Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 23, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
When making a decision, the 10-10-10 rule is used to think about where you’ll be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years after the choice. Similarly, the second strand of the Buddhist Eightfold Path is sometimes translated as right intention.
Call to Worship – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”
Sermon
The meditation reading was from Emerson, and he said what you believe about life shapes what you think about. What you think about shapes your actions. Your actions shape your work, your relationships, your whole life.
Buddhist teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi says The Buddha talked about two kinds of thoughts: those that lead to happiness and those that lead to pain. The ones leading to pain are thoughts of desire and greed, thoughts of ill will, and thoughts that lead to harmful actions. Those that lead to happiness are thoughts of contentment, thoughts of good will, and kind thoughts that lead to non-harming. Happiness will follow that person like a shadow, always there. For the person who thinks greedy, hateful, vengeful thoughts, pain follows like a cart follows the ox who is pulling it. Does happiness shadow you wherever you go, or do messed up situations lumber behind you like a cart on wobbly wheels? The first strand of the path was “right understanding, “or “right view.” Your right view of existence affects the things you care about, it affects where you put your focus, your habits of attention. The right view, or right understanding we talked about last month is the realization that life is full of suffering. Suffering is caused by desire. If you could let go of desire you lose your suffering. Not your pain, because pain comes with life in a body, but your suffering over your pain, the stories you tell yourself about your pain. The eightfold path of wise thought and action is the way to move yourself toward happiness. The teaching assumes that we want to be happy. It’s not wrong to want happiness, to aim for freedom from suffering.
Buddhism invites you to make three intentions, which I’ll tell you in a few minutes. First let’s try to look at the intentions currently guiding us. Emerson says you already have intentions that permeate your life. Do you want to be loved above all else? Do you want to be beautiful? The smartest? Powerful? Secure? Admired? Helpful? Do you want to leave the world a better place than you found it?
What are the stars you steer by? If you were to make a circle and pretend it was a compass, what one word would be at each compass point?
Martha Beck writes, in her book Steering By Starlight, that to find your real desires, you should ask yourself “what then?” questions about them. Say you want your business to succeed. Why? You would be respected. What then? Your dad will finally give you his blessing. What then? You can stop feeling like a failure. Odds are there is another way to stop feeling like a failure, because that feeling is inside you, not somewhere external. You want your business to succeed so you can have money. What then? You would feel secure. What then? You could stop feeling afraid. Is there another way to stop fear? Say you want a baby. What then? You would feel loved. Is that the way to get there? Maybe yes and maybe no, but it’s a hard job for a kid to be born to fill a hole in an adult. Is joy on your compass anywhere? Contentment? Think all the way out into the future, and imagine the feeling you want to have about your life.
Susy Welch, a business writer with a demanding job, a marriage and school aged children, talks about thinking out into the future in this way. She came up with a way to make decisions in her overwhelmed, information drenched, demand-crunched life. Should I say yes to the Saturday meeting the boss wants me to lead, which will be a huge plus in my column when it comes to promotion time, or should I say no to the meeting and go to my son’s black belt test? She asked herself this question: what would each course of action bring into my life in 10 minutes, 10 months or 10 years? I0 minutes from now her boss would be happy and her son would be crushed. 10 months from now her job would still be full of opportunities and her son would have a tangible memory of her love and support. In 10 years he would be looking for a relationship with someone who was not an out of control work-a-holic, and he would be confident that he was number one with her. That’s the decision she made. OR, and this is my contrariness, in 10 minutes her son would be happy and her boss would be disappointed, in 10 months she could be looking at someone else in the job she had coveted, and her kids would have had plenty of chances to feel her love, and if she had given up the meeting her son wouldn’t have grasped the sacrifice she’d made, and in 10 years he’d be looking for someone whose world revolved around him and he’d have unreasonable expectations.
I think the 10 10 10 works for decisions like “do I really want to go to the gym today?” In 10 minutes you’ll feel virtuous, but maybe whiny about missing a nap. In 10 months you’ll be stronger and maybe grow addicted to the gym. In 10 years it’ll be so much a part of your life that you don’t even look at it as a decision any more.
I think the 10 10 10 is a fun way of considering choices, and that the most useful part of it is the 10 year thinking. In order to think that far out you have to know what you’re aiming for. You need to have hold of your core values, you want to be squinting into your spyglass at the star on the horizon by which to steer.
Remember the three intentions the Buddha recommends? Here they are. First, you understand that greed, craving, and desire cause fear and suffering, so you make an intention to renounce desire. Second, you intend to have good will toward all beings. Third, you make an intention to do no harm. These intentions cure fear and suffering. They move you toward freedom and joy. Intend to have good will towards all beings. Intend to do no harm. You still might get fired, get sick, go broke, lose a child to illness, violence or accident. Life holds both beauties and horrors. Your intention is like a rope you’ve fixed along the way to your goal, and you can grab hold of that rope when conditions get rough. An intention forms your thoughts and gives rise to your actions. It’s not a feeling, or a hope, it’s a plan of action. Scarlett O’Hara set her intention on her knees in a field with the sunset behind her “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” That intention shaped her decisions, for good or ill, for the rest of her life – uh – for the rest of the movie. Some of us set intentions very early in life that shape the person we become: “I will find security.” “I will not be around anger.” “I won’t try – it just sets me up for failure.” “I will never be hurt again, so I just won’t get attached to anyone or hope for anything.”
Marilyn Monroe said “I just want to be wonderful.” There is an intention that can shape a life.
To be content, as the Buddha said, and Suzy Welch came up with later, is that you look a couple of steps ahead of your desires. If you want to drink yourself to sleep every night, you think about what comes after that: sick feelings and a sense of having done yourself damage. If you think ahead to the feelings that will come after you act on that desire, the Buddha says, you don’t have to repress the desire. Everyone has always known that repressing desires doesn’t work very well at all. Thinking it through sometimes can. When you think it all the way through, the craving just falls away like autumn leaves from a tree. If you want to have an affair, you think two or three steps ahead to the chaos and insanity that will likely come into your life because of that. If you want to change relationships, you certainly can. Just don’t sit in one thing and hope for another thing. Clarity works to diminish the desire. Be content with where you are, or think what needs to change and change it.
If we have the intention to be content, we practice being content. We are grateful for what we have. We take care of where we are, the things we have, the people we have in our lives.
If we intend to have good will, we practice letting go of resentments. That’s hard, and fortunately there is magic to help you. That magic is called the resentment prayer, where you pray for a person to have everything in their life that you want in yours. So you would pray for your mother in law to have peace of mind, financial security, good health, etc. In Buddhism it’s called the metta, or loving kindness prayer, and you don’t have to believe in it or even mean it at first, you just try it.
If we intend harmlessness, for some of us that means we give up doing wrong to people. For others, it might mean giving up violent thoughts, for others it might lead them to eat in a vegan way, the way of most compassion and the least harm. What does it mean for you? Take the steps that feel natural, that feel like a call, that feel like a move toward freedom and joy. So it’s little by little. Contentment and peace rather than agitation and anger. It takes practice, practice, practice.
Notice what intention has been guiding your life. It works like a mission statement. Wonder to yourself how it has shaped your experiences and wonder ( so much better than making a resolution) what your life would be like if you intended to be content, do no harm, to have good will toward all beings.
“Be a lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.” –Rumi
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 16, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
After the last weekend of Austin City Limits Music Festival, in this church where music is such an integral part of our religious and spiritual experience, we look at the unique ways in which music moves our spirits.
Call to Worship
Come, Come -adapted from Rumi by Leslie Takahashi Morris
Come, come, whoever you are
Come with your hurts, your imperfections,
your places that feel raw and exposed.
Come, come, whoever you are
Come with your strengths that the world shudders to hold
come with your wild imaginings of a better world,
come with your hopes that it seems no one wants to hear.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving
we will make a place for you,
we will build a home together.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
We walk together;
Come, yet again come.
Reading
Song of the Universe
For each child that is born
A morning star rises
And sings to the universe
who we are.
Listen carefully…
Can you hear the song
The one sung for you
When you were born.
The song sung by the cosmos
In motion
Rejoycing at your life.
You the result.
You the outcome.
You the celebration.
Listen carefully…
Can you hear it still?
A song of possibility.
A reminder that we still have time to be who
and what we need to be.
Listen carefully …
The vast expanse echoes a recognition
that it’s not always easy.
Possibilities
can be hard to pursue.
Roads not taken, wrong turns,
destinations that disappoint.
Through this,
the song persists.
The universe sings no less because time and space wear us thin.
The music calls us
Sermon
We live in a city that holds music as a central part of its identity. Likewise, music is a core ministry of this church and, for many of us, a vital component of our individual spirituality.
I think we are so blessed by the amazing talent of our music director, Brent Baldwin and the many wonderful musicians he gathers here. One of Brent’s many talents that stands out for me is his incredible ability to produce such high quality music across such a wide variety of styles and genres.
And that to me is such wonderful aspect of our music here at the church. We get to experience and learn about styles of music that may be challenging for us but deeply moving for other folks in the church and visa versa, and because of that we get to discover harmonies between these different styles that we might never have otherwise imagined.
OK, I think I have probably embarrassed Brent enough with all of this high praise.
Anyway, this all got me exploring why music can stir our emotions and move our spirits so deeply – what makes it such a central part of all known human cultures?
As I began that exploration, I quickly started to realize that the definition of ritual I talked about in a sermon last month exactly describes what is going on with music. Like other forms of ritual, music is structured and patterned. It is rhythmic and repetitive. Perhaps even more so than other forms of ritual, music can synchronize our feelings, thoughts and body movements to create a powerful unifying experience. And finally, when we experience and create music together, we synchronize with each other, which can create a very strong sense of bonding.
So, music is a form of ritual. And perhaps even more so than other forms of ritual, we are discovering the powerful ways music can benefit us.
Children who learn to play a musical instrument at an early age (or take singing lessons as the voice is an instrument also), develop greater motor and cognitive skills. Adults who learn to sing or play an instrument also reap benefits. Their brains tend to remain much more adaptable, and there is early evidence that they may be less likely to develop dementia.
Music therapy has psychological benefits, including improvements in depression and anxiety disorders. It has been used to steady the heart rates of premature infants and adult cardiac patients. Music can have powerful healing effects for people who have experienced trauma.
One of the most amazing ways that music is being used is to help people with Parkinson’s, as well as Alzheimer’s, other forms of dementia and stroke victims. I want to show you part of a video that I think demonstrates this so movingly.
Naomi Feil works with elderly dementia patients to help them reconnect and develop a feeling of safety. In this video, she sings hymns to Gladys Wilson, who has Alzheimer’s and has been non-verbal since also suffering a stroke.
[“Song Crosses Boundaries” video]
Later in the full version of that video, Gladys also speaks and says that she feels safe and taken care of.
You may have noticed that Naomi moving with and holding Gladys, matching her rhythm and tempo to Gladys’ movements was an important element of being able to break through to her.
That demonstrates yet another important aspect of music. While its effects on us can happen from simply listening to it, many of music’s benefits increase even more if we participate in it in some way and some only if we participate – if we sing, dance, sway, clap, play an instrument, drum on the back of a pew!
This seems to be related to the fact that the parts of our brains that process musical rhythm and tempo are strongly connected with the parts of our brains that control motor skills.
In the PBS documentary, “The Music Instinct”, neuroscientist Stan Levitin who has performed brain-imagining scans as people listen to or make music, says that we process pitch, tempo, rhythm, and so on, the various elements of music, in different parts of our brain. So, he says that looking at brain scans of people listening to music is like seeing a symphony going on in the brain, because so many areas, so many neural pathways are involved.
When we participate in the music in some way, even more of the brain lights up on those scans. Even better, when we do so with other people, we also activate the areas of the brain associated with social behavior.
This may help explain why many cultures have no concept of simply listening to music alone. It is necessary to see the movements and gestures of the musicians, to the feel the vibrations and to physically move with them. Some cultures do not even have separate words for music and dance.
This connection between music and our motor skills has profound implications for helping people with certain physical disabilities.
Here is another video that powerfully demonstrates this. It is from the trailer for a documentary about a man with cerebral palsy who learns to dance, and in doing so, transforms his life.
[“Enter the Faun” video]
So, music and its associated movement can have these amazing influences on us as individuals. Even folks who are unable to move some areas of their body still seem to benefit from participating in and moving to music in whatever ways they can.
But the benefits we derive also go beyond us as individuals. Music also can strengthen our relationships and group social bonding. When we participate in music together several things happen.
1. We engage with one another in coordinated, cooperative behavior, often evoking strong emotion, greatly increasing group cohesion.
2. Our bodies produce an oxytocin boost, a neuropeptide that results in increased affection and bonding between us.
3. Music activates the part of our brain that helps us comprehend what others are thinking and feeling, increasing empathy toward one another.
4. Music increases cultural cohesion. Perhaps more so than any other form of ritual, it communicates belonging and passes down cultural memory through the generations. There’s a reason folks say things like “these are the songs of my people.”
I want to show you part of one more video, that I think wonderfully demonstrates how music binds us together. Simon McDermott’s dad, Ted, has Alzheimer’s and is often non-verbal and cannot remember his family members. However, Simon singing an old, familiar song with him brings Ted’s memory back, and for those moments, they reconnect and Simon gets his dad back.
[“Quando Quando Quando” video]
That video just makes me feel happy.
So why is music this powerful to us? What makes it so intrinsic to all know human cultures?
Well, that is the subject of much research and great debate in several fields of study, and the answer is we just do not yet know.
There is much research on what the origin of music might be, how it is related to language and whether or not it is innate. If we are born with certain musical capacities, it would indicate that music played an evolutionary role in our development and survival as a species.
The earliest known musical instruments are flutes that date from about 42,000 years ago. However, it is possible our making of music goes back even further and that there is just no archeological record of it remaining to be found. Our musical origins remain a mystery.
Likewise, whether our propensity for music conveyed some evolutionary advantage or is just a by-product of other capacities we developed as humans is also a subject of debate.
I ran across a couple of theories as to what potential evolutionary roles it might have played. One is that like a peacock strutting his feathers, musical ability would have made the male human more attractive to females. I’m personally not buying that one, as tone deafness would have been evolutionarily selected out by now, which it hasn’t. Witness the campaign staff and surrogates for a certain Presidential candidate.
The other theory is that the group social bonding music creates that I outlined earlier might have allowed for the formation of larger and larger groups, which could well have conveyed survival advantages.
The evidence for the innateness of our musicality is mixed. One the one hand, musical forms vary greatly across cultures and many of our musical preferences seem to be learned. However, there is also evidence that we may be born with at least some of our musical proclivities and capacities.
Newborn infants can detect a downbeat, relative pitch changes, tempo changes, musical intervals that are harmonious and the like, making it possible we are born with these capabilities (though infants could have heard music in the womb also).
Likewise, certain commonalities in music seem to exist across all cultures, which might also indicate they are innate. Lullabies are remarkably similar in all cultures for instance. All cultures use the octave interval, though they divide it very differently.
Villagers in a remote area of Cameroon who had no prior exposure to Western music and who’s own music was very different than that of ours, listened to three different pieces of Western European music – one that we would associate with feeling sad; one with feeling happy; and one with feeling afraid. When asked to identify the emotion evoked by each musical piece, the villager’s responses were exactly the same as Western Europeans, indicating there is something innate about our emotional response to certain characteristics of music.
So, we just do not yet have all the answers for why music seems so central to our very nature as humans, so here’s how I like to think about music.
Scientists and mathematicians will tell you that math can describe and predict all known phenomenon in the universe. And it’s not that we came up with an abstraction and applied it to our universe, it is that math seems intrinsic to all that exists and we are discovering the math as we learn more and more. Math is in a way the language of the universe.
Music, at its most basic level can also be described with math – its pitches, chords, intervals, beats, rhythms, notes and harmonies are all simply math at their core.
So I like to think of music as the universe finding its voice. And we, we are its instruments.
So sing even if you think you might not be able to hit all the right notes. Learn to play an instrument even if it’s just for fun and even if you don’t think you’re all that good at it.
Dance the dance the best you can.
Make music with those you love and those you might someday. You got the music in you, and you always will.
Amen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 9, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
In Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer, “We Must be Saved,” he talks about what makes us whole as we try to do right in the context of history. Rev. Meg explores the beautiful complexity of this poem.
Prayer
We Must be Saved by Reinhold Niebuhr
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous,
can be accomplished alone;
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous
from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love
which is forgiveness.
Sermon
These are the Days of Awe, celebrated by those among us with Jewish roots. Rosh Hashanna was October 3 and 4, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. Yom Kippur starts Tuesday evening and ends Wednesday evening. Observance of this holiday includes fasting from sundown Tuesday until nightfall Wednesday. Repentance from wrongs you have done, asking for forgiveness from those you have wronged, and gratitude for being pardoned are at the heart of this holy day.
Last Sunday you heard Susan speak about Rosh Hashannah, about new beginnings. Today I would like to continue by talking about the story that is traditionally read right at the beginning of these “Days of Awe.” It is the story of Abram (later given the name Abraham)Sarai (later given the name Sarah) and Hagar. The story in the Bible, written and later edited by the Jews, has a different perspective and emphasis that the story in the Quran. You know that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (named in order of their appearance) are called the Abrahamic Religions, as they share the same stories of their history.
In the Bible, which contains the Jewish version of the story, Abram has had a vision where he was promised that his children would be as many as the stars in the night sky. Time passes and his wife Sarai does not conceive, so she arranges for her handmaiden, Hagar, to lie with her husband, and she will bear a child by him. As soon as Hagar knows she is pregnant, she begins to look upon Sarai with contempt. Sarai is hurt and angry, and begins to treat Hagar cruelly. Hagar runs away, and an angel finds her by a spring and tells her to go back and submit to her mistress, and her son will be the father of great nations. He will be a wild donkey of a man, the angel says (the Jews say the angel says, about the forbear of the Arab nations, and his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand will be against him, and he will live in opposition to all his kinfolk. She goes back. The angel comes back to Abram and Sarai, and says they will have a child by the next year. He changes their names to Abraham and Sarah. After their child Isaac is born, Sarah is jealous of Ishmael, and makes Abraham send them out into the desert again. He sends them with a little skin of water, but it’s not enough, and they are near dying of thirst. They are both crying, and God hears them and shows her a well where she gets water. Ishmael grows up in the desert and becomes and expert archer.
In the Muslim version, Hagar is the daughter of an Egyptian king who has been given to Ibrahim as a second wife. She bears her son, Ismael, and Sarai is jealous. She makes Ibrahim take his second wife and child to a desert valley and leave them there, telling them God will care for them. They almost die of thirst, and Hagar runs back and forth between two hills looking for water. Finally God causes a spring to flow from the ground, and they are saved. Ruth Behar, and anthropologist and Jewish scholar, guesses that this terrible story was chosen to open the days of repentance and reconciliation because everyone in the story is at fault. Sarai was cruel and jealous, Hagar was unwise to treat her mistress, or the first wife with contempt, and Ibrahim was the miserable dad caught between two feuding family members. It is fitting that we see that each of us contributes in a way to whatever misery in which we find ourselves. There is almost always a way we could have done better, and it is good to see that before you ask for forgiveness.
You can see how different points of view spin a story in different ways. In the Muslim world, Hagar is an Egyptian princess, a godly woman of faith whose son was the father of the Adnan Arabs. Ibrahim was a faithful father who traveled between his two households, loving both sons and both wives. In the Jewish story she was an arrogant and unwise brat who trash-talked her mistress and gave birth to a wild donkey of a son. What can you expect from our distant cousins, these Arabs, who descend from a wild donkey of a man? His hand is always raised against others and the hand of others is always raised against him. How many of you have family members, at the level of first cousin or closer, who don’t speak because of a conflict? Do you think the stories each side tells about what happened are different?
What if Sarah had apologized for her cruelty? What if Hagar had apologized for her contempt? What if they could have done what was best for the family, for Isaac and Ismael? What might the rippling after-effects of such apologies have been? What would forgiveness in that family done for the world? Repentance and forgiveness are what this season is about for Judaism, which is one of the sources of our UU faith.
We have seen a Presidential candidate apologize recently. Once a couple of months ago, the kind of apology that is not an apology, where you say “If I did something that hurt some people, I’m sorry
An apology with “I’m sorry if….” in it is thin gruel, and will not nourish any relationship. The one Saturday morning was better. “I said it. I was wrong, and I apologize.” That’s more like it. You acknowledge what you did. You acknowledge that it was wrong. You apologize.” That’s a C- apology. It’s the one we most often give and get. “I was tired. I wasn’t myself. I was worried about some other thing and it came out sideways…” The non-interactive apology. There is no asking for forgiveness. There is no validation of the hurt that was caused. There is no deep understanding of the other’s point of view. A truly great apology involvesan understanding snf sn acknowledgment of of what happened. Not only in you but in the other person. It’s not too quick. A premature apology, where you say you’re sorry and that means the other person isn’t allowed to talk any more about their feelings about what happened, is unfair and controlling. A great apology leaves room for the hurt person to talk about what it was like for them to be hurt. It validates the hurt. There is deep listening. Patience. Vulnerability. It’s as simple as saying “I can really see how that hurt you.” Then it might be good to say more about that. See if you really do see, if you do understand. A great apology has a lot of listening in it. Then there is an ask – for forgiveness. Forgiveness also takes listening. Listening until you understand another person, how they could have done what they did. Deciding whether you still want to be in relationship, and under what conditions.
Listening is one of the most healing actions in the world. It is also, as I’ve said to you before, astonishingly rare. Deep listening, I’m convinced, can not only make a great apology, it can lead to forgiveness because it leads to understanding. Deep listening can transform lives, nourish souls, and bring justice. So many people suffer from not being seen or heard. Your family, your church, is a place where you can practice the healing art of listening and forgiveness.
You could practice nourishing souls and transforming lives this very afternoon if you wanted to make a listening appointment. Some people worry that, once they start listening, they will be sucked in to a three-hour commitment. Make a container. Set a timer. Get a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend, and say “Ok, you talk for 30 min and then I’ll talk for 30 min.” When the other person is talking, you get still (this is a complicated/simple spiritual practice) open your heart (also a practice) and be present to them in the moment (also….. you get it). You don’t think about what amazing question you are going to ask them. You don’t plan your self-defense, as you are feeling criminally misunderstood. You try to receive what is the heart of this matter. What is the feeling? Mad, sad, glad? There are lists of feelings online you can print out if you would like assistance in this. You listen with love. Ask yourself how this situation would be changed if you were held in the arms of love while you listened?
Sweethearts, when you can quiet the mad buzzing of the voices in your core, the energy attached to being right, the panic at being misunderstood, the urge to tell the story of when a similar thing happened to you, when you can sink the advice that bubbles up and needs to, has to come out, then you can get still enough to really listen. This is why listening is such a rare gift. To get to this place takes practice. A good way to live our mission is to listen. This is what can change people’s minds in politics. This is what can make a hostage-taker put down his guns and give himself up. Listening is what can bring the realization of common ground between protectors of the water and people in the oil business trying to deliver the energy that modern life in our culture demands. Our Chalice Circles, which you can begin to sign up for today, are a crucible in which you can learn to listen and be listened to. If you feel you need a trained listener, please let me know and I will connect you to one of the trained listeners in the congregation. Listening can heal the world.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Susan Yarbrough
October 2, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
The night of October 2nd marks the beginning of both the Jewish and Muslim New Year, a rare occurrence occuring only once every thirty-three years. Both of these faiths have something to teach us about new beginnings.
Prayer
God of many names, whose highest name and form is human love, the prayers of the people are gathered before you in the midst of a great cloud of witnesses as our joys and our concerns are made known.
Thank you for new beginnings, day by day and moment by moment. Thank you for the easily received gifts of love and joy and forgiveness, as well as for the painful teaching gifts of pain and resentment and separation. Thank you for this congregation and its ministry to this community and to each other. And thank you for all people of good intentions, good will, and good hearts, wherever they may be.
Kindly and gently remind us of your presence everywhere, and invite us to reach for you, to speak to you, and to listen for you, even though you are frustratingly and maddeningly mysterious to us. If you have hands, hold us in the palm of them. If you have a heart, keep us close to it. If you have tears, weep for us when we resist and move away from you. And if you have ears, hear us now as we thank you for the new beginning that is in every breath and every step.
Amen
Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 25, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
The second UU principle is that we affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations. How can you get wise enough to balance justice and compassion?
Most of you know I have two sons, now in their twenties, and, although they are friends now, they bickered when they were young. My mission as a mother was to reach them to be useful citizens and good company. I asked myself “What happens in our culture when people fight? They get fined or jailed for disturbing the peace.” So we had jail (time out) and fines (losing money.) They didn’t have any money to lose, at first, but I fixed that by giving them a bag of nickels at the beginning of the week. When they would fight or whine, I would say “Please stop that. If you don’t, you’re each going to owe me a nickel.” Whatever money they had left at the end of the week, they could keep. Why did I fine both of them? “He started it” didn’t work because I didn’t have time to have court every time. Some kids can start something very subtly, and the less subtle one always gets in trouble. Sometimes if they were fighting over a toy, I would give the toy a time out for starting a fight. Fairness is a blurry and elusive goal.
This morning I’m talking about the second of our seven UU principles, We covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”
Our principles name the values we covenant together to affirm and promote. “Covenant” means to promise. By signing the membership book of this church you are promising to affirm, which means to say out loud that you agree with, and promote, which means to say it in public to people who might argue with you. The easy part is that most of our principles are so mildly stated and general that most people would say they agree with them. The harder part is actually walking the path they lay out for us on a daily, personal basis. The first principle we talked about was that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That one is hard for some folks who want to believe that some humans are worth less than others.
If you were to write this second principle for a child, you might say “We should be kind and things should be fair.” Justice is making things right and fair. You get what you deserve. Your actions have consequences. You open something, you close it. You pick something up, you have to put it back in its place. You dirty something, you clean it up again. You do the crime, you do the time. We covenant together to promote this value.
Equity is wanting justice for everybody equally. We agree that things should be right and fair for everyone. Male, female (or in between) should have the same rules; all shades of skin color, gay, straight (or in between,) Spanish speaking or Asian, moneyed or poor. Actions should have consequences. People shouldn’t get away with bad behavior. Some shouldn’t be able to dirty everything while others clean up. Our upcoming pledge drive is when we remind one another that the many shouldn’t count on a few people to keep this congregation financially strong and about to act out its mission more and more.
Often, though, someone else does help you: cleans up after you, gives you money, helps you more than you deserve. Sometimes your consequences are mitigated by someone understanding your circumstances. Someone makes the church part if their legacy so we get to have a justice fund and begin to provide breakfast tacos to the people who come to the first service. It’s often a wonderful thing when that happens.
Compassion adds some grace so that sometimes you give more than a person deserves. Or you can get more than you deserve. Why isn’t the world fairer, then? Why is there so much pain, hatred and misery? Often it’s because there is an imbalance among justice, equity and compassion.
How do we walk the path of justice, equity and compassion? You know I advocate adding the words “beginning in our homes and congregations” to the end of each principle, so lets talk about that.
I wrestle with this principle because, in my life, justice, equity and compassion fight with each other. Say I have a situation where someone has hurt me. Justice demands that the hurt be paid for somehow. Equity demands that if I hurt you, I have to pay too. The same rules apply to both of us. I would rather forgive you and have you forgive me. That’s where compassion comes in, I think. Should compassion overpower justice, though? Would it be a better world if we were sweet and understanding about where people are coming from when they create havoc and destruction? Can you be compassionate and still carry through with just punishment?
Here it is in the context of raising children. As I said at the beginning, I think a parent’s job is to prepare children to live in the world out there. In our culture we pay for things in money, labor and time. If one of my children made a mistake that costs me forty minutes, maybe driving something he forgot over to him at school, he owed me forty minutes of his time on some project where I have need. When they were small, if they didn’t obey by the time I counted to three, they owed me a nickel of their allowance. That feels like justice. On the other hand, I have compassion with the boy who made the mistake. I know I made mistakes like that. I understand not obeying. You get busy, you want to do what you want to do. I feel like that too, and I’m not the world’s most obedient person, so they came by that honestly. On the other hand, I know if my mom had made me pay for forgetting with time I might have learned at an earlier age to be more organized. If I allowed my children to ignore me when they were small, they would not have had as much chance to grow up into people I want to spend time with. Too much compassion, too much understanding of how someone got to where they were doing things wrong — it makes you weak on justice. That deprives the person who is behaving incorrectly of the consequences that lead to learning, and that’s mean to everyone else. There has to be a balance between steel-cold justice and mushy-gushy compassion. The Buddhist teachers talk about “idiot compassion,” a term attributed to Trungpa Rinpoche. Pema Chodron expands on this, writing “It is the general tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see them suffering….” You’re doing it for yourself, to avoid discomfort.
To our urge for justice, we might quote Mahatma Ghandi, “If we choose an eye for an eye, we will all soon be blind.” To our rush of compassion, we quote Malcolm X, “We sometimes must kill the one who is evil in order to save the many who are innocent.” My father used to quote what he claimed was a Chinese proverb: “Mercy to the tiger is cruelty to the lamb.”
We wrestle with this in our church community on a small scale in our relations with one another. If one of us behaves inappropriately, how much do we have compassion and say “Well, I know that person, and I know why she is acting obnoxious or why he is hard to talk to or why this one has bad manners or no tact or why that one can’t shut up.” Knowing the person, knowing why, that helps us have compassion. On the other hand, it makes the person never get confronted with bad behavior. That, in turn, makes it hard on the people around them. In fact, I think a belief in another’s worth and dignity makes it important for me not to dismiss that person or give up on them. We shouldn’t give in to a temptation to say, “Don’t bother with them, they can’t change..” “Love” is the one word some use to sum up this principle. Love includes compassion, and it also includes justice. When you love, you want the person to be better. You want them to face themselves. You want to challenge them, to say your piece, you want to encourage them to remember their community. Of course, that kind of challenge has to be done rarely, with fear and trembling, only after you have looked at yourself, faced yourself, and done your best to ensure that your behavior and attitudes are correct.
The Covenant of Healthy Relations you all voted on seeks to flesh this out, it presents what this might look like. You can find it on a big rolling board in the fellowship hall.
“Justice, equity and compassion.” If it feels too vague, as you walk this UU spiritual path, make it more specific. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At the grocery store. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At the gym. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At work. “Justice, equity and compassion.” In our living rooms. It’s really difficult. Let’s see if we can aspire to it. Some justice was moved forward yesterday as the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Sometimes justice involves the experience of finally being heard and seen, finally having your story told. Bells rang out across the nation, echoing the bell from the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, VA. You have downloaded bell sounds, so let’s celebrate that moment here in Austin with the ringing of our own bells.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 18, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
The first strand of the Buddhist eight-fold path is “Right Understanding.” Do you understand how things work? What causes suffering? What is the way to be happy?
Sermon
I see a lot of articles on how to be happy? They have titles like “7 steps to happiness” and “5 things we do to keep ourselves from being happy.” Most people want to be happy. We’ve all felt it. It tends to disappear, though, when our bank account shrinks to nothing, or our shoulder hurts, it shrinks when people we love are in trouble, or when we’re anxious or outraged or suffering.
On the front of your order of service is a photo of a path. The reason for this is that, today, we’re going to start talking a one of the oldest “8 part path to happiness,” which is at the center of Buddhism.
Buddhism is a religion that came up out of Hinduism. A Hindu prince had been sheltered from the world. Not just from the world, but from religion. His mother had died when he was a baby, and a holy man had prophesied that the boy would grow up to be a great general, a king, or a holy man. His father decided to eliminate the holy man option by raising the boy in a palace built just for him. When he was 16 he was given a beautiful wife, and they had a family. When he was in his late 20’s, though, the prince wanted to venture out. On the road, he saw an old man. “What is the matter with him?”
“He is old,” answered the charioteer. “that happens to everyone.”
On subsequent ventures out, he saw a sick person, a dead body and an ascetic. His charioteer explained to him that people get diseases. They get old, they (and by they, I mean we) die.
In growing Despair and horror at the realities of suffering and death, grieving at the thought of losing his mother, his father, his wife and children to these terrible ravages of living in mortal flesh, he decided to go follow the ascetic path. He was so committed to this path, enduring pain, starving himself until his belly button touched his spinal cord, never achieving satisfaction, but always wanting to go farther to find wisdom. Five other Ascetics who were so admiring of his dedication that they became his followers. After years of this, the Buddha realized these holiness practices weren’t going to get him to wisdom and peace. He accepted a bowl of rice from a little girl, took a bath in the river and sat down under a tree. His disciples were shocked, and left him. sat down to meditate. He realized that none of the ascetic practices he had been following we’re going to work. He vowed that he would stay meditating under the tree until he reached Enlightenment period all night and evil demon, Mara the demon of Illusion tempted him with food, beautiful women, power, all the normal people just moved into Nirvana when they reached Enlightenment, things that men are tempted with. Enlightenment was his. Normally but the king of Gods himself Brahma asked the Buddha to stay and teach. He agreed. Now he was hesitant to teach, but the simple truths that had come to him while he was sitting under the tree wood rescue human beings from suffering and unhappiness. He walked to the river where some holy men were sitting, among them the Five Guys who had abandoned the Buddha when he took rice from a little girl.
He preached the truth that had come to him as he sat under the tree for several days and nights
1. Life is out of joint.
2. This suffering, this out of place-ness is caused by desire.
3 if you stop craving/desire, you’ll be happy
4. The way to stop craving is the 8 fold path.
This is the first of eight sermons, over the upcoming months, on the eightfold path of Buddhism. The Eightfold Path is not like eight steps, or little boxes you check off one by one as you accomplish them. It is a path of eight elements interwoven, braided together, having to do with understanding, practice and behavior that Buddhism says will take you on a journey away from suffering and toward freedom. The first component of the path is “Right Understanding.” “Getting it” is the first and continuing job of the person on this path. You get stuck by the temporary nature of good health, by the sudden lightning strike of tragedy and trouble. A friend gets killed in a car accident. You have a heart attack. A piano falls on your head. Suddenly the assurance of ongoingness is gone. Suddenly security looks like a laughable illusion. Your ideas of how things work are upended. Or you catch a glimpse of the truth of how things do work. You have a glimmer of a sense that many people create their own suffering, that disquietude lurks at the corners of most lives, that grief, hope, fear, hunger for security or pleasure or acceptance drive people to do what they do and that satisfaction is elusive. A deeper reality crooks its finger at you and whispers ( if you’re old enough to remember the deeply Buddhist movie “The Matrix) it whispers in Laurence Fishburn’s voice: “Wake up. There must be satisfaction somewhere, let’s go look for it. “
One of the things I find most relaxing about Buddhism is that it doesn’t ask you to take any of this on faith. It asks you to try it out and see if it works for you. Buddhism asks you to start with your experience. Most people’s attention is squandered on the anxiety, all the worry, and the fear in their lives. What will happen to us? Am I doing this right? Will people have a good time at my party? Will I get well again? Will I end up a bag lady? Will I find love? Moment after moment, for most people, is filled with hope that things will go well and fear that things won’t. That life is a roller coaster. In the words of the poet John Prine “Some times you’re up, some times you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown.”
Things happen to you, then you make stories about the things that happen: that they shouldn’t be happening, that they are a punishment for something you did, that your life is unfair, that you are unlucky and unblessed. Buddhism says all of these thoughts about what happens, all of the roller coaster emotion caused by hoping and fearing makes you suffer. There is a way to end the suffering. In your life, you will have pain, but you don’t have to make yourself extra suffering over the pain. The eightfold path, with its eight elements, is the way to train yourself morality, mentally and emotionally, to be free from suffering from the thoughts you have about what happens. Here are the eight elements: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
Right understanding, the first strand of the Eightfold Path, “getting it, ” involves seeing how things are. You understand that you suffer because you have attachments to how things should go. You crave, you cling, you hope, you fear.
You have hopes that an interview will go well. You are anxious about it. You worry afterward about whether they liked you. If you get the job you worry about doing it well. If you don’t get the job you wonder why they didn’t like you. You have ideas about how it should go. You have interpretations of how it went, ideas from your interpretations, and you suffer over those.
Someone you love is drinking or using again. You worry about how bad it’s going to get. You feel the feelings from when it was at its worst. You interpret your friend’s using as his not loving you, because if he loved you he would want things to be good for you, and things aren’t good for you when he is using. It feels as though he is doing it to you.
In your thoughts is a way you wish things would go. You have fears about how things could be. All of these things, hopes and fears, cause you suffering. When you are anxious about these things you miss a lot of your life: seeing your other friends, you can barely hear what people are saying to you, you don’t enjoy your food, sleep, sex, beauty, things seem garbled and dim. You are suffering. How could that stop?
Wake up. “Get it” that if you calm and focus your mind you can see reality more clearly. “Get it” that what happens happens. There are certain things you can do to make the interview go well, and you do them. Or not. Then it happens. You get the job. Or not. You can interpret it any way you want to. They didn’t like you?
Maybe. Maybe they had someone else who was a better fit. Maybe this is not your job, maybe yours is coming. If the job wouldn’t have been a good fit for you, you would have been miserable in it. Is that what you wanted?
In meditation we have the chance of seeing the story we are telling ourselves about our life. You can notice the thoughts you are having about what is happening in your life. There are a hundred different stories, and seeing your story is part of getting it. Another part of Right Understanding, of waking up, is understanding the law of Karma. Its literal name is “right view of the ownership of action” The Buddhist teachers say: “Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs.” The Buddhist scriptures, like the Christian scriptures, talk about results of actions as “fruits.” “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If our lives are like a river, it’s as if we are all living downstream from our actions, and the dirty or clean water that runs because of those actions catches us later.
Good actions are morally commendable, helpful to the growth of the spirit, and productive of benefits for yourself and others. Unwholesome actions, to use a more Buddhist word than “bad,” ripen into suffering.
Getting it means that you see that suffering occurs from craving, desire and attachment, that the way to end suffering is to end craving and attachment, that the way to end craving is to attend to the eightfold path of right wisdom and right behavior. To own your actions, your part in any situation, to let go of blaming and clean up what you are putting into the water upstream from where you live.
I have a friend who tells the story of her mother-in-law, Carolyn, at the drive-through window at the bank. The teller had sent out a pen for her to use in filling out her deposit slip. She had dropped the pen, which had fallen underneath the seat of the car. Carolyn could reach the pen, she could get her fingers around it, but she couldn’t pull her hand out with the pen in it. Finally they made a present to her of the pen so she would go on.
We are caught like that with our grasping, unable to be free. What is the pen under your seat? What is keeping you from moving? Do you need to let it go? Do you need to drive to a safe place in the parking lot of the bank, get out of the car, move the seat, and get the pen? Either way, you get unstuck, and unstuck is where we want to be. Oh, and happy. We want to be happy.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 11, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Fifteen years after the attack of September 11, what are the ways we remember those whom we lost? How does ritual help us make sense of the events of our lives?
Call to Worship
We enter, now, into this place of renewal.
We join together, now, in this community that sustains and upholds.
We imagine, now, a world with more compassion, more justice, more love.
We worship, now, that which is greater than us,
and that holds our aspirations, our fortitude, our faith, our hope.
Now, we enter into this shared spirit of gratitude and community.
Now, we worship, together.
Sermon: Ritual and Remembrance: the 15th Anniversary of 9/11
On this day 15 years ago, it was a week day morning, and I was on my way to work when I turned on the radio in my car. I listened as a shell-shocked reporter described how apparent attackers had flown a jetliner first into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and then about 15 minutes later had flown a second jet in to the South tower.
My initial response was disbelief. My mind went immediately to the 1938 radio drama called “War of the Worlds” that had presented a fictional alien invasion as a live news report, leading to some people panicking in areas throughout the country because they believed it was really happening.
I thought what I was hearing must be like that – a fiction being presented as reality. My brain just could not accept that it could really be happening.
And then I changed the radio station. And then I changed it again. It was on every station. It was real.
Instead of continuing on to work, I went back home and told Wayne that we needed to turn on the television news. The country was under attack.
We watched in horror and disbelief as the gaping holes in the towers burned, and they played endless repeats of the video of that plane turning and crashing into the South tower. We watched as the reports began to come in that hijackers had crashed another plane into the Pentagon. We witnessed first the South tower collapsing and then the North tower, learning in between that another plane, United Flight 93, had crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
My memories of that morning are hazy and jumbled. I had to look up the sequence of events to make sure my memories of them were not distorted.
One clear and painful memory that stands out for me though, is that at some point before the towers fell, I had left the room. I don’t remember why. I just remember walking back into the living room and hearing Wayne say, “Oh my God, they’re jumping out of the windows to avoid being burned to death.” I looked at the television and saw images that fill me with horror and grief even today.
These are extraordinarily painful memories. It is so easy for me to want to avoid them. To lock them away in some distant room in the far reaches of my mind. And indeed, I suspect they are too powerful to carry with us in our consciousness all of the time. But I do think it is important that we remember sometimes – that we glance back into that room and retrieve some of what that day was like.
I think we must remember those whose who died, as well as those who grieve them each year, especially on this day – that we remember the horror and the grief and the anger and the confusion and the fear and the subsequent ways in which those feelings were sometimes used to manipulate us in the days that followed 9/11.
We remember because embedded in that day and in the ways we as a society, as a culture, reacted to it are lessons to be learned; illuminations of our values and ideals both healthy and good and some that are destructive; stories about who we are as a people that we continue to tell ourselves even today.
And to do so, that we commemorate. We engage in ritualized remembrances.
This morning, across our country in sanctuaries not so different than this one, n1any of our fellow citizens are also remembering 9/11 through whatever are the rites and rituals of their own faith traditions.
Today, in cites across our country and indeed the world, people are commemorating 9/11 by engaging in secular rituals. In Manhattan, two four mile high rectangular towers of light powered by 88 7,OOO-watt xenon light bulbs will recall the Twin Towers, as the names of those who died in the attacks are read aloud.
In Austin, City Firefighters are remembering the first responders who died on 911 by climbing the Pleasant Valley Drill Tower in full fire fighting gear enough times to equal to what had been the height of the world trade center towers. It is a ritual they do each year in complete silence.
Through these rites and rituals, we reach back into that room where we’ve stored the memories from that day 15 years ago and retrieve them, and it matters – it matters that we do so through such ritual.
When I dove into reading about what we know about ritual, I found quite a bit of scientific research and a number of theories about our propensity to engage in ritual. It has been studied across a wide range of disciplines from neurology to anthropology What I share today will be broad by necessity, getting at what seems to common among these theories about human rituals.
Here’s a definition of ritual developed by two neuroscientists that I really liked. “Ritual is a sequence of behavior that
1. is structured or patterned
2. is rhythmic and repetitive
3. acts to synchronize emotion, perception, cognitions and physical movement to potentially generate powerful unifying experiences and
4. synchronizes these processes among individual participants when in a group setting, creating a strong sense of group unity.”
Ritual has been observed across all known cultures and across both religious and secular institutions. We can see rituals play out in families, schools, workplaces, governments, sports and the military for example.
We find this patterned, repetitive, synchronization in storytelling, drama, music, dance and many of the other arts.
We engage in ritualistic behavior both on our own as individuals, as well as in group settings.
It seems to be embedded in our very genetic structure. Anthropologists have found evidence of ritualized behavior from even before language developed. It even may have been the source of more complex culture and communication.
Even very young children will automatically copy ritual. I’ve seen this several times at the “We Gather” Saturday services we do here at the church once a month. For those services, we put out a carpet and coloring materials so that children can stay with us for the whole service.
They will be coloring away, seemingly oblivious to the goings of the adults, until we start to chant or sing or do some other form of ritual. Then, they will look up and join in right away. We have had some pretty wonderful dance performances spontaneously added to our hymn singing a couple of times.
So ritual seems to be intrinsic to our nature as human beings, and we are developing greater understanding of how it may influence us both on the individual level and in groups.
On the individual level, studies mostly focusing on ritualistic meditation and prayer have found that these practices have a beneficial influence on human psychology, helping us create better coping strategies. They can reduce depression and anxiety and improve mood. They can also reduce blood pressure and heart rate, while improving the functioning of our immune systems.
Some rituals seem to turn off the part of the brain that gives us our sense of time and place, which can lead what our neuroscientists called the experience of “absolute unitary being” – that our deepest most true inner self is identical to the ultimate reality of the universe. Sounds a lot like “there is a spark of the divine within each of us,” doesn’t it?
This experience, in turn, seems to lead to greater valuing of peaceful cooperation and has even resulted in a reduction of implicit bias regarding race and age.
Ritual has also been shown to help with cognitive and memory improvements, and these all of findings are being put to use helping people.
Theresa Klein is an occupational therapist who works with people with dementia at an assisted living facility. Her own grandfather developed progressive dementia, He became disconnected and mute most of the time. He was a devout Catholic though, and she noticed that when she took him to church on Sunday, he happily joined in the familiar prayers and hymns AND that he was more able to connect with her during these rituals.
So, she brought the option to participate in rituals into the assisted living setting to powerful effect. One resident, an 82 year-old woman named Martha, had seemed so catatonic that her daughter who visited her every day had reluctantly agreed to allowing Martha to go on hospice care.
Then, they tried offering Martha the chance to participate in some rituals from her religious tradition. She suddenly sat up and joined in. As they did this more and more over the days and weeks that followed, she even looked at her daughter and said, “I love you” several times. Through ritual, a mother and her daughter were given more time to experience real connection with one another.
And that brings us to the role that rituals seem to play when we do them together in a group. First, they seem to create that sense of connection within the group. They bind people together. In smaller groups, rituals that involve fear or even pain can cause participants to very strongly fuse their personal identity with that of the group. This might have had a survival advantage in early tribal societies by creating strong cooperation and making them better able to wage war against competing tribes.
Conversely, regularly repeated rituals that have less negative emotional content can bond much larger groups together but less intensely and around a common doctrine or belief system. More recently, research has found that these differences between ritual settings are probably a matter of degree rather than absolutes.
At the group level, rituals are also a way we pass on social memory. Through ritual, we are embedding memories in a way that, for instance just reading about the events of 9/11 does not. We are getting at the essence of the story, creating and retrieving the common social values and norms, emotions and embodied experience, and we are creating a mechanism, a technology, that allows us to transmit these social memories to the next generations.
So, our 9/11 commemorations, our vigils and memorial services these are how people in a culture remember in a whole bodied, visceral way – a way of collectively saying “we remember you” to those we have lost. And even after all of us who experienced 9/11 are no longer living, these rites and rituals are ways that future generations may also say, “We remember you. We carry you with us.”
Almost all of our practices here on Sunday can be thought of as ritualistic. Our order of our service repeats itself in much the same way each week. We recite many of the same words together. We sing together. We listen to music together. We have a story for all ages together. We have a time of centering or prayer together. We light candles in our window together.
Particularly when I am leading worship, that is one of our most powerful rituals for me. I watch as people from this religious community that I serve and that I love light their candles in our window, and I imagine the powerful experiences and emotions they are holding up, and I can feel in a very visceral way that which binds this religious community together and moves out into our larger world to do justice. It is always powerful and moving.
Powerful too are our rites of passage that mark life’s transitions – our baby parades and coming of age ceremonies, weddings, memorial services and the like – our ceremonies that mark the changing of the seasons – the water communion, Christmas Eve, the burning bowl service, the flower communion.
And much of all of this has been passed down to us through social memory – from the Unitarians and Universalists who came before us.
It is important to note here that as vital as our ritual traditions are, the words that go with them, the stories that we tell ourselves, the theologies we express during our rituals matter greatly too. If these are directed inward, then the rituals by which they are expressed will create bonding within the group that is in opposition to any who are not a part of the group. We can see this with some of the more fundamentalist religions and certain highly white-nationalistic political rallies as of late.
Likewise, if the theologies we express within our rituals are directed toward all of humanity or even all of creation, the web of all existence, then the sense of interconnectedness they will generate also tends to occur both within the group and on a more universal scale.
So on this, the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I want to close by inviting you to join me in a ritual of commemoration. Please rise in body or spirit and extend your palms opened upward in a gesture of openness. I will say a few words of remembrance of several groups of folks, ending each time with the word, “today”. At which point, we will place our hands over our hearts and say together, “We remember” and return our hands to the palms held upward position.
To the Universalists and the Unitarians and then the Unitarian Universalists who have handed down to us this religious tradition that sustains and upholds us, particularly on days filled with difficult memories such as this one, today, we remember.
To our ancestors in this church, who created built, maintained and expanded it so that we are now able to continue this religious community that we love, today, we remember.
In this, our beloved church, we pause this day to look back into that sacred room at the edge of our consciousness, and today, We remember.
To the people who responded on 9/11 by going to the aide of those at the world trade center and the pentagon, some of whom lost their own lives and others who still suffer disabling health effects even now, today, we remember.
To those who attempted to retake flight 93 so that it could not reach whatever might have been the hijackers intended target, today, We remember.
To the families and loved ones of all who died in the attacks, today, we remember.
To all those who died when flight 93 crashed into that field in Pennsylvania, to those died at the Pentagon, to those who died at the world trade center, today, we remember.
For humankind, for future generations, for our world, always and today, we remember.
Amen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 4, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Water Communion Service. We each bring our water from a place that has meaning to us and pour our waters together. We sing water songs and have a child-friendly sermon.
Notes from the sermon
Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit
In the stories the ancient people tell about how the trees and rocks and animals and people got here, Some stories are of God shaping human beings from mud. Others are of a divine being named Spider Woman gathering different colors of earth, mixing them together to make all shades of skin, plants, flowers, and singing the Creation Song over them so they came to life. Science teaches that life came from the ocean, and beings emerged who could live either in water or on land, and then life evolved so that some lived in water and other life lived mostly on the land, breathing air. So we sing:
Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit
Our bodies are more than half water. It’s not like water is from here down, that’s silly because you can feel the bones in there! It’s mixes all in with the bones and muscles, blood and skin. Have you ever seen your blood? Sometimes when you get hurt, you skin breaks and some blood comes out. People’s blood all is pretty much the same. What color is it? Red. All life needs water to survive. We like to teach our children to be very aware of water. We are grateful for the clean water we get to drink. We are careful with the plants we plant around our houses, so they don’t use too much water, we don’t leave the water running while we brush our teeth. We like to drink water all day long in order to stay healthy, and we do what we can to help people in other places in the world where they can’t easily get to clean water. Some children your age have to walk a long long way to get some water and bring it back to their families. Sometimes the water is dirty, and it sometimes make their families sick. Some people are working with those families to build wells closer to them so they can get good water without sending their kids out to get water from far away.
Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit
Have you ever held your breath? Boy, do we ever need to breathe! Air comes into our bodies, all the way in. and we blow it all the way out. Sometimes we can sing while we breathe out. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we just breathe. Some places have air that is clean and good for you, and some places have air that’s dirty with car exhaust or factory smoke or pollen. We like breathing, and so we use our votes to vote for people who will keep our air the cleanest. So we can sing!
Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit
Our religion, Unitarian Universalism, has a symbol, the lit chalice. See it up here? The fire represents the spirit that helps us love, the spirit that is a voice of truth inside us. Do you have a sense inside when you’ve done something good? When you’ve made a mistake or hurt someone? Ancient people said there was something inside us that lives forever, that lets us feel when we are close to God, close to the Big Spirit that connects us all, and when we are farther away. The Big Spirit that connects us all is a spirit of love and truth. That’s why we light a chalice for our Sunday services, in our home chalices before dinner together, even at meetings that we have here at the church.
Our spirit brings us close to the fire that speaks to us of the Big Spirit of Love and Truth.
Let’s sing again while the last group of people come up and pour their water into the bowls.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 14, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
When the Unitarians merged with the Universalists, they decided to write a list of ideas we all “affirm,” which means to say “yes” to, and “promote,” which means we talk about these things, not only amongst ourselves but with others as well. Let’s take a look at how they speak to what is going on today.
What a situation we have out there these days! The election is unlike anything we’ve seen, terrorism is affecting European people now, so it’s getting a lot of press. Folks feel somehow that they have to choose sides between suggesting that Black lives matter and honoring the dangerous job that law enforcement is trying to do. You have to have fine-tuned ears now because people all talk at the same time on the cable news shows. People on both sides act like the others have taken leave of their good sense. In a situation like this, we need to go back to basics. We need to turn to our Principles. When we talk every Sunday about what holds us together, we say our mission. That’s not the only thing at the foundation of our church. We have Principles, and a thoughtful commitment to the Principles will shape your life. Taking a deep refreshing a dive into them this year, we will see what treasures we can bring up from the depths, to aid our growing strength as spiritual/spirited people.
The Principles were adopted in 1960, when the Unitarians and Universalists were merging. They were hammered out with passion, fury, diplomacy, compassion and compromise. Their language was of the time, and, in the early 80’s the women let it be known that changes needed to be made. There were discussions, thoughtful and fruitful. Much smoother than before. There were several General Assemblies where votes were taken. I remember, in the early 90’s when I was just coming into this denomination from the Presbyterians, at my first GA I got to see the seventh principle, about” the interdependent web of all existence, of which we a part” was given its final positive vote, to allow it to be added to the original six. My sense of the truth of that Principle, my experience with Earth-based spirituality, found it deeply satisfying that this denomination had taken that step.
So our principles are the result of a lot of committee work. They can challenge and change us, and I want you to know that the work of teams of people thinking and acting together are the way all of the best church work gets done. The Principles are something we agree to affirm and we agree to promote them, but they are not a test of belief, as a creed is. Creeds, also created by committees, were originally crafted as a focus for Christians who were being tortured for their beliefs. People had a list of beliefs to hold onto as they were threatened with death. It was self-definition in the midst of a hostile culture. It feels good to some folks to be part of a group reciting ancient words.
Our principles are not commandments or a creed, but they do point to who we aspire to be. They are a big, inviting house where there are lots of rooms, lots of ways of being and believing within a structure, a container for our right relations.
In this election cycle, we watch Trump rallies, and it is easy to see the people who do not live by the principles. It’s not that they would not be welcome here, it’s that they would feel a lack of fit. They would understand, listening to the principles being read that this was a different place. About as different as you can get from a Trump rally. There is still the longing for fairness, just different thoughts on how to get there. Different methods for getting there. There is still the longing for safety, but different thoughts on who should be included in that safety. The Principles inform our lives, and, often, unless we were raised with them, the first time we heard them we felt ourselves rung like a bell.
The first Principle that we agree to affirm and promote is the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This does not hold for ideas, which have to prove their worth. We are not called to affirm or promote the worth or dignity of every idea, but of every person. There is no individual or group of people who are worthless, who are undeserving of dignity. This idea can guide our thoughts, and show us how to treat people. Just in case you think this just means “be nice,” let me spell this out for you. I like to turn up the heat on our understanding of the Principles by adding “beginning in our homes and congregations” to the end of each one. So, we recognize the worth and dignity of every person in our home, including ourselves. Does this mean letting everyone do what they want to until civilization falls? Clearly not. A colleague of mine in the state of Maine took a walk in her neighborhood. Hanging from an apartment building was an enormous rebel flag. A woman happened to come out of the building, and they began a neighborly chat.. My colleague asked about the flag and found out this woman’s boyfriend had hung it. My colleague asked, gently, whether the woman knew that, for a lot of people, that flag was not a symbol of the South, but an emblem of racism and white supremacy. The next day it was down. Gone. She didn’t harangue. Didn’t hammer or nag. Just kindly, without self-righteousness, gave her some information. In this, she respected the worth and dignity of the woman and her boyfriend. That’s hard to do, though, and the likelihood is that the racism didn’t change, it just went inside the apartment. What works better?
In the spring I talked to you about how new research seems to indicate that the brains of liberals and conservatives are wired differently. From tiny involuntary eye movements in reaction to various peaceful or provoking photographs, researchers say they can have a good idea about a person’s political leanings. The corollary of this is that words will not change someone’s mind. The only things that changes someone’s mind, we learn from the FBU hostage negotiators, is listening. Deep, active, sincere listening. Listening to the point where you can almost sense the need for security, the urge to rest in the familiar surroundings of only people you understand, to the point where you can almost see how giving the whole system over to someone who claims he knows what to do, who claims he can fix everything, where you want to believe that there is someone more grown-up than you who will take care of things. It’s that kind of listening that will give you the best odds of partnering with another mind in making a change.
We honor the worth and the dignity of other people by believing that they can teach us something if we engage in conversation, if we listen, if we say our piece when what the I Ching calls “the window of influence” is open. Say our piece and then leave it alone. We honor people’s worth and dignity when we do not infanitilize them because we don’t understand their language or their culture. We honor their worth and dignity when we not only treat people with fairness, but we work for more fairness in the laws of our land. We see so many examples of this not being done. We see mostly male legislators, with values shaped by ignorant preachers, encroaching on sensible health care for women. White folks are waking up again to the structures of white supremacy in our society. We don’t need to feel guilty, we just need to notice it and not fall back asleep, and we need to do what we can do dismantle unfair structures, and use the privileges we do have due to our gender, our skin color, our mainstream sexuality or our able-bodied ness in ways that help those without. And if you know someone who quibbles about whether the structures are still unfair, just as them whether they would like to trade lives and be treated the way people of color are treated. If they would like to live in a body that works differently from the majority of bodies.
What we are seeing in this election cycle is a high status person giving permission for the voicing of crude, cruel, racist, sexist and uneducated prejudices. There are thousands of these folks in every state. I’m not here to play “ain’t it awful” I’m here to say we have an enormous and difficult listening opportunity.
Most listening opportunities are easier than that, with people in your family and at work. My challenge to all of us is this. Knowing that words don’t change people who disagree more than a few degrees from you, or people who are not open to you, let’s put all our emphasis on listening for a few months. Can we do it? I don’t know about you, but I know I won’t be able to. But I’m going to keep trying. It’s my goal. Listening is such a gift. Become aware. Almost no one does it. No one, and I think it’s the key to health and happiness. Take a look at the front of your order of service.
Let yourself hear “shhhhhh.” And trust your good sense to tell you when it’s time. To shhhhhhhhh.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 7, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
My attempts at cooking and baking have taught me some things. More recently, Kiya and I spent three weeks in Mexico learning Spanish, which has taught me even more.
One of the things I do as a writer is to try to tell the truth as much as I can, at least to myself. There is one trick I use to get to underlying truth, and I’m going to use it this morning so you can see how it works. Then you can decide whether you might want to use it too. I write a sentence or so, and then I write “What I really mean to say is …. ” And wait to see what happens.
With the first part of my vacation, as those of you who are on Facebook with me will know, I started experimenting with cooking and baking. I learned something about how I like to do things. What I really mean to say is, I cooked every meal when my boys were growing up. What I really mean to say is I grilled every meal. The grill was in the carport, so rain or shine, summer or winter, I grilled chicken breasts or pork chops, steaks, hamburgers, ears of corn, onions, peppers and peaches. There is something satisfying about cooking over an open flame, and there is very little measuring involved. Measuring seems like too much when you have a job and two small children.
I was no good at cooking. What I really mean to say is that I had decided when I was in my teens that I was bad at it. I used to experiment all the time. I made my own yoghurt, I made bread, I put salads together with apples and sunflower seeds. The grownups mocked me. It was the early 70’s, when salad was mostly iceberg lettuce and thousand island dressing.
I got confident. What I really mean to say is that I got confident enough to make a mistake, which was trying to make an applesauce omelet. I know. I should have known it would be awful, and lo, it was. Awful. I left the kitchen. What I really mean to say is I left the kitchen to my mother and my sister, who were a pair, and went to do math and play chess with my dad, because that was the division of parents decided upon in the family. It was also the early 70’s, which was a time when Feminism was trying to find itself again, and young women were told not to learn to type, because if you could type, that’s what you would be doing for the rest of your career, and we were somehow shown that, in order to move beyond stereotyped femaleness we should scorn all parts of the stereotype, which included cooking, make-up, perfume, giggling, or whatever was associated in the culture with the “Mad Men” type of womanhood. It has taken the new generation of young women who can wear aprons, have tattoos, struggle with work and family balance, and still ask why struggling with work and family balance is more of an issue for them than for working men their age.
In sharing my adventures on FB, I got help. “Freeze the flour before you make the pie dough” was a good one, as everything must be very cool for it to work well. One person offered to come over and bake for me. That is not help, that is just — something else. Sharing your knowledge with someone, (if they are mature enough to be open to input, which I, of course, am) can be helpful. A friend in Richmond sent an excellent set of measuring spoons, and someone in Austin gave me an extra Cuisinart she had, which fulfilled a wish I’d thought was out of reach. Another person kindly told me I should not start with the hard things, but start with the basics. That doesn’t work for me. What I really mean to say is I learn best by being thrown into the deep end. Plus, I don’t really want to learn to cook. I’m a first born Virgo, which means I just want to cook. See the difference?
Fortunately, the deep end is where I landed at the Spanish Immersion school in San Miguel De Allende. We had to find a gay-friendly school, which is something many people don’t have to consider. There are UUs in San Miguel, and they helped us with a house to rent and good information about where to buy meat and vegetables, wifi, electricity, water and cell phones. The school was about fifteen minutes taxi ride through hair-raisingly crowded and narrow cobblestone streets. The first day I just showed driver the address on the screen of my phone. That’s how much Spanish I had. The school had said, by email, that we could start any Monday. Monday morning, we were shown into a class of four people. They had already been going two weeks. They were on p. 52 of a 60 page work book. Immersion means that Spanish is taught in Spanish, but I speak moderately good French, so I found I could understand nearly everything. 80 percent of the words used in the class were very close to the French, so I could follow along. I was happy figuring it out. That part of my brain that is good at remembering names lit up, and I remembered the vocabulary words well. Grammar, well, not so much. And speaking. OY. That is the hard part. Still, we had wide-ranging conversations about US and Mexican politics, about religion and the revolution, about Chinese herbal medicine. The teachers were professionally patient with my struggles to say things I wanted to say. We had been practicing with Duolingo, an app on the phone that teaches any language you like, and I’d learned to say “Los elefantes no beben leche” (The elephants don’t drink milk), and “Quiero mas ulvas en my pastil.” (I want more grapes in my cake,) but none of those sentences was of much use with taxi drivers or in class. Everything in class was in present tense, which keeps communication fairly simple, and it’s a good spiritual exercise. I enjoyed practicing with taxi drivers and waitresses. They were also professionally patient with me, and once in a while, with a smile, they would correct my words. I was telling one that, at the pool where we were going, ‘voy a sentarse en la sambra,” (that I was going to sit in the shade.) “A la sombra,” he kindly corrected. Then, “what is that in English?” he asked. “The shade,” I said. He practiced that word a few times. When he came back to pick us up, he said “That word again? Shike?”
“Shade,” I said, and felt much better getting one sound right in my words but not all of them. The words for Thursday and egg sound the same, and dog and but sound the same, etc. It’s comical for the Spanish speakers to hear me talk, which I’m glad about. I’m still very timid about speaking, because I hate to be a beginner, What I really mean to say is I think I should be able to do everything well right away, What I really mean to say is being a learner is fine for other people, but I’m very uncomfortable in that role, What I really mean to say is …. What? It takes courage to make mistakes. It takes courage to be a learner. Why does it take courage? It shouldn’t. What I really mean to say is everyone should know that when you are learning new things you are, by definition, not going to be good at them right away. What I really mean to say is I’m just like everyone else, and it makes me mad that I have to keep reminding myself of that. Life reminds me often enough.
I learn over and over that it’s ok to be a learner, that mistakes are inevitable if you want to grow, that some people learn best when they are over their head, that the kind of help that equips the person who is adventuring is better than the kind of help that takes the adventure away. What I really mean to say is I’m glad to be back sharing life with you, and this is going to be a learning year.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Andy Gerhart
July 24, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
We know that knowledge is power, and in our UU faith we emphasize the free search for truth. But what does it mean when answers lead to new questions and new forms of ignorance? How do we cope with our ignorance and simultaneously act in good faith? We’ll discuss our current climate crisis as we explore how uncertainty might ground our theology to inspire us and offer a basis for moral action.
Call to Worship
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical.
It is the power of all true art and science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead.
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists,
manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and
the most radiant beauty,
which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-
this knowledge,
this feeling,
is at the center of true religiousness.
Albert Einstein
(As quoted in Philip Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, 1947)
Readings:
“Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.” -Steven Weinberg (Nobel laureate in Physics, and Austinite)
“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience.” -Al Gore, 2008
“Responsible action does not mean the certain achievement of desired ends but […] the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes… What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we undertake today?” -Sharon Welch, UU theologian, and Provost, Meadville Lombard
Sermon:
Good morning-
So, you all know our esteemed intern minister here at First UU, the honorable Susan Yarborough, right? And you also probably know that when she gives a sermon, often on a major holiday like fourth of July this year, she never fails to declare not only that it is a “seminarian Sunday,” but that they have brought out the B team. Well, I want to declare this a “pre-seminarian” Sunday! And I want to acknowledge the stark reality that if Susan is the B team, then I’ll be very lucky to be considered the C, D, or E team!
So… Shall we pave the road to hell? That is my question today.
Hopefully it brings to mind for you the popular maxim, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” This is the observation that the world is a far more complicated place than we generally imagine, and that a lot of bad stuff is done with the hope of improving it. Examples litter our lives. In fact just the other day, I had a moth breakout at home, and at a complete loss of how to protect my favorite sweater, I read that I could put it in the freezer while I went out of town, and that that would kill the wool moths. So I did, and when I returned, somehow my precious sweater had been pulled through the ice maker! Not only could I not extract it without cutting the sweater, but I broke the ice-maker.
Other examples are really familiar to us. We pour antibiotics into our agriculture in order to feed ourselves, yet in the end create new superbugs with antibiotic resistance. We burn fossil fuels to enable development that is supposed to increase people’s standards of living, but that same energy ends up trapping heat in our atmosphere. And now we are teetering on the edge of using very novel climate technologies, called geo-engineering, in emergency efforts; but these technologies may likely have even more disastrous consequences.
So we must underscore the amount of ignorance we confront whenever we try to do anything.
The photo on the cover of the order of service is of a courageous alliance of citizens putting themselves in front of bulldozers to protect Utah lands from a Canadian firm that the US has recently permitted to extract tar sands. And yes, we are literally paving ourselves, with fossil fuels, into the only type of hell I’ve ever been aware of, one here on earth. We just finished another record breaking June, which followed 13 months that each broke their respective month’s record. And it won’t stop. We are all drenched in oil, as our entire socio-economic system is built on it. We are heating our earth at a rate of 250 trillion joules per second, which is equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day, 365 days a year. And in May, in Karachi, the Pakistani government began digging anticipatory mass graves to prepare for the deaths they expect from this summer’s heat wave.
We face incredible anxiety when we contemplate taking moral actions that may confront these seemingly impervious realities. And no matter which actions we are considering, we confront different types of despair that are commonplace in our society. There’s that we’ve just touched on, the fear of acting because you may make things worse, which underlies the precautionary principle. Another is what I’ll call existentialist despair: the near certainty that no matter what, all of humanity is one day destined for extinction. Either a superbug will get us in the next thousand years, or the sun will explode in a few billion; this is what Bertrand Russell called “unyielding despair.” And then there is a kind of despair, which is so common that I think I confront it in myself or others almost every day. This is perfectionist despair: that dread voice in our minds that dictates that unless we do something perfectly, there is no point in doing it at all. In the case of climate change and reducing carbon emissions, I can’t simply make a choice to do some action that seems good for the climate. Unless I stop eating animals, and stop driving a car, and then stop eating dairy, and then only adopt children who have already been born, and then raise them as vegans, and buy carbon offsets for their extra impacts, well, then there is no point.
I’m sure there are many more types of despair. But regardless of which type of despair you do battle with when you think of doing something inspired, and which type you lose your battle to, let’s face it, all forms of despair become a justification for inaction. And for many, including me, they are comfort. Bertrand Russell and all the existentialists love their despair. And I have at times as well. Despair lifts the burden of hope off of our shoulders, and what a burden that is! Despair frees us to worry about nobody, including ourselves. It helps us cope. In many ways, despair is a religion.
UU theologian Sharon Welch, in her book A Feminist ethic of risk, talks about how we can tackle these anxieties by working toward what she calls “the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes.”
But what are these conditions of possibility? For Welch, they are formed when we act in communities, which she believes tend to hedge against bad ideas and actions, but more importantly, have much greater resilience in the face of failure than individuals do.
I agree with Welch. But there is an individual step that must occur well before we build active communities. This is especially true in our increasingly more isolated and isolating culture.
We each individually must decide to join a community, before we can actually act as one. And this individual and radical decision to participate with others, in inspired moral action, for me, this is where the magic is. I don’t really feel like I understand how this happens very well at all, but for me the critical move begins by acknowledging our ignorance in the face of our uncertainty.
In his introductory essay to the new Norton Anthology of World Religions, Jack Miles states that “the discovery of ignorance” may have been the greatest human discovery of all time. As he puts it, “until our prehistoric but anatomically modern ancestors could tell the difference between ignorance and knowledge, how could they actually know they knew anything?”
Miles continues by noting that religions throughout time can be considered not as privileged forms of knowledge, as is commonly thought, but as “ritualized confessions of ignorance.”
Seeing religion in this way is, he writes, easily overlooked, for “the world harbors many a quiet believer and many a shy practitioner, reluctant to undergo cross-examination about a confession of inadequacy that defies ready articulation.”
“a confession of inadequacy that defies ready articulation”… Indeed, I feel that this is at the heart of religions the world over. And I feel that this is at the heart of inspired moral action.
I myself cannot make a special claim to religious knowledge, either affirming or disaffirming deities. I can however, confess my inadequacy, communally, and ritualistically.
I believe that science is a profoundly deep method for doing this. In fact I believe it is a religion. Science inquires passionately into the nature of reality, and confesses a great deal of ignorance, loving the questions it asks so much that it discovers kernels of reality along the way. Things literally become real through the scientific process. To me it is much like the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. As that wonderful straw-filled toy becomes real through the tried and true testing and constant love of a boy at play, knowledge is revealed to us by the scientific community’s persistent and rigorous inquiry into ignorance by the testing of our world. In this sense, science is a form of real and intense love.
And one of the great misconceptions of science is that scientists are perfectly rational dispassionate actors! Quite the opposite, they love mystery as much or more than any religious actor, and pursue their passions with irrational love and intensity. And thank the dickens that they do, for through such passionate exploration comes most of the knowledge we have to work with in our daily lives. Not just in our daily hum and drum, but as we confront realities like climate change.
And as we just heard in the readings, true science does a great job of acknowledging ignorance. Even Steven Weinberg, our local Austinite Nobel Laureate in physics, as we just heard, wrote that fewer natural phenomena can be precisely explained than physicists originally thought. And as Jack Miles puts it, “Scientific progress is like mountain climbing: the higher you climb, the more you know, but the wider the vistas of ignorance that extend on all sides. The result is that our ignorance always exceeds our knowledge, and the gap between the two grows infinitely greater, not smaller, as infinite time passes.”
Indeed, after so much physical inquiry, when we fit our mathematical formulas to find out that more than 90% of the mass in the universe is what we call dark matter, and is completely undetectable, our universe becomes a completely new mystery to us. And so do our lives within it.
The worst part is that we cannot even admit it. We are an arrogant species. And the last thing we want to do is relinquish our fundamentalist beliefs, whether they are quote unquote religious or, quote unquote scientific. The last thing we wish to do is admit how little we know.
The notion of ignorance has indeed taken on a very unique, and complicated, valence when it comes to climate change. This is because instead of acknowledging ignorance, many people today actually celebrate it when it comes to climate change. These days there are very few scientists that deny human-caused climate change, and those that do are paid handsomely to do so, as historian Naomi Oreskes makes very clear in her book Merchants of Doubt.
To my mind, the critical reason we must acknowledge our ignorance, is because it enables us to recognize what we actually do know. I do not know what God is, or who she, he, they, or it is or isn’t; I do not know what dark matter is, or whether what lays beyond our universe are parallel universes through infinite space. Just as I do not know how to speak the Basque language (or any other language other than English and some Spanish for that matter).
I don’t know the mystery of the world, and it terrifies me. But I do know that I am alive. And in the same instant that I recognize my vitality I also recognize that I am, simultaneously, grateful for my life. This is the essential recognition. Gratitude for living, to my mind, is the natural result of a confession of ignorance. And it is the seed from which grows inspired actions.
I don’t know exactly how climate change will play out in what remains of my lifetime, but I do know that it will play out most disastrously for those who cannot afford to cope with it, and that we will have many reenactments of what happened in the 9th ward of New Orleans during the flood that many call Hurricana Katrina. I don’t know all the places this will happen, but I do know that many, many more of them will happen in Bangladesh, in Vietnam, in China, in India, and along the coasts of Africa. For those who are impoverished on the coastlines of this world, I do know that sea level rise will mean refugee status. And I now know, that people in large cities in deserts like Karachi will be preemptively digging mass graves.
I don’t know who will set aside the money to help these people, and I don’t know how our energy economy will transition from fossil fuels. But I do know we need hundreds of billions of dollars set aside to help them, and I know that we need to change our fossil fuel lifestyles.
Those who deny climate change are not acknowledging ignorance. They are not loving anything. They are closing their eyes, and their hearts, out of tremendous fear for old livelihoods. They come in many forms, but all are putting their heads in the sand. But its not just sand, it is sand along a beach, at low tide.
Still, the problem isn’t so much them, it is the rest of us, standing right next to them. Our heads may be out of the sand, and we may see the tide rising. But we are in despair, and we are paralyzed.
So how do we act amidst uncertainty? How do we collectively pull our heads out of the sand? How do we open our eyes to inquire into mystery and ignorance? And once we have done that, how do we open our bank accounts, and our homes, to environmental refugees.
Well, I don’t know. I too tend to despair. And I don’t think that is going to end anytime soon. I just want to learn to do it with more humor. I’m going to seminary, as an agnostic, because I yearn to know, why exactly, do certain people act courageously in a world full of mystery and uncertainty, and often at great personal risk, in such inspiringly ethical ways? Because it does happen. I am particularly wondering about why a village in the Netherlands, called Nieuwlande, so courageously hid Jews during the Holocaust; and so quietly, without even talking about it. They just automatically began doing it, at exceptional personal risk. There are many other types of examples. Yet often folks who do these things describe their actions in a double negative, as having “acted when they simply could not not act.”
But what grounds such moral action? An article by the ethicist Bill Greenway recently introduced me to the Jewish philosopher Emmaneul Levinas. Levinas, a holocaust survivor, characterized these types of actions as being passionately taken hostage, by the “face” of the other through a type of love. This is the same love that Jews and Christians might call agape love. Seized by the suffering of another, we are compelled to act not out of some a priori dispassionate rationality, but precisely the opposite. Our moral response takes priority and comes first as we grapple with the reality of the suffering before us.
I know about the Karachi graves thanks to a direct action a few weeks ago that Tim DeChristopher and Karena Gore staged so that we would know it amidst the hell-on-earth we’ve had closer to home. Tim, a UU seminarian, and Karena, the daughter of Al Gore, and a bunch of other ministers were arrested for lying in a ditch being dug for a fracking pipeline in Boston. And as Tim put it in an interview with Democracy Now, when he heard of the anticipatory mass graves in Karachi, “…it just broke my heart in a whole new way… it just really weighed on me and wouldn’t let go…You know, it was one of those things that just settled deeply into my heart, and I felt really compelled to take action. Tim did not ask the question, “Why act morally?” because the question never even surfaced for him. And when we act, like mad scientists, we do not do it so rationally either. Often, we have either already acted, without free will, taken hostage by the faces of the other; or we have hardened our hearts and not acted all. It is only from this last place that that dispassionate question “Why act morally?” arises.
I agree with Levinas about the hostage taking that happens. Inspired moral action is indeed doing that which one cannot not do. If a confession of ignorance amidst mystery is the soul of religion, and that confession provokes deep gratitude, then simply living with your eyes open is at the heart of the religious experience. It really is a form of witnessing.
So what are the preconditions of possibility for inspired moral action that Welch talks about? I believe they begin with acknowledging our inadequacy, such that when the sensation of gratitude for our existence arises in juxtaposition with the uncertainty of our universe, we’ll see Levinas’ faces, and a few among us spontaneously, passionately, and rather irrationally will make risky and responsible moral actions.
As Jack Miles puts it, “even the most reasonable among us must close the gap between indecision and decision, paralysis and action, not with knowledge but with something else. I expect the darkness of ignorance to continue to surround me until my dying day. In a sense, that darkness is my enlightenment.”
True despair, or paralysis in grief or fear, is a severance from our acknowledgement of mystery and uncertainty. It is a rejection of the gratitude and awe that such uncertainty provokes. Frequently that rejection takes the form of certainties, of know-it-all fundamentalisms, built almost exclusively on fear, like those of some climate deniers. Fundamentalist certainties are the opposite of the kernels that make up the steps on our small mountain of knowledge. They are the opposite of inquiry, and of love. They are more like the Dementors in Harry Potter, sucking all questions, and with them, all reality and love, away from us.
A huge problem with the way climate issues are discussed is through their negativity, through their apocalyptic tones. Talking about it in apocalyptic tones doesn’t help us address it. Hearing that it will make humans go extinct only creates an incredible amount of fear, despair, and more paralysis. Humans are like deer in the headlights in front of these kinds of headlines. And the denial these headlines produce is exactly the same denial that climate deniers have. David Sobel calls this ecophobia. The inability to psychologically process the dread.
I am not interesting in dread, or apocalypse, or hell at all. Instead, let us acknowledge what we do, and what we don’t know. We don’t know that humans will go extinct from climate change, in fact, it seems very unlikely since we do know that the rich are very likely to adapt with little trouble. We do know that the poor are the ones who will bear the brunt, and may experience massive devastations. So let’s own up to it, and take the attitude of David Byrne of the Talking Heads, the writer of the song our musicians just rocked out to, and find some joy amidst doom on our Road to Nowhere.
Instead of being paralyzed by grief, let us acknowledge our grief-stricken state while we come up with good ways to cope with our changing climate. Let us actively grieve, and listen amidst our uncertainty, refusing to deny what we do know.
There are many good avenues available to us. If you want to empower our youth, the ones who face the greatest burden amongst us, and are often willing to take the greatest risks, support the UU Young Adults for Climate Justice, organized by Aly Tharp based here in Austin, and join Commit2Respond. They are on fire. If you are interested in affecting policy, get involved with the Citizens Climate Lobby. If you might like to take direct, peaceful actions, which are often the most powerful: join Peaceful Uprising, Karena Gore, Tim DeChristopher.
But whatever you do, please don’t do it perfectly, and please do it in community.
I’ll conclude with the question Sharon Welch so brilliantly asks us to consider: “What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we, shall we, undertake today?”
“Will you join me in paving the road to hell?”
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 17, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
As a religion without creed, one of the cornerstones of UU spirituality arises from the covenantal nature of how we gather our religious communities. The covenant, a set of promises we make with one another about how we will be together, comes out of an ancient tradition.
Sermon
Our preeminent Unitarian Universalist theologian of the 20th century, James Luther Adams said the following, “Human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitment, by making promises. The human being as such is the promise making, promise keeping, promise-renewing creature.
Another way to put that is that we are covenant-making creatures. A covenant is an ancient concept that described most simply contains a set of promises concerning how we will be together. For Unitarian Universalists, this ancient concept becomes particularly vital. Because we do not have a creed, a prescribed set of beliefs to which we must all adhere, our ecclesiology, the way in which we structure ourselves as a religious people, is rooted in the covenantal. Our theological perspectives are necessarily grounded in relationship.
I have great admiration for James Luther Adams and his work, but I think he left one important thing out.
As human beings, we are also promise breaking creatures. We are imperfect and we fail each other sometimes.
That does not make our covenants less important. It makes them more so. Our covenants, like this church’s covenant that we read together earlier, provide us with the ways in which we may get back into right relationship with one another when we have failed – they provide the standard we can call ourselves back to.
The concept of covenant goes back to even before the times described in the Hebrew Scriptures and was likely borrowed from ancient civilizations that predated that of the Israelites or even their ancestors. We humans have been making and breaking promises for a very, very long time.
And we have through the ages also been making covenants with our Gods, and they with us.
Early in the Hebrew Scriptures, in Genesis 9, God makes a covenant with Noah to never again flood the earth, killing everything on it, save that which was on the ark with Noah.
“Whoops. I may have overreacted a bit there. You know me. Temper. Temper. Here’s a lovely rainbow so that every time you see one, it will remind you that I promise never to flood the entire earth ever again. We good?”
Next comes God’s covenant with Abraham, which seems to have two versions, one in Genesis 15 and one in Genesis 17. God promises Abraham a grant of land upon which God will raise up a new nation from Abraham’s descendants.
Never mind that there are folks already living on said land – God will take care of everything, and all Abraham has to do is wander aimlessly on faith for an unspecified distance and time.
Never mind that Abraham’s wife is barren.
Never mind that Abraham does not know where exactly this land is or when exactly the new nation will get raised up. Oh, and also circumcise himself and all of his male descendants and them their descendants and so on and so on in perpetuity.
And also all of the male slaves in any of his family’s households.
Bummer.
And then, of course, there is the whole thing where God allows Abraham’s elderly wife, Sarah to bear a son, Isaac, only to later demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, which Abraham prepares to do until God sends an angel to say pretty much, “Dude, we didn’t think you would actually do it. Here’s a ram, sacrifice that instead. It’ll do.”
Continuing the fun in the book of Exodus, God next made a covenant with the entire ancient Israelite people, Abraham’s decedents. This is the famous story of Moses going up to the top ofMt. Sinai, where God gives him the ten commandments and binds the Israelites to obey them, as well as the other laws laid out in the Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.
Often called the Mosaic Covenant, it was similar to the treaties, contracts or oaths that sovereign rulers of the time made with their subjects, and it stipulated the really good things God would do for the chosen people if they were obedient to the oath and the really dreadful, horrible things God would do to them if they violated it.
Which they did and which God did. Temper. Temper.
Finally, in Samuel 2, God makes a covenant with David that he and his lineage will be the kings, the royal line of Israel. Unlike the Mosaic covenant, God made this covenant unconditional. Even if David and his descendants misbehaved, while God might punish them in other ways, he would never take their royalty away from them.
And once again, misbehave they did, and punish them severely God did.
David even had a very special “friend” named Jonathan, who upon meeting David, and I am quoting scripture here, “made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David … “
Later, when the two “friends” learned that they must be separated from each other to save David’s life, the scriptures say, “They kissed each other and wept with each other.”
And after Jonathan was killed in battle, David wrote a song in which he says of Jonathan, “Greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”
Apparently, some of those so called abominations God supposedly spelled out in Leviticus have been getting ignored for a very, very long time, and by some of God’s favorites.
I’m just sayin’.
Finally, I’d like to talk a bit about one more of the times the concept of covenant comes up in the Hebrew Scriptures. You may have heard the story of Job, a good and righteous man who fears God and shuns evil. Job is living the good life – he’s healthy, has a successful business, a wonderful wife and family.
One day God is bragging on his faithful servant Job, when one of his angels says, “Well, you know, maybe Job is only so righteous and pious because you have blessed him with so much cool stuff. Take it all away and let’s see how pious he is then.”
And so they kill Job’s children and destroy his business, and property. When that’s not enough, they also inflict his entire body with terrible, painful sores.
Long story short, Job clings to his righteousness and, after some arguing back and forth with some rather unhelpful friends, he basically brings a serious breach of covenant lawsuit against God. He sues God for God having failed to uphold his end of the contract even though Job has remained righteous even after all these terrible things God has allowed the angel to do to him.
So, God answers Job’s lawsuit out of a whirlwind, saying, “Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge.”
Sounds a little testy and defensive already if you ask me.
Anyway, God continues, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Speak if you have understanding. Do you know who fixed its dimensions … Have you ever commanded the day to break, Assigned the dawn its place, … Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea, Or walked in the recesses of the deep?”
In other words, basically saying, “I don’t have to adhere to any stinkin’ covenant, because, well, I’m God.”
To which Job pretty much replies, “Well, you do kind of have a point there,” which pleases God, so God restores Job to his old life but even better than before.
Now, I’ve been having a bit of fun with these ancient covenant stories by providing one possible interpretation of each of them that is far too literal. They have to be read as poetry or allegory, not as being literally true. For instance, a more poetic reading of the story of Job would get at the idea that the world does not operate on a system of retributive justice, wherein if we only live decent, ethical lives then we will somehow be rewarded with lives that are carefree and without tragedy.
It is much more complicated than that.
And, even though this ancient concept of covenant is an important one for us, I think these stories, especially the story of Job get at another potential warning about covenants. It can be problematic when the parties to a covenant have a highly unequal balance of power. Can the less powerful party truly consent? How does a human hold a God accountable to a covenant?
I think of our current struggles with our criminal justice system which promises “to protect and to serve” – a covenant by which in return we cede to that system many powers and resources. Now that we’re seeing that system disproportionately arresting, convicting, imprisoning and even taking the lives of people who are not white, we are witnessing a great struggle to hold the justice system accountable to its promises, its side of the covenant.
But the system has been militarized and monetized and has over time been granted almost God-like powers by law makers and court rulings, so we face a mighty struggle indeed to bring about such accountability.
But engage in this struggle we must because to be fully human we must become promise-fulfilling creatures.
Another potential problem with a belief that a God made a covenant with a select group of people is that it can foster a sense of what scholars have called “chosenness” within that people. And scholars have found that this sense of chosenness can become woven into the very symbols and language of a culture, so that, even as the culture may become more secular, that sense of chosenness can still remain deeply imbedded within it.
Some scholars have claimed that this was at least a part of the Zionist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that was otherwise often progressive and secular.
Other scholars have pointed to the lineage of Jesus that is detailed in the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, establishing Jesus as being in the linage of both David and Abraham, as providing Christians with a similar sense of chosenness. It creates a kind of ultimate fulfillment of the covenants from the Hebrew Scriptures – or a new covenant with Jesus as the ultimate savior and King, and Christians the chosen people. Such scholars attribute Western Europe’s and the U.S.’s historical tendencies toward imperialism at least partially to this sense of chosenness.
And I think we have to be careful not to fall prey to a similar way of thinking and being if we were to focus only on our internal church covenant that we read together earlier – if we were to forget that our principles that we also read together earlier are expressed in the form of a covenant with our fellow Unitarian Universalist congregations – a covenant to affirm and promote those principles together out in our wider world. And even our mission is in its own way a promise we make to each other to work together in shared purpose both within these walls and beyond them.
If we were to forget these things, our covenant, the promises that we make can become too narrow and internally focused, we could be in danger of becoming a social club of the self-chosen.
I am pleased to be able to say that currently I do not see that happening here at this church.
And I am thrilled that there is a movement afoot within our wider Unitarian Universalist denomination to live out a greater sense of covenant among and beyond Unitarian Universalists more widely.
We can trace the way that we organize our churches and the covenantal heritage of what would become Unitarian Universalism in the U.S. all the way back to the Cambridge Platform of 1648. The Cambridge Platform was an agreement among our Puritan ancestors that among other things said that independent churches should be organized among members who covenant to walk together in the ways of love. Each of these churches, like we still do today, would choose its own officials, call its own minister, govern itself and own its own property. And since it is a stewardship testimonial days, I should also mention that all this means we get to provide the contributions to pay our own bills also.
But, the Cambridge platform did not stop there. It also called for churches to work together for each other’s welfare and to promote the greater good.
What if we take that part of our heritage truly to heart?
What if we promised to walk together in the ways of love not just within our church, but also with our other local Unitarian Universalist churches?
What if we covenanted to walk together in the ways of love with our fellow Unitarian Universalists in our Southern region?
What if we did so even at the national and worldwide level?
And what if we expand this idea about promising to walk together in the ways of love beyond Unitarian Universalism, finding interfaith partnerships and secular friends that would join us in an ever-growing covenant of mutual love and support?
What more might become possible? How much more power might we all have to bring about beneficial change in our communities, our country and our world?
These are the questions that are being asked within Unitarian Universalism as a whole. These are the efforts in which our denomination will be engaging as we move into the future. I hope our church will be an active part of the discussions and the effort. I know I plan to do so, and I promise to keep you informed as I learn more. And, yes, you can take that as a covenant.
We humans are promise making, promise keeping, promise breaking and promise-renewing creatures, and if we expand this idea of covenant-making to a much broader level, further and further beyond our own tribe and maybe even to this entire planet on which live and depend, as well as all of the creatures upon it, almost anything becomes possible.
Suddenly, God’s rainbows become abundant.
As we move in that direction, I look forward to continuing to walk with you in the ways of love.
Benediction
As we go forth into our world now, we hold in our hearts our covenant.
We carry with us the sacred promises we have made among ourselves and with our larger world.
We walk together in the ways of love not just today but through all of our days.
Until next we gather again, be blessed.
May the congregation say, “Amen” and, blessed be.”
Go in peace.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Susan Yarbrough
July 3, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
“Who’s Calling, Please?” These are the words I always use when I don’t recognize the caller ID number or the name of the person on the other end of the line. This Sunday, let’s think together about what we have been called to do as individuals and as a congregation, who or what is calling us, and the fact – yes, the fact – that we are all called and are all ministers.
Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Nell Newton
June 26, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
So much around us seems fragmented and unsustainable, like the world around us seems broken. But is it? We will look at theology and possible responses to the idea that our world is a broken mess.
Reading:
The Truth About Stories; A Native Narrative pages 21-22 by Thomas King
Reading: Adrienne Rich
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
Who, age after age,
Perversely, with no extraordinary
Power, reconstitute the world.
Sermon
One of my favorite bumper stickers asks “Where are we going? And why are we in this hand basket?!” To some it would seem like everything is falling apart and changing for the worse at every turn. The alarmists in our midst assure us that we are facing End Times.
The revolution will NOT be televised, but Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.
Even for us Universalists, this hand basket seems to be heading someplace hot. But what everything is not falling apart? What if this is just business as usual and it’s up to us to reframe our response?
In some religious circles, people have expressed a desire to “heal our broken world”. This sentiment is usually couched as part of a mission statement – along the lines of what the Salvation Army has as its mission: “The Salvation Army – a growing, loving community of people dynamically living God’s mission in a broken world.”
This language is pretty popular among justice-seeking Christians. You can find it in colleges, mission trip groups, and from folks who are working to improve the lives of the poor. It generally can be summed up as “Together we share a quest for justice, peace, reconciliation and healing in a broken world.”
(Honestly, they lifted the term from the Judaic concept of “tikkun olam” which translates as “world repair” but they took some liberties in the translation and theology.)
So there are people who see our world as broken. These are good and loving people, and they want to make things better. But something about it just sticks in my craw…
What is it? Why does that language make me itchy? That’s what’s happening… I’m getting itchy.
I really don’t have a problem with people who are motivated by their understanding of the holy to go out and do some good work. I deeply respect people of any faith tradition who are called to address injustice.
So why the itch over this language? Our Broken World…
What’s wrong with recognizing that things are messed up and we can become a blessing to our world by walking humbly and doing justice?
It’s the “broken” that sets me on edge. Casting our world as “broken” irks me.
I find myself growling – that’s how I know something is serious – growling: “It ain’t broke! It was built this way!”
Built this way – in our natural world and our human society.
Rockslides and typhoons are part of the entire system of Nature. They cause disruption of human activities – even death and illness – but they are how this whole system works. It’s not broken. It’s complex but not broken.
But scientists are pretty much in agreement that global climate change is directly caused by human activity. Wouldn’t that show that we’ve broken our world? Yes and no. Yes, our activities have changed the system. But it’s not broken, just different. Not very comfortable for us and many other species, but still a full system. No missing pieces, nothing removed, just all of the interlinked parts responding to the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. The natural world is not broken… it’s working quite well. And with or without us it will continue following its deep, old laws.
So, if anything, it’s not that we need to fix anything but we do need to get things back into balance if we, and all of the bears and bees and beavers are going to survive.
So what about our human society? What do I mean by “It’s not broken – it’s built that way?”
Well, our brains are hardwired for xenophobia. As a species we are inherently mistrustful of people outside of our immediate clan. We’re built that way.
But when it becomes institutionalized and rationalized, it moves from being a residual part of our lizard brain, to becoming racism that prevents us all from accessing the richness of life. Both the oppressor and the oppressed are limited by institutionalized racism. And our laws and financial practices have been built to hold groups of othered people away from resources like education, work, or medical care.
Why did so many people of color wind up in foreclosure during the Great Recession? Because of a complex system of practices, all legal, that kept them hemmed into certain neighborhoods and then made a lot of money off of them through predatory lending. It wasn’t that anyone said “How can we engineer a system to perfectly oppress people we are uncomfortable with?” But that’s pretty much what happened.
It’s what happens when we don’t examine prejudice or the way our brains work. Nothing was broken. The system worked quite well. In fact some systems work better when they are unexamined.
And that’s how evil moves about in this world, buried so deep into our normal that we don’t notice it until a person close to us cries out.
Many of the worst parts of our human society are not really broken, just unexamined prejudice. Any fixing to be done is the hard work of unpacking and naming and trying to do it better it over and over until there’s less unexamined stuff around to trip us up.
Okay… deep breath…
So that’s what I mean when I say “It ain’t broken.”
Now, here’s another reason why the phrase “broken world” just irks me: It implies that there is a more perfect, more preferred state that has been broken. It presumes that there is a norm that is better than a variation. Which is okay as long as you fit the norm….
And, here’s the real reason I get itchy: it is based upon an underlying theology that is problematic.
That theology – the one where our world is “broken”. It comes from an interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story. You know this one:
In the beginning there was perfection…
(Except that actually, if you read Genesis you find two beginnings…)
In The Beginning There Was Perfection in a Garden.
And eventually two humans, who were somehow too human, not perfect, despite having been made in God’s image…
(Do you sense a set up here?)
The two humans transgressed a rule…
(Really, this was a set up – eat anything and everything except THAT.)
And perfection was broken.
Because humans were not perfectly obedient.
Because they were too human.
Despite having made their god in their own image…
This break, this rupture, this banishment and punishment… this is the underpinning of what many Christians interpret as Our Broken World. Inherent human sinfulness broke God’s perfect world. And it continues to break this world.
This suggests that they have some assumptions about what Perfection would look like. They are trying to fix something they perceive is broken, and restore it to what they would consider whole or mended.
So, the problem with presuming that our world is broken is that it is based upon a theology that casts us as inherently bad children who broke something, and now we’re trying to fix it, but, of course, we can’t because there is an omnipotent god who is really in charge but seems to be waiting for us to live up or down to his expectations.
Can you see why I get itchy here?
So… here’s where a different kind of theology might change our response.
What if, instead of a single omnipotent, omniscient, judging sky god, what if there was a theology that accepted that perfection includes things that are outside the norms, things that appear imperfect? We’ve all seen leaves that simply grew asymmetrically or trees that have been misshapen by terrain or weather and yet they still grow and photosynthesize and bring beauty.
We’ve all seen imperfection and loved it more dearly because of its uniqueness. Think of a beloved – is it their perfection, their adherence to a norm that you love? Or is it their crooked smile – the way the left eye crinkles more than the right eye when they grin and laugh?
So, what if our understanding of perfection included some things that appear broken, or imperfect? And what if our understanding of the divine included our having to help create and recreate this perfect imperfection? Rather than always failing at restoring Eden, what if we are actually tasked with joining in as a part of Nature to create with wild diversity? Our job becomes less about fixing and more about participating!
Whew!
Okay, now I’m going to recognize that brokenness is real. There really is brokenness in our world. More specifically, covenants can be broken, and people can be broken.
You’ve known people who were broken. Most families have someone who isn’t quite okay. Maybe it was trauma or odd neurological wiring, or both, but there’s someone in the family who wound up broken. And that old judging sky god doesn’t seem interested in helping.
How we respond to broken people is how I’ll measure our gods.
Here’s an example – Cousin Guido. In one branch of my extended family one of our broken ones was Cousin Guido. He wasn’t really my cousin. He was my step grandfather’s second cousin but in an Italian American family, for better or worse, everyone is family.
When I was a little kid I really couldn’t tell how old Guido was. He seemed like a young man right up until the moment he became an old man. That was because when he was a young man, he was sent over to fight in World War II. He was a poor Italian American kid who was probably a little neurologically vulnerable but had no one to speak up for him or assign him to non-combat work. So, like too many poor young men, he was issued a pair of boots and a gun and sent to fight. And, when the bombs started exploding and guns firing all around him, his mind snapped. It was all over. It was what used to be called “shell shocked.” He got stuck in the middle of that terror and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Guido’s father finally found him in a hospital. Back then there was no real treatment for that kind of trauma, so his father simply brought him home and resigned to care for his son. In fact, Guido’s father married a young woman with the understanding that she would care for his son after he died. And she did. And the rest of the family cared for him too. My step grandparents always included Guido in the big family dinners and took him places. They’d include him exactly as he was – not leaving him in a back room, not waiting for him to get better, not expecting him to change – just including him and loving him as the rocking, moaning, terrified person that he was.
Have you ever seen that kind of love? The love that keeps loving someone even in their brokenness?
What makes it astonishing is because it means finding the holy in the spaces God seems to have deserted.
If we’re going to live and love brokenness, it’s going to take a different kind of theology that asks us to just live into what is, not in guilt or as punishment, but in a steady renewal, over and over again of what family and love and connection can look like.
It took the rest of Guido’s life, and he did have tranquility and kindness in his later years. He knew he belonged. It became the work of a family to hold his brokenness, his fragility. It showed us, the younger members of the family, that we didn’t have to be perfect to be loved; we simply had to be present.
This is the work of creative people who take what is imperfect and add to it with their love. Not to fix it, but to simply keep creating alongside their god.
And such is a god that I will measure us by.
Rev. Nell Newton was ordained by the San Marcos Unitarian Universalist Fellowship this past June. A lifelong Unitarian Universalist, she lives in Central Austin with her husband, assorted teenagers, too many cats, a mess of chickens, and one sweet dog.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Marisol Caballero
June 19, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
The word rahmah appears more times in the Qur’an than any other to describe God’s attributes. In English it is often translated as “mercy,” but that doesn’t begin to describe what it means to a Muslim.
Call to Worship
Kindness Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Reading:
“My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears” by Mohja Kahf
My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims
She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold
so she can accomplish this august ritual
and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares
Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown
as they notice what my grandmother is doing,
an affront to American porcelain,
a contamination of American Standards
by something foreign and unhygienic
requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray
They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see
a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom
My grandmother, though she speaks no English,
catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,
I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul
with water from the world’s ancient irrigation systems
I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus
over painted bowls imported from China
among the best families of Aleppo
And if you Americans knew anything
about civilization and cleanliness,
you’d make wider washbins, anyway
My grandmother knows one culture – the right one,
as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them,
my grandmother might as well have been squatting
in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,
Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which,
when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.
“You can’t do that” one of the women protests,
turning to me, “Tell her she can’t do that.”
“We wash our feet five times a day”
my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.
“My feet are cleaner than their sink.
Worried about their sink, are they?
I should worry about my feet!”
My grandmother nudges me, “Go on, tell them.”
Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see
at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers,
all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent
in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum
Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,
is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse
For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps that match her purse,
I think in case someone from one of the best families of Aleppo
should run into her-here, in front of the Kenmore display
I smile at the midwestern women
as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them
and shrug at my grandmother as if they
had just apologized through me
No one is fooled, but I
hold the door open for everyone
and we all emerge on the sales floor
and lose ourselves in the great common ground
of housewares on markdown.
Sermon: Tender Mercies
It has been a tremendously sad week for so many of you who have been deeply affected by the massacre in Orlando last week. We are becoming ever-numb to news of gun violence, as CNN reports that “136 mass shootings in the first 164 days of this year.” But, the scale of this attack, with its final death toll still uncertain as several victims remain in critical condition, along with the fact that it took place in the assumed safe-haven of a gay club during Pride month, have rattled many of us to the core. In an interfaith vigil, I shared that to me, knowing how sacred Latino nights at gay clubs can be, what a sanctuary they are to the gay Latino community, it felt as if blood had been spilled on holy ground.
During June Pride month, LGBTQ folks tend to go out dancing more than they typically do. Even the homebodies are dragged out of their slippers and into a pair of skinny jeans. We are celebrating our community’s courage and resiliency. We are affirming the worth of ourselves and of each other. We dance knowing that there are still LGBTQ elders alive today that could never have imagined being so bold. We dance because so many who fell victim to the AIDS epidemic are no longer here to dance, themselves. We dance in their memory. We dance because we are surrounded by others who also have to choose daily whether to come out to anyone and everyone who presumptively inquires about relations with the opposite sex.
We dance because, in that club, we don’t have to watch our backs like we do in the streets. We dance to celebrate, and especially during the month of June, the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the modicum of progress some of us have made in being fully accepted by our family of origins. There is a peace, a freedom, a camaraderie in a gay club that, especially during Pride month, gives way to level of joy that can legitimately bring about a religious experience. I don’t mean this in a drunken, euphoric sense, but think about how or when you have felt connected or united with God, or Humanity, or the Universe, or whatever you call it. Where were you? What were you doing? Maybe you held your newborn child for the first time … Maybe you sat in quiet solitude on a mountain peak and breathed in the sweet air. .. Maybe you won a sports tournament, or ran a marathon, or experienced divinity while making love … All of these experiences can bring us close to what I often call the Divine Mystery by reminding us that we are part of a whole and that we can do things and feel love in ways we never imagined. This is what can be experienced in the safe haven of a gay club. Even more so, for Latino LGBTQ folks, the remnants of brutal colonialism – traditional gender roles and hyper-masculinity reinforced by conservative Christianities create a need for spaces where LGBTQ Latinos can reconcile these two identities. The guys can speak Spanglish in the women’s bathroom while applying eyeliner and the girls can be anywhere on the gender expression spectrum and be no less Latina for it, and the gender queer Latinos can feel free to bring new gender-neutral words into Spanish’s very gendered grammar, such as elle instead of el or ella, and Latinx, instead of Latina/o.
The Pulse nightclub was no less sacred than this sanctuary, or any synagogue, mosque, cathedral, or temple. So, when violence happens in a sacred space, when people are most at ease and have a sense of safety, it is surely a heinous act.
Also like many of you, I’m sure, cringed when we saw that the gunman was a young Muslim man. Before we had information that might point to him being something of a self-loathing homophobe with a hyper-masculine, verbally abusive father, all we heard was his name, his interest in ISIS, and that he was Muslim. We knew all too well what would follow. It’s why we have the banner up in Howson Hall that reads, “We stand with our Muslim neighbors.” And, sure enough, it took nanoseconds for the internet and cable news networks to be filled with Islamophobic rhetoric and frightening threats to Muslim communities. I was so proud by the turnout for our second annual Ramadan fast-breaking Iftar this past Wednesday! It was such a show of solidarity!
This year, June is more than Pride month because this year Pride happens to coincide with the holy month of Ramadan on the Muslim calendar. Many people in the US know very little about Islam. I will admit to knowing more about Buddhism and Judaism than I do about Islam. When I went before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the UU Association to be deemed ready and fit for ministry, I was asked the question, “What are you most drawn to about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam?” I had a small panic and then answered, “Christianity – the radicalism of Jesus and his bravery to stand up against a powerful empire, Judaism – centuries of tradition and the emphasis on ritual and on family, and Islam – the huge focus of universal the Love of God.” I thought I’d remembered a concept in Islam like this, but couldn’t be paid to recall anything more than I said.
Last month, one of my Muslim friends posted an article about the Muslim concept of Rahmah. It turns out, Rahmah was the idea that I had in mind when I took an educated guess at the interview question, but universal love of God seems to be an inadequate interpretation of the word. In fact, Rahmah is often interpreted as “mercy,” in English, though this, too, does not fully capture what it means. Rahmah is one of the most central teachings of the Messenger, Muhammad. He said, “I am not not sent here to curse, but I was sent as a Rahmah.” Not only is the word and words derived from the root the most prevalent word family in the Arabic Qur’an, but it is also the most commonly used term to describe the attributes of God, Allah. There are famously 99 different “names,” or attributes of Allah. Some include, Al-Basir, The All Seeing; Al-Ghafoor, The All Forgiving; and Al-Hakeem, The Wise. But the first two, Ar-Rahman, The All Beneficent, The Most Merciful in Essence, The Compassionate, The Most Gracious; and Ar-Rahim, The Most Merciful, The Most Merciful in Actions, are in the first sentence of every single chapter of the Qur’an except for one and that is the chapter devoted to Rahmah.
Bismillah’I-Rahman’I-Rahim. Is that first line. It is often spoken in conversation between devout Mulsims. It means, “In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.” These are very similar attributes, but Ar-Rahman means, “The One who is defined by complete and universal Rahmah,” and Ar-Rahmin means, “The One who continuously shows much Rahmah.” But, to understand this difference, we need to gain a better understanding of what Rahmah is if it isn’t fully explained by being translated as mercy. Like many English-speakers, when I hear that someone is being “merciful,” I usually assume that they are in a position of power and they have the authority to punish but have decided to be lenient. This doesn’t seem like a godly attribute. Aaron Persky, the judge in the recent controversial rape case could be called merciful by this definition, since he delivered a ridiculously mild sentence to an admitted rapist. Also, oftentimes leniency is not granted out of compassion. There are often ulterior motives, such as maintaining the ‘Old Boy’s Club’ as in this case, or for political strategy.
Guner Arslan, the speaker and one of the main organizers of last Wednesday’s Iftar, spoke to me a bit about Rahmah. “Does Rahmah mean that God is ever-forgiving of our sins?” “No” he said. “Rahmah speaks to the fact that God regards us with mercy and He has mercy for everyone and everything in creation. He has more mercy than is possible for anyone else to possess; Supreme Mercy.” I was still confused. I was stuck in my understanding of the meaning of the word ‘mercy.’ When I asked him if that is what he meant by mercy, he said enthusiastically, “No! Not at all.” “Well, then what does mercy mean?” “That’s hard to talk about” he said with a chuckle, “It’s like trying to explain to you what Love is.” He went on, “mercy is what a mother feels for a child. The child has never done anything to earn that love, but they are just freely given it, even before they are born. When the child is hurt, the mother aches, as well. Well, fathers, too, but Rahmah is often regarded as a mother regards her child.” “So, is Rahmah “Love?” “No. It’s this type of mercy. It contains love in it, but there are many types of love. Muslims must regard every person with this same feeling of mercy to try to please God.”
In the article, “Rahmah- Not Just ‘Mercy” Adnan Majid explains:
Of course, this connection of rahmah and motherly love is linguisticolly unsurprising, for rahmah is related to the Arabic word rahm, which means “uterus,” “womb,” and figuratively “family ties.” This close linguistic connection is so eloquently expressed in Allah’s statement as transmitted in a hadith qudsi, “I am al-Rahman and created the rahm (uterus) – And I named it after Me.” Therefore, if we are to grasp the rahmah that is core to God’s very nature, we must look to what this feminine organ symbolizes – the nurturing emotions we find in mothers and the bonds that tie families together. However, mothers are not the only ones characterized by rahmah; the Prophet himself embodied the quality when he would hug his grandchildren, kissing them.
In the patriarchal Bedouin culture of his day, this was considered an effeminate characteristic. “I have ten children and have never kissed any of them!” retorted a proud, disapproving Bedouin. But the Messenger, knowing the beauty of parental love in Allah’s eyes, warned the man, “He who shows no rahmah will be shown no rahmah (in the hereafter}.” And in another instance, he reiterated, “He who has no rahmah for children is not one of us. “
I am trying, still, to fully understand this view of mercy, but upon reading that Ar-Rahman is the attribute of Allah that means God’s grace, blessings, love, and yes, this new-to-me definition of mercy encompass everything and everyone in the universe. While I don’t personally believe in a deity that is a who? What? When? Or where?, I can begin to see strands of my theology in Ar-Rahman. Ar-Rahmin is a measurable, observable act of compassion by God. If a Muslim is in a terrible accident and walks away unscathed, they may then pray a prayer of thanks, invoking the attribute Ar-Rahim. On the other hand, according to the attribute, Ar-Rahmah, just like a parent has to pour stinging hydrogen peroxide or alcohol on a scraped knee, so does God sometimes place us in situations whose favorable outcome we cannot see for the awful current state of affairs. This, of course, falls in line with the Muslim belief in predestination.
Learning about this while listening to the constant stream of news coverage of Orlando was actually comforting to me in a surprising way. No, I don’t think that the Divine placed those happy, dancing people in the path of those bullets to make way for a predestined favorable outcome, but I do like to think that, in reevaluating what mercy means and how we can all strive for it, I felt personal agency in a crippling grief that could have very well given way to feeling utterly helpless. If we can both mourn the dead and maintain an unconditional love for humanity, as a whole, disturbed mass-murderers don’t come out on top. There is, of course activism to take part in, policy change to effect, but for the emotional helplessness, that remedy is needed. We will never make sense of such a massacre, but there are ways of moving forward that both honor and mourn the dead and experience a personal spiritual transformation in our mourning, through striving to know and love Rahmah, that feeling we can nurture that allows us to allow our hearts to ache alongside others in pain. We need not loose ourselves to that pain, but to feel it, even fleetingly, is a Rahmah, a nurturing, compassionate love.
During this Holy month for both our LGBTQ family and our Muslim family, and especially for LGBTQ Latinos and for LGBTQ Muslims, may you love Rahmah and may Rahmah be bestowed upon you. May it be so.
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