And we’re seldom served very well by living someone else’s religion. Religion isn’t top-down. We don’t learn the truths we need from someone with a loud voice and a lot of arrogance. We learn it from the inside out. Our inside out.

2. The second part of honest religion’s trinity is that our reason and intuition are to be trusted, and no religious teaching should ever be accepted if it doesn’t make sense to us. There is a kind of mysticism about this, because we believe that the reality inside our hearts and minds can be trusted to have something to do with the reality outside of us. When you think about it, if that weren’t true, all our knowledge would be useless in the real world.

3. The third leg of this method is the belief that we need to find a center, a focus, that we believe can guide us toward living more wisely and well, because this is about the quality of our life. We want a way to live that will let us look in the mirror in five or fifty years and be able at least to say, “You know, if I only get one shot at this, I’m glad I lived the way I did.” If you can say that, you have won. It can take many forms, this center. It can be gods and saviors, rituals and civic duties, relationships, the psychological experience of conversion, or just waking up, as the Buddhists say. But we will worship something, and we will tend to take the shape of what we worship, so what we put at the center of our lives is most important.

The timeless quality of this spirit of honest religion is what’s behind the experience of so many visitors to churches like this. People will come for the first time and say, “My God, I’m home! This is what I was before I knew it existed. It’s what I’ve been looking for all my life. I didn’t know churches like this existed! My head and heart are at home here.” That powerful thing you’re relating to is not Unitarian Universalism, which was only turned into a religion during the 1980s – and what a sad mistake that was! It is also not Unitarianism (which is less than 200 years old in the U.S., and less than 500 years old in any form). It is not Christianity or even theism, but something far deeper and older: something primal. It’s that primal power, that primal and honest connection between ourselves and the world around us that life-giving religion is about.

Now I don’t want to get too spiritually precious about this, because you can find this spirit lots of places besides religion – there are plenty of people who’ll say you’re only likely to find it places other than religion. It comes from our yearnings, just as our gods and religions do.

I just finished reading a trilogy called His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, the British writer who wrote these teen fantasies for an audience of young people from maybe age 12-18 or so. When the first volume, “The Golden Compass,” was made into a high-budget movie last year, I read about some evangelical groups protesting because he was an atheist. At the time, I thought, “Oh, evangelical groups are always saying things like that!” But after reading the books, I think they grossly understated the power of his assault on religion. It is subtle, brilliant, deep and complete. I think the books can plant seeds of healthy skepticism about religion in many of the young people who read them – in older people, too. It’s an attack on authoritarian religion in the name of our deep human need to seek the kind of truth that makes us come more alive and become more whole.

Now this garden of the spirit of life is the garden from which the spirit of William Ellery Channing grew. His vision was not as deep or broad or ambitious as that of Philip Pullman, who had the advantage of writing a century and a half later. And Channing was no revolutionary; he disliked controversy, though he was drawn into much of it through his writing and preaching. But Channing was brilliant. He graduated from Harvard at the top of his class at age 18, in 1798. In the early 1800s, he was regarded as the best preacher in America, and was one of the people interviewed by Alexis de Tocqueville for his classic work on Democracy in America.

Channing was not a pioneer. He followed several generations of American Congregationalist preachers who taught that Jesus was just a human, that we all had a “likeness to God,” and that the creeds and rigid beliefs of the churches distracted us from the deeper message that was concerned with changing our lives here and now.

And Channing, no less than the Christians, had a trinity. But his trinity was that trinity of honest religion in all times and places:

1. He had faith in our dignity rather than our damnation. That faith in our inherent goodness rather than a crippling sinfulness is at the heart of the impulse toward honest religion in all times and places.

2. He trusted Reason, and exalted it above scriptures and religious teachings. He said if we couldn’t trust reason, then we also couldn’t trust the reason of those who try to teach us what is true.

You can shatter the creeds and orthodoxies of every religion in the world just through these first two methods.

Here are some of his words on this, so you can get a feel for his style:

“It is always best to think first for ourselves on any subject, and then [to look] to others for the correction or improvement of our own sentiments. . . . The quantity of knowledge thus gained may be less, but the quality will be superior. Truth received on authority, or acquired without labor, makes but a feeble impression.”

“Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.”

“And we therefore distrust every interpretation, which, after deliberate attention, seems repugnant to any established truth.”

He objected to the Christian trinity both because it was irrational and because it never appeared in the Bible. Like Jesus, he said, he worshiped only God.

He also found irrational and insulting the idea that Jesus came to save us from God’s wrath, or that his death would somehow change God’s mind. No, he said, Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind – think what a juvenile concept of God that involves – Jesus came to change our minds.

He granted that reason can be used badly in religion as in all other areas, but asked people to look back through history and decide whether more harm has been done by trusting reason, or by forbidding it. The historical record is dramatic and clear on this point.

3. The third part of his trinity was God, but even here he meant something very different from orthodox Christians. Here are some of his words. You can hear that spirit of honest and timeless religious inquiry coming through, and that he’s talking about something much more primal than any god:

“We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence, whether on earth or in heaven. We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established.”

“By these remarks, we do not mean to deny the importance of God’s aid or Spirit; but by his Spirit, we mean a moral, illuminating, and persuasive influence, not physical, not compulsory?.”

Can you hear that these words take him completely beyond the God of the Bible? He’s talking about high ideals and noble moral qualities, and his ideal version of them is called, by habit and convention, “God.” That’s fundamentally different from “believing in God,” as you can feel.

He spoke of a “zeal for truth,” but didn’t think it showed up often enough in religion, and wrote that “On no subject have people injected so many strange conceits, wild theories, and fictions of fancy, as on religion.” The kind of truth he sought was what he called “purifying truth” that could make us more godlike.

He also said, “In my view, religion is another name for happiness, and I am most cheerful when I am most religious.” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900 [Wesminister John Knox Press, 2001], p. 15) He is not speaking as a Unitarian or a liberal Christian here. He is speaking from a far deeper and more primal place, as you can feel.

Was Channing a Unitarian? That’s hard to answer. He called his sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” though what he really brought to his liberal Christians on that 5th of May in 1819 was a kind of Trojan Horse: a gift containing forces that would eventually destroy the foundations of Christianity, theism, and Biblical religion for many. His sermon contained ideas whose logical implications would lead beyond Unitarian Christianity, the Bible and theism. That’s the sermon that all students for the UU ministry are required to read. And he later wrote other pieces defending his Unitarian Christianity against the orthodox versions, saying it was more honest, and helped form better people. But what he meant was the method of honoring reason and experience, examing everything carefully, discarding what doesn’t hold up, and holding fast only to what is good. And then, when the American Unitarian Association first began in 1825, he would not join it, and never supported it. He thought people should seek to develop themselves within local churches, but that an organization like the Unitarian Association would probably just be an agent of unneeded mischief. He said there is “no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd, even towards the best objects.”

(http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/williamellerychanning.html) “An established church,” he said, “is the grave of intellect.” (Dorrien, p. 17)

When he used the word “God”, it meant excellence that made rational and moral sense – anyone must believe in that! To put it in his language, he believed we were created in the image of God, that God gave us reason and expected us to use it, and that any faith that denied this, or that could not stand up to the critiques of informed reason, was unworthy of us, and of God. In the language of our time, he was very close to what we would call religious humanism, as all varieties of liberal religion through the ages have been.

I’ve always identified with a lot about Channing, including his deep distrust and rejection of any national organization that was bound to become a kind of club, offering a kind of second-hand religion, as our modern UUA does. But I like him mostly because he was one of the people whose vision transcended the beliefs of his time and place, of the vast majority of his colleagues and parishioners, and caught a glimpse of the kind of honest religion that really does seem to be timeless.

The insights of honest religion transcend all the gods and religions. Not because we’re bigger than the gods, but because Life is, and it is Life’s longing for itself that comes alive in us and drives us to examine everything carefully and hold fast only to that which is good.

If you’ve never heard of this preacher from the early 19th century and wonder if you should be writing his name down in case there’s a test, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to care about William Ellery Channing. And while we’re at it, you don’t have to care about Jesus or the Buddha, either. Don’t let mean and arrogant preachers scare you: religion isn’t about the gods, the teachers or the preachers. The best of them are all windows opening us to visions of life so honest and big that they might beckon to us, might lure us into following them down a richer path. To use one metaphor, they are like rainbows, suggesting that if we could only follow them, there could be a pot of gold at their end. Or in another metaphor, they’re like recipes, saying if we can add our ingredients, figure out the missing instructions and imagine how to cook them up about right, they could help us make a better life. It shouldn’t be so hard. There are just the three known ingredients, at least they don’t change much. First, we must bring our life and our experiences, the happy ones, the proud ones, the raw ones, and those times we went off the road. All of them. They’re the stuff we need to wrap into our life. Then we need to trust our reason and intuition, how it sounds and feels, whether it feels like there’s a harmony of thought and action. And then the Center. What do we tune to? What will we serve? Where’s the focus around which we want to be in a kind of orbit; the kind of center that gives us a calling and an integrity that keep life from just becom-ing one damned thing after another?

We’re going to end here before it’s cooked, because finishing the recipe is our job in our own lives. And so we leave here, as we often do, half-baked. We leave carrying some of our parts in bags or buckets, still unassembled. But we kind of know how they should go, how they need to be put together to make a whole being, our whole being.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be that? A whole being? The essential parts put together with integrity and feeling, serving a Center of Life that gives us life, learning how to walk, to dance, maybe to sing?

That wild, enticing, nearly impossible-feeling task is what we’ve always been about in honest religion. There are no secrets, we have good materials to work with in ourselves, and it can be done, step by step by step. But it can’t be done in just one week. That’s why we meet like this, every Sunday.

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© Davidson Loehr

 7 September 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 give thanks for life and truth, and are grateful when they find us. The kind of light that can heal comes in so many forms, from so many directions. It may be that the best way to live is with the kind of openness and trust that seems so much easier for children than for adults.

When the man Jesus pointed to small children and said we must be like them if we are to enter the kingdom of God, it was a deep truth that transcended even him, and was rooted in the deepest nature of life itself.

Let us not think that religion is about swooning to the sound of heavenly words or music. It’s about coming alive in a deep and fulfilling way. Living well is more than “the best revenge” – it’s also the best religion. And it’s what generates the heavenly music, not the other way around.

Let us give thanks when we are found by the kind of truth that can set us free and make us feel more whole.

And let us try to be vehicles of that kind of truth and healing for the parts of our world that touch our heads and hearts. Those in our larger world need us, just as we need them, for we really are all in this together. And for that too we give thanks. Amen.

SERMON: Covenants

“Covenant” is a weird word. In 22 years, I’ve never preached on it, seldom used it, and get suspicious of people who throw it around like it’s something of which all really cool people should have one.

So after deciding to bring it to you as a Sunday theme, I had to try and understand it well enough to know why I think it’s worth your time to hear about it in a sermon. For me, that meant trying to learn a wide variety of covenants, both from religion and from real life, because I think the more ways we can say something, the better the chances are that we actually know what we’re talking about.

So let me start with you the way I started with myself – by talking about a lot of different kinds of covenants, so the pattern and feel of what this weird word means might come alive from several different directions. It’s actually about something pretty important, and not at all confined to religion.

One of the classic statements is from the Bible, from the book of Joshua, where the writer says that you can serve any god you choose, then ends with the famous line, “But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15)

Another is the famous statement of Martin Luther’s, when he decided he had to serve a different definition and style of God than the Roman Catholic Church had served for almost 1500 years, when he said, “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.” As I said last week, this wasn’t long before he had to hide out for a year and a half because the Church wanted to kill him. But he was sustained in his hiding out by the new faith to which he had given himself heart, mind and soul.

Probably the most detailed and demanding example is in the religion of Islam. We are in their most sacred month, the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are expected to fast during the day for a whole month, as an exercise in spiritual purification. But in addition, there are four other Pillars of Islam, expected of all. They are required to profess their faith, do the ritual prayers that occur five times a day, pay a percentage of their income each year to benefit the poor – the poor can demand this! – and at some time in their life, make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Those are all pretty dramatic. But the idea of being possessed by an idea or a cause that gives you life is not just something that happens in organized religions.

I’m a member of a local group of former military officers. It was started by a retired Air Force general I know, and most of the officers were Colonels or generals. I’m the token former Lieutenant, and the token minister. What I like most about it is the deep and powerful covenant these men made with the oath they took as officers, and how much that oath still empowers them. For the past few years, they have been mailing letters to the very highest level military commanders, some of whom they know personally, reminding them that this oath was to uphold the Constitution, not support a President who has violated his office by launching an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and systematically destroying the freedoms and civil liberties at home that these soldiers had once believed they were fighting to protect. “We have a sacred duty to uphold the Constitution,” they will say, “and we have all devoted our lives to that duty.” That’s a covenant, a very powerful one. At one time or other, most of these men have risked their lives on behalf of that covenant.

It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. The three banners we have hanging up on the front wall are inviting a kind of covenant (TO COME ALIVE, TO SEEK TRUTH, TO HEAL OUR WORLD). It is the covenant of people in almost every religion I know of, anywhere on earth. Is there a religion anywhere whose people don’t believe they are there to seek the kind of truth that can set them free, help them come move alive, and help heal themselves, their relationships with others, and whatever parts of their world they can touch? It’s very close to the definition of what it means to be religious, or just to be serious about life. And taking it seriously, giving ourselves to it, is a covenant that can be as binding as a General’s oath to uphold the Constitution, or Martin Luther’s saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

The banners and liturgical candles beneath them are reminders. Banners point to the lights because those ideals can each open us to kinds of light we need. The lights point to the banners, because we need to be lit up by plugging into only the highest ideals, and letting them take possession of us like the angels of our better nature.

The story of Androcles and the Lion also shows a kind of covenant. (I told this as the children’s Storytime at the beginning of this service.) It’s a very old story. Ancient sources insist that it is a true story, told by someone who witnessed the scene in the arena. It comes from Aesop’s Fables, and Aesop lived 2500 years ago, about the same time the Buddha lived. Androcles’ covenant was with Life. The lion was just the form of life that needed his help. It could have been a dog, a cat or a child, it happened to be a lion. The lion’s covenant was simpler. It was just with Androcles, who had probably saved his life.

And that wonderful ten-word statement of the spirit of liberal religion in the Bible that I read you last week is also inviting you into a covenant: “Examine everything carefully. Hold fast to what is good.” (I Thessalonians 5:21).

I don’t want to push the examples and metaphors for this too far, but I’ll try another. If life were an automobile, the covenant would be the transmission. It is how we get the power transferred to us, how we assimilate, incarnate, the promised power of religion. Every commitment with consequences comes from a covenant.

Now not all covenants are good. Not all gods are good, and not all gods give life to us. Some drain it from us in the name of lower and more selfish aims. After all, Mafia members also have a covenant. So do those conspiring to commit a crime. Corporations that punish whistle-blowers are saying that the whistle-blowers violated an implied covenant to put the corporation above all other considerations, including truth, justice and safety. But one of the most hopeful facts of life is that most of us can tell the difference between coming alive and selling out, and we know it very early in life.

I’ve been reading some fantasy series written for young people this summer, and It’s interesting how often this idea of serving high ideals with your life comes up, and kids understand it almost intuitively, I think. One series of books was by Rick Riordan (Ryer-den, rhymes with “fire”), four volumes on Percy Jackson and the Olympians, all based in the ancient Greek myths, and a wonderful retelling of them. The children are called half-bloods, meaning half human, but also the sons and daughters of the Greek gods, and so they have the nature of their divine parents, and you can predict how they’ll act and what they’ll be passionate about.

I know you’re getting what this is about. It is really about a fundamental concept in religion and life: the question of what are we serving, and whether it gives us life, whether it and we are a blessing to ourselves and others.

Here’s another example that may not sound at all like a covenant. My undergraduate degree was in music theory from the University of Michigan, and I still remember a remark from a lecture in composition, about the French Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel, who wrote “Bolero” but also a lot of more complex stuff, and was regarded as perhaps the greatest orchestrator of the 20th Century. The line that stayed with me came when the professor said the most remarkable thing about Ravel was that he never published a bad piece of music. He wrote some, of course – even the best composers write some bad music. But he destroyed it before he died. He never published a bad piece of music because the idea of it violated something that seemed sacred to Ravel: only to serve the muses at the highest level possible to him, nothing less.

As I’ve reflected on it over the years, I’ve thought this really makes Ravel a lot like a saint, one of those people way more perfect than we’d ever aspire to be. We don’t hear stories of saints being really nasty, rude, cruel, or selling out to a lobbyist. I don’t know how they were in real life, but the image created of them by those who told and edited their stories was an image of someone living a nearly perfect life. That’s how Ravel was like a saint. Living the live of a perfect composer who never published a bad piece of music, no matter what the market demanded of him – and you know the market clamored for more pieces like “Bolero” (which Ravel once described as eight minutes of orchestration without music).

When you come here on Sunday, you know that I, Brian Ferguson our ministerial intern, all of our paid and unpaid musicians, our lay leaders, greeters and ushers will always be trying to serve the highest ideals we can. If you’ve been coming here for awhile, you know this, but It’s worth saying out loud from time to time. we’re serious about the time we all spend together here, because we have made a covenant with high religious ideals, high musical ideals, a covenant to serve the truths that can make us more whole, help us come more alive, help us heal ourselves and those others in our world whose lives we touch. That is as sacred as it gets, and that’s what we’re here to serve, every week.

Every week, you know this is a room where you can come to hear inspiring and challenging words. If theyre more challenging than inspiring, they may not always be comfortable. But if we’re doing our job, they will always be about coming alive, seeking truth and healing our world rather than hearing about outsourcing, downsizing, maximizing profit for stockholders, winning through intimidation or learning how to swim with the sharks, as though that wouldn’t just turn us into sharks, while outsourcing our souls.

This church, like all sanctuaries, is committed to being a nourishing place to dream of making better music with our lives, and protecting the dreamers. It is a place, and these worship services are homes, where we can dream in peace together – dreams of finding and being converted by the kinds of truths that can help us become more free and whole, filled to overflowing with life, so the world around us might be nourished by the overflow.

The goal of all this seems to be to live as Ravel did his music, only publishing the best. To the extent that we can pull it off, It’s pretty admirable.

What if the children’s author Rick Riordan and the composer Ravel are right? What if we are all half-divine, called to find that higher voice, those angels of our better nature, the healing kind of harmony, let it get inside our souls and shape us in its image? What if all the works we published in our lives had the mark of that kind of excellent spirit? We’d be eligible for sainthood, for one thing.

Here’s another way of putting this. you’re going through your life, wandering around a bit. You see this church, but you think, “Oh, that’s religion, and I don’t trust it. It isn’t honest. I know religion, and it isn’t honest.” Then you come in, hang around and listen for a bit, and you think, Oh well, I get this. It’s just ideas, abstract ideals and values, like reading philosophy books. I get it. Well, that was interesting. Ho hum.” Then one day – it can happen at any time – you become aware of a large sort of animal near you who is suffering. It’s a thorn of some kind stuck into it, a big painful thing. The animal needs your help. You’ve learned about suffering, and truth, and life, and know that even you can help alleviate suffering. It’s a little scary, but you find some courage – maybe it comes from realizing that after all you are half divine, and you call on the power and courage of that god or goddess who’s always been with you as part of your soul. So you do it. In spite of some fear, you pull out the thorn in this animal’s foot. You do it perhaps not because you cared so much for this one suffering animal, but you have learned to care for life, and this potentially powerful creature is very much alive. You heal it. It is only afterwards, when you begin to notice how much more easily and lightly you are walking, that you realize the animal, all along, was really you.

And this life-changing little drama has a sound track. It’s accompanied by a choir of the better angels of our nature, singing some of the most beautiful music ever published.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

December 9, 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 not sleep through this holiday season. We don’t get a lot of holiday kits – these do-it-yourself or do-it-together chances to come alive. Let us not miss this one.

It isn’t belief that will keep us out, for hardly anyone would even know how to believe the many fantastic parts of this holiday season.

It is, in many ways, such a simple season: lights, candles, music, costumes, decorations, plenty of good food, chances to be present with people we don’t make time for most of the year.

And throughout the holidays, getting together is mostly a chance not to have political fights or once more go down our favorite list of what’s wrong with the world, but a time to try and recapture what’s right with the world, and with our lives and the people who matter to us, or the people we wish were more a part of our lives.

Christmas gives us an easy excuse – even a socially acceptable excuse – to mend bridges, to send an unexpected gift, to wish someone well, to re-establish connections.

Let’s not get so distracted by all the hoopla of the season that we forget that it’s offering us another chance to get caught up in one another, and in being alive.

SERMON: The Real Reason for the Season

Christmas is really quite a new holiday. In our country, it only caught on after the War Between the States – or as some longtime Southerners know it, the War of Yankee Aggression. And in spite of all the hype about Christmas as a religious holiday, many Christians still don’t accept it as having anything to do with Christianity.

Modern Jehovah’s Witnesses and other fundamentalists still see Christmas as a pagan holiday celebrating the winter solstice. They note that Jesus didn’t tell people to celebrate his birthday in his Sermon on the Mount. In Boston, a fundamentalist religious group has run advertisements in the subway proclaiming that early Christians did not “believe in lies about Santa Claus, flying reindeer, elves and drunken parties.” They don’t mention that early Christians didn’t celebrate Christmas either, didn’t have any idea when Jesus was born, or that Jesus also never counseled people to engage in self-righteous games.

It’s kind of ironic, but almost nothing about Christmas that people really love has anything at all to do with Christianity or Jesus. Yet people have been celebrating at this time of year, the winter solstice, since prehistoric times.

Though really, even the winter solstice is mostly an excuse rather than a reason for the season. In our modern calendar, the solstice occurs on 21 or 22 December, though in the old Julian calendar, it sometimes came on December 25th, and was identified with December 25th as far back as the 3rd century, when the Romans had their week-long Saturnalia and the festivals celebrating the birth of the invincible sun, not Jesus.

As far as we can tell, observations and celebrations of the winter solstice may go back 10,000 years – thousands of years before any of today’s religions had been born. In some ancient mythology, the Great Mother Goddess gave birth to a new sun god on that day. Sun gods are pictured with a glow of light, or halo, around their heads. So most of the paintings of Jesus portray him in the stylized way solar deities are portrayed. The solstice was celebrated in many cultures at this time, and by definition that 25th of December – the day the sun was “reborn” – was the birthday of all sun gods, of whom there were many. If you go to Wikipedia, you can find a list of over 100 solar deities, all of whom are “born” each year on the same date – though most of those gods have long since been forgotten. All gods die, and gods who last a few hundred or thousand years have lasted a very long time, as gods go.

So while over a hundred different religious cults and sets of rituals are known, each one of them was a kind of “cover” story over the real reason for the season, which had nothing to do with all those local and temporary gods.

In another twelve days, we will have the shortest day and longest night of the year. Leaves have died and fallen from a lot of trees; it’s been getting dark earlier and getting light later in the day. If we were living through this for the first time, we might think the world was slowly coming to an end, and the light would just continue disappearing until it was completely gone, and we might engage in some pretty desperate hoping.

But this isn’t the season of hoping the sun will come back, and it hasn’t been for over a hundred centuries. It’s the time of knowing the sun will return – after all, they knew exactly which date to plan their parties around, even thousands of years ago, and Stonehenge was built around 4,000 years ago to frame the sun’s rays precisely at the winter and summer solstices. They didn’t hope, they knew. We know full well that the sun will start returning and days will get longer, and we are safe in the hands of Mother Nature, for she will always give birth to the light again. That’s part of the message of this most optimistic of seasons: this is our home, and it’s a safe place for us.

In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine, whose religion was Mithraism, wanted to combine Mithraism and Christianity. He gave Christians protection from prosecution, but then assigned Mithras’s birthday – December 25th, since Mithras was a sun god – to be celebrated as Jesus” birthday as well, and also assigned Sunday – the day named after the sun god – as the holy day of Christianity. Until then, Christians did not have a holy day. Christian writers in the 2nd and 3rd centuries used to brag about having no holy days, unlike those heretical pagans who were always naming days after their gods – like Sun-day. So officially, Jesus started being born on December 25th in the middle of the fourth century, and we’re still meeting here on Sunday, the holy day of a dozen sun gods whose names we no longer even know. But Christmas didn’t start then, because from the very start, Christians wouldn’t buy it. Even 1700 years ago, they knew it was a pagan holiday about a sun god, so the day just wasn’t an important day for them.

A lot of people are surprised to learn that Christmas wasn’t an important day in modern times, either. But it’s a very recent holiday. In England in the 17th century, the Christian Oliver Cromwell ordered people put in jail if they were caught celebrating Christmas.

And when the Puritans came to America, they would not allow the celebration of Christmas, because they too knew their history. Our Congress was in session on December 25, 1789, the first Christmas under our new constitution. Christmas was a normal workday.

Christmas didn’t start catching on in our country until the last third of the 19th century, and then it had almost nothing to do with Jesus, and everything to do with Santa Claus.

In 1822, a dentist named Clement Moore wrote the poem we know as “The Night Before Christmas.” It’s still a magical poem, and it became immensely popular. That’s the poem we all know, about the visit of old Saint Nicholas flying up onto the rooftop in his sleigh pulled by eight reindeer, slipping down the chimney to bring presents to the children, then as he flew away calling out, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” There’s nothing about Jesus or God. Nothing about the winter solstice, either – just jolly old Saint Nicholas, presents, and a wonderful, magical atmosphere. After this poem caught on, the Santa Claus story became very popular.

Then in 1843, Charles Dickens published his Christmas Carol the week before Christmas. The US Congress was still meeting on Christmas. They kept meeting on December 25th as a normal workday until 1856. Meanwhile, the Santa Claus story became more popular, and the idea of Christmas as a special day – a day with family and a big Christmas dinner – caught on over much of the country. Two years after Charles Dickens published his story, in 1836, Alabama was the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday. But from the start, as in ancient times, it was about family, friends, sharing good food together, and celebrating – with a big boost from commercialism, just as in ancient Rome.

Christmas cards were introduced in England in 1843 – the same year Dickens published his Christmas Carol. They were simple lithographed cards that said “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

The first Christmas cards in the U.S. were used by merchants for advertising. So making money from this season has been a part of it since it began, as it was also in ancient Rome. We also owe our modern picture of Santa Claus to a cartoonist and a soft drink company.

Thomas Nast was the political cartoonist and illustrator for Harper’s Weekly from 1859-1886. He was born in 1840, so started his career as our country’s first top-quality political cartoonist at the age of nineteen. He gave us both the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey. And in 1863, at the age of 23, he drew Santa Claus dressed in a fur-trimmed suit. Up till then, Santa Claus was usually drawn either as an elf or as a tall thin man. (That’s why it hadn’t strained the imagination so much that Santa could get up and down chimneys.) So Thomas Nast gave us the symbols for Santa Claus and two political parties — and it’s still safe to say that more people love Santa than those other two animals combined. In 1870, Christmas became a federal holiday for the first time, and in 1907 Oklahoma was the last state to make it an official holiday. But as late as 1931, nine states still required public schools to remain open on Christmas day, still saw it as a normal work day.

But this new holiday didn’t have much at all to do with Jesus or God, and everything to do with the ancient festivals and giving presents. And the gifts which have become the main point of the season for all children and many adults were traditionally given on Saint Nicholas Day, December 6th, not Christmas.

St. Nicholas was a real person, a wealthy 4th century bishop known for his generosity – though not really a saint. The most famous legend about him tells of a poor man with three daughters. In those days a young woman’s father had to offer prospective husbands a dowry. The larger the dowry, the better the chance that a young woman would find a good husband. Without a dowry, a woman was unlikely to marry – much as it still is in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries around the Indian continent. This poor man’s daughters, without dowries, were therefore destined to be sold into some kind of slavery.

Mysteriously, on three different occasions, a bag of gold appeared in their home-providing the needed dowries. The bags of gold, tossed through an open window, are said to have landed in stockings or shoes left before the fire to dry. This led to the custom of children hanging stockings or putting out shoes, eagerly awaiting gifts from Saint Nicholas. Sometimes the story is told with gold balls instead of bags of gold. That is why three gold balls are one of the symbols for St. Nicholas. It’s also the origin of the three gold balls that you can still sometimes see hanging outside of pawnshops. St. Nicholas”

Day was celebrated on the anniversary of his death, December 6th, beginning in 13th century France. So the first part of our modern Christmas to become popular was the gift giving associated with St. Nicholas, but not any story about the birth of Jesus.

But combining gift giving with a religious holiday is like combining fireworks with the celebration of our nation’s declaration of independence on the 4th of July. Guess which one will trump the other one?

Some people in this country were giving gifts for St. Nicholas Day, which had become a secular holiday. But by the end of the 19th century, merchants succeeded in getting people to combine St. Nicholas” Day with December 25th, and give the gifts for Christmas, to help focus the shopping season. Earlier, Christmas gifts were almost always made by hand to give to your family and friends. But between about 1880 and 1920 merchants managed to sell us on the idea that they should be bought, and gift-wrapped in fancy paper. In the 1930s, they got President Franklin Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving back from its former date of November 30th, to November 23rd, so there would be a longer Christmas shopping season. A few years later, Congress made Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November, and the Christmas shopping season has officially started the day after Thanksgiving since then “though now it seems the Christmas ads start after Halloween.

You notice that so far, Jesus, God and Christianity have hardly been mentioned at all. Our modern Christmas was begun by storytellers, cartoonists and merchants, creating the shopping season that is the most profitable time of the year for them. It features holly, ivy, mistletoe, evergreens, fir trees, and the lights and fires and parties that go back to before Christianity existed, probably to before any religion still alive existed. But also notice that none of these stories talk about the winter solstice, either.

Our favorite Christmas music isn’t religious, either, though our favorite music comes at Christmas. The Number One selling record of all time is still Bing Crosby’s 1942 version of “White Christmas,” and the Number Two selling record of all time is still Gene Autrey’s 1949 recording of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

The single most important picture that established our image of old Santa Claus as the fat guy with the white beard in the red suit with white fur trim wasn’t by the political cartoonist Thomas Nast who started it, but another commercial artist. For 33 years, from 1931 to 1964, the Coca-Cola Company published ads picturing this fat Santa in his red suit and white fur, holding a bottle of Coca-Cola. Then in 1957, Dr. Seuss published his story of the Grinch who stole Christmas, a kind of cartoon version of the Scrooge character. And again, the “Christmas spirit” the Grinch had tried to steal wasn’t about religion, but about parties, celebration, giving presents and having a wonderful time together.

Today, Christmas has become an almost completely secular holiday. That even seems to be becoming the law. In 1999 a US District court ruled that Christmas decorations didn’t violate anybody’s religious beliefs because as they put it, “The Christian holiday has become almost completely secularized.” One of the great ironies of Christmas is that it really isn’t a Christian holiday – or even a religious holiday – at all. It is, as that court said, a secular holiday, just as St. Nicholas Day was and St. Valentine’s Day is.

So all the focus on gifts, merriment, meals with friends, singing, evergreens, mistletoe isn’t distracting from the reason for the season. It is the reason for the season, and has been for thousands of years before any of the world’s religions had been invented.

From all of the ancient and modern histories, whether around Rome or around the U.S., it looks like the real reason for the season was the need to celebrate, to get together with family and friends, to surround ourselves with merriment, and to just come alive. That’s a victory of the human imagination, inventing the brightest holiday in the midst of Nature’s longest nights.

What this season has been about since prehistoric times is coming alive. Early Christians said that the old Roman Saturnalia had parties, drinking, good food, singing, dancing and laughter – as though that were a bad thing. But remember, most of this partying was done with their families and friends. The winter solstice was an excuse for it, just as the 4th of July is an excuse for shooting off fireworks. But the solstice wasn’t the real reason, any more than any holiday is. We love holidays because they give us permission to come alive more theatrically and openly than we can do the rest of the year without being seen as a bit odd.

During 4th of July fireworks displays, all those “Oooohs” and “Aaaaahs” you hear when the fireworks go off aren’t in memory of a bunch of men signing a declaration of independence. They are the delighted gasps of our inner children, thrilled with being alive and being together. And that’s the real reason for the Christmas season, too.

I keep thinking of the wonderful words from theologian Howard Thurman, 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.” I had never thought of them as having anything to do with Christmas, and doubt that he meant for them to be. But they are about what this season is really about.

This is the most creative, positive and human of all our holidays. Fifty or a hundred centuries ago, some people were facing another solstice season. The days were short, the nights were long, and it could look like the end of the world. They knew it wasn’t – the world isn’t likely to end unless we boil it away or blow it apart. But once they started lighting fires, somebody got a very creative idea: let’s have a party! Let’s do an in-your-face to Nature, by having our biggest, brightest party right in the middle of Nature’s most dismal days!

There were other facts that made this a perfect time for huge feasts. They often slaughtered many of their cattle at this time, so they wouldn’t have to feed them throughout the winter – so there was a lot of fresh meat available for the feast. And the wine they had made last summer was finally ready to drink. Well, that’s a sign from the gods!

The best parts of nature have always been claimed by the mythmakers of the day for their particular story. In ancient Rome, the official storytellers said what’s going on here is the birth of that invincible sun. A few blocks away in the neighborhoods of Mithraism, they said no, it’s really the birth of Mithras, who was both the sun god and the Son of God. Disciples of Apollo would claim the time for him, and remind you that the only reason the sun even comes up in the morning is because Apollo drags it across the sky behind his golden chariot.

Then after the fourth century, Christian mythmakers said No; it was the celebration of the birth of another Son of God named Jesus that just happened to come on the birthday of Mithras and all the other sun gods. Then they connected it with the earlier story about Joseph and Mary, a wandering star, shepherds and wise men, and the rest of it.

These are all such wonderful stories! They are far more imaginative stories than the truth, which is pretty dull: “Well, the days will start getting longer for six months, then they’ll get shorter for six months, and they’ll probably keep doing that forever, as they’ve been doing on this planet for over four billion years. Now there’s a boring story! Nobody is lining up to see that movie!

Meanwhile, back on earth, a lot of people are getting ready to party. They’ve preparing a menu, inviting friends, deciding on the right gifts for the right people, whether they make them or buy them. They’re picking out fancy wrapping paper, hanging all sorts of things on real or artificial green trees – a lot like people did in ancient Rome, in the communities of Mithraism – the fir tree was Mithra’s sacred tree – and in more times and places than we can count. That’s the real reason for the season: a rare chance to come alive, to celebrate the gift of life by offering gifts to those in life who mean a lot to you, a chance for good food, good friends, and family who, if we can’t quite love having them around for the holidays, can at least tolerate them in good humor, and hope they return the favor.

It’s a time to get out not only our best behaviors, but some of our silliest and most child-like behaviors, too. My god, this is the season when full-grown people talk about flying reindeer, take their children to a million malls to sit on Santa’s lap, then line up and pay good money to see that ballet with mice that dance, and a magical nutcracker who comes to life.

“Comes to life.” That’s it. The real reason for this season has always been coming back to life. Not coming to worship the invincible sun, not coming to Mithras, not coming to Jesus, but coming to life. And all the stories, music, costumes, decorations and parties are like training wheels for us, to help us get back into that habit of being more alive – a habit we seem to slip out of so easily that it’s a good thing we have arranged this annual reminder that more than anything, what the world needs is people who have come alive.

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© Davidson Loehr

November 11, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us be honorable and courageous stewards of the lives of our soldiers. Let us match their willingness to go where we aim them, by making sure that the cause is worthy of their lives, and of our own highest ideals. They trust us with their lives, and that is not a figure of speech. We ask them not to flinch in the face of possible death; let us not flinch in the face of what may be uncomfortable truths.

May we learn from our veterans that there is something noble, even sacred, about putting our lives in the service of honest and high ideals, no matter the risk. It is our duty as citizens to insure that the ideals our armies are really serving are as high and noble as those our soldiers think they are serving. And the pursuit of that may require from all of us a quality of courage like that shown by our soldiers in their wars. May we find that courage, and be reconnected with those highest ideals.

Amen.

SERMON: Our Soldiers: Armed Corporate Mercenaries?

This contentious sermon title was inspired by the words of a remarkable soldier of 75 years ago. A Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, he was one of only seven men ever to win the Medal of Honor twice, and one of only two to win it for two different occasions (the other five were given two medals for the same action – the feeling being that they were exceptionally courageous. After WWI the rules were changes, so that the Medal of Honor could be awarded only once per soldier. So General Smedley Butler will forever be one of only two men who were awarded the Medal of Honor on two separate occasions.) I’ve read that he was one of the most respected veterans by other soldiers, which was partly due to his courage both on and off the battlefield. It’s his courage off the battlefield that interests me today. On August 21, 1931, General Butler stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

“I spent 33 years – being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism”. “I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street”. “In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested”. I had – a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions”. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.” (Joel Bakan, The Corporation, p. 93)

Now I’m a veteran of the Vietnam War, and I would never want to think of myself as a corporate mercenary. Our dangerous private army of Blackwater today has plenty of people who seem proud to be corporate mercenaries in Iraq, but I suspect nearly all of our real soldiers would be appalled at the idea, as I would be. Still, General Butler certainly didn’t hate soldiers, and he didn’t hate America. In a story we should all have learned in school but didn’t, he was approached in 1934 by a messenger from a consortium of wealthy men, offered a suitcase full of $1,000 bills as a down payment if he would assemble an army, take over the White House, and install himself as America’s first fascist dictator. Instead, he went before Congress to tell the story. That testimony was filmed, and I’ve watched part of it. He was a genuine American hero. Yet in spite of his public testimony, the group of wealthy corporate men were powerful enough that not even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have them prosecuted, and influential enough that as far as I know, the story has been kept out of history texts for all high school and almost all college courses, to this day. So maybe there is something to what he said. A second person whose writing has both irritated and persuaded me is John Perkins. I read his book (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man two years ago, and it made me feel like I’d been a naive and gullible child for decades – though I also thought he had eagerly worked at a slimy job only a sociopath could love, for a whole decade. But he too talked about how our soldiers are routinely used as pawns of some of our most powerful corporate and political interests in a game of American Empire, against the high ideals for which our country supposedly stands.

So on this Veterans Day, I want to take our soldiers seriously enough to explore this story of American empire, the role soldiers have been used to play in it, and the role we all play in it. The hope is that the truth can help make us more free, though I have no idea how, in the real world, to change a story that’s been part of us for so long. Our country was begun by the Puritans as a nation chosen by God with a “manifest destiny” to rule the world. John Winthrop used the concept of “manifest destiny,” without using the specific words, in his 1630 speech “A Model of Christian Charity,” written while aboard the flagship Arbella on his way to this country. His phrasing was that we shall be “as a city on a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.” Carried in this was the belief that God had set us apart and above others. The phrase “manifest destiny” wasn’t coined until 1839 by John L. O”Sullivan, but the seeds of the concept go back to our very beginnings. So the dream of a worldwide empire – and a Christian empire – goes back nearly four hundred years. Eventually, such a dream would have to require soldiers as the weapons and as the cost. As Gen. Smedley Butler said, war is a racket in which the profits are counted in dollars and the losses are counted in lives. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, was used to take Manifest Destiny a step further when, in the 1850s and 1860s, it was used to assert that the US had special rights all over the hemisphere, including the right to use our soldiers to invade any nation in Central or South America that refused to back our economic demands – usually referred to as our “vital interests.” President Theodore Roosevelt invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify US intervention in the Dominican Republic, in Venezuela, and stealing Panama from Colombia. A string of subsequent US presidents relied on it to expand Washington’s Pan-American activities through the end of WWII. And during the latter half of the 20th century, the US used the Communist threat to claim the right of invading countries around the world, including Vietnam and Indonesia. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 61)

The 20th century was fueled by oil, as this one still is. As our own oil fields began running out, we became dependent on Middle Eastern oil. But since we needed it, we believed – as we always have – that we had a right to it. This bi-partisan greed was stated very dramatically by President Jimmy Carter in his 1980 State of the Union address, when he said, “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Although he referred to “outside force,” the policy has equally applied to actors within the Middle East itself – as was seen in the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq invasion of 2003 – and it is playing out now in the crisis over Iran. (A Game as Old as Empire, p. 140) These are insights and patterns from John Perkins, who is for me the most important and readable author for understanding how our American empire works, what’s going on behind the scenes, and the role our soldiers are assigned in the grand scheme. Perkins worked for a decade as one of a group of people known among themselves as Economic Hit Men. Here’s what he says about them, and I’ll quote him because some of his persuasiveness comes from his confessional (and arrogant) style:

“We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to [those who run] our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. “Like our counterparts in the Mafia, we provide favors [to those whose cooperation we are buying]. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. xvii) “However – and this is a very large caveat – if we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones we refer to as the jackals (professional assassins). The jackals are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in violent “accidents.” And if by chance the jackals fail, as they failed in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq, then young Americans are sent in to kill and to die. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. xxi) Perkins says they channeled funds from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and their sister organizations into schemes that appeared to empower developing countries and serve the poor while primarily benefiting a few wealthy people. They would identify a developing country that had resources our corporations wanted (such as oil), arrange a huge loan for that country, and then direct most of the money to our own engineering and construction companies – and a few collaborators in the developing country. Infrastructure projects, such as power plants, airports, and industrial parks, sprang up; however, they seldom helped the poor, who were not connected to electrical grids, never used airports, and lacked the skills required for employment in industrial parks. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 3)

“At some point we returned to the indebted country and demanded our pound of flesh: cheap oil, votes on critical United Nations issues, or troops to support ours someplace in the world, like Iraq.” (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 3) The loans were used as a tool for enslaving these countries, not empowering them. If they wouldn’t bite at the bait of loans, jackals – assassins – were sent into replace uncooperative leaders with cooperative ones. And as Perkins says, world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in – as it did in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 5) The most dramatic instance of this before our two invasions of Iraq happened in Panama, a story that seems not to have been covered or understood very well.

We had trained General Manuel Noriega at our School of the Americas, in the methods of terror and violence, so we saw him as an easy mark. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter had signed a treaty with Panama giving control back to the Panamanians after 1999 as originally agreed. And when Noriega became president of Panama, he refused to bow to Reagan administration demands that the Panama Canal Treaty be renegotiated giving the US control. Instead, Noreiga negotiated with Japanese to see about rebuilding the canal with Japanese money. This was, of course, their legal right. But it would frustrate our dream of empire – the dream to which we’ve felt so singularly entitled. So on December 20, 1989, the first President Bush had our soldiers attack Panama with what was reported to be the largest airborne assault on a city since WWII. It was an unprovoked attack on a civilian population which killed between 2,000 and 3,000, and injured an estimated 25,000. Panama and her people posed absolutely no threat to the US or to any other country. Politicians, governments, and press around the world denounced the unilateral US action as a clear violation of international law. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, pp. 175-176) We even kidnapped the president of Panama and put him in American jail as our only “prisoner of war” for frustrating our economic ambitions. You can’t make this stuff up. And you can’t spin it around enough times to clean it up. It was illegal, immoral and murderous. We killed people because we wanted to steal from them. In this country, that crime is called “homicide in the commission of a felony.” And in Texas, it’s a capital offense. Our soldiers were used in this invasion, not to serve freedom or democracy, but simply to serve the economic interests that brought great profit to quite a small number of wealthy investors, which is one dimension of our American empire, our “manifest destiny.” Then came our first invasion of Iraq, also done under the first President Bush. Why Iraq? It had nothing to do with 9-11, of course – those lies have all been exposed and aired too often to need repeating.

We know the current Bush administration had talked about wanting to invade Iraq since the first week they were in power in January of 2001. But the West has been trying to grab Iraq’s oil since 1918. Contrary to common public opinion, Iraq is not just about oil. It is also about water and geopolitics. Both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through Iraq; so, of all the countries in that part of the world, Iraq controls the most important sources of increasingly critical water resources. During the 1980s, the importance of water – politically and economically – was becoming obvious to us”. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 183) Also, Iraq is in a very strategic location. It borders Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, and has a coastline on the Persian Gulf. It is within easy missile-striking distance of both Israel and Russia. Military strategists equate modern Iraq to the Hudson River valley during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. In the eighteenth century, the French, British and Americans knew that whoever controlled the Hudson River valley controlled the continent. Today, it is common knowledge that whoever controls Iraq holds the key to controlling the Middle East. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 184)

By the late 1980s, it was apparent that Saddam was not buying into the Economic Hit Man scenario. This was a major frustration and a great embarrassment to the first Bush administration. Like Panama, Iraq contributed to George HW Bush’s wimp image. As Bush searched for a way out, Saddam played into his hands. On 25 July 1990, Saddam invited US Ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, to a meeting, and sounded her out about Kuwait. Here’s part of her response, from a transcript of their meeting: “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60’s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” (NY Times International, Sunday September 23, 1990, p. 19)

A week later, on August 2nd, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Bush, incredibly, responded with a denunciation of Saddam for violating international law, even though it had been less than a year since Bush himself had staged the illegal and unilateral invasion of Panama. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 184) The Economic Hit Men tried to convince Saddam to accept a deal similar to the deal we had made with Saudi Arabia. But Saddam kept refusing. If he had complied, like the Saudis, he would have received our guarantees of protection as well as more US-supplied chemical plants and weapons. When it became obvious that he was entrenched in his independent ways,

Washington sent in the jackals. Assassinations of men like Saddam usually have to involve collusion by bodyguards”. Saddam understood jackals and their techniques. He had been hired by the CIA in the sixties to assassinate a predecessor, Qasim, and had learned from us, his ally, during the eighties. He screened his men rigorously. He also hired look-alike doubles. His bodyguards were never sure if they were protecting him or an actor. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 211) So the first President Bush sent in the US military. At this point the White House did not want to take Saddam out. He was, after all, our type of leader: a strongman who could control his people and act as a deterrent against Iran – as well as controlling the religious factions in Iraq, which we’ve never been able to do. The Pentagon assumed that by destroying his army, they had chastised him; now he would come around. The Economic Hit Men went back to work on him during the nineties. Bill Clinton imposed sanctions to remain in effect until Saddam agreed to US terms of ownership of their oil.

Clinton’s sanctions killed an estimated one million Iraqis – half of them children: this remains a completely bipartisan American imperialism. (Many will remember the chilling interview with Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, where she was asked about our sanctions causing the deaths of over half a million children. She said, “We think it’s worth the price.”) But Saddam wouldn’t give control of Iraqi oil to American or other foreign corporations. Assassinations were attempted, and once more they failed.

So in 2003, a second President Bush deployed the military. Saddam was deposed and executed. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 211)

Then Haliburton, Bechtel and other well-connected corporations got billions of dollars in unbid contracts, just as they had in so many other countries. When this happened, John Perkins finally decided to write his book exposing the game he had once been a part of. Twenty-six publishers refused to touch it. Finally, a small publisher in San Francisco took it. The book was an almost immediate best-seller. Perkins then contacted twelve other people who had worked in the empire game, had them each write a chapter, and brought out a second book called A Game as Old as Empire. Then he wrote a sequel to (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man which he brought out this year, under the title The Secret History of the American Empire. I recommend all three books to anyone interested in these issues. Our game of empire always has the same three steps. First, we try to use heavy-handed persuasion – mostly economic – to bring a country’s assets under our control. If that fails, we try to assassinate its leader – a tactic which has worked in many countries for us. If that fails, we send in our soldiers. So this seems to be how our dream of manifest destiny works today, and how both assassins and our soldiers are used not just to make those who run a few US corporations rich – that’s too clean to be realistic – but also to give us the benefits we call the American Way of Life.

See how this picture Perkins draws brings together a lot more data than our mainstream political and news stories, and ties them into a scheme that has a simple clear plot that makes, I think, far more real-world sense than the spin we’ve been fed? It isn’t a picture I’d ever had or wanted, any more than I’d thought of war as a racket or soldiers as pawns. But so many other people are affected, I think we owe it to them, to our soldiers and to ourselves to consider this darker picture and become far better-informed about it.

We are complicit in so many things we don’t want to think about because it feels like it pollutes our life. But then I remember the 4,000 American soldiers who have died in Iraq, the tens of thousands who have been wounded, and the estimated two million Iraqis we have killed since 1991, in order to take their oil and to start taking control, we hope, of the Middle East and, through controlling the world’s oil supply, to dictate terms to the world. It sounds like a very bad movie script written by very arrogant and immoral people within our government, a script in which our soldiers are being assigned key roles, but not noble roles.

John Perkins goes into many more details in other areas of what our American empire looks like in and to the rest of the world, and I’ll revisit him in two weeks. But war and imperialism, no matter how awful they may be, just aren’t what life is mostly about. Life is mostly about its healthy parts: living, loving, hoping and trusting, making things of meaning and beauty, and learning to enjoy being with one another and giving thanks for being alive. Some of you may know of this story from Will Durant. Durant was the historian whose life work was writing about a dozen-volume “Story of Civilization,” an ultra-ambitious task for one man and his wife. After writing those millions of words, he wrote a 100-page book called The Lessons of History, to sum up the giant set. And late in his life, he was asked to sum up civilization in half an hour. He did it in less than a minute, this way: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream 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.”

we’ve been wading in the river here. Nobody can live that way, and nobody should live that way. It’s being defeated by the tragedies that are often the background against which we are challenged to live our lives. This always reminds me of another story, one I experienced in Vietnam. We had shelled a small hamlet by mistake, taking out about two of the half dozen huts. Driving by a day or two later, we could see some of the damage. In one family the father had been killed, the wife wounded, a young daughter had part of her arm blown off and was wearing bandages covering both eyes. It was heart-wrenching and shameful to us. About three weeks later we drove by those huts again. The thatched roofs had been repaired. And out in the yard were the injured mother, her young son, and her one-armed blind daughter. They were laughing and dancing, playing and singing. Some of us wept bitterly. They were living on the banks; we were caught in the river. The challenge of life is to know the river, but not to let it poison our life on the banks. So next week, for Thanksgiving, Dina and I will each share a homily, and I’ll share some very optimistic, hands-on, actual real-world things we can do in a lot of different ways to help those serving the high ideals we prefer.

For now, thank you again for your service, veterans. And something more. I know that when you served, you believed, as I also did, that we really were serving high ideals and noble causes, not just imperialistic greed and sociopathic empire-building. It may seem hard to fathom, but as a combat photographer and Press Officer in Vietnam forty years ago, I believed what I was told. I attended briefings by General Westmoreland, and thought I had heard the word straight from the top. I believed we were there to serve high ideals, though the violence and blood confused and eventually kind of paralyzed me. Most of us believed what we were told. It’s how we served with pride and integrity. It was those high ideals and noble causes that made our service memorable to us – sometimes even sacred, as mine was to me. And I believe, as I think you do, that if we can find a way to convert our nation back to high and noble ideals, it can transform our nation’s soul back to something noble, perhaps even sacred.