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Forgiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonard Cohen Anthem

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

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

How do you do it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

Call to Worship
From Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Meditation reading:
Star Hawk

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

In Phrygia, Attis was born of the virgin Nama.

A Roman savior Quirinus was born of a virgin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A spirit or ghost was their actual father.

Krishna and Jesus were of royal descent.

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

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

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

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

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

Both were considered both human and divine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hafiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 6, 2015

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

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

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 22, 2015

Can we gain more understanding of our place within our family? Why are we the way we are? How can we love those around us more capably?

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 8, 2015

Another in the fairy tale sermon series, why do we sometimes feel that we don’t belong, that we don’t fit? What are the blessings and curses of being different from those around us?

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 1, 2015

What is it like being at the end of one’s life? What do people think and write about? On this All Saints Day, we’ll say the names of loved ones we have lost.

Call To Worship

Our call to worship today is an adaptation of a poem by Birago Ismael Diop, a Senegalese veterinarian, diplomat, poet, and storyteller whose work revived interest in African folktales. He died in 1989, and many of you will recognize his words in the song “Breaths” by the African American women’s singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Listen more often to things than to beings,
Listen more closely to things than to beings.
‘Tis the Ancestor’s breath when the fire’s voice is heard,
‘Tis the Ancestor’s breath in the voice of the waters.
Those who have died have never, never left.
The dead are not under the earth.
They are in the rustling trees, they are in the groaning woods,
They are in the crying grass, they are in the moaning rocks.
The dead are not under the earth.
Those who have died have never, never left.
The dead have a pact with the living.
They are in the woman’s breast, they are in the wailing child.
They are with us in our homes, they are with us in this crowd.
The dead have a pact with the living.
The dead are not under the earth.

Reading

A Parable of Immortality by Henry Van Dyke

This is a poem by Henry Van Dyke, an American author, statesman, Presbyterian clergyman, and professor of English literature at Princeton University until his death in 1933.

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
“There she goes!”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight … that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
” There she goes! ”
there are other eyes watching her coming …
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout …

“Here she comes!”

Sermon

I was at the bedside of a man in my congregation. He was dying. “I don’t know how to do this,” he said. He had been a professor, a scientist. He’d been mean to his wife, mean to his grown kids, mean to the people in the congregation. I was surprised at the openness of this moment.

“I don’t either,” I said. “I’ve sat by a lot of people while they were dying. It looks like you just go farther and farther away, and your body shuts itself down. Maybe it’s like falling asleep. You’ve done that plenty of times, right?” He was fighting, kicking at death like he had kicked at life. One thing I’ve noticed over my thirty-five years of being a minister is that people seem to die the way they live. Some want to be no trouble, they slip away when no one’s looking. Some want to be surrounded by family and friends, some want to be sung to, read to. One man who was well loved in the congregation died in the hospital, and his nurse that night happened also to be a member, and his wife was there. She held one hand, Greg, the nurse, held the other, and I held onto his feet as he breathed his last.

My mother died at home. She’d been sick for five years, and she’d asked to come home to die. We made a pallet by the couch where she lay. I slept there that night. Sometimes when she’d called out, I’d said “I’m here.” Once, she said, “Just a second, I’ll be right there,” as if she had a long way to come back to where we were watching with her. One gardener said he just hoped he wouldn’t outlast his legs. When his legs went, he was ready to go. He was 92, and he said he’d thought he would like to get to 95, but now that he was looking at it from a wheelchair, he didn’t care to get there so much any more. My great-grandfather, the preacher who had been at his church fifty-four years, who retired when he was 80 by saying, after the sermon, “no one should preach past their 80th birthday, so today I retire.” As the buzz in the congregation died down, he asked Brother Matthew to pray, and while everyone’s head was bowed for the prayer, he walked down the aisle of the church and out the front door. That was his last day of work. When he lay dying, his family kept watch on the porch. Through the open windows they heard him saying “Isaiah, I’m James Hearst Pressly, from Statesville, North Carolina. I’m pleased to meet you. Jeremiah, James Hearst Pressly, Statesville, North Carolina. Pleased to meet you.” Then he died.

The end of life is a threshold time, meaning that it is a time when things come up for review, when changes are made more easily. Families can reconcile or break apart. Often, emotionally wrenching decisions have been made. Atul Gawande, in his book “Being Mortal,” talks about people weighing treatment options. How much pain are you willing to endure to add two months more of life? Medicine can prolong technical life for so long – what measures do you want them to take? How do you decide? How much does being at home matter to you? Who do you want to talk to? Do you have any regrets you want to take care of, if you can?

Some people’s thoughts have been mostly of the people they were leaving behind. They worried about how they’d get along. Some people get right to the point of dying and they haven’t made any plans, any arrangements. Everyone’s been talking to them about “fighting,” and no one has just gone on and asked what they would like to have happen at the end. That’s sometimes the minister’s job. “What do you want for your memorial service?” You might ask. It’s good to give it some thought, that way you get to pick readings that say something about you, songs you like. No one who is crazed with grief has to figure all of that out.

I’m asking you to think about these things. Talk about them with your family before you get sick. Take care of your relationships so you won’t have any regrets that could have been fixed. Practice accepting help so you will be graceful to your caregivers, rather than surly. When you’re angry at having to be helped, your helpers have a double job of helping you and reassuring you, or helping you and enduring your surliness. What questions do you want to ask your medical team? How can you communicate to them what things are important to you? Think about that now. They will want to extend your life. What do you enjoy in your life? What do you want to hold on to? Write them down and stick them in your freezer, or email them to me. I have a file I’m keeping of people’s wants and wishes for their memorial services. I have a form you can fill out if you’d like, that I can send to you. Me, I want the song Skylark at the beginning of my service. It’s a sad song, and it’s going to be a sad time. At the end, “Blue Skies.” And I want people to cry. Dying is scary, but we are brave, and we can talk about it together.

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 18, 2015

It has become more and more difficult to have fruitful conversations with people who are different from us in their view of the world. How do we talk to one another?

One of the winners of the auction item inviting a suggestion of a sermon topic suggested that I preach on how she could better talk to her conservative relatives. We all have family members who think very differently from the ways we do. This sermon is a series of suggestions and some crucial bits of information about how liberals can talk to conservatives. This is as much a roadmap of how Republicans should argue with Democrats too.

Hard Wired

The news from science about changing a person’s mind through rational discourse is this: When someone feels something strongly, you can talk yourself blue in the face and not make a dent. You can post the wittiest and most cogent memes on Facebook, you can email jokes and facts and charts and not make a dent. You won’t make a dent in you and their memes won’t make a dent in you. We almost can’t help it. Study after study is showing that the very brains of liberals, conservatives and moderates are wired differently. In a study at University of Nebraska, the scientists follow people’s involuntary responses, including eye movements, when they are shown scary, neutral, pleasant or disgusting photos. It turns out that conservatives react more strongly to the pictures which might create fear or disgust. John Hibbing, of the University of Nebraska, says conservatives are more attuned to fearful or negative stimuli. So the conservative focus on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, and wanting the widespread availability of guns may go with an underlying threat-oriented biology. John Jost from NYU drew a lot of backlash from conservatives when his studies seemed to show in 2003 that conservatives have a greater need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Their funding was looked into, but so many peers were finding the same results that it makes everyone safer. The correlations between the body’s reactivity and political ideology are so striking that they can predict a person’s political views from simply watching the eye movements they make when seeing the aversive photographs. There is a common sense evolutionary imperative for threat-oriented wiring. Conservatives also tend to be happier, more emotionally stable. Liberals a bit more neurotic. Being sure of things, having strong ideas of what’s familiar and an aversion to what’s strange or icky keeps you happier, apparently, than being open to new experiences, being bothered by inequality and fretting about the suffering of others. I’m not saying conservatives don’t fret about the suffering of others. They just have a more certain, rule oriented plan for what should be done. I think, since there seem to be almost even numbers of those on the right and left, that nature decided we need people with their foot on the gas and people with their foot on the brake, in terms of social change.

Moral Code

It’s hardwired. The only way to change someone’s mind is to show them that their behavior or practice is counter to their own moral code. Not counter to your moral code, their own. But other studies show that the moral codes used are different. In a study by Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek University of Virginia, liberals cared more about fairness and compassion. Conservatives cared about those two sets of moral imperatives too, but also measured things in terms of respect for authority, the purity and sanctity of ideas and institutions and in-group loyalty. Those last three were less important to liberal’s thinking.

Steps to Change

Talk about the FBI hostage negotiators about this. What they know is that arguments are emotional. It is rare that someone you’re arguing with will change their mind due to a rational argument. Negotiators have diagramed what they call the Path to Behavioral Change. The first step is active listening. When a Republican is talking to a crazy liberal, or a liberal is talking to your wacky uncle who listens to Rush, the first step in changing someone’s mind is active listening. So you would say “tell me more.” You would say “How did you come to this view?” As they talk, you don’t evaluate: “hm, that’s a good point,” or “I’m not sure your facts are straight….” You just say small encouraging things. “hm.” Or “I hear you.” You might ask open ended questions, like I mentioned before “How did you come to that view?” “What do you think about the front runners?” “What policies really feel important to you?” You can also just, without being weird about it, repeat the last phrase they said. If they say “I just think this is the stupidest group of leaders we’ve ever had.” You could say “the stupidest we’ve ever had?” Using pauses can be extremely effective. When the Moonies and I were talking about their beliefs, sometimes all I would need to do was stay quiet after they had said something and let their words hang in the air. “You say Mr. Moon takes away your sins before he marries you? How does he do that, exactly? By dabbing some wine on your photographs Hm.” It also can help to name the emotions you hear. “That sounds like it was upsetting.” “That makes you mad.” “It doesn’t seem fair to you.”

It’s hard for even the most passionate and committed person to carry on a one-sided argument. You are listening, and not only that, you are showing them that you are listening. This is a rare enough experience for anyone to being to open things up between you. Empathy is the second step of the ladder to change. This doesn’t mean making understanding noises or saying an understanding phrase. This means really having empathy, emotionally relating, to the other person’s perspective. This is what the active listening is for, partially. To actually ask the questions which will help you get to a place of understanding. Rapport, when the other person feels in their body, their mind and their spirit, that you understand, when they begin to actually feel you with them, is the next step. See, this is hard. I rebel at this point. I don’t want to look at the places in me that actually relate to their fears, phobias, suspicion of the stranger, “disasterizing” about the future, cruelty to the suffering, what I see as lack of communitarian spirit. Without getting in touch with those places in you, conversation is not going to be fruitful. If you are a conservative talking to a crazy liberal, you may need to get in touch with the places in you that feel for other people, that want to help, that can face suffering and the reality that it isn’t always the person’s fault who is suffering, the idea that the world is big and overwhelming and our country might not be the greatest country there ever was, that we might have bad decisions, greed and cruelty in our history, that some of us are victimized by others, that security is an illusion, etc.

After rapport is established, then comes influence. It is at this point that you might be able to influence the thinking and feeling of another person. Since empathy, though, you are open to their influence as well. Our mistake is that we try to jump right into influencing other people. Things seem so clear to us. The facts seem to make our conclusion so obvious. One problem is that it seems everyone has different facts.

It used to be that people thought facts were supposed to be – you know, factual. When JFK debated Nixon, though, he later confessed that he just made up the statistics he cited. Made them up. They sounded great. Now it seems that people will say things with great authority whether they are true or not. It used to be that media outlets had to give both sides of an argument. They had to seek out viewpoints on all sides, facts which supported all sides, present them to people so they could decide. During the Reagan administration, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. I think that was 1987. In 1988 Rush Limbaugh started his radio show. These days, most people watch Fox news or MSNBC. They get red facts and blue facts. They hear about red issues and blue issues. You have to really work to hear both sides. Reasoned and civil discussions are not the style. It is easier and more fun for people to mock one another, to imagine that the people on the other side are ridiculous, crazy, clowns! All this does is to make you feel energized and good in a nasty way about your own side. I’m not asking us to stop that, but you have to understand that we can’t ask those who feel differently to stop their emails, jokes and memes either. It sounds like a lot of listening is recommended. And love even though they may not be able to see how right you are.

“In terms of their personalities, liberals and conservatives have long been said to differ in ways that correspond to their conflicting visions. Liberals on average are more open to experience, more inclined to seek out change and novelty both personally and politically (McCrae, 1996). Conservatives, in contrast, have a stronger preference for things that are familiar, stable, and predictable (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008; McCrae, 1996). Conservatives – at least, the subset prone to authoritarianism – also show a stronger emotional sensitivity to threats to the social order, which motivates them to limit liberties in defense of that order (Altemeyer, 1996; McCann, 2008; Stenner, 2005). Jost, Glaser, Sulloway, and Kruglanski (2003) concluded from a meta-analysis of this literature that the two core aspects of conservative ideology are resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. How can these various but complementary depictions of ideological and personality differences be translated into specific predictions about moral differences? First, we must examine and revise the definition of the moral domain.”

“Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek University of Virginia How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people’s use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally.”

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 11, 2015

For Coming Out Weekend, we’ll talk about the cultural and political statement of drag: men dressing as women to perform as entertainers. How is it subversive to the powers that be?

At first I was afraid
I was petrified
Kept thinking I could never live
without you by my side
But then I spent so many nights
thinking how you did me wrong
And I grew strong
And I learned how to get along

Every social movement has its songs, its gestures, its slang, its assumptions, infighting, and its sense of what’s wrong in the world. This morning, in honor of National Coming Out Weekend, we’re going to look together about the culture of drag and give it a salute for being one of the big-haired, heavily made up mothers of the new freedom, the growing normalcy of the LGBT movement. Drag is cis-men (that means men who were born male) dressing up as women for the purposes of entertainment. Well, sometimes they dress up as parodies of femininity, with exaggerated eye makeup, wigs that reach to the ceiling fans, and six inch heels. Sometimes they dress in torn punk clothes, with just a couple of items of female-identified clothing. Sometimes they are in a satin dress and pearls, sporting a full beard. Sometimes drag can be cis-women (women who were born female) dressed as men, expressing themselves in ways that our culture has identified as male. Sometimes they will have on makeup, eye shadow, a beard, girl jeans and a boy shirt, smoking a pipe…. Oh well. It’s complicated. RuPaul, the most famous drag queen in the world, says “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.

A sociology PhD thesis by Elizabeth Kaminski analyses drag culture as a community. An oppositional culture, organized both to imitate and mock the dominant culture. In the had old days, which, in many places ended – um – last month, you could get thrown out of your family for being gay. In the early seventies, when some of you came out, you could still get thrown into a mental institution for being gay. About 40% of street kids are gay or transgender. You are three times more likely to commit suicide as a gay teen. A chosen family becomes the structure which holds you together. Sometimes drag queens will take in younger men, give them a place to stay and a start as a drag performer. They can be the “drag mother,” and you can be a performer at the drag balls from their “house.” You belong. There is love and drama and betrayal and cattiness, like there is in a lot of families. A created community has its own language. Your work may have its own language. Your family may have it’s own language. Some of you know a little drag language. What happens if I say “You – better – WERK!”

Not all gay people know about drag. Drag and trans are two separate things, with some overlap, of course. Trans is being born biologically one gender and feeling inside like the other. Of course, that’s oversimplified, because some babies are born with some characteristics of one gender and some of the other, but our culture doesn’t have space for a third gender, like some other cultures do, so parents have to choose for the child. All of this is over simplified, because gender is a continuum, but not as linear as that – you have how you like to express your gender, who you’re attracted to, And trans women aren’t performing, aren’t exaggerated, they just want to express the femaleness they feel at their core. Trans men are just being regular men, not performing. There is a little overlap, but the two things shouldn’t be confused. Drag culture expresses community. It makes a free space for an oppressed minority to express and experiment without apology or approbation, where the music evokes sympathy, humor, solidarity. Outrage, then agency/empowerment. Through songs, jokes, language. Drag shows are for gay folks, but they are also to expose heterosexuals to the culture, to give them a sense of being outsiders let inside.

Drag queens have had to be tough and funny. When you get beat up as a child, you learn to fight, or to take the beating. The GLBT revolution started in a bar where there were men dressed as women and women dressed as men. It was a free space, but not really, since the police raided it regularly. It was 1969, where being gay was still considered pathology. The patrons of the Stonewall Inn were gay men and lesbians, drag queens, transgender folks, and homeless teens. They were used to being raided by the police. Arrests were violent, gay bashing was the rule of the day, and that doesn’t mean verbal bashing. This one night, though, something snapped. The police raided, but the patrons wouldn’t run. Accounts vary, but many say it was the drag queens and butch lesbians who started throwing punches. Then bricks. People poured out on the street to protest police violence that had run unchecked for decades. Things began to change.

Social change happens when collective identity can be developed, and social action frames can shape understanding of what is wrong and what can be done to make it right. Then political protest can be energized. There must be a strong sense of “us” and an anger at what it wrong. Language and music helps with the sense of “us.” We are the ones who understand certain words. We are the ones who get it. We get strong among ourselves and then we act. Some will be drawn to our cause.

One thing sociologists haven’t talked about in the reading I’ve done is that, for social change to happen, there have to be the people who are respectable and the other scarier people. In the often-violent suffrage movement, Alice Paul and her followers chained themselves to the White House fence, were arrested, beaten, went on hunger strikes, and were force fed in jail. Carrie Chapman Catt was respectable and reasonable, and the legislators only dealt with her because on the other hand were the riot women. It looks like President Johnson dealt with MLK because Malcom X was on the other hand, looking scary. Gay organizations which had been working respectably in the culture were suddenly easier to deal with when images of foul mouthed drag queens with bricks in their hands were there for you to deal with if you didn’t deal with the respectable gays.

One song performed in drag shows is called “What Makes a Man a Man.” The performer presents as a woman, but, during the song, takes off the wigs, takes out the pads, and reveals himself as a man as the verses go on. The persona of femaleness is not just for performance – it’s an expression of soul. Some drag queens would dress up whether or not they were performing. Some say they wouldn’t. What they do for the culture is to make it clear to everyone that there are powerful biological drivers which determine gender, there are also certain agreed-upon elements of gender performance we all learn. What woman doesn’t remember someone teaching her to run like a girl, laugh in a lady like way, cross your legs when you sit. I remember my mother telling me to turn the steering wheel delicately, with a pretty bend in my wrist. She also told me not to beat a boy in ping pong or chess, that men had to be taken care of in that way. She was my gender performance coach. My dad too. Drag queens, in the ways they exaggerate femininity, pay tribute to the beauty of that gender performance, but mock it as well, putting the idea in the mind of the culture that they see the performance. They see the social construct. They play out the pathos of longing for love and losing it, gathering up the shards of a broken heart and willing yourself to survive.

A drag show is a place where a free space for an oppositional culture is created. Gender constructs are parodied, injustice is mourned, rage is sung, and spirits are empowered. The queens deserve our respect and our gratitude.
THE BEAUTY IN YOU

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 4, 2015

What is the historical context of the story of Samson and Delilah? Samson is the man whose strength was in his hair, and Delilah is the one he let cut that hair off.

Children’s time:

Long ago the Jewish people were living in a land where their enemies were ruling over them. Whenever people you don’t like are telling you what to do, you long for a superhero who can rescue all of the people out of that situation. In that time of oppression, a superhero was born to the Jewish people. His name was Samson. He was amazingly strong, but no one knew why. It was a secret. He fought a mean lion with his bare hands, and won! Some bad guys were waiting for him out on the street when he was visiting a lady friend, and when they tried to attack him, he just pulled up the whole doorway of the town up out of the ground and walked away with it, just to show how strong he was.

When he was grown, he fell in love with a woman named Delilah. He loved her, but she didn’t love him. The rulers of the bad guys asked her to find out what the secret of his strength was. She asked him and he said “I’m not going to tell you that, I haven’t even told my mother and father that secret.” But she kept asking. She nagged him. Do you ever do that? 3 fake stories. 3 times she betrayed him. Why did he keep going back? Finally after lots of tears and nagging, he told her the truth. His strength was in his hair. She waited until he was fast asleep and shaved his hair all off. The bad guys came in and captured him. They did all kinds of mean and hurtful things to him, and made him do work for them. Then — his hair began to grow back! He was getting strong again, but he didn’t let anybody know that. The bad guys, called Philistines, had him working in the jail, but they wanted to celebrate having captured him. They brought him to their temple and made fun of him. He said he was tired and leaned against one pillar holding up the temple roof, where about 3000 Philistines were sitting, laughing at him. He pushed on them, summoning all his strength, and the pillars cracked and everyone fell down and hurt themselves. He got hurt too, though. He got in trouble by letting someone nag him into doing something he knew wasn’t right.

Sermon notes:

You heard the main part of the story, but let me tell you some background. The area of the world where Israel is now was divided into Judah in the south and Israel in the north. The Philistines, who, along with the Canaanites, were long time enemies of the Jews, were in the ascendancy and ruled the land from their five main cities, one of which was Gaza, which is still there with the same name. The Philistines were a sea faring people, probably from Greece by way of Crete. They worshiped a god named Dagon, and built temples with big flat roofs held up by columns. The Jews were governed by women and men called by a word that’s translated “Judges” in the Hebrew Scriptures. Some of them did actually judge the people in the way we would think of it, but most ruled like kings or advisors. Samson had been born to a woman who couldn’t have any children. She was visited by an angel several times who talked to her and then to her husband about the child. She was to drink no wine or strong drink while she was pregnant, and the boy was to be a Nazirite. That was a person who kept extra pure, no drinking, no grapes or raisins, nothing from the vine, and never never cutting his hair. It was a miraculous birth, and the boy was miraculously strong.

He fell in love with a Philistine woman. He asked his parents to go do the negotiations. They told him they’d a lot rather him marry within his own people, not among the enemy. He was in love, and he wouldn’t be swayed. On the way down to the negotiations, Samson was attacked by a lion. He tore it apart with his bare hands. Later, on the way to the seven day wedding feast, he detoured to check out the lion’s carcass, and saw that some bees had made a hive in there and there was honey. He scooped out some with his hands and ate it, and gave some to his parents too without telling them where it came from. As a Nazirite he wasn’t supposed to have any contact with corpses, and he wasn’t supposed to eat anything unclean. He broke the vow by doing this.

Now comes the first time nagging worked on him. At the feast, there were thirty men from the town who were his groomsmen. He told them a riddle. “Out of the eater comes something to eat: out of the strong comes something sweet.” He told them if they could guess it within the seven days of the wedding feast, he’d give them thirty linen garments. If not, they would give him thirty. From their backs. They couldn’t guess. They said to the wife, “You’ve got to get Samson to tell you the answer to this so we don’t have to give him our clothes. Also, if you don’t, we’ll kill you and your family. She asked him, wept, nagged, said “you hate me, you won’t tell me the answer to the riddle” for seven days until he broke down and told her. She told the men, who guessed the answer. Samson was mad, and went to another town, beat up thirty guys, took their clothes, gave them to the men, and went back home without his bride. Her father gave her to one of the wedding groomsmen. So now she was married to a guy who had threatened to kill her and her family.

Samson came down there one day, came in the house, and said “I’m going into my wife’s room.” Her dad said “I thought you hated her, so I gave her to someone else.” Samson was mad. I’m really going to hurt you people, he said, and he tied the tails of 300 foxes together and sent them out, crazed, into the fields, where all the crops burned up. The Philistines were so mad and that family that they killed them and burned down their house. Samson was so mad about that, that he made war on those guys and killed a lot of them. He ran down to take shelter in a canyon. Three thousand men from Judah came to him and said What are you doing? Those guys rule over us, and now they are going to make a war with us. I was just doing to them what they did to me.

We have to take you to them.

Promise you won’t kill me yourselves?

We promise.

So they bound him with ropes and took him to the Philistines. They came at him shouting, and he broke out of the ropes, picked up the jawbone of a donkey and killed a thousand Philistines. When he was through, he called out to God and said he was thirsty. God made water gush out of the rock for him there. He led the Israelites there for 20 years.

Then he fell in love with Delilah.

It doesn’t say whether she loved him. You decide. The Philistines asked her to find out the secret of his strength. He didn’t want to tell, but she nagged. He told her, finally, that if he were tied with seven fresh bowstrings, he would be like any other man. When he was asleep, she tied him with the bowstrings. “Samson! The Philistines are upon you!” He snapped them like threads and fought off the men. She pouted that he hadn’t told her the truth. “You don’t love me. If you did, you would tell me.” He told her if they bound him with new ropes he would be weak. When he was sleeping, she bound him with two new ropes. “Samson! The Philistines are upon you!” He woke up, burst the ropes like thread in a fire, and fought the guys off. She pouted and cried, nagged until he told her “You have to weave the seven braids of my hair into that piece of cloth you’re making on the loom. While he was asleep, she wove his braids into the loom. “Samson! The Philistines are upon you!” He woke up and broke out of the weaving. She wept for days. Finally he told her. “No one has taken a razor to my hair since I was born. That’s the secret. If someone shaved my head, I’d be weak.” When he was asleep, she shaved off his hair. “Samson! The Philistines are upon you!” He couldn’t fight. They blinded him and dragged him off to prison. They shacked him and made him walk around moving the grindstone, like a donkey, grinding the grain. After a few weeks they decided to have an enormous celebration, make a sacrifice to Dagon. Samson was brought to the temple to entertain the crowd. They had their fill, laughing at him, the great superhero of the Jews. Not so strong now, are you? What they didn’t know was that his hair had started growing back. He didn’t say anything about it.

He told the boy who was leading him around that he was tired, that he wanted to lean against one of the pillars of the temple. He put one hand on one and the other hand on the other. He prayed for strength, and asked God to let him die with his enemies. Pushing, he collapsed the temple roof, killing the three thousand people on top. He went with them. His parents took his body home to bury him.

Why would he go back over and over? Sometimes people love like that. We make excuses for that lover, spouse, partner or friend. We make excuses for that church or that boss or that parent. We want to believe they love us. We want to believe so badly that we don’t let contrary information in. We just don’t believe it. Some people demand that you betray yourself in order to prove your love. Some churches demand that you betray your own good sense, your own heart or intellect in order to prove your loyalty. Some jobs demand that you betray yourself in order to keep the paycheck coming in.

Love has mutuality in it. You give and you receive. No one who loves you would ask you to give them your strength. No relationship should ask that you betray yourself.

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