Copyright Davidson Loehr 2005     30 October 2005

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PRAYER:

     Let us not be scared too easily. Not all who come in costumes are monsters.  Sometimes the new forces that appear in our lives are forces of healing and of life, that we just need to learn how to recognize.

     The voices most familiar to us aren’t always good voices.  And new, unfamiliar voices may be those of friends we really need to make.

     This Halloween when so many wear masks, let us be reminded that we all wear masks.  So let us try not to be impressed by the masks, including our own. 

     Let us look behind the masks, including our own, and ask Who goes there?  Who goes there in our dreams, our relationships, our families, our country.  Who goes there, that we may know their heart rather than their mask. 

     The masks are parts of children’s games we play.  Behind them are people who need to connect with others in authentic ways, at levels of both mind and heart.  Let us look forward to and be ready for, the great unmasking when we shall see and be seen, face to face, in both truth and love.

     Amen.

SERMON:     Happy Halloween

     Like nearly all Christian holidays, including Easter and Christmas, Halloween - a shortened form of the Eve of All Hallows, or All Saints Day - is a “cover” of a much older pagan festival.  Some scholars say that November 1st was the beginning of the new year in ancient Celtic reckoning, and that the evening before it - called “Summer’s End,” or “Samhain” - was the most important holiday of their year. 

     Samhain marks one of the two great doorways of the Celtic year, for the Celts divided the year into two seasons: the light and the dark, at Beltane on May 1st and Samhain on November 1st. Some believe that Samhain was the more important festival, marking the beginning of a whole new cycle, just as the Celtic day began at night. For it was understood that in dark silence comes whisperings of new beginnings. 

     With the rise of Christianity, Samhain was changed to Hallowmas, or All Saints’ Day, to commemorate the souls of the blessed dead who had been canonized that year, so the night before became popularly known asAll Hallows Eve(ning), or Halloween.

     A night of glowing jack-o-lanterns, bobbing for apples, tricks or treats, and dressing in costume. A night of ghost stories and seances, tarot card readings and trying to see the future. A night of power, when the veil that separates our world from the Otherworld is at its thinnest. It was a ’spirit night.’

     The most interesting belief was their belief that on this night, the spirits of the unseen world - usually the dark spirits, the spirits of the dead - came through to our world.  A Jungian psychologist might rephrase this by saying that we are invited to confront our shadow sides, the unexpressed part of the world that is less obvious than the part that we’re living.  Usually, that means that we live in positive images, suppress or deny the fearful things - that’s how we make it through the day, you might say.   But on this one night, the veil between layers of consciousness is lifted, and we are given a kind of ritual permission to let our unconscious become conscious. 

     You may be sitting here thinking “Well, that could be scary!”  And then you’ll have a much deeper appreciation for the kinds of costumes people wear on Halloween.  They are mostly the costumes of our fears, let loose for one night of the year - though by now, they’re so dressed up as cartoons they hardly scare anybody.

     This is why Halloween is so spooky: because it is trying to reach through the cartoons to let us confront our own shadow sides.  And that’s spooky. 

     Preachers often love a chance like this to get all morbid, to delve into all the deep suppressed things we carry around, drag them out and whack you with them.  You may have experienced that in church before.  It’s part of the sadism of this religion business.  We say “Have a spooky Halloween!” - then we snicker. 

     This year, I’ve decided to do it differently - even to risk being too optimistic. Because this year the times are “out of joint,” as Shakespeare put it.  There are signs that this may be a different kind of Halloween - not a spooky Halloween, but a Happy Halloween.  So I want to use Halloween as a lens for looking at our world today.  And I decided to use what might seem like a very unrelated and unlikely symbol as a kind of teaching aid: the Yin-Yang symbol of ancient China:

     Most of you probably didn’t even know that the ancient Celts knew about ancient Chinese philosophy.  Well, they didn’t.  But all the best religions and philosophies are trying to give form and substance to some of our enduring questions, the things that just always seem to be part of the human condition.  And sometimes it’s useful to mix the teachings of different cultures, to let them illuminate each other - and, hopefully, us.

     This symbol (Yin-Yang) represents the ancient Chinese understanding of how things work. The outer circle represents “everything”, while the black and white shapes within the circle represent the interaction of two energies, called “yin” (black) and “yang” (white), which cause everything to happen. They are not completely black or white, just as things in life are not completely black or white, and they cannot exist without each other.  Each carries within it, at its strongest, the seeds of its own undoing, so the dance goes on forever. 

     While “yin” is dark, passive, downward, cold, contracting, and weak, “yang” is bright, active, upward, hot, expanding, and strong. The shape of the yin and yang sections of the symbol, actually gives you a sense of the continual movement of these two energies, yin to yang and yang to yin, a kind of nonstop dance, an undulation, causing everything to happen.  The yin/yang symbol isn’t meant as a snapshot, but as a dynamic image of the forces whose movement define nearly all reality. 

     If you think about it, the weakest position you can be in is to be at your strongest and fullest position, for it means that you will soon be giving way to the kinds of forces you have suppressed.  And the strongest position to be in is the weakest, the force just beginning to come up, because it just gets better during your turn to lead in the next round of this dance. 

     Yang (white) is the strong force, and Yin is the weak force.  Is the strong force always good?  No, just strong.  Back in history when both Halloween and the yin/yang symbol were born, I suspect the strong forces were seen as good, because they were identified with the planting and growing season, where the dark forces were identified with winter, when the seeds lay fallow in the ground. 

     But today, they’re psychological and social and political symbols and forces.  And the strong forces aren’t always good.  Just strong. 

     You can find some of our most timeless sayings reflected in the dynamics of this yin/yang circle.  At the top, when the strong forces are at their peak, you can think of saying “pride goes before a fall.”  And at the bottom, when the darker forces have become out of balance, you remember the saying that it is always darkest just before the new dawn. 

     You experience this rhythm in your own life, with its ups and downs.  You experience it in your relationships, with give and take, strong and weak moments or periods.  It’s what Hindus and Buddhists have called karma, the cosmic law of cause and effect.

     All actions have consequences.  You can see this in nature, especially now.  We have allowed a very high level of destructive omissions from vehicles and factories for years, to increase the profits of the owners and stockholders.  Those emissions led to global warming, which has led to the melting of the ice caps.  Many scientists are saying these changes in the balance of the atmosphere were the root causes of the record number of destructive hurricanes we have been having.  Not only is it not nice to fool with Mother Nature, you can’t get away with it for long.  All actions carry within them the seeds of their own undoing.  It is about as cosmic a law as we have. 

     These risings and fallings of strong and weak forces are the dynamics of all life.  If you are in a relationship and you fail to address important issues for too long, forces will rise from the depths of one or both of you that will become more dissatisfied until something erupts.

     Want a faster and worse eruption?  Try betraying the trust of your partner.  Lies, betrayals, brutality, violence - all these things carry the seeds of their own demise, as the forces of yin and yang do.  And the opposing forces represented in the “seeds” - those small circles - will arise in time to reverse the direction of relationships, even nations. 

     And it works the other way, too.  Plant seeds of trust and compassion, and see how they change the people around you, and the atmosphere of your life.  Take advantage of people, you plant seeds of uprising and vengeance.  Empower and educate them, and you can raise citizens and neighbors with strong bonds. 

     I grew up in such an empowering time.  The GI Bill after WWII let more Americans go to college than ever in our history. The Marshall Plan invested huge sums of money to help the people we had just defeated in the war get back on their feet and rebuild.  Those were the actions that earned America the respect of most of the world, as a moral leader. 

     Now, the tide has turned, as it does, and our nation’s spirit is greedier, harsher.  How can we be the only developed country that doesn’t provide health care for all its citizens?  How can that have happened in America?  How can we possibly be arguing, as the Vice President did this week, for the right to torture prisoners without restraint?  How could leaders lead us into a war by manufacturing claims about weapons of mass destruction and a tie between Iraq and the attacks of 9-11 that they knew never existed?  All these actions are strong, but they carry the seeds of their own undoing.  How can leaders ask our young soldiers to die in a war of imperialism and greed, and then vote to cut veterans’ benefits by $25 billion?  Such deceit and betrayal carry their own undoing in them, just as Hindus observed in their law of karma thirty centuries ago. 

     Well, you can extend this list of questions as well as I can.  In the yin/yang picture, these are pictures of yang at its fullest and most arrogant size.

     These are very strong forces, but they are not forces of life.  Every new news story carries more facts about the deceit at all levels. 

     But the other voices are rising.  This week, the first indictment came, for the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United States.  And Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, also had a meeting with President Bush’s criminal defense lawyer, the content of which was not revealed. 

     The media are starting - though weakly - to write more critically of the President, and to show him in more awkward poses rather than the staged photo-ops.  This is a shift in emphasis.  It’s rounding the top of the circle, moving from one kind of force to its opposite. 

     Cindy Sheehan’s witness has had a big effect.  I was visited this week by a local woman who won a Best of Austin award for her idea of putting up billboards of conscience along I-35.  She came to talk about billboards and posters outside many church entrances  that might simply say “Thou Shalt Not Torture.”  That is a very different kind of voice.  You can feel the difference. 70% now disapprove of the war. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.

     And the rise of fundamentalism isn’t as strong or enduring a force as the media and others are trying to make it.  It is tempered, for instance, by the seldom-publicized fact that new studies are showing that only about 21% of Americans attend church regularly.  We are a far more secular society than we are being led to believe.  (Studies done by Kirk Hadaway, who has written a dozen books in the field.)

     I’m speaking this Wednesday from the capital steps for a group that is part of a national effort to move for the impeachment of President Bush.  Does it have a realistic chance?  I don’t know, but it’s important that these voices be heard, and it feels right to be a part of them. 

     Europe is rejecting the US control of the Internet.  That’s a huge move.  China holds so much of our debt it could bankrupt us in a heartbeat if it thought it could find other adequate markets - or calculated that it was worth making that power play.  Citizen groups and lawyers around the country are rising to take on corporations, to try and get corporate money out of elections - the things that our elected officials haven’t had the gumption to do. 

     I think all of these new voices are voices of truth, of life, of justice and compassion.  Proposition 2 will probably pass by a large margin: its counterpart passed in Michigan earlier by a vote of more than 60%, as it has done in a couple dozen other states.  At least we’re just following the parade it bigoted Bubbadom, rather than leading it.  But the bigotry and hatred that produced these bills carry the seeds of their undoing, too.  I think the rise of this new bigotry is a sunset, not a sunrise. 

     Why does this matter?  For several reasons.  First, these are the forces that make up the atmosphere of our society and the stresses in all of our lives.  And to feel that we’re passing over the top of this yin/yang circle, is to feel a surge of life coming. 

     All these voices of life and compassion are holy voices, and should be encouraged.  You’ll hear those voices of life and compassion in this church in as many ways as we can manage.  You heard these voices singing out through the piece the choir sang this morning, that wonderful piece by “Sweet Honey in the Rock.”

     So I am optimistic this Halloween.  I think we see the signs of turning toward a more honest, healthy and empowering direction that we’ve needed for a long time. 

     It is almost impossible to kill the human spirit.  Life is profoundly good, and that goodness may start to define us in the near future.  People are still falling in love, parents are still having children and excited by their coming and their being.  And while it’s easy to blame “the government,” we have many people in this room who work for the government.  And most people who work for the government are good people who want to make a positive difference.  After all, Patrick Fitzgerald works for the government, too. 

     The beauty of the universe isn’t playing to a passive audience.  It’s an interactive game. We’re all a part of it, each in our own small but important way. 

     Halloween is about bringing the shadow sides up to the surface, to restore balance.  Usually, those forces are a little scary, and Halloween is spooky.  But the point isn’t to scare us; it’s to help integrate us and help us become more authentic and power-filled.  Because an authentic person rejuvenates the world. 

     And so I hate to risk upsetting you with this big bunch of optimism, but I’m optimistic.  Happy Halloween!

Copyright Davidson Loehr 2005   23 October 2005

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NOTE: This is the third of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia. 

PRAYER:

     So often the stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone of the building we really need.

     Let us ask whether it has happened in our own lives.  Have we rejected insights and unpleasant truths we should instead be building our lives around?

     Have we adopted tough, rigid values that have damaged the compassionate and vulnerable connections with the people around us?

     Have we rejected tender mercies as too soft, too weak, and traded them for too much tough love?

     Have we made such a habit of associating only with our own kind of people, that the richness of the larger human community is slipping through our fingers and our lives? 

     So much in building depends upon the cornerstone.  Are we building our lives and relationships in solid, honest and loving ways?  Or is there a large stone missing, a cornerstone that we finally need to bring into our lives and into our relationships?

     So often the stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone of the building we really need. 

     Let us attend to the building of our selves, our souls, our relationships and our world.

     Amen.

SERMON:   Liberal Religion, Part Three - The Religion of Jesus vs. the Religion About Jesus

     You probably aren’t aware of what a significant day this is.  For today, October 23, 2005, is the 6009th birthday of the universe!  Yes, according to Archbishop Ussher’s seventeenth-century calculation, made by adding up all the days he found in the Bible, he concluded that the world was created on October 23, 4004 B.C.  Pretty exciting.  Also pretty absurd. 

     Yet that absurdity is part of one of the main styles of religion that exist within Christianity, so it’s worth understanding those styles, and the implications of that absurdity. 

     Within the tradition of Christianity, there are two distinct and diametrically opposed religions.  They have almost nothing to do with each other, and both began in the first century, about thirty to forty years apart.

     The first is the religion of Jesus, which can be found in his most profound teachings.  The second is the religion about Jesus, which is called Christianity.  The differences between them are sometimes almost total, and they had two very different origins.  So I want to talk about these two religions this morning, because those two styles of religion - the liberal and the literal, the religions of trust and of fear, of love and of hate, seem to be eternal parts of the human imagination, wearing the costumes of the culture and era in which they appear in each of their new forms.

     Let’s start with the religion of Jesus.  We know almost nothing about the man.  We think he was born around 6 or 7 BC, but we don’t know.  The tradition says his father was a carpenter, and that he may have been one too.  We don’t know.  He seems to have been born and raised in Galilee, a country north of Israel, in very complex and contentious times. 

     There was no unifying identity in Galilee, and many little religious and ethnic groups lived together without sharing a lot of values or traditions.  The conquests of Alexander the Great’s Greek army and then the Roman army had destroyed all the temples that had served as the unifying centers of the several different religious and ethnic groups in the area.  The different religious and ethnic groups living together didn’t share enough social or ritual identity to provide a cultural center.  Jews wouldn’t eat pork or shellfish.  Greeks, who were often their neighbors, loved both. 

     It was a time of great religious experimentation.  Religious entrepreneurs abounded.  A dozen religions and mystery cults flourished.  The cult of Isis and Osirus was popular, as were Dionysian festivals and meetings of the new religion of Mithraism, from which Christianity took much of its structure. 

     And there were great animosities between some groups in particular.  The Samaritans hated the Jews and the Jews hated the Samaritans.  Each considered the others to be half-breeds.  And Greeks, Jews, Samaritans and others were all under the rule of the Roman Empire, whose gods were more like social binding agents than the markers of deep personal beliefs.

     Each little group had its own stories, and each of their stories tended to make them the center of the universe.  As small stories always do, they were too small to include or care for those not in their club.  In this respect, their world was a lot like our own. 

     Jesus had been a disciple of John the Baptist, a very charismatic teacher who said the world was ending and the kingdom of God would be coming with judgment and wrath.  After John’s murder, Jesus emerged as a new charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him.

     But Jesus’ message was radically different.  His was not a supernatural message.  He didn’t think the kingdom of God was coming at all.  He thought it was, at least potentially, already here.  That phrase “the kingdom of God” was a popular phrase in the first century, and a lot of groups used it.  It meant the best kind of world, the world where compassion and justice ruled rather than the values that almost always rule us. 

     John the Baptist’s supernatural religion had said there was nothing we could do, that it was all in God’s hands.  We had to wait for God to act.  Jesus reversed it.  He said only we could bring about the kingdom of God, and that it would be here when we treated one another like brothers, sisters and children of God.  No short-cuts and no magic: God was waiting for us to act. 

     He attacked the Jewish identity that exalted Jews over Samaritans and others.  But if he had been a Samaritan, he would have attacked their small, exclusive and judgmental rules.  What was distinctive about Jesus was that he had that kind of grand vision that we associate with history’s greatest sages and prophets.  He thought he saw how to make the world whole, and he put the ball squarely in our court.

     He had no creeds, nothing people were required to believe.  He didn’t seem to care what they believed.  He never spoke of heaven or hell, though those who wrote the gospels a half century after he died put words about heaven in the mouth of their Jesus.  But Jesus wasn’t concerned with rewards, punishments, or an afterlife.  He was concerned with how people treated one another.  He said they shouldn’t judge others, and that the quality of their faith was determined by how they treated “the least among them,” the poorest and most vulnerable people.  This group “the least among you” is a moveable group, different for each of us, and sometimes changing several times a week or day.  It is whatever person or group of people we are currently treating as things, as means to our ends, as less precious than we are.  For some today, it’s gays or lesbians.  For others, it’s independent women, or the poor, or liberals, or atheists, or fundamentalists.

     Jesus didn’t think rich people could get to heaven, didn’t trust or respect the priests, and wasn’t interested in quoting the Bible as an authority. This was not a man you’d want at a polite cocktail party or a political gathering.  

     He spoke, they said, under his own authority.  And this always irritates priests, who have decided they speak for God, since God couldn’t possibly believe any differently than they do.  The teachings of the priests were seldom about behavior.  Just do the rituals, recite the prescribed beliefs, love who they love and hate who they hate, and you’re saved - at least in the imaginations of the priests and the others in your particular club. 

     More accurately, Jesus spoke from within a vision of life that was so big it transcended the beliefs of any religion and the teachings, creeds and absurdities of the priests.  He would have been bored or angry if someone tried to tell him on what day the universe was created.  He didn’t care.  He cared about how we were to treat one another while we are here, and those are much harder teachings because there is no place to hide from them, no simple creed to recite and shut off your responsibility toward others. 

     Few people seemed to understand Jesus, including his own followers.  This isn’t covered over in the New Testament.  It’s right out in the open.  At one point, the author of the gospel of Mark has Jesus saying to his disciples, “You still aren’t using your heads, are you?  You still haven’t got the point, have you?  Are you just dense?  Though you have eyes, you still don’t see, and though you have ears, you still don’t hear!” (Mark 8:17-18, Scholars’ translation from The Five Gospels, by the Jesus Seminar)

     At one point, he even called his disciple Peter Satan, in the famous line “Get thee behind me, Satan!”  He said this because Peter didn’t understand him or his mission.  Peter kept wanting to exalt him as a superhero, and Jesus kept saying not to call anyone good but God. 

     The spirit of the religion of Jesus was profoundly liberal.  He excluded no one, even made a Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous parables.  It’s hard for us to imagine how disgusting it would have been for his fellow Jews to hear a story about the Good Samaritan.  In the year 6, Samaritans had thrown human remains over the wall into the courtyard of the huge temple in Jerusalem.  They did this to define the space, but also to make a particularly vulgar insult.  The Jews hated them.  Nobody could imagine linking the idea of a Samaritan with the idea of a good person - and Jesus made the Samaritan a better model than the priest and the Levite.  Today, to get such an effect, you might have to tell the story of “The Good Terrorist.” 

     He saw God as a God of love, not judgment or exclusion, and told people not to judge, not to puff themselves up, not to wave their good deeds about for others to see, because it was phony, and you can’t do honest religion with that kind of phoniness.

     The truth is, that while the religion of Jesus was profound and timeless, it would never be very popular, either then or now.  It’s too hard. 

     After he died, maybe in the year 30, maybe a little later, there were groups of people who collected his sayings, and wrote some others in his style, to augment them.  They saw his sayings as offering wisdom for living wisely and well here and now, and they passed them around, talked about them, and saved them. 

     But there is something remarkable about this group of people, who you could call Jesus People, but not Christians, for they had never heard of Christ.  They didn’t consider him a savior, a son of God, or a miracle-worker.  They didn’t even tell a story about his arrest, trial or crucifixion.  In fact, they seem never even to have heard of these stories.  They just knew and loved his teachings, as some of them could remember hearing them from Jesus.  (This fascinating story can be read in the now-classic book by New Testament scholar Burton Mack called The Missing Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins.)

     What this means is that the biography of Jesus had not been written yet.  He had died, but nobody had invented his life yet.  He was just a teacher who even the gospels described as a glutton and a drunkard, who hung around with the outcasts and prostitutes, and taught really disturbing things.  But for many groups of people in the 30s, 40, 50s and 60s, Jesus wasn’t any kind of a savior, miracle worker or son of God.  This is remarkable.  Because - think about this with me - if they had believed this man was born of a virgin, or a son of God, or a miracle-worker or a savior, or rose from the dead or walked on water, they could not have left that out!  Can you imagine people saying “Well, this guy was a son of God and all that stuff, but forget it.  We just want to talk about his teachings.”  It’s not possible!  If the story had existed, if they had ever heard it, that supernatural story would have trumped a mere collection of teachings.  But the religion of Jesus didn’t have a Christ, just a Jesus.  In the 30s, Christ had not yet been invented.

     The religion about Jesus seems to have originated with Peter, the one Jesus called Satan because he couldn’t understand either Jesus’ teachings or his sense of mission.  Peter was also the one who denied Jesus three times when he was arrested, claiming he never knew the man. 

     And in a favorite line of mine, Roman Catholic scholar Thomas Sheehan has written “And Peter continued his denial of Jesus by inventing Christianity.”  Roman Catholicism considers Peter to be the first Pope.

     The Christ myth was constructed two or three decades after Jesus died.  And to turn him into a savior and a god-man, the early Christians patterned him after most of the other god-men and saviors well known in the culture at the time.

     So like many Greek and Roman gods, he was born of God and a young woman.  He was given a virgin birth, but virgin births were a dime a dozen in the first century.  Even Caesar Augustus, who had died in August of the year 14, was awarded a virgin birth by the Roman Senate a month later.

     The category of savior figures was a genre in the first century.  There were things that would-be saviors needed to be able to do.  So the life of Jesus as the Christ was patterned after the well-known savior figures already known to most people of the time.  Like the Greek Aesculapius, Jesus raised men from the dead and gave sight to the blind; like Attis and Adonis, Jesus is mourned and rejoiced over by women.  His resurrection took place, like that of Mithra, from a rock tomb.  And like Dionysus, Jesus turned water into wine, and his body and blood were symbolically eaten by worshipers.

     In Christianity, everything Jesus cared for has been thrown aside.  Now Jesus has been turned into a god-man and a supernatural savior.  And once again, there isn’t much we need to do except believe the stories being taught by the new priests.  Once again, there is our in-group, and everyone else is the out-group, a fit target for scorn or hatred.  This was the situation Jesus spent his whole life fighting against!  All religious wars have been designed to kill or eliminate those who wouldn’t get in line behind the story of the priests of the day.  Jumping ahead more than a thousand years, remember that the Crusades were undertaken to kill all the Muslims.  And the Christian soldiers were promised a trip to heaven if they died in this holy war, just as the Islamic Jihadists are promised by Muslim fundamentalists today. 

     In a sentence, Christianity - the religion about Jesus - has been the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus, ever since Jesus called Peter Satan. 

     It was those who followed the story put together by Peter and Paul who put together the gospels, forty to eighty years after the man Jesus had died.  And the victors write the history, as well as the gospels.  No, the gospels were not written by disciples or by eye-witnesses.  Mark and Matthew were given their names in the second century by a Catholic bishop named Papias, who thought it would sound better if the gospels were written by disciples. 

     But the difference between the two religions is fundamental, profound, and often deadly.  Jesus hit people between the eyes with his demand that they treat all humans as equally children of God.  The religion about Jesus demanded obedience to their teachings, not his, and to their ever-changing and usually strange creeds.  Catholics teach that there is no salvation outside of the church.  Jesus never talked about salvation at all.  Baptists say Presbyterians, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists and just about everyone else is going to hell.  Jesus never talked about heaven or hell at all - though the community that wrote the Gospel of John put words in his mouth sixty years after he died, that made it seem otherwise.

     If you look back through the history of Christianity for its absurdities, as many like to do, you will find virtually all of the absurdities in the religion about Jesus, but almost never in the religion of Jesus.  Like people saying Jesus was both God and man, when there has never been a theologian who could make coherent sense of such an absurd statement except as poetry.  Churches exhorting believers to go into holy wars and kill other people, as they are now exhorting American Christian Soldiers to kill people in Iraq who look a whole lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us.  It’s absurd.  They’re also saying the universe is just 6,000 years old, and may well agree with the 17th century Archbishop Ussher that today is the universe’s birthday.  It’s a dangerous kind of absurdity. 

     Voltaire once said that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities.  That’s why absurdities like thinking this is the universe’s 6009th birthday are potentially so dangerous.  Because those conditioned to believe that are also conditioned to believe that teaching about “Intelligent Design” is intelligent, or that God hates homosexuals, or wants America to rule the world, or invade Iraq, take its money and oil, and kill anyone who gets in the way.

     I know many people who call themselves Christians who reject this kind of Christianity.  What they are saying is that they prefer the religion of Jesus, the teachings of a holy spirit rather than a bigoted and deadly spirit. 

     When you compare the teachings of Jesus with the religion about him created by far lesser people, it is easy for Christians and non-Christians alike to hate the religion that has so often served as the enemy of the teachings of Jesus, the enemy of love, the enemy of the kingdom of God.  But of all the people who might hate Christianity, none would hate it more than Jesus.

     And Voltaire’s saying keeps haunting us, that notion that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities. 

     Today, we hear the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and a host of other morally and theologically reprehensible preachers say that Christianity demands that the rich not be taxed, that uppity women and all gays and lesbians be excluded and suppressed, and that you don’t have to act as Jesus wanted, you only have to do as today’s priests and politicians say.  It’s hard to imagine a teaching designed as more of an insult to the man Jesus.  It is the new crucifixion of Jesus.  And today, Jesus is being crucified by Christians.

     And when you think of the times that Christianity has been combined with state power, as is happening now in our country, it is always the religion of the priests, the religion about Jesus, but almost never the religion of Jesus.

     Proposition Two is coming up for passage on November 8th, to add an amendment to the Texas constitution forbidding any area of Texas to give gay couples status or rights similar to marriage.  This is an excellent example of this religion Jesus would have hated.  I suspect it will pass by an embarrassing margin, and the Christian churches will be able to take major credit for passing it.  That’s what I mean by saying the religion about Jesus is, as it has often been, the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus.  

     Now what does any of this have to do with you? 

     For one thing, since we are hearing a low form of Christianity being increasingly mixed in with our government and our war, it is important to be able to point out that this is a religion, filled with bigotries and hatreds, that is a complete betrayal of the teachings of Jesus.  We don’t have to be against religion to be against the religious right; we only have to be against dishonest and ungodly religion.  We can attack the religion about Jesus in the name of the religion of Jesus - which is what Jesus would have done. 

     For another, it’s important for us to understand that virtually all liberal Christians in the country would agree with us in this.  I have now set up the Round Robin series of guest preachers for January, when we’ll have a Muslim preacher and three Christian preachers.  All three of those Christian ministers are trying to stand up for the religion of Jesus against their churches who have nearly beat it to death with the religion about him.  We’re all on the same side, and it will strengthen us all to know that.

     But there is another reason, and ironically it is profoundly Christian, from some of the best thought in that religion about Jesus.  When you study the philosophy of religion, you learn that, theologically, what the invention of the Christ figure represents is the realization that the only God we’re likely to find, now or ever, is the one that has taken human form and acted in loving and godly ways right here on earth.  It seems that’s what Jesus taught in the Gospel of Thomas, too.  That’s where he said that those who understood him became him: that we are all potentially incarnations of the divine.  That’s really why Jesus is so beloved by so many Christians and non-Christians alike: because he was the embodiment of love for the least among us, the kind of love we have always thought of as God’s main job on earth. 

     That notion that we can become incarnations, embodiments, of a spirit of compassion and love that might rightly be called holy - that is a sacred notion, and a profound one. 

     Maybe, if Voltaire is right that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities, then maybe it’s also true that when we are led to profundities, we may also be led toward acts of compassion and courage, with the power to reconstitute, to save, both ourselves and our world.

     We can only hope - but not only only hope.

Copyright Davidson Loehr 2005   16 October 2005

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NOTE: This is the second of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia.  

PRAYER:

     We give thanks on this beautiful day for the beauty that is all around us and within us.

     For the beauty of the earth, we give thanks, and we accept its stewardship.

     For the love of family and friends - love we did not earn - we give thanks, and we vow to be worthy of it.

     For the love that lives in our own hearts we give thanks.  We hope and pray that we can nourish that love until we are filled to overflowing, and the world around us is fed with the overflow.

     We are stewards of love and life that come through us more than they come from us.  And only by sharing these gifts can they - or we - grow to full size. 

     We give thanks for the many gifts of life.  Now it is also our turn.  Let us share the gifts of life - with ourselves, with others, and with the often hungry and lonely world around us.  Let us share our gifts.

     Amen.

SERMON:       Liberal Religion, Part Two

     Three weeks ago, I began talking about liberal religion, and have decided to make it a short series of sermons, on the worldwide phenomenon of liberal religion that dates back to at least 2500 years ago.

     This is a much broader sense of liberal religion than you’re probably used to, so let me take a couple paragraphs to explain. 

     Between about 2200 and 2800 years ago, in what one scholar named the Axial Age, religious thought all over the world turned on its axis.  Before that, religions had been religions of fear, centered on offering bribes to the gods for our safety, trying to see the whole world as somehow revolving around our wishes, if only we could find the right sacrifice, the right ritual formula, the right appeasement.  It was a million fearful people in search of a persuasive magician. 

     Ancient religions both East and West had human sacrifice, meant to be the most precious gift they could offer, to bribe the gods and gain favor.  It was the picture of powerless and frightened humans trying to bribe a sort of cosmic Alpha Male or tribal chief for safety and favors.  And echoes of all this can still be seen in the world’s major religions today.

     But in this Axial Age, for reasons we don’t know, cultures that had no contact, no relation to one another, all began to see religion as looking for ways to live more wisely and well here and now, in spite of whatever slings and arrows Fortune might bring.  This was the birth of seeing religion as a quest for wisdom rather than ways to bribe or fool the gods.  It was the birth of the spirit of liberal religion, which has always been about the search for wisdom to help us live more wisely and well.

     And while some religions, like Hinduism, kept their supernatural stories about some sort of afterlife, the focus in the emerging liberal styles of religion was on the here and now, on our souls, our own capacity for understanding and meaningful action.

     There are many ways to sketch this history, both in long and short versions.  I want to do it this time in just three or four sermons, so I’ll take what might feel like a simple approach.

     Last time, I talked about how the messages of the emerging liberal religions can be found with and without supernatural stories, with or without gods.  Hinduism taught reincarnation as a central belief.  But in one of the Upanishads, you read “there is no consciousness after death.” (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad)  You’re recycled.  Your parts become the parts of other things.  Nothing is destroyed, but your consciousness and memories and identity die with you.  That’s a bold message in the history of religion. It’s a message that prophets proclaim and priests suppress. 

     Buddhism also teaches about reincarnation, which they inherited from their Hindu origins.  Yet the more advanced Buddhist teachings don’t mention the supernatural stories, as much as they mention living in the here and now, and outgrowing our need for illusions.  This is the spirit of liberal religion in Buddhism.

     And Taoism and Confucianism are all about how to live, with almost no supernatural stories to sugarcoat their teachings. 

     The best teachings of religion can be done with or without supernatural stories.  The Hindus had both the teachings and the stories, as Buddhism also did.  And you know that Judaism, Christianity and Islam also come with both the teachings and the stories.

     But it’s important to know that the stories are optional.  And nobody taught us this better than the ancient Greeks.  I want to talk about the Greeks today, because they introduced some very new ideas into Western religious thinking.  Their concern, going all the way back to Homer, was with how we should live.  They thought breeding mattered, but they focused more on how we can create noble humans out of the raw material we’re born with. 

     If you think about this with me, you’ll see how deeply logical they were about this.  And you’ll learn a new word, which you might think at, first is completely foreign to anything in our world, but you’ll then see that it is absolutely fundamental.

     The Greeks had both teachings and stories.  But their gods were intended from the start as symbols of, projections of, the natural forces around and within us.  Gods like Zeus and Poseidon were responsible for thunderstorms or storms at sea, as Demeter controlled the growing of the crops and Hestia gave us the subtle ability to add human feeling to worship and home.  It was the presence of Hestia’s spirit that made a religious service feel like a worship service, and that made a house feel like a home. 

     Other gods and goddesses were personifications of some of the psychological styles that have always been part of human nature.  The war-making, angry spirit familiar to many men came from Ares, the god of war.  Our cleverness, as well as our ability to understanding subtle and sacred meanings in things came from Hermes.  Women whose lives revolved around the care of their children were the daughters of Demeter, as those with a fierce and focused ambition claimed Artemis.  Several years ago, I read a book on the gods of Greece by Arianna Huffington.  She grew up in Greek culture, and said her life has been a series of trade-offs between the demands of Demeter - since she is a single mother of two daughters - and Artemis, since she is also extremely bright and very focused and driven. 

     So these gods and goddesses weren’t really about supernatural creatures, but about the dimensions of our world and of ourselves that always set the stage for our lives, and that seem to drive us through them.  The Greek gods and goddesses - originally they had six male and six female deities - were aspects of the human experience writ large, rather than distant and unrelated powers we must appease.  When Muslims say that Allah is closer to them than their own jugular vein, they are showing the kind of awareness from within which the Greek gods were created and clothed.

     The Greeks did make sacrifices to them, especially Apollo and Athena.  But it was more like trying to bring those facets of life into sharper focus, to feel their presence more fully - though they still hoped for favors.

     But the other development of the Greeks is what concerns me more today.  And this is where the famous Greek logic is especially logical.  They believed that we create noble people out of the raw material we’re born with, and that we do it by shaping them in the form of the highest and noblest ideals we know.  There are no gods in this picture, only humans, ideals, values and education. 

     Now if this is true, then the most sacred treasure of any society is precisely that collection of their highest and noblest ideals.  Every citizen would be responsible for holding, serving, and passing them on.  And that’s how the Greeks saw it. 

     Here’s your new word for the day.  They had a collective noun that referred to all their highest ideals, the most sacred treasure of their civilization.  That word was paideia.  It was found in the roots of their words for both child (paidos) and education, just as we still find our Anglicized versions of it in our words pediatrics and pedagogy. 

     Every citizen, in every action, was responsible for upholding these highest ideals.  A favorite story makes the point.

     It involves Aristophanes, the great comic playwright.  He’s the only comic playwright whose works survive, so for us he’s the best by default.  But the Greeks thought he was great, too.  And while the humor in his plays sounds like 14-year-old bathroom humor, his plays made points that were serious.  Some historians think one of his plays (”The Clouds”) was the reason that Socrates was brought to trial and condemned to death for corrupting the youth by questioning the values of the paideia. 

     The story is about a scene witnessed between Aristophanes and a younger comic playwright, whose play had just won a gold medal in competition.  (When the Greeks put on their Olympic games, and the Pythian games and others, they gave medals for athletics, and also for playwriting.  They thought the whole person needed to be formed: mind, body and spirit.) 

     You might think old Aristophanes was congratulating the young writer, but he was reaming him.  What he said, in essence, was “You simply went for laughs.  You never presented or transmitted the paideia anywhere!  You failed in the only sacred mission you had, and compared with that failure, all the gold medals in the world are worthless!” 

     It’s almost impossible to imagine such a scene today, isn’t it?  We’re used to seeing writers rewarded for going only for the laughs.  Then again, this young man in ancient Greece had also just won a gold medal. 

     But the soul of the Golden Age of Greece - the real gold - was a seriousness about preserving, presenting and transmitting the highest ideals they could articulate, knowing that without them, they were unlikely ever to mold the noblest sort of human beings, including themselves.  That was a high point in human history, and you could argue that it produced the greatest outpouring of literary and artistic genius of any culture in history.  This was secularism raised to its highest level.  The word “secular” means to be concerned for this world.  So it can overlap with the aims of liberal religion, but only when it’s raised to such a high level.

     That old story with its commandment to serve only the highest ideals has been an inspiration to me in my own work ever since I read it over twenty years ago.  But even with this story, you have probably still never heard of paideia.  At least not in Greek.  But you know it in Latin. 

     For a few centuries later, the Roman philosopher Cicero became acquainted with the ideals of the Greek culture, and with the word paideia.  He realized that they had neither a word nor a concept in Latin like this.  He also believed that this was one of the most important ideas in any civilization: the notion that we create noble people by molding them in the image of noble values.  It’s how we become most fully human.

     So Cicero continued to serve the aims of liberal religion through non-supernatural secular means, by coining a word to translate this into Latin.  The word he coined was humanitas, which means roughly the essence of what it means to be most fully human.  That word, and that concept, became the soul of the “humanities” and the liberal arts in Western educational curricula from his day to our own.  These are the courses designed to make us more fully human: an aim we inherited from the Golden Age of Greece.  It’s also the root of our word “humanism” which, at its best, still preserves the ancient Greek ideal of preserving and passing on the most sacred of ideals, without using any stories of gods at all.

     Indeed, the Greeks were the first Mediterranean people to pass down their highest ideals without wrapping them in religious or priestly authority.  Here was the essence of liberal religion, expressed in ordinary language, and expressed in some of the finest dramatic plays, poetry, philosophy, and athletic games our species has ever produced. 

     You might think that Greek philosophy doesn’t really have anything to do with religion, especially Christianity.  You’d be wrong.  It had almost everything to do with it.  ”Philosophy” means, “love of wisdom,” and the Greeks loved wisdom, or “Sophia.”  But the Sophia they loved was not a collection of facts or abstractions.  The kind of wisdom they loved was the wisdom to live by.  After Socrates, it didn’t so much matter what you said, or how smart or wise it was.  What mattered was who you were, and whether you had a right to speak such words, whether you had striven to embody them in your own life. 

     Beginning at least with Plato, philosophy was no longer about acquiring mere knowledge, but about questioning ourselves, because we have the feeling that we are not what we ought to be. (Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? p. 29)  This started with Socrates, whose effect on some people was so much like a religious experience; it’s hard to know how it’s different at all.

     For example, Plato records the words of Alcibiades, one of the prominent men whose life was changed by Socrates.  ”I was in such a state that it did not seem possible to live while behaving as I was behaving.  He forces me to admit to myself that I do not take care for myself.” (Ibid. p. 31)

     If this doesn’t sound profoundly religious, it should, because it is.  No gods, no supernaturalism, no afterlife, no stories.  Wisdom, stripped down to its most naked and arresting, with the power to bring people like Alcibiades forth in a kind of ancient altar call.

     This is really what Greek philosophy was about: how to live.  They weren’t trying to inform students as much as they were trying to form them, into the noblest sort of people, aware of themselves, their world, and inspired - even driven - to live according to only the highest of personal and moral values.  Philosophy was a way of living, not a way of thinking.

     They all agreed on this, even though the philosophers disagreed on other things. 

     The Stoics, who mixed ethics, astronomy, astrology and fate together, believed that everything was a result of the fates, everything that happened was part of a plan.  If this sounds very Christian, it’s because the Christians took this attitude, and the structure for most Christian ethics, from the Stoics.  So for the Stoics, it wasn’t important whether we were happy, but whether we lived right, served the Good, and always intended to do good.

     The Epicureans didn’t think there was a plan.  They thought life was essentially a crapshoot, that we were the playthings of Chance.  And in this world, they said we need to be able to enjoy whatever our lot is.  If it’s steaks, enjoy the steaks.  But if it’s only bread and cheese, you should be able to enjoy that just as thoroughly.  And what mattered most, they said, was friends: being part of a warm and loving community of friends.  This is a teaching I don’t think Christianity ever picked up, unfortunately.

     For Plato, it was living in harmony with the abstract Ideals: the notions of pure Beauty, pure Goodness, pure Justice, pure Truth, and striving to emulate them, to serve and become one with them.  It was quite mystical, and Platonism is the style of thinking from which Christian mysticism was later derived. 

     And then there is that other Greek word which, like paideia, provided both the foundation and the transition from secular Greek philosophy to Christian theology: the word logos.  It’s a hard word to translate.  It referred to the logic of, structure of, essence and understanding of something, as well as the words we use to express all this.  We find it in our words “psychology” (the structure and understanding of the psyche, or soul), anthropology (the understanding of humans), and the word “logic.”

     For Heraclitus, it was all about the logos, the essence of what is most real and enduring, sort of the hidden Center of all reality.  In the second and third centuries, when early Christian thinkers were trying to define just what this new religion was, they were exposed to, and accepted, the Greek notion that philosophy is a way of life, the way we should live here.  And they accepted the notion that there was a logos, an invisible sort of structure and understanding, kind of the secret of life, that could be communicated to us, and which became the center of any worthwhile philosophy of living.

     Not many Christians know this, but Christianity was first defended to Greek thinkers as a philosophy, a way of life.  That’s also how Saint Augustine understood it.  He agreed with Plato’s notion that philosophy meant living in the best way, being the best sort of person.  Nietzsche once described Christianity as “Platonism for the masses,” and he could have had Saint Augustine in mind, for Augustine could have agreed with him. 

     Where the Christians thought they had the edge on Greek philosophy was in that idea of logos.  For the Christians said they had the ultimate, the final, logos, in the person of Jesus Christ.  The opening words of the Gospel of John are almost always translated as “In the beginning was the Word.”  But the Greek word there is logos.  Let me read it to you with the correct translation, and you can see in just a few sentences the modulation from Greek philosophy to Christianity as the ultimate philosophy:

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” (John, 1:1-4).

     Now there.  In just a few sentences, we moved from secular philosophy without gods or myths, right into Christianity with its God and its very different myths. Snuck in through that one hard-to-translate Greek word logos.  And in the history of Western religious thought, it also happened almost that smoothly.

     What’s this like?  It’s like a holy spirit moving through time, granting life to those it touches, but wearing a hundred different costumes, each suited to the imagination of the ages in which it appears.  It appeared first in the Upanishads, wrapped in their innumerable gods, their wonderful webs of myth and story, and cradled in the concept of reincarnation, which promised that we would have all the time we need to get it right.

     Then in Buddhism it shed its gods and most of its supernaturalism.  In Greek philosophy, it shed them completely, and brought at least the idea of a perfect human down to earth in plain talk.

     And the Christians, writing further variations on this timeless theme, said they went one better.  They said they had brought God himself, the Logos, down to earth, in human form, in the person of Jesus Christ, to teach us how to live.

     Next time I’ll talk about the liberal religious spirit in Christianity.  But you don’t get off easy, you know.  We’re in dangerous territory here.  We’re talking about how we should live, who we should be, and it isn’t just a sterile list of objective facts.  It is the living spirit of liberal religion and of life, and it looks at you.  It looks at you, and asks “What about you?  Are you living as you should?  Are you taking proper care for yourself?  These aren’t just mind games, you know.  There are lives at stake, and one of them is yours.  So you: What about you?”

Copyright Davidson Loehr 2005
Worship Associate - Sally Miculek
9 October 2005

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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:   Sally Miculek

     My husband and I don’t have Cable.  We don’t have satellite.  We just have an antenna for our television, and sometimes find ourselves watching a little extra fuzz.  A couple years ago, when we moved in together in anticipation of our coming nuptials, both of us looked forward to getting Cable hooked up.  But then it just didn’t happen.  We set up DSL.  We signed up for Netflix.  Finally, we talked it over and decided that maybe we don’t need all those extra channels after all.  We get enough TV shows from Network Television, and the Netflix keeps us in a steady supply of movies, so my cinephile mate doesn’t think longingly about what he could be watching if we had HBO or the Independent Film Channel.  Anything that comes on Cable that ends up good enough for us to want to watch it will come to DVD soon enough, and this way we get to skip the commercials!

     Inevitably, one night as I was happily watching Antiques Roadshow or The American Experience, or some other vaguely wholesome PBS offering, the doorbell rang.  I opened the door, encountering the ubiquitous Time Warner guy.  He launched into his schpiel about the current offer from Time Warner, and how much money we’d save if we hooked up now, and what kind of introductory package we’d get, blah blah blah.  I was in the process of turning him down when he looked around behind me, saw the television, and then stared blankly at me, incredulous.  ”You don’t want Cable?”  ”Nope.”  ”But you’re watching Public Television.  Don’t you want better TV than that?” 

     Now, I realize that the poor Time Warner guy is programmed to tell people that Cable is waay better than PBS, but come on!  How on earth could the folks who brought us the Golf Channel possibly claim that what they’ve got to offer is somehow of higher quality than the Keno brothers?  Are the Sopranos really much more interesting than a documentary on Appalachia?   Needless to say, the poor guy didn’t get his commission that evening, and the Miculek household soldiers on in its Cable-free state, much to the shock of many friends and extend family members. 

     I’ll be the first to tell you I’m a media junkie.  My VCR is programmed to record The O.C.  And I admit it.  I’m sure a lot of you are junkies, too, even though you may not watch shows about beautiful people in California.  Maybe you don’t watch television at all.  Maybe you’re addicted to your computer.  Or books.  I’m a junkie for media in most of its forms.  My morning isn’t complete without Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep.  I check multiple email addresses many, many times each day.  I paid for New York Times Select so I can still read all the online articles I want.  I choose purses and bags based on whether or not they’re likely to hold a copy of my trusty New Yorker and/or whatever book I may be reading at the moment.  In short, I’ve got a lot of means at my disposal to tune out the world around me, and I’m a fervent user of them all. 

     But how do I keep from letting a small amount of media-induced isolation mushroom and truly cut me off from the things I love to do and the people I like to spend time with?  I work on tilting the balance away from rampant media consumption and towards activities that encourage actively participating in my life.  I record and watch two television shows on a regular basis.  That number’s down from about four last year and about eight the year before.  I still watch other TV, but I try not to let it become a priority.  I try to make sure the books I read are good ones.  I talk to people about what I’m reading, whether they’re going to read the same things or no.  I jog.  I use my husband’s new banjo habit and the endless practice sessions to help pass the time while I take on what would normally be tedious household tasks.  I am definitely addicted, but at least I’m aware of the problem and am trying to do something about it.  Maybe some of the folks in the congregation are on the same path.  And perhaps someday we can all go toss our televisions and computers (figuratively, at least) off Mount Bonnell.  Until then, though, a few minutes reading Maureen Dowd, or a little time spent dwelling on the trials and tribulations of the Cohen family isn’t going to kill us.  And, no matter what, I’m keeping my books.   

SERMON:     Media Addiction

     My name is Davidson and I’m a recovering television addict.  That may sound silly, but it’s true.  When I bought my house two years ago, I decided not to have cable connected.  So for the past two years, I have not watched any television at home. 

     I made the decision to go cold turkey when I realized that I’d been watching an average of over four hours of television a night for several years, and couldn’t remember ever seeing anything I really needed to know, and very little that I could even remember. 

     Now I read more books, and go out to my shop and turn wooden bowls, and sometimes have dinner with friends - things I didn’t have time to do when my television addiction was in full swing.

     Four hours a day may sound extreme, but it isn’t.  An online Indian magazine just reported that in the twelve months from 20 September 2004 to 18 September 2005, the average American watched four hours and thirty-two minutes of television a day, and the television set was on for an average of eight hours and eleven minutes a day - the highest figure in the history of television.  (http://www.Indiantelevision.com/, 29 September 2005)

     Children spend more time watching television than they spend in school now, by over a hundred hours.  They see an average of 30,000 commercials a year.  At that rate, by age 65, they will have seen over two million television commercials.  And the people who write commercials are much better storytellers and much better at appealing to their deep fears and wants than public school teachers are.  After all, toy manufacturers spend 92% of their advertising budget on television ads.

     In some important ways, television is the real teacher of our children.  It’s where they learn the most powerful stories, see the most powerful images, where they learn how to look, what to wear, what to eat, and to a large degree who to be.

     Still, is this really a spiritual or religious issue, or just the kind of rant you’d expect from a recovering addict?

     It’s a spiritual matter, and I want to think about it with you in two different ways, one theological and one more down-to-earth.

     Most of us grew up in the atmosphere of Western religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  And all three religions make a big deal out of idolatry, the difference between worshiping gods and idols.

     Here’s an easy lesson in Religion 101, on the difference between gods and idols.  If you think in these terms, then it matters a lot what we worship, and whether it’s a god or an idol.  To put that in ordinary language, it matters what values and ideals we put at the center of our life.  We want to serve things with our life that serve us too, that make our life richer and more satisfying.  Some theologians call these gods. 

     We all have them, whether we call them gods or just call them ideals and values.  And we all make the same deal with them.  See if this isn’t true for you.  We make a kind of contract, a covenant. 

     We say “I’ll live my life in your terms.  I’ll make you the center of my life and my energies and activities.  I’ll serve you heart and soul.  And in return, you must give me a life that will have been worth living.” 

     One person gives their life to working for justice as they define it.  They’ll break dates to work at this, and gladly do this work rather than take a vacation or read a book about something completely unrelated to the kind of justice they want to see.  And they do it gladly, because they believe that there is nothing that is more worthy of them and their time.  They expect, when they look back in years to come, that they will be able to say, “I served this, I made it the center of my life, I made it my god, and it gave me a life I am proud to have lived.”  If we can say that, we don’t ask much more. 

     But not everything we chase after can give us life.  Some things we chase after were never really interested in us at all.  They just use us for their own ends, and take life away from us, leaving us drained and empty and depressed.  It’s such a shock when it happens.  They were so seductive!  We were so sure!  It seemed so good! 

     This is what Buddhists or Hindus call the difference between living in illusions or maya, and living in reality.  In Western religion, we call it the difference between serving gods and serving idols.  And chasing after idols, like chasing after mirages or living in illusions, usually ends up by draining life from us rather than giving us more and deeper life.  Because idols use their seductive powers to take us in, use us up, and throw us out.

     This word “seduction” is the right word for what’s going on.  It’s always surprising to learn that “seduction” comes from the same root as the word “education.”  And the difference between the two words is precisely the difference between idols and gods, illusion and reality.

     The root of both words is the “-duc,” which means “to lead.”  So a conductor leads the musicians through the music, or leads his bus or train through the countryside.  Induction leads you into something - the Army, or the Hall of Fame, perhaps.  Education means to lead you outward, out of your smaller self into a larger and more adequate self.  That’s what education is about.  It’s why we go to school: to learn to become bigger, deeper, more aware and nuanced.  We want to be led into a bigger sense of identity and a bigger life; we want to be educated.

     And seduce?  It means to lead astray: to lead off the path.  To lead somewhere that doesn’t make you bigger or deeper or better.  It means to lead you in ways that serve not you, but your seducer.  Your seducer takes you in.  You follow gladly, willingly, because you’ve been seduced but think you’re going to be educated.  They you’re used to fill the seducer’s needs, used up, and tossed aside. 

     A seducer is an idol, a powerful but illusory presence that you want to follow but shouldn’t follow. 

     The oldest and most vivid story of seduction I know of comes from around three thousand years ago, in The Odyssey from ancient Greece.  If you know the story, you’ll remember the scene where Odysseus’ ship must sail past the Sirens, those supernatural but deadly women who would seduce him and his crew with their Sirens’ Song.  No one could resist that song, he was told.  But he was curious.  So he had his men tie him to the mast so he couldn’t escape, then had them fill their ears with wax so they couldn’t hear the seductive song, and they sailed by the island of the Sirens.

     The Sirens called out, and even mighty Odysseus screamed for his men to turn to shore, to follow their seductive song.  But they couldn’t hear him, so they kept sailing.  If you looked closely on the shores of their island, you saw the many piles of bones bleached white by the sun and surf.  That was all that was left of those who had followed the Sirens’ Song. 

     The seducers, like the Sirens, are only doing what comes naturally to them.  They’re simply a lot better at it than you are, so they take you in.  It’s so easy for them to take you in, and then to use you as they will.  But anybody that easy to take in is hard to care very much about, and they don’t.  You can see why so many people want to say that whatever else you could say about God, God is Love.  Because love wouldn’t do that to you.  Seduction would, but not God, not Education, not anything that cared about you.

     What does this have to do with television?  Seduction means leading astray, leading away from wholeness, truth, health, into a direction that serves the seducer at the expense of the seduced - in any field.  Television distracts us from life in order to draw us into crowds to hawk their wares to.

     You might ask, “What about news?  We need the news!”  I would ask you to think about how much news we get, how complete it is, how reliable it is, and whether news programs, just like other entertainment programs, aren’t really trying to draw a crowd for their sponsors, rather than educate them.  If “news” is the information that keeps people free, I don’t think there has been much news on television for decades. 

     And look how the time is actually spent on news programs.  About 30% of the total time is taken with commercials. Nearly 54% of the time is spent on war, crime and terror, and one of the slogans of nearly all news programs is “If it bleeds, it leads.”  Is this education, or seduction?  Do they want to serve you, or use you?

     “Well,” you might think, “if the world is really that full of war, crime and terror, then don’t we need to know about it?”  Well, we need to know why there is war, who is making money from it, what deceptions were used to trick others into losing their lives there.  It would help to know the economic background of most of our crime, why people feel driven to crime in order to get by.  But we don’t hear these things.

     And the focus on crime and terror aren’t to educate us.  They are the evening news version of “If it bleeds, it leads.”  It’s car-crash journalism, meant to draw a crowd of passing sailors to its shores, like the Sirens.

     For example, during one five-year period (1990-95), television coverage of homicides went up by 336% — nearly three and a half times.  Yet during that same period, the actual homicides in the real world went down by 13%.  That’s not news.  That’s a Siren Song, a seduction, an idol. 

    And it’s not a secret.  Four out of five Hollywood executives believe there is a link between TV violence and real-life violence.  Over nine out of ten children say they feel upset or scared by violence on television.

    The longest we go on television without a commercial break is eight minutes.  Violence, terror, murder, sex and brutality are featured on the news for the same reason they are featured on so many regular television shows: because they draw a crowd that can be used by the superb seduction of the advertising industry to reward their sponsors.  Is this education or seduction?  Is it serving us or duping us? 

    Spending an average of four and a half hours a day watching television means that we are spending one quarter of our waking time, and nearly all our leisure time, sitting in front of the tube.

     When I was watching an average of four hours of TV a night, I watched mostly the Law & Order-type shows, or CSI, or Monday Night Football.  I found that I was more paranoid, more aware of danger, less aware of grace or kindness, more suspicious of others, and when I dreamed, the dreams often had violent themes.  Since I stopped watching TV, I seldom dream, and almost never have violent themes in my dreams or my waking imagination.  It is simply easier to see and believe in the loving and kind parts of people, and to see violence and deceit as sins against humanity, rather than the way things are in a dog-eat-dog world. 

     Even when I watched good dramas - and I thought a lot of the Law & Order shows were good dramas, well-acted - the aftertaste was violent.  I never felt better after watching them, never felt uplifted, never had my faith in myself or in humanity strengthened, only weakened. 

     And so, like many addicts, I don’t have much good to say for the drug that seduces me so easily.

But I don’t hate television because:

1.   of car-crash journalism that draws crowds to sell them things rather than to educate and enlarge them

2.   or because it seduces Americans into living vicariously within the stories it spins to attract them, while its commercials help them run up their credit card debt to an average of about $10,000 at over 22% interest. 

3.   I don’t hate television because it tries to seduce us into wanting material wealth when what we need is spiritual wealth. 

4.   Or the reality TV that both reflects and programs the selfish and deceptive behavior used to get ahead while downplaying or ignoring our humanity, our decency and our compassion.

5.   And I don’t hate news shows that titillate rather than educate, and turn serious debates into the shallow sensationalist joust of the day.

6.   Or the fact that after a few years of watching over four hours of TV a day, I still can’t remember anything I learned that I needed to know.

7.   And I don’t hate television because I resent the fact that commercials work, and I, like millions of others, keep buying things I don’t need.

     Well … yes I do.  Yes I do hate television for this, for all these reasons.  But I hate it the way an alcoholic hates alcohol, because if it’s on I’m drawn to it like a moth to a flame or a sailor to bone-covered shores.  I watch it like an idiot.  When I’m on the road, I sit in front of the TV in my motel room for four hours every night.  The next morning, I can’t remember what I watched or why, and am glad to return home to a TV set that only plays movies and videos on how to turn bowls. 

     You may not be addicted.  Your self-control may be much better than mine - unless you’re also watching four and a half hours a night.  But television is not an innocuous presence in our homes.  I think it’s a dangerous one. 

     Because we are shaped by the most powerful stories we learn, molded by the ideals and values that we absorb.  All of education and all of religion know and rely on this fact.  So do advertisers.  But education at its best is about leading us out of ourselves into a bigger identity and more satisfying life.  Religion at its best is about inducting us into a Sangha, a community of faith where life is valued and only the best in us is encouraged.  And the media, I think, neither educate nor induct, but seduce.  They lead astray.  They are the Siren Songs of today, and few of us seem very good at resisting them. 

     Think about it this way:  Would you invite a storyteller into your home every night to tell you stories of blood, greed, murder and violence, leaving you more fearful and paranoid, robbing you of the time you might have spent doing things together?  And then the next day, would you rush out to buy things you don’t need, so that the sponsors would send this same toxic storyteller back into your home again the next night?  No, of course, you wouldn’t do that.  Or do you? 

     A few years ago, the Surgeon General of the United States sponsored Turn off the TV weeks.  When the Surgeon General sponsored a Turn off the TV week a few years ago, he said, “We are raising the most overweight generation of youngsters in American history … This week is about saving lives.”  The surgeon general says television is bad for physical health.  But most of it is just as bad for emotional, psychological and spiritual health. 

     A second grader named Drew Henderson of Donora, PA said “I really didn’t like TV-Turnoff Week except that I did notice that my grades went up and I was in a good mood all week.”

     So I wonder.  What if we could kick the TV habit, stop spending most of our leisure time ingesting stories that make us more afraid, more suspicious of our fellow humans, and more insensitive to real-world violence?  And what if, instead, we had more time to spend with those we love - learning how to turn that love into memories worth having - and our real-world performance went up and we were in a good mood.  If we could do that, would that be a bad thing?

Jack R. Harris-Bonham   2 October 2005

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INVOCATION:

This is the place. This is the time; here and now the Mystery waits to break into our experience:

To change our minds, to change our lives, to change our ways;

To help us see the world and the whole of life in a new light.

This is the place. This is the time.

Here and now let us praise the Mystery by joining together in song.

CENTERING:

At the center of our service and at the center of our lives we take this time to light candles of memory, of hope, or because we feel troubled, blessed, conflicted or simply because we wish to add a little light to this world.

PRAYER:

Most gracious and loving SPIRIT, we gather together this morning as community – community in search of meaning, in search of hope, in search of itself. In these trying times when there exists so much pain and poverty, so many opportunities for us to act responsibly, help us to winnow out the seed of action from the chaff of talk. Help us to bring into focus the things that we need to do, to quiet the cavalier voices of those who see poverty as a part of character, and to raise our own standards when it comes to acting upon what we believe. We believe that those on the borders of life deserve more than existence. We believe that the dominant culture must open its arms and embrace those that stand at the margins looking in. Help us Great Spirit to see our connections to all that exists. To see that where we live is precisely how we live, that the gathering of the wounded, the hungry, and the poor is as much for us as act of redemption as it is for them.

Now, open our hearts and our minds so that the unexpected and unforeseen can find its way into the solutions of our lives. Prepare us for the magnificence of the moment.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is precisely, everything. Amen.

SERMON:

     One afternoon while I was sitting in my garden two dogs came down the path to the place where I was seated. I like dogs, I always have. The shorter of the two dogs sort of broad in the chest and bandy legged came over to me and demanded some attention from me with her nose; the way dogs have a tendency to do. So … I scratched her back. She arched approvingly. My eyes then wandered over to the bigger black dog with the yellow close-set eyes of the wolf. I mean I like dogs, but it pays to be wary. It was then I noticed that the big black dog was wagging her tail. I stopped scratching the little dog’s back and the big dog stopped wagging her tail. I scratched the little dog again and the big dog wagged her tail again. So I did a little experiment. Do you know that each and every time I scratched that little dog’s back the big dog wagged her tail? Finally, the big dog came over and I scratched her back and the little dog took the part of the tail-wagging friend.

     And I thought, How wonderful, how absolutely wonderful! Scratch one dog’s back and all dogs wag their tails. If only human beings could learn this trick. Now, the dogs in my back yard weren’t going through some difficult machinations coming to the determination that what was good for one dog was good for all dogs. No! They were connected at a heart level and at a heart level we all know that what is good for one is good for all.

     We can learn a lot from our animal friends. The great Jewish thinker, Martin Buber, in his seminal work, I AND THOU, speaks of the intimacy that he one evening experienced with a cat. He writes in this work;

     “Sometimes I look into a cat’s eyes …The beginning of this cat’s glance, lighting up under the touch of my glance, indisputably questioned me: “It is possible that you think of me? Do you really not just want me to have fun? Do I concern you? Do I exist in your sight? Do I really exist? What is it that comes from you? What is it that surrounds me? What is it that comes from me? What is it?” … The world of It surrounded the animal and myself, for the space of a glance the world of Thou had shone out from the depths…” (Buber, I and Thou, p.97-98)

     When was the last time you watched a dog lie down? Sometimes they plop down, but a great deal of the time they turn in circles. I have had this explained to me as the vestiges of their primitive natures. When they lived on the steppes and the savannahs, when they were more jackal, hyena and wolf than dog this circling, pawing and circling was the process by which they pushed down the grass and made a bed for themselves.

     In today’s sermon we will be doing a lot of circling. We will be pressing down the tall theological, religious and symbolic grasses of several traditions. The outcome will hopefully be that in the end, when these words have finished being spoken from my lips and received by your open and willing hearts, in the end we will have found the bedrock of a potential religious center, a place to lie down, rest and view the dizzying activities of the world that surrounds us.

     When my family lived in Sacramento, California from 1952-1959, we quite often made our way to San Francisco. If you’ve been there you know the tourist stuff to see: Knob Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Trolley cars, Haight-Asbury, Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and Seal Rock. If you were there back in the 50’s and 60’s you’ll remember that there was a restaurant called the Cliff House across from Seal Rock. Up the street from the Cliff House along the ocean there was Suttro’s. Suttro’s was an amazing place with seven stories of exhibits from player pianos to mummies, and all these layers surrounded an arboretum that on the ground floor was an ice-skating rink. Yet, given even this plethora of interesting sights and things to see my favorite place was the Fun House – south from the Cliff House across the street from the ocean.

     My favorite attraction at the Fun House was a huge disk that sat on the floor. Everyone who wanted to could sit down on the disk, and when a horn went off the disk would begin slowly to revolve much like a merry-go-round. But this was no merry-go-round because there were no gaily-painted horses upon which to ride, there were no carriages within which to safely sit, in fact, there was absolutely nothing to hold onto except the others who were riding with you. And as the disk revolved faster and faster brothers held onto sisters whom they would in no wise ever be seen touching in public, and estranged wives and husbands clutched onto one another for dear life, but to no avail.

     Centripetal force would have its way, and eventually everyone was thrown from the disk, everyone except those who had found their way to the center. It wasn’t hard to find, right there it was from the beginning. Not to sit directly on the center meant that the centripetal force would eventually pull you and little by little until you’d lose the center and be thrown off.

     What I am suggesting to you today is this: Finding our religious center isn’t simply something that would be nice to have on Sundays, or when we feel especially religious, no! Finding our religious center is finding that place in our lives from which we can view the rest of the crazy, chaotic, confusing and brutal world flying by. Finding our religious center will allow us to have a new vision. We will no longer clutch at the people, places and things that surround us as if they could support us, stabilize us and give us meaning. Finding our religious center means that the banter of midway will still be heard, but we will be less inclined to find direction there. Finding our religious center means that the sirens of life – all of them – will begin to become an opera of desire, want and lack. We will finally reach that place in ourselves where what the world thinks we need, what Madison Avenue wants so desperately to sell us, what the drug companies want us to ingest – all these maddening monologues of the barkers of life – every one of them change from clamor to simply the musical harmony of the spheres. Think of it this way. If a playwright writes a scene in which all his characters are talking at the same time – no one will be able to understand anything. When a libretto for an opera is written, there are scenes in which all the singers sing at once and there is no problem because harmony takes the place of understanding.

     When I worked on my Masters in religion at Florida State University my thesis was on non-verbal communication in Zen Buddhism. I was Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein’s assistant – the Richard L. Rubenstein who wrote the popular book, AFTER AUSCHWITZ. This is what Dr. Rubenstein had to say about Buddhism;

     “I first became conscious of my affinity with Buddhism as a result of an encounter with Maseo Abe during a job interview at the University of British Columbia in March 1970. In the Vancouver lectures, I expressed my ideas about the “death of God” explicitly and unambiguously. The next day I met with the religious studies faculty. As was so often the case, the faculty consisted primarily of conservative white Protestant males. Not surprisingly, my ideas made them uncomfortable, especially ideas such as God after the death of God as the Holy Nothingness.

     “As the faculty questioned me, I noticed a small, thin Japanese scholar seated on the floor in the corner behind me. He became increasingly agitated as the discussion continued. Finally he stood up and said, “I’ll have you know, what this man is saying is the essence of Mahayana Buddhism.” “That’s strange,” I replied. “I haven’t studied Mahayana Buddhism.” “That proves my point!” was his response.” (Mitchell 184)

     Zen Buddhism is often described in this manner –

     A special transmission outside scriptures,

     Not depending on words or letters,

     Directly pointing to the human heart,

     Seeing into one’s true nature.

     What is true nature? It sounds like it might be a soul. It’s not a thing. Your true nature isn’t rolling around inside you like a marble inside a guitar. Zazen (seated meditation) isn’t turning yourself upside down or inside out till you lose your marbles. For Zen Buddhists to express their true nature they sit. It’s practice.

     I like to play tennis and was a good, steady player while attending Yale. I played tennis with older men, women, men my own age, and younger men. On clay, grass, asphalt and cement. There was only one way to get better. Practice.

     To be here and now in the here and now seems idiotic and commonplace. Yet, most of us do not live in the here and the now. Coming back to the moment and the breath is the awakening of one’s true nature. There’s nothing special about it. It simply is.

     Artists have described this as being in flow. For seven years I sat at my computer and wrote over 30 screenplays. No one forced me to do this. It was a drug. To be in flow with story, with character, with writing. I’ve said it before – so much of my writing is simply stenography. Once you suspend “disbelief” anything is imaginable.

     And it is disbelief that we must suspend. It sounds like – to create – we must suspend belief – must make believe, but the truth is, most people disbelieve their ears, eyes, nose, tongue, heart, lungs and body. Most look for clues outside themselves on how to behave.

     We must suspend our disbelief.

      And as we suspend our disbelief who is it or what is it that we hope to find at this religious center of ourselves?

     A great majority of the world’s religions talk about a soul or something like a soul. In the next few moments I am going to discuss what some of these world religions have to say about the soul. The list I will discuss is in no way exhaustive. If I leave out your particular religious flavor I apologize.

     “The soul is a “non-material or non-tangible part of a person that is the central location of his/her personality, intellect, emotions and will; the human spirit. Most religions teach that the soul lives on after the death of the body.” That’s from the World Encyclopedia.

     From the Dictionary of Buddhism we have the definition of anatman as “the key Buddhist doctrine that both the individual and objects are devoid of any unchanging, eternal, or autonomous substratum.” In other words for Buddhists there is no abiding self, no soul.

     However there is a concept known as Buddha-nature.

     The Abbot at Zen Mountain Monastery, John Daido Loori says this about Buddha-nature.

     “Rather than positing an original defect or sin that needs to be transcended, in Buddhism we begin with the assumption of inherent perfection. Our practice is to return to the inherent perfection that’s originally there. There’s nothing to be transcended. There’s just a lot of baggage that we need to unburden ourselves of.”

     You see originally within Buddhist thought there was a lot of discussion about one’s potential for becoming a Buddha – realizing one’s Buddha-nature. Finally, within Mahayana Buddhism we get this notion that there is no distinction between practice and enlightenment. To sit in meditation is to be enlightened. It’s there – this Buddha-nature – this soul with a no return ticket – this thing that we’re born with, but also dies with us.

     A present day Zen Master has this to say;

     “We usually assume that the world existed long before we were born and that our birth is our entrance onto the stage of an already existing world. At the same time, we often assume that our death means our departure from this world, and that after our death this world continues to exist.”

     Now here’s where it gets real interesting.

     “My true Self lives in reality, and the world I experience is one I alone can experience, and not one, anyone else, can experience along with me. To express this as precisely as possible, as I am born, I simultaneously give birth to the world I experience: I live out my life along with that world and at my death the world I experience also dies.” So there’s no soul to live on, but more importantly there’s no world left for this soul to be departed from.

     The Holy Koran is quick to remind us that everything is a drama that posits only one soul.

     “The entire drama of this single soul serves only to express the Divine Attributes of the Hidden Treasure of Love.” (Holy Koran 31:28) So the next time you hear that the Koran teaches hate and separatism you tell them about the single soul that serves only the Divine Attribute of Love! That, my friends is what the Holy Koran teaches.

     Within Judaism God breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of man and he (man) became a living soul.

     By the Maccabean period in Jewish history the Greek concept of the immortality of the individual soul was incorporated into Jewish thought. Not that everyone thought that way. In fact in Jesus’ time the Pharisees believed in life after death while the Sadducees denied it.

     All of Greek neo-Platonist’s thought is an attempt to describe how everything comes from the ONE – much like light from the Sun.

     Paul Tillich, arguably the 20th Century’s greatest Protestant theologian, says, “the soul is not primarily an immortal substance, but the principle of movement. It is the principle which moves the stars, so the stars have souls; (it is) the principle which moves the animals and plants, so they also have souls; (it is) the principle which moves our bodies, so we have souls; (it is) the principle which moves the whole universe so there is a world soul.”

     The essential thing about the individual soul and the world soul is, according to Tillich, the concept of its being ambiguous, doubtful, uncertain, and capable of multiple interpretations. To me, Paul Tillich begins here to sound a lot like the UUA.

     The same present day Zen Master again;

     “At it very essence life is contradiction and the flexibility to forbear and assimilate contradiction without being beaten down by it, or attempting to resolve it (that flexible ability) is our life force.”

     I think this is good definition of soul – a life force that’s flexible enough not to be beaten down by contradiction, flexible enough to assimilate contradiction without attempting to completely resolve it.

     Within the Jewish mystical tradition, the Hasidic myth of the creation says that in the beginning everything was God and then, God exploded. That which was most like God went furthest from God – much as like poles of a magnet repel each other.

     The former Rabbi and now death of God theologian, Richard L. Rubenstein, explained that Sigmund Freud stood on the shoulders of these Hasidic Rabbis when he came up with his theory of psychoanalysis. For a person to be whole that person would necessarily have to go deep into the darkness of the unconscious and find that spark of him or herself that when brought to consciousness would make them whole again, make then one again, make them God again.

     Conclusion: How do we find our souls, our religious center? Why don’t I tell you what happened to me, how I found my way to this place of grace.   

     I wanted to be a preacher since I was 10 years old. From the age of ten till eighteen I sat on the front row of church and took notes on what the minister had to say. When I entered college I lost three things; my sobriety, my virginity and my God!

     When I graduated in 1969 the war in Vietnam was raging. Catholic Priests and brothers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan were convicted of destroying selective service records; both Woodstock and Altamont happened that year; The United States landed a man on the moon and I had a decision to make – leave for Canada or find a way to avoid the draft.

     Just as others are proud that when called they answered the call, so, too, am I proud that when called to serve in what I saw to be a war of genocide that I did not answer the call. I attended Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University – two thirds of the class that year were draft resisters. It was at Perkins that I discovered Zen Buddhism.

     Given a high lottery number I jumped from Perkins to the Religion Department at Florida State University, then to Starr King School for the Ministry, Berkeley, California, then to the peace time Army and Military Police School at Fort McClellan, Alabama. I felt like a pinball in a pinball machine. But I finally dropped down into a hole that I couldn’t get out of – the lights were going off and the bells were ringing and I had another decision to make. I had to learn how to manage my drinking.

     I went to my first AA meeting in Denver, Colorado in 1977. The first person to speak was a lovely young woman. She was missing an arm. The next person to speak was a successful looking young man. He was missing a leg. I left that meeting and went directly to a liquor store. Obviously I didn’t have a problem with alcohol, I had both my arms and legs.

     Two years later, December the 23rd, 1979, I quit for good. I traded my pistol in for a typewriter and I began telling stories on paper instead of in bars.

     Ten years after sobering up, in 1989 I entered the Yale School of Drama and got a formal education in telling stories. I graduated from there in 1992 with a Masters of Fine Arts in Playwriting. Twenty years after sobering up in 1999 I got fed up with the Hollywood system and decided I would write a one-man show about Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, the Confederate Civil War general. I taught homeless people Bible Study for one year because Jackson had taught a black Sunday school class when he was a professor at VMI. I became a Presbyterian because he was a Presbyterian. Flooded by childhood memories of what Jesus had meant to me I became a Christian again after 30 years of being a Buddhist.

     In 2004 after nearly three years of Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, I realized who Jesus was – a man who saw that the Kingdom of God was located within the human heart. I found my way to the Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas where I became a student of Ruben Habito Sensei.

     The path I now walk is no different than the path I have been on my entire life with one exception. I know now where the power lies; I know where God, or whatever you wish to call our ultimate concern, lives. There is only power by living in the present moment. For me to live in the past through regret or wishing I could do it all over again is to put myself in the victim’s seat. To live in hope that things will someday be different is to put myself in a place of fear. Future – Events – Appearing – Real.

     What I learned is that we must stop looking outside ourselves for anything – anything at all. How do you know when you’ve reached your religious center? Trust me, you’ll know. No, better than that. TRUST YOURSELF!! You’ll know – it’s that place where you experience a peace that passes all reasoning and understanding.

     There are times when looking for our souls and our religious center is a little like wandering the streets as homeless persons all the while being the children of the richest family in town. Once we have found our religious center there is no end to our resources.

     So … what I’ve told you about the soul and our religious center is incomplete, ambiguous and perhaps even contradictory, but such is the essence of life.

     I want you to do something for me? Place your right hand over your heart.

     Now put your left hand on the person’s shoulder to your left. At the end of the rows just figure it out – this ain’t brain surgery. Let us pray.

     Great Spirit we come before you today as a group, a community of seekers, questioners, rebels and malcontents. Hollow second-hand answers aren’t for us. We want to know for ourselves. We want a special transmission outside of scripture, not relying on words or letters, pointing directly to the human heart.

     We sense that we have been given something that yearns to know exactly what that something is. Some of us call this soul, some call it intellect, some mind, some Big Mind. Some of us have no name for it. As we are connected physically as one community help us to realize that we all have our spiritual questions. Some of those questions were addressed this morning, but some of them were not and, quite honestly, we still question. Yet help us to remember that when one dog is satisfied all dogs wag their tails. At this moment, right now, within the sacred, the boundless, the timeless, let us feel with our right hand our hearts wagging within us. For truly what has been good for even one of us has been good for all of us.

Amen!

BENEDICTION: