PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, today we bring with us thoughts of those who have come before us. In dealing with the dead the first thing that’s obvious is they sure are a lot easier to get along with than the living. The living have a tendency to protest when you say something negative about them, while the dead seem just fine with whatever is said. Perhaps the dead are grateful for the release from taking things personally? Perhaps, it’s time to start living our lives with the same sort of abandon that’s enjoyed by those who have passed on? There are many ways in which we honor the dead in this society but forgetting about their shadow sides isn’t one of them. We must remember that those who have gone before us are no nobler than we are, nor are they less human for simply being dead. We can learn some lessons from the dead. One, we could start taking things a bit less personally ourselves, we could even imagine that we are already dead and see how that feels, if it changes the way we live, if it lessens our burdens, if it allows us a certain freedom that we wouldn’t have when we thought we were going to live forever.

Lastly, we hope that those who brought memorabilia and pictures of their dearly departed ones for the Day of the Dead Altar will be comforted by their act. Simply putting my mom and dad’s picture up there on that altar made a difference for me and moved me strangely. I also put a picture of Hawthorne my best dog friend up there. I wear his dog tag around my neck even today. The sound of it makes me think of him bouncing up beside me, his toothy grin and the way he twisted his body when he had a strong wag on. We need to remember those sentient beings that have gone before, that have offered us comfort, that have offered us pain, that were there for us to the best of their abilities, but then we must turn back out to life, to living, to love because that’s what’s demanded of us by life itself. We must return the compliment of life by living fully in the moment, giving regardless of what’s returned, stepping out when the moment presents itself, never fearing, or at least not letting fear stop us, always ready to go that extra mile, and own all that comes our way.

We give thanks this morning that death is there for us, that we carry our own deaths with us, and we would hope that death will be the good companion, the friend that never lies, the friend that never leaves, the lover who will embrace us even and most especially when we appear unembraceable.

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

Amen.

Cocooned

Luke 24:1-5 (NIV)
First Lesson

Lie back, daughter, let you head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently back and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
(Phillip Booth)

Cru’ci fy – from the Latin crux, crucis for cross + figere, to fix

Responsive Reading #645

SERMON

Introduction: This will be a short sermon. Aren’t those comforting words? Perhaps in today’s society those six words may be the most comforting words you can hear in church. This will be a short sermon. Today we are to talk about different kinds of deaths, and maybe even a little resurrection. Perhaps you think speaking of a little resurrection is like speaking of being a little bit pregnant. Perhaps you’re right. What we want to do is inquire about death and resurrection, and to do that, we first have to ask questions.

          What are questions? A question is perhaps one of the only ways to open ourselves up. To ask questions is to reach out – to seek – to explore our environment.

          I’m thinking now of Dr. Loehr’s invocation in which he says, “Questions more profound than answers!” Why is it, questions can be more profound than answers? It has something to do with the fact that our questioning is the edge of our life – the fingers of our growth, if you will – reaching out into the world and into ourselves. What would existence be like without questions?

          Once a man entered a cave in Roquefort, France and discovered a rotten cheese that someone had obviously forgotten. There were green veins of spoilage running throughout the cheese. Anyone in his right mind – and who was not French – would have covered that cave entrance with a stone and left it there. But this man by asking a simple question, “I wonder what those green, moldy lines taste like?” – this man resurrected what was thought to be spoiled. Without this man Roquefort Cheese would never have been discovered.

          Who and what are we? These questions have baffled philosophers and theologians from the start. To ask these questions assumes that we were at one time, or can be in the future, or are right now something – some thing – an object among other objects.

          As a practicing Buddhist I do not believe in a permanent self. In other words, there is no – thing in me that can purport to be anything substantial. I am, in essence, without substance and some of you have known that for some time.

          The minute we have an answer for who we are, we have, in all probability, died. The only answer to whom or what we are is a eulogy. In the moment of death the sentence, which is each of us, can finally have a period.

          Short of a eulogy we are incomplete, in process, always flowing. Hence the importance of the moment, the only place that we existentially belong. This flowing into each moment is for me a form of enlightenment, a form of resurrection. When I am reborn into each moment my eyes see what there is to see, my ears hear what there is to be heard.

          On the 2^nd of November, El Dia de los Muertos is celebrated in Mexico and Latin America. On this auspicious day we will dedicate the oak memorial sculpture in the foyer. The memorial tokens to be placed on the oak tree will be butterflies.

          How’s your insectology – I know that’s not a word – but who here remember the stages that lead to the butterfly? The butterfly larva is called a caterpillar and it becomes a pupa and resides within the cocoon where it undergoes metamorphosis and emerges a butterfly. The reason Sterling Heraty chose this image is its use in the Mayan culture as a symbol for resurrection.      

          Scientifically, metamorphosis is considered complete when there is no suggestion of the adult in the larva stage. In other words, no caterpillar would consider itself a future butterfly.

          We human beings, we Homo sapiens, undergo a metamorphosis similar to the butterfly and the frog. For in the womb we are swimmers, not walkers on land, our lungs are dormant for we receive all our nourishment and our oxygen through the umbilical cord compliments of our host animal generally referred to as mama. One of the clues of complete metamorphosis is the habitat change between the larval and adult stages of life. Tadpoles live in water, frogs live on the land, caterpillars crawl the earth, butterflies flutter above it dining on the nectar of flowers.

          In the passage from Luke the women go to the tomb with spices and ointment to complete the burial preparation of Jesus’ body. They discover the stone has been rolled back and instead of Jesus inside there are two men dressed in shiny white garments. What these men say is in the form of a question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

          A wise man once said, “To become free we must see all of our past as a mere preface to this present moment.” (Repeat this line)

          All our degrees, our PhD’s, our honors, our medals, our six figure salaries, our pedigrees all the way back to the Mayflower, our DNA, our IRA’s, our adventures and misadventures, all are MERE preface to this present moment.

          There are cocoons that we must break through in order to become adults. The cocoon of the family defines you in the order in which you arrived and the manner in which you reacted to and acted in the world. This cocoon of childhood is a tough nut to crack, but leaving mama, letting daddy go, dropping the hands of brothers and sisters and venturing forth into the world is the way out from the familial cocoon. It isn’t fun, it can cause problems within families of origin, and many times when we venture back into those families of origin we literally have to fight not being placed back into our childhood cocoon. How many of us have made trips home as adults and lying in that bed that we grew up in we sense something stagnant and death-like about the tombs, I mean, rooms of our youth? Ask yourself this; Does a butterfly ever hang out with caterpillars?

          Where do we belong? We create other homes, don’t we? The place where our kids are cocooned, the place that eventually they must break from if they are to be free – we create these homes. When they leave will we, then, be dusting their cocoons hoping for that weekend in which we will be pretending that the family is back together again?

          Our lives are not the glittering trail left behind us any more than the glistening trail of the snail is the snail itself. Our lives are not what has past, but rather what lies ahead – complete and total possibility. This is true when we’re ten years old. This is true when we’re ninety. 

          Another cocoon awaits us, and that is the cocoon of the community of agreement. This cocoon is cultural, societal, national.  For those who break free here there awaits a reality of our own choosing, a reality stemming from within, a reality which evolves – a reality we choose, by freely intending it.

          Freedom finally is not something we can sell to other countries, or import to other cultures. Freedom is like our dead, it haunts us, provokes us, causes us to dream dreams – dreams that reach far into the future, dreams that have us gazing with great awareness until our last breath.

          So on this Dia de los muertos Sunday – this day that we have erected an altar to the dead and placed our pictures and memorabilia there I would ask that we remember the words of the glowing strangers in Jesus’ tomb, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Remember we’re not being rebuked for looking … we’re only asked to consider why we look there.

          In complete metamorphosis the word imago refers to an insect in its final adult, sexually mature and usually winged state. The imago of the caterpillar is the butterfly; the imago of the tadpole is the frog. The imago of human beings is the imago dei – the image of God. We are the image of God; we have projected this image into the heavens. The source of that projection is something within us. This knowledge leads us to none other than our winged state, free; free from the prejudice of others, free from our own limitations, free to dream, free to think, free to be whatever we imagine we might be … free, great God Almighty, free at last.

SERMON

Imagine this: you are surrounded by loved ones, without inflated egos or scrambling for rank, wealth and power. Private property is limited to the decorative or personal. There is no “marrying or being given into marriage,” at least not as an economic unit. There is plenty to do, but it is meaningful. You labor until the task is done; then everybody rests or celebrates. You feel pleasantly tired, doing work your body was designed to do, without grinding you down. Fruits and nuts are there to be picked from the trees and bushes; game is plentiful. The land flows with milk and honey in Earth’s Great Garden. Best of all is the sharing with close friends of poems, stories, gossip, jokes; discreet flirtations and wild romances; mountaintop experiences of shared religious ecstasy or the serenity that comes from deep understanding.This may not be your vision of Paradise, but it has commonly been so for peoples throughout the ages. Some, like the Jews and Greeks, had it as the Golden Age at the beginning of the world; others, like Christians, Moslems and Marxists, made it the outcome at the end of History. The Greeks might insist Eternity is only for souls stripped of all human traits; Christians might fill up Heaven with activities that bore us silly on Earth. But there is a part of us that deeply craves a proper existence, one we never seem to get in this life, of intimacy, acceptance and meaning. This Heaven also resembles the reality of hunter/gatherer life for millions of years of our ancestors, at least “on a good day;” there were ups and downs, times when the game was scarce, the berries poisoned, the milk soured and the honey got you stung. The Serpent in the Garden brought agriculture, starting about 10,000 years ago. It did not win because it was attractive to the tribes: the originally nomadic Hebrews called it the “curse of Adam;” and farming cultures have often lived in fear of having their own children “go native.” Agriculture won out nonetheless because it could support far larger populations.

Human nature was shaped in a fiery caldron. Without a strongly cohesive band of adults watching over the young and passing on skills and lore, humans were the most helpless of animal species; with such bonds in place, humans were so successful that they could think about other matters beyond survival. Our normal behavior does not make sense in a usual Darwinian model – why do we spend time gossiping with neighbors instead of foraging for dinner? – unless we understand that it is the result of ages of strong selective pressure for socialization. There were several different genetic adaptations toward this end, including a retooling of sexual behavior and a hard-wiring of language abilities. Religion was also part of this species makeover.Part of our religious instinct reinforces group bonding. Religious cravings can only be satisfied by group participation. Have you ever wondered why you wonder? All of us desire to understand our place in the scheme of things. Why am I here? What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? How was the world created? How will it end? Why do evils like drought, scarce food, disease and dangerous animals exist? What are thunder and lightning? Tell me about death and what comes after. The fact that we consider these questions important is rather odd. No other animals ponder such questions: they do not enhance survival. Yes, all animals attempt to avoid danger and death, but mostly by instinct. Thinking about death, fearing it, obsessing over it, does not make humans more likely to survive; brooding about death may even decrease survival chances. But our questions cry for answers, and to get them we need other people, if only to reassure us – thus we bond to get something we need. The road to serenity is found in The Mysteries, rituals that promote secret and sure understanding. Today we claim to value scientific knowledge, but science is always tentative, and it does not satisfy the soul. You can’t make a religion out of science, as the content keeps changing, new explanations replace the old, and lack of absolute certainty leads to anxiety. The Mysteries are sometimes physically addictive. We lose ourselves in them; the sights, the sounds, even the smells stimulate the senses. Sex and mind-altering drugs could enhance the mood of religious ecstasy. In America we have had Jim Jones, David Koresh, Philadelphia’s MOVE and the Comet Cult; each exercised psychic power over adherents to the point of mass suicide. But for many, serenity itself is the sweetest gift, the “peace that passeth understanding.” And none of this makes any sense whatsoever in conventional Darwinian terms; objective knowledge of the real world should always beat fantasy and thus lead to higher survival rates, while the delusional self-destruct and do not leave progeny behind.Let’s look at the underlying problem. Selfish behavior will always produce more progeny than unselfish behavior; so it should always be selected for, even in social species. Cheaters should out-breed cooperators; those who live to fight another day should inherit the earth, tearing it from the cold dead hands of the brave and self-sacrificing. Sociability should be steadily undermined, until it pushes a social species to extinction. Bees and ants found one workaround: cooperation, hard work, altruism and self-sacrifice on the part of workers do not result in fewer progeny, because workers are always infertile; those traits are of value to the queen; so the queen which passes on the most altruistic genes to her workers will have an edge.

Our human ancestors took another path. Perhaps the original method of selection was simple: if your tribe got too anti-social, it would drop out of the gene pool, and leave a niche for tribes that hadn’t. But religion is a more elegant response. We are wired to carry within ourselves an image of what society and pro-social behavior should be, idealized images from our childhood – unselfish cooperation and affection among members of the group. Some of us may be more tolerant and flexible than others, but all are wired to defer to “elders” who feel and express the “conservative images” most strongly. Reactions are triggered by extremely selfish or antisocial behavior; the group takes action against the deviant, through ostracism, exile or even death, but in any case exclusion from the gene pool. Extraordinary courage and sacrifice are also socially reinforced : “none but the brave deserve the fair,” we say. In hunter/gatherer society, these mechanisms kept human sociability, cooperation and altruism stable over vast ages.In the change to herding and farming, there were many dramatic changes, but the fundamentals of relationships changed little: it took a village instead of a tribe to raise a child; there was still a rough equality of wealth and status; religion continued to be a shared monitoring for selfish behavior. But by 3300 BC, cities had begun to appear in Mesopotamia, piling village on village, plus those bereft of any community; in this chaos, tribal mechanisms no longer worked. The first rulers were priest-kings, originally bureaucrats handling religious rites. Religious control became political control. Non-orthodoxy was treason; religion kept citizens obedient. Reciprocity of rights and responsibilities, an integral part of human society from its origins, was gone. Some people became tools to be used by others; and the earliest human governments were among the most despotic that have ever existed.Thus began “status quo religion,” the use of human religious instincts for the benefit of an elite. Thousands of years later Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, hoping the piety of the Christians would shore up a decaying civil society. Before the American Civil War, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches split nationally, with their Southern branches remaining loyal to slavery and the planter class. And then came the modern Religious Right. Fundamentalism among evangelical Protestants dates to the early part of the 20th century as a reaction against Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. William Jennings Bryan might be a political liberal; but as the most respected Biblical literalist of his day, he was dragooned into being spokesman for that cause and became branded forever, not as one of our heroes, but as the foolish villain of Inherit the Wind. For all that, fundamentalism was still a fringe movement in my youth. In the ‘60s Nixon initiated the first “wedge issue” campaign, his “Silent Majority.” His successors in the ‘70s brought modern business techniques to creation of a religious right machine: mailing lists were assembled; evangelical ministers and conservative Catholic clergy were courted and tempted with power; conservative denominations like Southern Baptists were hijacked by coups, engineered by new corporate style megachurches. Conservative Protestants and Catholics, whose predecessors had spent the last 400 years trying to exterminate each other, were forged into uneasy political alliance by Radical Right apparachiks. So began the modern campaign to use status quo religion to help forge an American Fascist Movement.Where the religious instinct originally was used to monitor the behavior of people close to you, wedge issue politics today use modern advertising methods, mass media and coordinated attacks to arouse anxieties and feed off them by generating an endless succession of issues, each painted as a spontaneous reaction to some incredible attack on values. News and entertainment media have long been used to this end; they make grisly crime stories their meat, as the public can be entertained indefinitely in anticipating an equally grisly vengeance, while coming to fear their own communities. But modern propaganda techniques have also managed to elevate to the highest levels of public importance such things as never ending wars on drugs, wardrobe malfunctions, celebrity peccadilloes, steroids in sports, taking the X out of Xmas, teaching science in science class or sex in health class, and in fact almost anything which might suggest that sex continues to exist and motivate human beings, yea even unto the current generation.

The Terry Schiavo case is wedge issue politics at its most obscene. Her higher brain cells were long dead, and she had been in the limbo of a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. An army of doctors supported this diagnosis; an endless array of judges supported her husband’s right to terminate medical intervention. But what was the message delivered by television news coverage? Doctored video footage was played over and over, an endless stream of libelous attacks on her husband’s character were shown, all trying to persuade us that this was a vibrant young woman on the verge of waking up, yet subjected to a slow tortured death by inhuman secular liberals. Attacks on the Constitution, death threats against judges, laws riding roughshod over separation of powers and Federal/state divisions, laws aimed at specific individuals; most frightening of all, the total disappearance of any principled opposition in Congress, leaving judicial integrity as the only barrier against government gangsterism. The roles played by news media and government officials would until recent times have been unthinkable; now they are routine, expected. Some believe the Right overplayed its hand because polls say three-quarters of the American public disapproved; but the experience of recent politics says that the frenzied faithful have long memories and turn out in elections, whereas most of the three-quarters would forget the whole business in a month.In what was once the world’s premier democracy, these become the stuff of the news and of public discussion, replacing health care, job creation and disappearance, deficits in government budgets and in the balance of trade, Social Security prospects, war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, population growth and the depletion of the world’s resources. The point of wedge issue politics is not to solve problems, for a problem solved is an issue lost; it is to keep the passions constantly at a fever pitch and so overwhelm the democratic process. Rational discussion, even on areas of profound disagreement, is the lifeblood of democracy, but it is poison to status quo religion. Your opponents must be painted as deviants and perverts, not even fully human; their very existence fuels your outrage. If status quo religion were all that remained of our instinct, we might conclude that religion had become a dangerous atavism, that we would be better off in a totally secular world. Many liberals seem to have reached such a position: for them, secular vs. religious means enlightened vs. troglodyte or even good vs. evil. That’s pretty much what the fashionable blue state/red state thing is all about – people on both sides of the political fence who believe that wedge issue exploitation is the only way that religion can be part of politics. But status quo religion is a perversion, not the impulse itself. The standard by which hunter/gatherer humans judged each other was not just an idealized world of their own childhoods; it was an unchanging image of cooperation, unselfishness and intimacy. History is filled with prophets who judged their societies not by the desires of rulers, but against the ideal vision of life we carry within us. When the power of a prophet’s voice matches the strength of his convictions, the world trembles, and sometimes it changes. The prophets of ancient Israel attacked their societies in times of social and economic injustice. “Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion,” said one; of others, it was said that they comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. Judaism gained a commitment to social action it has never lost. Jesus argued for a life built on love and compassion, sought out the company of losers, pariahs, lepers and prostitutes, and announced that it were easier “for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Early Christians often lived in other-worldly hippie-type communes. Much the same happened with early Islam; and social justice has been a central part of that religion ever since, even more so than in Christianity.

In America, the power of prophetic religion has produced major positive changes at least three times. In the years before the Civil War, most Bible-thumpers who tackled the issue at all were against slavery: some courageously faced death in delivering their message. Two generations later, in a time disturbingly like our own, with both political parties owned by corporate money, with corruption, cynicism and despair everywhere, a young William Jennings Bryan – yes, he of the Scopes Trial – electrified the Democratic Convention of 1896 with a politically grounded, religiously impassioned keynote speech in which he pleaded that his countrymen not let Mankind be “crucified on a Cross of Gold.” He and his followers made common cause with more secular reformers and recreated the Democrats into a party of reform, arcing from New Freedom through New Deal to Great Society before finally losing their way in the last generation, when they stopped speaking to the needs of the whole nation and started seeing only voting blocs, electoral coalitions, corporate financing and a comfortable status quo. The third example was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, when Rev. Martin Luther King and others were able to share with America the vision of a great crusade for justice and equality that went beyond group interest politics. The Segregationist Deep South never got that support from its own ministers, and its cause was lost; even white Southerners understood at the deepest levels that their cause was wrong, and so the battle was already half over.Would we then be better off without the religious impulse at all? It can be positive as well as negative in political impact. When it is a negative force, as in recent American politics, some other group is usually manipulating religious feelings for its own purposes. But an equally important question: is there an alternative? We throw around the word “secular”: what does it mean? Is it a good or bad force in the world? The secular has probably been around from the beginning, making up our underlying personality traits, over which selected religious behaviors are superimposed. All of us, even the various kinds of saints, live in the mundane world most of the time, even if for saints, the context of that daily life is shaped by great religious life choices. And religion has in any case been more for ordinary folks than for elites, leading Karl Marx to his cynical comment about religion being the “opiate of the masses.”But there are now whole cities, states, civilizations where public piety is exceptional and religious arguments unimportant in civil discourse. Some of America’s great cities may have reached such a condition. We can certainly see a sharp dividing line between blue tending Austin and surrounding small towns and rural areas of Texas; and similarly sharp lines could be drawn all over the country, as between Philadelphia and small town Pennsylvania. Nobody questions that Europe has become quite secular. Europeans and Americans seemed to be on a similar path toward secularism after 1870, but have diverged rather sharply since World War II, perhaps because of our higher birth rates; having children around seems to correlate to stronger religious feelings. Are there consequences? As a whole, European nations have made better political choices than the United States since 1945; most Quality of Life indices rank many of these countries above us and the gap widens each decade. These choices appear to be from secular moral systems. Yet an increasingly secularized Europe after 1871 was a seed bed for materialism, racism, Social Darwinism, militarism, fascism and communism, ending in slaughters running to the tens of millions in World War I, World War II, Nazi Holocaust and Stalinist purges. Like religious societies, secular ones can make good or bad moral choices.While I am a “blue” in the present culture wars, I am uncomfortable that racist and Social Darwinist ideas from a dreadful past have slipped back into vogue among liberals. Many believe that the greater Kerry vote in blue states occurred because people in those states are intellectually superior. But demographic analysis shows that the most Republican tending groups were the richest and, in general, more educated groups, just as in every other election.

Neither religion nor a secular outlook automatically leads to doing the right thing. If you are concerned about wedge issue politics, as I am, then work to control big money spending, money that buys politicians in both parties, uses lying and manipulative advertising, undermines independent journalism with phony news channels and phony reporters – these corrupt political practices have much more to do with the decline of American politics than the passions of evangelicals do; and those who spend the money are consummate hypocrites. And if money is so out of control that the integrity of American politics cannot be restored in any conventional way – then perhaps we should all pray for a return of prophetic religion inspired politics – the only vision which cannot be bought or corrupted, cannot be lied to or manipulated, and which cuts through all pretenses, all humbug.Much of religious evolution in the past 5000 years can be seen as an attempt to regain the certainty we enjoyed in tribal life. In the West, the first attempt was polytheism: every village religion was considered true; but where one story of deceit, seduction or cruelty by the god was a sacred mystery, a pantheon of such stories invited contempt and disbelief. So philosophers offered a God from reason; though their logic went unchallenged for millennia, common people never found it religiously consoling. Christianity brought the Infallible Church, which proved to be run by quite fallible human beings; then the Inerrant Bible, passages of which contradict not only science, morality and common sense, but each other.If there is a religious instinct, is our knowledge of God also hard-wired? No such luck: look at the diversity of religions. On ultimate matters, we are always left with a leap of faith. Here is my own:I don’t know if there is a God, but I have staked my life on three bedrock beliefs: first, God cannot be a deceiver – if we have been given the ability to unravel the universe, it cannot be merely to trick us; secondly, God cannot be a cosmic sadist, condemning us to damnation; thirdly, God does not depend on our adulation. Deceit, vanity, torture: the worst of traits in human beings; they are unimaginable in what God must be. The patient and humble methods of science are a surer guide to truth than are sacred texts of primitive peoples or arrogant men who claim they are chummy with the Almighty. The universe is billions of years old, developing according to comprehensible laws; humans got the way they are over long ages of evolution by natural selection. Intelligent Design may lie behind it all; but this is not science.

If God doesn’t need our worship nor punish unbelievers, then our creeds may not be life’s most important religious task. If finding the right answer were crucial, we should have been born with the tools to find it, not left with as many dogmas as there are people to dream them up. What we must know is hard-wired: we are here to need, accept and embrace one another; there is no better way to love and honor God, Whom we have not seen, than to love and honor our neighbor, whom we have. The prophets, including Jesus, have said this: “inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” I personally do not wish to go back to the Garden of our hunter/gatherer origins. Western Civilization in the last 500 years has enriched human experience immeasurably by its emphasis on the Individual – and we would be diminished to be forced back into the simple life of the tribe. And competitive capitalist economies have unleashed great wealth and innovation, to which we have become rather addicted. But if the end result of the path our economy, politics and society are on is to turn the whole world into nothing but a vast competitive arena, a war of all against all, with only buying and selling left as a bond between one person and another, then we are on a path to catastrophe, because we are warring against all that made us human in the first place. We shall see an endless succession of rebellions, fundamentalisms, random violence by the alienated, senseless rage everywhere. What our religious sense never stops telling us, the poet W.H. Auden said best: “we must learn to love one another or die.”© Gary Bennett 2006

Absent Fathers Is there any among you, who, if your child asked for bread would give a stone, or if your child ask for a fish would give a snake instead of a fish? (Luke 11:11 NRSV)

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, today we’re sitting here celebrating a man’s music and a man’s life. It’s important to remember that this man was full of human foibles and wasn’t exactly in the business of hiding them. We may not agree with his theological assumptions, or like his music, or even think that such a service is appropriate. Doesn’t matter. This morning we celebrate a man who was willing to stand up for those who have lost their ability to stand for themselves. Our jail populations keep growing each year – more and more of those who should be receiving attention for their mental health problems are ending up in our prisons, our jails, the places we put folks that we’re just not quite sure what to do with them.  In a world where notoriety leads those in the public eye to aggrandize themselves and walk on their fans we give thanks this morning that there are men and women whose fame raises up others besides themselves. No, fame does not legitimize a perspective, but whenever anyone within the public’s attention draws that attention from themselves and to those less fortunate, let us all say a silent, Amen! And just because it is Johnny Cash Sunday I want to say something for Johnny. Johnny Cash believed that Jesus Christ was his Savior, and I don’t know about you, but that’s just fine with me. As a matter of fact, it’s fine with me that a whole bunch of folks believe that same thing. As far as I’m concerned there’s simply nothing wrong with that notion. If it serves you, then by all means be served by it. If it’s minorities and those out of public favor that need to be held up, then I’m holding up all UU’s today. We’re a minority. As Dr. Loehr reminded us not four months ago, more people believe that they have been abducted by aliens then are actually members of the UUA. If we’re not in a minority, I don’t know who is. And I’m also reminded of Don Smith and what he has to say about diversity. The word diversity means what it says, various in form or quality. I challenge anyone in this congregation to find me another congregation – that is not a UU congregation – that is more diverse, more varied in form and quality than we are. We’re a bunch of people who are so unlike each other that to know one of us is certainly not to know us all. And I say, congratulations to us! I’m glad I’m not like you, and you should be thrilled you’re not like me. The thing that we do have in common is our uncommon ability to rest easy with this diversity. Easy Does It as the bumper sticker used to say. So maybe you don’t like Johnny Cash, maybe he’s Mr. Monotone to you, well, rest easy, the Mozart and the Chopin will return, in the mean time, there’s somebody on your

aisle that tapping a foot and sporting a grin.

In the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON

Introduction: This is an absent Father’s Sermon. This is a sermon about parenting – both present and absent. How present can anyone be in today’s society? And then, there’s the disturbing notion that we are the only Industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t openly support parenting.

          There was a time in our culture, and the older members of this congregation can remember it, and some of the younger ones have heard stories about it, when parenting wasn’t the job of simply the mother and the father of the child. There was a time in this culture when parenting was a town’s job, a community’s job and an extended families’ job.

          But times, sadly, have changed. We are one of the most mobile societies on record. We have computers that we carry with us, phones that we carry with us, electronic appointment books, and we are on the go constantly. The Interstate Road System passed small towns by, Agricultural Mega Farms bought up small farms, churches fell to leisure time and family values have become a weapon to be wielded by politicians.

          We pretend that we are in control and that all this technology has opened up new horizons for us, while in truth we are powerless. We scream that we are the most powerful nation on this earth, but this is a scam, a sham – we are dependent, a part of a web that makes the world-wide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

          So this morning I want to tell you a story, a parable if you will. It’s important to remember that “While parables, like fables, allegories and myths, are stories with hidden significance, they are clearly distinguished from these other kinds of stories because of their peculiar characteristics.” (C.H. Dodd suggests) “At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” So here’s my parable. I call it the “Parable of the Mismatched Deck.”

          Once upon a time there was a man who liked to take evening walks in New York City. He was a big man so he wasn’t afraid of walking while it was getting dark and late. Sometimes he’d walk for hours. He walked every day, but some days when he was troubled or thoughtful, his walk would take him into the night. His wife understood.  Before he started walking he was a worrier and at times not easy to get along with. So … she never said anything about his habit of walking, and she didn’t ask to go along. If he wanted her along surely he would have asked her. About twice a year – when the colors of fall were coming in and after the first snow fall they would take a walk around the neighborhood together.

          The first playing card he found was the three of hearts. He saw it lying there on the sidewalk and he walked passed it, but then he stopped, turned around and picked it up. Yep, it was the three of hearts that’s what it was. He put it in his left shirt pocket and thought no more about it.

          When his wife was doing the laundry she found it in his shirt pocket and placed on his dresser, right where he put his change and other stuff from his pants.

          The next morning he saw it again. There it was the three of hearts. He smiled remembering the walk he’d found it on. He picked it up and kissed it. He didn’t know why he did that. Then he placed it back in his left shirt pocket – right over his heart.

          The years went by. The man walked hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. Once he started looking for playing cards, they seemed to be everywhere. He’d memorized the ones he had and he remembered the walk he found each one on. Sometimes, he’d  see another three of hearts, but he’d smile and think about how it had started his collection of  the 52-card deck.

          When the man died his wife came home from the funeral and took the elevator to the 8^th floor. She walked down the hall to their apartment, walked in, closed and locked the door behind her. She took off her coat and hat and turned the kettle on for tea. Then, she went into their bedroom and opened the top right drawer of his dresser.

          There it was the mismatched deck of 52 that he’d found over the years. Once he’d found all 52, he shuffled the deck a couple of times and placed it in the drawer, and on the evenings after that, when he did walk, odd, even though he looked, he never saw another playing card  – not a one.

          She took the deck from the drawer, sat down on the bed, and thumbed through them. Once before he died when he was sick, he took the deck and went through each card for her, where he’d found it, what the weather was like, and where he’d walked that day.

          She opened the window that overlooked the street below. She threw the cards out with a fanning motion. Some of them caught the updraft from the street below and blew higher than the building next door; some of them went down to the street fast like they had been waiting to escape. The rest were scattered to the wind.

          She was smiling when she heard the kettle whistling. She shut the window, shuddered with the cold, put on her sweater and went into the kitchen to call a friend over to have some tea.     

          I got a letter from my son, Ian, recently. He was worried about his neighborhood. It’s pretty violent. On the day he wrote me someone was scrubbing blood off the walkway in front of where he lives.

          There are loads of police-types in the neighborhood, but it seems they are beating up on the people in the neighborhood just about as much as the so-called criminal element.

          He starts his letter with, “What’s up, Preacher?!”  He then says he hopes everything is fine with me and I know that this is a lead in to things aren’t great with him. And they aren’t. There’s also an element in his neighborhood that’s simply crazy – they maim themselves and wear their scars like metals. My son, Ian, only gets to see his daughter, Emily, once every two months. He and his common-law wife don’t live in the same city. It’s tough on him. She was three years old when this separation happened. The same age he was when I left him with his mother and the friend who wouldn’t go away.

          You see, he’s always held it against me that when he was three years old I walked out on his mom and him. He doesn’t know the stories and they weren’t his stories anyway. His story he’s got down. His father walked out of the house when he was three and he never came back. Well, he never came back to stay. His mother married a honest to God Marxist political science professor who quit his job to drive a cab, who then quit the cab business to run a bait shop. I think he was demonstrating Capitalism in reverse. It worked for me.

          The Political Science Professor wasn’t even the reason I left. His mother had fallen in love with one of my friends and she wouldn’t tell this friend to go away. It was as simple as that. My whole writing career started out by me writing a story in which I was going to kill this SOB and be done with it. That’s when I discovered the power of story and writing, how you only imagine you’re in charge and when it came time for my character to kill his character it got twisted around and my character ended up dying.

          We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

          In the story I tried to change it back the way I wanted it to be. Me killing him, but it didn’t read right that way. The story had its own logic and reason. The story only made sense when my character died. That’s when I realized that if a writer can’t even control his imaginary characters how in God’s name are we as fathers, mothers, sons and daughters supposed to control any of this stuff we call life.

          She opened the window that overlooked the street below. She threw the cards out with a fanning motion. Some of them caught the updraft from the street below and blew higher than the building next door; some of them went down to the street fast like they had been waiting to escape. The rest were scattered to the wind.

          My son admits to me that he’s told his wife, Jennifer, not to let Emily be with me. He’s told her that because he believes that I have called him a bad father for moving away like he did. In all honesty I never said anything like that. I think it must have gotten back to him that I found it ironic that he thinks I’m a bad father for leaving when he was three and here his daughter, Emily, is three and he moves away from her. Irony appeals to me because it is literally words, deeds and acts meaning the opposite of what they obviously are. In other words when I say I love George Bush, you know that’s irony.

          It’s irony that on October 23^rd 1883, when Sarah Bernhardt was on her way to America for the first time that she and an older woman were knocked down by a wave that rocked the French ship L’Amerique and it was only through the strength of being an actress trained in the theatrical arts, juggling, dance, fencing, and stage fighting that the divine Miss Sarah was able to jump for that secured deck chair and grab hold for dear life, and it was only because she was a strong and agile actor that Miss Bernhardt was able to reach out then and save the older woman. And was the older woman dressed in her widow’s weeds – as  formal mourning wear was called in the 19^th Century – was she in the least bit grateful that her life had been saved? No, she wasn’t because she did appreciate irony. For it was ironical that an actor had taken her husband away from her and now it was an actor who was keeping her from going and joining him in his heavenly rest.

          After that morning onboard the L’Amerique, Sarah Bernhardt suffered the loss of one of her more famous fans, Mary Todd Lincoln.  

          She opened the window that overlooked the street below. She threw the cards out with a fanning motion. Some of them caught the updraft from the street below and blew higher than the building next door; some of them went down to the street fast like they had been waiting to escape. The rest were scattered to the wind.

          My son goes on in the letter to tell me how bad the food is that he’s served. He’s got a room and board type arrangement. He’s lost down to 190 pounds. He probably looks better – he was a little heavy the last weekend I spent with him.

          It was the first time I ever saw my granddaughter. He had warned me that she wouldn’t go to strangers and that if I tried to pick her up she would scream bloody murder.

          Her mother drove into the driveway and stopped the car. Emily Rose got out and took off running toward her father, Ian. She ran and jumped into her daddy’s arms and he hugged her real good and she kissed his neck.

          The first card he found was the three of hearts. He saw it lying there on the sidewalk and he walked passed it, but then he stopped, turned around and picked it up. Yep, it was the three of hearts that’s what it was. He put it in his left shirt pocket and thought no more about it.

          Ian, my son, then told his daughter that the guy standing at the end of the driveway was his daddy. Emily put her little hand up to shield the Florida sun from her eyes. We looked into each other’s eyes. She said something to her dad and he put her down.

          I didn’t know what to do, so I bent down and held out my arms.

          She never hesitated. She ran from her dad to her granddad and she jumped in an arc into my arms and her little arm went around my neck and she gave me a neck squeeze. I can still feel that little arm around my neck.

          We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

          My son, Ian, tells me he could sure use a couple of extra bucks a month – with that money he could buy some better food at the cantina – at least better than they serve at the boarding place. I make a mental note to send him a Western Union Money Gram once a month. He may be 36 – but he’s still my boy, right?

          I remember when Serhan B. Serhan’s father was interview by one of the networks shortly after Bobby Kennedy had been killed in that hotel kitchen in Los Angeles. They asked him why his son would do such a thing. The old Arab just looked at the camera and said, “How should I know?”

          A father and a son; a father and a daughter. They’re not the same people. One affects the other. The other affects the one. But the one doesn’t cause the other to do anything that the one doesn’t choose to do. Isn’t that right?

          There it was the three of hearts. He smiled remembering the walk he’d found it on. He picked it up and kissed it. He didn’t know why he did that. Then he placed it back in his left shirt pocket – right over his heart.

          The rest of the letter from my son, Ian, concerns his appeal. He’s appealing to a court system that put him somewhere that he doesn’t want to be. He’s saying what we nearly all say from time to time, “This isn’t fair, I don’t deserve this, Many have done more and are not punished.” He sees his crime as nothing, it’s nothing, I’m in here for nothing. Then he howls as we all have howled from time to time, “Do all you people really feel I deserve this – that I did something to deserve this!?”

          Is there any among you, who, if your child asked for bread would give a stone, or if your child ask for a fish would give a snake instead of a fish?

          We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

Conclusion: The last words in his letter are words of love. He is in the penitentiary, my son is locked up like an animal and from this place of incarceration he sends me love. He puts it just like this; “I will always love you for you are my father! But I don’t understand you! Ditto probably! Take care of yourself! Your Son, Ian. Then he adds an “X” and an “O” an “X” and an “O.”

          Getting back to the Parable of the Mismatched Deck, how many of you didn’t like the wife when she threw the cards out the window? Maybe she resented all those walks her husband took without her? Maybe she thought he’d had girlfriends and simply collected the cards to remember them by.

          So … when she did this, when she scattered his cards of the heart to the wind what did that mean? Was she simply destroying an accidental life’s work, or was she sending 52 other persons, the rest of the neighborhood, out on their quests for completion?

          She was smiling when she heard the kettle whistling. She shut the window, shuddered with the cold, put on her sweater and went into the kitchen to call a friend over to have some tea.

          The old days are gone. We can’t go back, and we may not be in control, but we are still dependent upon community. That’s what you’re doing here this morning. You are a portion of the lucky few that share community. This is your extended family and it validates your children and it connects them to something greater than the parental unit – something sacred and holy, yes, a web of life that’s vibrant, growing and trustworthy.