Eric Hepburn
Sunday, May 25, 2008

Invocation:

A wise person once said to me, you get to choose how to live, and there are basically two choices, you can choose to be right or you can choose to be peaceful.

The more I have reflected on this the more clear it has become that choosing to be right is about ego, while choosing to be peaceful is about wisdom.

Peace be with you.

Let us join together in song.

Prayer

How can we become more compassionate?

It is helpful to think of a generic situation where you are engaged with another person.

You perceive their actions, and from this perception you normally confer onto them motives and thoughts.

It is by these motives and thoughts, which we have imagined, that we determine how we will react to their action.

One form of compassion happens when we are clear and honest about the actions of others, but kind and generous when we infer thought and motive.

There is an expression for this in English, it is called ‘giving the benefit of the doubt.’

One way to cultivate our capacity for giving the benefit of the doubt is to keep in mind that we do not know what others are thinking.

Another way is to confer to others a range of possible thoughts or motives, and to be intentional when we treat them as if their motives are the noblest ones.

One of the side effects of this practice, is the way that it helps and encourages others to live up to the generosity of your interpretations.

Let us pray this morning that we can learn to become masters at giving others the benefit of the doubt.

Sermon: Understanding Evangelical Christianity

My first chosen religion was evangelical Christianity, I was a holy roller, I sang and danced and spoke in tongues, and I shouted Amen, whenever I was moved. My second chosen religion was Atheism, I was a professional skeptic and debunker, proud in my claims not to believe in anything that hadn’t been proven. And now my chosen religion, they say the third times a charm, well my chosen religion now doesn’t have a name, I attend this Unitarian Universalist church and I stand in this pulpit from time to time, I search for the truth, and I am honored that you have agreed to spend this morning with me so that I can share some thoughts with you about this journey.

In the home where I grew up religion was not a serious issue. We subscribed to the pedestrian mainstream American view that Christianity was true, but that you didn’t have to go to Church to be a good person, and good people go to heaven, which is important, because hell is not a very nice place.

During my childhood I spent summers with my maternal grandparents. When I was twelve they moved back to rural Illinois where our extended family lived. My Great-Uncle Web was a preacher at a Free-Will Pentecostal Church there, and since all my cousins who were my age went to Church three times a week, I wanted to go with them.

Now, I had been to Church before, but I had never seen a Church like this. I don’t think I will ever forget the first time that I saw someone speak in tongues. I didn’t have to wait long, it was about seven minutes into my first service when my Great-Aunt Rose got to her feet and began making noises not unlike ululation at first, and then transforming into a kind of wailing string of syllables. It was eerie and a little frightening, but by the end of that service, I knew that this wasn’t just an eccentricity of my Aunt Rose, but a normal part of how these people, many of them my family, worshiped.

Three weeks later I was saved, the next week I received the spirit of the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues for the first time, later that summer I received the gift of healing and performed a faith healing on my great-grandmother’s chronic headaches, which she swore lasted a whole week. I also participated in casting out my first demon that summer, it was a spirit of man-hating in a young woman in the congregation who had been abandoned by her father, and who later went on to marry one of my cousins. As the summer drew to a close, I became concerned about how I was going to continue ‘walking in the light’ when I returned home. My uncle’s Church didn’t have any affiliates in my area, but he assured me that if I prayed and searched, God would find me a home congregation.

I returned home, filled with hope, not only of finding a spiritual community, but of rescuing my family from their religious malaise and bringing them once more under the direct protection of Jesus Christ. Both of these quests were disastrous. My family rejected my evangelical advances and my search for a local congregation was even worse, I was told by many ministers and preachers that speaking in tongues was wrong, that it was a misinterpretation of scripture, that it was even the work of the devil. This practice of Speaking in tongues had become central to my way of worship, as had dancing in the spirit, and raising my hands in the air, and shouting Amen when something the preacher said really resonated with me. Sitting quietly and listening to someone talk, standing still with a hymnal in hand singing dirges, I couldn’t reconcile these methods with my desire to worship and glorify God. I searched, and after a while I stopped searching, I read my Bible, and after a while I stopped reading, I worried about my salvation, and after a while, I stopped worrying.

My life became much as it had always been and when I returned to my Grandparents’ home the summer of my 14th year, I inititialy refused the invitations to go to Church, I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, I preferred to forgo the ecstatic experiences of church to avoid the pain of losing them again. And I also felt let-down by God because I believed that he had not helped me to find a home congregation.

But it didn’t last long, a month maybe, and I was back at Church, on my knees weeping, asking forgiveness for my failure to stay on the path. So I sang, and I danced, and I shouted Amen, and I spoke in tongues. And this time when I went home, I didn’t struggle. I rendered unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s, and unto God the things that were God’s. In this case, the God that I worshiped was in rural Illinois and my normal life; school, immediate family, friends, these things belonged to the secular world of Caesar. That was my last summer in the Church.

Religion once again became a non-issue in my daily world, but that all changed during my first semester at college. I was taking a philosophy course on contemporary moral issues, and when the topic of homosexuality came up, the quiet (or sometimes not so quiet) bigotry of rural Christianity was waiting there in the back of my brain, ready to argue the point of why homosexuality was wrong. I bolstered my claims with biology, with logic, with everything but the kitchen sink. But when the professor asked me what was wrong with two people loving each other, with two people wanting to be each others’ best friends and helpmates, I had no answer. Like most people who had never actually known or been friends with any gay people, I was all focused on the sex act. Once I was forced to step beyond the bedroom into the world of life, where people love each other, where people care for each other, and where sex is simply a physical expression of that love, I was left without a leg to stand on. On that day, in that class period, I abandoned the God of rural Illinois, I publicly changed my position on homosexuality, apologized if I had offended anyone, and began to self-identify as an atheist. Because my professor was right, hate and intolerance are incompatible with love. And I knew then that Love and justice were more important to me than the God of the Bible, than the God of rural Illinois.

I spent the next few months reading psychology texts and talking with people, trying to reframe my religious experiences into this new atheistic framework. I rewrote my narrative of those years using terms like: social pressure, group think, and brainwashing. I researched the Bible critically, embracing a deconstruction of both the text and the life of Jesus. I believed that I had been duped, that I had been sold a Santa Claus type lie, the only consolation was that the people who sold it had believed it to be true. In reality, this simply increased my feelings of condescension toward grown-ups who had failed to realize that the Jesus story was just another myth. I patted myself on the back for being smarter than they were.

Luckily for me, my journey was not over. It took two other mentors to help me find a deeper and more honest view of the truths of those years. The first one was a Sociology professor named Lonn Lanza-Kaduce. He issued a challenge at the beginning of his Sociology of Law course. He said that anyone can read a theory and tear it apart and find all of its weak points; deconstruction is easy. What is hard, he said, and more rewarding, is to give each author their strongest possible reading. What problems or issues is the author most concerned with? What truth or truths are they trying to deal with? As a reader, can you give the author the benefit of the doubt and confront him on his strongest ground, instead of searching for his weaknesses. It was a serious challenge and it had a profound impact on the tenor of the class, every week we had serious discussions about the merits and strengths of different theories and we looked at how different theories actually addressed different domains of problems, and how much of the criticism that was written about them was really missing the point. We learned how to build better theories.

The second influence was Dr. David Hackett, a religion professor, I took the Sociology of Religion course primarily as a way to improve my background knowledge and debating skill when I challenged the evangelical literalist Christian missionaries who regularly visit college campuses with their confrontational style of ministry. It had become a favorite pastime of mine to spend hours in the middle of the day debating them, challenging them, winning over the crowd. I wish I could say that I had done it with love, I wish I could say that it had meant more to me at the time than winning the debate, in the background was always this justification of keeping them from preying on students’ insecurities and feeding them lies, but, in reality I knew that I was preaching to the choir. My sparring with them was about my own ego, my need to show my superiority, so I got what I deserved when I took this Sociology of Religion course.

When I found out that the professor was a practicing church-goer, I almost dropped the course, luckily for me, my ego was too big for that. Just like the philosophy professor had pulled the rug out from under my homophobia by asking the larger question about love, this professor pulled the rug out from under my sense of atheistic superiority by asking if there was value in the story. He claimed that one didn’t have to believe that the Bible was the literal word of God in order to be a Christian, that one did not have to subscribe to the divinity of Christ, or the resurrection, or miracles, or any of the things I had spent the last two years lambasting. If the Roman myths served Roman culture, and the Greek myths served Greek culture, why couldn’t the Christian myths in the Bible serve as a moral framework for Western Christian culture.

Well, he had me there. If we had permission to view the Bible as a collection of stories, a collection of myths, then we could apply the same ’strongest-reading’ approach that I had learned in the context of social theory. I became a fan of Jesus, of Buddha, and of Mohammed in that class. I read their words, and the words from other world religions in that class, I looked for the passages where they saw the truth most clearly and didn’t worry about the parts where their culture, or their fear, or their greed, or their other human frailties got in the way. I began to believe in the universality of truth, in the idea that we are all seeking this truth, that it is a fundamental part of our nature, that it is this truth that unites us and makes us whole.

In graduate school I began to integrate my love of the prophets with my own narrative. I began to critically evaluate both my early religious experiences, my atheism, and my atheistic contention that those early experiences had been meaningless. Ultimately, I was able to reconcile my understanding with my history and reclaim the genuine aspects of those early religious experiences.

I no longer find it surprising in retrospect that one of the most socially bizarre and controversial aspects of my early practice, speaking in tongues, has ended up being one of the most important to me. When I was an atheist I was ashamed of this part of my past, ashamed because I believed that I had been socially pressured into faking a religious experience. But the more I reflected on the experience, the more I realized that I had been wrong. The social pressure theory wasn’t true to the story, it wasn’t true to my experience. The pressure I felt was not pressure to fit in, it was not pressure to please my family or the church, it was the pressure of what to say when you believe you are face to face with God. When you are in that moment of prayer and you feel yourself in communion with God, with the Universe, what do you say? What can you say? Such immense beauty, such immense pain, such immense love… That is what speaking in tongues taps into. When you want to shout your feelings to God, but you can’t put them into words, you just let those raw feelings out in the form of sound. And in that church, you were allowed that freedom and I experienced it, and I cherish it still.

Now, I’m not suggesting that UU’s should start speaking in tongues, it wouldn’t be genuine, and it wouldn’t produce the desired result. What I am suggesting is that we start thinking, individually and collectively, about how we can foster an environment, how we can produce a spiritual haven here in this sanctuary every Sunday, where people leave their self-criticism and their criticisms of others at the door. A space where people can clap, sing, dance, meditate, sit quietly, hum, think, pray, do whatever they do, but do it without worrying about being judged or without spending any energy judging or thinking about what others are doing. Can we, the distracted intellectuals that we are, find a way to experience communal peace and joy here together every Sunday? I think that we can.

I think it starts with looking inward, with using this time we have here together with the unconditional love and support of our community to bask in the light, love, and joy of the truth. Because the truth is joyful. Let me reiterate that for all of us intellectual doubting Thomases who have a much easier time seeing everything that is wrong with the world, and I include myself. The truth is joyful. This didn’t sink in for me until I went to see the Dalai Lama when he came to town, and I tell you friends, the truth has set that man free. And that freedom radiates from him like a warm light of love and joyfulness. He is not joyful because he has comforting illusions, he is joyful because he has spent his life smashing the illusions that separate us from the truth. There is ever-present in his life the radiance of God, the radiance of an interconnected and interdependent universe, the radiance of the power of life and love.

That radiance, the radiance of the truth, is the light that has inspired all religion. It is the same light that the Evangelical Christians are seeking to capture when they go to church, the same light they are trying to share when they come knocking at your door, the same light that you were searching for this morning when you made your way to this sanctuary. The truth is not fractured, but we are often fractured. The truth is not exclusive, but we are all too often exclusive.

The next time you are confronted with someone who has a religious symbol system that you don’t share, I want you to try and translate. You don’t have to subscribe to God language in order to use God language. Maybe internally, you prefer to use the word Universe instead of God, or maybe you don’t like to assign a word to that concept at all. That’s OK. You can translate into their language, and if your heart and intentions are in the right place, your translation into their symbol system will work out.

This doesn’t only apply to Evangelical Christians, it can apply to anyone. If you remember that the differences are often differences in religious language, differences in symbols and not differences in ultimate truth, then you come to realize the possibility of breaking spiritual bread with any of your brothers and sisters. This does not negate the reality of differences in belief, those differences are real, they exist. What I am suggesting is that when we focus on our differences in opinion, we create divisiveness and discord. When we focus on what we agree on, on the magnificence of the universe, the beauty and the pain of living, the importance of love and compassion, the comfort of human companionship, when we focus on these core truths of religion, we create peace and joy. The choice is up to you, you can choose to be right, or you can choose to be peaceful.

Benediction

I would like to close today with a greeting, because today’s sermon, if given its strongest reading, was about changing the way we meet people, it was about conferring the greatest benefit of the doubt to all of our brothers and sisters, without any reason to do so but faith, without any reason but love.

The greeting is Namaste and it means “I see the light in you that is also in me.”

Namaste.

Davidson Loehr
18 May 2008

PRAYER:

Let us not tell paltry stories about ourselves. We don’t just work at a job, we have a mission that is part of the cosmic effort to improve and perfect the world. We’re not just sweeping the floor, throwing out stuff and trying to get this place cleaned up before guests arrive. We are a modern incarnation of the goddess Hestia, the one whose sacred gift is to transform a house into a homey place, to let those who enter feel cared for. We’re not just a doctor sewing stitches into the fourth patient to cut himself this hour. We’re healing the sick, caring for them in the spirit of old Aesclepius, the patron saint of physicians. We’re not just taking a lawsuit to court so we can stick it to whoever we have in our sights. We’re agents of fairness and social trust, working to help the powerless balance the scales of justice. We’re not here just to whistle little ditties, but to sing small spiritual symphonies with our lives.

We are, whatever we are, so very much more than we have given ourselves credit for being. Our biggest failures are failures of imagination. We need a story worthy of us. We need the largest story that wraps us in the most imaginative tapestry of life lived skillfully, caringly.

Let us find a story worthy of our spirit, and tell it. Salvation can come through telling and believing the right stories about ourselves. It may be the only way it does come. Let us become spirited parts of stories that are worthy of us.

Amen.

SERMON:

Life as a work of art: what does that mean? I want to begin with a quotation that Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote over eighty years ago:

“Every person, in the course of his life, must build – starting with the natural territory of his own self – a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. [She] makes [her] own soul throughout all [her] earthly days; and at the same time [she] collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of [her] individual achievement: [that greater work is] the completing of the world.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1927)

He used the word opus for the work of a life. That word opus is also used for a musical composition or an artist’s total production. We are also works of art. We are partly the artistic designers of our own life, and it is the most important work we will ever do. (Thomas Moore, A Life at Work, p. 2)

Boy, does that sound easier said than done! How to make a life? When most people hear this, their first thoughts are probably more economic, like how to make a living.

Some of the older folks here will remember how much this has changed in the last half century. In the 1950s, the object was to get a job with a good company, work for them your whole life and they’d take care of you. You’d have health care and a good retirement. For women, the work options were severely limited – most were steered to becoming nurses or teachers or stewardesses (and in the 50s only young women could be stewardesses, and there were no male flight attendants). For all, the goal was to get married (heterosexual only – nobody was “out” in the 1950s), have kids, raise them to be good Americans. America was the most respected nation in the world after WWII and its Marshall Plan to help Europe recover. We were generous and just, trusted by almost everyone.

It’s amazing how much of that has changed now. Our nation is no longer respected by many. There’s little or no job security – I think I read that people entering the work force today should expect to have eight different jobs in five different fields during their career. Job benefits keep getting cut, unions have largely been disempowered, and it’s been widely reported that this is the first generation that can’t look forward to a higher life style than their parents. The divorce rate is about 50% — so many people have neither a job nor a partner for life.

There is a lot more competition for good schools and jobs, school loans put people into far greater debt. Twenty-five years ago, I spent seven years in a very expensive graduate school and graduated owing a total of $17,500. Today, Unitarian ministers leave a three-year seminary owing between $50,000 and $80,000 or more, and I’ve talked with at least one student here at UT who’ll owe $100,000 for a four-year Ph.D. program in Latin American studies. And it can get much worse. I have a niece attending medical school in Israel through a Columbia University world medicine program, who’s also getting a Master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins. When she’s done in two more years, she’ll owe about $300,000. She had wanted to be the next Albert Schweitzer, devoting her life to helping needy people in Africa – but not with student loans like that.

So it’s harder to make a living today than it was fifty years ago.

It’s easy to get depressed, or go into a rant.

But the job of making a life – as opposed to the job of making a living – really isn’t fundamentally different now. It’s still a religious task, though today we use the word “spiritual” more, and it doesn’t need to involve churches or even gods.

Many churches still talk about this life as though it were just a meaningless prelude to some life in heaven forever – if we obey a certain concept of God or church. But I don’t believe the world is built that way. I think we do it here and now. So in many ways, it matters even more, to try and make a good life. What’s it mean?

By a good life, I really mean something as simple as a life that lets you stand in front of a mirror in ten or fifty years and be able to say, “If I only get one shot at this, I’m glad I lived the life I’ve lived.” In your whole life, there’s hardly anything you could say that’s more important. It may not be the life someone else would choose, but you’re not supposed to live other people’s lives. You’re supposed to live your own. And to some extent that involves making it, crafting it, like a work of art. And while I think that’s a little more complex than it used to be, it isn’t fundamentally different.

We need the sense that we are here for a reason, that life wants something from us, that life grants us honor, and a task. Being part of a larger purpose can give meaning to our smallest acts and helps create a strong identity. (Thomas Moore, A Life at Work, p. 17)

If I were an old-fashioned preacher talking in old-fashioned ways, this is when I could say, “Come to Jesus! Come to Jesus and be saved!” I think very few people here think or talk that way, but there can be a powerful kind of truth to that Come-to-Jesus invitation. It means, “Recast your life as a beloved part of a larger reality, as a child of God rather than just one more lost person stumbling through life. Then it can be about the larger you precisely because it’s no longer primarily about you, but about your part in a bigger story, a transcendent scheme. You’re no longer just doing the kind of fairly menial work we all do; your work has now become part of the plan of the creator of the universe. So come to Jesus, and be saved!” There’s both poetry and power there.

What’s right about it is that we need to be able to cast our lives as parts of a bigger and more enduring story than just making it through another day.

But we have to try to say it in less parochial terms today. Fewer and fewer people are learning to talk about their lives as though they were about Jesus or God. The fastest-growing “faith groups” in the country are not evangelicals, but non-believers, even atheists, as I’ll talk about more in two weeks. But no matter how we put it or what we call it, we need to call forth this image of our life as part of something greater. And it isn’t hard, though we’re not taught how to do it. I want to give you some examples of recasting life as part of a bigger story, in a few different styles, both with and without gods.

One is a story that Rev. David Bumbaugh read to you three weeks ago, and it’s worth repeating.

In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a visitor went into one of these huge buildings. Over to the right were carpenters, and he said to them, “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? We’re carpenters. We’re building pews!” Then he went to some stone masons. Again he asked, “What are you doing?” They laughed, and said they were members of the masons’ guild, the finest of all the guilds. They acted like just belonging to that group meant they didn’t actually need to be doing anything at all.

On the other side of the room there was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters, the masons and the others. Of her too, he asked, “What are you doing?” This woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him, “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!”

We could look at her job and say it was the least important of the three, just sweeping, cleaning up. But it gave more to her than the jobs of the carpenters and stone masons seemed to give to them, because she had made her life part of a much larger story, in which even cleaning up was helping to build not only a magnificent cathedral, but a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God! It’s hard to beat that. There’s a simple life transformed into a work of art through an imaginative story. We all have simple lives, and we all need that kind of transformation.

Many Hindus can still do this through their belief that their soul is part of the soul of the universe, their spirit is part of the creative spirit of everything. And that’s not just a belief; it’s true. All of our lives are parts of that bigger picture. But it’s so hard to see them that way. I think that’s why “Come to Jesus” is so appealing. It sounds so simple, so quick. No waiting in line, Just BAM! You’re saved!

I often envy the ancient Greeks, who knew these spirits were eternal, and turned most of them into gods. And so craftspeople and artists weren’t just making pews or doing stonework; they were serving the gods of art, music and beauty: Hephaestus, Apollo, Athena. They were doing sacred duty in their work. Parents planted seeds of tomorrow, and nurtured them, as part of the creative force of the universe. They were the current incarnations of the spirits of Zeus, Hera and Demeter, as the Greeks would say. Homemakers, those with gifts for making a house feel like a home, or making a church service feel like a worship service, were serving the invisible goddess Hestia, the goddess of that feeling of being deeply at home.

Thinkers weren’t just ivory-tower eggheads, overeducated chatterers – look at some of the ways we describe ourselves! Mechanical, cold, condemning, not loving. But in Greece, thinkers were those who helped bring fire, bring light into the darkness, modern incarnations of Prometheus. Soldiers weren’t just murdering foreigners. They were serving the dangerous but sometimes necessary god Ares. Even politics could be transformed – even today’s politics. A Hillary Clinton could be recognized as the spirit of the goddess Athena, and maybe Artemis, and Obama could be seen in the role of Hermes, the messenger of the gods who carried the message beyond comfortable boundaries, because the message was more holy than the boundaries. Heraclitus once said that everything is filled with gods, and in his world it was. You didn’t have to come to Jesus. You didn’t have to go anywhere because the gods were everywhere. You just had to understand your gifts and your passions as gifts from the gods, callings, duties – because they were.

Look how this could transform human lives! It still can. Arianna Huffington is a Greek, born in Athens and educated at Cambridge, and the ancient Greek gods still help frame her life. She wrote that as an ambitious single mother of two daughters, she saw her life as a constant dialogue between the demands of Artemis and Demeter. How much more dignifying, and also descriptive, that is than just calling herself an ambitious single working mother with two girls. It’s so much easier to view our life as a work of art when we think of ourselves as incarnating eternal spirits. But today, our spiritual vocabulary is so sparse, we hardly know how to talk about it. Talking about gods leaves many people cold today – even ancient Greek gods. It sounds so “otherworldly,” in a bad way.

So let me share part of my own story with you, two of my own “Come to Jesus”-type moments that transformed how I defined myself and my job as a minister, as your minister. I’ve told parts of this before, and I’m not doing it to talk about myself, but to offer you more ways to talk about your own life.

I went to one of those elite graduate schools, worked as hard as the others there, and earned my Master’s and Ph.D. degrees. I saw it as a pretty solitary adventure. You go to seminars, you read, you read some more, you discuss, you read, you write, eventually you graduate. Graduation ceremonies have never meant much to me, and I’ve avoided them. But a classmate told me I had to go to the ceremony to be given my Ph.D. “Why?” I asked. “They can mail it.” “You don’t understand,” he said, “You have to hear what President Gray says to all the Ph.D. graduates.” Hannah Gray, who was then president of the University of Chicago, was the first woman president of what they called an elite university. I admired her, and was on a committee with her. But come on – commencement addresses are like political speeches: all predictable rhetoric, no significant substance. My classmate assured me I was wrong and I trusted him, so I bought the cap, rented the gown, and went.

It was a come-to-Jesus moment. I’ve never been the same since that day. When the other degrees had been awarded, she called the doctoral students forward, and she said those magical words which were burned into my memory instantly. She said, “I welcome you into the ancient and honorable community of scholars.” It was transformative. Suddenly, we were no longer just a few more unkempt graduate students hiding out in libraries working on papers and dissertations nobody but our three readers would ever be likely to read. No, now we were part of something grand: an ancient and honorable community of scholars, of which I hadn’t even been aware until then. Plato, Aristotle, and us! You try not to dwell too long on Plato, Aristotle and those at their level, or the magic would wear off and it would just feel really embarrassing. But for the first time, I believed I was part of an ancient tradition of millions of people who had been so curious and passionate about something that we wanted to devote years to its study, and lives to its service. I knew it was obsessive – but I didn’t know it was also sacred.

The other come-to-Jesus moment had happened a few years earlier, during some of that reading. I read a book by a very influential 20^th century conservative theologian (Karl Barth), where he was addressing a group of young ministers. David Bumbaugh and I talked about this when he was here, and he said he also memorized this the first time he read it over forty years ago, and also took it as a sacred commandment. The theologian had said, “Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”

I think of this every Sunday, every week when I’m preparing a sermon. It isn’t about me, it’s about that ancient and honorable community, that sacred duty to take people perhaps even more seriously than they take themselves. In my mind, those ancient and honorable people are watching me; I can feel their eyes. That isn’t always a good thing. I don’t always succeed at this, as you know. Nobody does. But those two statements transformed my life from the life of a single fairly unimportant Unitarian minister to someone who feels empowered and commanded by an ancient tradition far larger and more enduring than I am. These are the same feelings as coming to Jesus, but without the Jesus, the gods, or the dogma.

Now this isn’t your story, so you might say, “Oh, come off it. You’re just a preacher at a church most people in Austin have never even heard of, preaching to less than one-tenth of a percent of the population!” And that’s true. Just as it’s true that the peasant woman was only sweeping the floor, or Arianna Huffington is just a driven woman with two kids. But these larger callings – whether her seeing herself as incarnations of the spirits of Artemis and Demeter or my believing I’m part of an ancient and honorable community of scholars charged with helping people take their lives more seriously – these larger callings transform solitary lives into little works of art, because they reconnect us with those enduring, perhaps eternal spirits that we serve.

And what about you? After all, that’s the point of all this. How would you describe your life? In ways that make you seem isolated and small, or in ways that connect you with a life force that transcends, empowers, and commands you? Are you just insignificant little you, or are you one of the masks of God, an incarnation of holy spirits, a small but significant part of a cause, a belief, an ideal that is timeless and incredibly necessary? Sweeping the floor, or building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God? Putting a few bucks in the collection plate here, or becoming the church rather than merely attending it? It’s your choice. I’d like you to discuss these things this week with your friends, your family, somewhere you can feel safe and won’t get put down for dreaming. You can choose the story of which your life is a part, whether small or large, and that choice makes all the difference in recasting your life as a work of art.

And so. What about you? As happens so often in this church, it’s your move.

Davidson Loehr

11 May 2008

PRAYER:

Let us not be so filled with ourselves that we cannot forgive others their sins and foibles when we knew they meant better. And let us not be so empty of ourselves that we let others use our forgiveness as a license to behave badly.

The balance between justice and mercy is always a dynamic balance, meant to empower the best kind of life within and around us. If our sense of justice is no more than punishment, it is a poor justice. And if our sense of forgiveness does no more than enable bad behavior, it is a poor forgiveness.

Let us try to balance a rich sense of justice and an empowering kind of forgiveness, as though the quality of life both within and among us were shaped by them.
Amen.

SERMON: Forgiveness

This is the third sermon I’ve done on a one-word theme. I’m planning to do one a month, and am developing a list of 36 themes, so we’ll revisit each theme once every three years. The themes may be only one word, but they don’t seem to be simple. Forgiveness - perhaps especially within Western religions - is very complicated. In fact, I’d start by saying that “Forgiveness isn’t always a good thing.” And the reason is that forgiveness suffers from a deep imbalance in Western religions, and when it’s unbalanced, it can be a very dangerous and bad thing.

The best-known story about forgiveness in the Bible is probably the Prodigal Son story. You know the story. A father had two sons - their mother is never mentioned - and one of them demanded his full inheritance in advance. That was permitted within Jewish law at the time, but if a son did it, he had no more claims on his family, ever. The father had to come up with cash for half of all his property was worth. It probably meant he would have had to sell things, and it also meant that after the younger brother left with the money, both the father and the older brother would have had to work much harder to get the work done. The young brother squandered all the money on wine, women and song, and returned home to ask if his father would take him back - this time, just as a servant, since he had forfeited all right to be taken back as a son. To the older brother’s disgust, the father welcomed him home and threw a great feast to celebrate.

Most adults who hear the story side with the older brother, and don’t think it was right of the father to forgive the young brother.

To see and feel how sex-linked notions of forgiveness are, all you have to do - especially on Mother’s Day! - is change the story to one about two sons and a mother. Suddenly, it changes everything. We would expect the mother to forgive him!

We expect the father to stand up for justice, but the mother to offer forgiveness, don’t we? Forgiveness seems closer to a feminine trait than a masculine one. It might be interesting to ask trial lawyers whether, if they were defending the younger brother, they’d rather have a jury of men or of women.

Forgiveness does seem to be a feminine trait, especially in our Western religions. In Hinduism, the goddess Kali is a fierce and judging and punishing presence, and in Greek mythology, the goddess Dike is the goddess of justice, and is equally fearsome. So in other religions, goddesses can be fierce. But not in Western religions. It’s hard to think of stories from the Bible or in Christian history of women who are that fearsome, or men who are terribly forgiving. In the Bible, the traits seem deeply sex-linked. It’s worth asking why, and the answer goes all the way back to the birth of the God of the Bible. There is no story of the birth of God in the Bible. I mean the story that biblical scholars have discovered about where the ancient Hebrews got the idea for their God.

The Hebrew tribes were surrounded by people whose gods were nature deities, and almost always that means that the main deities will be female, as it’s females who give birth, nurse and nurture. But the ancient Hebrews’ god wasn’t a nature god. He grew out of the idea of a tribal chief. He didn’t want to put you in touch with nature. He wanted to be obeyed, and could be ferocious when he was disobeyed. Scholars have found that the Biblical covenant between God and his chosen people was modeled on an ancient Hittite sovereignty treaty between a ruler and the people he ruled. If they obey him, he will protect him. If they disobey, he may destroy them. It isn’t about understanding or forgiveness. It’s about obedience. It’s hard to think of many good stories about forgiveness - as opposed to favors shown to obedient believers - because there aren’t many.

Maybe that’s why so many people find it odd or even wrong for the Prodigal Son’s father to forgive him, but would expect his mother to forgive him.

The psychologist Carl Jung talked about the human psyche, or soul, as divided into a masculine style, which he called the animus, and a feminine style, the anima, and that framework seems helpful here.

They act in different ways, and in different directions. The animus, or masculine style, acts outward. It can be a fierce protector of things like duty, obedience and justice, and when it is unbalanced it can be quite dangerous to others, because it will insist on a kind of obedience and justice without any rounded appreciation for our human frailties. Even the word animus is the root of the word animosity.

The anima or feminine style is inward, and seems to be the key in which a forgiving kind of understanding is played. But it also needs to be balanced with a concern for what’s fair: for justice. Unbalanced, it can be dangerous to us, by endorsing abuse without insisting on justice or respect.

I’d say that great religions are all trying to develop our animus for its sensitivity to justice, and our anima for its sensitivity to forgiveness and mercy. Justice and mercy. The conflict is between “mercy that negates justice” and “justice that negates mercy.” For either of them to be humane and safe, they have to be balanced. And in Western religions, because of the nature of their God who evolved from, and in most ways has remained, a tribal chief, we are raised with both justice and forgiveness out of balance.

Now many Christian scholars like to jump on this and say “Oh yes, the Jewish God was a God of judgment, but you see that’s what Jesus brought: a god of forgiveness rather than judgment.”

For example, whereas it’s hard to find clear stories teaching forgiveness in the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus once told people that he didn’t expect them to forgive just seven times, but seventy times seven. He also said you shouldn’t judge, so you won’t be judged. So it sounds like he is emphasizing forgiveness over judgment. But now it is an unbalanced kind of forgiveness. In Christianity, forgiveness too often has no component of justice in it, no holding others accountable to a social contract. And without that balance, forgiveness can be dangerous to us, just as an unbalanced sense of justice can be dangerous to others.

Jesus’ saying we should forgive seventy times seven has inspired at least one book by that name, with hundreds of short tales of people who forgave all manner of things, with no concern for justice at all. There’s even the story of a man who had been badly physically abused by his father - sometimes beaten unconscious - until he finally ran away from home in his teens. A few years later when he joined a church and told his story to the minister, the minister insisted that he write his father and beg his forgiveness for running away! That’s as unbalanced and dangerous as the passages in the Hebrew scriptures listing all the disobediences for which your children, wives and neighbors should be stoned to death. This is the kind of forgiveness that can be demanded by a tribal chief who can do what he likes without accountability. It’s unhealthy and wrong. And it’s not rare in Christian history. We have been taught to transfer the obedience owed to the tribal-chief-god to those who dress up in his clothes, or just those with money and power, however obtained.

Mother Teresa provided a memorable example of an unbalanced and dangerous forgiveness, when Union Carbide essentially hired her to do their PR after their chemical spill in Bhopal, India which killed 3,800 people. They made a donation to her Sisters of Mercy charity, then flew her to Bhopal. When she landed, the media were there, wanting to know what she advised following this horrible tragedy. She said, “Just forgive, forgive, forgive.” That’s not enough. This is a forgiveness that becomes an accomplice to corporate irresponsibility, a forgiveness that is the active enemy of justice - especially when the company had hired her. I think Mother Teresa only meant the inward kind of forgiveness, but she had been bribed by a large corporation, and her message suited their non-religious agenda perfectly. Nor do I think she was unaware of this.

Other examples of forgiveness so unbalanced that it becomes dangerous to the ones doing the forgiving are the many battered women’s shelters in our country. A majority of the battered women return to the men who beat them - probably not for the first time, nor for the last. This license to abuse seems granted only to husbands, not wives, as St. Paul taught the early Christians that men are made in the image of God, while women are made in the image of men. (As ridiculous as this sounds, it comes from a literal reading of one of the two creation stories in Genesis, where the male God first created the male - in his image - then created the female to be like the male, as his helpmate.) Once again, these are the ethics of deference to a powerful male tribal chief. The biblical God’s birth story has colored almost all the ethics of Western religion.

My dictionary offers two definitions of forgiveness that might be helpful ways to understand it. American Heritage Dictionary (1969) defines forgiveness:

1. To excuse for a fault or offense; to pardon.

2. To renounce anger or resentment against [someone].

The first definition is forgiveness that goes outward, pardoning someone for their behavior. The second goes inward, releasing their psychological hold on you so you can move on. Ideally, both kinds are possible. But they often aren’t.

The first kind of forgiveness is only safe if the other person is in a mutually respectful relationship with you. If an abuser can’t or won’t come into respectful relationship, it’s unwise and probably unsafe to forgive them, because it won’t be much more than permission for them to do it again, as tens of thousands of battered women have discovered the hard way.

There has to be a social contract in order to forgive someone for bad behavior against you. Then it’s a restorative kind of forgiveness, meant to restore a good relationship. There is a Proverb from the Hebrew scriptures that shows how important the social contract is. It’s one of my favorite Proverbs from the Bible - and on the surface, one of the strangest.

Proverbs 25:21-22 - “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; so you will heap glowing coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.” Now there is something weirdly delicious about this image of being kind to those who have abused you because it dumps hot coals on their head as God applauds, but the real meaning is less bizarre. A note says that these “hot coals” really mean deep shame and remorse. So acting in a forgiving way will shame them back into behaving well. This is restorative forgiveness, meant to restore a respectful and healthy social contract. If they can’t or won’t feel shame, however, forgiving them will only give them permission to abuse you again, because you’re an easy mark.

Without the mutual relationship, the first kind of forgiveness can’t be done. Sometimes, people just aren’t capable of or interested in a mutual relationship. But sometimes, they’re dead or gone, and you have to move on because you can never restore the relationship with them, and so have to settle for resolving it within yourself. Then it’s more of a rejuvenative forgiveness, meant to rejuvenate your spirit, to reconnect you with your life force and your sense of optimism and hope.

I have a story about this that I’ve told before, but is worth telling again. About fifteen years ago, I was the Theme Speaker at a Unitarian summer camp in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. There were about five hundred adults there for the week, and while I didn’t know any of them, I conducted the worship services every morning, so everyone sort of knew who I was, and would come up to talk, or to confess something, during the week. The most memorable was a woman who asked me, after lunch, whether she could talk to me about something very painful and awful she was going through. We sat on a bench under a tree outside, and she told me about what sounded like an absolutely horrible divorce she had been through. It was so painful, it hurt to listen to it. It was like a wound still completely raw. I felt very sorry for her. “When did this happen?” I asked. She looked at me sadly, and said, “Ten years ago.”

Ten years ago, and she was still bleeding from it! Of course, I don’t know any of the facts of the story for sure. Maybe he’s a jerk, maybe he just fell out of love with her, maybe it wasn’t as good a marriage as she thought, maybe she didn’t even notice whether he was happy, maybe she was the jerk. I don’t know. But it really didn’t matter any more. There can be no restorative forgiveness, because the relationship can’t be restored. The only kind of forgiveness she can hope for is the second kind, where she lets go of the hurt and the hate, and moves on with her life. She had a dream for her marriage, and it didn’t come true. Not all dreams come true, but all dreamers deserve the chance to dream again, and they can’t do it if they’re wrapped up in hate and hurt.

This kind of rejuvenating forgiveness, which we do not for others but for ourselves, is a decision to let go of resentments and thoughts of revenge, and to move ahead with our life.

This internal forgiveness takes away the power the other person continues to wield in your life, where your pain and anger have possessed you like demons. Through forgiveness, you choose to no longer define yourself as their victim. Rejuvenating forgiveness is done for yourself, not the person who you think wronged you.

It’s this second meaning that has the most religious and psychological power. The first, the restorative forgiveness, can be powerful within a relationship of trust and respect. Without that trust and respect, it just frees the person to do it again; it rewards abusive and selfish behavior. The second can be powerful within our own psyche, by cutting loose the hold that anger, resentment and hatred can have on our hearts. Be careful confusing the two categories of forgiveness. People don’t have a right to demand forgiveness: that’s a gift only we can give, and we shouldn’t give it if it will be likely to hurt us or be understood as a sanction for abusive behavior.

You don’t have to forgive the person - the person may be long dead. But (like the woman divorced ten years earlier) the anger lives on as though it had happened yesterday, keeping your heart from even being open again, let alone loving again. You can’t dream again when you’re possessed by the demons of hurt and hate. You’re trapped, not your partner or parent. Do yourself the favor, not them.

You can forgive within yourself what you would still hold the abuser responsible for. That inward forgiveness does not necessarily mean you want to be around the person again. It means you relinquish the hold that anger and hatred have on your own heart, so you can move on and dream again.

It seems important to say over again that restorative forgiveness only works within a relationship of mutual respect and trust. Otherwise, it’s enabling the worst behavior in another, and rewarding it. And there must be transparency. A mate who cheats in secret, then tries to rationalize it by demanding his/her privacy is not to be trusted. No one is safe in that relationship. Without honesty and transparency, there will be neither respect nor safety.

Now I want to go back to an earlier point, left over from that version of the Prodigal Son story with a mother rather than a father. It almost sounds like it’s the mother’s job to forgive, while we don’t really expect it from the father. This could sound like it’s the mother’s job, or women’s jobs, to teach men how to forgive - and I don’t want to say that, especially on Mother’s Day, because it’s just assigning women another job. But the other piece from the story is that if women do most of the forgiving, then where do they find forgiveness? Where do they find the understanding and forgiveness they need for their own sense of failure? - which may be that they weren’t able to accomplish a list of tasks not even Wonder Woman could manage. Maybe this is a good hint to the men and the children in their lives on this Mother’s Day. There is a woman living with you who may have been more forgiving of all of you than you’ve been. Now where is she going to find the understanding and forgiveness she needs?

And while the men and children are figuring out just how and where they might be more understanding, a final word to the mothers. If you are good at forgiving, don’t forget to forgive yourselves.

Just like justice needs an element of humanity in order to be a safe thing, so does forgiveness need a sense of justice to be a safe thing.

Let us try to balance a rich sense of justice and an empowering kind of forgiveness, as though the quality of life both within and among us were shaped by them - because they are.