Size Matters!

Davidson Loehr

11 September 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us pray with our words, our hearts, and our resources. We’ll share our resources later in the service, but let’s begin by opening our hearts.

We hear of the continuing loss of life in Iraq, and wonder what to tell our soldiers if they return. Can we honestly tell them that the deaths and disfiguring injuries they received were justified by an illegal war sold to us through outright lies? That our lust for oil and military location was worth their sacrifices? And the more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens we asked our troops to kill – what was served by their deaths that was worth their lives?

At home, resources were diverted from strengthening levees in New Orleans known to be a danger for the past six years. The money was sent to Iraq. A hurricane came that everyone knew was coming. Many news personnel were evacuated several days before the public was warned to leave.

Yet still, we came with no food, no water and no apparent concern. The president’s mother, characteristically, laughed off the suffering of those stranded in Houston, saying they were poor anyway, so this isn’t so bad for them. And her son, the president, seems to show that the apple does not fall far from the tree.

These tragedies cry out for attention, even outrage. So many ways to spread the blame or remain in denial. Yet when the dust clears from the war and the flood waters recede from the Gulf Coast, there remain thousands and thousands of our brothers and sisters lying dead, and ten times that number suffering the loss of those they loved, those who loved them.

Religious voices are saying “We can only hope and pray, it’s in God’s hands.” We can hope and pray, and that might make us feel better. But we also have hands, and much of what must come is in our hands. And so let us hope and pray that these tragedies will end as well as they can. We never want to lose hope, so let us hope.

But not only hope. Not only hope.

Amen.

SERMON: Size Matters!

“By size I mean the stature of one’s soul, the range and depth of one’s love, one’s capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature. To me, this is the fundamental category, this is the essential principle.” This is the size that matters.

This paragraph was written over thirty years ago by a liberal theologian named Bernard Loomer. He was the Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School for a decade, then finished his career teaching religion in California, where he also began attending, and joined, a Unitarian church. Some may think he was one of us because he once joined a Unitarian church. I don’t care what his official religion was; I think he was one of us because he understood just how – and what kind of – size matters.

Today is the beginning of our annual pledge drive, and I want to talk to you about what religion is, what a healthy church is about, and why you should support generously whatever church you attend regularly. And I’ve decided to do all this by talking with you about this notion of size. So first I’m going to do the pitch, and then I’ll spend the rest of our time together explaining why these things matter so much, and why they should matter to you.

I read a story this week about a boy who wanted to help survivors of the Hurricane Katrina, so he sent some supplies, and also sent his $2 allowance to help with the disaster relief efforts. Just two dollars. The story was treated as cute. I also read this week that Sam Walton donated $23 million to the disaster relief efforts, and was praised by President Bush as a great philanthropist. But Sam Walton’s net worth is about $90 billion. If the average American family donated the same percentage of their net worth, it would be less than $8.00. Sam Walton’s gift sounds big. But it’s like most of us giving $8.00, which doesn’t sound very generous at all. So for this boy to donate $2, his whole allowance, is hundreds of times more generous than the Walton family was.

When we hear this story, we hear the boy as part of something big, not a boy-sized thing. If the boy had just said “Ah yes, I feel your pain,” I’m not sure we’d care much. But he got possessed by a very big spirit of compassion, and it made him a bigger person, opened him up, and he became a bigger person, far beyond his years, and far more generous than the richest man in the world.

And all his caring, all his praying, wouldn’t have helped a single family. That takes money.

Last week, closer to home, our own 4th and 5th grade boys baked cookies and sold them to help with the disaster relief. They raised $200.

Conservatives laugh at liberals when we talk about money, saying we’re all talk and no action because we don’t support our churches at a very high rate. They say, as many have told me over the years, that this just proves that liberals don’t believe in anything really worth supporting. We ask for 5% of your pre-tax income as a pledge – half a tithe. But we’re really averaging less than 2%. The First Baptist Church downtown has around 800 members and a budget triple ours. They’re a pretty liberal Baptist church – they withdrew from the SBC a few years back, and their minister’s wife has been here several times to attend some of the liberal social causes that meet here. Their members come from the same socio-economic slice of Austin that you all do. Yet they can do things we can barely dream of.

It’s not right. Our rightful place in this community is as a leader church and we’re not likely to do it without a healthy and responsible level of financial giving.

We count only about six hundred members here, meaning they have signed the membership book and made a financial contribution during the past year. But if you count everyone who has signed the membership book, we have over 900 members. Several hundred people attend here fairly regularly, and don’t contribute money to help pay the bills, and help the church realize its potential.

Don’t do that! Don’t do it to this church, and don’t do it to yourselves. I want you to join with us fully: not as a spectator, but as a full member and participant. Don’t stand back. Join fully with us. Invest your energy here. Invest your money here. Invest your spirit here. Choose really to be a part of this community of seekers. Join us fully. Come all the way in to this church.

The grown-ups, the adults, need to support it financially. It’s walking the talk, putting our money where our mouth and our values are. It’s consecrating our money and our energy to the search for size and for light that makes this church so special.

Now let’s talk about why all of this matters so much.

At its best, every religion is about this kind of size

Some religions make God big and you absorb some bigness second hand by worshiping God, like the moon is bright only by reflecting light that came from the sun. This is like identifying with your college on game day, or your country in war, feeling bigger as part of a bigger identity. All UT fans feel a little bigger today, after the UT football team, ranked #2 in the country, beat Ohio State, ranked #4, in the first meeting ever between these teams. As a University of Michigan alumnus, I’m glad Texas won, too – in spite of what Texas did to Michigan in the Rose Bowl! That’s a certain kind of bigness, but it’s limited: we don’t care a bit how they may feel in Columbus, Ohio today. So it’s a pretty local, and constrained, kind of size.

It’s like this in religion, too. You cozy up only to your own little club rather than the bigger purpose they’re supposed to be serving. Then everyone in other clubs is condemned because they’re not in your club – and then you’ve missed the whole point of religion. Baptists condemn others to their hell; Catholics say there is no salvation outside the church. And people who support them with their time and money are sometimes paying not to seek truth or authenticity, but merely certainty, safety. And those are so much smaller things.

Here, we say – though it is true everywhere, whether people say it or not – that you are not damned, ever. You have faults. You have done things you shouldn’t have done, and hurt people you shouldn’t have hurt. We all have. We don’t want to be that way, and we work toward offering more light than heat. But we are never condemned by our faults. That’s a different approach to life, and to religion. It’s valuable to have this kind of option, isn’t it?

And when we support causes and ideals like this, they raise us up and make us bigger, too. They can consecrate us, as we consecrate our money to supporting them.

“Consecrate” is a wonderful old word we don’t use much any more. The dictionary says it means to make holy, to set aside as holy. A Catholic Encyclopedia says only a priest can consecrate things, but this is not true. In the early church, members used to bring even their household items to church to be consecrated: their hammers, pots and pans, regular household tools. What that meant was that these things were dedicated to the service of God, wherever they were being used. Then they took them home again. But now when they were building or baking, they weren’t just doing it for themselves. They were doing it for the glory of God. That’s consecration. It increased the size of the imaginative world within which they lived almost infinitely.

And there’s a great story about this from a later time. In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a tourist once went into one of these huge buildings. Over at one side were carpenters, and he said to them “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? We’re carpenters. We’re building pews!” Then he went to the glass cutters who were painstakingly piecing together one of the monstrous stained-glass windows. Again he asked “What are you doing?” And again, they laughed and said they were assembling a window.

Then over on the other side was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters and glass workers. Of her too, he asked “What are you doing?” The woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!” Her job was bigger than the jobs of the carpenters and glaziers. Not “bigger” in the sense that it was more important to the cathedral, but in the sense that it was more important to her. She lived in a world where her simple act of sweeping was part of a magnificent service to God. And activities of that size absolutely bless us.

The great mythologist Joseph Campbell used a more modern metaphor to talk about small and great spiritual size, by comparing light bulbs with Light. You look up above, and you’ll see a lot of light bulbs that are on. But sitting here, you’re not aware of them. What you’re aware of is the light that comes from all of them. If one went out, if one or two more came on, you probably wouldn’t notice. And I suspect nobody here cares a bit about what brand those light bulbs are. We’re not here to look at the bulbs; we need light.

Religions are like this too, Campbell said. Each religion is like one light bulb that offers light to the world. But nobody else really cares about the brand name of the religions, any more than we care about the brand names of the bulbs above us. Their purpose is to provide light, not draw attention to themselves.

Now looking out at you, I don’t see light bulbs, but heads. But here too, you could say, Well, it’s a couple hundred heads, each doing their own thing. Or you could say No, here are a couple hundred heads all tuned into the words they’re hearing, hoping those words from this preacher in front might do for them what the light bulbs above are doing: giving them light they can use. And the preacher’s job is to serve the greater glory of light and enlightenment, not call attention to him- or herself. Here are two or three hundred people seeking light, opening themselves to its possibility. If you put it that way, we’re all involved in something much bigger. Then it isn’t about me or what I believe or say. It’s about whether and to what extent you can participate in the shedding of light, and can find some to catch in your imagination and take home with you, to tend to, to nurture, to ponder, to see what might be brought into your own life to make you grow in size.

Too often, religions don’t understand what they are supposed to be doing. They stay small rather than trying to become big. They think it’s about the light bulbs.

I experienced this in a ceremony at City Hall downtown a few months ago, and know some of you were there, too. Your reactions to it may have been different from mine. But to me, it was a very weird and disappointing ceremony. They brought together representatives of many different religious traditions, to offer our several blessings to the city and the City Council in their new building. I think they were asking for light, and bringing the individual lights in to offer it – maybe wondering if we had any light to offer.

But what happened was very disappointing to me. A Christian woman stood and read a confessional statement from her faith. Then, while she was speaking, a Buddhist began reciting something in another language. Then a Jewish cantor sang, very loudly, something in Hebrew. Then another and another and another. Here, a woman who defined herself as a wiccan came in costume and went through dramatic gestures with her arms. There, another, also in costume, chanting a chant no one else could understand. I wanted to shout that this isn’t about you! We’re not here to look at you! We’re here to see if you have anything to offer to people outside your club besides a chance to see you perform.

The idea was to be that here we have this wide variety of religions in Austin. But then all of them took this moment to shine their light not on the city, not on the City Council, not on those in attendance, but merely on themselves. It was as though they were all, one after another, shouting, “Now look at me! Now look at me!” They acted as though religions really are merely little clubs where club members dress and talk in idiosyncratic ways that those outside the club can’t understand, rather than little lights whose sacred mission is to help light both our individual and communal paths. It felt like a pep rally for a bunch of teams I wasn’t interested in rooting for because they were too self-absorbed.

You can’t light a path for others if each person shines their flashlight only on themselves. It gives religion a bad name, and makes us smaller.

Yes, they probably each have some light for the members of their club, expressed in ways that only those in their club can really understand, judging from the City Hall ceremony. But as the Buddhists have taught us, each religion is like a finger pointing at the moon, at the Light. And once you realize that, you realize that there isn’t anything special about any religion except its ability to point to a light that shines not just on its own club members, but on everyone. And that’s rare. How many times have you heard a church define itself and its religion that way?

(After this service, a couple people asked me, understandably, what I had said at the City Hall occasion. I’ve attached those remarks at the end of this sermon.)

We’re going to have an exercise in trying to offer something to the world outside our walls right after the sermon, when we take our offering. The entire offering this morning will be given to help people hit by Hurricane Katrina. Half of the collection will go to a UUA fund set up to help the thirteen UU churches damaged or destroyed, and some of their members who are now without a home. The other half will go into a restricted fund that we will use to help some of the families that have been relocated to Austin. At last count, we had over 4,000 survivors of Hurricane Katrina in Austin, and they will be here for several or many months. It’s the kind of challenge that asks whether we are here to shine our light only on ourselves, or to help enlighten the world beyond our walls.

You know we could sit here and pray for them and hold them in our hearts, and it wouldn’t help them one bit. Helping them takes money for food, rent, clothes and all the rest. The same is true of helping and supporting a church.

Our society has seldom needed strong liberal institutions as it needs them now, and the work of any good church can not be done on loose change and one-dollar bills, or even five-dollar bills.

I want to read you that paragraph on size that we began with. This is what religion is about here, what we are after, what we are trying to do with ourselves and with you. It’s a remarkable statement, let’s listen to it again:

How many churches have you ever attended that would describe what is sacred to them in a way this broad, this inclusive, with this kind of spiritual size? How rare are institutions like this? How important is it to support them, to consecrate some of your time and money to them?

This is the kind of size that makes us useful rather than merely decorative. And both we and our nation need this greater and more humane kind of size more than they have needed them in decades.

You can think of this as just a church, and you can think of supporting it as just paying money or putting in time. But you’d be wrong. We’re doing something here of much greater size. We are building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of life, love, truth, hope, God, and all the gods worthy of the name.

I invite you to become a part of it: a full, participating, supporting part.

—————–

Following are the remarks I made at that City Council affair mentioned in the sermon. While I had not heard of Bernard Loomer’s notion of “size” then, and hadn’t articulated my beliefs the way I did for this sermon, these beliefs – that we are here to share light with others rather than calling attention to ourselves – run so deep they color and shape most of what I try to do.

– Davidson

To our City Council:

Blessings, and a Challenge from Austin Area Clergy

January 2005

Rev. Davidson Loehr,

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

www.AustinUU.org

512-452-6168

davidson@AustinUU.org

When we all speak at once in our different languages, the messages of religions aren’t much more than cacophony: just noise. But beneath the noise, all the world’s great religions are in profound agreement about how we should treat one another, and who needs the greatest care and protection. And we hope and believe that the areas in which we speak with one voice can offer both blessing and challenge for you, and for all of us.

We have been invited to offer blessings to the City Council in your lovely new building, and we are pleased to do so. The blessings come in the currency of religion rather than politics, and it is a currency both rich and challenging.

So often, politics is the art of compromise between the different values, or currencies, by which people are to be measured and rewarded.

But religion and politics don’t always deal in the same currency, as you know. And many people would have you give power to currencies that disempower the majority of our worshipers and your citizens. There, our blessings are accompanied by the challenge to honor only the most humane, compassionate and just of values.

Citizens with more money want money to buy not only goods but also favorable laws and rulings, which favor them at the expense of those without money or power. And there, all the religions of the world rise as one to protest. For it is always the weak, poor and powerless who are the chief concern of religions being true to their best teachings. “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me” was a saying from Jesus, but fits as well with the teachings of Muhammad, the Buddha, the great Hindu teachers, Taoism, Sikhism, Judaism, humanism and so many others.

Employers may want the rights of employers to trump those of workers, in the interest of greater profits. Yet here too, we would ask you with one voice to serve the higher calling that honors the weak rather than the strong, and to defend them.

There is a dangerous mood in our nation now that sanctions the suppression of individual rights and individual voices, and counsels an unquestioning obedience to those who have gained power. Here too, the religions of the world speak as one to remind you that when push comes to shove, we must not push our sometimes cantankerous freedoms out of reach, or shove higher values aside for political agendas designed to serve much lower aims.

You requested blessings, not a sermon. But we would remind you of the higher ideals honored by all religions in defense of a currency that defines us by our simple and fragile common humanity. We hope to join you in protecting and serving those better angels of our nature here in our beloved city of Austin.

And so – blessings to you for this noble and challenging endeavor, in the name of all that is most sacred, through all the names by which it is called forth!